Verbatim report of proceedings

Tuesday, 19 January 2016 - Strasbourg

Towards a Digital Single Market Act (debate)

  Michał Boni, rapporteur for the opinion of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. – Mr President, I would like to thank everyone for the report, which is well-structured and with a balanced approach, including in the area of the competences of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, and with a clear message that we need digital harmonisation in Europe.

What does a ‘balanced approach’ mean? It means that we have not achieved the real turning point, to say that we need stronger solutions, more harmonised in some areas, as decisions on 5G spectrum development and text and data mining development have been scarce. On the other hand, however, we have made progress in the right direction, have begun working faster on the e—Privacy Directive and have established equilibrium between privacy protection, security needs and business opportunities in the era of big data. It shows that we understand how important data privacy is in the light of the data-driven economy. In that area, we need future—proof solutions. Now we can start work on issues such as how to share data, what ownership of data means and how to make data much more secure, also using the solutions of security and privacy by design.