The European Union (EU) has made reform of the e-commerce rules in Europe one of its main priorities for 2018. The European Commission has already published two proposed Directives relating to cross-border e-commerce but legislative progress has been slow—a situation that the Commission plans to correct in 2018. The Commission’s stated aim is to establish a more harmonised set of rules for the supply of digital content and sale of online goods across the EU,…

The European Union (EU) has made reform of the e-commerce rules in Europe one of its main priorities for 2018. The European Commission has already published two proposed Directives relating to cross-border e-commerce but legislative progress has been slow—a situation that the Commission plans to correct in 2018. The Commission’s stated aim is to establish a more harmonised set of rules for the supply of digital content and sale of online goods across the EU,…

The European Commission has announced new draft laws that would give consumers new remedies where digital content supplied online is defective or not as described by the seller. On Dec. 9, 2015, the European Commission proposed two new directives on the supply of digital content and the online sale of goods. In doing so, the Commission is making progress towards one of the main goals in the Digital Single Market Strategy (the “DSM Strategy”) announced in May…

The cloud computing market is evolving rapidly. New as a service (aaS) platforms are appearing and the dichotomy between public and private cloud domains has been fractured into many different shades of hybrid cloud alternatives. And while many of the key issues – privacy risk, data location, service commitment – remain the same, service providers’ commercial offerings are becoming more flexible. Over the past 18 months, we have even started to see changes in the…

The cloud computing market is evolving rapidly. New as a service (aaS) platforms are appearing and the dichotomy between public and private cloud domains has been fractured into many different shades of hybrid cloud alternatives. And while many of the key issues – privacy risk, data location, service commitment – remain the same, service providers’ commercial offerings are becoming more flexible. Over the past 18 months, we have even started to see changes in the…

In November 2012, we wrote an Alert about the European Commission’s Communication on Cloud Computing intended, it said, to “… unleash the potential of cloud computing in Europe”.  Sceptics were doubtful that the cloud industry needed much help from European regulators to thrive. Twenty months later, the Commission has begun to deliver on its key actions in the Communication with the publication of its Cloud Service Level Agreement Standardisation Guidelines. How helpful are these Standardisation…

Cisco estimates that 25 billion devices will be connected in the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2015, and 50 billion by 2020. Analyst firm IDC makes an even bolder prediction: 212 billion connected devices by 2020. This massive increase in connectedness will drive a wave of innovation and could generate up to $19 trillion in savings over the next decade, according to Cisco’s estimates. In the first part of this two-part post, we examined the…