Belgium Fines Yahoo For Protecting User Privacy On Its US Servers

from the this-is-bad... dept

For many years, we've discussed the many challenges faced by countries in trying to recognize that "jurisdiction" on the internet isn't what they probably think it is. Many countries want to interpret internet jurisdiction as "if it's accessible here via the internet, it's covered by our laws." But it doesn't take much scenario planning to recognizing what a disaster would result from such an interpretation. Effectively that means that the most restrictive legislation anywhere in the world (think: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.) would apply everywhere else.

That's why it's quite worrisome to find out that Belgium is trying to fine Yahoo for protecting its users' privacy and refusing to hand over user data to Belgian officials. Yahoo noted, accurately, that it does not have any operation in Belgium, and the data in question was held on US servers, not subject to Belgian law. On top of that, the US and Belgium have a good diplomatic relationship, such that such a data request could have gone through established diplomatic channels to make sure that US laws were properly obeyed as well. But, instead, Belgian officials just demanded the info from Yahoo's US headquarters directly, and then took the company to criminal court where the judge issued the fine. The Center for Democracy & Technology highlights the problems of not pushing back against this ruling:

The implications of this ruling are profound and far-reaching. Following the court's logic would subject user data associated with any service generally available online to the jurisdiction of all countries. It would also subject all companies that offer services generally available on the global Internet to the laws of all jurisdictions, potentially exposing individual employees to a variety of criminal sanctions.

The U.S. government should be paying close attention here: To understand how problematic this ruling is, we need only imagine how the governments of China, Iran, Vietnam or other repressive regime of your choice may decide that the precedent set here is one well worth following. Such actions undermine Belgium's moral authority since, after all, it would only be hypocritical for Western democracies to criticize such radically overbroad assertions of jurisdiction by other nations.

CDT suggests the US government should get involved and protest the Belgian court ruling:

In the present case, Yahoo! has done right by its users. The company asked law enforcement officials to follow established diplomatic and legal processes in order to gain access to user information. It also enlisted the support of its home government to facilitate the process. In return, Belgian authorities have flouted an existing MLAT agreement, slapped Yahoo! with a fine, and set a dangerous precedent that potentially imperils the privacy of all Internet users and invites abuse by bad actors.

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Yahoo Digs In Against Belgian Ruling Demanding User Info

from the belgium-is-a-lot-smaller-than-china dept

Yahoo got into a lot of PR trouble (and some Congressional scrutiny) a few years back for its cooperation with the Chinese government in handing over info on some users. Folks at Yahoo have certainly suggested in the past that this was a mistake on the company's part, and it looks like it's acting differently this time around... in Belgium. There, a court has fined Yahoo for failing to hand over information on a user accused of illegal activities. Yahoo's response is that, as a US company, all such requests should go through the US. This makes a lot of sense for a variety of reasons (otherwise, Yahoo would be responding to requests from tons of different countries), but many may cynically point out that Belgium is a much smaller market to "fight" than China. On the whole, though, it seems that Yahoo is making the right move. If the data was being hosted in the US, then it only seems reasonable to suggest that the data is under US jurisdiction, not Belgium's.

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Belgian Court Realizes That ISPs Shouldn't Be Forced To Block File Sharing

from the about-time dept

A year and a half ago, we wrote about a Belgian court requiring an ISP to block all file sharing, and saying that after six months to implement a filtering solution, the ISP would be fined 2,500 euros per day that file sharing still occurred on its network. The court had been convinced by the IFPI that blocking all file sharing was as simple as installing the filtering software from the entertainment industry darling, Audible Magic. Of course, as has been seen over and over again, Audible Magic's "magic bullet" solution isn't particularly good, and certainly does very little to stop file sharing. Apparently, Belgian ISPs have finally been able to convince the judge of that fact, and he's reversed the original ruling, saying that the ISP in question is no longer subject to the fine. Apparently, even the recording industry lawyers had to admit that they misled the court over the efficacy of Audible Magic's filtering software.

