It is what we have decided to call “DSA month” here in Brussels and your monitoring report will do a deep dive of it. A total of 8 (in words: eight) committees are working on it and there are literally thousands of amendments to plow through. On the Council side the Portuguese Presidency tried to solve one issue of ours before it hands it over to Slovenia. Enjoy the read!
Anna & Dimi
This and previous reports on Meta-Wiki: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Monitor
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Digital Services Act
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Council: As the Portuguese Presidency steps down and Slovenia takes over [1], there is still no “general approach”, meaning Member States still haven’t agreed on a common negotiating position vis-à-vis the European Parliament. France is pushing for stricter liability (see French Republican Values Bill below) and would love to see hard deadlines for platforms’ reactions to notices. In the other corner Sweden, Ireland and Finland have released a joint paper [2] calling for a higher threshold for content removal. They argue that takedown rules should apply only to “clearly illegal” content as opposed to “apparently illegal” content and make a freedom of expression argument.
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Council Compromises: One thing the Portuguese Presidency did rather well was to propose new wording of the “actual knowledge” in Article 14.3. Online platforms are obligated to act upon obtaining “actual knowledge” of illegal content. However, the Commission proposal could have meant that almost any notice we receive is considered to be “actual knowledge”. Most notices we receive are not about illegal content. The proposed compromise adds that it applies only if “services can identify the illegality of the content in question”, [3] which is much better.
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Parliament - IMCO: In the lead Internal Market and Consumer Affairs committee (IMCO) the rapporteur Christel Schaldemose (S&D DK) presented her draft report. [4] While she focuses mainly on consumer protection and physical goods and services, she presented a few worrying ideas. Ms. Schaldemose proposes that accounts of politicians should be harder to block. She also proposes a 24 hour deadline for platforms to remove illegal content that “can seriously harm public policy (?!?), public security or public health” and a seven days deadline for all other cases. Other MEPs have until the end of today to submit their amendments. We are working with several groups on amendments to clearly distinguish between service provider rules and rules created up and enforced by editing communities. We are also raising attention to the “actual knowledge” issue, as we did with Council.
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Parliament - other committees: A total of seven other committees are working on issuing opinions on the DSA, some of which the lead committee will have to take into account. There is a flurry of literally thousands of amendments in all directions. Across the board French lawmakers are pushing for stricter liability and hard content removal deadlines, in sync with their national government. Perhaps one interesting suggestion was made in the Industry, Trade and Research committee (ITRE). A group of EPP lawmakers there tabled amendment 225 [5], which would exclude not-for-profit providers of scientific and educational repositories from the act. This would probably be the safest way to keep Wikipedia and Commons as they are. We are going to do a deeper, legal analysis of what it means, but we welcome the thoughtful proposal by these MEPs.
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French Republican Values Bill
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France, in an attempt to create facts and push its views onto the DSA is debating a “Republican Values” Bill, which is incorrectly summarized as a "social networks" law, as it has a much larger scope of application and Wikipedia is targeted. It basically creates obligations to quickly delete content that is considered illegal (But by whom?!?).
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WMFR: Needless to say that Wikimédia France is not amused and tabled some amendments in the Assemblée nationale as it seems inappropriate to regulate social networks and not-for-profit educational sites in the same way. They also published a somewhat angry blog post. [6]
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European Commission: Another party that is not amused is the European Commission itself. They just love it when Member States start creating national laws while they are trying to establish EU-wide rules to avoid fragmentation. Member States have the obligation to notify the Commission when they are working on national implementation of EU law, something France did for a second time last week. [7] Stakeholders have the opportunity to submit comments on these notifications to the European Commission. Something that Wikimédia France did for a second time this week. [8]
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Digital Markets Act
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The DSA’s weird sibling, DMA, has been taken on at the IMCO Committee. Rapporteur MEP Andreas Schwab (EPP, DE) proposes that the special rules for gatekeepers are limited to really wealthy and popular platforms, targeting them effectively at GAFAM. The leak surfacing a few days before the report’s publication showed a bold attempt to create a procedure for tailor-made remedies in case gatekeepers don’t behave well that included measures ranging from mandating interoperability with other services to breaking up culprit services. Disappointingly, the Rapporteur got shy and the idea bordering on introducing a new competition tool, was removed from the official version of the report. We shared our feedback with the MEPs sitting at IMCO as the deadline for tabling amendments passes on July 1st.
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Data Act
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Before you ask: No this is not the Data Governance Act, neither the AI Regulation. Those are still going on and we will get back to them next month. The European Commission is toying with the idea of proposing yet another law to force companies share more sectoral data among each other. The details are murky, as we are in the very beginning of the process. There’s a roadmap which is currently open for feedback. [10] Companies like Microsoft, IBM and associations like the CCIA say they hate the idea. As this procedure officially also covers the potential review of the Database Directive, we wrote that we would like the sui generis database right to go away, as there is not proof that it has lead to more investment in databases in the EU, while there is evidence that the EU is lagging behind other regions in data sharing (something the sui generis right doesn’t make easier).
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wikimedia.brussels
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In June we blogged about:
Takedown Notices and Community Content Moderation: Wikimedia’s Latest Transparency Report - Dimi takes us through our content moderation practices and results presented in the report
COMMUNIA, the voice for public domain, celebrates 10. anniversary - Anna explains the role COMMUNIA Association has played in protecting users’ rights in access to knowledge - and in keeping us all positive and hopeful amongst the legislative turmoil
Wikimedia France: new anti-terrorist bill exposes users to mass surveillance - Naphsica provides insight into the new law proposal that would raise red flags in the EU if it were proposed anywhere else but France
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[1]https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/presidency-council-eu/
[2]https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a-zdxR9mWfUgkG-u9hkMYuY-xxAXrD8W/view?usp=sharing
[3]https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HG8U6hHjNAmHY50iwWFMc70j4EUfobgZ/view?usp=sharing
[4]https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/IMCO-PR-693594_EN.html
[5]https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/ITRE-AM-693906_EN.pdf
[8]https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z88gqC7Mu7FBWq0mr2_pZEX5Sewqys9D/view?usp=sharing
[9]https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/IMCO-PR-692792_EN.pdf