 So I'm happy to introduce you to Thomas Leninga. Thomas Leninga is the executive director at an NGO in Vienna called EpiCenter that works. He's also very committed to net neutrality and he's working on the topic at various institutions like the Modzila Foundation, like in Stanford. And today his talk is about standing up and acting, which is kind of the wet thread that we have for this morning talks. So well, Tom, I leave you to it. Thank you Nina. Thank you everybody for being here on this Sunday morning. My talk is going to be about the digital rights debates that are ahead of us in the next five years in the starting European legislative term. But I'm also going to look backwards and particularly about meaningful ways of making a difference for people in the FOSC community, companies in particular. So first something about the organization that I'm representing, EpiCenter Works, was formally founded as the working group on data retention and I'm going to talk more about that historic fight in a minute. But right now, although we started off as a small group of volunteers without any budget, we are now a team of 10 people with an office in Vienna and we are working half-half. 50% our energy goes on the European level and 50% on national dossiers in Austria, Germany, France. And we are quite general digital rights organizations. We work a lot on privacy surveillance, net neutrality, copyright, basically wherever shit is burning and you need somebody to make a difference and to tell politicians that they should do the right thing and respect fundamental rights. The Charter of Fundamental Rights is basically the founding document that we are striving for and we don't need a digital charter, we don't need any new fundamental rights if we would only just respect and enforce the rights that we have. We could solve most of the problems of the digital age. So but first let's start with a brief introduction. What is net politics or net's politics is it called in German? You could summarize it as basically politics trying to influence the internet or digital technologies but it is a circular thing because the internet and technologies are at this point also very much influencing the way our democracy works. You see this in the negative way with Brexit and Trump and all of the things that the news feed is making happening in democracies these days. Also the election of Obama at one point should be summarized as something that would not have happened without the internet. But then there are also more decentralized ways of looking at it. For example, deliberative or participatory democracy models also heavily rely on the internet and as Cori Doctoral put it, you might think that climate change right now is the most important issue and it is. But yet without a strong free and open internet we lack the infrastructure to tackle global problems like this that can only be solved with global collaboration. And just on a very abstract level and we'll come back to that list later. What are the ways particularly for companies to have a meaningful impact in these debates? Very simple one is respond to consultations. May they be from your parliament, from European institutions, from regulators, there are many ways in which officials are already asking the general public for input. And the most voices that you hear in these debates are NGOs like ours, big industry associations, trade associations, other companies or public bodies, but very little SMEs, small companies, particularly forced companies are often not represented in this first step of deliberative, taking stock of the opinions out there. Secondly, of course, having an open letter or a letter that you just signed as your own company but making it open, having more companies sign on as a very good tool to actually put attention on a particular issue, that's not something you start with. But when you're close to the final vote, when you're close to the decision you want to influence, then such an open letter is a very sharp and pointed way to get your message across. Thirdly, of course, blog posts, educating the general public, you all have a peer group, you all have volunteers that you work with, letting them know how a particular political decision can influence the reality which they also experience is a very meaningful way to make a difference. In the copyright debate, it was YouTubers advocating their people via their mediums, so it doesn't need to be a blog post and text. It can be a TikTok video or whatever means you have to educate people. The fourth point is something where I put a question sign because I'm actually against it, but it is a one-way to make a meaningful difference, running your own online campaign. This is something that we've done several times and several types of those years. But at the end, it's better to let NGOs, civil society, or any non-profit entity run campaigns, and I'm going to come up with examples later. What is a very meaningful way of interacting and supporting existing campaigns? So linking to them, having page peels and stuff like that, that is actually a nice way to emphasize and amplify the campaigns that are already out there. Talking with politicians, of course, you can do that. You can send an email that's the lowest point, or you can have a physical meeting. A call is somewhere in between. But there are many types of politicians that I, as a NGO person, arguing with fundamental rights will never convince. But they might be convinced with local companies telling them this is bad for jobs. We actually rely on net neutrality to compete with Google. These types of messages can convince politicians that will be very resilient to even meet with me. So be aware that you have actually a quite strong voice even in front of people that you might never vote for. And lastly, of course, that's the obvious point. You can always donate to civil society. There are many good NGOs out there. And finding the one that has made the most impact, the decision here should always be which NGO really had the most