EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Early Thursday (5 November) morning the European Parliament and EU member states reached a deal over a long-delayed telecoms package when MEPs dropped their opposition to French-style 'three-strikes' laws aimed at illegal internet downloaders, ending for now the Brussels debate on a fundamental 'right' to internet access.
In a major reversal of the parliament's position for much of the last year, MEPs in behind-closed-doors negotiations with the Council of Ministers, representing the member states, embraced new language in a compromise text that no longer requires that only judicial authorities be allowed to cut off internet access.
The overall package had little to do with internet piracy originally, focussing on improving competition in the sector.
But twice in the past year, MEPs with strong majorities inserted an amendment to the telecoms package that would have forbidden member states from restricting internet access without judicial authorisation and only in exceptional circumstances.
The move was in reaction to France's ‘three strikes' or ‘Hadopi' law, named for the new government agency charged with hunting down the pirates, backed by a series of special piracy judges, to cut off internet access and even jail repeat offenders after the third offence.
The UK has in the past week announced it too is to introduce a similar three-strikes bill and the Dutch parliament has called on the government to come forward with its own version of the law.
MEPs from all parties, but mainly from the centre, left and the Green Party, strongly argued ahead of the European elections in June that three-strikes legislation is draconian and, with an eye to young voters, vowed to continue their opposition to such laws, maintaining that access to the internet had now essentially become a fundamental right as vital as access to water or electricity.
The deputies maintained that so many aspects of a citizen's participation in society - from paying bills to dealing with local government to reading the news - now required access to the internet that cutting off access from the digital world was depriving someone of a host of other rights.
The argument kicked off a global debate on whether access to the internet really was now evolving into just such a human right, with some arguing the parliament was quite premature in its advocacy of an internet access entitlement and others cheering the chamber for being at the cutting edge of digital democracy.
On 6 October, telecoms ministers formally rejected the parliament's key amendment - the now infamous Amendment 138 - requiring a ‘conciliation' process between the two sides.
On Thursday, this process concluded with the parliament backing away from the barricades.
Pressure from member states is understood to have worn down resistance from the elected chamber, not merely due to the desire on the part of a number of countries to introduce tough anti-piracy bills, but also because EU capitals felt that the European Parliament was encroaching in a judicial area responsibility for which is jealously guarded by European national governments.
MEPs in the end capitulated before this argument, conceding that they had no competence to legislate in this field.
Internet civil liberties groups critical of the compromise text say that it essentially only restates existing rights protections and does nothing to explicitly rule out internet blocking.
"It is much more important to protect fundamental rights than to push for a quick agreement at any cost," said Jérémie Zimmerman, whose France-based online rights organisation La Quadrature du Net has been at the forefront of campaigns against three-strikes legislation.
"Disturbingly, the parliament delegation has used a tailored and debatable legal argumentation that suggests it has no competence to defend citizens' rights when they are endangered by corporations or governments."
