(I have to take a short break from forging code to share my concerns
regarding the important upcoming European elections:)
Recent developments regarding the security of the internet show a
striking resemblance to western societies apathy towards the crumbling
of basic democratic values. Looking a little closer the seeds of the
European Union started about the same time a bunch of Californian
hippies worked for the military on the internet. The idealistic spirit
of those times is a unique heritage, never before did we have a
decentralized means of communication and never before did we have such
a diverse representation in policy-making as in the European
parliament. "United in diversity" - indeed. Let's avoid the sad
corruption of the internet to a tool of oppression and keep the EP
working in the idealistic spirit of its creators.
Wins
Besides legislating on the standard parameters of toothpaste-stripes
there are few very important policy domains that point beyond the
usual 5 year horizon of the average elected EP representative. The
European Parliament has been fundamental in stopping ACTA just 2 years
ago. A battle which started long before (thanks wikileaks) the current
batch of members of the European Parliament (MEPs) took their seats.
Stopping the attempt to install EU-wide censorship - disguised as a
child porn filter - was also a success. We have a lot of hope in the
recently revised data protection regulation and just this month the
network neutrality regulation proposal got saved by a broad coalition
against the intent and interests represented by the lead rapporteur.
Losses
We lost the unitary patent battle last year - and thus also the EU
economy and competitiveness. We still have all kind of data sharing
agreements with the US. The network neutrality and the data protection
proposal by the EP will also probably go into a second round after the
elections. But the council will be smart enough to wait for the
results before committing itself to the next step (which seems to
involve the UK to veto this in the name of censorship hidden behind
the ragged excuse of child porn.) We lost the cybercrime issue as
well, vendor liability has not even been mentioned in the final
proposal. We also lost the Radio Spectrum Policy Programme, an
important initiative about the prospects of the radio frequencies
freed up by switching to digital television. Instead of opening up
parts of this liberated commons, it is auctioned away to telco
companies. With good legislation we could have created a new industry
that provides local radio-based internet services. Instead we fed the
quasi-monopolies.
Future
Among the many outstanding issues, most importantly ACTA is back on
steroids called Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), a
classical FTA renamed to TTIP so it does not sound so scary. Another
concerning agreement is the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), which
seems to be coming out of the same corner as TTIP. Similar future
challenges are the conclusions of the Data Protection and the Network
Neutrality initiatives. Data retention has just been ruled
unconstitutional by the European Court of Justice, this topic will
surely come back in the next term. The world is copying our laws,
let's make sure they are copying good stuff.
We live in exciting times, on the global level Europe has a lot of
merit. However the other global players are not interested in a strong
Europe, thus Euro-skepticism and national politics plays into our
global competitors hands. The NSA scandal is a great example of this,
as it shows weak isolated inaction in the member-states. The only
serious effort has been the more than dozen hearings on this issue in
the Civil Liberties Committee of the EP.
Euro-skeptics
As with many populists movements, the root-causes of euro-skepticism
are partly valid and quite interesting. The European institutions are
overly bureaucratic, some useless or redundant (looking at EP in
Strasbourg for example), non-transparent, undemocratic and quite
corrupt. The answer of the euro-skeptics to the broken system is quite
wrong, the tool is great we just need to take responsibility, fix it
and learn to use it! We are not living in a small isolated town,
Europe is a major player in a global competition. As such we must use
our power in a concentrated way, we must fix the problems identified
by the euro-skeptics and be a role-model for the whole world with
positive action like the rejection of ACTA or a strong Data Protection
regulation.
I see however a chance to become a skeptic myself. As with any
technology, the EP itself I believe it is neutral, what matters is who
and how uses it. If we allow the EP to degenerate by staffing it with
the corrupt political elite that fails us daily at home, then I see a
reason for skepticism myself, but still not against the institution
but its inhabitants and rules.
Villains
"United in diversity" - indeed. the European parliament has members
from 28 countries, between 170-190 parties, even if there are large
political blocks - or groups as they're called in Brussels-speak - in
the EP. There's no sign of a suffocating and anti-democratic majority
dominating the parliament, there's almost always some dissenting
splinter-group. Of course in such a diverse crowd there are also all
kinds of interests represented, mostly narrow interests. Some are
fully legitimate such as the narrow interests of Mediterranean fishers
for example are not concerns shared by a polish miner, or less legit
meddling of foreign, non-european interests like the tobacco industry,
or the US State department, Hollywood, Monsanto, or the pharma
industry, you name it. Of course the bulk of the parliament is from
dumb populist parties that have no values but lots of closely
controlled voters. But for every topic you have some kind of small
core group of representatives that is deeply engaged and informed
about the issue. Some of these core MEPs can be considered the
villains representing narrow industry or interests external to Europe.
Champions
Some representatives have a strong interest to strategically serve the
diverse European society. Issues like copyright, patents, data
protection, network neutrality have been heroically fought over by a
handful of few MEPs. These sound like quite technical matters, but
they are very much defining our environment and our daily lives. One
of the most heroic of all was Amelia Andersdotter the young Pirate MEP
from Sweden. Who although started only at half-time of her term - due
to the blocking of the french - she took on responsibility as some
kind of rapporteur for 17 issues with quite hard topics. She also
authored more than a 1000 amendments, putting her way ahead of most of
her colleagues when it comes to hard work and representing European
social interest. Other notable champions were
...and lot's of others, see the following part:
Ranking of MEPs
The campaigns of the leading political groups are incredibly boring,
promising populistic visions of "Jobs, Growth and Security". Let's not
get into the statistics and history game about their merits in this
regard. Instead let's look at some facts on long-term strategic
positions affecting all our society. score-ep.org ranks all MEPs based
on their voting behavior on Climate Change, Fracking, GM Crops, Arms
Trade and LGBT Issues. The presentation of this data-set is beautiful.
