Last summer (2011) the AMC Legislation Committee drew up a simple 5 Point Plan in an effort to establish a solid collective position that aligned to the ICO guidance as we understood it. In practice, establishing this level of unified clarity in quick time has been impossible and it took until 2012 to get real traction mainly due to the timing of the ICO’s Mid Year Guidance release.

In February 2012 the Legislation Committee published a Consumer Transparency Framework aimed mainly at affiliate publishers. It offers practical guidance on how the Regulations could be approached starting with a cookie audit and working through how transparency might be approached on websites. We want to go further with the framework in the coming months to incorporate emerging best practices for dealing with the Regulations. Ultimately we want it to be a practical tool promoted within the industry as something which publishers ought to be considering.

We also have a similar Advertiser/Merchant Framework as well as a consumer facing information piece on the table and being worked on. We are seeing this as something that will evolve beyond the May deadline.