European institutions concluded a new dossier in the single digital market strategy on cross-border portability. Speaking on Twitter, the Maltese Presidency of the Council of the EU announced that representatives from the Parliament, Council and Commission reached an agreement on this draft regulation on Tuesday 7 February.
The aim of this text is to enable European users who temporally travel to another member state to continue accessing the online services they normally have access to (such as music, games, films or sports fixtures). Overall, the three institutions are almost all on the same wavelength: they want to prevent any irregular use occurring, whilst respecting the personal data protection principle.
During a Coreper meeting on 1 February, which was due to prepare the mandate of the Maltese Presidency, the latter indicated that, “an agreement should not be ruled out during the trialogue meeting on 7 February”.
According to the information we have received, the discussions from this second trialogue meeting are expected to concentrate on two areas: the definition of the country of residency and means of verification of the latter available to the service provider. In the first area, Parliament decided to define the country of residence as the member state in which the subscriber has their usual residency, whilst the Council is insisting on the “effective and stable” link that the subscriber maintains with their country of residency to which they “regularly return”. In the second area, the co-legislators agree overall on leaving a certain margin of manoeuvre open to service providers when they verify the country of residency of their subscribers. Parliament’s mandate (see EUROPE 11678) and that of the Council (see EUROPE 11559) define a list of criteria from which providers can draw: that of Parliament contains eight criteria (such as banking details and the location of the decoding installation), whereas that of the Council contains ten of them (additional criteria based on a declaration by the subscriber or evidence of inclusion on local electoral lists). The two institutions support IP address verification and Parliament supports “random controls… without geolocation or subscriber tracking”. The Council prefers “periodic” verification.
During the trialogue meeting, the three institutions are also expected to define the period after which the regulation should be applied in full. The Commission suggested six months, whilst the Council and Parliament would like a longer period to allow service providers the time to adapt. The negotiators might therefore opt for an intermediate solution, in this case, nine months. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)