Policy Observatory

Today, 28 member states of the European Union presented a joint proposal on the Telecoms Single Market — legislation that will determine whether Net Neutrality will become a reality throughout Europe. The proposal officially triggered the start of joint negotiations between the EU Commission, the EU Parliament, and the Council of the EU to produce a final text.

After the European Parliament voted to protect net neutrality in April of last year, the EU Council of Ministers has just adopted its text on net neutrality (pdf)*. It claims to aim to defend the open internet, but would, in fact, permit every imaginable breach of net neutrality.

German diplomatic cables and thousands of pages of leaked classified EU documents reveal behind-the-scenes efforts by governments to weaken the EU’s data protection bill.

LobbyPlag.eu, which obtained the cables and documents, on Tuesday (10 March), found that 132 of 151 (87%) changes by member states lowered privacy protections.

In the context of the undergoing Spanish Criminal Code reform, PSOE and PE, two major political parties in Spain, agreed on a law proposal on terrorism which include provisions about the Internet. This happened despite critics saying that the section on terrorism should be left out of the Criminal Code reform.

France's government is pressing a surveillance bill that would give French intelligence services legal backing to vacuum up metadata in hopes of preventing an imminent terror attack.

The bill "would pave the way for extremely intrusive surveillance practices with no judicial pre-authorization," the organization Amnesty International said in a statement.

The bill was proposed long before the deadly Paris attacks by Islamic extremists earlier this year, but the government says it takes on added urgency with each person who radicalizes and turns against France.

National Digital Council’s report on the draft digital bill is not ready yet although the bill should be presented to the Council of Ministers in June 2015.