Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

A European digital public sphere—legal and policy implications

Anna Mazgal 11th November 2021

The EU has hitherto applied conventional market-regulating tools to the online arena. It’s time to adopt a human-centred approach.

human-centred,EDPS
A European digital public sphere has to be human-centred (fizkes/shutterstock.com)

The European Union provides a unique regulatory environment—supranational, affecting the lives of nearly 448 million people, but also national, since the member states actively participate in shaping it. It is an especially important framework in responding to problems which have a global impact, such as the way Big Tech has taken over online spaces for public debate.

Globally more than two-thirds of all internet users use ‘social media’ and that includes almost all young people in the richest countries, many of them European. Europeans thus make use of a digital public space which in reality is privatised.

As the platforms dominating the global market are run by United States and Chinese companies, their functioning is shaped by the regulatory and social environment of those jurisdictions. This does not reflect European privacy standards or principles important to Europeans, ranging from freedom of expression to consumer rights. So there is a good argument for creating an online public space stemming from European values and policies.

Market perspective

When it comes to imagining a holistic framework which could shape the online experience of European denizens, however, so far the EU has been limited in ambition, narrowing it down to the concept of the digital single market. This market perspective restricts the scope of intervention, as it omits all the non-market possibilities of interaction and building a good online experience. It has been associated with directives on copyright, audiovisual media services and regulations, terrorist content and artificial intelligence, as well as the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA).


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

These do impinge beyond market considerations, as they shape freedom to receive and impart information, the right of access to a court, privacy and personality rights. They can also be seen as a concerted effort to create a European version of the internet. Yet these laws, realised or proposed, do not significantly change the status quo. Rather they impose unified rules on key actors, while insufficient to carve out effectively an agora governed by the people for the people.

How can the European agenda be expanded beyond market considerations? EU legislators are bound by the Treaty on European Union and the Charter of Fundamental Rights and this is where a renewed mandate for creating the European digital public sphere (EDPS) should be sought. To put citizens and not companies at the centre, existing laws should be revised as well.

Unfortunate logic

Legislators must resist the pressure from the creative industry to create new copyright or related rights as soon as technological developments provide new possibilities of access to cultural and creative activity. This unfortunate logic underpinned the copyright directive, which advanced, among other things, new rights related to text- and data-mining and a related right enabling press publishers to request payments from platforms when they link to their news sites. Together with other provisions, such as content-filtering requirements for platforms, this rendered it counterproductive to open up new public spaces online. It also stems from a binary perspective where cultural production and creative exchange happen between market actors, omitting the contributions of internet users.

While it is true that most of the media and news outlets cannot exist without adequate financing of their work, it is wrong to expect that the problems created by the business models of platforms based on personal data commodification can be solved solely by increasing transfers to the publishers. As long as journalism is dependent on ‘social media’ intermediation it will be at the mercy of the platforms providing it.

To ensure that the EDPS can thrive, these barriers will need to be removed, including the excessive copyright protection over machine-reading. Sui generis rights for databases where not an original creation should be abolished as well: these limit access to datasets otherwise not protected by copyright.

Another fundamental issue is geoblocking, a market practice of limiting access to services and goods in some member states while allowing it in others, which the EU considers discrimination between EU customers. It is hard to imagine a smoothly functioning EDPS with geoblocking practices. The EU’s geoblocking regulation, adopted in 2018, does not regulate any copyrighted content. Its recent review however ‘considers the possible extension of the scope of the legislation, including with regard to copyright-protected content (such as audio-visual, music, e-books and games)’.

Levelling the playing-field

The EU shouldn’t aim at recreating an online ecosystem with a small number of big platforms concentrating power, resources and data, locking in users through network effects. Rather, any new legislative proposals should aim to level the playing-field for small and not-for-profit players who can compete with variable offers, prioritising different values important to different users (efficiency, privacy, personalised access to content and so on).

This array of services could work as a general infrastructure which does not bind intermediaries into competition with ‘surveillance capitalism’ only with strong interoperability requirements. The Digital Markets Act, currently going through the legislative process, provides an opportunity to introduce such requirements into the framework regulating gatekeepers. This approach should be more widely adopted, to increase competition and create a public space in which private actors can provide points of access as well.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

The need to implement directives in national legal frameworks creates a problem by diversifying conditions of liability, or exemptions from it. Since the member states get to shape copyright domestically, for example, we end up with 27 different frameworks. These include a patchwork of copyright exceptions and limitations benefiting users in access to information, knowledge and culture.

The EU needs to ensure there is a concerted effort to harmonise these exceptions. And the default for future legislative initiatives should be a regulation binding member states directly, to remove differences of interpretation via national laws.

