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to the website of the Belgian chain of department stores,
where the same sneakers can be purchased, yet at a
considerable higher price.
A similar example was chosen by the European
Commissioner for Competition, Mrs. Margrethe Vestager,
who is a Danish citizen, when she provided a speech at a
high level international conference on March 26, 2015 in
Berlin, entitled “Building the Digital Market”.
She referred in her speech to geo-blocking practices of
companies and rights owners, which are widespread in
the TV and movie industry, but are also quite frequently
used in the area of cross-border sales of branded
products. Sometimes foreign customers and website
visitors are diverted and redirected to websites in the
country where they live or work; be it that articles are
sold at different prices in different countries
(e.g. because of different sales tax or currency
exchange rates), or be it that a local seller in the
other country just does not want to engage itself
into cross-border transactions, since such seller
has not the required logistics or payment methods
in place to adequately accommodate the needs of
such foreign consumer knocking at its door.
It is now the vision and one of the top political
priority goals of the EU Commission to enable
European customers to purchase products or
services online from any given point of sales
in any of the 28 EU Member States at the most
favorable price by at the same time enabling these
consumers to compare prices European wide and