The Open Internet Alliance, a policy advocacy lobby group that is being branded the Open Internet Alliance, is being hosted by the social media firm's Spaces platform in a formalization of an earlier push to try to exert influence over fast-forming European digital regulations.
The founding members of the company include: Vimeo, a video streaming platform; Seznam, a Czech and Slovak focused search engine company; and Jodel, a Berlin-based (profile-less) social network.
Two years have passed since the establishment of this formal lobbying alliance.
It appears that Mozilla is not being named as a founding member of the new EU digital regulations to support better user controls to tackle bad speech rather than honing in on content censorship. At the time of writing, we don't know why Mozilla is missing. The Alliance wants other internet companies to join the initiative so it can grow.
Big tech needs not apply.
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The group is making a plea to lawmakers to think about the wider web, rather than see, according to the global policy VP of the company.
She urged policymakers to not view the Internet as a monolith and instead view it as a solution to society's problems. Big tech is the problem, and get away from that.
She warned that they may end up with nothing because of their efforts to tackle big tech.
The aim of the initiative is to kick off an open conversation and press for regulation that fosters diversity and innovation on the internet, according to a statement from a person associated with the initiative.
OIA members support an Open Internet where digital rights are preserved, where the internet is not dominated by a handful of companies and consumers can have real and meaningful choice.
At a time where the global internet is at a crossroads, potentially ill-considered regulations risk us heading for a future where the biggest internet companies become the only companies able to operate stifling innovation, and risking freedom of expression as a pillar of democracy becoming more and more compromised.
Two of the five founding members are small European tech firms.
This isn't surprising, given how advanced the EU is on digital policy making, with a whole swathe of ambitious policy proposals being presented in recent years which are set to impact scores of digital businesses.
The Data Governance Act, the Digital Services Act, and the Digital Markets Act are some of the major EU digital proposals that have already been adopted. The EU's co-legislative process and other incoming puzzle-pieces of the bloc's expansive digital policy agenda are in the process of being drafted.
Once the EU regulations are applied across the bloc's 27 Member States, they will have broad application. European digital policymaking is cutting edge and big enough to make any global tech business take notice. When the goal is to lobby EU lawmakers, having local membership in your alliance will surely help increase local impact vs a purely US tech firm grouping whose talking points could be all-too-easily dismissed as a non-European view of digital rule-making.
Big tech's lobbying of the flotilla of EU digital regulations being shaped in Brussels has been hard to miss in recent years as the sums of euros involved are so eye-watering.
Lobbying transparency group, Corporate Europe Observatory, points out that the top five big tech lobbyists all updated their entries in the EU lobby register last week. Apple went from spending 3.5 million dollars to a whopping 6 million dollars.
A report by COE and LobbyControl found that only 10 tech giants dominated EU lobbying. The figures are out of date as the tech lobby budgets keep growing.
In any case, the bald sums transparency organizations have been able to attribute to tech giants is likely the tip of the iceberg where big tech's public policy spending is concerned.
The largest tech firms are able to laundered regional lobbying that is aligned with their corporate interests under the guise of grassroots industry concern. There is a report on the funding of a network of think tanks.
How can the SME layer of the Internet, which includes plenty of platforms offering directly competing services to big tech, hope to get their voices heard by lawmakers? It seems that the answer is by banding together to push a narrative around Internet openness.
In the adtech space, we have seen a similar claim being deployed as a lobbying device to push against privacy-minded reform of ad.
In simple terms, the OIA is hopelessly outgunned by big tech in the EU's lobbying campaign. The disclosures show that Seznam will spend between 100,000 and 199,900 in 2021. Vimeo and Automattic spent a lot of money between 2020 and 2021. Jodel is not a lobbyist.
The combined lobbying of these companies is at least 420,000 per year, according to the COE researcher. The lobbying budgets of the top companies with the vast majority of other players are vastly different.
The resources the OIA can marshal to try to influence EU digital policy are a far cry from the multi-millions being annually pumped into Brussels by big tech, unless they manage to recruit thousands more long tail Internet companies to their cause. Grouping together under an open internet banner may be able to attract support from progressive NGOs and civil society organizations.
