Respons to European Commission’s Digital Fitness Check- Call for Evidence

Europe’s share of the global ICT market nearly halved over the period 2013-22.1 It is lagging the US and China in seven of the eight most strategic technologies. The volume, quality and cumulative burden of regulation is an important barrier to the success of the bloc’s technology sector – and to the take-up of new technologies by European businesses across all sectors of the economy to improve their productivity. In this context, the Digital Fitness Check (DFC) is a unique opportunity to restore competitiveness. This does not require the EU to lower its regulatory standards. Instead, the DFC is an opportunity to modernise regulation: making it simpler, more agile, proportionate, and innovation-friendly. Swedish Enterprise has already contributed to the discussion of how to improve regulation in position papers on the GDPR , ePrivacy Directive , Digital Omnibus and AI Omnibus proposals. We have also participated in a BusinessEurope position paper on simplifying the digital rulebook. This response complements those documents by identifying the most pressing issues and proposing improvements to the whole digital rulebook, in line with the DFC’s broad scope.