Warsaw, 9.12.2025

Open Letter on the Digital Omnibus Proposal

Dear Members of the Council of the European Union,
Dear Members of the European Parliament,

On behalf of the undersigned organisations, we express our strong support for the direction the European Commission has taken with its “Digital Omnibus” package proposal. However, we must unequivocally state that its current scope remains insufficient. This initiative marks a promising and much-needed first step toward meaningful deregulation in Europe, but it stops short of the bold, pragmatic, and forward-looking measures required to unlock Europe’s digital potential and secure its long-term economic prosperity.

Europe is steadily losing its global standing and must now take decisive, visionary action to reverse this trend. We cannot hope to achieve genuine “strategic autonomy” if we are incapable of developing our own foundational technologies. Nor can Europe expect to retain influence on the world stage in the 21st century without being a leading economic and technological power – an imperative more pressing than ever.

For these reasons, we urge that the European Commission’s proposal be seen not as a final goal, but as a starting point that must be strengthened and expanded. A vibrant, innovative, and data-driven economy is indispensable to the success of the European project. Economic progress is not a threat to our values – it is the very condition for preserving them.

CLARITY & SIMPLIFYING THE LAW
The growing complexity of EU regulation creates invisible barriers and mounting costs for business – particularly Europe’s SMEs and start-ups, the driving force of our economy. Instead of building new products, innovators are forced to spend resources on lawyers and consultants just to determine whether their idea is even legal. As a result, the AI Act and other recent EU proposals risk becoming a web of “spaghetti law” – decipherable only by paid experts, rather than clear, functional texts meant to guide innovation.

This excessive complexity risks turning the AI Act into an unintended barrier to entry. Companies may abandon AI development not because they cannot build safe products, but because they cannot confidently determine whether they comply with the rules. This chilling effect in practice favours only the largest, best-resourced players – undermining the very innovation Europe seeks to promote.

Call to action: To avoid this, the AI Act must be radically simplified. It should establish clear, proportionate and genuinely understandable compliance pathways for small and medium-sized enterprises, while upholding the high standards of fundamental rights protection that underpin the constitutional traditions of the Member States and of the Union as a whole.

STOP THE CLOCK
The AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive framework for regulating AI, has adopted an overly restrictive, a priori approach that treats AI primarily as a threat. Its extensive prohibitions and administratively burdensome obligations risk critically impeding innovation and placing European developers and users at a severe disadvantage in the global AI race. The urgent call to “stop the clock” is therefore imperative – specifically, the two-year postponement of the remaining provisions of the AI Act as proposed by initiatives such as the “EU AI Champions,” supported by major industry leaders including Airbus and Siemens. This pause would provide European companies with the necessary time for effective implementation while allowing for a fundamental review and simplification of the current framework, preventing Europe from falling further behind global competitors such as the United States, which are actively pursuing an AI strategy focused on “winning the race.”

Call to action: It is essential to unambiguously “stop the clock” and implement an unconditional two-year postponement of the remaining provisions of the AI Act, that haven’t yet entered into force. As a bare minimum the timeline extension should be a separate legislative proposal within the Omnibus package, enabling a swift adoption to avoid legal uncertainty for the industry.

GDPR
We commend the Commission for its political courage in presenting a meaningful improvement to the data protection regime that Europe’s digital industry so urgently needs. For years, public debate around Europe’s lag in the AI revolution has centered on the AI Act, but as the Draghi report rightly identified, our data protection framework has posed an even greater barrier to innovation. While we welcome the targeted amendments to the AI Act, the proposed clarification to the GDPR – specifically confirming that development and training of AI systems can rely on legitimate interest as a legal basis – represents perhaps the single most important step for creating truly European AI.

Call to action: Ensure that the rules governing the use of legitimate interest for AI development and training are clear, coherent and easily understandable for businesses. The framework must deliver genuine legal certainty and harmonisation across the Union, leaving no room for divergent or restrictive interpretations by supervisory authorities.

CYBERSECURITY
We welcome the Commission’s efforts to streamline cybersecurity rules through initiatives such as the Single Entry Point (SEP) for incident reporting. This is a positive first step toward reducing fragmentation. However, much more needs to be done to ensure clarity, harmonisation, and trust across the EU’s cybersecurity framework. Today, overlapping requirements under NIS2, CRA, and DORA create unnecessary complexity and compliance costs, diverting resources away from actual risk mitigation. Further simplification of AIA-CRA conformity is necessary for example. It should be possible to demonstrate conformity under both legal acts through common conformity assessment, not just certification (as currently foreseen by AI Act).

Many critical gaps remain: inconsistent reporting obligations across Europe, liability protection for reporting is missing, and conformity harmonisation is absent from the Digital Omnibus. Without addressing these issues, companies will continue to face redundant audits and fragmented national rules, undermining the goal of a unified cybersecurity framework.

