Today the European Commission is gathering its European Multi-Stakeholders Platform on ICT Standardisation to discuss issue on ICT and Standardisation issues in Europe. I have taken the opportunity to bring to the agenda the issue of DRM in HTML5, a currently much controversial issue which risks passing the standardisation procedures at W3C without further political scrutiny. I have had the help of my assistant Ulf Pettersson, who attends the event in my name as I have obligations in Strasbourg, and Martin Kliehm, a Piratenpartei member and well-acknowledged expert on public sector ICT use from Frankfurt.

Dear ICT experts and platform participants,

Unfortunately Ms Amelia Andersdotter, Member of the European Parliament, cannot be with us here today as she needs to remain in Strasbourg for important plenary votes. My name, however, is Ulf Pettersson and I work for Ms Andersdotter with matters of technology and intellectual property.

Today I woke up with the news that Turkish riot police has kicked out protesters from Taksim square, symbol of the Istanbul protests against Erdogan's government. Since the first actions of police violence against a pacific group of people camping in Gezi Park to save it from complete destruction and its replacement with another shopping mall instead. National media has silent the protests, showcasing penguin documentaries and other kind of programmes that, apparently, were more relevant than the happenings originated in Istanbul and that spread all around the country.

This week Amelia is in Strasbourg for the monthly plenary session. During these days, she will work with many of the dossiers the she is involved at the moment, as there will be shadow meetings for the Collective Rights Management, eTEN and eID legislations. There will be also a press conference on the data protection campaing and votes on the Public Sector Information directive. You can take a more detailed look to her schedule here:

Monday

16:00 – 17:00 Green group meeting
17:30 – 16:30 Debate on customs enforcement

Tuesday

11:30 – 12:00 Plenary votes
12:00 – 12:30 Intervention of the President of Slovenia in the plenary
12:30 – 14:00 Plenary votes
15:00 – 16:30 Internet Core Group Meeting
15:00 – 16:00 eTEN shadow meeting
15:30 – 16:30 Debate with the European Commission on the proposals for single telecoms market
16:30 – 17:00 Shadow Meeting on Collective Rights Management
19:00 – 21:00 Green group meeting

Wednesday

08:30 – 09:00 Nordic-Baltic Breakfast Meeting
09:00 – 10:30 eID shadow meeting
10:00 – 11:00 Press conference on the data protection campaign
11:30 – 12:00 Plenary votes
12:00 – 12:30 Intervention of the President of Portugal in the plenary
12:30 – 14:00 Plenary votes
16:30 – 17:00 Meeting on the Implementation Report on the regulatory framework for electronic communications
18:00 – 20:00 Green group meeting

Thursday

08:30 – 11:30 Debate in the plenary on the reform of the Public Sector Information directive
10:00 – 11:00 Pirate Delegation Meeting
12:00 – 14:00 Votes, including for the reform of the Public Sector Information directive

As I have already mentioned in my previous article, I met Caspar Bowden, who had some really interesting points at the last Open Forum Europe event. The topic is the privacy protection related to the rapidly growing market of cloud services in the context of the law in the US and the upcoming regulation in the EU - EU Data Sovereignty and Privacy in the Cloud - as says the title. I am happy to put his presentation here for you to study it as it seems to be a really interesting summary of what we are dealing with nowadays. It contains not only analysis of the threats, but also recommendations for cloud providers and customers.

eu_data_sovereignty_and_privacy_in_the_cloud_-_ofa_version_22.5.13_based_on_26.9.2012.pdf

Open Internet is on the verge of being a rare commodity. Not because it's so difficult to manage, or because the resources for it is scarce. On the contrary. When telecom operators are inquired how much the bandwith costs, how much data transfer costs, beside the actual service cost and the investment in the infrastructure, they cannot give any numbers. 

Yesterdays conference, coorganized by Access, Marietje Schaake MEP and Sabeine Verheyen MEP, guaranteeing competition and open internet in Europe, was enlightning. The European Commissioner of Digital agenda, Ms Neelie Kroes gave the opening speech about how important it is to have transparent, open Internet services and ensrue consumer's right in the digital era.

There she spoke, of course, about Net Neutrality. What is Net Neutrality? Net neutrality "is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication."

Ms Neelie's speech was not well suited for the crowd. Among the speakers and attendees, there were expert on open access, net neutrality, human rights, people who have been fighting for the openness. Some of them are in direct touch with everything that's been going on in Turkey the past few days, and haven't had much sleep. This was the crowd that make  sure people have access to secure internet, that's not filtered or tracked by the local government. 

A particular sentence struck me: