Copyright law, Net-Neutrality, it sometimes feels that our current Governments cannot bring forward decent legislation on complex tech issues.
Regardless of whether the cause is ignorance or cynicism; have there been other examples of times in US or EU history that governments passed such clearly 'anti-people' (for lack of a better term) laws?
20 years later, the DMCA in the US actually seems pretty decent. It's not perfect but it strikes a pretty good balance between the interests of copyright holders and allowing for innovation.
In my experience, it's been used to threaten people who reverse engineer software to find bugs and take down content that is not remotely infringing. Not a "pretty good balance" in my book.
It's true that it does not contain adequate protection for reverse engineering, however, I think the underlying premise of offering a safe harbor predicated on responding to abuse complaints is an effective one.
Few companies I work for have their stuff stolen and posted on youtube constantly. It took 3 months to get any response from Youtube. That times goes down to 3 weeks IF you have attorney representing you. Over 70 vidoes I have worked with lawyers to get removed, we always been looked at as the real criminals; we have to upload and prove all sorts of things just to get pass by the submit form. Longest case took us 5 months and $3,000 to remove a 45 seconds of stolen material.
Yes, DMCA works pretty decent; for lawyers that charge per hour.
It sounds like you weren't using the real DMCA takedown notice procedure. If you sent Youtube's designated agent a proper takedown notice with all the information required by law (which you certainly should have been able to do correctly on the first try), then three months of non-response or heel-dragging from Youtube would give you an open and shut case for suing Youtube directly for the copyright damages.
On the other hand, the 45 seconds of stolen material you refer to sounds like you may be going after uses that may fall under fair use, in which case you should absolutely expect to have a fight on your hands, though only after going through the DMCA takedown notice and counter-notice dance.
Considering you could trivially compose a DMCA notice via cut and paste and search and replace in minutes and google I sense we aren't getting the whole story.
Can you explain what 45 seconds of video was worth $1 to get off the internet. 45 seconds isn't a song length let alone a video of note.
Here is a random guess here. The 45 seconds was damaging in some way to the client and they really wanted to bury something.
It was was the on ramp to the highway to hell. Just because it looks tame in comparison to what we have, remember we likely wouldn't be where we are, legislatively, without it having showed the politicians the way.
Only innovations that neatly fit the copyright industries' business models. Innovations that totally break business models based on centralized distributors selling to consumers -- P2P filesharing systems, for example -- have been stifled. If you want to build your own DVR using an HDMI capture device, get ready to do business with some Chinese electronics makers, because nobody in the US can innovate in the market for that sort of hardware.
Just because the EU is doing something worse does not mean the DMCA is "decent." It is still a terrible law even if the EU manages to create something worse.
History is mostly a record of just those kinds of “anti-people” laws. In the UK their history is practically defined by them, with arguably the most famous being Acts of Enclosure dating back to the very early 17th century.
They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
Yet let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.
In fact the history of European and American law tended to emphasize draconian punishments for minor crimes against the landed gentry, nobility, and aristocracy. If you want a present example consider the real impact of the war on drugs, and cui bono.
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. John Erlichhman
While there may be negative examples as you are asking for. There are also many positive examples, I think GDPR is an excellent one. I would also ask for people to share the positive ones, lest we go to sleep in misery.
Large data-farming corporations can and will continue operating in Europe, since they are the only ones that have the resources to understand the law, find limits and loopholes, pay fines, make major changes to their systems etc. Smaller companies and startups are the ones who will suffer.
Really? Then you aren't using it at all. The impact it's had on my life is that companies have to tell me what they're doing with my data. If I say no, they have to refrain from using it, they can't just say "well tough luck, we have it now". If I give my email for a contest, they can't keep spamming me with crap. If I tell them to forget I exist, they have to do it. If I want to see what Facebook knows about me, it has to tell me everything.
As someone who runs dozens of side-projects with thousands of users, I didn't even have to change anything. All it took was to not be shitty to begin with.
> If I tell them to forget I exist, they have to do it.
