Although we are distracted by daily news of crime (for instance, Oscar Pistorius) or sex (Jimmy Savile and others), we all know that there are more important developments changing our world. An example is the way the huge internet barons – Amazon, Google, Facebook – are altering our physical and virtual landscapes in a way that seems out of our control. Interestingly, the only tool which seems able to grapple with them is, of all things, EU law. Here are some examples from the areas of data protection and competition, which show that the battle ebbs and flows, and is not yet won.

First, data protection. There was a hearing a few days ago in a case involving Google and Spain before the European Court of Justice. Spain claims to have over 180 ‘right-to-be-forgotten’ cases involving Google. This case (C-131/12) is based on a complaint by a man who found a newspaper announcement on Google from several years earlier saying a property he owned was up for auction because of non-payment of social security contributions. Spain's data regulator asks whether EU citizens have to go to US courts to exercise their privacy rights, and whether Google ‘is responsible for the damage the diffusion of personal information can cause for citizens’. Google argues it should not have to erase lawful content which it did not create. The advocate-general will publish an opinion on June 25, with a ruling expected by the end of the year.

Then there is the EU data protection package, about which I wrote recently. I called it ‘Becoming excited about data protection’, and that was prescient, because the internet monsters have become very excited about it indeed. It has been called the most intense lobbying campaign ever of the European Parliament, with the monsters mounting overwhelming exercises. Someone has been tracking the effect of amendments from companies like Amazon and eBay, alleging that, among others, well-respected UK Conservative MEP, Malcom Harbour, took up to 25% of his proposed amendments directly from monsters’ briefings – a cut-and-paste-job effectively – which he has tried subsequently to justify. The future of our data protection will be decided in this legislation.

And finally the EU is worried about Google’s data collection policy, which was changed last year, allowing it to collect data from across all its properties, including Gmail and YouTube, into a single data store. Google is now to be summoned to explain why it has not yet satisfied EU concerns.

Second, competition. The EU’s competition authority is continuing to consider action against Google. The US Federal Trade Commission recently limply let off Google from the complaint that its search engine favours the company’s commerce and other services in search queries, so frustrating competition. But the EU is still looking at the same issue, and has the potential to impose a large fine. Different standards apply between the US (conduct can be justified in the name of efficiency) and the EU (where abuse of a dominant position is the test). Of course, this is partly the case of monsters fighting among themselves, since Microsoft is one of the complainants against Google.

If you tap ‘EU and Google’ into Google’s own search engine, you can find out much of this information. Thank you, Google. In fact, the monstrosity does not go all one way. Google’s own latest Transparency Report, released late in January, showed that requests by European governments for the browsing history, email communications, documents and IP addresses of Google's users have boomed over the last three years. Countries in the EU made 7,254 requests about 9,240 users or accounts between July and December 2012, averaging over 1,200 requests a month. This represents over a third of all requests made by governments worldwide over the period, and a 100% increase over the past three years. So the very governments which are clubbing together in the EU, supposedly to protect our interests against the monsters, are using the same monsters for their own interests.

If you tap ‘UK and Google’ into the same search engine, however, you can see only one substantive interaction. When ‘Don’t be evil’ Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, was told that the natives were restless in one of his minor colonies, the UK, about the fact that Google was paying less tax than might be expected, he effectively gave us the finger: ‘It’s called capitalism.’

My point is that the UK alone, through no fault of its own, is not in a position to look after us against the monsters. We have borders, they do not. Group action by a number of countries is obviously more effective. As we have seen, that is not a perfect solution. But I believe it is better than the alternative. If EU law does not save us from the monsters, nothing will.

Jonathan Goldsmith is secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents about one million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies. He blogs weekly for the Gazette on European affairs

The European budget discussions which ended just over a week ago might have left you puzzled as to whether EU funds impact lawyers. Do you benefit, and if so how? Here is a little insight into how a tiny part of the cash has been used to help the legal profession.

The European Commission is now building an online search facility, whereby citizens will be able to look for lawyers in other member states in their own language. So, if you are a Hungarian-speaking personal injury solicitor, and a citizen of Hungary who does not speak English trips over while on holiday in your town, that citizen will be able to find you for the purposes of making a claim. (Actually, if you are a solicitor, this might not apply to you – see below.) Obviously, although not intended to be a professional tool, the facility can also help lawyers find lawyers in other member states, to help with local work.

The search engine is based on a project carried out by my organisation, the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE), with European funding. We built a prototype which the commission is now using to build a working model on the European e-justice portal. It is expected to go live later this year.

