EU May Not Unify Its Data Protection Rules After All

jfruh writes: One of the EU's selling points is that it provides a single regulatory apparatus for the entire European market — but this isn't the case for everything. Data protection laws, for instance, provide a confusing thicket of different regulations across the continent, and now, much to the frustration of large American Internet companies, it seems that a plan to consolidate these rules under a single EU agency are coming apart. In other EU news, reader Presto Vivace points out that German Chancellor Angel Merkel has spoken out against net neutrality. She said, "An innovation-friendly internet means that there is a guaranteed reliability for special services. These can only develop when predictable quality standards are available."

Comments

Special service available!=net neutrality violated

[drolli]

IP packets had a TOS field from in the beginning. IP v6 has this again. I am fine and appreciate prioritization/TOS if:

* ISP explicitly list these classes of traffic in their Terms
* Everybody (no matter if google or a 1 person specialized SW shop) can buy priority traffic on the backbone with a specific latency/reliability class
* Traffic/Capacity is traded only trough a open market (tick exchange), with no "secret deals"
* Costs for traffic appear separately on the bills of the customers - even if the overall product is free.
* The "last Mile" is a deal between the Customer and *his* ISP. Cross financing the last mile from other businesses should be considered as abuse of a vertical monopoly.

Understandable given the nature of the EU

[Registered Coward v2]

The EU is very much a group of independent countries that have agreed to work together on many issues but have not been willing to give up sovereignty to the point where an EU law has supremacy over local laws. A a result, EU rules tend to be a lowest common denominator with individual countries adding on their own requirements. That's not unexpected since the EU is not a country like say the US where there is a federal system that has sway over the individual states, district and territories that make up the US; where there is agreement the EU works well and but individual countries still have the real power in the union and there still is a very distinct nationalism at play in the political and economic dynamics. That's not necessarily better or worse than other models but just a reflection of how the EU came into being.

Re:Understandable given the nature of the EU

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty much what the US started out as under the Articles of Confederation. It didn't work for long. The EU is learning that lesson too: having a monetary union (centralized control of monetary policy, removing that from the individual nations' economic toolsets) but no fiscal union was a recipe for sovereign debt problems from the beginning, and patchwork regulations across the EU do lead to real problems for cross-border import and export. Tighter EU integration from the start would have been easier and more productive, except that the EU dream, that started out so magnificently, has devolved into the bureaucratic swamp that Brussels/Strasbourg is today, in no small part as a result of being a lowest common denominator. Farage's insulting "low-grade bank clerk" could, in sad truth, easily apply to the general appearance of the EU as a bureaucratic entity rather than just its former leader: the institution as it stands is a far cry from the noble promises of a strong, unified Europe. The nationalists may well be too strong to allow that to happen, though, and the longer they drag out the current, disjointed state of the EU, the worse the bank clerk will get. Pretty much all that the EU has going for it now is that it's not the US or Russia, so people see still it as a less bellicose and freer option.

Re:Understandable given the nature of the EU

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear pro-EU campaigner, this propaganda that "since EU isn't working well, then we need more EU" is exactly the same that caused the well-known results of the recent EU elections, with the success of Farage, Grillo, Tsipras, Le Pen and others, as well as the eurosceptic shift of many formerly pro-EU parties (especially the EPP, but even some members of the PES).

Citizens have spoken, and they clearly stated that they don't want the "united states of europe". Actually it's now more likely that there will be less "EU" in the future, especially if the UK and maybe even France, Italy and Greece are really going to hold EU-exit referendums, as many of the relevant politicians in those countries are proposing.

Live with it. And bore off.

Re:Special service available!=net neutrality viola

[gcnaddict]

Everyone who doesn't have a personal stake in the game is naturally inclined to act recklessly. See the decade-ly cycles of recession and depression economies slip into when markets (housing, finance, oil, whatever) forget that someone else's money is still of value and not to be treated with total abandon.

The decisionmakers at ISPs don't have a piece of skin in this fight because they have special classes of access just as a benefit of being where they are within their companies, and they stand to make more personally from making profit-minded decisions. For these reasons, there's very little personal incentive to uphold the moral high ground because the decisions don't have an immediate negative impact on them. They might feel it once they retire and/or if they go to a different industry, but that's after they've made their profit, and it's long after their short-term decisionmaking window.

It's just human nature. We haven't had this trait bred out, and it's doubtful we as a species ever will. The only way to counter short-sighted thinking is by shortening the mental leap between short-sighted decisions and long-term consequences, which is what everyone fighting for net neutrality is trying to demonstrate right now by citing live examples of where a lack of enforcement has already gone wrong (T-Mobile Unlimited Music, Netflix v. Comcast/VZ, etc.)