Data protection and digital competition
by Ian Brown and Douwe Korff
This Note is an immediate response to the recent EDPB guidance relating to the processing of certain special categories of personal data that enjoy special protection under the GDPR, commonly referred to as “sensitive data”. The Note explains why the EDPB’s guidance is not clear enough.
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Tools to bridge and otherwise help Mastodon and Bluesky work together are slowly reducing some of the obstacles to replacing X/Twitter.
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The NYT headline (Did Apple just kill social apps?) is over-the-top, but a reminder of the impact Big Tech firms can have on entire market sectors with their product decisions — and why the EU was right to legislate rules for fairness and contestability in the Digital Markets Act. Indeed, further interventions might be necessary, like mandating privacy-protective friend-connecting services.
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Part A of Mario Draghi’s report for the EU on “competitiveness” reform was published this morning. In one sentence, he concludes: “Europe must profoundly refocus its collective efforts on closing the innovation gap with the US and China, especially in advanced technologies.”
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This analysis explains why the EU bans on Russian media outlets, and the Court of Justice judgment in RT France v. Council relating to them, are wrong. The bans limit the right of individuals in the EU to receive such information and ideas, while EU rules on sanction violations can easily lead to the use of the criminal law against individuals in the EU for non-violent political speech.
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More excitement as the world cleans up after Friday’s global IT chaos, caused directly by poor CrowdStrike testing processes and marking its software as essential to Windows booting — but indirectly by Microsoft allowing inadequately tested/sandboxed code to run in “kernel” mode on PCs, where it can/did cause a system crash on around 8.5m Windows PCs globally and billions of dollars of insured damage.
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In December, German research agency WIK published an interesting (critical) study on the DMA NIICS interoperability requirements. I have innovation-related questions 🧐
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You have to analyse every Apple announcement through the lens of how it plans to maintain its market power and attack regulation. So, will Apple’s promised Rich Communication Services (RCS) support make iMessage fully interoperable at least with Google’s Messages? What would the most grudging compliance with Chinese 5G regulations look like?
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Prof. David Erdos has shared his latest (excellent) research showing i) little UK GDPR enforcement, ii) a worrying gap with formal law expectations & iii) limited accountability for this. I hope the European Commission is not going down the same route with the Digital Markets Act.
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Over 30 European police forces have (yet again) attacked the increasing deployment of end-to-end encryption. This is how powerful policy stakeholders (like law enforcement and big business) often win arguments. They never, ever give up, repeating the same arguments ad nauseam — over decades if necessary — regardless of any evidence which emerges.
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