Europe Is About To Create A Link Tax: Time To Speak Out Against It

from the speak-up dept

We've written plenty of times about ridiculous European plans to create a so-called "snippet tax" which is more officially referred to as "ancillary rights" (and is really just about creating a tax on Google). The basic concept is that some old school newspapers are so lazy and have so failed to adapt to the internet -- and so want to blame Google for their own failures -- that they want to tax any aggregator (e.g., Google) that links to their works with a snippet, that doesn't pay for the privilege of sending those publishers traffic. As you may remember, Germany has been pushing for such a thing for many, many years, and Austria has been exploring it as well. But perhaps the most attention grabbing move was the one in Spain, which not only included a snippet tax, but made it mandatory. That is, even if you wanted Google News to link to you for free, you couldn't get that. In response, Google took the nuclear option and shut down Google News in Spain. A study showed that this law has actually done much to harm Spanish publishers, but the EU pushes on, ridiculously.

As discussed a year ago, some in the EU Commission are all for creating an EU-wide snippet tax, and as ridiculous and counterproductive as that is, the Commission is about to make a decision on it, and the public consultation on the issue is about to close (it ends tomorrow). Thankfully, many, many different groups have set up nice and easy systems to understand and respond to the consultation -- which you should do. Here are just a few options:

• The EU Commission's own consultation platform (this one is messy, buggy, and annoying, but it's the official one).
• The site FixCopyright.eu has a well done "answering guide" that helps you through the consultation and explains the details behind many of the questions in the consultation.
• SaveTheLink.org from OpenMedia has a simple signup form that just adds your name to a letter.
• The group Allied for Startups has another good sign on letter Stop the link tax

There's also a good detailed discussion of why this snippet tax is the wrong solution from European copyright lawyer Remy Chavannes. Here's just a... um... snippet (that I didn't pay for):

In fact, there is precious little indication that the challenges currently being faced by press publishers are due to the lack of sufficiently broad intellectual property rights. And if insufficient IP rights are not a significant part of the problem, increasing IP rights is unlikely to be a significant part of the solution. At a recent conference in Amsterdam, speakers from publishers, academia, politics, civil society and the internet sector were in near-total agreement that a neighbouring right for publishers would solve nothing at best. It would seem more fruitful to investigate other ways in which the position and prospects of publishers of quality journalism can be increased, e.g. via subsidies, tax facilities, the partial repurposing of public broadcasting funds, or other measures that reflect the significant value to a democratic society of having a vigorous, free and independent press.

Implementation of a neighbouring right would bring significant uncertainty, costs and risks, not just to authors and publishers, but also to the eclectic group of platforms, intermediaries and other service providers that play a role in facilitating the publication, discovery and consumption of press content. Larger, existing broad-based platforms will be incentivised to reduce or remove service features that might trigger the new neighbouring right. New entrants are likely to be discouraged, particularly new entrants who want specifically to serve the market for finding and consuming press content. Depending on the scope of any neighbouring right, moreover, it could also negatively impact providers of social networks as well as providers of access, caching and hosting services. Increasing costs, complexity and uncertainty for such a broad category of service providers threatens the free flow of information and investment in – and availability of – innovative digital services, as well as the commercial prospects for publishers and authors.

Good stuff, and I urge you to read the whole thing -- and to respond to the consultation before the EU Commission destroys the link.

Filed Under: ancillary copyright, austria, copyright, eu, eu commission, germany, link tax, news, snippet tax, spain

Top Internet Companies Agree To Vague Notice & Takedown Rules For 'Hate Speech' In The EU

from the who-defines-what-hate-speech-is dept

It's easy to say that "hate speech" is bad and that we, as a society, shouldn't tolerate it. But, reality is a lot more complicated than that, which is why we're concerned about various attempts to ban or stifle "hate speech." In the US, contrary to what many believe to be true, "hate" speech is still protected speech under the First Amendment. In Europe, that's often not the case, and hate speech bans are more common. But, as we've noted, while it seems like a no brainer to be against hate speech, the vagueness in what counts as "hate speech" allows that term to be expanded over and over again, such that laws against hate speech are now regularly used for government censorship over the public saying things the government doesn't like.

