A market, is a market, is a market

Not to fix something working is a straight forward and easy enough maxim but one that seems very difficult to live by. In particular if you are a European Commission public servant…

A few years back the European Commission launched what they called an e-Commerce initiative, the aim was to further e-commerce in the EU. It was, for the Commission, a rather good initiative where EU internal trade barriers were, if not abolished, so at least substantially lowered and harmonised. All in all rather good. It has now been reviewed and it turns out the good EU officials have been inspired by Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA, a very unfortunate turn of events. In practise this means that we now are blessed with yet another directive concerning free trade in the EU, this time one wanting to create a coherent framework for building trust in the Single Digital Market for e-commerce and on-line services. Already here the good people at the EU crash land – there isn’t a “digital market” there is (or should be) a Single European market, but whether the market exchanges are digital or not is really not for the European Commission to regulate. If the Commission really want to make a difference in the EU citizen’s life it should identify trade barriers and find solutions to how to abolish them and to ensure that (EU) cross boarder trade can be performed in a legal, safe and integrity protecting way. That’s it. No dividing into digital markets or other, a market is a market is a market.

Bar the tribulations on markets, what worries is the European Commission propose that it should give itself the possibility to ask ISPs to block content and to ask payment providers to with-hold money on demand from right-holders. It goes without saying that IP rights should be upheld, but I don’t think it is for an ISP to police its customers based on maybe arbitrary claims. From an EU citizens’ perspective, the EU is heading down a very slippery slope with these policy proposals. The advocacy group La Quadrature du Net has signalled that the E-commerce directive review could represent an erosion of rights, notably where ‘action’ or payment suppression is conducted in an extra-judicial process.

Overall, the E-commerce directive review suggests the European Commission is making a formal link between copyright and Internet policy.

According to Dr. Monica Horten:
The E-commerce directive to date has been the protector of the open Internet, notably the mere conduit provision. The review sets out pivotal changes which threaten that protecting role of mere conduit.  Notably, the Commission wants to introduce a pan-European notice and action scheme. This is based on other ‘notice and takedown’ schemes (such as the one in  the American  DMCA law) but with an important difference. The proposed EU scheme uses the word ‘action’ instead of ‘takedown’, where action could mean asking hosts to take down content, but also would seem to mean blocking of content by ISPs on request.

Let’s face it while there certainly is need for lower trade barriers (in the EU) there is no need for (tax financed) European Commission incentives and directives to create markets; virtual or other. A market develops when someone has something to sell and someone wants to buy. This principle is as old has humankind and no public servant can change that. Or this is at least until now, because this proposal certainly does its best to hamper (free) trade.

Of course the European Commission made this review in the best of European citizens at heart. And the subsequent proposals are filled with the best of good intentions, but as we all know – so is the road to hell.

Someone gets under your skin – how do you get them out?

You know how people sometimes can get under your skin? And not in the Cole Porter version either, but really so bad that it clouds you completely. This is the case now with me and I try to tell myself to LET GO and MOVE ON. The person isn’t worth all the energy. Let go and use the energy to something useful like homework or chatting with Mother or ironing. And it’s not only a waste of time and energy; it makes you look churlish, childish and small-minded and surely you are a grown up that can be the bigger person? But how come being the bigger person when it’s only you and yourself that’s involved always seems to be the most difficult thing? Is it because you can’t put the blame on someone else but yourself? And even if the “blame game” is most unattractive it does simplify your life.

But back to square one, this person keeps popping up in my mind, in particular when I read something related to the person’s subject matter. And yes, I have to read those texts because they’re a part of my curriculum. Does this incessant popping imply that s/he is a genie of some kind and that there something I need to learn? Or is it a case of clashing personalities? I think the latter.

Whatever the reason, is there a patent way to get people out from under your skin?

2011 in my blog

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4 000 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Antisemitism in the 21st century

Antisemitism in the 21st century.

Campaigns – is ”waving” one way to keep them alive?

