EU Digital Commissioner Oettinger offers free digital lunch for everyone

The European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, a German gentleman named Oettinger, has been busy.

His office has been at the center of some of the most brain-dead EU proposals, the latest of which is a sweeping "copyright modernization" venture.

Previous successful initiatives the office include abolishing telecommunications roaming charges in the EU by 2017. Well, that's what the European Parliament codified into a law. But this must have been too easy of a success after more than a decade of wrangling over lucrative roaming charges.

So, in the most recent incarnation of the "end of roaming charges", the Commission defines "end" to mean 90 days out of each year and no relief for cross border commuters. Once the 90 are up (or 0 days for commuters), the Commission defines the "end" following that end as "a mobile operator may apply a surcharge not exceeding the corresponding wholesale roaming cap. The Commission has proposed 4 cents/min, 1 cent/SMS, 0,85 cents/MB – still to be adopted by the Parliament and Member States in the current wholesale roaming review."

The blogster considers the wholesale roaming cap worthy of wholesale ridicule.

With the actual cost of long distance telephony as well as data volume down to values that see the first non-zero digit in some place behind the decimal point (comma in Europe), 4 cents/min is supremely profitable.

Although we still have not seen a gold-plated cell phone tower, so there's your mystery.

The wholesale success of the end to roaming charges policy bodes well for the modernized copyright.

In a recent interview in Frankfurter Allgemeine, Mr. Oettinger brought us the good news: consumers will bear no additional cost.

So, y'all relax.

Only the rich interweb companies like the Google, the Twitter, the FB, and others will pay for the privileges the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls "Plans to Force the Internet to Subsidize Publishers".

In the past, the blogster has ranted about the German internet being "a desert" and bitched about the German "snippets law".

This is slightly emotional, so we'll quote a few sentences from the much more nuanced EFF statement.

Rightsholder Greed: The assumption that copyright owners should be entitled to share in any value created by online platforms is never really examined by the Commission.

Automated systems, no matter how technically sophisticated, can never replace human judgment about whether user generated content infringes copyright. Content ID-type systems are extremely expensive.

Link Tax: The Commission's proposal is to award publishers a new copyright-like veto power, layered on top of the copyright that already exists in the published content, allowing them to prevent the online reuse of news content even when a copyright exception applies.

Under the new EU rules, the above quotes would suffice to put the K-Landnews out business. Where business is defined by about 50 Euro cents a month from ad revenue.

Since the Commissioner has assured us - in the internet version of a traditional print medium - that end users won't see any additional cost, we are getting a free lunch, right?

Because "we" don't pay for using Google et al.*

The statement of the O might be true if everyone along the corporate value daisy chain decided to simply eat the decreased margin that comes with the gentleman's package.

Because money will flow from someone who has it to someone who wants it. Judging by the unquestioned reception of the free lunch interview by the modernized print publisher, O might get away with it.

Sadly, few people ever question the well worn "it won't cost users/consumers anything".

* Showing off some education here, sorry.

[Update 9/9/2016] The EU Commission just withdrew the roaming proposal after wide protest and will make changes.

[Update 9/17/2016] There has been near constant press support from the "conservative" German paper publishers, for example in yesterday's Frankfurter Allgemeine. The gentleman who did this OpEd calls for additional protection not only for periodicals but also for books.

I am so looking forward to the EU link tax, because I can finally dispense with linking to German sites.