Open platforms for web‐based applications and services in Europe, enlarging the stakeholders community : executive summary

Acknowledging the link between ICT and Economic Growth, the commission made the Digital Agenda a key pillar of its strategy for growth, Europe 2020. Action 54 of the Digital Agenda Europe (DAE 54) specifically aims at enabling the new generation of web‐based applications and services. However, its implementation requires a deep knowledge of the current web ecosystem and its foreseen evolution, including the identification of stakeholders involved, as well as the identification of technical, policy and economic challenges posed by future web platforms. This report presents the findings of a study on web platforms and stakeholders commissioned by the EC in response to DAE 54. Emergent web platforms drive value creation and growth across the economy in intricate and unforeseen ways, creating and reinventing markets and business models. Since 1995 more than two billion people joined the Internet, half of them in the past 5 years. Web platforms played a central role in this mass migration. It allowed successful web businesses such as Google and Facebook to turn garage start‐ups into billion dollar global brands in a matter of years. App platforms such as the Apple App Store created a total market estimated to be worth up to 35 Billion in 2014. Numerous other successful businesses build on top of the new platforms or create entirely new ones in a wide range of domains from ecommerce to health, from entertainment to finance. The biggest and most successful of these companies, controlling entire platform ecosystems, are non‐European, mostly US based. Our study includes an analysis of the web‐services economy in Europe, including a forecast of growth and a technology roadmap for 2020. In addition we reviewed the hindrances European entrepreneurs perceive when doing business on the web and the possible remedies that can be conceived at European level.