From PC World:
After months of often bitter debate, European Union lawmakers reached agreement on how to preserve citizen’s rights to Internet access in a meeting that ended in the early hours of Thursday morning.
The issue, which pits citizens’ civil liberties against the rights of content owners such as record and movie companies to protect creative works on the Internet, has blocked the passage of a wide range of laws collectively dubbed the telecoms package. . .
. . . The text of the telecoms package now contains a new Internet freedom provision that states that access to the Internet is a human right of every E.U. citizen, and that if authorities take away that right people must have the opportunity to defend themselves; citizens also have an automatic right to mount a legal challenge.
However, the text does not demand that authorities in the 27 countries of the E.U. obtain a court order before cutting off someone’s Internet connection, as the European Parliament demanded when it last voted on the issue in early summer.