European Union

The Council Presidency and the European Parliament reached an informal agreement on a draft regulation on the European agency for the operational management of large-scale IT systems in the area of freedom, security and justice (eu-LISA).

Declaration by the High Representative on behalf of the European Union on the alignment of certain third countries with Council Decision (CFSP) 2018/655 of 26 April 2018 amending Decision 2013/184/CFSP concerning restrictive measures against Myanmar/Burma

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

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EU Finance Ministers meet on 25 May 2018 in Brussels to agree measures to reduce risk in the banking sector. They discuss macroeconomic imbalances and age-related expenditure in the member states.

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The EU's Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström expressed concern on Thursday (24 May) about the US administration's announced plan to launch an investigation into imports of cars and trucks that might lead to new tariffs.

Written by Philip Boucher,

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Social media platforms are often thought of as open and connected spaces, since they allow users to communicate with a wide range of people and organisations. It seems obvious that to have access to a social network it should be necessary to open an account with the platform, and that on closing the account that access would be lost. However, telephone and email networks do not restrict access to their networks depending on which provider or platform is being used, and there are ways in which social media too could be more open and connected, providing greater connectivity and allowing users to change platform without losing access to the network. This could help foster a more competitive market that is more responsive to challenges such as privacy and disinformation.

The implications of changing provider for telephone, email and social media, three transformative communication services, vary. First, telephones. With both landlines and mobile phones, regardless of the service provider used, it is possible to call friends and family on other networks competing in the market. Any phone, using any service provider, can call any other phone. This means that customers can change provider if they become unhappy with their current provider or want to test the services of a new market entrant. They can even keep the same phone number, so they do not have to tell their contacts to update their phone books. Indeed, their contacts will probably not even notice.

Just like with phone calls, emails pass freely between accounts managed by different providers. Many people have several accounts, perhaps including a personal account from a commercial provider and a professional account maintained by an employer. Here, a customer who wants to change provider can open a new account elsewhere without losing the ability to email friends and colleagues who still use the original provider. Advanced users who are dissatisfied with what the market has to offer, for whatever reason, can even set up their own domain names and servers and control the whole account themselves. They can still send and receive emails to and from anyone else, with any email address. A change of provider, however, means a change of address, requiring contacts to update their directories.

Listen to podcast ‘What if social media were open and connected?‘

When it comes to social media profiles, there are many options available, and some people manage several profiles for different aspects of their personal and professional lives. However, social media platforms do not usually offer interconnectivity, so users cannot interact with accounts on a particular social media platform without having an account on it. This also means that the price is high for any customer who decides to leave a platform. They lose access to the network and their contacts and so might no longer receive invitations to events, and might not even realise what they have missed because they cannot see the pictures posted by their erstwhile contacts.

On the markets for telephone, email, internet or electricity services, customers can choose between several companies that provide access to the same open and connected network. There might be a small fee or minor inconvenience involved in changing provider, but the customer is not penalised by losing access to the whole network. Social media platforms, on the other hand, not only provide access to a network but, rather, they are the network. So the only way to participate in a particular social media network is through an account with the platform itself. Leaving the platform means losing access to that space.

In this sense, social media platforms are less open and less connected than old-fashioned telephone and email networks. As a result, their market is also less competitive. While new entrants to the telephone and email markets can immediately connect their new customers with all other telephone and email users, a new entrant to the social media market does not have the same luxury. Only platforms that are already large can offer a large network and, since they have full control over access to their network, they continue to attract more users. As large networks grow even larger, the cost of leaving them grows accordingly, and so do the barriers to new market entrants.

With high penalties for leaving platforms and little competition in the market, life is difficult for the discerning customer. Yet, there is a long and growing list of reasons to be judicious when it comes to social media providers. Citizens are increasingly concerned about immediate personal risks related to privacy, cyberbullying, depression and addiction, as well as wider social issues such as taxation, fake news and political interference. Perhaps a more competitive market would foster more robust responses to these problems. One way of fostering a healthier ecosystem of social media platforms might be to encourage the emergence of an open model for social media.

Potential impacts and developments

An open model for social media would have two separate features, open accounts and open platforms. Open accounts are just like standalone social media profiles, so they would include basic personal details as well as contacts with other accounts – using their email, phone number or other identifiers – and familiar content such as status updates, events, photos and videos. They would also specify the user’s preferences for how content could be shared with other accounts and how information from the network should be presented and communicated to them. These open accounts could be used with any open platform.

Open platforms would host and maintain these accounts. They would be responsible for managing communications with other platforms and accounts, protecting the user’s privacy, and presenting the user with information from the whole network – including contacts from all of the open accounts on all of the other open platforms – according to the user’s preferences. Open platforms could be funded by advertising revenue, subscriptions, donations, endowments, the state or some mixture of sources. They could offer specialist features and services catering for different users’ needs and preferences. Advanced users could set up their own servers and manage their own accounts and their relationships with the network. They could pay for this themselves, and offset the cost by charging advertisers to use their data. With such an open model, there would be no contradiction in a social media platform that has only one user, because it could still connect with any other open account on any other open platform.

The key to this is developing open standards that describe how open accounts and open platforms should communicate with each other, such as W3C‘s social web. The open standard should have full connectivity and portability so that any account on any platform that complies with the standard can connect with any other account on any other open platform. This means that users could change platforms without losing access to the network. In this way, if they felt that their current social media platform was untrustworthy or unethical, they could leave it and join another without missing invitations to events. En masse, such behaviour could help foster a competitive market that could respond to the immediate personal risks and wider social problems posed by social media. Users who already had accounts on closed social media platforms that did not comply with the open model could download a readable copy of all their data and convert it into an open account format, which they could then use with any open platform.

