The EU has legalized the blocking of sites for "consumer protection"

On November 14, 2017, the European Parliament approved the regulation of state cooperation in the field of consumer protection Consumer Protection Cooperation (pdf) . This document expands the rationale for blocking websites in EU countries.

Representative of the Pirate Party in the European Parliament Julia Reda (Julia Reda) explains what the main problem of the new document. The fact is that it allows national consumer protection organizations to order any indefinite third party to block access to websites without a court order .

Organizations that used to look for sour milk and expired meat in stores will now be able to block any websites without trial.

According to the "third party" primarily mean Internet providers. So, in order to comply with the requirements of this legislation, European Internet providers will have to create an infrastructure to block websites . According to Julia Reda, the creation of such an infrastructure is dangerous in itself, because in the future it can theoretically be used to block sites for any reason, including political censorship. And the process has already begun: just a few weeks ago , sites dedicated to the independence of Catalonia were blocked. Large Internet providers received a court order to block access to these sites, and the police conducted searches at the .CAT domain zone registrar. It would seem that such chaos is possible only in undemocratic third world countries. But this is happening in the European Union.

In the case of blocking .CAT sites, there was a real court decision that required the domain zone registrar to “block all sites that contain referendum information”. Human rights activists expressed indignation on this issue, because evaluating the contents of websites is not within the competence and scope of the registrar. In fact, the only way for a registrar to execute a judgment was to split all .CAT domains just in case . Which he naturally did not do.

However, this story shows that blocking websites and violating the principle of free exchange of information is becoming a normal thing even in the European Union. An international professional organization, the Internet Society, made a statement in this regard. She draws the attention of lawmakers that network blocking measures are usually ineffective and tend to cause indirect damage, including due to the erroneous blocking of law-abiding sites and infringement of freedom of speech. In connection with this situation, the Internet Society, together with more than 130 human rights organizations, launched the Keep the Internet On public campaign .. On their website it is indicated that in 2016, 50 Internet outages were registered in different countries of the world. Turning off the Internet is the first sign that human rights may be violated in a country.

In the case of the Catalan domains, political censorship was carried out in accordance with a legal court decision. But now, after the adoption of the rules of the Consumer Protection Cooperation , censorship can be carried out without a court decision at all. Such actions to block objectionable resources can be quickly carried out only if the appropriate infrastructure for blocking is created and an out-of-court procedure is provided.

When Parliament Discussed Consumer Protection Cooperationin March 2017, Julia Reda proposed changing the procedure - and demanding that violating websites remove illegal content, and not immediately block it. And the blocking itself must take place in compliance with fundamental rights, that is, with prior judicial permission. Unfortunately, these proposals were not taken into account in the negotiation process. In addition, during the discussion, other wordings on consumer protection were softened: 1) compensation for damage was made voluntary, and not mandatory; 2) canceled the seizure of income illegally obtained as a result of violation of consumer rights.

Julia tried to make the necessary amendments on the last day before the adoption of the document ( video), but members of parliament, unfortunately, did not support her. Therefore, parliamentarians from the Green Party and the European Free Alliance, as well as Julia Reda, voted against the document.

The new document has the status of regulation (regulation), not a directive, that is, it is binding on all members of the European Union and does not require additional approval by the parliament of each country.