Europe

As Big Tech’s market power grew, so did its political clout. Now, as the EU tries to rein in the most problematic aspects of Big Tech – from disinformation, targeted advertising to unfair competition practices – the digital giants are lobbying hard to shape new regulations.

Read the full report.

In 'The Lobby Network', Corporate Europe Observatory and Lobbycontrol offer an overview of the tech industry's EU lobbying firepower. For the first time, we map the 'universe' of actors lobbying the EU’s digital economy, from Silicon Valley giants to Shenzhen’s contenders; from firms created online to those making the infrastructure that keeps the internet running; tech giants and newcomers.

We found a wide yet deeply imbalanced ‘universe’:

• with 612 companies, groups and business associations lobbying the EU’s digital economy policies. Together, they spend over €97 million annually lobbying the EU institutions. This makes tech the biggest lobby sector in the EU by spending, ahead of pharma, fossil fuels, finance, and chemicals.
• in spite of the varied number of players, this universe is dominated by a handful of firms. Just ten companies are responsible for almost a third of the total tech lobby spend: Vodafone, Qualcomm, Intel, IBM, Amazon, Huawei, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google spend more than €32 million making their voices heard in the EU.
• out of all the companies lobbying the EU on digital policy, 20 per cent are US based, though this number is likely even higher. Less than 1 per cent have head offices in China or Hong Kong. This implies Chinese firms have so far not invested in EU lobbying quite as heavily as their US counterparts.
• digital industry companies are not just lobbying individually. They are also collectively organised into business and trade associations which are themselves important lobby actors. The business associations lobbying on behalf of Big Tech alone have a lobbying budget that far surpasses that of the bottom 75 per cent of the companies in the digital industry.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21375406

The yearly rule of law reports were launched five years ago and are presented by the commission as a key weapon in its armoury against democratic backsliding, including corruption and attacks on independent media and judiciary, across the union.

But Liberties, an EU-wide network of civil liberties organisations, pointed on Monday to several “significant deficiencies” and said “swift and decisive action” was now essential if the commission was to be able to uphold the rule of law in the bloc.

“The commission’s annual rule of law report is certainly useful for detecting violations – it’s effective as a monitoring exercise,” said Viktor Kazai, Liberties’ rule of law expert. “It has country-specific recommendations; that’s great.”

Issued in July, this year’s report – which was particularly critical of declining media freedoms in Italy – was reportedly delayed by Ursula von der Leyen as she sought support from Rome for re-election as president of the bloc’s executive.

https://archive.is/7OQh3

In a landmark legal action, a coalition of Palestinian and Dutch civil society organisations has filed a lawsuit against the government of the Netherlands, accusing it of failing to prevent genocide in Gaza and other Israeli violations of international law. The case, brought before a Dutch civil court today, seeks to compel the Netherlands to take decisive action against Israel’s ongoing military operations and the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.

At the heart of the legal case are two primary demands: a ban on the export and transit of weapons, weapon parts and dual-use items to Israel, and a prohibition on all Dutch trade and investment relations that support Israel’s unlawful occupation of Palestinian territory.

The lawsuit comes in the wake of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) January 2024 ruling, which found that Israel is committing plausible genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Despite this ruling and numerous international warnings, the Dutch government has failed to take substantive action to prevent further atrocities.

An international summit on Ukraine where Volodymyr Zelenskyy was going to present a “victory plan” to western leaders has been formally postponed – though the Ukrainian president will try to organise a tour of European capitals instead.

Organisers said that the Saturday meeting of about 20 world leaders at the US Ramstein airbase in Germany would be rescheduled, a day after Biden had said he had to stay at home to respond to Hurricane Milton’s landfall in Florida.

Ukrainian sources said that Zelenskyy would travel to meet the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in Berlin on Friday – and potentially go on to visit other leaders as part of what sources described as a “European tour”.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/44012689

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/43972292