impact, and not who is the loudest, who has the people that I personally know the most, but really who has delivered on their promises, who has actually made a meaningful impact in legislation. Past examples are briefly, because time is short, want to give you an overview about the past seven and a half years of campaigning that we've done. And we're going to start with data retention. That of course is working group on data retention was our founding topic and our primary and sole goal to kill data retention in Europe and Austria. We started with a petition that was the first petition that you can sign online on the parliament's website. And you could also mail us a sheet of paper with a few signatures. And in order to be online on the parliament's website back then, you had to have 500 signatures in paper. So we said, okay, we need at least four months to get these 500 signatures. Within a day we had 100, within a week we had 500, and within the first few months post was delivered like that. And we had letters with sheets of paper with one signature from somebody from some mountain village in Austria who was born 1948, but he cared enough about data retention. And it was another magical thing happening that I experienced in every successful campaign that I've ever run. We put on this website with the text for the petition, with the sheets you could print out as collected signatures. And within a few weeks, people that we've never met went to cities where we've never been from door to door and collected signatures. With every successful campaign, if your message is strong and stringent enough, people will pick it up and they will make it their own. And they will do stuff with it that you could never have imagined. And this point of losing control, control fellows, that is when you start to become successful and broad with every political moment. At the end we had 106,067 signatures in total. And one of the major driving forces for the strong online success that we had was Guidesize RT. It's a price comparison website that I think recently has been acquired by Heizer and they had this nice page peel at the top of their website. And it actually helped us a lot and drove a lot of traffic to us. Yeah, of course, then data retention went into force, 1st of April, 2013, and immediately we took on to the next phase of the campaign and went to the constitutional court to sue against this law. This time it was even harder. You had to fill in an online form, print a PDF, sign it and mail it to us. Still 11,000 people did that. Moving fast forward, the European High Court, CJU, for the first time in its history annulled a complete European law and the directive was completely struck from the legal books in 2014. Subsequently also it was annulled in Austria and that's us celebrating. I'm not going to go back to details. This is the original judgment and you can see here a person called Michael Zeitlinger, just a private person, suing against this law that was actually the chief of legal from Telekom Austria, the biggest ISP in Austria. And he sued against it from a totally different angle as somebody who was working in a company that is surveilling himself because the law also obliges them to of course spy on employees. Data retention means you spy on everybody. So he had a totally different angle and that added to the structure of the case. It was not a final nail in a coffin but still it was a meaningful way to have an impact. So even as an employee in a big company, you can make a difference. Not a nice competitive run was against a package of legislation, the government called it a security package, we called it a surveillance package that was two governments before in Austria, before the right wing populist took a collision with the conservatives. And you had a collection of measures and I'm only showing this because of this slide. With every campaign you have to be very clear about your theory of change. What is the outcome you're actually trying to work towards? What is the ultimate end goal? How do you know that you've won? Once you've established that, then you have to go down the chain. Who is actually in control of making that decision? Who has to do the right thing for me to be successful? And then you go one, two, three hops more. So what are the circumstances? How we could make this politician do the right thing? How can we influence work towards these circumstances? And back at this point we already were very successful in getting mainstream attention. So we were in the media every week, even mainstream television channels brought reports about us, but it was a time of government crisis and these laws were already in consultation. And so we campaigned the consultation because many NGOs, when they are against something, what they do is they just have an online petition. And you sign the petition, then you're part of something, you're part of a number of people, but it actually nobody cares. At this point you have people like Kampacht or Avast that have millions of people that can make signed petitions, so the petition itself becomes meaningless. Other tools of engagement are far more effective and this one was, okay, you actually have a multiple choice. I'm against government spyware, data retention, IMSI catches, and I just collect those. And we create a full consultation response that's legally structured, that gives you detailed arguments based on fundamental rights, why you are against it. People can of course change that text, but within a few clicks they have an official consultation response on the parliament's website. And that led to the situation of this becoming the most successful quantitative consultation ever in the history of Austria, so we had the quantitative success. But what about the qualitative success? It was not just a few thousand consultation responses that we drove, we had organizations like the Chamber of Workers, the Red Cross, MST International also siding with us. So we then went through all of these thousands of consultation responses and get the