June 2016

The European Union and the United States signed a deal to protect personal data transferred across the Atlantic in a bid to fight crime and terrorism. The so-called umbrella agreement signed in the Dutch city of Amsterdam follows five years of talks hobbled by European concerns about revelations of large-scale US snooping. "It will improve cooperation between US and European law enforcement authorities when combatting serious crime and terrorism," Dutch Justice Minister Ard van der Steur said at a signing ceremony during the six-month Dutch presidency of the EU. "It will advance the full respect for fundamental rights whenever personal data is being transferred between us," he said at the ceremony with US Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The European parliament must still give its consent to the agreement which was signed after the United States adopted in February a prerequisite law granting EU citizens the right to judicial redress in the US. An EU statement said the umbrella agreement covers all personal information shared between EU member states and US law enforcement authorities in a bid to prevent, investigate, detect and prosecute criminal offences, including terrorism. The deal will not only facilitate law enforcement cooperation but guarantee the legality of data transfers, it added. Safeguards include setting clear limits on data use and requiring agencies to seek consent before data is transferred, it said.

[Commentary] The great 21st-century platforms — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, and the rest — have in 2016 found themselves in the middle of the speech wars. Twitter is struggling to contain vile trolling and harassment, and Facebook has gotten scalded on the little toe it dipped into curating journalism. They have run into trouble where the lines blur between their missions and the missions of the journalists, activists, and other citizens who use them. The platforms’ own missions are vast, and clear: They power social connection, free expression, and the distribution of news and entertainment on an unprecedented scale. But they largely don’t create speech themselves — most don’t have their own reporters or they generate their own content. And so their core mission can’t and won’t be realized by what they say, but rather in how they empower, constrain, and manage what other people say.

The trust we place in them is ultimately about whether we trust them to manage our own collective expression. For this trust to endure, these platforms must be transparent about their own policies and be consistent in their enforcement. Fortunately, experimenting platforms do not need to start from scratch. Lawyers and judges have spent centuries wrestling with similar questions surrounding free speech. Their answers can be deployed to defend the remarkable global public squares the platforms have created. We are not suggesting — as many have — that these services be regulated in the US as a public utility, making speech on it subject to certain guarantees. We are suggesting, however, that the platforms make a public commitment not just to opaque and ad hoc rules, but to time-honored principles and process. These private companies want and need the public trust. We hope they will commit to earning it.

[Nabiha Syed is the assistant general counsel of BuzzFeed. Ben Smith is the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed.]

[Commentary] After long and considered thought, I have decided that I refuse to spell “Internet” with a lowercase i, and I could care less that the Associated Press has decided otherwise. [Editor’s note: I, on the other hand, live in constant fear of AP style editors and will be adjusting Public Knowledge materials accordingly. Just not this one.] I realize that I’m on the wrong side of history here, that it is only a matter of time before the majority, then the predominant, then the unanimous choice is to name the global network in lowercase. But at least for me, the choice of capitalization is not just about orthographic trends. It is fundamentally about what the Internet is meant to be.

The AP’s decision to change the capitalization of “Internet” was just one entry into a debate that has run nearly as long as the Internet itself has existed. The primary arguments in favor of capitalization, other than longstanding tradition, are twofold: first, that the Internet is a specific noun referring to a single entity, thus meriting a capital initial; and second, that lowercase-internet identifies a generic type of technical network system, of which there may be many, as opposed to the uppercase-Internet, of which there is only one. Arguments, among others, for lowercasing the global Internet: that the network’s rapid growth has rendered it so ubiquitous as to be generic; and that capitalization is old-fashioned and pedantic — the “grammatical tyranny of the internet as a proper noun,” as the Verge put it. We’ve forgotten something important when we see the Internet merely as that loose collection of separate apps and services, rather than seeing the Internet as a phenomenon of interconnectedness. So to me, the choice between the internet and the Internet is not merely about typographic preference or popular fashion. It is about whether we keep seeing the Internet as that bustling marketplace of people and ideas, or whether the internet fades into the background, merely propping up the apps and social networks that dominate the view.