Big tech accountability? Read how we got here in The Closing of the Net
Try, try again: How the OECD High-Level Meeting replayed the fight over the EU Telecoms Package
by Milton Mueller
4 July 2011
"This weekend I've been reading a pre-publication draft of a new book on the EU Telecom Package, entitled The Copyright Enforcement Enigma: Internet Politics and the EU Telecoms Package, by Monica Horten. It provides a detailed chronicle of how copyright interests tried - and failed - to revise European telecommunications law to make Internet access providers enforce copyrights for them. Reading this blow by blow account of the European Telecoms package, I was struck by a sense of deja vu. The same clash over the same principles regarding intermediary responsibility took place from 2007 - 2009. We saw battles over wording and the nuances of certain phrases ("co-operation," "lawful content") almost identical to what happened at the OECD this June. That debate pitted end users' fundamental rights to free expression, privacy and due process against an attempt to make copyright enforcement more efficient and pervasive by conscripting Internet service providers into the job of rights enforcement and user surveillance.
Both the governments and the businesses engaged in the OECD seem to have forgotten the outcome. So, aided by Dr. Horton, let me remind us all of that result."
Iptegrity.com is the website of Dr Monica Horten. I’ve been analysing analysing digital policy since 2008. Way back then, I identified how issues around rights can influence Internet policy, and that has been a thread throughout all of my research. I hold a PhD in EU Communications Policy from the University of Westminster (2010), and a Post-graduate diploma in marketing. I’ve served as an independent expert on the Council of Europe Committee on Internet Freedoms, and was involved in a capacity building project in Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine. I am currently (from June 2022) Policy Manager - Freedom of Expression, with the Open Rights Group. For more, see About Iptegrity
Iptegrity.com is made available free of charge for non-commercial use, Please link-back & attribute Monica Horten. Thank you for respecting this.
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"original and valuable" Times higher Education
" essential read for anyone interested in understanding the forces at play behind the web." ITSecurity.co.uk
Find out more about the book here The Closing of the Net
FROM £15.99
In 2012, I presented my PhD research in the European Parliament.