The internet is #MoreThanFour – our laws should reflect that.
The Open Internet is at a crossroads in Europe. With the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, the EU has an opportunity to create laws that make the internet a safer and healthier place and a more competitive environment for companies of all sizes. We’re concerned that these laws are shaping up to make the largest and most powerful companies even larger and more powerful. Read on to see our eight principles for effective and fair lawmaking.
Photo by William Fortunato from Pexels
Our Principles
1
Regional & Global Regulatory Alignment
There should be one, global, open Internet. The Open Internet Alliance advocates for regional and global regulatory alignment to avoid disparate national laws and different consumer experiences.
2
Non-Binary Content Regulation
The Open Internet Alliance supports a regulatory conversation that addresses content discovery and amplification, rather than upholding a binary model of maintaining or deleting content. The latter only benefits the largest companies.
3
Consumer Choice & Transparency
The Open Internet Alliance stands for algorithmic transparency, greater insight into the consumer experience and the empowerment of consumers with the ability to better control relevant algorithms.
4
Effective Competition
Regulatory approaches to content moderation, data localisation, consumer privacy, copyright, or other measures can act to entrench monopolies and permit anti-competitive practices. We prefer a competitive environment without significant barriers to entry.
5
Intermediary Liability Protection
The Open Internet promotes diversity, competition and innovation, which requires policymakers to commit to intermediary liability protections.
6
Net Neutrality
The Open Internet Alliance fully supports net neutrality protections and condemns any form of blocking, slowing down Internet speeds, and engaging in the development of discriminatory fast and slow lanes on the Internet.
7
Decentralisation
The future of the internet should be built around open APIs and consumer-empowering features such as decentralised, public protocols on which various interface providers can build new services.
8
Interoperability
The Open Internet thrives because of its open architecture, with interoperability between platforms, universal consistency and transparent standards, and consumer choice. Open architectures, done properly, do not lock-in consumers on a particular platform.