Platform regulation
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People ask MEPs: Take the opportunity, end surveillance ads!
Thousands of people are asking the EU Parliament to end online surveillance advertising , ahead of the DSA (Digital Services Act) vote in the plenary on Thursday, 20 January 2022. EDRi is part of the movement mobilising people, together with individual organisations in the PeopleVsBigTech group and beyond.
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Informing the Disinfo Debate: A Policy Guide for Protecting Human Rights
Today, 20 December 2021, EDRi, Access Now and Civil Liberties Union for Europe publish a joint report as a continuation of its 2018 predecessor, Informing the “Disinformation” Debate. The main outcome of this report is a set of policy recommendations addressed to the EU co-legislators focusing on: how to effectively mitigate fundamental rights risks that result from the manipulative methods deployed by large online platforms that exploit people’s vulnerabilities and their sensitive data; and how to combat disinformation in a manner that is fully compliant with fundamental rights standards.
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Digital Services Act: EU Parliament’s key committee rejects a filternet but concerns remain
The European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA) is a big deal. It's the most significant reform of Europe’s internet platform legislation in twenty years and the EU Commission has proposed multiple new rules to address the challenges brought by the increased use of services online. EU members of Parliament (MEPs) showed that they listened to civil society voices: Even though the key committee on internal market affairs (IMCO) did not follow the footsteps of the ambitious DSA reports from last year, MEPs took a stance for the protection of fundamental rights.
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EU Parliament Takes First Step Towards a Fair and Interoperable Market
The EU’s Proposal for a Digital Market Act (DMA) is an attempt to create a fairer and more competitive market for online platforms in the EU. It sets out a standard for very large platforms, which act as gatekeepers between business users and end users. As gatekeepers “have substantial control over the access to, and are entrenched in digital markets,” the DMA sets out a list of dos and don'ts with which platforms will have to comply.
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PlatformPower.eu
Imagine we live in a world where online platforms enable you to change society, are following your choices for online experience and are accountable to society about how their negative effect on society should be tackled.
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What you need to know about the Facebook Papers
Facebook is now undergoing what may be the tech giant’s biggest crisis in its 17-year history. In October, The Washington Post reported that a second Facebook whistleblower came forward to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that the company prioritises growth over combating hate speech, disinformation, and other threats to the public. The whistleblower’s testimony follows that of former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, whose legal counsel released what’s known as the Facebook Papers — a 10,000-page collection of internal reports, memos, and chat logs leaked to more than a dozen major news outlets.
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Big-tech lobby sets the rules about big-tech in Europe
The dominance of Google and Facebook is disastrous for the public debate online. We've been saying this for a long time. But this dominance can also be felt in the regulation of the same platforms. Huge amounts of money are spent by big tech to influence European laws and regulations.
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Platform Regulation: Key takeways from Haugen’s hearing
On 8 November 2021, Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, participated in a hearing of the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO). While her testimony brought extremely important insights into Facebook’s opaque operations, it also showed that Haugen’s thinking of what the digital world in Europe should look like is influenced by her expertise in data science rather than public policy, as well as by her professional experience working with Silicon Valley’s centralised mega-platforms.
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Disinformation and propaganda: It’s all political!
The disinformation and propaganda campaigns in the European Union (EU) are inexplicably tied to the political parties that misuse the tools of mass media communications to spread fear and deceit (Euractiv, 2021). The media exemption currently debated within the scope of the Digital Services Act (DSA) that would prevent digital intermediaries from interfering with content posted by media outlets is an early Christmas present to the disinformation agents, as it would enable them to continue with their propaganda production, fueled by algorithmic distribution.
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Digital Services Act: The EDRi guide to 2,297 amendment proposals
Various committees in the European Parliament have tabled such a large number of amendments for the Digital Services Act (DSA) that today, EDRi publishes a guide to support Members of the European Parliament in navigating those that would help create a successful, open, and rights-respecting European digital sphere.
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Closing the Loopholes in EU’s Net Neutrality Framework
The European net neutrality rules are being reformed to fix one of the biggest loopholes in the EU‘s framework: Zero-Rating. EDRi has been vocal about the dangers of Zero-Rating, a practice by which telecoms companies discriminate between online services by making some data traffic more expensive than other such traffic. Prompted by three judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Board of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) has acknowledged that their previous 2016 Guidelines on how to enforce the Net Neutrality Regulation have to be overhauled. The direction of the reform is looking to confirm the previous submissions of EDRi over the past six years and today we add another submission to BEREC with the hope of fixing the last loophole in Europe’s net neutrality framework.
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noyb publishes the draft decision by the DPC in the case against Facebook
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has sent a draft decision to EDRi's member noyb - European Center for Digital Rights and informed noyb that the draft decision would be shared with the other European Data Protection Authorities for consultation. The case concerns Facebook's reliance on contracts for serving advertising to its users - the legal trick Facebook applied in May 2018 to bypass the GDPR.
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