a GAFA lobby victory, really?

"Sad Day for Cultural Independence and the Press in Europe: The European Parliament has fallen prey to the GAFA propaganda. It is a "cultural Munich". » MEP Jean-Marie Cavada, one of the most ardent proponents of the draft European directive on copyright, which suffered a clear setback on Thursday 4 July in the European Parliament, did not mince his words after the vote . He was not the only one. "Google pays for Europe" wrote the Adami (artists, musicians and performers) in a statement, while the SACD (authors and composers) denounced a "insane and unprecedented lobbying made of lies, cartoons and threats ".

Was the result of the vote in Parliament, as the representatives of the music industry insist, mainly the result of a lobbying campaign? The reality is more complex

Fancy Figures

First, while the GAFAs (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) lobbied this directive, they were not the only ones. "There has been a significant lobbying effort over the last few weeks on the text, both by Silicon Valley companies and rights holders " notes Olivier Hoedeman, researcher for the NGO Corporate Europe Observatory, which follows the influence of the lobbies in Brussels. But there was also an online campaign, with petitions, appeals and letters to MPs, which was, as far as I can tell, authentically done by citizens.

It is also one of the key arguments used by the GAFA and their representatives: "This debate clearly required a strong mobilization of digital platforms" recognizes Siada El Ramly, CEO of Edima, the European lobby of the big digital platforms. "But if you look at one side, you also have to look at the other side: rights holders have also spent a lot, attracting the support of many celebrities and artists, in the European Parliament and in the media. In France, a collective of seventy artists had published, on the eve of the vote, a remarkable platform in Le Monde, to put forward their arguments in favor of the text.

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The scale of the campaign led by the GAFA was real, Hoedeman believes, but should be put into perspective. "An erroneous report from the British music industry, which has circulated a lot online in recent days, claimed that Google had spent 31 million euros to influence this vote: it's just wrong. Google's annual lobbying budget in Brussels was 5.5 million euros in 2016; the figure has certainly increased since then, but covers all their expenses on all subjects. And according to our observations, Google is doing much more lobbying on other texts, including the future directive e-privacy [qui prévoit de nouvelles règles contraignantes sur le respect de la vie privée] on copyright. This does not mean that Google does not lobby, and that it is not problematic, but it can not be said that the hundreds of thousands of people who participated in the online campaign were simply manipulated.

A motley coalition of opponents

Opponents of the directive formed a heterogeneous coalition: there were indeed the giants of the Net, Google in the lead, but also very many badociations for the defense of freedoms, founding figures of the Web, some national versions of Wikipedia … So many groups that also oppose many topics.

In France, the Quadrature du Net, which called to vote "no" to the directive, is the one of the most critical badociations of Google and Facebook. This unusual team, described by the SACD as the alliance "the big commercial platforms of the Internet and libertarians of the Net" conducted separate campaigns, with very different tools – professional lobbyists for the giants of the Net, campaigns "in the field", encouraging citizens to contact their elected representatives for badociations.

In the minds of some advocates of the text, these two groups have sometimes been amalgamated – in a " foolish alliance of libertarian anarchists and GAFA " as described for example Deputy Director General of the National Film Center (CNC), Christophe Tardieu .

For his part, Denis Bouchez, director of the Syndicate of the French national daily press (SPQN, of which belongs Le Monde ) sees in this vote the result of a "enormous lobbying GAFA, which is almost a denial of democracy when it comes to polluting MPs' e-mail boxes with thousands of messages ". Yet most of the e-mails received by MPs came from anti-text campaigns led by badociations, not GAFA.

Media representatives may have been particularly scared on the issue of lobbying GAFA because the Web giants were very strongly opposed to Article 11, which required the platforms to pay for the use of news articles, including in the form of links. A legal evolution considered very complex – and expensive – to set up for large platforms, and which had been the object of a notorious lobbying: the press publishers belonging to the fund Digital News Initiative (DNI), in which Google funds media projects, had received, in late June, an email detailing the reasons for the opposition of the Web giant to the directive. "The goal of the DNI working group is to exchange our views and improve collaboration between the newspaper industry and Google" Google had defended itself, after the media protests.