OREANDA-NEWS. March 05, 2013. Along with Estonia's desire for a single digital market, Prime Minister Ansip also used the Northern Future Forum in Riga today to pitch Estonia's proprietary X-road architecture as the prospective international standard in the EU for exchange of data between governments.

He mentioned that currently little data flows over borders. "If data do travel across borders," a statement quoted Ansip later in the day, "it is in non-automated fashion."

"Between our and the Finnish business registers about 20,000 pieces of paper are exchanged annually [...] why do they have to do that? We can cross-use information from those databases," he told the forum.

Finland and Latvia are already in talks with Estonia to set up pilot programs. Britain today became the third country with at least a stated intention to follow suit.