Spend an hour with Viviane Reding and you cannot help but get acquainted with her bete noire: fragmentation. For the past five years, as European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, she has pursued the lofty goal of creating a single European digital market - a eurozone for ICT, if you like, where the same digital rights, protections and business opportunities are extended across the European Union's (now) 27 member states.

Through a raft of pan-European legislation, uncompromising directives and forceful pronouncements on everything from data privacy and security-breach disclosure to mobile roaming charges and green IT, the Luxembourg politician has transformed what was an anaemic directorate into one of the EU's most powerful offices.

In the process, she has established herself as unquestionably the most influential person in European IT, with a remit for the digital interests of some 500 million citizens.

But any conversation with Reding about the state of "Digital Europe" is always going to be peppered with references to the evils of fragmentation, the result of country-specific laws and policies, whether protectionist, short-sighted or naive.

While other aspects of European life - trade, finance, freedom of movement and social policy - have progressively become borderless across the EU, many of the barriers in the supposedly fast-moving digital arena have stood firm, effectively dampening the potential for both business and the consumer.

Cross-border ecommerce

Just take the issue of cross-border ecommerce, one that riles Reding. Covert research by the EU into e-tailers' practices showed that 60% of customer attempts to buy items across EU borders fail, with the transaction or shipping declined by the vendor, even though the buyer could have saved at least 10% by e-shopping abroad (even including shipping costs) in half of the 11,000 cases investigated.

The now-ratified Lisbon Treaty, with its aim of streamlining the EU's sclerotic political processes, should help attack such fragmentation. But Reding - who will be elevated to justice and citizen rights commissioner when the new European Commission takes office in late January 2010 - has already set in place a powerful and ambitious agenda for ICT that will extend well into this decade.

Fittingly, in her view, ICT should not just have its own agenda but be a key factor in almost every part of the commission's activities. "'Digital Europe' will be at the core of the EU's policies for the next five years," she says. And that means dismantling some walls.

"The main priority - and the one that will have the biggest impact on business - will be opening up the market," she says. "If you have 27 different sets of rules which apply instead of one, it is a huge cost to industry. So perfecting the internal market in Europe will be of great importance, not just from the point of view of technology, but also for the services that go with it."

An internet-driven society demands nothing less. "It's a contradiction in terms when you say 'digital border': digital is borderless," she says. "Europe must open its digital borders, not for the sake of technology, but in order for technology to help us solve our problems - healthcare, social security, pensions"

That will only happen if the EU addresses some key issues that inhibit consumer engagement (and ultimately business risk-taking). She singles out data security, copyright protection and consumer protection, among others. "If the consumer is not sure that when they make a purchase online their identity is safe and that the transaction is going to go through [no matter where they are in the EU and where they are buying from], they just won't do it."

And that is hurting business. She is adamant that by "stabilising the question of data security" through pan-EU policy and directives, business will benefit by the widening of ecommerce.

Data protection

Critical to that will be the strengthening of Europe's data-protection laws. As European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship (to cite her new business card-busting title), one thing she will be in charge of is the redrafting of existing directives on data protection and privacy. A further factor in the drive for universal user confidence in online engagement will be a move to the compulsory disclosure of data breaches by business and public sector organisations.

Under legislation recently approved by the European Parliament, telecoms companies operating in Europe are now obliged to disclose when customers' personal data is compromised.

But that is just the start. "We have to go further," says Reding. "We want to expand this to every sector because it is in the interest not only of the consumer but of industry. If we have legal certainty, if we all know how to behave, then trust will grow. If trust grows, then take-up will grow. It's a virtuous circle."

Mobile roaming charges

That was the logic she applied when pushing through her best-known and most widely applauded policy to date: the imposition of mandatory price caps on roaming charges for mobile phones within the EU.

As a result of her campaigning, from July 2009 mobile communications companies across Europe were required to set an €0.11 ceiling on the cost of sending an SMS message between countries in the EU and to abolish the cost of receiving one completely. In addition, the cost of surfing the web while abroad has been radically reset through the introduction of a maximum wholesale cap of €1 per MB of data downloaded, with that limit to decrease annually, while her strenuous efforts helped to establish a maximum tariff of €0.43 for making a cross-border call and €0.19 for receiving one.

"We had seen that the fragmentation of the European [mobile communications] market into separate segments was punishing the telecoms industry [itself]," she says. "It was punishing the citizen because the citizen couldn't utilise the technology as if they were in one big market. And I said, 'That doesn't make sense, that's not Europe - business people and consumers must not be punished when they cross a border.'"