Call to action:

• Ensure that the SEP allows companies to report to the relevant national authority in their country of main establishment.
• Ensure that companies operating across the EU report into the country of their main establishment.
• Introduce liability protection clauses for reporting to build trust and encourage transparency.
• Address fragmentation by including conformity harmonisation in the Digital Omnibus, eliminating overlapping audit requirements under NIS2, CRA, and DORA.

COPYRIGHT
The development of AI models needs clear and flexible copyright rules that permit the use of copyrighted works in training. The industry is relying on the Text and Data Mining (TDM) exceptions enshrined in Articles 3 and 4 of the copyright in the digital single market (CDSM) directive, which are not perfect, but are the result of a hard fought compromise. Recently however, this situation is being challenged – both politically within the European Parliament, and judicially by some member state courts. Without legal protection for acts of transient use of copyrighted works during AI model training all research in the field in Europe will stop. This would be a calamity with consequences far graver than the burdens of the AI Act and must be avoided.

Call to action: The legal basis for AI development in the EU in Articles 3 and 4 of the CDSM Directive is fundamental to innovation and must be firmly safeguarded against any attempt to narrow or undermine them. Furthermore, they must be clarified and expanded to provide a stable, pan-European legal basis for all forms of AI training across the EU.

We pledge our full support to advancing this proposal through the legislative process and expanding wherever possible. In particular, we will advocate for clear legal provisions enabling the postponement of the AI Act’s obligations and for the establishment of a robust legal basis for legitimate interest in AI training under the GDPR. We are committed to working closely with members of the European Parliament and the Council to ensure that this package is adopted swiftly and effectively, delivering on its promise and the broader objectives outlined in the above calls to action.

We stand ready to assist you in this essential mission.

Respectfully,

Tomasz Snażyk – CEO – AI Chamber
Csongor Bias – MD – Startup Hungary
Jakub Bińkowski – Board Member – The Union of Entrepreneurs and Employers (ZPP)
Simonas Černiauskas – CEO – Infobalt
Milena Jabůrková – Vice-President – Confederation of Industry of the Czech Republic
Jolanta Jaworska – President – Digital Technology Employers’ Association Lewiatan
Lukáš Kačena – Director – PRG.ai, Czech National AI platform
Michał Kanownik – CEO – Digital Poland Association
Michal Kardoš – Executive Director – Slovak Alliance for Innovation Economy (SAPIE)
Peter J. Kofler – Chairman of the Board – Danish Entrepreneurs
Egle Markeviciute – EU Affairs Manager – Consumer Choice Center Europe
Gergana Passy – President – Digital National Alliance, Bulgaria
Marek Tatała – CEO – Economic Freedom Foundation

See: Open Letter on the Digital Omnibus Proposal

Warsaw, 17^th October 2023

 

Open letter from the President of the Union of Entrepreneurs and Employers to political leaders

 

Krzysztof Bosak
Włodzimierz Czarzasty
Szymon Hołownia
Jarosław Kaczyński
Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz
Sławomir Mentzen
Donald Tusk
Adrian Zandberg
Zbigniew Ziobro

 

Gentlemen,

If I may, I would like to interest you in the discriminatory challenges that small Polish companies have been facing in their very own country for the past 30 years.

Micro-enterprises, unlike large companies, cannot afford lawyers, accountants, lobbyists or PR specialists. No foreign ambassador will call the prime minister or any of the cabinet ministers when provisions of the law or administrative decisions limit the opportunities for microbusinesses to thrive. Regulations that for a large company may only mean hiring another lawyer or accountant, for smaller companies may mean their end. Small companies cannot afford yearlong battles in courts of law against civil servants. They do not a team of lobbyists and PR companies at their disposal to defend their image or gain direct access to decision-makers.

At the same time, micro-enterprises constitute a significant share of the Polish economy and play an essential social role. They generate more GDP and create more jobs than large companies do! Alas, both in state policies and the reality shaped by scientists and the media, micro-entrepreneurs are placed in a secondary position and are presented as obstacles on the road to growth. Micro- and small enterprises have played, do play, and will continue to play a considerable role in the development of Poland. The Polish people should be made aware of this role, and decision-makers ought to appreciate it.

In 2019 (the last year for which there is data available as of October 2023), the share of micro-entrepreneurs (companies employing no more than 10 people) in GDP was 30.6%, while for large enterprises (employing 250 people or more) the share in GDP generation was much lower: 22.7%. Microbusinesses are also the place where most jobs are in Poland! At the end of 2020, nearly 10 million people worked in the enterprise sector, including as many as 4.2 million in micro-enterprises. And only 3.2 million people worked in large companies.

