E-privacy Reguation draft rejected by EU Council committee. In 2020 the EU will have to choose between re-drafting or withdrawal.

Last Friday, the Council’s position on a draft ePrivacy Regulation was rejected by the Permanent Representatives Committee of the Council of the European Union (COREPER). This is a significant setback for the European lawmaker, as the ePrivacy Regulation is in the making for many years and should complement the GDPR on crucial topics such as cookies and unsolicited commercial advertising. A revised proposal for the new ePrivacy Regulation was issued by the Finnish presidency for review on 15 November with the aim to get it through to the European Commission meeting of 3 December 2019. However, too many Member State representatives have rejected the proposal. In 2020, the Commission, under respectively Croatian and German presidency, will have the choice to either withdraw the entire proposal, or to re-draft the proposal in a new attempt to get sufficient support for is. In practice this means that the rules in the EU around cookies and spam will remain a patchwork of national laws implementing the ePrivacy directive and that companies will have to check their compliance on a country-by-country basis.