Swedish Pirate Party MEP Amelia Andersdotter, on taking office at long last

Amelia Andersdotter is the Swedish Pirate Party MEP who won her seat more than two years ago, but is only heading to the European Parliament now, due to eurocratic delays. TorrentFreak catches up with the 24-year-old, who will be the youngest MEP in the room when she finally takes her seat.

“European approaches to competition law need to be changed, at least a bit. Better sector adaptation, for instance. The lack of real control over vertical integration creates the situation where telcos (or media enterprises) own everything from the backbone cables to the music streaming service – that’s not good. One would at least expect some obligation to keep the different tiers apart,” Andersdotter says.
“Currently this type of bundling is, more worryingly, encouraged rather than regulated and it creates a very unfair balance between the infrastructure owners (in this case) and users. Competition law just now deals mostly with horizontal integration, which would be say, if one company owns all of the cable in northern Belgium (Telenet).”
Andersdotter points out that the telecommunications sector has some good sector specific laws already, the net neutrality law in the Netherlands being a prime example. The problem is, however, to get all member states to adopt these regulations.

Pirate To Join European Parliament As Youngest Member

(Image: Demonstration mot IPRED, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from cybriks's photostream)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Copyfight • eu • pirate party • politics • sweden

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inkfumes

also her haircut is totally rad.
pKp

Well at least she’s had time to bone up on European procedure/law and the like… Hope she can do some good or at least crack a few heads. That being said, I’m predicting she’ll have a hard time being taken seriously, what with being (shock ! horror !) a woman, young, and member of a “nontraditional” party. Hope I’m wrong. Still, good news.
Lobster

Yarrr, she don’t sound like no pirate I e’er met.
bcsizemo

I was going to make a comment on that mullet look, but all the other pictures of her have a more normal hairstyle. I didn’t know if it was a lighting thing or something.

Either way, if that is a mullet – we need more people like that in office.
Navin_Johnson

You’re too shy shy, hush hush, eye to eye…..
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=5310808 Christopher Locke

She doesn’t really need the microphone. Voices carry.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_IH3CQ7VQW6OVWD2OW367WYETXU William

C30, C60, C90, Go!

She’s beautiful.
Mikael Isaksson

She has totally owned every opponent in every political discussion I have ever seen. To the point where the opponent start stuttering because they realize they are utterly defeated and just start trying to save their face. She is razor SHARP and have a gigantic intellect. I would not want to face her in a debate believe you me!
- Andrei Vlad S
  
  I have had the pleasure of seeing her talk in public, and I can totally confirm what you just said. She’s a force to be reckoned with!
niktemadur

Andersdotter’s net neutrality views and points made in the selected quotes at the top, are extraordinarily reasonable. With the public-speaking eloquence to back them up, it’s no wonder she won elected office… in a system where corporate sponsorship is not an open-secret prerequisite for a political career.