"The ICANN Board finds that the public interest is better served in withholding consent as a result of various factors that create unacceptable uncertainty."

ICANN, the entity that oversees web addresses, said on Friday it voted against a $1.1 billion deal to sell control of .org — Read the rest

As former MEP Marietje Schaake (previously) writes, "Can we please stop calling Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc 'The online public square'? They're ad companies. It is like calling a billboard ad a 'vertical public message'…. Pay for play, social media & search engines have created an online marketplace of ideas. — Read the rest

Marietje Schaake (previously) is a Dutch Member of the European Parliament who has a fantastic track-record for getting it right on issues related to technology, free speech, human rights, and privacy; she is the author of a report on export controls for spying technology used to identify dissidents to torture.

Andrew sez, "The fight for the Open Web and Net Neutrality won a big one today after the EU Parliament voted to approve EU Parliamentarian Marietje Schaacke's proposal to codify Net Neutrality in EU law. Here's her statement after the winning vote:"

Marietje Schaake, the EU's most tech-savvy MEP, writes, "Recently I launched a global campaign against the trade in digital
arms from the EU: stopdigitalarms.eu
It is unacceptable that EU-made technologies are still exported,
deployed and operated by European companies to third countries
without oversight."

The Dutch MEP Marietje Schaake has a fantastic, must-read essay on the problem with "cyber-war." She lays out the case for securing the Internet (and the world of people and systems that rely on it) through fixing vulnerabilities and making computers and networks as secure and robust as possible, rather than relying on weaknesses in security as vectors for attacking adversaries. — Read the rest

A fifth and final EU committee has reported unfavourably on ACTA, the controversial, secretly negotiated, far-reaching copyright treaty. The damning move came from the committee for International Trade, seen as the most important of the committees considering ACTA. Now that it has reported in, the verdict is unanimous: every expert committee in the EU has recommended against ACTA. — Read the rest

Maria Martin-Prat, who took a leave from her job at the European Commission to work as Deputy General Counsel and Director of Legal Policy and Regulatory Affairs for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI — thee international version of the RIAA, CRIA and BPI, though they're all basically the same companies), has returned to the EC to run its copyright unit. — Read the rest