EU
ministers have agreed to give more power to a pan-European body of Internet
regulators. The move upset tech businesses and countries who say it will result
in unncessary bureaucratic hurdles.
Deutsche Welle, 13 March 2015
The
European Union's interior and justice ministers agreed on Friday to grant more
powers to regulators to enforce a new data protection law, upsetting businesses
who hoped the power would instead be devolved to the regulators in each
individual country.
Initially,
the new EU law would have established a "one-stop-shop" mechanism,
meaning that a business operating across the whole 28-nation bloc would only
have to deal with one protection authority - in the country where it has its
headquarters or European base, even if the issue affected citizens in another
EU country.
However,
this upset some countries which do not what their national authorities to lose
all jurisdiction over big technology companies like Apple and Facebook, which
are based in Ireland. In the past, Ireland has been accused of going soft on
large multinationals in order to remain an attractive place for doing business,
something Dublin has denied.
Under
pressure from the concern nations, the EU ministers agreed that henceforth if one
country's authority is "concerned," they can appeal any ruling to an
as-yet-uncreated board of all 28 regulators who could then come to a binding
decision.
New rules
will encourage "capricious referrals"
"The
proposed mechanism will be more cumbersome than the existing procedures,
resulting in unnecessary administrative burdens, including delayed decisions
for citizens," said the Industry Coalition for Data Protection, which
includes major technology firms Apple, Google, and IBM.
EU
diplomats had previously agreed to scrap an adjoining proposal that at least
one-third of the national regulators would have to raise an objection before a
case would be referred to the European Data Protection Board (EDPB).
Member
states such as Ireland, Great Britain, and the Netherlands had supported the
numerical threshold, saying it would have "greatly reduced the risk of
capricious referrals," according to Ireland's justice minister.
Friday's
agreement is still subject to change until June, when ministers will review the
entirety of the proposed new data protection law - the General Data Protection
Regulation, meant to update decades-old statutes that have not kept up with the
development of the Internet.
Germany's
Justice Minister Heiko Maas called the new data law "one of the most
important projects under discussion in Brussels at the moment."
es/msh (AFP, Reuters)
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