Trade association representing major European tech companies
DIGITALEUROPE is a European trade association that represents the digital technology industry. It is led by the Director General.
The members include 105 major technology companies[1] and 41 national trade associations.[2] It seeks to ensure industry participation in the development and implementation of EU policies" and has several working groups that focus on different aspects of policy—environment, trade, technical and regulatory and the digital economy.[3][4][5] Based in Brussels, Belgium, DIGITALEUROPE represents over 45,000 companies.[5]
History
DIGITALEUROPE was formed in 1999 as the European Information and Communications Technology Industry Association (EICTA) by consolidating two former European organisations, ECTEL and EUROBIT, which represented the information and telecommunications industries.[6] EICTA expanded its scope to include the consumer electronics industry; on October 1, 2001, the association merged with the European Association of Consumer Electronics Manufacturers (EACEM). The new joint association changed its name to the European Information, Communications and Consumer Electronics Technology Industry Association (but kept its original acronym, EICTA).[7]
On March 12, 2009, EICTA rebranded as DIGITALEUROPE to better reflect the importance of the consumer electronics sector in Europe and its slogan "Building Digital Europe".[6][8]
Overtime, it's membership has expanded to include vertical industries such as healthcare, finance and manufacturing.
Logos
DIGITALEUROPE previously developed the industry standards related to high-definition televisions.
On September 5, 2014, DIGITALEUROPE released an Ultra HD TV logo to certify companies that meet their technical requirements.[9][10] The technical requirements for the Ultra HD logo is that the display must have a resolution of at least 3840×2160, a video signal path that does not reduce the resolution, a minimum color space of Rec. 709, and HDMI input that supports HDCP 2.2 content protection.[11]
Policy positions
In November 2014, it published a paper called "Law Enforcement Access to Data in the European Cloud" that asks the European Commission to "consider filing an amicus brief" with a U.S. appellate court regarding Microsoft's legal challenge of a U.S. warrant for a Microsoft user's private emails. As DIGITALEUROPE sees it, the fact that the data requested is stored on servers located in Dublin, Ireland, means that U.S. authorities should use mutual legal assistance treaties rather than strong-arming a U.S. multinational, which raises concerns about national sovereignty.[12][13]
In anticipation to the publication of Neelie Kroes's Digital Agenda,[14] DigitalEurope released a paper in May 2010 about Europe's digital future which was called A Transformational Agenda for the Digital Age DigitalEurope's Vision 2020.
