This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with John Higgins. John Higgins is the Director General of Digital Europe, which represents the digital technology industry in Europe with around 60 corporate members and 35 national trade associations.

John, we're going to start by talking about the digital single market, of course.

And its strategy unveiled by the European Commission back in May this year.

What excites you about the strategy, or is it largely old wine and new bottles?

I think the best way to look at the strategy is that it's digital turning the heat up on the

challenges that we've had to here in Europe to have a really functioning internal market or single market.

And so it's not really, it's not old wine in new bottles, but it's rather that the continuing

opportunity of a single market for Europe is now even more obvious to us in the digital

era.

So why has not such a strategy succeeded in the past and why are we so optimistic in Europe now?

I'm not sure we are optimistic, are we, Paul?

But anyway, I think to have a functioning single market

requires all of our member states to want to be in a single market.

And that brings it saying precious, doesn't it?

So because you think about many

things that people do in a group, they say, I'd be very happy with the group's rules as long as

they're very like my rules. And so I think the real challenges of a single market in anything

are that people like the idea of a single market, but they're quite wedded to their own national

ways of doing things and changing those national ways of doing things takes time and you have

to stick a lot of people with you. So I think digital will make it more obvious to people

in the member states that there will be benefits from having a single market. So I think it's not

so I think digital will make it more obvious to people that there are benefits to a single

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