It has raised some interesting implementation issues, which were not foreseeable when I first wrote about it over three years ago. For instance, the system gathers languages spoken by lawyers, as mentioned, but of course most bars do not gather information on lawyers speaking the native tongue of their own country. Imagine if you searched on the Czech Republic and found no lawyers speaking Czech. Of course, that is easily remedied, by assuming, almost certainly correctly, that they all do speak Czech.

The new system will also have to resolve different means of referring to the same place, for instance Brussels, Bruxelles or Brussel, depending on your language, or Baden-Württemberg and Baden Württemberg, depending on your use of hyphens. And postal codes, which are not at all harmonised around the EU, have led to more difficulty than you can imagine.

To return to my fictional Hungarian citizen, he or she will also have to know – for the purposes of the UK – in which jurisdiction the accident took place (England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland), and which of the legal professions (solicitor or barrister, or advocate for Scotland) is the appropriate lawyer. All this has had to be explained to the poor IT technicians building the search engine, so that it can be made as easy as possible for the citizen by way of drop-down boxes, maps or text.

The UK is not alone with its complications. Ireland and Poland both have two legal professions (in the case of Poland, it is based on the former Soviet-era distinction between advocates and legal advisors, which has been swept away in other former communist countries). Belgium has two bars, based on the language grouping of the lawyers, French or Flemish – although there is a small German-speaking community, which goes together for bar purposes with the French. So, presumably, citizens will have to decide whether they want a French or Flemish lawyer to handle their case.

And Germany has, for these purposes, the most unusual distinction of all, since it consists of two overlapping groups, one the membership of the regulatory body (BRAK), and the other that of the representative or trade union body (DAV), although this issue has not yet been addressed for the purpose of the search engine. However, it is true that the UK is the only member state with separate geographical jurisdictions within the same country.

Not all bars collect all search fields, although they are encouraged to do so. So not all bars collect languages spoken by their lawyers, or even practice areas. We have developed 20 practice areas, which were agreed after vigorous discussion among our member delegations. Some bars have to funnel their 60 or 100 own practice areas into our 20.

As for the UK, not all the bars and law societies have yet joined up. One not yet signed up is the Law Society of England and Wales. I am writing this on my knees, begging and praying that it will join, so that you, too, will appear when our Hungarian friend is looking for a lawyer in your area. In this way, even solicitors will be beneficiaries of EU funding.

Jonathan Goldsmith is secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents about one million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies. He blogs weekly for the Gazette on European affairs

I have been reading Robert A. Caro’s masterpiece on the life of US president Lyndon Johnson, which I cannot recommend enough. It is not short (four gigantic volumes so far), but is compulsive and brilliant. The relevance of this to EU legal affairs is in its exposure of how the southern US states used states’ rights for decades to defend their inexcusable behaviour towards their black citizens. Each time a national civil rights bill came before the south’s national political representatives, they did not talk about racism and white supremacy, but about how the federal government had no right to interfere with precious states’ rights, and that the states should be able to manage their own business. In this way, they dodged reform.

Does that sound familiar to the EU debate? My point is not to compare traditional Euroscepticism to the awful reality that the southerners were defending - that would be totally wrong, and I apologise for any offence caused in advance - but to point out that states’ rights can be used to avoid positive reform, albeit of a gentler sort. Much good has come from European legislation, and to avoid it because of states’ rights is to use a formal position regardless of substance.

So what is coming up this year in the field of EU legal affairs to make Eurosceptics reach for their states’ rights arguments? I know it is already February, and I should have presented a timetable of 2013 activities at the start of the year. Last week, I outlined the current activities of the European Commission in trying to make the legal services market more competitive. This week, I add to the list by reporting what is coming in new substantive legislation affecting the legal profession.

Within a few days, we are expecting two important documents. The first will be the draft fourth anti-money laundering directive. Given the excitement around the last two, we are gearing up for action. The commission will be holding an opening conference on the directive on 15 March. At the same time, the Financial Action Task Force - not an EU body, I realise - is preparing an exercise on the points at which lawyers are vulnerable with respect to money laundering, and it expects to prepare, in due course, best-practice guidelines.

The second important document is a report on European judicial training (‘judicial’ is Euro-speak for all legal professionals), which we hope will highlight the imbalance in attention and funding paid towards the training of lawyers at EU level. Judges and prosecutors are easy to deal with, since they are government responsibilities, but lawyers, being private actors, have so far received a smaller size of the cake. This is despite the fact that lawyers are the first port of call for citizens with EU problems. We anticipate that the communication will point out this old imbalance, and maybe in time to lead to a correction.

