European disintegration threatens business on the Internet

[Commentary] By making it harder to start and run an internet business, European Union authorities threaten to make Europe less prosperous and the web less useful. Facebook’s recent experience in Europe tells a disturbing tale.

National authorities are entitled to their differences over how Facebook and other internet companies should be regulated. But ignoring the rules Europe has so painstakingly crafted, and arrogating the authority that those rules accord to the Irish regulators, is not the answer. The simplest way to resolve their differences is for national regulators to work together, as they have done effectively in the past. That is surely a better approach than to fragment Europe’s single market, and waste resources mounting independent investigations into issues that have already been thoroughly examined.

[Allan is Facebook’s vice-president of public policy in Europe]