So consider me quite concerned about the news out of the EU that the EU Commission has convinced all the big internet platform companies -- Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft -- to agree to remove "hate speech" within 24 hours.

Upon receipt of a valid removal notification, the IT Companies to review such requests against their rules and community guidelines and where necessary national laws transposing the Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA, with dedicated teams reviewing requests.

The IT Companies to review the majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal hate speech in less than 24 hours and remove or disable access to such content, if necessary.

In addition to the above, the IT Companies to educate and raise awareness with their users about the types of content not permitted under their rules and community guidelines. The use of the notification system could be used as a tool to do this.

In other words, it sounds a lot like these companies have agreed to a DMCA-like notice-and-takedown regime for handling "hate speech." Let's be clear here: this will be abused and it will be abused widely. That's what happens when you give individuals the ability to remove content from platforms. Obviously, these companies are private companies and can set whatever policies they want on keeping up or removing content, but when they come to an agreement with the EU Commission about what they'll remove and how quickly, reasonable concerns should be raised about how this will work in practice, what definitions will be used to determine "hate speech," what kinds of appeals processes there will be and more. And none of that is particularly clear.

And, of course, very few people will raise these issues upfront because no one wants to be seen as being in favor of hate speech. And that's the real problem. It's easy to create rules for censorship by saying it's just about "hate speech," since almost no one will stand up and complain about that. But that opens up the door to all sorts of abuse -- whether in how "hate speech" is defined, as well as in how the companies will actually handle the implementation. Two major human rights groups -- EDRi and Access Now have already withdrawn from the EU Commission forum discussing all of this in protest of how these rules were put together:

Today, on 31 May, European Digital Rights (EDRi) and Access Now delivered a joint statement on the EU Commission’s “EU Internet Forum”, announcing our decision not to take part in future discussions and confirming that we do not have confidence in the ill considered “code of conduct” that was agreed.

Their main concern was that the whole thing was set up directly between the EU Commission and the internet companies behind closed doors -- and when you're talking about issues that impact human rights and freedom of expression, that needs to be done openly and transparently.

In short, the “code of conduct” downgrades the law to a second-class status, behind the “leading role” of private companies that are being asked to arbitrarily implement their terms of service. This process, established outside an accountable democratic framework, exploits unclear liability rules for companies. It also creates serious risks for freedom of expression as legal but controversial content may well be deleted as a result of this voluntary and unaccountable take down mechanism.

I recognize why many people may cheer on this move, thinking that it's a way to stop "bad stuff" from happening online, but beware the actual consequences of setting up an opaque process with a vague standard for pressuring platforms to censor content based on notices from angry people. If you don't think this will be abused in dangerous ways, you haven't been paying attention to the last two decades on the internet.

Filed Under: censorship, eu, eu commission, hate speech, internet, notice and takedown, platforms
Companies: facebook, google, microsoft, twitter, youtube

EU Regulators Can Barely Contain Their Desire To Attack Google And Facebook, Believing It Will Help Local Competitors

from the not-how-it-works dept

Look, we warned everyone. Back in December of last year, we told you that the EU Commission was looking to put in place new regulations that were clearly designed to hamper Google and Facebook with needless regulations. It was pretty obvious from the way it phrased its broken survey form, that this was the intent. We, along with a bunch of internet startups told the EU that this was a mistake. We explained that Google and Facebook are big and they'll be able to handle whatever regulations the EU throws at them, because they can just throw money at the problem.

But... everyone else? They're going to get screwed over. The folks over at Euractiv have got their hands on a leaked draft of the plan to regulate online platforms, and it's more or less what we expected, and what was hinted at a few weeks ago.

The EU Commission is trying to pretend it's not going to do what it's obviously going to do. On the one hand, it talks about not creating a one-size-fits-all solution. In the conclusion, it states:

Overall, at this stage, there is no compelling case for general ex-ante regulation of online platforms across the board.

However, elsewhere throughout the document, you can see that the EU is chomping at the bit to put some shackles on Google and Facebook and basically any American company, in the belief that it will magically open things up for EU competitors to take over the market. The document whines about the lack of EU companies:

However so far Europe is not driving the online platform revolution: at present the EU represents only 4% of the total market capitalization of the largest online platforms, with the vast majority of platform enterprises originating in the US and Asia. As online platforms increasingly capture new digital value chains, this particularly limits the competitiveness and growth of the EU. Given the growing importance of online platforms in the economy and the disruptive role they play in business, including acting as gateways to customers, the EU must ensure favourable conditions for the creation and growth of online platforms.

It really takes a bureaucrat's mind to look at the market and say that the problem here has to be not enough regulation on internet platforms, and not recognize that the overall conditions in the EU are not conducive to the kinds of internet innovations that create successful internet companies. Hell, one of the few truly successful European platforms, Spotify, is threatening to move the company headquarters from Sweden to New York, because the regulatory environment is so hostile. And yet, rather than setting things up to encourage more innovation, the focus is constantly on how can regulations be put onto the big companies to keep them hindered in the EU market.

Yes, there is some talk of things, but it's the usual misguided bureucrat's idea of how to encourage innovation: (1) throw money at it and (2) beef up intellectual property protections. On the first one, they talk about increasing funding for innovation. That's not a bad thing, per se, but it almost never works when the government is the one behind such a project. Governments rarely know how to truly invest for innovation. On the second one, it's no surprise that the legacy copyright industries are using this effort as yet another vector to attack internet players, and the EU Commission has bought it hook, line and sinker. It calls for "sectorial legislation" for "ensuring a fair allocation of revenues for the use of copyright-protected content." We keep hearing this line over and over again about "fair allocation." How does that work exactly? Will it mean that record labels no longer are allowed to take musicians' copyrights, and then charge them expenses against their advance so that they never make another dime beyond the advance (which they'll have to use to record)? Seems unlikely.

In fact, nearly all of the report uses bureaucratic speak for "we just need to stop these successful companies, and our own companies will grow." That's not how it works. You get a lot of "level playing field" claims throughout:

Online platforms have disrupted traditional business models and are increasingly regarded by users as equivalent or as substitutes of traditional services in various sectors. Current examples range from the media and entertainment sectors to the retail and communications sectors. As a general regulatory principle, the same activities must be subject to the same rules in the Digital Single Market. This principle is usually referred to as a "level playing field."

Yes, but too often the "leveling" of the playing field seems to be to push it back towards the way legacy businesses ran. The reason startups are disruptive is because they're innovative in ways that tilt the playing field towards them. Having government put its thumb back on the other end of the field doesn't help innovation. It doesn't help the public. It just helps legacy businesses remain static and feel less of a need to innovate themselves.

And yes, the report makes a brief nod to that potentially, noting:

Competition from online platforms can provide incentives for traditional market players to innovate and improve their performance, as well as point to a need to simplify and modernise existing regulation. This modernisation should seek to avoid imposing a disproportionate burden on online platforms business models. At the same time, in areas where competitive pressures have been increased, deregulation of traditional sectors may offer the most beneficial response to achieve a level playing field.

But none of the rest of the report seems to follow up on that. Instead it's just more ways to push the innovation back down.

The report also says "we know our intermediary liability protections are important, so we'll keep them... but... we really won't."

The public consultation showed strong support for the existing principles of the e-Commerce Directive, but also for the need to clarify certain concepts, including the scope of the safe harbour for intermediary liability, including for online platforms. Given this background, the Commission intends to preserve the existing liability regime.

However, with the rise of online platforms monetising users' content and data, and with the need for online platforms to contribute to making the Internet a safer place, the EU needs to further define its approach to their broader responsibility. As they occupy a special role in the economy and society with unmatched influence, online platforms should behave responsibly and have frameworks in place to take reasonable and effective action to protect their users from illegal and harmful activities.

Got that? The second paragraph totally undermines the first.

Basically it appears that, as we suspected from the way the report was set up, the plan here is to put some sort of "duty of care" or some such on internet platforms. This will mean that Google and Facebook will be fine -- they can staff up giant warehouses of people reviewing content. But it will become extremely expensive and risky for anyone else to enter the space, since they won't have the resources to satisfy the EU's regulators.

