European Union News - Internal Market

MEPs at the Industry Committee approved draft EU rules that will enable companies or persons to get access to data such as maps, statistics, weather data, infrastructure listings, data from publicly funded research projects, and digitised books from libraries, which they can then use to develop their businesses. According to MEPs, EU firms could save billions of euros thanks to these draft EU rules that would enable them to re-use public data instead of producing them from scratch

Google has made proposals to try to address the European Commission's four competition concerns. The Commission has concerns that Google may be abusing its dominant position in the markets for web search, online search advertising and online search advertising intermediation in the European Economic Area (EEA). Therefore, the Commission is seeking feedbacks on commitments offered by Google to address these competition concerns.

Alexander Ljung & Eric Wahlforss of SoundCloud are European Entrepreneurs of the Year while Jon Reynolds of SwiftKey is Young European Entrepreneur of the Year (under 30 years). The Europioneer awards are a partnership between the European Commission and The Next Web. On this occasion, 908 nominations were received from across Europe.

The European Commission sets up a Platform for Tax Good Governance that has as main aim to monitor member states' progress in tackling aggressive tax planning and clamping down on tax havens.

Eurostat published its figures regarding provision of deficit and debt data for 2012. These figures show that the government deficit of both the euro area and the EU decreased in absolute terms compared with 2011, while the government debt rose in both zones. The data published also show that seventeen member states had deficits higher than 3% of GDP. Spain (-10.6%), Greece (-10.0%), Ireland (-7.6%), Portugal (-6.4%), Cyprus and the United Kingdom (both -6.3%) had the highest deficit in 2012.

The Permanent Representatives Committee of the Council approved a compromise agreed with the European Parliament on the establishment of a single supervisory mechanism (SSM) for the oversight of credit institutions. Once formally approved by both institutions, the Council and the Parliament, the European Central Bank will assume its supervisory tasks within the SSM either on 1 March 2014 or 12 months after entry into force of the legislation.

The European Commission presented a strategy on adaptation to climate change, and also a Green Paper on insurance in the context of natural and man-made disasters. This public consultation launches a wide debate on the adequacy and availability of existing insurance options.

MEPs adopted in plenary session a resolution that stresses that the European Central Bank should do more to ensure that its cheap loans to banks were being passed on to the real economy and the ECB itself must become more transparent and accountable in line with its growing role in the Eurozone crisis.

The European Parliament voted against freezing auctions of a portion of CO2 emission quotas, so as to boost the price of EU polluter's permits. A majority of MEPs felt that interfering with the supply of credits would undermine confidence in the Emissions Trading System (ETS). On the other hand, MEPs agreed to temporarily exclude intercontinental flights from the scheme.