EU to allow web controls

THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT has backed out on an amendment to its laws that aimed at protecting citizens' freedom in the online world.

Amendment 138, which had been adopted twice by an 88 per cent majority in the plenary assembly, was turned into a toothless wonder after pressure from member states.

The amendment prevented governments from cutting off Internet access without a court order. It will be replaced by a weak provision.

According to human rights groups, the knifing of the amendment was designed to avoid a face off with the EU Council and get the Telecoms Package approved and into law.

Jérémie Zimmermann, spokesperson for lobby group La Quadrature du Net, said that amendment 138 was "in haste" dissolved into "useless legalese and soft consensus". 

Parliament hurried to get rid of  safeguards for citizens' freedoms because it knew that with the Lisbon treaty both institutions will soon share the legislative power in the field of judicial affairs. This would make any attempts to change the amendment null and void, he said.

"The bad excuses we have heard these past few days to justify [abandoning] amendment 138 will then be totally obsolete," Zimmermann claimed.

Basically the EU Parliament was not brave enough to stand against the Council to defend citizens' freedoms, he indicated.

Meanwhile in the US it's starting to look like all the money the telcos have spent lobbying politicans to allow them to develop a two-tiered Internet would have been better spent on a holiday somewhere hot.

According to the Washington Post, despite all AT&T and other old line telecom and cable companies have spent pushing their cause, they are poised to lose a key vote to a bunch of younger technology companies that never had anything to do with Washington until recently.

The FCC is tipped to vote in favour of rules to let the government oversee access to the Internet.

This means that AT&T plus traditional public utilities commissions and large insurance companies will be joined at the table by Internet technology companies.

The FCC vote will be on a proposal that would begin a months-long process to formulate rules on how Internet service providers manage traffic on their networks while not blocking or unfairly slowing some content.

AT&T and other wireless and cable providers have whinged that the proposal amounts to giving the government control over the Internet, and that companies will lose the ability to reduce congestion on their networks.

Meanwhile Google and Skype counter that they need unobstructed access to all Internet users because the carriers can block services that compete with their own.

While the telcos have been spending a fortune flooding the offices of Congress, blasting emails and calling aides to try to get them to sign onto letters sent to FCC chairman Genachowski in protest of his push for new 'net neutrality' rules, it is believed they have lost already.

Over the weekend, AT&T's chief lobbyist, Jim Cicconi, asked the outfit's 300,000 employees to write the FCC complaining that net neutrality would severely hurt their business. This was widely viewed as a blatant and heavy-handed corporate astroturfing play, though later an AT&T spokesperson said that the letters from its employees opposing net neutrality were sent because they believed in its position.

However, as a key member of the Energy committee Edward J. Markey pointed out, AT&T "wants to frame it as big companies against each other, but in fact millions of people online see net neutrality as the ability for great ideas by the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Sergey Brin to get out without having to ask permission from companies like AT&T." µ