Pressure mounts in EU to treat Facebook and Twitter as critical infrastructure

Pressure is mounting in the European Union to subject companies including Google, Twitter, eBay and Facebook to the same critical IT infrastructure security requirements as banks or energy networks.

EU lawmakers want providers of essential services in industries including banking, health care, transport and energy to protect their networks from hackers, and to disclose data breaches to the authorities.

The European Commission, which proposed the draft Network and Information Security Directive two years ago, also wants it to cover enablers of key Internet services, such as e-commerce platforms, Internet payment gateways, social networks, search engines, cloud computing services and app stores. The European Parliament, however, rejected their inclusion in the critical infrastructure rules last year.

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