Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the EU's Digital Agenda, explained:

"[This] means doubling both online sales, and the share of the internet economy in EU GDP [currently less than 3%]. We’ll do this by making it easier, more transparent and more trustworthy to buy online. And by making it an integral part of our single market, so that you can have as much confidence when buying online in another member state as in your own – and can benefit from as much choice and opportunity online as possible. Because, remember, if you can buy from online shops across the EU, you will have – on average – 16 times more choice than if you only shopped offline in your own country!

There’s a lot of strands to this action plan: sixteen, in fact. Some of them are about the kinds of issues I mention above – being able to trust those who supply goods online, to pay for goods and services easily online, to respond to illegal content, and to rely on postal and delivery systems.

But, of course, we’re not just talking about old-style physical delivery of goods: it’s also online “virtual” services like video and music streaming, or online games. Those services need serious broadband bandwidth: and we need to ensure we can provide that infrastructure, through broadband roll-out and spectrum provision. Likewise, we need to look ahead to future developments, and make sure our strategy makes it easy to develop and use cloud services."