EU agrees to abolish geoblocking restrictions on some goods on e-commerce sites by end of 2018; proposal excludes copyrighted content like streaming services
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union has agreed a plan obliging online retailers operating in the bloc to make electrical goods … Tweets: @johnmu Tweets: @johnmu : Interesting EU plans: “Companies will no longer be able to re-direct consumers to a country-specific website without their consent.” http://www.reuters.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a loop the Commission opened in 2015, when it first announced plans to banish geo-blocking alongside a copyright modernization push. Two years of negotiation later, the agreed rule covers physical goods sold online — with the notable carve-out that copyrighted content like streaming stays outside its scope.
That carve-out sits awkwardly next to the separate cross-border access deal for streaming services struck earlier in 2017: the EU is forcing goods retailers toward a single market while leaving rights holders' territorial licensing largely intact.
First-order effects
- Online retailers operating in the bloc can no longer re-direct consumers to country-specific websites without their consent, and must sell covered goods like electrical items across borders by end of 2018.
- Streaming services and other copyright-protected content are explicitly exempt, so their existing country-by-country catalogs and pricing survive this round untouched.
Second-order effects
- Retailers lose a tool for segmenting the EU market by willingness-to-pay, pushing competition toward uniform pan-EU pricing and logistics rather than national storefronts.
- Rights holders and platforms face pressure to justify why content stays territorially split when goods no longer can be — the exemption becomes the visible exception in the Commission's digital single market agenda.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the EU keeps regulating e-commerce structurally rather than case-by-case: the same session of policymaking feeds into the copyright reform package on upload filters and aggregator payments, and later the platform-ranking transparency rules negotiators agreed in 2019.
- A two-speed digital single market hardens — borderless for goods, still territorial for content — making copyright licensing the next battleground once the goods rule takes effect.
The trend: The EU is dismantling geo-discrimination sector by sector, starting with physical goods while deferring the harder fight over territorial content licensing.