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Belgian Newspaper Lets Readers Into Editorial Meetings On Financial Crisis

from the connecting-with-your-community dept

Earlier this year, I wrote about how too many newspapers thought that adding "community" just meant putting comments on stories. That's not really engaging the community, though. While we've seen a few examples of newspapers doing a better job of really engaging communities, this new story out of Belgium may be one of the best examples so far. A reporter for a newspaper there, De Tijd, had been experimenting with some live blogging solutions, and decided to basically liveblog an editorial meeting where the paper decided how to cover a developing chapter in the financial crisis. While some others in the editorial meeting were nervous about "opening up" their editorial process, it actually was quite useful.

The wider community contributed plenty of useful feedback both on what they hoped the newspaper would cover (which was different than what the editors originally planned to cover), but also in providing more details about what was really important. It gave the journalists there much more insight into the real story, rather than the usual shallow coverage that often comes out of newspaper reporting on a sudden crisis (for example, recognizing that interbank lending -- or the lack thereof -- was a much bigger story than a collapsing stock market). It became truly interactive, with various journalists bouncing ideas off of the community and getting a lot of real time feedback to create a much better product.

Even more interesting was that after the reporter shut down the live chat, many in the group simply organized themselves into an IRC chat room and continued the conversation themselves. It's a fascinating story of how a newspaper embraced an actual community, rather than simply thinking that community was something you add on as a module at the end of the "real journalism."

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Rogers Tries (And Fails) To Appease Angry iPhone Buyers As Belgians Contemplate $1,000 iPhones

from the ain't-so-cheap dept

Part of the supposed appeal of the new 3G iPhone when it was announced by Steve Jobs a few months back was that it was going to be much cheaper than the old iPhone. That was true until you actually looked at the fine print. The $199 pricing only applied in the US to those who signed a long-term contract with AT&T -- for which you had to pay higher service fees. In other countries the story was also questionable. Up in Canada, the only national GSM provider, Rogers, caused a stir with ridiculously high service plans. After a rather loud protest, Rogers has pretended to relent by having a limited-time offer for cheaper data rates, though still not offering an unlimited plan. This has potential customers still pretty ticked off:

So, all early adopters that will ever be interested in the iPhone will have to buy by August 31. It's a ridiculous idea, and an obvious attempt to turn a concession demanded by the market into a cudgel against its customers -- not only can you not have an unlimited plan, but you can't buy at your leisure -- for example, waiting a few months to see if users reports overcharge horror stories from Rogers' miserly plans. You have to "buy now!!!, this offer is **limited**" What nonsense. If the plan is a bona fide effort to respond to a recognized customer need in a responsible manner, it should not be time limited.

Meanwhile, folks over in Belgium have a different problem. Due to laws forbidding the entirely reasonable practice of bundling goods together with subsidized pricing, you can only buy the phone at full price: which works out to nearly $1,000. On the good side, this has highlighted how dumb the "no subsidized bundling" law is, and politicians are looking to toss it out this fall.

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Belgian Newspapers Demand Google Pay $77 Million For All The Traffic Google Sent Them

from the of-all-the-ridiculous-lawsuits... dept

Back in 2006, we couldn't believe that a group of Belgian French-language newspapers could be so confused about how the internet works that they would sue Google for daring to send them more traffic. Of course, if the newspapers were so upset about Google sending them traffic, they could have taken rather easy (robots.txt) means of preventing the indexing -- something they finally did after someone explained to them how search engines work.

But, of course, that's not what it was really about. It's always been about the money. So, it should come as no surprise that the same group of Belgian newspapers is now demanding that Google pay them $77 million. Google should counter that these newspapers owe them every damn cent of ad revenue that was generated by anyone clicking through from Google to those newspaper sites -- plus an additional fee for being so kind as to "advertise" those newspapers websites to those who had never heard of them before.

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