There is insufficient data available on micro-companies in public statistics. And available data is published with a significant delay. The paucity of data suggests that state decision-makers are not invested in micro-entrepreneurs’ condition or potential for growth, which means that politicians and public authorities make decisions about microbusiness without necessary knowledge. When a body of key data on microcompanies describes the state of affairs from two years ago, and state policies often need up to two years to work in full effect, the period between the authorities’ decision and the assessment of that decision’s impact on micro-entrepreneurship lasts up to 4-5 years!!!

The Ministry of Finance has tools in the form of Uniform Control Files, which demonstrate the financial flows of enterprises. Based on this, one can create analyses, determine the economic situation in individual industries, exclude IT specialists from statistics (who are most often B2B contractors), and also recognise the real effects of the enforced economic changes and regulations. However, they are not made use of, and we basically have no idea why this is the case.

Polish scientists, politicians, and media frequently suggest that too many micro- and small enterprises hinder Poland’s development. In the media and social media alike, small business owners are usually portrayed as stupid, simpletons, exploiters, and fraudsters. Political leaders claim that if micro-entrepreneurs are unable to run a business in the conditions created by politicians, they are not suitable for business and should do something else!

What has been created is a business-unfriendly state where chaos rules supreme. Its main features include the lack of legal stability and economic mismanagement of assets owned. Businesses are up to their necks in chaos and regulatory roulette. One can never say what any given minister will come up with out of the blue or how a law will be enforced.

The legislator can wreck an entire industry with one legal act. And then the political class is surprised that micro- and small entrepreneurs are afraid to invest. There is no other way to increase domestic investment than legal stability and a sense of security of economic transactions.

It indeed is true that smaller companies are on average less efficient than larger ones – both in Poland and globally. According to Eurostat, in the case of entrepreneurs employing 0 to 9 people, the average annual turnover per employee amounted EUR 74,000. While in companies employing 250 people or more, the average turnover per employee came up to EUR 181,000. So yes, larger companies are more efficient. But if all florists in Poland merged into one corporation, their turnover per employee would not increase like that!

A kind of socio-economic experiment is underway, which involves forcing micro- and small companies to consolidate through significantly rising labour costs, eccentric games related to raising the minimum wage disproportionately to the average salary or tightening the tax screws in the form of the inability to deduct health insurance contributions. The political class openly despises micro- and small companies, and economists from the Ministry of Finance want to force them to merge with the use of brutal fiscal incentives.

Moreover, we have in Poland slightly more smaller entrepreneurs than is the EU average, and these smaller entrepreneurs employ on average slightly more people than they do in the EU. At the end of 2020, entrepreneurs employing less than 10 people constituted 94.6% of all entrepreneurs in the EU, while in Poland they constituted 95.2%. However, individual European economies vary significantly in terms of the share of small entrepreneurs in the total number of entrepreneurs. And there is no general pattern here. For example, in Germany in 2020, the share of entrepreneurs employing less than 10 people in the total number of entrepreneurs was 87.4% – that’s less than in Poland. But the same share in Italy was higher than in Poland and amounted to 95.4%.

Same goes for the share of smaller entrepreneurs in employment. In Poland, smaller entrepreneurs employ a larger proportion of people than on average in the EU. But EU member states differ greatly. At the end of 2020, the share of entrepreneurs employing fewer than 10 people in total employment in the EU was 32.9%, while in Poland – 34.5%. In Germany, smaller entrepreneurs employed a significantly smaller proportion of employees than in Poland, only 20.1%. But in Italy, smaller entrepreneurs employed a much larger share of employees than in Poland, as much as 44.1%.

Therefore, the frequently repeated conclusion that there are too many small companies in Poland compared to the most developed economies, and that this high share inhibits our country’s development is simply untrue. The relatively high number of micro-entrepreneurs is an adaptation to Poland’s economic conditions.

The large number of microbusinesses in Poland is probably an adaptation of Poles to, among other things:

• a significant dispersion of the population on the territory of Poland,
• decades necessary to accumulate the capital needed for development,
• underdevelopment of the financial sector in Poland,
• lack of large domestic companies based in Poland.

Compared to developed countries, Poland has a disproportionate number of people living in small towns and villages. The degree of urbanisation in Poland amounts to is 60% and 75% in the EU. We also have fewer multinationals with large resources of capital, machinery, patents and organisational knowhow. And there are many more similar factors that may cause Polish entrepreneurs to be more dispersed and smaller.

But what actually is dangerous for Poland’s development is the conviction that there will be more investment, higher efficiency, and better growth when the number of smaller companies is curbed. Limiting the number of small businesses will not lead to more growth! Micro-enterprises are a necessary complement to large companies, foreign and domestic alike. They provide work in smaller towns to people who do not plan to move to large cities. They provide work to people whose careers began all the way back in the Polish People’s Republic prior to economic transformation, and who cannot or do not want to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to be employed in highly paid positions in large enterprises.

