Internet Activism

A couple of weeks back, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend an interesting lecture on European telecommunications regulation during my regular classes of competition law at the University of Amsterdam. A substantial part of the lecture was devoted to a discussion about net neutrality, which is to be voted on by the European Parliament during its plenary session on 3rd of April.

For various reasons, net neutrality, as proposed by the Connected Continent legislative package, is currently a very sensitive issue. Briefly – telcos want more leeway in charging content providers such as Google or Netflix extra costs as those are (purportedly) necessary considering the bandwidth requirements of their services, while content providers, unsurprisingly, deem any (of those) charges wholly unreasonable. To complete the triangle, however, there is also a third group of interested ‘lobbyists’ – advocacy groups or ‘activists’ if you fancy that term – and those groups are precisely where the main focus of this brief submission of mine comes into play.

Even though I am not entirely convinced whether full and complete net neutrality implementation, as advocated by many, is at all possible, but I wholeheartedly believe that the voices of those advocates have more than just a single message to them. To give an example, allow me to recall a demise of one (ugly) trade agreement going by the name of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which was ultimately taken care of by the European Parliament. Interestingly enough, the burial of this agreement was the first time the European Parliament used its power under the Lisbon treaty to reject an international trade agreement. And the numbers are impressive as well – 478 MEPs against, 39 in favor and 165 in abstention – that’s not a close call. ACTA was bad and it obviously sparkled up a lot of debate and, ultimately, a stern activism.

The European parliament, as a democratic element in the legislative procedure and a representative of the people of Europe listened closely and Europe was free of dangerous legislation, at least for a while. As a side-note, I am not sure if forces such as the Pirate Party might have played a role as well – and for that matter please refer to always refreshing commentary on the inner workings of European politics to other sources – but the role activism played in the final result should, in my opinion, not be understated.

As skeptical as I usually am about European politics, I am very pleased that the Commission listens as well, in one way or the other – although I would not like to be the person who has to review 11 000 responses (an all time record) to the European Commission’s (extended) public consultation on the review of EU copyright rules which closed on 5th of March. However, coming back to what I proposed earlier – activism is not just about what it is advocating for – it is also about the act of advocating itself. Looking at the magnitude of responses to the consultation it is hard not to notice that we are, in many areas, at the turning point of how things work and how they might work in the future.

Let’s be respectful of all the voices in that third group of ‘lobbyists’, not forget about what has been done, who our heroes are and what we still have to do.