61 organisations ask Macron to give up its antiterrorism censorship project

61 NGOs, professionals, hosting services and non profit Internet access providers ask Emmanuel Macron to renounce to its European Regulation project to censor the whole Web for dubious security reasons.

European governments will meet on the 6th of December to find a common position on this text. This Regulation will use the fear of terrorism to silence all of the Internet. It will do nothing but reinforce Google and Facebook (read our article) and threaten the confidentiality of our exchanges online (read our article).

Update (4 December): your organisation can still sign our common letter (if you’re not an organisation, please spread the letter broadly!). To sign the letter, write at contact@laquadrature.net with “Sign letter censorship” as your mail’s subject. Thanks!

Find the letter in PDF or below:

Mr. President,

Using the pretext of the fight against online radicalisation, you are supporting a proposition from the European Commission for a Regulation imposing new obligations to all actors of the Internet: services hosting websites, blogs and videos, forum and social networks, press websites, email and messaging providers…

While the European Commission and your government do not demonstrate in a convincing way the effectiveness nor the necessity of these obligations to fight against terrorism, you wish to force all actors of the Internet to act on content whose dangerousness have not been assessed by a judge, and in a very short period of time.

These obligations are extremely dangerous for the entire European digital ecosystem. Indeed, the economic, human and technological means required to comply with these obligations are beyond the reach of almost all the actors of the Internet: very few will be able to answer 24/7 and within one hour to removal requests issued by any Member State. In a similar way, surveillance measures and automated censorship that national authorities will be able to impose are totally impracticable. Thereby, to comply with these new constraints, small and medium-sized economic actors will outsource the execution of these obligations to the few Web giants that, because of their financial power, will be able to support it, Google and Facebook firstly. This outsourcing will lead to an economic and technical dependence that would highly damage the whole European digital economy.

Non-profit and collaborative organisations will have no other choice but to close down their activities.

This Regulation will therefore dramatically reduce Europe’s digital diversity and will submit the rest to a handful of companies which are already in a near-monopolistic situation, and whose hegemony should be disputed rather than reinforced.

Finally, this Regulation would lead to mass surveillance of our online exchanges and to private and automated censorship of information, contrary to the humanist project that you intend to promote at the European level.

We, actors of this ecosystem and defenders of fundamental liberties, ask you to renounce to this project.

Signatories :