Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-01-20-Speech-4-200"
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"en.20000120.12.4-200"2
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"Mr President, I should like to thank Mrs Palacio and Commissioner Bolkestein for starting this discussion with typical lucidity and courtesy.
It is remarkable – and though it may be banal to say it, I cannot forbear to make the point – what a huge change the development of e-commerce is going to have on the way we all live in the coming decades and throughout this century. Speaking for myself, I did my first Christmas e-shopping this past Christmas, partly because of the new circumstances of my life and the lesser availability of the high street shops of Edinburgh to me at present. Indeed, I sent some e-flowers to my daughter on her recent marriage in Texas, and – as you will appreciate, Mr President – it was agreeable to a Scotsman to get the flowers there without the cost of a fare! We are moving into a new world. But there are, as has been said, extraordinarily difficult problems.
If you move away from the own-country basis, small firms will have difficulty getting into the market. Mrs Berger made a part of the point, but is it not important to remember that people who are getting into a trade need to know what they have to insure against, and local advice on that is going to be better. It makes it important that the home country principle prevails. But then the opposite problem arises. You can get long-distance rip-offs from companies in other countries that know that they are not at much risk of facing angry Mrs Smith who got a dud article through the mail. So how do you deal with that?
It has been mentioned twice already – and it is an important suggestion – that there should be ways in which you can use the credit card companies as a risk-spreading mechanism if they are willing to participate in this. Consumers can have rights against the credit card company in their own country, and the credit card company can have rights against the producer or seller in its country. That way, all those involved in the market would participate in a very small way in the risks across the whole market. The Commission should be looking at that.
In the long term though, we must move to a harmonisation of laws in civil and commercial matters throughout the Union. We in the UK, as you know, Mr President, ran a very successful internal market for 300 years, with two legal systems which grew together spontaneously, not by imposition. We need, in the long run, to look for that kind of development in Europe. We should have European restatements like the American restatements and let our law evolve."@en1
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