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Deutsch: Internet Governance Dialog 2011 in Belgrad
The 4th European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EuroDIG) took place in Belgrade on 30-31 May 2011 covering a lot of debates on a large area of issues on concepts of Internet Governance, from freedom of expression to privacy and cybersecurity.
The opening session was marked by Internet freedom concepts with the opening video speech by Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden who noted that "the blocking and filtering of content, popular in certain quarters, should be avoided. I think it is a disturbing fact that more governments have become more sophisticated in trying to monitor the behaviour and also, to a certain extent to censor, the content of the net. We must send a strong message that according to the values that we represent, this is simply not acceptable."
He also claimed that Europe should have a unitary voice asking for freedom on the Internet: "I would say that from the European point of view, our emphasis should be on the freedom issues of the net, the other voices in the world that are pressing in another direction and we should be on our guard against those particular tendencies. And I think we need to develop as unified and as strong European voice on these issues as we can."
His speech follows a similar stand for Internet freedom taken a few days before, in an event held on 23 May 2011 in Brussels (reported in a previous EDRi-gram article).
In a data protection workshop on the first day, the panel, including Katarzyna Szymielewicz from EDRi-member Panoptykon Foundation Poland, participants debated the review of the privacy standards, with an emphasis on the right to oblivion, as a new principle to be included in the review of the data protection legislative tools. The workshop also underlined the tension between the right to privacy and some new business models, a tension which should not lead to diminishing the protection of privacy.
A plenary on "new media" of the second day involved a lot of participants trying to debate the notion of new media, editorial control, trust in mass medium sources and freedom of expression. The discussion drew on the current work undertaken by the Council of Europe to develop a "new notion of media", already covered in the EDRi-gram. An interesting debate on the paid vs. free media focused on the fact that for the free media there is a price to be paid as well, but it is just not visible. You can pay by giving your personal information or you can pay via advertisement. Another part of the debate was if the media law needed to be changed and in what direction. In this respect, Meryem Marzouki from EDRi underlined that such a regulation on a new media should be possible only if the purpose was "to ensure plurality of views and to ensure the public interest."
The conclusions of the meeting underlined the openness of conversations, the challenge of incorporating different perspectives and the importance of maintaining a bottom up approach to internet policy issues. An active participation of the youth is also worth noting, some of them also participants in the New Media Summer School, with strong public positions in favour of preventing censorship and promoting freedom of expression and net neutrality during the debates.
The next EuroDIG conference will take place in Sweden in 2012.
Eurodig 2011 (30-31.05.2011)
http://www.eurodig.org
Carl Bildt at EuroDIG 2011 (30.05.2011)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLLpW4s7WTo
New Media Summer School (27.05.- 1.06.2011)
http://newmediasummerschool.eu/
EDRi-gram: ENDitorial:CoE: A New Notion of Media. For Better or For Worse?
(20.04.2011)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number9.8/coe-new-notion-of-media