The Digital Single Market
On December 6, 2017, the Atlantic Council’s Global Business and Economics program co-hosted an event with the Bay Area Council Economic Institute in San Francisco, CA. The discussion focused on the progress of the EU’s Digital Single Market (DSM) strategy and its implications for businesses in the United States and the transatlantic digital marketplace. Our panel included Usman Ahmed, Head of Global Public Policy at PayPal; Bruce Andrews, Managing Director at Rock Creek Global Advisors LLC; Andrea Glorioso, Digital Counsellor at the Delegation of the European Union to the United States; and Luke Kowalski, Vice President of the Corporate Architecture Group at Oracle. Melissa Blaustein, Founder and CEO of Allied for Startups, moderated the discussion.

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Mr. Ahmed stressed how European and US businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, could benefit from ongoing DSM reform efforts to boost e-commerce that include a ban on unjustified geo-blocking, lower prices for parcel delivery, and a simplified VAT framework. Mr. Andrews emphasized the role the DSM could play to elevate the US-EU commercial relationship to another level. Mr. Glorioso provided participants with an update on the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will be enforced across the EU beginning in May 2018. In addition, representatives from Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and large Silicon Valley companies, including Mozilla Inc., Stripe, and PayPal, took part in the discussion which ultimately transitioned from the EU’s DSM to the future of work and its implications for the transatlantic digital marketplace.