I have just read the “Responsible business case studies” from Ethical Corporation and one of the case studies they discuss is the “Social media and environmental campaigning: Brand lessons from Barbie” on Barbie and rainforest deforestation. The article describes how Greenpeace International targets Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) and APP’s actions in the rainforest. If you can get your hand on this study (it’s free) I recommend you reading it as it brings interesting insights to how to use Social Media and campaigning. But I ask myself, how do you keep up the good work? As they say in the study – it is so easy to have a blitz of activities but once the initial flurry of actions have died out there is little to be seen.

In fact it is it so easy for a campaign to die out that a company engaging in dubious activities, this case rainforest de-forestation, just can sit back and wait and see. Will the people living in tents in Haiti ever get out of them? When did you last hear or see something from Port-au-Prince or the Haitian country side? It’s human nature to get engaged and to keep momentum for a short period of time. But then it is just as easy to just go back to life as it was ”before” or to see your actions being taken over by someone else. Just look at the Occupy Wall Street movement that at least for now looks like a swallow that flew one short summer. The movement hailed as the “Facebook-revolution” the Arab spring, seems more and more to be to be taken over by religious permafrost. It’s at least how it looks from my womanly westernized point of view.

Campaigning via Social Media is a relatively new but mature phenomena, but I wonder if the campaigns should be organised differently? Instead of all activists acting all at once, should they be organised in “waves” thus ensuring a constant stream of messages and pressure on the company whose practises the activists are trying to change? Say if Greenpeace organise its activists in groups, it could relay the work, thus keep pressuring the corporate in question while not exhausting their activists and their will to work. Once group A have stopped their work, group B takes over etc. Nothing stops other group members to get active but the core activity for that period is carried out by the group members in question. This of course goes against our idea of a campaign that is by nature “short, strong and sassy” but is it the way forward in particular now when more and more campaigns are using Social Media? It would take some different organisation from e.g. Greenpeace, but who knows, it just might work?

I only ask because the campaign mentioned above seems to have gone into hibernation while there appear to be few signs of changing practises by APP. And it looks as if like “keep up the job” is something that tends to be too short-lived to achieve a real change…

2011 spelled Good bye Internet and civic liberties

Big Brother is watching you

This Orwellian saying has never been truer. 2011 did not only spell the Arab Spring and a worldwide wave of protests against bankers’ greed it was also the year when the Internet as we knew it disappeared. Below is a list, far from complete, unfortunately of what has been achieved or what is in the pipeline.

In the US the “SOPA” (ironically sopa means trash in Swedish) law is currently going through the law making machinery. The US entertainment industry has taken upon them to be some kind of global content police. And if a web page contains what the industry considers copyrighted material it can be closed no matter where in the world it is registered. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn will all be forced to join in and close down users on loose accusations – if nothing else to save their own skins. The possibility to stand corrected and to reverse the decision to close you down if you as a user are wronged is next to impossible.

German companies have now completed equipment capable of storing everything that happens on the internet. This means that if someone does something wrong, it will be possible to back track this person’s activities and map the person’s previous contacts and social networks, including highly private matters such as political opinion, religious beliefs or sexual preferences. In practise this means that even if you yourself haven’t done anything wrong or illegal, you can still become involved in various scandals just because someone you know or may just have had contact with is suspected of something irregular.

It’s data retention on acid.

The EU data retention directive will be re-examined in the Swedish Parliament next year. All phone calls, SMS, MMS, emails, internet connections and mobile positions will be stored. All this in order to be able to map of whom you have had contact with, when and where… innocent people will encounter very unpleasant surprises.

EU is taking a grip on “cloud computing” this means that not just our telecommunications will be monitored, but also our FILES will be registered and monitored. Google, Amazon, and others what are ye doing to stop this?