Filed Under: competition, copyright, don't wreck the net, duty of care, eu, eu commission, innovation, intermediary liability, online platforms, platforms, regulations
Companies: facebook, google

EU Officially Goes After Google's Android On Antitrust Grounds

from the where's-the-beef? dept

This was widely expected, but the EU Commission, led by Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, has officially announced that it's going after Google over some of its practices concerning Android. This comes just a day after Canadian antitrust officials went in the other direction, finding no evidence that Google's activities stifle competition. The EU has a few specific concerns about Android:

The Commission's preliminary view is that Google has implemented a strategy on mobile devices to preserve and strengthen its dominance in general internet search. First, the practices mean that Google Search is pre-installed and set as the default, or exclusive, search service on most Android devices sold in Europe. Second, the practices appear to close off ways for rival search engines to access the market, via competing mobile browsers and operating systems. In addition, they also seem to harm consumers by stifling competition and restricting innovation in the wider mobile space.

I definitely worry about monopolistic practices by incumbent players crowding out startups and innovation, so I was keen to dig in on the details here, but they seem oddly... lacking. I've noted in the past that the EU tends to view antitrust through a fairly different lens than the US does, and perhaps that's the issue here. This is a broad generalization, but for the most part, the US focuses on whether or not practices harm consumers. The EU tends to focus on whether or not a company is really big. I think the US standard makes a lot more sense.

Let's dig in to the specific complaints raised by the EU, saying each of these practices violated antitrust laws:

requiring manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and Google's Chrome browser and requiring them to set Google Search as default search service on their devices, as a condition to license certain Google proprietary apps;

Many people have compared this to the case against Microsoft from the early 2000s, in which it got dinged for making Internet Explorer the default. Of course, a quick retort on that is: where is Internet Explorer in the browser market today? It's basically a non-entity, and it wasn't because of any antitrust penalties (which were basically wrist slaps). And, either way it appears that the issue here with Google is that it requires all of its core services to be bundled together: so if you want to offer the Google Play Store, then you have to also offer the other pieces of the Google app suite so that they work well together. But, of course, this also doesn't stop phone makers or service providers from adding their own apps as well. I now have a bloat-free Android phone running Cyanogenmod, but back when I had a Samsung S4 on Sprint, it came with a ton of bloatware from both Samsung and Sprint (and, frankly, all of it was useless and annoying).

Perhaps there's an issue with making Google search the default, but is anyone actually harmed by having Google's search as the (easily changed) default on an Android phone? It certainly seems like Apple's iOS ecosystem is a lot more restrictive. At least with Google you can route around Google's app store and sideload apps easily or use alternative app stores. I frequently use Amazon's app store, for example.

preventing manufacturers from selling smart mobile devices running on competing operating systems based on the Android open source code;

This is the one prong (out of three) that at least seems worth investigating more. I can understand Google's position -- that if you're offering Google's suite of apps, you need to offer Google's version of Android to make sure everything works together well -- but this seems like an unnecessary condition for Google to include in those agreements. The simple fact is that most manufacturers are likely to want to go with a stock Android anyway, and just pile on their own customizations and bloatware. In most cases, there isn't going to be that much desire for manufacturers to use an Android fork. But, if they do... so what? I don't really understand why Google prevents manufacturers from choosing to offer different flavors of Android, but I'm also not sure that this is an antitrust issue.

giving financial incentives to manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively pre-install Google Search on their devices.

This one probably confuses me the most. This is just a business deal for installing software on phones. For years, Google paid Mozilla to be its default search in Firefox, and then Yahoo outbid it to become the default. That's how business works. Google isn't leveraging its market position here -- it's just doing a deal. The EU claims that its issue is "not with financial incentives in general but with the conditions associated with Google's financial incentives, in particular with the condition that the financial incentive is not paid if any other search provider than Google Search is pre-installed on smart mobile devices." But... isn't that the nature of the deal? If you're doing a business deal to be the exclusive search provider, then, shouldn't you be the exclusive search provider?

It will obviously be worth watching how all of this plays out. The EU has made it clear for a while that it has it in for Google, so if I had to predict, this process won't go well for Google.

