The Tech Brief EURACTIV

The Von der Leyen Commission recently passed its mid-term. With Andrea Garcia Rodriguez, the lead digital policy analyst at the European Policy Centre, we discussed what the EU executive has achieved in this first half of the mandate and potential perspectives for the future.

Scandinavian countries are well-known for having their own approach to social affairs. As regulating the working conditions of platform workers is now an hot topic in Brussels, we got a non-EU perspective to the issue in this discussion with Norway’s Minister of Labour and Social Inclusion, Marte Mjøs Persen.

Measures addressing copyright infringements are often a hot topic in EU digital policies. We discussed what is the state of play and trends in the EU with Alexandra Poch, Deputy Director of the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights, Julio Laporta, Head of Communication and Spokesperson at the European Union Intellectual Property Office.

EURACTIV caught up with the Czech Deputy Prime Minister for Digitisation, Ivan Bartoš, directly from Luxembourg during the Telecoms Council. We discussed the approach of the upcoming Czech Presidency to the open questions of the AI Act and Data Act, two of the main digital file Prague will have to deal with. We also discussed the telecoms’ ‘fair share’ proposal and the never-ending ePrivacy Regulation.

The European commission has unveiled on 11 May its long-awaited proposal to fight against child sexual abuse material online, or CSAM in short.

While children’s organisations have been receiving this regulation very well, it also sparked a lot on concerns for privacy defenders, worried that the provision forcing tech platforms to scan the communications of their users to detect CSAM would lead to an indiscriminate and disproportionate intrusion into our lives and would undermine encryption.

This week, Dan Sexton, the chief technical officer at the Internet Watch Foundation, a British child safety nonprofit, and Ella Jakubowska, a policy advisor at the European Digitals Rights network, joined the podcast to discuss the proposal.

Alexandra Paulus, Fellow for International Cybersecurity Policy with the German think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, explains what cyber norms are, who shapes them and whether Germany is actually practising what it preaches.