If you do not see a policeman outside of your door, you are looking out of the wrong window. Read this scholarly essay as an analogy of privacy violations.
News and Research articles on Europe
The increasing complexity of cloud services has created the opportunity for a new business model: Cloud Services Brokerage. The answer to the interest in policy-aware cloud-solutions is choice, argues Claus Schaale (Cisco) in his guest post for the Internet Policy Review.
After a first on Slovenia, here is our second in our series on internet policy innovation in small European countries. Finns are moving fast and experimenting with crowdsourced legislation.
A new expert group on cloud computing is to ensure trust in the internet cloud. In the meantime, users can already find privacy-enhanced cloud offers.
Civil disobedience is a familiar and well established phenomenon in Western societies. Currently, this concept of political action is challenged by new practices evolving on and around the internet. This paper focusses on the question of whether several forms of digital civil disobedience are legitimate.
The European Civil Liberties Committee LIBE is pushing the EU data protection regulation draft forward. Yet, many compromises are made along the way, leaving Europeans wondering who will be the good, the bad and the ugly in the data protection saga.
Is Slovenia at the avant-garde of communications policy? One says yes, the next says no. Where lies the thruth? Read the first of our country-by-country series on smaller countries in Europe and their approaches, ideas and implementation of internet policy.
Cloud-based information intermediaries curate information and distribute in a way that fundamentally challenges the right of access to information.
Can smaller countries in Europe only copy and past from the legislation of the EU or other big players, or are they in a position to provide fresh ideas for innovation in policy development? This new series by the Internet Policy Review checks on it.
There are significant dangers in surveilling online communications unless the mechanisms and policies of surveillance are subject to strict and legally enforceable standards of transparency, oversight, and control.
KEYWORDS:
Surveillance, Intelligence services, Base rate fallacy, Interception, Fundamental principles, Predictive algorithms, Privacy, Security, Content data, Communications data, Bundestrojaner, National Security Agency (NSA), PRISM, Tempora, Encryption, Liability, Transparency, Cyber security, Content, Censorship, Filtering
How can European states protect themselves against surveillance programmes such as those of the US and the UK? Different takes on the question where delivered at EuroDIG, in Lisbon.
Details about a future European net neutrality rule are still lacking, but competing models from EU member states are already on the table. Should it be a law, like in the Netherlands and Slovenia, or are co-regulatory guidelines like in Norway doing the job. The Internet Policy Review's Monika Ermert was at EuroDIG this week and found some leads.
Over the years, the video game industry has grown into one of the largest, most profitable entertainment industries in the world. Originality and innovation - instead of fueling competition and guaranteeing a diverse market - are regarded by many as risky ventures. Some would even argue that innovation in the industry is not really innovative at all anymore. It doesn’t come as a surprise then, that user-driven innovation has come to play a considerably important role for the industry in recent years.
We knew the US (and other governments) were watching us, many politicians and engineers said after The Guardian and the Washington Post published information about the spy programme PRISM, which allows US agencies access to all of your whereabouts on the net.
This article presents a general analysis of how user autonomy in the internet cloud is increasingly put into jeopardy by the growing comfort and efficiency of the user-interface. Although this issue has not been, thus far, explicitly addressed by the law, it is a fundamental ethical question that should be carefully assessed to guide the future deployment of cloud computing.
gTLDs are the highest level of domain names in the domain name system, including .com, .net and .org; their number has been restricted to twenty-two for several years. This will change, as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) - the organisation responsible for managing and coordinating the system - rolls out a new gTLDs programme. Businesses and organisations are now able to apply for their own customised top-level domain names. But ICANNs move is mired in controvery, as Francesca Musiani reveals.
The last years have seen a growing politicisation of intellectual property issues, especially those relative to the internet. Sebastian Haunss assesses the current state of the policy field and draws attention to three parallel processes, which structure the future development of intellectual property policies related to the internet: the growing focus on enforcement, the plurilateralisation of international IP policies, and the trend to open access.
KEYWORDS:
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Intellectual property, Copyright, Content, Academic publication, Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), Free trade agreements, Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), Digital rights management (DRM)
Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy, Portugal, France and recently The Netherlands and the UK have all allocated new spectrum in the 800 MegaHertz (MHz) band to providers of mobile broadband service, especially LTE (Long Term Evolution). Despite this new development, EU Commission Vice-President and Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes is not satisfied. Is her dissatisfaction justified?
In an April press release, Deutsche Telekom announced it would throttle IP traffic flows of its DSL customers once they cross certain data limits and to privilege their own and "partner" content at the same time. "Managed services will be delivered at a higher and guaranteed quality at an extra cost," a spokesman explained. This article looks at what's hidden behind "managed services".
Over the last few years, privacy has become a trending topic when it comes to the mobile internet. Mobile app developers and providers of app stores have increasingly been put under pressure by privacy advocates.