The European Union is today seen as a ‘digital laggard’ which relies on divergent national regulation and whose digital policies lack coherence. This review looks back at internet policy making and makes a few prescriptions.
News and Research articles on Inter-governmental
The European Commission today released a position statement on how it hopes to approach internet governance in the coming months. Internet governance specialist Bertrand de la Chapelle reacts to the statement in this op-ed.
Early warnings by German government officials at the Munich Security Conference proved true. On February 3, the International League of Human Rights in Germany, together with the Chaos Computer Club and civic group digitalcourage filed a criminal complaint against the German government for not acting on the mass surveillance by intelligence services.
The EU Data Retention Directive - which requests the retention of communication data of EU Citizens - is “as a whole incompatible” with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, determines Europe's top lawyer. What happens now?
Access to the net, while a core topic of the Internet Governance Forum, has seen more reporting than big visionary pictures. Universal access remains a huge challenge.
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.
Changes in the internet's architectural design affect the repartition of competences and responsibilities between service providers, content producers, users and network operators. This article outlines the dialectic between centralised and distributed architectures, institutions and practices, and how they mutually affect each other.
The Bali Internet Governance Forum is the first IGF since Edward Snowden has made revelations about the United States National Security Agency's spying activities. It's face off time, many believe.
ICANN gets closer to presenting new domain names for the net, but discussions on safeguards and obligations for the domain industry continue.
After years of legal fights before national courts the Luxembourg court will hold a hearing on cases brought forward by Austria and Ireland.
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.
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.
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)
Ten years after the first World Summit on the Information Society, WSIS+10 was held in February 2013 at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Internet governance scholar Francesca Musiani attended and reports back with a critical assessment of the “multi-stakeholder” approach to global governance of information and communication technologies.
People who deal with draft bills are in for the long haul. Uta Meier-Hahn explains how far the reform of EU’s data protection laws has progressed.