In a victory for publishers and a reality check for Silicon Valley, a recent ruling by the European Court of Justice has confirmed that publishers can request Big Tech companies to pay “fair compensation” for using snippets of their news articles.
From Hungary to France, financial strains, political influence, and growing restrictions on press freedom are ever worse in Europe, the general secretary of the European Federation of Journalists, Ricardo Gutiérrez, tells EUobserver in an interview.
In one Ukrainian model, the drone flies to the front line and when its pilot gives the order, it locks onto the target, pursues it, and destroys it, even if Russian jamming cuts off contact.
Two years after adopting its AI Act, the EU is already preparing to simplify it. Does this mean Europeans are scaling back their regulatory ambitions on AI?
US card networks earn billions from our transactions. Europe is trying to change that.
The European Investment Fund says a past investment, which indirectly ended up at Israeli Paragon Solutions, met all eligibility criteria.
This is the first time Europe’s Digital Markets Act will be used to regulate cloud computing and so this is unchartered territory.
The EU’s leadership is now on a precipice. Our push for digital sovereignty was driven by concern that the US Cloud Act might give the US administration access to US-owned data centres in Europe. Yet, now the EU Commission is considering a deal with the US authorities to share the personal data of European citizens in exchange for the continuation of visa-waiver scheme.
Instead of funding European commercial alternatives to American chokepoints, Europe should fund the layer underneath them: infrastructure that is useful because it cannot easily be owned.
Cookies have been around since the early days of the internet. The “Accept All” button has become a routine reflex for many. But even the “Reject All” button disguises hundreds of so-called “legitimate interest” tracking.
Now the EU wants to fix this loophole in its landmark privacy rules, claiming users would save 198 million hours a year with new changes – but will these really empower users or reshape old problems into a new form?
Demonising the internet can easily be read as a sign of desperation and insecurity: open spaces such as those online make it more difficult for Vladimir Putin to fully-control information flows, and alternative narratives.
In this edition of the Secrecy Tracker: how Big Tech’s fingerprints ended up on data centre secrecy laws, the European Court of Justice’s €1.2m website “disaster,” and the irony of a closed-door event celebrating transparency. Plus, the EU Ombudsman is facing an AI-fuelled complaint surge.
It costs $10,000 to $20,000 to get someone’s Signal chat content on the data black-market, depending on the target’s seniority, a European intelligence source said.
Can we really force platforms to follow our rules? We have powerful legal tools, like the DSA. But it’s also political. It’s part of a broader, complex relationship between Europe and the United States—one that has grown more strained since Donald Trump took office.
Microsoft and DigitalEurope, a lobby group whose members include Amazon, Google and Meta, secured a secrecy provision in EU law to block public access to critical information on data centres’ environmental impact, Investigate Europe can reveal.
“We believe that technological giants are making a lot of good business in Europe, and also significant profits,” Siegfried Mureșan, a Romanian centre-right MEP, who is heading negotiations on the EU budget along with Portuguese S&D MEP Carla Tavares.
Millions of euros worth of EU subsidies and taxpayer money is fuelling the very market that leads to spying on journalists, activitists, politicians and people in the EU, and undermines our democracies.
European digital assets have a habit of not staying European. A ‘Buy European’ label is not a sovereignty guarantee unless it embraces licensing as a tool and helps to safeguard the supply chains the software depends on.
When Meta announced its Libra/Diem project in 2019, central banks worldwide were confronted with an uncomfortable question: could a private technology corporation issue money at global scale and thereby erode their monopoly over monetary control?
The response was swift. What began as a defensive reflex had become a genuine policy agenda.
Next week, Italy’s Court of Cassation will hear the case of journalist Fabio Butera. In 2023, Butera was fined €33,000 — not for his reporting, but for comments others posted under his Facebook post. The outcome of this case will determine whether journalists are legally responsible for audience comments – a decision with major implications for free speech online.