money quotes, the strongest quotes from all of these big institutions, and then hand selected them from the website. What happened, mainstream media, all television channels first reported about this consultation and then hand select and only brought those quotes that were hand selected by us. So with the qualitative response we controlled the narrative and finally could prevent the adoption of this legislation in 2017. This example is net neutrality that is a two and a half year long campaign that we ran from 2013 to 2016. And we followed the legislative dossier from the parliament to the council to trial look and then to regulatory implementation. So it was really a huge chunk of my life, honestly. And yeah, one meaningful way how to make a difference was faxes here. I'm going to talk more about that later when we talk about copyright. But what was really fun was that we had the support of Mozilla, Firefox linked to us on the start page of Firefox and that drove a lot of traffic. Ultimately we reached half a million comments in the final debate in 2016 about the Barrack guidelines. So that was the last step where we could get net neutrality on the right side. And again, it was the support of big companies like that. They didn't run the campaign. It was a campaign that was already established years ago and it was the focus point of all civil society work on that. But they could link to us. They could just say, okay, these guys are doing the right thing. You can help there. And that was enormously helpful to drive traffic and to also get the attention of regulators. Another business association that did help us a lot was startups for net neutrality. It was founded by some Dutch people and had, I think, over 300 startups in Europe that were for net neutrality. And again, it's not a charity thing. It's in their business interest. Because who will get paid prioritization? Who will be zero rated? It's not going to be a decentralized FOSRUN service. So I know everybody is short on time and there are always more important things to do. But at least tripping in 2 or 5% of your time to the fights where with a low hanging fruit effort you can make a big difference, I think is a very meaningful tool. And then of course we had open letter from civil society from a few hundred academics and if you're a bad company then you might get trolled on your annual shareholder gathering by me that's 2017 at Deutsche Telekom. The talk is on YouTube. If you look for my name and stream on and we also had a demonstration outside of Bonn, which was fun because there are never demonstrations in Bonn. Coming to the most recent and biggest fight, copyright. The European Copyright Directive was heavily influential in many of the next decades. I can tell you that with this law we will have to fight a lot because now this directive will be transposed in all European member states. And we have two main problems with that. First is upload filters, article 13 formally now 17, which basically mandates every platform that's older than 3 years and that has large amounts of user generated content to implement upload filters. At least once you have one or two letters from a rights holder you have to establish technical means to prevent the further upload of the same works and that puts you a lot of many technical problems. The founder of the worldwide website in Berners-Lee criticised it as being technically unsound. The special rapporteur from the UN for freedom of expression said it goes against fundamental rights, but still it was adopted. Similarly, the link tax, a Leistung schutzrecht in Germany, a creation of German news publishers was also adopted. That means we soon have intellectual property on the news itself. Not the article, but stuff like Merkel meets Trump will soon be somebody's intellectual property. Because this sparked many debates, there were many campaigns. One of them was Save Your Internet, a campaign that was successful in some stages of the debate, but then also a big vulnerability of the anti-upload filter movement because it was run by C4C. And C4C is a business association in Brussels and among their supporters is Google. And as you can imagine, this campaign was heavily criticised. And via them as a proxy, the whole, everybody was against the upload filters that was paid by Google, that was the narrative. And what I take away from that is don't outsource campaigns to companies. That is something that we should really be in the hands of civil society or neutral actors. Mozilla also did a campaign which focused on creators, librarians, technologists to stand up against this law, but ultimately also drove very little traffic. And then at the end, we also had a campaign, Save The Internet.info, which had a petition which at this point even has more than 5 million signatures. Companies intervened here with many different letters, one of them coming from GitHub. They also were strongly advocating against upload filters, and those guys have a lot of potentially copyrighted code on their platform. And actually, they were a very meaningful voice in that debate. But sadly, then two things happened. First, they were bought by Microsoft. And from this point on, they couldn't say anything. And secondly, they got a carve-out. So open source cold sharing platforms are exempted from upload filters. So basically, everybody who could send a lobbyist to Brussels got their exception from upload filters. And everything that is not able to send a lobbyist or that's not yet invented will soon have to do upload filters. I'm going to skip over the very ugly debate. The parliament and the commission really didn't do themselves any favors with the way they reacted to this criticism. But it led to this very creative protest, particularly in Germany, Poland, and Netherlands, and Austria. We are no bots. We are voters. So there was a very strong message, particularly from young people, that they really don't like what politicians are doing with the internet. Similar to the climate movement, many of the big questions