As if this sorry state of controlling wasn’t enough – there is the ACTA agreement which means that our Internet operators are forced to become criminal investigators, carrying the full responsibility of the law for what their customers are doing in their cables. To do this they have to implement monitoring mechanisms of everything and anything that happens on the net. Since common sense have given way to control and fear the question will no longer be if you can do what is legal, more and more the Facebook and Apple approach will prevail – what fearful faceless operators believe is appropriate will be the norm. Fear and bigotry will rule.

But as if this already scary situation wasn’t enough the face less European technocrats are building an extensive security bureaucracy of which one part is the European Network and Information Society Agency, ENISA. ENISA will ensure that the monitoring and registration information will be shared between the EU Member States in accordance with the so-called convergence principle. And so the Union’s capacity for intelligence activities will be reinforced.

European research projects such as Indect continues. Indect researches camera monitoring with facial recognition and pattern analysis in real-time, associated with each registry and other monitoring forms. Only now it is more secretive than ever before, because the media and citizens have been a little too “curious”…

These are just some of the things that are in the pipeline for 2012. And as usual privacy and civil liberties will be betrayed in the name of fight against terrorism, child pornography, file sharing, and more. You can justify just about everything, you only have to try a little…

The EU’s ‘techno party’ is hollowing out democracy

EUobserver.com / Opinion / The EU’s ‘techno party’ is hollowing out democracy.

Long and frightening – but a must read.

EU and the Euro and the cake – or a Tasteless badly timed celebration

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The EU and communication has always been a subject by itself. The kindest things you can say is that the EU communication has been developed in a bubble. Or that the results are sweetly awkward. But now I ask myself if the darlings at the Commission hasn’t reached new heights in their isolation. OK, it is very likely easy to get lost in committees and meetings and high groups and DG’s and the lot – but really even a Commission employee must have noticed that the Euro is currently living through its deepest crisis ever. Or living through,we don’t know if the currency will survive.

But anyway, I digress from my subject – EU and communication – is this a good time to release a video celebrating the 10^th anniversary of the Euro? Haven’t the responsible communications manager heard about 19 crisis meetings the past two months? Haven’t the person in question heard that there is a crisis, catastrophe and predictions that the currency have 10 days rest to live?

In the middle of this, today to be exact, this video is released. Tasteless is what comes to mind. I can hear the reasoning: 10 years! We must celebrate. A video! With moving pictures and flags and blue skies and of course all to the music of Beethoven 9^th – it will be beautiful and exiting and we’ll get a chance to push all the good the Euro have achieved.
Well, the BEST you can say about the video is that there is certain robust humour with the video. In particular in the beginning when Mario Drahgi is choking when he is about to explain the Euro’s success.  If you have 10 mins of your life you don’t mind loosing, you can watch the master piece here.

LinkedIn invitations to connect

I find it very flattering every time someone not previously known to me wants to connect on LinkedIn. Only lately I have started to say Thank you, but No thanks to several of the invitations.

The reason is that these invites have incomplete profiles and in particular lack a photo. Now, of course an LI profile is a work in progress, I realise that – I frequently change mine myself. But the basic information remains rather static. It is the lack of photo that stops me.

Of course I realise that a photo can be doctored with and doesn’t really mean anything per se, still I prefer an invite from a fellow LI member with a face to hers/his name.

Am I just grumpy and unfriendly or is a basic LI-profile a minimum when hoping to connect?

Few public leaders understand the power of social media

This article on Forbes Nearly One Year After The Start Of Arab Uprisings, Few Arab Leaders Understand The Power Of Social Media made me curious how governments are doing here “at home” in Europe. I found the article in the twitter feed of Matthew Fraser, @frasermatthew.

We are after all seeing a raising citizen engagement in many countries over the world and in any case it is always in any government’s interest to communicate with its citizens. But maybe it should be even higher in times of change. Today with Social media communication is easier than ever before. Only I find that if governments actually do use Social Media it is one way only and it is rare that the citizens actually gets to interact with their governments. In fact I haven’t found any proof where interaction is the ”normal.”

