*You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and they hide all the scorecards. It's basically about "cyberspace sovereignty," though. The Europeans will never be able to tax and regulate the daylights out of GAFAM unless they've got at least some kinda functional platform under their control that isn't GAFAM.
*In the meantime the various stakeholders wander around in loose camps pretending to argue on principles, but they'd dump those in a hot second if they thought they would get something useful out of it.
https://corporateeurope.org/power-lobbies/2018/12/copyright-directive-competing-big-business-lobbies-drowned-out-critical-voices
(...)
But who was actually lobbying the EU institutions on copyright?
One of the easiest ways to see who is lobbying the EU Institutions is to find out who is having meetings with EU civil servants and MEPs. Unfortunately, to this day there is still no overarching rule obliging them to make their full list of meetings available to the public. However, the Juncker Commission has adopted a rule that all Commissioners, cabinet members and director generals are required to publish a list of all of their lobby meetings.
Since November 2014 there were 765 declared encounters between lobbyists and the Commission with “copyright” as a subject 1 Over 93% of these were with corporate interests, but the list of main actors might be quite surprising: the lobbyists with the highest access were in fact not big tech, but the collecting societies, creative industries (including big film and music studios) and press publishers (see Table 1).
The most frequently listed names are: IFPI - Representing recording industry worldwide (37 meetings) whose members include Sony Music and Warner Music, followed by the Federation of European Publishers (27) which represents national associations of book publishers, and GESAC - the European lobby for collecting societies (25), whose members include big EU collecting societies such as PRS for Music, the US giant recording label Universal Music Group International (22), and the Society of Audiovisual Authors (22), which represents national collecting societies.
Of the top 20 lobbyists by meetings, only two represented tech interests – Google, ranking number seven, and one of the trade associations it belongs to, DIGITALEUROPE, ranking 18th – while one sole NGO, the independent consumer organisation BEUC, ranked 12th.
The Parliament unfortunately does not have any rules in place obliging Members of the European Parliament or their staff to divulge their lobby meetings, though some MEPs and groups do so voluntarily, which gives us at least some insight into who was lobbying the Parliament.
Showing laudable practice, for instance, MEP Comodini attached a legislative footprint to her report on copyright. It listed over 100 organisations that she met with to discuss the Parliament’s position on the Copyright Directive (see page 54), but unfortunately the listing does not say how many times she met with each organisation.
Another resource is the list of lobby meetings held by UK Conservative MEPs which has been published since 2009 2 . In their listing it can also be seen that the collecting societies and publishers again got the greatest amount of access, although naturally there was a clearer national angle. The top 20 lobbyists who met with UK Conservative MEPs is made up almost entirely of big collecting societies (IFPI- representing the recorded industry worldwide, British Recorded Music Industry, PRS for Music) and publishers (European Media Magazine Association, Axel Springer). By comparison, of the big tech companies and their trade associations, four actors are in the top 20 (DIGITALEUROPE, the Computer & Communications Industry Association – CCIA, EdiMA and Google). The list of lobby meetings also reveals a curious meeting with German publisher Hubert Burda, who was accompanied by a former MEP Carole Tongue. Not a single NGO made it to the top 20 organisations met by UK Conservatives on Copyright (see Table 2). (((Makes you wonder what "UK Brexit Cyberspace" is gonna look like.)))
The last resource for meetings data which is publicly available comes from the Green MEPs 3, whose meetings reflected a better balance of views, a bigger presence of small organisations, and many more NGOs. In spite of this, however, the top 20 still contains eight collecting societies and publishers organisations (see Table 3).
The list from the Green MEPs is particularly interesting because it is regularly updated by them, and it reveals that Google has increased its lobbying on copyright, and indeed counts as one of the actors with the most meetings with the Greens (5 in total). However, three of these took place in November 2018, after the main vote in the Parliament.
Overall, the limited information which is available about lobby meetings shows the intense level of lobbying taking place on the Copyright Directive, but it also interestingly exposes that the biggest lobbies were not in fact big tech companies and their associates, as many headlines claimed, but the publishers, creative industries and collecting societies.
MEPs under intense pressure... (((etc)))