that we have to tackle are generational conflicts at this point. And so every politician should better listen to young people. And of course, then maybe that's the reason also why I was invited here. Next up really did the right thing at the right time by inviting, by setting up this open letter against Article 11 and 13 against unsellable copyright and upload filters, and got over 240 companies to sign it. And that was particularly helpful for people like me running through the hallways of the European Parliament because we could now say, look at all those competitors of Google. They are saying they will be hurt in their capacity to compete if you adopt this law. Google will be strengthened. And the small, local, European, privacy-friendly, and free and open companies, they're going to suffer from that. And that was a very strong message. Again, particularly with those politicians that don't care a lot about the fundamental rights, but they care about jobs. And so that was a very helpful point for us. And then quite close to the finish line, we created pledge2019.eu. Again, with that same slogan, we are not bots, we are voters. We combined the final vote in European Parliament with the European elections. That whole thing was set up in lightning speed. We had the decision in December to do this. And then development started in January with a team actually here in Berlin of a few people from different countries. And then we had one month of campaign. Keep that in mind. And at the end, you had two things that you could do. You could basically, as a politician, sign a pledge not to vote for upload filters. And as a citizen, you could call a politician. And why did we do calls here? I've shown you that we already built online tools to participate in consultations. We also influenced the Parliament with Faxes back in 2013-14. And we had like 40,000 Faxes that were delivered to the European Parliament. It was bad for the trees, but good for net neutrality at that time. But with every meaningful tool to reach the powerful and make them listen, they'll soon react and adopt. They are like the Borg. And so these days, Faxes no longer work. They are delivered to Outlook. And the same nasty spam filter reaches them as emails too. Particularly in these campaigns, emails were used in the first two stages of the debate. And then you had people like this CDU politician who said, oh, all those emails from Gmail addresses, this must be Google. So again, email was also not a very meaningful tool of engaging with the Parliament. Social media, likewise, can be discredited as bots. And so the only meaningful tool that we saw was telephone. But for the average nerd, it's probably the highest ask that you could have, pick up the phone, talk to another human being, particularly a politician that you don't know or haven't voted for. And so the total conversion rate from the hundreds of thousands of people that got to the site every day was around 1% to 2%. That actually did a call. So we had to find a way how to converge those 1% to 2%. And we created a multiplier. So if you call once, you can also sign up to weekly or daily calls with politicians. That really helped a lot with driving calls. And within this one month of campaign, what would you guess? How many hours of net of phone time with the Parliament did we have? Anybody's guess? 100,000 hours? No. No, there was a total of 168 hours. So we had a call duration of almost 24-7 within that one month. And we had support from not just us from a coalition of 17 NGOs from 13 countries that supported this campaign, a few international ones and a few local ones. And we translated the whole campaign in 12 languages. Mostly we were volunteers because we had no budget. And the algorithm that decided which politician you call was actually a quite sophisticated one because we, as you could see here in this graph, had the amount of MEPs, members of the European Parliament, per country, and then the average sway ability score. How likely it is that we'll convince them. And so we only give you MEPs from your country, but we had within that sample also the most swayable MEPs that haven't signed the pledge yet that you were meant to call. And ultimately, we also knew that we particularly need to focus on check because we have a high swayability there. And Italy, where we also had Wikipedia Blackout and the Wikipedia link to us, was also a focus point. So that was basically the starting point for the battle map for this campaign. And then we also had a tweet of Edward Snowden. We had banners on Reddit, Twitch, Pornhub, and several other sites. And so in total, we had many, many, many calls. And in a way, sad and proud to say as well, we did this campaign with a total budget of zero euros. So we didn't get any funding from no foundation, no company, nobody, and it was also too late for any applying for grants. We saw that this need to be done, and we did it. But if you like what we did, then you can support us in becoming a supporting member. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about the upcoming debates. I know I only have five minutes left, so I want to make this brief. But as somebody who's working closely on European issues and who's also on the board of Edgery, the European Umbrella Organization, I just want to briefly warn you as it's the habit of Packers riding the shockwave about the upcoming fights. The first thing that will hit us is the AI regulation. Incoming Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that within the first 100 days after she takes office, which will be first of November, the Commission will propose new legislation on regulating artificial intelligence. Nobody knows what this will mean. There isn't a sound policy proposal on how to regulate AI, what the AI really is, how you could prevent the worst without preventing the good or the innovation. So it's a big black box, and everybody's going to stay tuned about that. There will be consultations in the next months between November and February, and you could give your