European lawmakers are pressuring the European Commission to make environmental information from highly polluting data centres publicly available in upcoming rules, citing a deep-dive investigation by corporate watchdogs showing the EU executive is “copy-pasting” text suggested by Microsoft into upcoming regulations.
“It is one thing for Microsoft to seek to protect its interests; it is quite another for the Commission to incorporate its demands almost word for word into European law,” Greens/EFA lawmaker David Cormand (France) told Euronews, commenting on the report by the watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory and AlgorithmWatch.
In a recent letter addressed to Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswal, 35 Green and Socialist MEPs asked the EU executive to delete a Microsoft amendment and restore "full transparency" regarding the environmental impact of data centres.
The signatories argue that the EU executive's draft rules include text "almost word-for-word identical to wording suggested by the US tech company Microsoft and the lobby group DigitalEurope".
"It states that the Commission and the member states will keep all information on individual data centres confidential", reads the letter.
