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Kafkaesque conditions in my fight against extortionate ticket prices for concert

24 July 2016

Kafkaesque conditions in my fight against extortionate ticket prices for concert

Foto: Paige
In December of last year I promised, during a nationally broadcast television programme, that I would take up the cudgels at the European level against extortionate pricing for concert tickets. In addition I’m supporting a proposed national law from my colleague in The Hague, the SP Member of Parliament Jasper van Dijk. Sites via which you can but tickets are often established in other EU member states which prevents you from doing much against them under Dutch law. As at the moment there’s continual talk about legislative proposals for a ‘digital internal market’ I have been thinking that I could quickly add this to one of these measures. This is certainly possible, but the means to achieve it say a great deal about how ‘Brussels’ works. A brief impression of the Kafkaesque conditions in which I find myself mixed up.

Jasper van Dijk has presented a legislative proposal aimed at stopping extortionate prices being charged when tickets are resold. He wants to fix a maximum mark-up of 20% on the original price. A reasonable proposal which prevents all sorts of dodgy practices.

Recently the European Commission has been going on incessantly about the possibilities offered by the ‘digital internal market’, which means everything that you can buy or sell via the Internet. Two legislative proposals relate to the regulation of consumers’ rights and in my naivety I assumed that the extortionate prices which you can pay for concert tickets that you buy on line could well be included. But that turned out to be more awkward than you might think. One proposal concerns the sale of goods, but a ticket is not so much a ‘good’ as something which gives you the right to a service, in this case the concert or performance which you wish to attend. And services fall outside the proposal’s scope. The other proposed measure concerns digital content. An e-ticket seems to me a typical case of digital content, but no, cultural services are excluded. So once again rejected.

In the European Parliament you are constantly obliged to translate things - matters which everyone understands and regarding which people would like to see change - into the language of the European Union. This explains to some extent the gap between what we do in the EP and the broader society. Well, okay, I’ve promised to do something and I won’t allow myself to be flustered by a load of Brussels jargon and things in brackets. So I’m going to approach it from another angle, through another report that the Commission has published, on the subject of ‘online platforms’. These include everything, from social media to sites on which you can compare prices, to buying-and- selling platforms. And this last includes sites where you can sell buy and sell tickets.

It’s a pity that this is only a Commission report and not as yet a concrete legislative proposal, as this means that all I can do is ensure that the Parliament’s response, a resolution currently being prepared, treats the extortionate prices charged for concert tickets as a major point. Normally the Commission will then get to work and a specific proposal will appear. Laws in the Netherlands do sometimes take a long time to materialise, but in Brussels you have to have the patience of a saint if you want to solve practical problems. Unless you’re a multinational. But that’s another story. I’ll keep you updated. Here too, slow and steady wins the race.

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