Frankly, if I were Google, I probably would have dropped a lot of the exclusivity requirements. I know they're in a race to see who will get access to the most data, but let the apps and services compete and see who wins out. Google's app ecosystem does well because it tends to be pretty good. Google could have avoided at least some of this fight by just trusting its own services to win out, rather than pushing for certain defaults and exclusivities. Some others have made this point as well:

I'm pretty sure Google can survive and come out the winner. The best of its products -- that ones that have the most users -- are excellent. People won't stop using Google Maps just because it isn't preinstalled on their phones. It's among the top 10 most downloaded applications in Apple's App Store because iPhone users often prefer it to Apple's own map software. Chrome is in the top 100 most downloaded apps even though it's impossible to change the default browser in iOS from Apple's Safari without "jailbreaking" the device to untether it from Apple support.

Google's search engine, too, wouldn't be dominant if it didn't index more pages than competitors and produce better results. YouTube is a must-have app, while Google's cloud office services are free, unlike, say, Microsoft's, and they work just as well.

These are great, competitive products. They don't really need the extra push from restrictive deals between Google and phone manufacturers. Google's brand name is strong with those who buy Android phones, and, given a choice, they are likely to prefer Google products rather than spend time researching alternatives. The company may need to spend a bit more on advertising its products in a free-choice situation, but that won't break the bank because the apps are already hugely popular.

But what Google should do, and what the EU should force it to do, are different questions. I'd much prefer that Google take a more open approach to these things, but I'm not convinced that we want bureaucrats deciding for the company exactly what Google's approach on the mobile phone should be.

Filed Under: android, antitrust, bundling, defaults, eu, eu commission, margrethe vestager
Companies: google

Final Reminder: Tell The EU Commission Not To Wreck The Internet With Poorly Thought Out Regulations

from the last-call dept

Join us in telling EU regulators not to wreck the net.
Read & sign our open letter »

Just a quick reminder of our project to remind EU regulators not to wreck the internet with short-sighted regulations, where you can sign on to a letter that will be sent out early next week. The issue is that EU regulators have taken what seems like a good idea (removing geographic restrictions on the internet in Europe) and turned it into an excuse to try to cram in a bunch of bad internet regulations, mostly focused on removing or weakening intermediary liability protections. It appears that some in the EU Commission think that by forcing Google and Facebook to monitor communications and be forced to more proactively delete content that it will somehow (1) stop bad stuff from happening online and (2) hold back those two companies from continuing to dominate the European market.

They're wrong on both accounts and need to hear from people -- both inside and outside the EU. Such rules will not stop bad stuff from happening, and actually could make it more difficult to track down when necessary. And, it will almost certainly further entrench the biggest internet companies, as they'll have the resources (both money and people) to deal with the monitoring requirements, while startups will be unfairly harmed and burdened by such demands. Imagine trying to enter the video space today if you were required to build your own ContentID system first.

So please join all the people and companies who have already signed on and sign our letter as well. Thanks.

Filed Under: digital single market, dsm, eu, eu commission, internet, platforms, regulations

Join Internet Startups In Telling The EU Not To Mess Up The Internet

from the do-it-now dept

Join us in telling EU regulators not to wreck the net.
Read & sign our open letter »

We mentioned this a few weeks ago, but wanted to remind folks to help us tell the EU not to wreck the internet with a series of bad regulations. There you can see the letter that we put together, which has already been signed by a wide variety of internet companies, including Reddit, DuckDuckGo, Medium, Automattic, Patreon, Shapeways and more. The issue is a big deal right now. European bureaucrats (who couldn't even program a web survey to operate properly) are in the midst of putting together plans to regulate internet companies. This is under the umbrella of what they're referring to as the "Digital Single Market," but which some Commissioners are using as part of a plan to saddle the internet with a variety of new regulations, which have the potential to wipe out important safe harbors that made the internet what it is today.

Just a few months ago, a top EU Commissioner flat out said that the EU should heavily regulate the top internet companies, mainly because they're based in the US. What they don't seem to understand is that the companies they're targeting -- mainly Google and Facebook -- are big enough to deal with almost any of the regulations that come up. They have teams of people who can figure out how to manage them, even if they may grumble about it all. But the companies who cannot deal with such regulations will be basically everyone else. All of the smaller companies and new startups.

