Internet: Finland running ahead on access and democracy

Monika Ermert, Heise, Intellectual Property Watch, VDI-Nachrichten, Germany

PUBLISHED ON: 20 Nov 2013

Will the first ever crowdsourced legislation come from Finland? Possibly, with decisions pending on four proposals put before the Parliament of Finland over the innovative “Open Ministry“ platform. The news that over 50.000 Finnish citizens put a reform of stern copyright legislation before their politicians catapulted Finland to the international media over the summer – in much the same way as the legislative guarantee for broadband for all Finns did three years earlier. What to expect from a place that saw the rise and fall of mobile phone innovator Nokia?

Members of parliament according to Joonas Pekkanen, president and founder of the Open Ministry, only after the fact realised that they had allowed competition in legislation by passing the necessary constitutional change and allowing policy initiatives via the citizen's website of the Ministry of justice.

politicians get competition from their electorate

Citizens' initiatives now “may be organised by one or several Finnish citizens who are entitled to vote,” the Ministry says, when explaining how its crowdsourcing legislative channel works. “The citizens' initiative may include either a bill or a proposal that a bill drafting process should be started. An initiative may also concern amending or repealing an effective Act. If the initiative is formulated as a bill, it shall include the actual sections of the proposed legislation. The initiative shall comprise only one complex of issues and it must always include reasons for the proposal.“

The threshold of 50.000 signatories in six months has already been reached four times with a new initiative for a post-Snowden law still trying to get there right now. The Lex Snowden initiative, according to its presentation on the Open Ministry portal, has three main elements. It criminalises excessive surveillance in the Finish Criminal Code, with prosecution outside of Finland possible with fines against companies in the game of up to 25 percent of their total international revenue – clearly a bigger piece of the pie then what the EU draft data protection regulation put into its anti-FISA paragraph. Second, it makes transparency reports by public authorities and telecom operators mandatory, and, third, it provides protection for whistleblowers. Lex Snowden still has time until the start of 2014 to gather support. If it passes the threshold, Parliament has to deal with it in its regular process.

It may fail there, being rejected by majorities in the parliament, as the first legislative initiative, a ban on farming animals for furs, did. For certain, it will result in a big political discussion in the same way as the three other pending initiatives that passed 50.000 already did – especially given the concerns by many observers about a real “NSA envy” by the Finnish Secret Service.

Copyright reform by the people

The same-sex marriage initiative, putting brakes on Swedish language education obligations, and the overreported copyright reform proposal, according to Pekkanen, have much better chances than the farming initiative. There was a lot of political support to reform the 2005 Lex Karpela, which transposed the EU Copyright Directive of 2001 into Finnish law. Heavily criticised recently, after a nine-year old girl had her computer confiscated by the police for downloading songs, there might be a momentum for the people's proposal to do away with such raids, to begin with.

There are initiatives in other countries to open up their legislative processes, namely in Estonia. But existing systems often do not make the successful citizens petitions equal to traditional legislative proposals. The Open Ministry platform now also supports those putting a EU citizens' initiative in, which certainly is not as innovative as the Finnish one, as its effect is not a full legislative process. In March this year, the Right 2 Water initiative reached the EU threshold. The number of initiatives nevertheless is relatively small compared to small member state Finland.

Broadband law

Finland has already once itched ahead, to the envy of many other EU member states. The legislator in 2010, granted a right to a 1 Megabit per second access connection. Telecom operators starting July 1 2010, had to provide that speed to customers who requested it. In 2015, everybody shall have 100 Mbps connections, according to a commitment of the legislator. Granting a certain speed by law is as unique as the citizen legislative initiatives. With Finns acting over the net in many areas of their lives, the legislation was declared necessary by the then Communication Minister Suvi Linden.

The European Commission, through one of many studies on EU broadband development, had to applaud the Finnish model. Finland had overcome its geographical disadvantages and low population (5.4 million people) density: not only was coverage of different super-fast technologies well ahead or, at least equal to countries enjoying an easier setting with regards to population density. It was top with 100 percent coverage of 3G mobile broadband, HSPA. While the Commission also noted some slow-down of the broadband growth rates from 2011-2012, it underlined that 98 percent of households, according to the study commissioned by Directorate General Connect, could get basic broadband (144 Kbps) and 68 percent were up to 30 Mbps (in Helsinki, 97 percent). Also, in Long Term Evolution (LTE) and in general competitiveness, Finland was in the little top group. Mobile connection, according to reports, were prefered by the industry to connect rural areas, while subsidies offered by the government for fibre roll-out (66 Million Euro from the government, 23 from the EU and an additional 40 Million from municipal governments) were mostly requested by local consortia.

Nokia's fall and open data initiatives

Can a look into Finnish innovation go around the story of the splendid rise and sudden fall of Nokia? No, not really. The mobile vendor, poster child of Finnish tech innovation, sold its phone business to software partner Microsoft in September 2013. Long stories about what that meant for Finland have been written.

Wired in a melancholic piece recounted: “By 2000, Nokia accounted for a mindboggling 4 per cent of Finnish GDP, 70 per cent of Helsinki's stock exchange market capital, 43 per cent of corporate R&D, 21 per cent of total exports and 14 per cent of corporate tax revenues. It was and still is unprecedented. Internationally, the massive company from the tiny country peaked in 2006 taking 41 per cent of the mobile phone market worldwide.”

While generations of researchers might ponder about the reasons for the failure from a business or policy standpoint, experts from the sector of the component suppliers consider that one decisive factor might have been the lack of fortune in deciding about how to move forward with its software platform. With competition from Apple and Google around, the company might have waited too long to delve into developing a cool platform of its own, deciding late to join Microsoft.

Policy innovation is not driven by governments in the first place, innovative companies are the drivers, thinks Pekkanen.“The state has not been innovative, but some companies have,” he told us. But he adds: “There is a large "Information Society Act" being prepared currently, which will hopefully turn out good and support privacy and user rights also.”

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