There’s been a lot of money thrown around to determine the future of the
Internet in the EU, but despite the frequent assertion that every
opponent of the new Copyright Directive is a paid puppet for Google, the
numbers tell a different story: according to the watchdog Corporate
Europe Observatory (CEO), the entertainment industry
are the biggest spenders by far, and they have obscured that fact by
using dodgy accounting to make it look like Google is buying out the
European Parliament.
The fight over the European Copyright in the Single Digital Market
Directive has been a long one, but it boiled over last spring, when
control over the Directive passed into the hands of the German MEP Axel
Voss, who reversed his predecessor’s decision to drop one of the
Directive’s most controversial clauses (Article 11, the “link tax” that
forced publishers to charge for licenses to include more than a word or
two in links to their news stories) and jettisoned the compromise work
on the other controversial clause (Article 13, which makes online
platforms liable if their users post anything that infringes copyright,
even for an instant, which will require expensive black-box algorithmic
censorship to accommodate).
Since then, the lobbying and public debate has been fierce. Roughly speaking, there are three sides:
Large corporate rightsholder organisations and collecting
societies, often allied with creators’ rights groups, who are largely in
favour of Voss’s version of the Directive (though a large group of
powerful corporate rightsholders completely hate it;
The tech sector, a mix of smaller EU tech companies that
couldn’t afford to comply with Articles 11 and 13, and US “Big Tech”
platforms, who largely oppose it (though YouTube isn’t actually that worried, because they’re closer to having a filter than any of their competitors); and
Amazingly, Group 1 – the entertainment lobby – has spent much of this
debate insisting that the third group doesn’t exist: that everyone who
opposes the directive is directly or indirectly working for the big tech
companies. This is the European Copyright version of insisting that
everyone who disagrees with you is actually being paid by George Soros
to get in your way.
What’s more, Group 1’s contention has been that Google has lavished
incredible sums of money and despatched an army of lobbyists to Brussels
and Strasbourg to influence the outcome of the debate.
The picture that emerges from the CEO data is one where the
entertainment industry completely dominates the spending and lobbying on
the new Directive (unsurprisingly, as they’ve been at it longer and
have deeper ties to MEPs, Commissioners and other officials who deal
with copyright). Google and its fellows in the tech industry have also
spent and lobbied a lot, but the entertainment sector lobbied a whole tonne.
What’s more, the entertainment industry’s own strategic plans turned on creating the false perception
that the opposition to the Directive was just Google’s influence
campaign writ large (“From the music side, this week’s lobbying is
focused around two points: convincing politicians of Article 13’s
necessity on one hand, and criticising Google’s lobbying on the other”).
The false narrative about Google’s big spending was bolstered by bad
accounting: the UK Music Industry body accused Google of spending €31m
on the Copyright Directive. But they arrived at that figure by adding
the €6m that Google spent on all of its EU lobbying, on every issue, and
adding it to the total budgets of every organisation and coalition that
Google belonged to. As is so often the case, an imaginary number
multiplied by a very large number produced an even larger number, but
that didn’t make it a real number.
Between the entertainment industry’s blitz and the more fumbling
lobbying attempts from Big Tech, it’s no wonder that staffers for Green
MEP Max Andersson called the Copyright Directive the “most intense lobby
effort so far.”
Given the big noise that corporate money was making in the debate, it
was hard for civil society voices to be heard. This was worsened by the
entertainment industry figures’ insistence that the flood of emails from
their constituents was a kind of attack. For instance, an editorial
by Volker Reiker (owner of File Defender, a company that “helps clients
to receive copyright remuneration for their work”) denounced the
letter-writing campaign sponsored by Copyright for Creativity, a
coalition of which Google is a member (along with numerous co-equal
civil society groups who often oppose Google in regulatory and policy
matters). He wrote multiple editorials accusing Google of being civil
society’s puppetmaster, which entertainment and publishing industry
groups translated and circulated.
While these libels were without merit, there’s some irony here in that
the only vocal player in this fight whose financial backing is not
disclosed, and whose lobbying activity is not registered: “Netopia,”
fronted by Swedish gaming industry lobbyist Per Strömbäck. Despite its
extensive activities, Netopia is not registered with the EU’s
Transparency Register, and the source of the dark money that paid for
things like a €50,000+ campaign by the lobbying firm MSL Brussels is a
mystery. Even more ironic: Netopia is the most vocal proponent of
conspiracy theories that accuse civil society organisations of being
secretly funded by the tech lobby to carry water for it.
The EU is at a crossroads: eurosceptic movements are on the rise, and
their stock-in-trade is the accusation that the EU is a tool of
corporate money, unresponsive to the needs of Europeans. The EU has not
helped itself in this regard: its transparency rules are wildly
imperfect, making it difficult to get a full picture of who spent what
in this record-setting lobbying cycle.
But Group 3 – the experts, the academics, the civil society groups, the
four million Europeans – are the people whom eurosceptics say the EU
ignores. It can ill afford to do so this time.
