The topic of the plenary session for the last IETF 101 in London was about "The Future of Internet Access", or how community networks, spectrum regulation and satellite links can enable the remaining 50% of the global population in developing their own network infrastructures.
As part of the WP4, studying the legal framework of the community network and actors interacting with them, netCommons publishes short legal practice guides.
The first guide, written in collaboration with La Quadrature du net, is about French law. It aims to offer synthetic and human readable guidelines for organisations providing an open access to the Internet (such as Library or Internet Cafe).
It explains, in French, how these organisations should understand their legal obligations regarding data rentention, data processing and net neutrality.
Dagstuhl Seminars are international meetings for researchers and scientists that meet in an informal way to share their vision on a specific research theme, and open the way to new research fields. As the Schloss Dagstuhl website reports a seminar "is organized by at most four organizers, established leaders in their field, representing the different communities invited to the Seminar, preferably from different institutions. Dagstuhl invites on their behalf about 35 to 45 researchers of international standing from academia and industry, among them promising young researchers.
As it happened in 2016, in November 2017 about 20 people of the ninux community gathered, this year in the city of Bologna, to discuss about the state of the network and of the community. According to the participants the community is more or less stable, with some new islands (that's the way ninux communities are called) that are growing in the center-South of Italy, and some other ones, especially in the North that struggle to pass from one-man project to real communities.
Dear all, the recent days Catalonia is (in my opinion) under a defacto state of siege. You may have heard that today the 1-O referendum in Catalonia is ongoing. 73% of electoral offices were open this morning despite the blockade from prosecutors, judges and the charges from police forces. There are very long queues to vote. Meanwhile the "guardia civil", a military police, together with the riot police, have entered in large groups to some of the electoral offices to seize the ballot boxes and papers. As a result of the police charges to peaceful people, about 500 people so far have suffered injuries (you can find in the media sad images of the police charges) ...
In February, European Community Networks (CNs) and supporting organisations have expressed their concerns about the upcoming “European Electronic Communications Code” in an open letter sent to EU policy-makers.
The European Parliament will soon have two major opportunities to address these concerns.
The SIF, today May 17 and 18 is an international forum for in-depth dialogue and discussions on how a free, open and secure internet promotes human rights and development worldwide.
On March 17th, the Industry committee of the European Parliament (ITRE) – responsible for assessing the proposed Code – has issued its draft report, which will contain the main amendments that will be discussed by the whole Parliament in few months.
Until April 4th, members of the ITRE committee may propose further amendments to this report. Such additional amendments will be necessary given that, in its current state, the draft report is even worse than the initial proposal, aggravating the gap between small operators and incumbents, extending to 30 years the duration of radio spectrum rights and removing the initial provisions in favor of the open spectrum. Its sole merit is to remove the administrative fees for small operators.
UPDATE:
The consultation is now closed and a joint press release is published on March 16th, 2017. Help us to spread the word!
After many discussions with many European Community Networks (CNs), researchers from netCommons are happy to present a draft open letter on "policy recommendations for sustaining Community Networks".
The Internet Governance Forum 2016 was this year in Guadalajara, Mexico, on December 5-9 2016. There were lots of events: pre-events, post-events, lots of conferences, workshops, booths, tents, side-meetings, parties. netCommons was there and participated in many events through Roger Baig and Leandro Navarro (guifi.net and UPC).
Co-Funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union Grant Number 688768