Within weeks, we expect an announcement about an EU-US free-trade agreement. We don’t yet know what it will include, but if legal services are part of the eventual deal then the long-awaited goal of easier entry to all parts of the US legal market might finally be in sight. New York and California, to take two examples, have been open to foreign lawyers for some while, and are obviously attractive states. But equal access to other states has required so far a patient state-by-state negotiation – and there are fifty of them. A single agreement will make lawyers’ lives easier, but will not in itself be simple to accomplish. For instance, it will need to overcome the longstanding problem that the deal will be with the federal government while regulation of lawyers is dealt with at state level, usually by the State Supreme Court.

Also coming soon is legislation establishing a European Public Prosecutors Office (EPPO). The aim is to improve the protection of the financial interest of the European Union, which everyone - even Eurosceptics worried about fraud and other abuses against EU funding - can agree to in principle. But the EPPO raises potential worries, especially around its structure. It it is to be decentralised within the member states’ current legal systems that would be of less concern than if a supranational structure able to intervene in national courts is the outcome.

Towards the end of the year, a criminal law package is scheduled. This will cover three different proposals: legal aid in criminal law, the protection of vulnerable suspects, and the presumption of innocence.

There are continuing, existing legislative preoccupations (professional qualifications directive, data protection package, regulation on cross-border e-identification and trusted services). And of course the current struggle over what is called Measure C - in other words, the harmonised right of a crime suspect or defendant to access to a lawyer in any member state - continues, although the Irish presidency of the EU hopes to settle it during its six-month leadership.

States’ rights or EU rights? The debate has been opened by the prime minister, and my plea is that we look at the substance of the measures in question rather than just shielding behind the formality of a states’ rights position.

Jonathan Goldsmith is secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents about one million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies. He blogs weekly for the Gazette on European affairs

I often avoid writing about sensitive topics, out of cowardice. One of these has been the hyper-sensitive subject of governmental lobbying by lawyers, which is of interest both in the UK and in the EU.

There are opposing sides in the debate: government authorities and transparency NGOs want full disclosure of all lobbying activities, including by lawyers; while bars and law societies, whether my own organisation - the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) - or the Law Society, argue that confidentiality and legal professional privilege (‘professional secrecy’) mean that lawyers cannot disclose their clients’ details (in this case, the client’s name, and overall fees obtained from lobbying) on a public register.

The argument has been batted backwards and forwards over the last few years, with – in the EU at least – the public affairs consultancies joining the side against lawyers, on the grounds that, if they are under pressure to register, why should competitor law firms be able to escape the need?

According to the most recent annual report of the EU lobbying register, six member states have what is called ‘interest representation regulation’ at the national level, among which are France and Germany. The UK is listed in the group of a further six that are considering it. The UK coalition government has promised legislation by the end of this parliament.

At EU level, there has been a voluntary register for over a year now, run jointly by the European Parliament and the European Commission. The EU claims that it is in line with international standards, such as the Recommendation of the OECD Council on Principles for Transparency and Integrity in Lobbying. Many current EU registrants (not the CCBE) want the register to be made compulsory, but the commission and Euro parliament argue that that would mean pursuing nearly-impossible objectives, since it would require either a change to the Treaty or a decision by unanimity of the European Council. So, it looks as if the register will remain voluntary for the time being.

Solutions are being suggested by the register’s authorities to some of the problems faced by lawyers. On the question of professional secrecy, one idea - apparently already adopted in Quebec - is that a lawyer faced by such a question would request a confidentiality order from the registration authority. If the authority is persuaded that there would be a material risk of damage to the interests of the client or the lawyer, then the information can be made exempt from registration.

This brings us to another issue faced by lawyers. The CCBE has in the past emphasised the principle of professional self-regulation, which would be breached if the government – or here the commission or parliament – were able to impose a sanction on a lawyer in case of non-compliance with the rules of the register. I have just suggested above that the commission might be able to make a decision on the relationship between a lawyer’s ethical code and the register’s code of conduct – would it not be worse if the commission could sanction a lawyer who is properly sheltering behind the bar’s ethical rules?

A compromise being discussed is that the lawyer involved could ask his or her bar for a ruling, which the commission (or other authority) would take into account in its final decision.

This is one of those areas – cropping up more frequently these days – where everyone can agree with the objective of the initiative (‘Transparency is a good thing’, ‘Fighting money laundering and corruption is a good thing’), but the specific implementation relating to lawyers rubs up against long-agreed core principles of the legal profession. In this case, compromises are being advanced, and the question for the bars – which the CCBE will soon examine – is whether the compromises are acceptable.

Jonathan Goldsmith is secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents about one million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies. He blogs weekly for the Gazette on European affairs