Commissioner Thierry Breton took note of the continued impasse in the European Council. A new proposal will now be discussed in H1 2020 during the Croatian presidency.
Background: The proposed Euopean ePrivacy Regulation has been one of the most controversial pieces of recent legislation. The Regulation is intended to replace the ePrivacy Directive of 2002, which guarantees the secrecy of communications for citizens and limits the scope of what electronic communications service providers can do with communications data. The previous Commission tabled the proposal in January 2017; despite their resolve to pass it before the last European elections, strong disagreements between member states (and between Council and Parliament) led to a standstill. In October 2019, the Finnish presidency of the European Council made a new effort to reach an agreement; however, in November 2019 member states failed again to reach a common position, and only agreed on a progress report.
The new Commissioner will make a fresh proposal: The Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council has now met to discuss the ePrivacy proposal, among other matters. It was the first meeting attended by the new Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, who is also in charge of digital economy matters. During the meeting, Breton highlighted the need to urgently update the ePrivacy rules, and to complement the provisions of the GDPR. After several countries (Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and France, among others) called for a rework of the text, Breton took note of these positions and suggested that the Commission will have to take charge for a new proposal, to be discussed during the next presidency.
What next? Breton’s proposal means the Commission will now take some time to draft a new text, which will form the basis for the discussions during the next semester, when Croatia will take on the presidency of the Council. It is currently unclear how close the new text will be to the last one tabled by the Finnish presidency; in his press conference, Breton noted that “all options are still open”.
