Three days in and European’s are taking this tragedy back to the political realm. First step: analyzing the vote breakdown.
We are now three days after European politicians voted to kill the free and open Internet. Already, we’ve seen citizens mourning the loss of the Internet. Additionally, legal uncertainty of a websites existence is growing across the continent.
Of course, one of the messages European’s had to politicians during this whole debate is the fact that they vote. It seems that politicians more or less called their voters bluff and decided to kill the Internet anyway. So, now the focus for European’s is who voted to kill the Internet? Figure out who did what. We’ve got all the data surrounding the vote here at Freezenet. First, we found people offering a visualization of the vote breakdown. Here’s the picture that was posted:
The picture does show German, but you can still find out who voted for the legislation. Anyone who has a green square next to their name voted in favour of killing the open Internet. Anyone with a red square voted to support free speech.
The people who supported Article 13 came from the Christian Democratic Union of Germany. The only exception to that is Hermann Winkler who did vote against the legislation. The other political party that supported the upload filter is the Christian Social Union in Bavaria. There are a few other names that popped up outside of those two parties that voted in favour of the censorship machines. Gabriele Preuss, Maria Heubuch, Helga Trupel, Hans-Olaf Henkwl, and Bernd Kolmel.
Another analysis has been posted by Julia Reda who tweeted out this image:
She offered this analysis as well:
How the political groups voted on #uploadfilters and the #linktax:
- @eppgroup overwhelmingly in favour
- @theprogressives & @aldegroup significantly in favour
- @GreensEP & @GUENGL overwhelmingly opposed
So, that offers some additional insight to the vote. After some research, we managed to dig up the official European vote breakdown (PDF). It’s a large PDF, but one can find the vote of the whole directive on page 52 of the document. That, of course, refers to A8-0245/2018. In there, you can find the last names and party affiliation of the MEPs voting in favour or against.
Those who are voting in favour of it are under the “+” heading (first section). Those who voted against are under the “-” heading (immediately after). The rest fall under the “0” category.
For those following this story from other sources, you might note that there was another vote to separate Article 11 and Article 13. That vote went down by 5 votes. Controversially, a number of Swedish MEPs accidentally voted against separating these directives out when they intended on voting the other way. If those corrections were respected, many argue that the vote would have gone the other way.
Well, the PDF also contains that vote in page 50. That information is presented in an identical manner as you would expect. It’s worth noting that the corrections are only shown at the bottom of the section. The people who intended on voting for separating the controversial components were Gerolf Annemans, Johannes Cornelis van Baalen, Dita Charanzová, Karima Delli, Martina Dlabajová, Nigel Farage, Antanas Guoga, Mike Hookem, Eva Joly, Jo Leinen, Peter Lundgren, Marlene Mizzi, and Kristina Winberg. Conversely, the people who intended on voting against this idea were Georgios Epitideios, James Nicholson, Marek Plura, and Marita Ulvskog.
At this point, what is crossing a lot of European’s minds is that if a politician voted to take away the free and open Internet, then voters have every intention of taking away their seat.
The question at this point in time is whether or not that anger and betrayal will still be present come election day. It’s tougher for citizens because so much can happen between now and election day. For businesses, it will be a lot easier because owners will always be reminded that their hopes and dreams are about to go down in flames.
Still, this is the information we have been able to gather. No doubt European’s will be able to use this when the time is right. It is, after all, all out in the open now.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
