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Deutsch: EP: Wirtschaftsausschuss bezieht Stellung zur Offenheit des Internets

The Industry Committee of the European Parliament has adopted its non-legislative report on Internet governance. MEPs took this opportunity to respond directly, quickly and strongly to the recently-announced plans of the Council of the EU to introduce systems for the revocation of domain names and IP addresses (aiming to create a system of state-sponsored cyber-attacks on Internet resources in third countries) as well as Internet blocking.

Parliamentarians responded very clearly and concisely (using the text proposed by EDRi and the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue), explaining their opposition to such plans, as well as the dangers of such an approach. The Committee report calls on Member States to: "protect the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication by avoiding any regional measures, such as revocation of IP addresses or domain names in third countries"

Similarly, the Committee adopted a text (proposed by German Social Democrat Matthias Groote) calling governments "to desist from imposing restrictions on internet access by way of censorship, filtering, blocking, monitoring or otherwise, and from requiring private entities to do so" and a text from the Civil Liberties Committee of the Parliament arguing for efforts on taking down websites first before blocking is even "considered". It should, however, be noted that this was a very rushed last-minute compromise and (very unfortunately) it is not necessarily a reliable guide to how the Parliament will vote when this issue is voted on, later this year, as part of a legislative proposal.

Unfortunately, some last minute lobbying by the copyright industry resulted in the addition of some unhelpful, but generally incoherent, text in the report. For example, an inexplicable text was adopted calling for a balance "between protecting users' privacy and recording personal data". Another amendment seeks, in a very confusing way, to place intellectual property rights on an equal footing with fundamental rights of freedom to communicate and privacy.

The report (which is not yet available in its final form) will be voted on by a full parliament "plenary" session in the coming weeks.

Council Conclusions concerning an Action Plan to implement the concerted strategy to combat cybercrime (26.04.2010)
http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/en/jha/1...

EDRi-gram: European Commission proposes Net blocking and defends illegal activity (7.04.2010)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number8.7/framework-decision-blocking-pro...

(Contribution by Joe McNamee - EDRi)