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The Europe roundup: "Internet is freedom": Lawrence Lessig at the Italian Chamber of Deputies

Antonella Napolitano | March 12, 2010 - 4:53am | 1 comment | Email This!
  • Italy | "Internet is freedom": Lawrence Lessig at the Chamber of Deputies
    There were high expectations for Lawrence Lessig's lecture at the Chamber of Deputies yesterday afternoon during the event "Internet is freedom". Some days before, the organizers asked people to tweet about the theme of the conference: the chosen hashtag was #difenderelarete, a reference to some recent bills attempting to limitate freedom of expression on the web. There were thousands of tweets and even more during the speech, making the topic the most popular of the day in Italy.
    But, apparently, mainstream media still don't get it: the lecture was preceded by a speech of the President of the Chamber, praising the Internet as a force of peace and innovation, and that is the only part of the conference that has made it to the news so far.

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The Europe roundup: Is transparency compatible with “robots.txt”?

Antonella Napolitano | March 1, 2010 - 6:31am | Email This!
  • Italy | Is transparency compatible with “robots.txt”?
    PDF friends David Osimo and Alberto Cottica point us out a story from Italy about a “transparency project” launched by the Italian government.
    The initiative, launched some time ago, aimed at publishing relevant information about civil servants, such as paycheck and days of absence. But, as this article points out, most part of this data (including those about the ministry itself) has been published in a directory which is not possible to reach by search engines – using the robots.txt file with “disallow:/operazionetrasparenza/”.
    Here’s David’s take on the story: “The implication is that searching with google the name of a person, you will not find these data. You will have to know that the person is employed by a public administration, and visit the website and check the name. This is obviously limiting the real transparency of the public data.
    I assume the excuse is related to privacy: there are different privacy implications if a personal information is searchable or not. This is an important matter, which I would like to understand better. Yet in this case it appears as an excuse. Real transparency needs machine-readable data, and using robots.txt is a clear contradiction of the principle of transparency."
    Plus, David has another point to make: why is transparency applied first of all to (against) public sector workers and their behaviour instead on how the P.A. spend public money?

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The Europe roundup: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Antonella Napolitano | February 26, 2010 - 6:02am | Email This!
  • E.U. | Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition
    Last week a document on Internet policy has been realeased by the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council. The document addresses Member States about illegal activities and how to fight them, but there seem to be a little confusion: copyright infringments, racist speech and child pornography are all together in the "Internet frame". A way to justify the imposition of Internet filtering?
    Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of the advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, has very strong words on the issue, defining the document 'disturbing'.

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