Political will

One cannot envisage all the cases where national legal frameworks, including constitutional systems, will limit the ability to introduce a continental landscape enabling the EDPS to thrive, whether unified by regulations or harmonised by concerted implementation of directives and other international laws. A legislative deus ex machina is required—the generation of political will.

How much to integrate is largely a political decision as to future European direction. Either national rules will be deemed to respond well to perceived political objectives in member states, at the cost of a fragmented European space, or there will be less laisser faire on the national level but more debate and co-ordination and a single European space.

Since many aspects of such a strategic push need to be considered and evaluated, there is a role for expert advocates and civil society to manufacture such readiness on the political level. This is a difficult task, given rising scepticism towards further EU integration expressed by developments such as ‘Brexit’ and the popularity of political parties dismissive of the European project.

On an immediate practical level, however, there is room for national legislative powers and regulators of all kinds, vis-à-vis telecommunications, privacy and potentially in the realm of obligations imposed on platforms by the DSA and DMA. To ensure that the EDPS can be brought about, a robust network of bodies, sensitive to national particularities but able to work effectively on the supranational level, is needed.

Human-centred approach

The ideas required to enrich the European project—to champion a human-centred approach in addition to the market-focused one—have been emerging on many sides of the public debate over the future of the EU. One of the most immediate tools has been the Better Regulation agenda, a framework aiming to strengthen the quality of law-making in the union. Within the framework, a comprehensive codification of existing laws, supplemented by missing pieces as explained above, could go a long way.

There is also inspiration to be drawn from new concepts. Shared Digital Europe has been developed by activists (disclaimer: I was part of that group). Its vision is based on four principles: enable self-determination, cultivate the commons, decentralise infrastructure and empower public institutions. The individual pursuit of online happiness is combined with communal and shared fulfilment.

These are aided, as explained in the Shared Digital Europe strategy, by the online presence of public institutions on one side and healthy, sustainable private infrastructure on the other. From the perspective of the EU, this encompasses both the market and non-market components of societal interactions online. It provides an indispensable context to the EDPS.

Finally, the challenge is to galvanise citizens to support solutions that benefit their autonomy and social cohesion at the same time. This includes governance over their data and online persona, as well as shared, community-led governance over content moderation, whenever possible. Ensuring such support requires a grand narrative that is attractive to internet users and goes beyond the legalese of ‘Eurospeak’.

The notion of a networked public sphere where citizens are at the centre should underpin that narrative. Principles of collaboration and decentralisation should be illustrated in an approachable way, for example by showcasing how various communities online practice constructive deliberation.

images

This is the second article in a series on a European digital public sphere, supported by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung with an eye to its Digital Capitalism conference from November 15th to 19th. All articles in this series are published under a Creative Commons licence.

Anna Mazgal
Anna Mazgal

Anna Mazgal works for Wikimedia Deutschland as a senior EU policy adviser, based in Brussels. She is currently involved in discussions on the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, employing a human-rights perspective and the experience of Wikimedia as a platform hosting the world’s biggest online encyclopaedia whose content is generated by users.

You are here: Home / Society / A European digital public sphere—legal and policy implications

Most Popular Posts

Visentini,ITUC,Qatar,Fight Impunity,50,000 Visentini, ‘Fight Impunity’, the ITUC and QatarFrank Hoffer
Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic

Most Recent Posts

transition,deindustrialisation,degradation,environment Europe’s industry and the ecological transitionCharlotte Bez and Lorenzo Feltrin
central and eastern Europe,unions,recognition Social dialogue in central and eastern EuropeMartin Myant
women soldiers,Ukraine Ukraine war: attitudes changing to women soldiersJennifer Mathers and Anna Kvit
military secrets,World Trade Organization,WTO,NATO,intellectual-property rights Military secrets and the World Trade OrganizationUgo Pagano
energy transition,Europe,wind and solar Europe’s energy transition starts to speed upDave Jones

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

Social policy in the European Union: state of play 2022

Since 2000, the annual Bilan social volume has been analysing the state of play of social policy in the European Union during the preceding year, the better to forecast developments in the new one. Co-produced by the European Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), the new edition is no exception. In the context of multiple crises, the authors find that social policies gained in ambition in 2022. At the same time, the new EU economic framework, expected for 2023, should be made compatible with achieving the EU’s social and ‘green’ objectives. Finally, they raise the question whether the EU Social Imbalances Procedure and Open Strategic Autonomy paradigm could provide windows of opportunity to sustain the EU’s social ambition in the long run.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Discover the new FEPS Progressive Yearbook and what 2023 has in store for us!

The Progressive Yearbook focuses on transversal European issues that have left a mark on 2022, delivering insightful future-oriented analysis for the new year. It counts on renowned authors' contributions, including academics, politicians and analysts. This fourth edition is published in a time of war and, therefore, it mostly looks at the conflict itself, the actors involved and the implications for Europe.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube