Once a group of jackasses, always a group of jackasses—that’s the European Commission. From Don Quijones at wolfstreet.com:
The European Commission seems determined to make itself even more unpopular among Europe’s disaffected public. This is just about the only conclusion that can be drawn from its latest decision to steam ahead with plans to adopt a controversial ancillary copyright law — A.K.A. snippet tax — that would open the way for Big Media in Europe to charge news aggregators and other websites a special fee for linking to their works.
The Commission has repeatedly denied that it has any intentions of introducing such a tax. Just two days ago Commissioner Ansip state unequivocally: “This Commission does not have any plans to tax hyperlinks.”
It was a hugely disingenuous claim, as was confirmed by the publication on Friday of a leaked draft of the Commission’s own impact assessment on the modernization of EU copyright rules.
Business As Usual
In the document, the Commission clearly states that it intends to introduce an ancillary copyright for press publishers, giving them the ability to levy a fee (or tax) on links with accompanying short snippets of text. It may not be obligatory but it will set a very clear precedent: once the law is passed newspaper publishers across all 27 EU Member States will have the right to extract fees from sites that link to their works.
Citing dwindling revenues at news organizations, the Commission claims that failure to push on with such a policy would be “prejudicial for… media pluralism.” In other words, it will do whatever it takes to protect Europe’s established media from the cruel vagaries of a new market reality in which by and large the biggest winners are large US tech companies.
The fact that the same policy was rejected — not once but twice — by European Parliamentarians in last year’s copyright report is, much like the European Parliament itself, of little relevance. The policy was also shunned by over 37,500 Internet users in a recent public consultation.
But who cares?
Certainly not the Commission, which has shown once again that it has learnt absolutely nothing from the Brexit experience. It continues to legislate with no consideration for the public interest, serving the exclusive interests of the most powerful lobby groups in Brussels, while continuing to say one thing in public and doing the exact opposite in private. In other words, it’s business as usual in Brussels.
A History of Failure
The link tax is the brain child of EU Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, Günther Oettinger, as we reported last year. Now his scheme could be on the verge of being unleashed across all 27 EU Member States, even though two of them — Germany and Spain — have already piloted almost identical schemes, with disastrous consequences.
The first country to introduce the link tax was Germany, in 2013. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes, the law was a manifest failure since most publishers willingly forfeited their right to payment from Google as soon as they realized just how much traffic they would lose from not being indexed on news aggregators such as Google News. Now, three years on, not a single journalist or newspaper has received a single cent from the tax.
To continue reading: New Leak Confirms: Brussels Has Learnt Nothing from Brexit
