Geo-blocking is a practice that unfairly discriminates in most cases against consumers of a particular nationality or location.
A small step for online shoppers, a big step for eCommerce. The European Parliament approved the end of geographic blocking in electronic commerce with 557 deputies in favor, 83 against, and 33 abstentions. The law will enter into force nine months after it is published in the Official Gazette of the EU and will have to be ratified by the different parliaments of each state.
What is GeoBlocking?
It is a discriminatory practice that prevents access and purchases online by a consumer on a website that is located in a country other than that of the consumer. Moreover, many online stores redirect the user or show them different products for the simple fact of being geographically in another place or selecting a different language than the one that the web page brings by default in case it does not do it automatically. The servers assign the IPs to different blocks of internet service providers (ISP) so that they take the user to one website or another depending on our geographical location.
Unjustified geo-blocking prohibited
The new rule approved by Parliament will prohibit any unjustified geo-blocking, allowing consumers to choose from which website they want to make an online purchase without having to be redirected to another website or even blocked due to nationality, location, or residence. This will be a further step towards a single market .
Products affected by the regulations
Among the products included in this new regulation are tickets to shows and leisure parks, car rental,s, and hotel stays. On the contrary, products such as electronic books, music, or video games that are protected by copyright are excluded from the standard. These articles, however, will have to be reviewed within the following two years according to amendment 96 of the regulations.
How is the regulation
It will be prohibited to offer different treatment to the buyer for having a different place of issuance of his credit or debit card. Accepted payment methods will remain the seller’s decision, but you will not be able to reject a specific brand of a specific nationality.
MEP Róża Thun, responsible for the parliamentary processing of the text, highlighted the benefits of this new regulation for both consumers and sellers in the online medium, saying that:
all companies want to sell online abroad, but they want to do it without losing sleep
geo-blocking is an inexplicable practice in a 21st century Europe
With regard to companies and their benefit, Thun made it known that this regulation includes the right of sellers to apply the law of their country of origin regardless of the country to which they sell, thus facilitating the work of companies. Consumers will have to be the ones to organize the collection of the product.
The current situation in eCommerce
And it is that 63% of the websites do not allow users to make purchases online from another EU country according to the study carried out by the European Commission. This type of geographical barrier occurs to a greater extent in household appliances, with 86%, and in the services sector, the most affected are tickets to sporting events with 40%.
Today, it is unthinkable to have a barrier of this magnitude since online purchases outside the EU have increased considerably and in the last 10 years, the percentage of European consumers who buy online has doubled. This regulation has been presented as part of the digital single market, within the area of electronic commerce together with the legislation on cross-border package delivery services, whose vote in the plenary session of the European Parliament will take place in March 2018 and also together with the law that was already approved to reinforce the rights of consumers, recently in November 2017.