According Jared Cohen, Google Ideas, we currently see two systems in the midst of a noisy transition, where one is physical and dominated by states with the traditional division between state and power and the other is a rival system that is virtual, cross-national and dominated by citizens.

Cohen believes that these two systems will eventually find a way to exist side by side and that there will be a sort of checks-and-balances situation where we still will have a system based on states but with a higher interaction by its citizens.

Anyway, this prompted me to make a very non-academic investigation about the status of a few European countries. I have studied the Prime Minister home page of the following countries and noted if there was a link to Twitter. And when I mention the name of the Prime Minister this often refers to the actual office as I do understand that it is rare that the Heads of State engage like this with their constituencies – although from a credibility point of view it wouldn’t hurt them if they did.

United Kingdom: PM Cameron tweets under the profile UK Prime Minister, and rather actively too. Although Cameron seems to like Social Media only when it used to push information not so much when it is used to interact. And he certainly shows a lack of intellectual honesty in his actual approach to Social Media. He cannot on the one hand praise Social Media and the role it played in the Arab spring and on the other hand demand higher control of the same Social Media when it is used to create the same upheaval in the UK.

Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel doesn’t tweet, however the spokesperson Steffen Seibert is Twittering and answering tweets, actually only one of two (the other is Latvia) that seems to interact. I did think that countries going trough a crisis would jump on the possibility to communicate with their citizens, if nothing else to try to avoid violent demonstrations.

At the Italian Prime Minister home page there is no trace of social media interaction. However the Greek Prime Minister is Tweeting and quite intensely too as is the Portuguese Government.

For a while I was hopeful about the Spanish Prime Minister as the website showed logos from all the major Social Media networks – but I was quickly thwarted in my enthusiasm – it was only to share the wisdom of the prime minister, not for him to communicate with is constituencies. In particular seeing that Spain gears up to national elections tomorrow (Sunday 20 November) one would think that interaction with the citizens might be of interest. But in all honesty, this might be from the Socialist Party since it is not the office of the Prime minister that is active in an election campaign.

I did have my hopes up about the Nordic prime ministers, we’re after all know as being forerunners of the civic inclusive society; small countries with a flat administration and early adopters when it comes to technology, surely there in the high North we would have seen the light – but alas, Norway and Denmark is a desert when it comes to social media.  There were a few blogs found on the Swedish PM home page but no links to Twitter nor to Facebook. Although there is the possibility to send a mail to the PM’s office. And at least in Sweden public officials are legally bound to answer any communication from a citizen.

The Finnish government is a light in the dark – they even have a page called Government and the social media

France – interesting enough the first link that came up in my search was to Priceminister, but the French Prime Minister isn’t tweeting. Although they do have a good social media approach and the eager user can download various apps which helps the office of the Prime Minister to push information.

In Poland the Prime Minister is tweeting and rather intensely too. Estonia has a tweeting Prime Minister but only over 300 tweets. Latvia is interesting, the PM is tweeting and as far as I can understand interacts with the readership (at least re-tweeting other tweets). The neighbour Lithuania tweets but shows only little over 600 tweets.

In a sense I can see why a government can be hesitant to use e.g. Twitter as a way to communicate. Even if the information we publish on Twitter belongs to us, we have given Twitter the right to use this material pretty much as it chooses. And therein lies the age-old conflict between being public and open and (private) censorship. While I do believe that any government by default can release much more information than currently is the case I do realise that the fact that you don’t know where the released information will end up and how it be used can be a difficult question to manage [for a government]. But with a smart Social media policy this might  be solved. While I overall find it’s better to communicate than not to communicate I realise that some national questions are of concern for national security and can’t be e.g. tweeted about.

But I am nevertheless convinced that a public leader that is smart about Social Media and considers it as a way to interact with its constituencies – and I mean interact – not just push information will win in the long run. And what more if the public leader really listens and adapt and adopt while not loosing sight of hers/his ideological beliefs  s/he might also be considered as a great leader.

True listening tends to do that with you.