Issue #1 - July 3, 2025

How can the EU be ambitious for its Single Market if member states don't truly believe in it?

What would it take for the EU to drastically change its single market? Gathered on June 26, the EU Council agreed on the goal of pursuing competitiveness through the development of the EU Single Market. Simultaneously, the executive VP of the European Commission, Stéphane Séjourné, has come up with a strategy to tackle "the 10 most harmful Single Market barriers" such as "overly complex rules" or a single market not prioritized by member states that often tend to push for additional national rules instead of EU ones.

The Single Market strategy provides key areas of improvement, starting with boosting European services markets, where solutions emerge to simplify train ticket bookings or car rentals all across the EU, for instance. While very concrete solutions have been suggested, few are made regarding critical and strategic sectors such as telecoms and energy, where consumers would heavily benefit from EU-level players instead of a myriad of national ones.

Overall, we can already see a gap between the recommendations from the Draghi and Letta reports and the current proposals from the EU. No mention is made about GDPR enforcement and harmonization rules, while many companies, along with Mario Draghi, agree its enforcement should be harmonized. Here too, national regulators have gained over the years a role that can hardly be transitioned to a fully harmonized EU body without a strong will that comes from Member States. Stéphane Séjourné acknowledges that "everyone agrees on paper, but when you get down to the details, everyone has arguments to protect their market."

In the EU capital, AI Act and trade discussions are hotter than the heat wave

Trade negotiations with the US are back, and the US is asking to include digital rules into the agreement. The DSA, DMA, and AI Act have been criticized by both the US administration and some US tech companies as indirect levies on US tech companies. According to the Wall Street Journal, "a draft 'agreement on reciprocal trade' circulated by the U.S. Trade Representative's office lays out tentative deals on a litany of specific trade issues, including the EU's Digital Markets Act." So far, Trump's deadline for a trade agreement has been set for July 9, and the EU's proposed retaliatory tariffs are set to kick in on July 14 if no deal can be struck.

The AI Act has become over the past months the example of what companies see as a disconnect between the promise of the EU to promote innovation and its ongoing regulatory activity that essentially does the opposite. Today, a coalition of dozens of CEOs of European companies, including Airbus and Siemens, have signed an open letter urging the EC to apply a 2-year moratorium on the landmark regulation.

This call comes at a time when the Code of Practice of the AI Act is also going through immense scrutiny from the private sector. The Code, which among other things should clarify enforcement rules over model training transparency and use of copyrighted data, is expected to be published by August 2025. The debate is still extremely heated between tech companies and civil society and academia. CCIA Europe urges to pause its implementation while a group of organizations has called to "resist pressure." In early June, Commissioner Henna Virkkunen told the Council that postponing some parts of the act should "not be ruled out" if implementation tools are not ready.

Can the Danish Presidency of the EU unlock youth regulation?

The Danish Presidency of the EU started on July 1st and will continue until the end of December. While the question of youth regulation on the Internet has been a key policy issue in many member states including France or Spain, it appears Denmark is willing to benefit from its 6-month EU Presidency to swiftly accelerate the debate at the EU level.

In aninterview with Politico, Denmark's Digital Affairs Minister Caroline Stage Olsen has said "All European countries have the opportunity to demand from the Big Tech platforms that they introduce age verification." She added the bloc could act through new guidelines under the Digital Services Act, through the upcoming Digital Fairness Act, or through GDPR.