Estudio Financiero
COSTO DE MANO DE OBRA DIRECTA
3.4 Costos totales de Operación
The assessment has shown that Article 20(2) of the Services Directive is not an effective EU intervention to achieve the pursued objectives. Several factors contribute to this: legal uncertainty regarding acceptable and non-acceptble justifications which companies
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can use to treat customers differently, and consequently, lack of enforcement by national authorities. Due to the lack of data, the efficiency of the provision could not be assessed. However, the objectives of the non-discrimination principle remain highly relevant, and coherent with other EU policy actions, such as the Digital Single Market Strategy and the Single Market Strategy for goods and services. The introduction of Article 20(2) has not brought any substantive added value due to its lack of effectiveness, but the analysis shows that EU intervention to address the issues concerned is necessary to reach the objectives.
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Annex 9: Glossary
For the purposes of the Impact Assessment on geo-blocking and other discriminations based on nationality or place of residence the following definitions shall apply:
'Service' means any self-employed economic activity, normally provided for remuneration, as referred to in Article 57 of the Treaty. (It covers for example retail of goods and services, leisure services, services provided by architects and engineers, construction services such as installations and maintenance of equipment, food services such as hotels and restaurants, and leasing services.)
'Customer' means a consumer who or an undertaking which intends to purchase or purchase goods or services which are not for resale to another customer;
'Trader' means any natural person or legal person, irrespective of whether privately or publicly owned, who is acting, including through any other person acting in her name or on her behalf, for purposes related to her trade, business, craft or profession.
'Contract' means any agreement under which the trader transfers or undertakes to transfer the ownership of goods to the recipient, supplies or undertakes to supply a service, and the consumer pays or undertakes to pay the price thereof.
‘Distance contract’ means any contract concluded between the trader and consumer under an organised distance sales or service-provision scheme without the simultaneous physical presence of the trader and the consumer, with the exclusive use of one or more means of distance communication up to and including the time at which the contract is concluded; 'General conditions of access' means all terms, conditions and other information,
including sale prices, regulating the access of customers to goods or services offered for sale by a trader, which are set, applied and made available to the public at large by or on behalf of the trader and which apply in the absence of an individually negotiated agreement between the trader and the customer.
'Discrimination based on nationality or place of residence' means unjustified differences in the general conditions of access to goods or services made available to the public at large, i.e. outright refusals to sell or the application of different conditions, based on customers' nationality or place of residence when intending to purchase or purchase goods or services which are not for resale to another customer. Differences in treatment do not amount to discrimination if the differences can be justified by objective criteria.
'Nationality or place of residence' cover also proxy factors which may end up being tantamount to nationality or residence, such as the country of the driving licence, the country of credit card issuance, the place of delivery, the country of origin of specifically dedicated IP addresses, the lack of credit history in a particular Member State, the lack of registration in the population registry, etc.
'Unjustified geo-blocking' means online discrimination based on nationality or place of residence.
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'Re-routing' means any practice by information society service providers the purpose of which is to redirect the customer to an alternative version of the online interface to an information society service, on the basis of the customer's nationality or place of residence; 'Online interface' means any software the purpose of which is to allow customers to conclude
a commercial transaction by means of information society services, such as a website;
'IP address' stands for Internet Protocol address and is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing. IP addresses are often used for deducing location of an Internet user through geolocation services
'Geolocation services' means a software service used to deduce the geographical location (i.e. geolocation) of a device connected to the Internet. The most common way of obtaining a geolocation is through user's IP address. IP-based geolocation services use databases mapping IP addresses to Internet providers, cities and countries that allow them to locate a device based on its IP address with a high accuracy. Using this method, determining the country in which the device is located is 95%-99% percent accurate, while accuracy rates on naming the city from an IP address vary between 50%-80%. Geolocation information can be obtained in a number of other ways, including MAC address, RFID, Wi-Fi connection location, or GPS coordinates.
'Micro enterprise' means161
micro those businesses having less than 10 employees and a turnover of €2m or less.
'Small enterprise' means those businesses having less than 50 employees and a turnover of €10m or less.
'SME Small and medium enterprises' are those businesses having less than 250 employees and a turnover of €50m or less.
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