What is the alliance lobbying for?
Given how much digital policymaking is going on around the world, the OIA has put its objectives into eight core principles. The EU principle of no general monitoring obligation for platforms is set to be ripped up by the UK's safety focused content regulation push.
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There is a push for a single set of rules for the global Internet.
Interoperability is likely to be a key component of the EU's ex ante competition reform, but the extent to which the most powerful tech platforms will make their services play nice with rivals is still being debated.
An EU diplomat with knowledge of trilogue discussions on this file told TechCrunch that discussions are ongoing over whether or not interoperability provisions should apply to messaging platforms and whether group messages should be excluded from a requirement to interoperate.
Smaller and mid tier messaging firms stand to benefit from the EU's flagship ex ante competition regulation, which would limit how far it could reverse messaging platforms.
If EU lawmakers lose their nerve over the extent of the interoperability obligations, tech giants like Meta will gain a major victory by closing down the possibility of smaller, nippier, friendly rivals and startups having a legally certain route.
The DSA will apply more broadly to digital services, according to the OIA. Not limiting the options for implementation to a specific service or technology is something that should be done.
The company pointed to its earlier policy position statements on the DSA and the Digital Services Act: Defending the Open Internet in order to better understand where the lobbying efforts will focus.
The group is concerned about the risk of the DSA becoming more fragmented.
It suggested that the DSA's focus on illegal content could allow Member States to create their own rule variations, rather than being forced to comply with the EU's rules. As has been the case after Germany's NetzDG social media hate speech law.
The alliance argues that regulations that don't limit regional variation could help the tech giants and hurt the long tail of digital businesses which have nowhere near as much resource to throw at compliance.
During today's Spaces event, McSweeney spoke about the concern of the alliance, saying that the voices of mid and smaller companies are not being heard in talks on these pieces of legislation. If we don't speak up there is a chance that the DSA will slam them shut by mandating content moderation rules that will break the digital single market into 27 different markets with 27 different sets of rules. Only the largest tech companies will be able to comply.
Our industry is more than the largest companies and our laws need to reflect that. She said that it was important to highlight how large the gap was between the top companies and the rest of the internet.
The industry group is the culmination of two years of talking and letter writing, as smaller internet companies watch regulatory proposals brew.
She wants to forge dialogue with policymakers and define the future of the open internet in the EU.
The EU is looking to finalize two significant laws that will set rules for Europe for at least a generation. She said that others around the world will seek to follow in her footsteps.
McSweeney said that the DSA is intended to address concerns about online misinformation and illegal and harmful content by setting out governance rules for how platforms handle such content.
As an Alliance, we want to foster the Internet as it was intended to be, open, diverse, fair and innovative, and that would give us clear parameters in which to operate.
The other founding member companies of the OIA spoke during the event.
The general counsel for Seznam talked about the discrepancy in lobbying power between tech giants and other digital businesses, despite upcoming regulations that are set to affect the broad internet.
The budgets are incomparable to what large giants can spend on public affairs and PR through tens of different Brussels-based associations and lobby groups. I see this as an opportunity for smaller internet companies to voice their opinions and concerns about what's going on in Europe while shaping the legislation in Europe.
There are a lot of important legislation growing in Brussels, and I think it will shape the face of Europe for the next several years. It is a large group of companies that help keep the internet open. These companies should be heard.
The Alliance's smallest founding member, Berlin-based Jodel, spoke up in favor of regulation, while emphasizing the disproportionately greater burden that less well crafted regulations can impose.
I think regulation is necessary, but it also needs to be good regulation and in order to preserve innovation, we need good regulation. Tim Schmitz, COO and co-founder of Jodel, said that they want to keep that and make sure that the regulation goes in the right direction.
The more complex the regulation, the more local regulation it creates in a country. He said that the time would be better spent on making sure the platform was safe.
Setting aside the irony of a call for a more open internet being hosted on Twitter's proprietary Spaces platform, which doesn't make it easy to join without signing into the service first.
Automattic, Mozilla, Twitter and Vimeo urge EU to beef up user controls to help tackle ‘legal-but-harmful’ content
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