Much less visual, and overlapping in the Climate Change dataset I have
also prepared such a scoreboard.
Based on the input of four interests groups whose assessment of the
MEPS was available to me, this is a ranking of all MEPs serving in the
7th (currently ending) term of the EP. The four data-sets I used came
from:
- La Quadrature du Nets Memopol - and covers various internet and
digital rights related topics.
- Lobbyplag created an assessment based on the amendments submitted
in the civil liberties committee to the Data Protection Regulation.
- CAN Europe, Sandbag and WWF Europe rates MEPs based on votes
related to climate change (this is overlapping with the
ep-score.org data).
- Phillip Morris tried to influence the tobacco directive and some of
its MEP assessments have leaked to the public and thus into this
list ;)
The results: eastern countries and conservatives have the least
respect for civil liberties, long-term public good or social
benefit. On the good side the official champion is Rui Tavares, he and
his green fellows rank highest when it comes to representing the
widest interests. Personally I was expecting someone else to come out
on top, Amelia Andersdotter. Her problem, she was in the wrong
committee - Industry instead of Civil Liberties - only members of the
latter got scored by Lobbyplag. If not only the amendments of the
civil liberties but also the Industry committee would have been rated
she would've come out on top.
The top 10 MEPs
| Total Score |
MEP |
Country |
Party |
| 2.8888 |
Rui Tavares |
Portugal |
Bloco de Esquerda (Independente) |
| 2.8809 |
Jean Lambert |
United Kingdom |
Green Party |
| 2.7909 |
Mikael Gustafsson |
Sweden |
Vänsterpartiet |
| 2.6472 |
Jan Philipp Albrecht |
Germany |
Bündnis 90/Die Grünen |
| 2.6333 |
Pavel Poc |
Czech Republic |
Česká strana sociálně demokratická |
| 2.6174 |
Tarja Cronberg |
Finland |
Vihreä liitto |
| 2.6166 |
Cornelis De Jong |
Netherlands |
Socialistische Partij |
| 2.6111 |
Marije Cornelissen |
Netherlands |
GroenLinks |
| 2.6055 |
Bas Eickhout |
Netherlands |
GroenLinks |
| 2.5681 |
Rebecca Taylor |
United Kingdom |
Liberal Democrats Party |
The bottom of this list is mostly populated by (french) conservatives.
Ranking of countries according to the 4 criteria:
| rank |
country |
avg |
total |
| 1 |
Denmark |
0.729 |
10.206 |
| 2 |
Sweden |
0.723 |
15.912 |
| 3 |
Netherlands |
0.536 |
15.566 |
| 4 |
Estonia |
0.458 |
2.751 |
| 5 |
Ireland |
0.398 |
5.980 |
| 6 |
Belgium |
0.349 |
8.725 |
| 7 |
Austria |
0.325 |
6.825 |
| 8 |
Finland |
0.297 |
5.056 |
| 9 |
Portugal |
0.246 |
5.920 |
| 10 |
Cyprus |
0.206 |
1.651 |
| 11 |
Malta |
0.196 |
1.767 |
| 12 |
Greece |
0.138 |
3.738 |
| 13 |
Slovenia |
0.115 |
1.042 |
| 14 |
Germany |
0.106 |
11.155 |
| 15 |
United Kingdom |
0.052 |
4.073 |
| 16 |
France |
-0.003 |
-0.339 |
| 17 |
Lithuania |
-0.025 |
-0.333 |
| 18 |
Latvia |
-0.035 |
-0.318 |
| 19 |
Romania |
-0.044 |
-1.660 |
| 20 |
Spain |
-0.068 |
-4.104 |
| 21 |
Croatia |
-0.072 |
-0.875 |
| 22 |
Italy |
-0.142 |
-11.390 |
| 23 |
Slovakia |
-0.149 |
-1.938 |
| 24 |
Luxembourg |
-0.174 |
-1.049 |
| 25 |
Czech Republic |
-0.180 |
-4.324 |
| 26 |
Bulgaria |
-0.346 |
-7.622 |
| 27 |
Hungary |
-0.370 |
-9.634 |
| 28 |
Poland |
-0.730 |
-39.423 |
You can download these datasets in a CSV format that you can load into your favorite spreadsheet editor:
meps.csv, countries.csv, parties.csv.
Conclusion
So what I want to say is that, the EP is a powerful tool, there are a
lot of important issues, there are a few good people in the
parliament, they have been working hard, there's also a few corrupt
people in the parliament that have vast industry support. And then we
have the majority of the parliament who is so busy with other issues
that they have no clue, they amount to about 90-95%. These masses
follow either the champions or the villains. We must make sure that we
have more champions and less villains and that the remaining masses
are aligned with the Champs.
So please look at the rankings, go and vote, express your skepticism
of the people who brought us here, not the institutions that have been
abused. It matters. Thank you.
~stef/blog/
credit: rgy.
