EU privacy law will change to address the challenges of AI and other technologies, European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) Wojciech Wiewiorowski told Communications Daily in a wide-ranging interview. He is urging governments not to wait for global privacy solutions to emerge before regulating AI but to use existing tools.
EU negotiators OK'd rules Friday night governing the use of AI, subject to final approval by the EU Council and European Parliament. Before the AI Act becomes effective, the European Commission will launch a voluntary AI Pact to help companies prepare, the EC said. Policy, consumer, digital rights and tech organizations met the political agreement with skepticism.
Big Tech platforms are making a good effort at complying with the EU Digital Services Act (DSA), but much more remains to be done, European Commission (EC) officials said during a Nov. 10 briefing where they presented the first transparency reports required of the 19 companies classified as "very large online platforms" (VLOPs) (see 2304250008). These include Facebook, Bing, LinkedIn, Google and YouTube. Separately, the EC requested information from VLOPs Meta and Snap about how they're protecting minors.
Countries need to decide the way forward on a broadcast protections treaty, the chair of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) said at a Nov. 6-8 meeting in Geneva, according to a transcript. A review of the third revised draft text accomplished two things, said Owen Ripley, Canadian Heritage associate assistant deputy minister-cultural affairs. It identified issues that could be improved for clarity or to move toward a consensus document and it allowed delegates to map the areas where outstanding issues remain.
Europe won't back mobile identification in the upper part of the 6 GHz band (6425-7125 MHz) unless five conditions are met, the46-member European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) said in its European Common Position (ECP) for the 2023 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-23). Debate on the band will be intense and complicated and two other agenda items (AIs) are also likely to prove tricky, telecom consultants said. The conference runs Nov. 20-Dec.15 in Dubai.
Five major US tech companies are "gatekeepers" subject to the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA), the European Commission said Wednesday. It designated 22 core platform services provided by Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft, saying the companies have six months to bring the platform services into compliance with the act. The services involved are social media, intermediation, ads, messaging, video-sharing, browsers, search and operating systems. Several platforms said they will work toward compliance. ByteDance criticized the decision.
Amazon's decision to charge for public IP4 addresses on its cloud network could help spur businesses to move to IPv6, backers of the technology said. They have been pushing for years to persuade internet companies to move away from IP version 4 (see 1806070001). Now the cost-benefit analysis for IPv6 is shifting, leading to hope for a swifter transition.
Expect an adequacy decision on U.S.-EU data transfers "soon," a European Commission official said on a Friday Atlantic Council Europe Center webinar. The EC is "very confident" the proposed framework will survive a challenge in the European Court of Justice (ECJ), said Lucrezia Busa, a member of Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders' cabinet. If it doesn't, several alternatives could be considered, including some sort of multilateral scheme, panelists said. An adequacy decision is a finding by the EC that a non-EU country's data protection regime affords privacy protections essentially equivalent to those granted under EU law.
Ukraine continues to be a vibrant IT market despite the ongoing war, speakers said Thursday during the Ukraine Recovery Conference, held Wednesday and Thursday in London. Ukraine led the world in digitization even before Russia invaded and continues to do so, being an example for other countries on e-government, they said. It's now the best place for the world's public and private sectors to test digital products, services and hypotheses, said Prime Minister Mykhailo Federov.
Making content providers pay telcos to carry traffic may not be a good idea, several speakers said Thursday at a streamed Information Technology & Innovation Foundation event on the future of the internet in Europe. The European Commission has been consulting on the future of e-communications in the bloc, and one aspect of the inquiry is "fair compensation" for ISPs that carry traffic of major content producers (see Ref: 2303220017]). One question is whether this is even a problem, and whether regulation could have unintended consequences, said Analysys Mason Manager-TMT Strategy Shahan Osman.