On June 14 and 15, 2018, the French Telecoms Federation attended EuroISPA’s General Meeting in Vienna, Austria

During this quarterly meeting, the members of EuroISPA discussed the legislative evolutions of their 10 respective Member States, as well as European legislative initiatives.  The representatives notably discussed the GDPR and its implementation in the various member states, which enabled the FFTelecoms to fully grasp the discrepancies existing between some Member States.

For instance, whereas the French DPA employs more than 200 people in order to fully implement the GDPR, the Austrian DPA can only rely on about 30 employees to handle the same tasks. This example highlights France’s strong commitment to the protection of personal data. The participants also learned about an upcoming Swiss bill that aims at including the GDPR’s principles into Swiss Law, showing the extraterritorial value of the text.

EuroISPA’s members also pursued their study of the legal framework of intermediary liability, in the wake of the publication of the communication on tackling online disinformation by the European Commission. Since the Commission is also currently elaborating its strategy to tackle online terrorist contents, the coordination of the Internet sector is an important step towards a better regulation.

This coordination process was originally initiated as a multi-stakeholder reflection around the topic of CSAM-contents (Child Sex Abuse Material). The Federation is notably active in this domain thanks to its online reporting tool that can be accessed by following this link : https://signalement.fftelecoms.org. Each month, the Federation thus transmits the URL of a dozen of websites containing CSAM-contents to the French Ministry of Interior in order to facilitate their investigations.

Once more, EuroISPA’s General Meeting was especially important to the Federation, as such meetings allow a constructive exchange of best practices, but also help the Federation gain some insight on different European and national initiative that help shaping the Internet.