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Tactic: European net freedom lobbyists unite to fight new internet bill
Written by Simon Columbus on August 12, 2008 – 11:08 pm -
Description: The Telecoms Package is a proposal from the EU Commission to reform the EU’s regulatory framework for electronic communications networks and services with a view to completing the internal market for electronic communications. It is seen by net freedom activists as a serious threat. Especially some of the amendments brought in related to intellectual property rights would lead to monitoring and blocking of websites and peer-to-peer exchanges by ISPs, permitting ISPs to sanction users by suspending or
terminating internet access.
The proposal was due to be voted on by the responsible committees on July 7, followed by the vote of the European parliament as a whole on September 2. Not long before the committees’ votes hundreds of amendments to the package made it impossible to overlook it, which bore the huge risk that members of the parliament would vote for a bill the consequences of which they could not foresee.
Tools Being Used: Blogs, Wiki
How These Tools Are Being Used: On July 1, netzpolitik.org from Germany, La Quadrature du Net from France and the British Open Rights Group published a press release on their respective blogs announcing their actions to stop the Telecoms Package or have it changed in a way that it would not inflict net freedom any longer.
The involved groups subsequently organized the action mainly using a wiki, frequently posting updates on their respective blogs or websites to communicate the progress to the public.
What Are They Doing: Especially before July 7, the work mainly consisted of mobilizing an opposition by contacting members of the European parliament and their respective assistants to inform them about the dangers of the Telecoms Package and to convince them to drop or reject the amendments related to intellectual property rights. The organizations’ tactic included inviting volunteers via their open wiki - and “advertising” that trough blogs - to participate in this effort, which made a broad action possible.
Outcome: The action was successfully publicized in many blogs and subsequently turned massive (mainstream) media attention on the Telecoms Package. As an outcome, many - but not all - amendments inflicting or endangering net freedom were dropped by the committees. Additionally, the members of the parliament decided to postpone their own vote for three further weeks. That means, the decision will now be made between September 22 and 25.
The extraordinarily fast action against the Telecoms Package was only possible because the leading organisations could fall back on existing structures. In Germany, netzpolitik.org and the company behind it, Newthinking Communications, a specialist for Open Source strategies, are well known as a main power behind the German Open Source and Creative Commons movement. But most importantly, they are part of the Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung, a nationwide association of civil rights campaigners, data protection activists and Internet users founded to fight a telecommunications data retention law.
Within a few years, the “AK VDS” has managed to built up a huge network of activists who mostly spontanously support campaings around the topics of privacy and data security, gathering more than 35.000 citizens to officially bring an action against the data retention law passed in November 2007 at the federal constitional court.
The new awareness for these topics, fed by the seemingly unappeasable demands of several politicians has become a model for organizations in other countries. On October 11, activists in several countries of the world will hold a sequel of the succesful demonstrations organized by the AK VDS during the last years under the motto “Freedom not Fear“. The last rendition of this event in September 2007 attracted about 15.000 citizens in Germany’s capital Berlin, which made it the hugest rally in support of civil rights in Germany within the last 20 years. But while that demonstration solely protested data retention, the German movement now has become a strong opposition to all kinds of surveillance and a defender of data security and privacy on many playgrounds, supporting among others the action against the Telecoms Package.
Tags: European Union, La Quadrature du Net, net freedom, netzpolitik.org, Open Rights Group, Telecoms Package
Posted in Blogs, Europe, Tactics, Wikis |