Henrik Piski, a Green living in Malta

“Liberalisation of telecommunications services has meant that the internet is now within reach of the 500 million people in the 27 countries of the European Union, with global means of payment, and global distribution systems.

But consumers do not yet have global commerce. Far too often they do not even have pan-European commerce.

Consumers see the internet, and the borders that exist online, and feel that they are not getting a fair deal.

There seem to be many reasons for this, some common to the online and the offline worlds, including tax systems, consumer protection laws, guarantees and after-sales service.

The Single Market of the European Union is based on a relatively straightforward premise. The fewer the barriers between markets, the more efficiently those markets will work. There are questions about territorial restrictions. It is a long standing principle of Community law that a company can prevent its distributors from actively selling across borders – this helps to protect investments and efforts made by other distributors. However a company cannot prevent arbitrage and stop its distributors selling – passively - to consumers who are themselves active, and who seek out the distributor.

Why is it possible to buy a CD from an online retailer and have it shipped to anywhere in Europe, but it is not possible to buy the same music, by the same artist, as an electronic download with similar ease? Why do pan-European services find it so difficult to get a pan-European license? Why do new, innovative services find licensing to be such a hurdle?”

Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Competition Policy, raised these questions in her closing speech at an Online Commerce Roundtable in Brussels on the 17^th September 2008.

Unfortunately, Maltese consumers often realize that they can not get products and services delivered to Malta and that they are not able to download legally music due to licensing issues or not available online stores for the Maltese market (like Apple Store).

I fully support Mrs. Kroes initiative and hope that she will create the rules and the environment for a real European online commerce without any electronic borders and geographic restrictions.

The government is pushing local companies to use the internet for the reselling of services and goods. In Malta, only Bank of Valletta and HSBC Malta are offering e-commerce and card clearing services.

Bank of Valletta has recently updated its e-commerce policy:

* a monthly cap is introduced meaning that every transaction over
the monthly cap will be blocked for 120 days
* a retention of at least 20% of the transaction amount for a period
of 120 days is introduced.

These conditions are tough burdens for every e-commerce merchant as a non negligible amount of their turnover will be block for a very long period. This is clearly going against the effort of the government.

It has to be mentioned that neither Bank of Valletta or HSBC are clearing the debit cards of their competitor, thus creating a disadvantage for both the merchants and the consumer.

Alternattiva Demokratika is urging the two major banks to revise their e-commerce policy and to get inline with SEPA regulations as fast as possible.