Fighting over the future of the internet
By Mehreen Khan
January 21, 2019
Big Tech could be on the verge of snatching an improbable
triumph from the jaws of defeat in one of the EU’s most hard-fought recent
policy battles: how to rewrite Europe's copyright rules for the digital age.
If you’ve used the internet in the last two years, you can’t
have escaped the copyright lobbying wars. They’ve included one-day blackouts of
Wikipedia in Europe, pop-up ads on your YouTube videos, and mock ups from
Google on what the world could look like if EU legislators prevailed (see
below).
At stake is the first revamp of Europe’s copyright directive
since 2001. The reform was proposed by Brussels in 2016 as a way to give more
rights to creators over their content (musicians, publishers, filmmakers) and
has sparked incessant squabbles between governments, MEPs, creatives and the
tech sector ever since.
Two parts of the planned reform have infuriated tech giants
and internet freedom campaigners. One would force the likes of Google News to
buy licenses for showing “snippets” of content
(Article 11). Opponents says it’s a “link tax”. Supporters say it will
give fair pay to publishers, like newspapers, whose material can often be
accessed for free online.
The other is Article 13 - a filtering requirement that would
make YouTube or Twitter legally responsible for content uploaded by users.
Platforms would need to take down material in breach of copyright. Critics
think these “censorship machines” would make memes illegal to share.
Copyright’s opponents seemed to have lost the fight when
MEPs last year voted in favour of a draft that included filters and the snippet
licenses. But since then, closed door negotiations between the parliament, EU
governments and the commission to finalise the regulation have stalled and the
tide seems to have turned in back favour of Big Tech.
According to a diplomatic note seen by the Brussels
Briefing, governments spent three hours clashing over whether SMEs should be
subject to the filters, whether platforms should be liable for their users and
how “snippets” should be defined.
The spat shows governments are more divided than ever. Even
if they find agreement among themselves, they’ll still need to settle
differences with MEPs before the regulation can be approved. EU elections loom
in May.
It has raised the real possibility that Article 11 and Article 13 could be dumped as
the only way to rescue a regulation that has been nearly three years in the
making. One centre-right MEP has suggested as much. Even cheerleaders for the
overhaul - like some music groups and publishers - have gone cool on the
filters arguing the revised version wouldn’t achieve any of its initial aims.
mehreen.khan@ft.com @mehreenkhn
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