France is reportedly pushing to expand regulations that would give European Union member states more power to punish large tech companies’ bad behavior.

The changes France wants to see concern the Digital Services Act, proposed legislation that was designed to reduce anticompetitive behavior by tech companies and provide more online protections for consumers. If companies are found to have transgressed, the fines would be heavy.

France would also like to see countries have the power to force companies to remove content from their platforms that’s deemed problematic. Effectively, France is calling for individual states rather than the EU to be responsible for weeding out “illegal content.”

As it stands, EU member countries don’t have this ability unless the said tech companies have servers located in their country. Apple Inc., Google LLC, Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. currently have servers in Ireland and Luxembourg.

According to the Financial Times, Cedric O, France’s minister for the digital economy, has been meeting over the last few weeks with various members of the European parliament to discuss the matter. “Getting these laws passed is a major objective of ours for when France next holds the rotating presidency of the EU Council next year,” he told the Times. “They touch on vitally important subjects both for our economies and democracies.”

The proposition makes some EU officials worried. They told the Times that such a move would “fragment” the single market, saying that if 27 countries are each allowed to make such decisions, the outcome would turn “the single market into a nightmare.”

O also wants member countries to be able to police what it called “harmful content and disinformation,” not just illegal content. “We think the text needs to be broadened to include other types of problematic content,” he said. “If there is no legal framework, there is nothing to stop Twitter or Facebook from censoring speech they do not like.”

Photo: Christiaan Colen/Flickr

by Jason Gorringe, Tax-News.com, London

  <h3>15 February 2021</h3>

The European Union has released its Winter 2021 Economic Forecast, which says that Brexit will dent UK economic growth considerably, and more than for the European Union, despite the new free trade deal between the two parties. 

The free trade deal between the UK and the EU provides for zero tariffs and zero quotas on all goods trade that complies with the appropriate rules of origin. However, the report highlights that non-tariff barriers have increased substantially for both imports and exports from and to the UK.

“In sum, while the FTA improves the situation as
compared to an outcome with no trade agreement
between the EU and the UK, it cannot come close
to matching the benefits of the trading relations
provided by EU membership,” the report says.

The report estimates that, for the EU, on average, the exit of the UK from the European Union under the FTA will generate a loss of GDP of 0.5 percent by 2022. The UK, meanwhile, will see a 2.25 percent drop in GDP over the same period.

Compared to a scenario where the EU and the UK failed to agree an FTA, the FTA has cut the negative economic impact on the EU by about a third and for the UK by about a quarter. The report says those member states with a larger share of goods trade with the UK benefit
relatively more from the FTA than those
with a higher share of trade in services.

While the UK and the EU have agreed to impose no tariffs on goods trade, new non-tariff barriers are considerable, equal to a tax of 10.9 percent for EU imports and 8.5 percent for UK imports, the report says.

Money from the European Union’s Covid-19 recovery fund will be spent on a green and digital transformation in Ireland, according to the Finance Minister.

Ministers have been taking submissions on how to spend Ireland’s €853 million share in grants from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).

The RRF will make some €672.5 billion in loans and grants available to support reforms and investments undertaken by EU member states.

Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe said the Government is examining some specific areas for spending, though no final decisions have been taken.

“My judgement is that the three priority areas that the RRF plan will look to deliver in Ireland will be about a green transition in Ireland, will be about how we can better fund the digital transformation of our economy, and then finally also in the area of skills,” he said.

Eurogroup meeting

It comes as a meeting of the Eurogroup, chaired by Minister Donohoe who was elected its president in July 2020, took place on Monday.

The informal meeting of finance ministers from across the eurozone was briefed by Dr Mike Ryan and Dr Bruce Aylward of the World Health Organisation (WHO) on how the Covid-19 pandemic is evolving amid a vaccine rollout.

In a statement, the Department of Finance said a debate on the prospect of a gradual reopening of European economies was informed by the briefing from Dr Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, and Dr Aylward, senior advisor to the WHO’s Director General.

We now need to ensure that we work harder than ever to build on the unprecedented economic support measures

“The expertise and experience of Dr Ryan and Dr Aylward provided the backdrop for an insightful and engaging discussion on the evolving social and economic challenges we face due to the Covid-19 pandemic at a national, European and global level,” Minister Donohoe said.

“We now need to ensure that we work harder than ever to build on the unprecedented economic support measures already agreed to deliver the coordinated support, reforms and sustainable growth our citizens and economies need.”

With the European Commission forecasting that economic growth is expected to resume in spring, eurozone ministers also discussed the coordination of national economic and budgetary policies.

Ministers endorsed a staged approach to budgetary discussions at the Eurogroup, the Department of Finance said.

Developments in the solvency of the corporate sector were also discussed, with the group noting “the need to continue to carefully monitor the solvency situation in the corporate sector, so as to protect jobs and to effectively target supports”.

The “potential opportunities and advantages but also the risks” of an enhanced international role of the euro currency were also assessed.

BRUSSELS, Feb. 15 (Xinhua) — China became the main trade partner of the European Union (EU) in 2020, with exports and imports both increasing despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Eurostat said on Monday.

According to the EU’s statistical service, the bloc’s imports from China throughout the year 2020 grew by 5.6 percent year-on-year to 383.5 billion euros (465 billion U.S. dollars), and exports grew by 2.2 percent to 202.5 billion euros.

At the same time, the trade in goods with the United States, which had topped the EU’s trade partners list until early 2020, saw substantial decline in both ways.

The EU also witnessed higher trade volume with the rest of the world in December 2020, up by 6.6 billion euros from the same month in 2019, a first year-on-year increase since it was hit by the pandemic.

The single market suffered a decrease of 9.4 percent in exports of goods and 11.6 percent decrease in imports in 2020. With industries largely affected by the containment measures last year, energy recorded by far the sharpest drop among all sectors, followed by food and drink, raw materials and chemicals.

The Eurostat release on Monday coincided with China’s official data published in mid-January, which showed the trade with the EU grew by 5.3 percent to 4495.77 billion yuan, or nearly 600 billion euros, in 2020.

While China’s total goods imports and exports expanded 1.9 percent year on year to 32.16 trillion yuan (about 5 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2020, hitting a record high, the surge in trade with the EU was more than double the average growth rate.

The result fully speaks for “the strong resilience and importance of China-EU economic and trade cooperation,” said Zhang Ming, head of the Chinese Mission to the EU, at a webinar last month with the European thinktank, Friends of Europe.