Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on measures to combat geo-blocking and other forms of discrimination
IT&Telecom companies have been offered the opportunity to respond to this reply to public consultation.
"The Digital Single Market Strategy adopted in May 2015 and the Single Market Strategy adopted in October 2015 announced legislative measures to tackle unjustified geo-blocking and to combat discrimination based on nationality, place of residence or place of establishment in a comprehensive manner (for the sake of simplicity, these are collectively referred to as place of residence in this explanatory memorandum).
The general aim of this proposal is to provide customers with better access to goods and services in the internal market by preventing direct and indirect discrimination by traders who artificially divide the market on the basis of the customer's place of residence. Customers experience such differences in treatment when they shop online, but also when they travel to other Member States to buy goods or services.
Despite the implementation of the non-discrimination principle in Article 20(2) of Directive 2006/123/EC3 ('the Services Directive'), customers continue to be refused purchases or subjected to different conditions when buying goods and services across borders. This is mainly because it is unclear what constitutes the objective factors that can justify differences in the way traders treat customers. To address this problem, traders and customers should be provided with more clarity on the situations where different treatment based on place of residence cannot be justified."