In effect, by "regulating" the big internet companies in an attempt to punish them, the EU Commission might actually be entrenching them as the dominant players in the market: the exact opposite of what they think they're doing. Similarly, some of the discussed regulations would again seem to contradict the stated or implicit intentions of those politicians. For example, many in the EU complain about the "privacy" implications of large internet platforms that are monitoring what their users are doing. Yet, a key regulatory proposal being discussed is adding a "duty of care" to internet companies, that will require them to more actively monitor what their users are doing, to make sure that they're not doing anything "bad" that needs to be stopped/taken down/reported on.

Given our concerns that this process appears dangerously misguided, we crafted a letter to send to the EU Commission that is reviewing this issue, and have now opened it up so that you (and/or your companies) can sign it too. Please take a look and consider signing on, and telling the EU not to wreck the internet, in a short-sighted focus on trying to hinder big internet players.

Join us in telling EU regulators not to wreck the net.
Read & sign our open letter »

Filed Under: digital single market, don't wreck the net, eu, eu commission, internet regulations, startups

First Report From Inside Germany's New TAFTA/TTIP Reading Room Reveals Text's Dirty Secret

from the 24-seconds-a-page dept

Last week we wrote about the only place that German politicians are currently allowed to view the latest texts of TAFTA/TTIP: a tiny room, guarded at all times, and involving all kinds of humiliating restrictions for visitors. Katja Kipping was one of the first to enter, and she has written up her experiences for lesser mortals like you and me, who are not permitted to besmirch this sacred place with our unworthy presence. Even though she is -- of course -- forbidden from speaking about what she read there, a translation of her account, made by War on Want, nonetheless contains some interesting new details:

Once I'd registered, I was sent the instructions on how to use the room. The first thing that I noticed was that the terms and conditions had already been the subject of negotiations between the European Commission and the USA. Get your head round that: TTIP isn't even signed yet, and already individual countries have lost the right to decide who gets to read the texts, and on what terms.

Here's how the actual visit went:

A guard took me in through security and asked me to lock away my jacket and my bag. He checked that I wasn't taking any camera or mobile phone into the reading room, and then knocked on a door. The heightened level of secrecy made me all the more excited as to what I was going to find, but the room itself was nothing special. There were eight computer work stations, and I was only allowed to sit at the one designated for me. A friendly woman sat in the room. She got me to sign the visitor rules -- if you don't sign, you don’t get in, so I signed. There was a thermos of coffee and a plate of biscuits in the corner. Yet no amount of caffeine or blood sugar would have made it possible to get through the 300 or so pages of text in the two hours I had available to me.

Even though this reading room for German politicians has finally been opened -- two and a half years after the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations began -- numerous obstacles are placed in their way to make that opportunity as inconvenient as possible. First, the texts are only available in English -- imagine if US politicians were only allowed to read the French version of the negotiating texts. Moreover, the German visitors to the room are completely on their own: they cannot take even security-cleared specialists with them in order to decode the highly-abstruse wording of the documents. Finally, as Kipping notes above, she had just two hours to get through 300 pages -- roughly 24 seconds per page.

Even racing through the pages made available to her, Kipping says that she was unable to find anything that allayed her concerns about the proposed agreement. And despite the blanket prohibition on giving things away, she does reveal one dirty secret about the TAFTA/TTIP texts:

the documents are simply crawling with typos. The word 'and' is regularly written 'andd' and 'the' often appears as 'teh'. Either the negotiators are really shoddy workers or this is one of those famous security measures we've heard about.

She is doubtless right that these errors are fairly unsubtle attempts to create unique copies so that any leaks can be traced back to their source, since visitors to the reading room are directed to a particular computer when reading the text. And she is also correct in her conclusion:

Anyone who was going into these negotiations to enhance environmental protection, consumer protection and labour standards would have nothing to fear from transparency. Anyone who's engaged in selling out democracy, on the other hand, is obviously going to want to avoid public scrutiny. If [Germany's Minister for Economic Affairs] Sigmar Gabriel and the negotiators are really so convinced of the benefits of TTIP, why don't they just make the text available to everyone online?

