2024-12-29 –, Saal GLITCH
Language: English
Net Neutrality is a core pillar of the open internet. But we witness a coordinated, world-wide attack from the telecom industry on the very foundation that ties the internet together. The interconnection of autonomous parts of the internet used to be a non-political and non-commercial field that not many paid attention to. But through heavy lobbying activity we are on the brink of regulating interconnection in the EU, Brazil and India to establish a new payment obligation that would force everyone who wants to send a significant amount of data to customers. Telecom companies would end up being paid twice for the same traffic, from their customers and the content and cloud providers that want to reach them.
This talk by Raquel Renno Nunes from Article 19 and Thomas Lohninger from epicenter.works gives insights into the global civil society fight against the telecom industry. We will lift the veil about the lobbying of companies like Deutsche Telekom, Orange and A1 and showcase strategies how NGOs fought back in Latin America and Europe. This war for the open internet is only heating up. European Commissioner Henna Virkkunen for Digital will have in her hands to uphold net neutrality in Europe.
We want to extend our perspective by also looking at the successful fight in Latin America. Brazil in particular made their own experience with Zero-Rating tariffs that connected millions of Brazilians only to a selected few Apps instead of the whole internet. We will showcase how WhatsApp became a catalyst for the spread of fake news around the election of Jair Bolsonaro.
Thomas was a programmer and anthropologist in his former life. Digital rights had been his hobby until it became a job when he intensively accompanied the EU Net Neutrality Regulation as Policy Advisor for European Digital Rights (EDRi). Thomas was one of the driving forces behind the www.savetheinternet.eu campaign and has a strong work focus on net neutrality, data protection, and mass surveillance. Since 2010 he has played an active part at Epicenter.works and since 2014 he is the executive director of the organization. He also writes on Netzpolitik.org, is a regular guest in the Podcast Logbuch:Netzpolitik and a non-residential Fellow of the Center for Internet and Society at the Stanford Law School. He was in the board of the EU umbrella of 45+ digital rights NGOs (EDRi) and since 2024 he is Chair of the Governance Working Group of the UN dpi-safeguard initiative and member of the Jury for the German eIDAS Wallet and the Ad-Hoc Technical Advisory Group on eIDAS of the European Commission.
Raquel is a Senior Digital Programme Officer at ARTICLE 19, focusing on connectivity issues from an infrastructure and radio spectrum perspective. Since 2003, she has worked on human rights and the social impact of digital technologies within educational and digital rights organizations. Currently based in Berlin, she has also collaborated with grassroots communities across Central and South America on initiatives aimed at bridging the digital divide. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Semiotics.
Leitung Center for User Rights, Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF)