Towards the single digital market for e-identification and trust services

The EU intends to complete the creation of Digital Single Market in 2015. In order to achieve this ambitious, but rather unrealistic goal, serious initiatives need to be undertaken to remove barriers and introduce new rules reflecting the state-of-the-art of e-commerce and e-government. Over the last three years the EU has commenced several important initiatives. One of them is the newly adopted and largely unnoticed Regulation No 910/2014, which established unified rules across the EU for recognition of national electronic identification as well as the introduction of a variety of new trust services, which go beyond well-known digital signatures and timestamps. The new instrument laid down the foundation for the development of innovative, cross-border online services that will hopefully increase the security and transparency of information society services in the EU. A lot needs to be done to popularise the cross-border trust services, as the predecessor of the Regulation – the directive on electronic signatures – has not been widely adopted in public and especially, in private sector. Directive 1999/93/EC will be repealed with effect from 1 July 2016.