The Romanian Presidency summarised the work of the EU Council on the draft regulation on the confidentiality of electronic communications in barely four pages. It will submit this progress report to the European Telecommunications Ministers on 7 June.
The document, published by the American website Politico, therefore contains no surprises. It merely recalled that work on this text, which addresses the issue of Internet cookies and also covers bypass services such as Skype, was started in the EU Council under the Maltese Presidency in 2017 and that, despite nine meetings of the working party and four draft compromises, no solution could be found under the current Romanian Presidency.
The progress report generally addresses four issues: interaction with new technologies (Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communications, artificial intelligence), the fight against child pornography, data retention and the degree of autonomy of the Member States.
The fight against child pornography appeared relatively late, at the request of Germany, the United Kingdom and Ireland. "Although the idea of addressing this issue at EU level is welcomed, delegations expressed divergent views on whether and how to do so in the data confidentiality proposal", the progress report states. It specifies that some Member States want to include a specific derogation from the Principle of Consent in Article 6 (processing of data and metadata) to replace the legal basis of legitimate interest, while others consider that "this issue could be better addressed in a separate legal act in the context of Article 11 on restrictions".
The problem of data retention is older. Many Member States would indeed like to use this text to codify the issue of data retention after the judgment of the Court of Justice prohibiting mass surveillance (judgment C-203/15, known as Télé2). (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)