It will be interesting to see what other snippets of information escape from the little room as the negotiations proceed, and as more German politicians visit it -- and whether they, too, still encounter texts that are crawling with highly-suspicious typos.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: eu, eu commission, katja kipping, secrecy, tafta, transparency, ttip, ustr

A Tiny Cell With An Omnipresent Guard, Visitors Just Twice A Day: TAFTA/TTIP's German Transparency Room

from the and-mind-you-behave,-children,-or-you-will-be-punished dept

One of the most problematic aspects of the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations is their lack of transparency. Although the European Commission, to its credit, has made available many of its initial offers and background papers, the key consolidated documents that show what's really happening in the negotiations -- and what deals are being cut -- are reserved for the inner circle. Even national politicians within the EU have been denied access to these, and that has really rankled, particularly in Germany. In an effort to defuse the anger there over this manifestly anti-democratic approach, a special reading room has finally been set up in the German Ministry of Economy. As this report from the non-profit investigative newsroom Correctiv.org makes clear, it's very special:

MPs have to schedule an appointment as the room opens only twice a day for two hours. Before entering the room, they have to leave their mobile phones and any electronic device in a secure locker.

They can read the documents only on a computer screen which is not connected to the Internet. They may take notes but are not allowed to copy any quotes from the consolidated texts.

And if any of the children -- uh, politicians -- are naughty, the US will be very, very cross, and may be forced to withdraw the privileges it has granted:

In the case of unauthorised disclosure of information, the US "may withdraw its consent to the placement of TTIP consolidated texts in any or all of the member states reading rooms”. This means if an MP leaks or quotes any sensitive information, the parliament may be denied access to the documents.

To keep an eye on things, a guard is present at all times in the room, which is very small -- just 35 square meters in all (about 370 square feet). The War on Want site has a picture: It also provides a handy translation of the room's "features":

Starting in the top left corner and moving clockwise, the signs translate as follows: Lockers (for mobile phones etc) -- Reference library (reference works) -- Work stations (maximum 8 people) -- Digital documents (negotiating language: English) -- Supervisor (official of Ministry for Economic Affairs) -- Computer (not networked) -- Confidentiality agreement (must be signed before use).

These may be standard conditions for viewing negotiation documents in the US, but they are likely to be regarded as pretty insulting to German politicians -- not least because all the documents are in English, and it has taken two and half years to achieve even this miserable level of transparency.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: eu commission, germany, tafta, transparency, ttip

Your New Years Resolution: Tell The EU Not To Undermine The Foundations Of The Internet

from the do-it-now dept

For a few weeks now, we've been telling you about a worrisome EU consultation on regulating the internet. That consultation was supposed to end today -- but it's been extended a week. As we noted recently, the survey technology built by the EU Commission had a major bug in it, meaning that many people had their submissions rejected. Based on this, we requested that they extend the survey. We got back two separate responses, the first telling us that they were very sorry, but it would be "impossible" to extend the survey. The second response was that they had agreed to extend the survey one week... but only for people who had run into problems. Given the two conflicting responses, I asked for more information on this (including how they would keep it open only for those people). I also asked if they were planning to announce this anywhere. I was told that it would likely be impossible to make an announcement, and I never heard anything else, as I believe many left for the holidays.

However, the survey's website now lists January 6th as the final date for submissions, which means that, without any public announcement whatsoever, they've extended the submission period by a week. So, for those of you who have not done it yet, you now have a New Year's resolution: go to our guide at Dontwreckthe.net, and follow along as you fill out the survey.

Yes, the survey is horrible and confusing. But this is really important, because regulations that come out of this could be a huge mess for the future of the internet. Also, we've heard from two separate sources (one on the Commission and one in the EU Parliament) that if you fill out the survey and then use the reference number provided to you to email in further thoughts (via a "position paper") the Commission is required to read it. So, yes, even if some of the questions are nonsensical, you have a chance after-the-fact to explain yourself (and we'd recommend doing that as well).

So, yes, it's boring and seems silly, but we urge you to find some time in the next few days and tell the EU Commission not to mess up the internet.

Filed Under: consultation, don't wreck the net, eu, eu commission, platforms, secondary liability