Telecoms companies were none too pleased, but they should have been, says Reding. "When roaming costs went down, cross-border utilisation of the telephone went up almost immediately  by 35%," she says proudly. "So there was interrelation between policies; initially, it might have seemed only to be consumer-friendly, but it was friendly to the overall economic environment."

Business vs consumer interests

Given that, Reding has come to the firm belief that the blurring of the boundaries between business and consumer interests means they are practically indistinguishable as far as EU policy is concerned.

"What I found was that there is a wrong way to look at this, with industry on one side and the consumer on the other," she says. "I believe you can create an industrial policy that serves both. So you must not separate the two - you must bring them together, and it works. It really works."

It works especially well when the right environment is created for digital growth. Reding points to the use of mobile phones for ecommerce - something commonplace in countries such as Japan and South Korea - as an example of the kind of innovation that can be unleashed as a result of effective EU legislation.

"M-commerce will happen [on a large scale in Europe]," she says. "But for it to happen quickly, we need to have the trust of consumers. Europeans are very sensitive about their private data, so you have to give them a guarantee that it's secure."

Faster broadband

The pervasive digital market that Reding champions will also require fast, widely available broadband across both fixed and mobile. "If you want to have a successful single digital market, you need high-speed infrastructure," she states.

She has launched policies involving private and public investment to address "next-generation access" - that is, to try to ensure that few if any individuals are left behind in the "digital enfranchisement", although she feels that current broadband penetration levels are acceptable. "As far as [that] is concerned, Europe is the world leader by far," she points out. "European countries are doing even better than South Korea and far better than the United States."

At the same time, she has taken action to satisfy the appetite for 3G mobile broadband capacity. For example, as part of the switchover from analogue to digital TV scheduled for January 2012, her "Digital Dividend" policy will require national governments to give up frequencies no longer used by analogue TV for 3G and 4G mobile broadband usage.

"We are the mobile continent," she argues. "We have had a good start with the GSM standard, and using this [new, opened-up spectrum], we could build the top telecoms industry in the world."

In terms of broadband speed, though, the EU is today far from a level playing field, with policies for universal access varying wildly from one country to another: France aims to equip all households with a connection speed of 512Kbps by 2012, whereas Finland is aiming for 100Mbps by 2015. Those contrast with Japan, where fibre-optic networks with speeds of up to 160Gbps are in development.

How can the EU ensure it doesn't trail far behind its Asian and American competitors? "The first access step has been done: the 'Broadband for All' strategy," she responds. "But" - and this is a big but as far as she is concerned - "we need to go a step further, to fibre. Don't upgrade copper, but go directly to fibre."

Political leadership

That is the kind of "wake-up call" that Reding likes to deliver to member states. "If you ask me, nothing is ever going far enough," she says. "We're always pushing [European member state] ministers to go further than they thought they could go, and so we set the targets very high. They have all been shouting, 'But we can't go there.' But our view is that if you don't start to go there, you certainly cannot ever get there.

"It is a question of political leadership. If I declare tomorrow that 100% of Europe has to have fibre at 100Mbps, well, that's a nice declaration, but when will it happen? On the other hand, if I say we're staying at 1Mbps, we will not [even] reach 50Mbps," she says.

"That is why I think you need very strong leadership," she adds. With regard to that point, the former European Commissioner for Competition - Neelie Kroes from the Netherlands, who has had confrontations with Microsoft, Oracle and Google, among other technology giants - is nominated to take over from Reding in January, heading a newly named Digital Agenda directorate for the five-year span of the commission.

New challenges

Reding herself is moving to powerful new territory. As well as heading the broad portfolio of Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship (subject to approval by the European Parliament, expected in late January), she has been nominated by the EU as the third most senior member of the commission, after the president, Jos Manuel Barroso, and the new foreign minister, Catherine Ashton.

Reding's elevation (she was education commissioner prior to taking on Information Society and Media) is in large part down to the way she embraced a transformational agenda for ICT. "When I took over this role, [the directorate] was without importance," she says candidly.

However, she is fiercely proud of how it has grown into one of the commission's key portfolios, and one that now extends into every one of the other 26 commissioners' territories, from industry and foreign affairs to environment and competition.

This stems from not only the burgeoning role of IT in business and society, but her own forthright - yet frequently collaborative - approach to the making and implementation of EU policy. And like it or not - because closer European integration is by no means welcome in all of Europe's political quarters - CIOs, both inside and outside of the EU's borders, need to pay close attention to the digital agenda she has set in motion for the next five years.

Be prepared to hear a lot more about the "F" word, because the assault on fragmentation will remain top of the agenda. As she says, "We still have a way to go before the location of an IP address really doesn't make a difference any longer."

Photography: Jake Walters