EU agrees to abolish geoblocking restrictions on some goods on e-commerce sites by end of 2018; proposal excludes copyrighted content like streaming services
Lily Cusack / Reuters : 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 opened in March 2015, when the EU first announced plans to banish geo-blocking alongside a copyright modernization push. Two years of negotiation produced a narrower deal than that early framing: physical goods sold online get the ban by end of 2018, while copyrighted content — streaming above all — is carved out entirely.
The carve-out is less of a loss than it looks, because content was already handled separately: in February 2017 the EU agreed a cross-border portability regime for video-on-demand, TV, music, and games starting 2018. So the digital single market is being built in two tracks — goods via anti-geoblocking, subscriptions via portability — with the harder copyright questions left to a separate reform fight over snippet fees and upload filters.
First-order effects
- E-commerce retailers selling covered goods can no longer re-direct EU consumers to country-specific sites without consent, forcing them to serve cross-border shoppers on their existing national storefronts.
- Consumers gain the right to buy those goods across borders at whatever price the seller's site offers, ending the practice of walling off cheaper national versions.
Second-order effects
- Retailers face pressure toward pan-EU pricing and fulfillment, since visible price gaps between country sites become directly shoppable rather than merely annoying.
- Streaming services keep their territorial licensing model intact under this proposal, which shifts the battleground for content geoblocking to the copyright reform file where rights holders and platforms are already contesting aggregator fees and upload filters.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the EU regulates the digital single market piecemeal — goods first, portability second, platform conduct third — with each step normalizing Brussels as the de facto rule-setter whose template other jurisdictions copy.
- The goods/content split entrenches a two-tier internet commerce regime in Europe: one where location discrimination is illegal for products, and one where it remains the legal foundation of media licensing.
The trend: The EU is assembling its digital single market through sequenced, sector-by-sector interventions that split physical goods from copyrighted content rather than tackling both at once.