Socialist modernisers viewed small private farms as inefficient and believed that Poland would develop by limiting the number and ultimately getting rid of family farms. But large farms that were truly efficient only began to be established in Poland when favourable economic conditions appeared with the introduction of the free market and democracy after 1989.

Many politicians and scientists as well as the media share nowadays similar views when it comes to the role of micro-entrepreneurs. Yes, the size structure of enterprises in Poland differs from that in the most developed countries. We have a little more micro-enterprises than is the average in developed economies. However, the relatively large number of microbusinesses is not the source of the backwardness of our economy. It is the optimal adaptation to the operating conditions in Poland.

By interfering in the size structure of enterprises in Poland through administrative means, taxes, labour law etc., Polish authorities will achieve any more development potential. On the contrary, they will limit the growth we can have. Further subsidies for large foreign investors and increasing regulatory burdens on small entrepreneurs will slow down Poland’s development – not accelerate it!

Poland’s development is dependent on the creation of optimal conditions for earning, saving, and investing for all entrepreneurs. To achieve this, it is necessary to adhere to the following rules and fulfil the following requirements in particular:

• The public statistics system should provide more information about micro-entrepreneurs, and much faster. With the current digitisation of life and economic transactions, greater availability and timeliness of information does not require imposing further reporting obligations on microbusinesses. In fact, more information about microcompanies can and should be made available with reduced reporting obligations.
• When analysing existing and creating new regulations, one should consider the asymmetry in costs incurred to meet said regulations by large companies and micro-enterprises. The same regulations are often much more burdensome for smaller entities.
• When creating and enforcing socially beneficial regulations, their broad costs should be taken into account, including whether further enforcement of certain regulations will result in such a widespread agony of micro-entrepreneurship that we will incur new and significant economic, social, and budgetary costs.

For over 20 years, we have been conducting actions with the aim to advocate and promote knowledge about the Polish “economic anthill” and its significance for the socio-economic development of Poland. We will continue to do so. Our fight is not against corporations – we need them too. We wage war against discrimination of small Polish companies, whose importance for the economy I have tried to describe above.

Kindest regards,

Cezary Kaźmierczak
President of the Union of Entrepreneurs and Employers

Warsaw, 22 March 2022 

 

Joint Association letter on DMA

 

We, undersigned organisations, would like to thank policymakers for the effort and work that has been put into Digital Markets Act negotiations so far. We are appreciative of the proposals aimed at making the DMA workable and avoiding the unintended consequences of the DMA for SMEs. Nevertheless, with the negotiations nearing the end, we believe it is important to fine-tune provisions aimed at targeted advertising to avoid negative impacts for European businesses.

We support all initiatives aimed at improving the position of European businesses and users. That is why we are in favour of proposals to increase the transparency of targeted advertising. At the same time, we recognize the value that targeted advertising brings to SMEs and NGO, which, in contrast to large players, do not have multi-million marketing budgets, as well as the value that targeted advertising brings to users, who can access ad-supported online services for free. This value has been confirmed by various studies, including a survey by Ipsos showing that 69 per cent of surveyed users prefer to see ads over paying for content online, and a further 68 per cent agree that targeted advertising is beneficial for small businesses.

Hence, in our view, the implementation of the obligations by the gatekeepers should not affect the quality, functionality and integrity of the services that small businesses currently benefit from. It is, therefore, crucial to ensure that DMA avoids unnecessary restrictions that would undermine the value of targeted advertising for European businesses.

Unfortunately, the European Parliament’s proposals do not seem to go in that direction. The EP has proposed to introduce an opt-in based on GDPR consent for both the combination and the “cross-use” of personal data for targeted advertising. This goes beyond what was proposed by the European Commission in the original version of Article 5(a), which required users’ consent for the combination of personal data only. The extension to the “cross-use” of such data is disproportionate and will seriously decrease the functionality of targeted advertising, thereby harming the needs of the many entrepreneurs for whom targeted advertising is the most cost-effective way to acquire customers. The introduction of an opt-in for targeted advertising is also a departure from established practice under GDPR. This change has been criticized by data protection experts, including the Centre for Information Policy Leadership, which has “strongly recommended” to align the DMA with the GDPR due to the fear of creating conflicting regulations. Ultimately, an opt-in does not respond to more substantive concerns regarding the transparency of targeted advertising, which are better addressed through other means.

To conclude, while we support the objectives of the DMA, we believe that DMA does not strike the right balance between value creation and the protection of users. Since European SMEs often cannot afford advertising in mass media, an opt-in for targeted advertising will inevitably weaken their position vis-à-vis large companies, making the DMA miss its point.

 

See the whole letter.