input there if you have an idea. I'm sure the Commission will be happy to hear it. One thing that will also be part of that proposal is language and legal protection for facial recognition. That's going to be interesting because there currently is no legal basis besides GDPR on how to regulate facial recognition. And if you think about suit culture, London, this is a very high-impact legislation. Second, that is the biggest debate that it will have for the next five years is platform regulation, the so-called Digital Service Act. So the reason why the internet has become so diverse and colorful and open is basically because if you have user-gerated content, you're exempt from liability. If somebody uploads something illegal and you don't know about it, you can't behold liable. That is a founding principle in every country around the world. In the US, it was started with the Communications Decency Act, and in Europe, it was soon also implemented with the e-commerce directive. And everywhere in the world, you'll find laws like that. But now, step-by-step, they're going to revoke those liability exemptions, those safe harbor protections, and the platform regulation debate will really encompass all of these debates, all of the privacy debates, all of the media lobby that we had against us in the copyright fight, and then all of the NGOs around women's rights, hate speech, anti-racism, and the alt-right. So basically, every fight, every debate in society where we disagree if somebody should be able to say something mixed in one pot steered and then you, global profiler in that company, please solve that. And we don't know if we'll end up with upload filters against hate speech or if nothing will change right now, everything is open. Then, stuff that we haven't solved in the last legislative turn is the privacy regulation that's basically about tracking online and offline. The do not track technical standard could be made mandatory with this law. This law is still stalled in council and we now have to fight to actually move it from there. We'll soon probably see it back in the parliament where we can have an impact. Another thing is the evidence. That's important if you are a host or somewhere in a European country, because the evidence basically breaks down all of the legal protections that you have between countries. So if this law passes in the way the commission and the council wanted, it could mean that the Hungarian prosecutor and Budapest could ask a German company to hand over data for crimes against the Hungarian state, which is a very flexible legal provision there. And here as a German company, we have no way to dispute that, no redress mechanism. You have to comply with orders from any other European country. So all of these nasty, slow things down for prosecutors, you could also call them the rule of law. This will go out the window if this directive is adopted. Final two things is the anti-terrorist regulation, the regulation on the dissemination of terrorist content online that again is upload filters. It is still in council and we'll see how the text goes out from there, but we could have another law on upload filters if this goes through. And finally, the most immediate thing is the net neutrality regulation that's going on in Europe that nobody knows about, seemingly. So all of the great rules that we fought for in 2016 are now up for renegotiation. And if you have any service online or any software that's around the central, you should really participate in the consultation of BEREC this October or November. So that is a very important focus point of the net neutrality debate in Europe. And what we need is the voices of companies that also say how their business model depends on the open and free internet. How they are not part of stream on and zero rated in Germany. How they don't get prioritization in 5G networks because they are a small decentralized service. How they are against their competitors becoming a specialized service because they think everybody should be equal on the open best effort internet. Arguments like these that we are happy to help you formulate would be very helpful in this debate. And this October and November is the final time window to make a difference about net neutrality in Europe. And then I also wanted to talk about business models that incorporate theory of changes like atmosphere and open free which they do like open data stuff with governments. Then we have privacy friendly messages. We have NextGuard and we have 350.org that is a campaign to divest from fossil fuels. But I have to skip over that because I'm already over time. And finally I just want to check over that list again. Whenever you see a consultation from a legislator and you can go to edu.org or epicenter.works to find out about them, participate in that even if it's just one paragraph. That will make a difference if it comes from a company or an engineer that knows what she or he is talking about. Support open ledgers or drafting yourselves if you really care about an issue. That's very low effort. You just have to give your name. And again 240 companies against upload filters. Be vocal in your community via a medium. Don't run your own campaigns but support existing campaigns and amplify them within your network. And ultimately talk with politicians. They are not biting for the most part and you can still have interesting conversations with them. And lastly support the NGO that does a great job from your site because in Europe we can really need more support because we are far too few people. Thank you. Thank you very much Thomas. So for the last lot of the schedule for this morning we are hosting a panel about how to improve diversity in open source, like real actions. So I'm very happy to welcome you all on stage. You can join. And Thomas, thank you very much for your talk. It was, it's really like this policy issue and the way to like take actions is really something that I think we all miss like in our usual daily activities. So thank you very much for that.