IDC welcomes the Commission's determination to ensure that there is one single law across the EU that is applied uniformly throughout Europe independent of where you are and which data protection authority is responsible for you. This will remove the messy situation we currently have with multiple laws and regulators.
"For harmonisation to happen, the privacy rules have to meet the sensitivities of the most conservative countries, in particular Germany, otherwise we will just end up where we are now, with a highly fragmented landscape and no legal certainty for companies operating in the EU," said David Bradshaw, research manager for cloud services at IDC. "The main problem is that the new rules are far more robust than those that apply in many other EU countries, in particular the UK. These countries will bear the main cost of getting to a single market."