More than three quarters of citizens and civil society organisations who responded to a consultation on Europe’s privacy rules believe the law should be extended to cover over-the-top (OTT) service providers, such as Skype, Messenger, Gmail, and WhatsApp.

On Thursday the European Commission published the preliminary findings of the public consultation on the review of the ePrivacy Directive—the so-called cookie law.

The directive currently only applies to traditional telco companies, but needs to be updated to make it compatible with the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Unusually for a commission consultation, a large proportion of the 421 responses came from private individuals—almost 40 percent. 186 contributions were also received from the industry side, including network providers, Internet content providers, and trade associations. 40 public bodies, including those who enforce the ePrivacy Directive at national level, also responded.

According to the early results, 83 percent of individuals and organisations representing consumer rights agreed that “there was a clear added value in having specific privacy rules for the electronic communications sector to ensure the confidentiality of electronic communications” and 76 percent said the scope of the rules should be extended to OTT services.

However, most citizen respondents said that the current ePrivacy Directive is too limited, since it does not include instant messaging, voice over IP, and e-mail applications; that the rules are too vague, leading to differences between different countries; and that compliance and enforcement are low.

According to the commission “industry and public authorities were more positive that the ePrivacy Directive [as it stands] has achieved its objectives,” presumably because they don’t want the rules broadened—42 percent of industry respondents were against this.

“Industry responses were much more sceptical on the need for special rules,” said the commission. “Only 31 percent see a need for rules on confidentiality and only 26 percent for rules on traffic data.”

93 percent of public authorities believe that some or all of the provisions should be broadened to cover OTT players

On the thorny issue of cookies, civil society and public authorities were of similar mind, with around 75 percent saying that information service providers should not be able to prevent access if users refuse cookies. Unsurprisingly, corporate players took the opposite view—three quarters of industry said they should be able to block access if users refused “identifiers.”

Spam was also on the menu and the huge gap between companies and their customers was also evident on the issue of direct marketing calls: citizens want an opt-in regime, industry favours an opt-out one.

Draft proposals for the revised law are expected from the EC before the end of the year. In the mean time, it will analyse in full all submissions to the public consultation.