BRUSSELS – 6 DECEMBER 2018 – Following the Home Affairs Council approval of the Regulation “on preventing the dissemination of terrorist content online” and the decision to include Enterprise Cloud Providers in the scope, BSA | The Software Alliance highlights the risks of this “one-size fits all” approach for the European digital economy. Such an approach with a broad definition of “hosting service providers” fails to adequately take into account the fact that different types of services merit different rules. A future EU framework centered around a horizontal approach to the removal of terrorist content online risks negatively impacting the European enterprise cloud economy.

Thomas Boué, Director General – Policy, EMEA said: “BSA supports the efforts of the EU institutions to tackle the propagation of terrorist content online and recognise that online platforms have important responsibilities to improve the effectiveness of this fight. However, including Enterprise Cloud Providers that purely provide business-to-business cloud services, do not share content to the general public, and do not have unfettered control of and access to the content of their customers’ data is the equivalent of cracking a nut with a sledgehammer. For such Enterprise Cloud Providers, blocking and removing specific content would in many cases require them to take down entire services. This “one-size-fits-all” approach undermines the prerequisite trust, privacy, and data protection standards and sends the wrong signal at a time when the EU has shown leadership with the GDPR.”