Authors: Regina Hučková, Pavol Sokol, Laura Rózenfeldová
Abstract
Digital Technologies alter our everyday life and the world around us. Individuals and businessmen are confronted with significantly differentiated conditions in every area of social-economic relations in contrast with the state that existed a few years ago. These altered conditions are in the case of the European Union’s Member States multiplied by this status and by the related facts, especially by the necessity to conform the domestic politics to the EU’s politics in many areas. Frontal offensive towards the creation of the digital single market was announced by the European Commission in May 2015 by releasing its 16 initiatives within three basic pillars. The year 2017 was characterized by various legislative activities motivated by the creation of optimal legislative conditions in the EU. Slovak Presidency of the Council of the EU was also significantly defined by the Digital Single Market Agenda, since the presidency’s program explicitly states the new key aim of the EU to ensure the free flow of data as the 5th freedom within the EU’s internal market. The Article analyses the most significant legislative changes introduced in 2017 which impact will be observable in the beginning of 2018 and in the following years.
Introduction
Professor Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, has been at the center of global affairs for over four decades. He is convinced that we are at the beginning of a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and relate to one another.2
Previous industrial revolutions deliberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is fundamentally different. It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.3
New dimensions in business and acceleration of business activities are accompanied by the development of new technologies, especially, by the development of computer technologies.4 The importance of computer technologies in the business sphere at present go along with the enormous virtual potential for conducting business, it means, the internet network.
As regards the technological development, the branch of commercial law is in the forefront among other branches of law which can be viewed from different perspectives. On one hand, these modern age inventions are considered as objects of conducting business activities; on the other hand, these conquests of science and technology are deemed to be instruments to facilitate processes in conducting business activities. Further considerations must be of accentuated European dimension, since the European Union declared the strategy of single digital market in the previous months that should be created until 2020 and serve as the virtual platform to the existing physical single market. The general intent drifts forward to prepare the European economy for the new period in commercial and economic relations that is determined by the development in the sphere of information technologies.
This paper discusses some of the legislative changes in the European Union legal framework presented, discussed and implemented during the last months. Three different issues are discussed and incorporated into the separated parts of the paper: eIDAS Regulation, law of Cookies and issue of the Cybersecurity which all seem to be very different. But if we look closer and more into details all of the discussed topics are fundamental elements of the agenda of Digital Single Market.