Anticipatory policy making

Several EU policies are already encouraging the portability of social media accounts, as well as the development of open standards. For example, Article 20 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives citizens the right to obtain readable, portable copies of data about them that is held by their social media platforms. This could help discerning users to change platform if they are dissatisfied. EU procurement strategy also supports open source and open standards. Further initiatives supporting user control and open standards, combined with consumer demand for a new approach, could lead to the emergence of a genuinely open and connected model for social media.

Read this At a glance on ‘What if social media were open and connected?’ on the Think Tank pages of the European Parliament.

Central European countries say they have "nothing to hide" on rule of law issues - while justice commissioner Vera Jourova said they should agree to the Commission's controversial budget plans on rule of law conditionality.

Written by Elena Lazarou,

The event was part of the series on the future of EU.

Speakers including David McAllister (EPP, Germany), Chair of the AFET Committee, Julia de Clerck-Sachsse (Adviser, Strategic Planning Division, EEAS), Tomáš Valášek (Director, Carnegie Europe) and Elena Lazarou (Policy Analyst, EPRS), as well as moderator Alexandre Stutzmann, Director of Committees, DG EXPO, joined the EPRS on 15 May 2018 for a roundtable event entitled ‘Roadmap for the Future of Europe: shaping EU Security and Defence Policy’. The event was held in the European Parliament’s Library and was the occasion for the launch of a new EPRS publication on ‘Peace and Security in 2018 – Overview of EU action and outlook for the future‘, which will be updated annually and which complements the existing annual publications on the Economic Outlook for the EU and the Demographic Outlook for the EU.

In his introductory keynote, David McAllister referred to the topic as a very timely one. In the past two years, the EU’s Member States have begun for the first time to put words into action in the area of security and defence. Looking back to the Bratislava Summit of 2016, which followed the Brexit vote and aimed at breathing new life into the EU integration process; one area of priority EU action was Security and Defence. This meant moving to the implementation of the Global Strategy and of the EU-NATO Joint Declaration. David Mc Allister identified three decisive factors in the EU’s decision to move ahead in the area of defence: the EU’s defence efficiency problem; improving EU-NATO relations to an unprecedented degree; and external factors such as the growing pressure on the international rules-based system and the shifting of economic and political power globally. He discussed ongoing challenges, such as Russian aggression, cyber threats and interference with elections, as well as the changes in United States’ foreign policy, and perceived those challenges as ‘push’ factors for European integration in defence. Permanent Structured Cooperation in defence (PESCO), implemented through projects such as Military Mobility, is perhaps the most illustrative example of this move towards integration. He also highlighted that the next challenges for PESCO will be arrangements on financing and governance, which will be discussed in the European Council in June 2018. The developments we have witnessed, such as PESCO and the European Defence Fund, led David McAllister to express optimism about the future, based on the fact that, contrary to the situation in the past, political will has emerged that could give rise to a new momentum. He ended his speech by reiterating the European Parliament’s call for an EU Security and Defence White Book, with more details and specifications on the implementation of the Global Strategy.

In the subsequent roundtable, experts discussed the challenges ahead for the EU’s security and defence policy, such as relations with NATO, implementing decisions and managing to keep up with the pace of events. The discussion also focused on the Global Strategy and how it translates into action, including in terms of the objectives set in Bratislava, but also with regard to the identity of the EU as a global peace and security actor. It was highlighted that security and defence is one of five priorities in the Global Strategy that include resilience, an integrated approach, a focus on prevention, regional orders and strengthening the multilateral order and global governance making it more inclusive and sustainable. That the multilateral rules-based order is being challenged today was a recurrent theme of discussion, and the EU’s need to work with partners on this was highlighted. The role of media and public perceptions of peace, security and the global environment was also emphasised as a source of anxiety about the future of the international system.

On the particular issue of PESCO, experts agreed that the combination of political will and the specific process that it represents, coupled with external factors (fragility, crises, a confrontational global environment), are encouraging. PESCO is also putting pressure on governments to spend more on defence and defence innovation, something which is needed in the EU. However, finding a compromise in the ambitions, interests, threat perceptions and capacities of Member States, is bound to be the major challenge ahead. Nevertheless, within an environment which is becoming increasingly unstable, this is a challenge – experts agreed – to be dynamically tackled.

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As the chief EU adviser to David Cameron and then Theresa May, Ivan Rogers has seen the EU and British political class up close and knows where the bodies are buried. And hell hath no fury like a civil servant scorned.

Main agenda items, approximate timing, public sessions and press opportunities.

On 22 and 23 May 2018, the EU-U.S. Ministerial Meeting on Justice and Home Affairs was hosted by the Bulgarian Presidency of the EU Council in Sofia, Bulgaria.

G7 Leaders adopted a joint statement to reject the electoral process leading to the May 20, 2018 Presidential election in Venezuela.

President Tusk received the letters of credentials from two new ambassadors to the European Union.

Council and Parliament agree on new data protection rules for EU institutions and bodies.

The Council and the European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on the proposed regulation establishing the European Defence Industrial Development Programme.

The EU issued a declaration on the presidential and regional polls, which went ahead without a national agreement on an electoral calendar and without complying with the minimum international standards for a credible process, not respecting political pluralism, democracy, transparency and the rule of law.

The Council adopts the waste package which will lead to more recycling and re-use of valuable material.

Council adopted new EU rules on organic production and labelling of organic products.

On 22 May 2018, the Council adopted a regulation to reform the EU's type-approval and market surveillance system for motor vehicles.