European Contract Law and the Digital Single Market: Current Issues and New Perspectives

Digital technology significantly changes the balance in society and economic relationships, offering new opportunities for innovative business models. This raises challenging questions affecting several aspects of the law. For a functioning market economy, private law has to provide a general framework and efficient tools. The realisation of a connected Digital Single Market is one of the ten priorities of the European Commission, which aims to react appropriately to the challenges of the digital revolution in order to use this opportunity for economic growth. In the framework of its Digital Single Market Strategy, the European Commission announced a set of measures aiming to create better access to digital goods and services across Europe for both consumers and businesses, underlining that the absence of consistent EU-wide criteria creates barriers to entrance, hinders competition and reduces predictability for investors throughout Europe. The paper addresses the impact of digital technology on private law relationships, the status of information as a tradeable commodity and the new instruments to protect it, the legislative instruments for a Digital Single Market concerning consumers’ and users’ rights when buying goods, services or digital content online, the new features of standard contracts in the digital market, online intermediary platforms and online dispute resolution platforms.