EU lawmakers must ‘patch the last loopholes’ in draft revisions t...

telecom ministers (CD Dec 1 p8). It contains improvements, but retains a “blatant lack of clarification and concrete guarantees that telecom operators won’t be allowed full control over the Internet,” digital rights group La Quadrature du Net said. It urged members of the parliamentary industry and internal market committees to be vigilant in closing the gaps. The group praised lawmakers for reviving a provision that fundamental rights and freedoms be restricted only under judicial authority. But it but complained that clauses that lay the groundwork for a “graduated response” or “three-strikes” approach to online piracy weren’t changed. Drafters removed provisions “pushed by AT&T” that could lead to Internet discrimination and “network management policies” that could threaten net neutrality, the group said. But they added loopholes for “network discrimination” by allowing nondiscriminatory limitations on access to services and applications while failing to specify the traffic management measures that providers can apply to control users’ activities, it said. Since dangerous provisions were introduced by the entertainment industry during committees’ work on the first reading, the telecom package has grown cleaner at each step of the legislative process, La Quadrature analyst Gerald Sedrati-Dinet said, but “some stains remain to be washed.” The Business Software Alliance strongly opposed provisions allowing mandatory Internet filtering for intellectual property rights purposes. But it sought the right, supported by EU governments, for online service providers to process traffic data for network security purposes. But “after being misinterpreted and heavily criticized” by La Quadrature, the European Data Protection Supervisor and others for its attempts to bar mandatory filtering, “we backed out of the EU debate,” said Francisco Mingorance, the BSA’s director of public policy for Europe. The alliance is now fighting filtering in France as the National Assembly prepares to debate the three-strikes proposal March 10-11, he told us. Opponents of filtering probably will lose, leaving judges free to impose broad anti- piracy technology filtering requirements on all providers, include software and hardware producers, he said. Since the alliance missed its chance to kill the proposal at EU level, he said, there’s not much it can do to block adoption of the mandate in France. Ironically, he added, La Quadrature, which was the Alliance’s most vocal opponent in the telecom package discussion, “will be left with a bitter taste when the first [filtering] decisions are imposed” by French judges.