News and Research articles on GovernmentalThe revelations of Edward Snowden have created a sense of urgency to finalise the future framework for protecting privacy and personal data in the European Union. But how far has it progressed?
European countries' welfare increasingly depends on the services of the information society. This comes along with a price tag: continued increase of the cyber threat spectrum. Despite the need for coordinated efforts in cyber security, Europe lacks of common understanding.
Whistle-blower protection and clear limits to state secrets should be the rule, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe decided on October 2. Yet from recommendations to implementation and effective protection it is a long way to go.
Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff sent a stern warning to the US over its spy activities and announced counter-measures. Will this lead to real change in infrastructure, legislation and participative proccesses?
The EU draft regulation on a “connected continent“ has made one thing clear: the fight around net neutrality is far from over. What's more, the fire has set the European Commission ablaze.
There is user-generated content in many shapes – from musicians setting up their own labels, funded and supported by users to remixes of the latest political campaign slogans. What is still pending, is a genuine European copyright reform which would address this type of content.
Cloud-based information intermediaries curate information and distribute in a way that fundamentally challenges the right of access to information.
The American aversion to big government is matched by the German aversion to big data. How to best reconcile the two privacy cultures, is the subject of this analysis.
Russian internet industry and civil society groups bite back at newest law designed to protect corporations holding rights to audiovisual material.
This week the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meets in Berlin. In this guest commentary Fred Baker, longtime IETF chair, calls upon the technical community, legislators and researchers to make a stronger effort in advancing privacy online.
Privacy gets another push from recent surveillance revelations, but who shall provide it? A workshop on data protection in cloud computing prior to the upcoming meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force tries to get an answer from politicians and techies.
Fans who engage in the subtitling of motion pictures have been prosecuted on several occasions. A recent case in Sweden results in yet another discussion: do the actions of fans violate copyright?
ICANN gets closer to presenting new domain names for the net, but discussions on safeguards and obligations for the domain industry continue.
Despite a flurry of commitments, real open data progress seems slow, according to a new census. And then, there are governments excelling in both open and secret data.
Member states and EU bodies had to answer tough questions at the hearing of the European Court of Justice on July 9, 2013. The final ruling about the constitutionality of the EU Data Retention Directive is expected at the end of 2013.
After years of legal fights before national courts the Luxembourg court will hold a hearing on cases brought forward by Austria and Ireland.
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.
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.