‘What is illegal offline should be illegal online’ has been the EU’s guiding concept in regulating the internet. Yet, politicians and experts continue to question whether ending online anonymity is the missing step towards reaching this ideal.
The debate, which first erupted during the negotiations on the EU’s Digital Services Act, resurfaced at the French National Assembly on 19 September as a special commission was reviewing a government bill to “secure and regulate the digital space”.
“It is not possible to live in an [online] world where, because everyone feels anonymous, a sense of widespread impunity prevails”, wrote Paul Midy, the rapporteur for the bill who pushed for an end of anonymity.
Midy was trying to take stock of the violent riots in France in late June, which showed how unprepared the French policepeople were to track online leaders calling for destructive actions.
Midy belongs to the Renaissance party (Renew Europe), whose colleagues opposed such a provision during the DSA negotiations in 2021, and Midy eventually withdrew his amendment after facing strong opposition from his colleagues.
Use of VPNs
Looking at the same bill, two groups of French MPs suggested amendments to restrict the use of VPNs (virtual private networks), which allow to securely and anonymously navigate the internet.
On 15 September, Mounir Belhamiti led a group of 27 Renaissance MPs suggesting a ban on the use of VPNs.
On 30 September, 28 MPs from the centre-right Horizons tabled an amendment to forbid the download of VPNs on application stores (such as the Apple App Store or Samsung Galaxy Store)
Their arguments were similar: the use of VPNs prevents judicial services from identifying social media users responsible for illegal behaviours, which leads to a discrepancy between offline and online application of the rule of law.
Yet, Jérôme Notin, director of Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr, a French authority working on cyber-awareness and providing assistance to cyber victims, specifically explained that preventing the use of VPNs was dangerous in terms of cybersecurity.
MP Philippe Latombe from MoDem (affiliated with Renew Europe) told Euractiv the last tabled amendment was “stupid, useless, technically unfeasible, dangerous, and off-topic”.
He said VPNs can be downloaded out of application stores and stressed that “anonymity on the internet is not equal to impunity”.
To exemplify this, he quoted the French Pharos system, which allows users to flag illegal content on the internet to the French police.
In Latombe’s view, police investigators should be the only people able to identify online users guilty of illegal behaviours online.
MPs from La France Insoumise (The Left) published an open letter on 4 October calling the push to end anonymity online contradictory to the EU laws and the European Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Eventually, Belhamiti withdrew his amendment, while the Horizons’s one will soon be debated in plenary.
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Pseudonymity
The anonymity debate is frequently linked to pseudonymity. Midy wrote in his justification that his “principle is to allow pseudonymity, but to limit anonymity in the digital space, just as in the physical world”.
The rapporteur therefore suggested creating a certified procedure linking social media accounts with governmental identification platforms (like FranceIdentité).
Yet, this argument raises the same privacy concerns quoted before.
Aurélien Taché, a Green MP, told Euractiv that Midy’s pseudonymisation suggestion would be “a significant loophole” in citizens’ fundamental freedoms, explaining that “the government should not monitor anything done by its citizens in real-time”.
Working on the European Digital Wallet regulation, Mikuláš Peksa, a member of the European Parliament from the Pirates Party (Greens affiliated), told Euractiv pseudonymisation was a concern for his party as well.
He said that “the pseudonymisation foreseen in the text can be easily reverse-engineered and is therefore not real pseudonymisation”, voicing concerns about infringements of citizens online fundamental rights.
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[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]
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Source: euractiv.com
