Sonja Bettel
The basis of today's pyramid of needs, it is said jokingly, is no longer physical needs, but battery and WLAN. In fact, the internet has become an integral part of most people's lives. But the wonderful online world has its dark side: hate posts, cybercrime, terrorism, stalking, malware, illegal copies of copyrighted works and much more seem to make the worldwide Internet a dangerous place.
No wonder that the European Union is increasingly trying to regulate this place with laws.
Controversial copyright law
The first thing is copyright. For many years, there has been a lot of discussion about how authors can be protected and adequately remunerated in the digital age against illegal copying of their works. At least as long there is an imbalance between the creative and the labels and publishers. For a long time they slept through the fact that the audience had migrated to the Internet and no longer only consumed it, but also designed it themselves - with snippets of other people's works. When sales collapsed, they asked to share in the online platforms' revenue. The users demand a copyright that meets today's technical and social reality.
After a long, tough struggle, an EU copyright directive has emerged that causes trouble. Problem number one is the ancillary copyright law, which gives press publishers the exclusive right to make their products publicly available for a certain period of time. This means that search engines, for example, may only display links to articles with "single words". Firstly, this is legally unclear, secondly, hyperlinks are a crucial element of the World Wide Web, and thirdly, ancillary copyright law in Germany, where it has existed since 2013, has not brought the hoped-for income for publishers. Google threatened to exclude German publishers and subsequently received a free license for Google News.
Problem number two is Article 13. According to this, content must be checked for copyright infringements before it is published on social networks. This is actually only possible with upload filters. These are difficult to develop and expensive, says Bernhard Hayden, copyright expert of the civil rights organization epicenter.works: "Smaller platforms would therefore have to play their content through the filters of large platforms, which would lead to a central censorship infrastructure in Europe." In addition, filters cannot distinguish whether content really violates copyright law or under an exemption such as satire, quote etc. falls. These exceptions also differ depending on the EU member state. A "notice and take down" solution like in the USA would be much more useful, says Bernhard Hayden, where platforms only have to remove content when requested to do so by an authority.
The vote on the copyright directive was narrowly in favor of the controversial new rules. The national legal situation is decided by the EU member states themselves, so there will be no generally applicable solution for the entire EU area.
The vitreous human
The next adversity for telecommunications is just around the corner: the E-Evidence Regulation. This is a draft from the EU Commission on cross-border access to user data. If, as an Austrian, I am suspected, for example, of a Hungarian authority of "aid to illegal migration", that is, support for refugees, she can ask my mobile network operator to hand over my telephone connections - without an Austrian court. The provider would then have to check whether this is legally compliant or not. This would mean privatizing law enforcement, ISPA criticizes - Internet Service Providers Austria. The information would also have to be provided within a few hours, but smaller providers do not have a legal department around the clock and could therefore be pushed out of the market very quickly.
Over the summer of 2018, the EU Commission also developed a regulation to combat terrorist content, even though the counter-terrorism directive only came into force in April 2017. Here, too, providers should be obliged to remove content within a short period of time without defining what exactly terrorist content is.
In Austria, the amendment to the Military Authorization Act recently caused excitement, which is intended to enable the military to carry out personal checks in the event of "insults" to the Federal Army and to request information about cell phone and Internet connection data. The next step is likely to be a draft law on the use of real names and other national monitoring instruments that could restrict fundamental rights, says the managing director of the association epicenter.works. "In Austria as well as at EU level, we have to check all laws that are under review," said Thomas Lohninger.
SME vs. Network giants
Internet users, that is, all of us, should also be attentive, because in the majority of cases law enforcement agencies or large, globally active Internet companies benefit from new Internet and telecom laws. They don't even pay taxes to the extent that smaller companies have to. This is now to be changed with a digital tax, according to which Facebook, Google, Apple and Co have to pay taxes where their customers live. Something like this is being considered at EU level; the Austrian government has announced its own quick solution. How sensible this is, whether it is compatible with existing laws and whether it will work is still open.
Failed legal situation
In any case, one thing is clear: the legal restrictions of the network are of little use to the individual user. The case of Sigrid Maurer, who was sexually abused via Facebook and has to pay a hefty compensation after the publication of the alleged poster, but cannot defend himself against the abuse, shows that the law of reality lags far behind in terms of online hate . The journalist Ingrid Brodnig, who has written books about hate and lies online, therefore suggests that large internet companies demand more transparency: “An early utopia of the internet was that it would make us a more open society. In fact, only the users are transparent, the effects of the algorithms on society are not. ”It should be possible that, for example, scientists can examine them so that we can find out why certain search results or postings in social networks are displayed in a specific order. So that the large platform operators do not become even bigger and more powerful, a stricter interpretation of competition law would also be needed.
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