That could be useful, I suppose. Although to be honest, it's likely to be used to erase bad behavior that we'd rather have public much more than any legitimate privacy concern, i'd guess.
The law is not merely a list of bad things you can't do. Many of its 99 sections require new bureaucratic procedures like "hire a data protection officer to write an impact assessment and wait eight to fourteen weeks for an official response" that you almost certainly weren't already doing.
All corporations that spent money on compliance, their customers, their employees, etc. It's becoming very annoying to see proponents of the legislation act like it only impacts one type of tech company. That is willful ignorance.
Oh, and I understand that some don't realize it, but some of us out here running and working for companies affected by these rulings are people too. I wish everyone would stop pretending who they hoped would be affected and see who actually are so we can move from politics to reality.
Individuals who run their own business are far more vulnerable to the harm form GDPR than well-resourced enterprises are.
And as an individual consumer, I'm comfortable in saying that it is a really not great law for me (ie, YMMV). It's impeded some of the content I access and for many sites it's like having cookie notices on steroids. It's a pain in the arse.
My only problem with GDPR is that you can be fined up to 4% of org revenue for breaches, even if the violation isn’t that bad. This is pretty unfair for very horizontally-large organizations and causes a lot of CYA training/education/compliance. Yes it highly disincentivizes noncompliance but I’ve seen first hand how much work it can create relative to the actual practical effects of a violation. If potential penalties were adjusted better towards the severity of a violation, there would be a lot less wasted man hours
Well, the official guidance for most agencies involved is to not issue 4% worldwide revenue fines unless repeat offenders show little to no signs of changing behavior to prevent further violations. If there was in letter adjustment for the amount depending on violations, orgs would just worm themselves out of the high penalties by exploiting the wording, having it up to the agency's judgement means they can issue high fines if necessary.
You also always have recourse against unjust or excessive fines, as per established EU law.
Everyone has latched onto this 4% number, like every breach of GDPR rules will incur a massive fine.
It's not "you will be fined 4% for every breach". It's "you can be fined up to 4%", the GDPR actually states that the punishment should be proportional to the damage caused.
Here's the specific language form the English language version of the GDPR [1] (I suggest you read the whole page):
> Each supervisory authority shall ensure that the imposition of administrative fines pursuant to this Article in respect of infringements of this Regulation referred to in paragraphs 4, 5 and 6 shall in each individual case be effective, proportionate and dissuasive.
If you accidentally send customer data to Google Analytics without their permission, and rectify the issue when it's discovered, you're not going to get slapped with a multi-million dollar fine.
> If you accidentally send customer data to Google Analytics without their permission, and rectify the issue when it's discovered, you're not going to get slapped with a multi-million dollar fine.
Hopefully. It seems like the law is completely open to the judge's discretion, so for risk assessment purposes it should be assumed that the full fine will be granted, because you can't bank on a lenient judge - especially if you're one of the earliest cases and they decide to make an example of you.
The data roaming law which allows you to use your data allowance in other EU countries, which is great when travelling around Europe. I can’t think of others from the top of my head
If the purpose of government is to ensure stability (and particularly to ensure the stability of the people in power), that would seem fundamentally at odds with disruptive innovation and exponential progress. I don't think it can be stabilized, more likely it shatters under the strain, and something new and different emerges from the wreckage
>it sometimes feels that our current Governments cannot bring forward decent legislation on complex tech issues.
No, the issue is not advanced technology but special interests. When the later take priority over resolving troubling consequences, you get results like those two articles.
Politicians are not meant to understand the areas they regulate. Even if they were IT professionals, they still would not understand all the other professions.
Politicians have no incentive to understand complex tech issues.
Most voters don't vote for a candidate on the basis of the candidate's tech-literacy. Most voters don't understand complex tech issues themselves, so they couldn't even if they wanted to.
This is what happened with banks, where the regulatory requirements are so onerous that they constitute a massive barrier to entry to new competitors. That's both a curse for banks (it's not fun to be regulated to death) and a blessing (it does't matter how badly your service sucks, as long as it is about as bad as your few competitors).
The specific legislation in mind that relates to these banks in the EU is PDS2: basically banks have to make their data both machine consumable and portable for the user. Basically they have to make a public API.
That's true, but those same regulatory requirements reduce the impact of monopolizing on consumers. Youtube has already achieved a monopoly without the responsibilities of public service and consumer protection that usually come with them
The point is moot as soon as someone builds an API to take your user's uploaded video and run it through copyright detection. The software doesn't have to be good, it just has to do what the law asks. This article is pretty off the mark.
This is one more reason for innovation to keep dying in Europe.
They are working on this regulations that stifle tech and are losing.
The EU had 16B VC investments agains 60B in the US, the market capitalization of Top 500 companies has been declining. [1]
Of the 50 countries studied in the Digital Evolution Index, which tracked the levels of digital development and attractiveness to global businesses and investors, the bottom 9 were European. [2]
From the video [1]:
"Loser: Europe, which is becoming irrelevant when it comes to innovation. Only six of the world's most valuable companies are based in Europe, and venture capital funding has declined."
Another big reasons are language barriers and more importantly, vastly different tax codes and laws between EU countries. But the regulations don't help either, that's true.
You are right, I've been looking into EU taxes and the Netherlands, which was dead last in the list above, has a nice 30% tax cuts for expats.
The EU seems to tax quite heavily compared to the US, and also the salaries are also quite lower there too, I checked the cost of living in some EU cities compared to Austin and the salaries are not great.
I am only looking into Europe because the immigration system there seems to be much better than the US, otherwise the US would be much better option.
In a related note Teachers salaries don't seem that different.
Health insurance in the US varies wildly. I pay less than $20 per paycheck for my insurance and my health expenses are capped by plan on an annual basis. I may spend little to none one year and a thousand dollars the next. It all depends on your employer, your health, etc. Additionally, all preventative appointments are covered under my insurance for free (1 per year).
Is there any significant competitor to youtube in the American market?
This is not the reason for lack of innovation. If that was the case, China would have not moved up the ranks with a legal environment that makes this law look like nothing.
The reason why nobody competes with youtube is because youtube is big because of platform and network effects, so the distribution of users basically looks like a power law distribution.
The only way to compete is actually to move towards a closed internet. Shut Youtube down in Europe and build a national champion that provides the same service.
It's fine to defend the open internet, but it's got nothing to do with innovation. Europe lacks in this regard for very different reasons, among them non-existent of VC funding and no concentrated knowledge networks. Europe has no Silicon Valley. The Silicon (semi-conductor) part of that name being vital.
when I'm looking up not-available-in-the-USA episodes of The Great British Bake Off? Usually Dailymotion, which even has chromecast pretty well integrated with their player.
This is a good point. Even if you escape YouTube (which isn't quite a monopoly by itself) you'll still end up running into some other tentacle of the Google-kraken: Chromecast is Google's proprietary video transmission protocol.
Right, and they happily transmit pirate video to my TV as long as it isn't hosted by YouTube, because it's not like I was going to BUY all of those seasons - it's strictly better for their bottom line if I buy the chromecast and pirate.
That’s assuming most people use google to find videos to watch. It’s much more likely that through network effects, people arrive at YouTube through YT links given to them by friends and acquaintances, then they stay on YT. Looking through my WhatsApp groups, that’s entirely likely. Or people by default go to YT because that’s what they know, they’re already part of the YT community, they already have an account there, etc.
Scott (from the video [1]) says the same thing, Europe added regulations because it was getting all the tech downside without the upside, and should close down the market and create local alternatives.
I don't know if copying China is a great move for innovation though.
The EU would have to become much more powerful to be able to do that, which is scary to me seeing what happens in China.
I think you are right, maybe they should look into creating a tech hub somewhere in Europe, maybe reduce taxes or regulations there, but who knows.
It’s counterproductive to label all regulations as if they’re the same.
Antitrust laws and consumer protections are very different from something like this designed to maximize profits for record labels and publishing companies in character and effect on the world at large. Some regulations are essential to a functional society, while others, like this, are disastrous and serve only to reinforce monopolistic strangleholds.
But he said "regulations that stifle", not "regulations that are essential". It seems like people don't even read comments nowadays and just get triggered by keywords.
“this regulations that stifle” was in somewhat broken syntax, which led me to believe that it was saying something to the effect that (s)he was speaking of regulations in general and saying that they stifled innovation as a whole. Perhaps your mental parse didn’t have that connotation, and I could have been wrong in seeing it that way.
I don't think all regulations are bad, but in my opinion the EU hasn't been adding great regulations, GDPR IMHO wasn't great, I think it does harm innovation and even worse doesn't add much value.
If you delete your FB account and they remove you from the public but still use your data privately, for the average Joe, does it really matter? Also does Joe care?
I think Joe doesn't care, and the negatives will outweigh the positives.
Tech (FAANG) probably should have some regulation, but I am really concerned with the tech people (HN) being so acceptive of regulations that are obviously bad.
I'd say defending terrible regulation is not better either.
I agree. And this is certainly absolutely terrible. I am a big fan of the GDPR. While imperfect, it’s a hell of a lot better than the protections I enjoy.
Thanks, this is what I think we must do, disagree where is acceptable (GDPR), I don't like it, you do, but we should be together screaming this other one is horrible.
> It’s counterproductive to label all regulations as if they’re the same.
I don't see where all regulations were labeled. What's counterproductive is to ignore an obvious trend. And despite the differing motives of the recent tech legislation, their effects are similar and can be summarized by these effects as a whole. I'm not sure where this trend of looking at what laws are "designed" for vs what they actually do came from, but I hope pragmatism returns one day. In the interim, I wish legislators would just sit on their hands.
There is no "obvious trend" in the way that you are suggesting. The copyright directive is bad because copyright legislation is bad. If you want to enforce copyright the directive isn't incorrect, it is just that many people don't want that including myself. Most other reforms including data protection, roaming and payment services are huge steps in the right direction.
Disagree as these internet "reforms" are often only paid lip service, make it harder to build new products, and in practice are rarely enforced anyways. The other obvious trend, as I alluded to previously, is people just claiming something is a step in the right direction based on intent instead of reality. There are lots of ways to make steps in the right direction and these legislative approaches are heavy handed and harmful towards providers with little user benefit.
Things like GDPR aren't supposed to be enforce in every instance. Similar to things like FCC or CE certification. That is just the better way to have such regulation. When someone complains or something happens, then these things will come into effect.
Things like the new roaming rules are essentially universally followed. It used to be extremely cumbersome to get mobile data when travelling, today it is essentially a non-issue. SEPA payments is another similar thing.
Other regulation isn't for users at all, but for other businesses. Most users won't directly notice the revised payment directive, but they will very likely get a lot of new service.
> Things like GDPR aren't supposed to be enforce in every instance. Similar to things like FCC or CE certification. That is just the better way to have such regulation. When someone complains or something happens, then these things will come into effect.
That's the problem. When enforcement is rare but with complex rules and huge penalties, it causes everyone to have to hire an army of lawyers to make sure it isn't them who the government is able to arbitrarily make an example of. The less common the enforcement the harder it is to predict how to stay on the right side of the line.
What you want instead is clear, simple rules with proportionate penalties that are rigorously enforced -- ideally with notice to give the company a chance to correct its behavior before any penalties have to be put on the table.
The thing that hurts investment the most is surprise. The investors are already taking the risk that the new business may fail. Add an uncertain regulatory environment on top of that and investment will walk away in droves.
> When enforcement is rare but with complex rules and huge penalties, it causes everyone to have to hire an army of lawyers to make sure it isn't them who the government is able to arbitrarily make an example of
This is Europe we're talking about. You are using your liberal American mind set to create issues that don't exist here.
>
What you want instead is clear, simple rules with proportionate penalties that are rigorously enforced -- ideally with notice to give the company a chance to correct its behavior before any penalties have to be put on the table.
This is exactly how rules is enforced in Europe. Pedagogy first and after that the stick for those who are purposely break the rules or are malicious.
I think the stats show that the system doesn't work given education vs tech output. Even if it isn't that specific aspect at fault it is clear that the way things are being done is not fine.
There is also quite a bit of vested interrest protectionism and permission culture run amok there like the link tax to subsidise utterly stupid greedy losers who were complaining about free advertising and wanting more that failed in Spain and yet they want everywhere and right to the memory hole - a more accurate description of right to be forgotten. Then there is the utterly stupid reason one abombinable trade bill failed, not the horrible corporate sovereignty portion that would allow for tobacco companies to sue for antismoking campaigns but thinking they could push the new world into accepting their region naming restrictions when they have been making parmesan cheese for centuries already.
> This is Europe we're talking about. You are using your liberal American mind set to create issues that don't exist here.
"This is Europe" doesn't mean anything. Do companies in Europe just violate all the laws constantly and hope the government leaves them alone? Why even have laws then instead of just a king that decides what they don't like after the fact?
If you pass a law that is complicated and hard to understand, complying with it will be arduous and inefficient. "But we didn't mean it that way" doesn't save you from businesses and investment moving elsewhere over compliance costs.
> This is exactly how rules is enforced in Europe. Pedagogy first and after that the stick for those who are purposely break the rules or are malicious.
The EU didn't ask Google to change its practices first. The opening volley was billions of dollars in fines, and then billions more for other things that they also didn't advise them to stop doing (and give them a chance to challenge the interpretation) before imposing huge penalties.
When you have broad, ambiguous laws with arbitrary enforcement, how do you expect anyone to comply with them? Or even know what compliance looks like?
Pretty much any regulation harms business. The smaller the business, the more toll new regulations usually have on it. The more regulations we enact, the more big companies grow and small companies die/not started. It acts like a positive feedback loop because the whole reasons for most regulations in the first place was to tame big evil corporations, which in the end usually benefit more from regulations (less competition). Also, consumer pays for any regulation costs anyway, so everything becomes more expensive with more regulation. It might not be immediately noticeable, but it's definitely the trend in the long term.
I'm not saying that we don't need any regulations at all, but I think we should strive to keep it to absolutely bare minimum.
There is no way for these two statements to both be true:
1.) Pretty much any regulation harms business.
2.) Also, consumer pays for any regulation costs anyway,
If consumers pay for the regulation, then the business is not harmed. But think about how silly that would sound if you said that to a business person: "Don't worry about government regulations, because your customers will pay for them!"
This is an old fallacy:
"consumer pays for any regulation costs anyway"
Consumers don't pay for regulations except in those situations where demand for a product/service outstrips supply, and therefore the businesses are able to pass the cost along to the consumers. But wherever supply outstrips demand, then the businesses pay for the regulation themselves, via reduced profits and therefore reduced market value.
This is simple supply and demand. It is remarkable that so many people are often mislead on this subject.
"Consumers don't pay for regulations except in those situations where demand for a product/service outstrips supply."
This doesn't make sense. Demand may outstrip supply at a certain price, but that just means that the price must go up.
If a market is clearing, then the regulation (or a tax) will be borne by buyers or sellers in proportion to the relationship between the supply and demand elasticities.
That's ridiculous. The Free Market is one of the greatest economic tools we've ever discovered, and hybrid distributed representative/micro constitutional monarchies a successful governance/innovation model. Together they're the foundation for most of modern business and are a direct creation of regulation and maintained by the same. The Free Market has requirements for operation like any tool. I really have trouble understanding how you could argue that business would be better off under mercantilism and aristocracy or any other older, less efficient system. They don't work as well in known theory and haven't worked as well in practice either.
Good vs bad governance is very important, but "more" vs "less" not so much. Just like anything else implementation matters the most.
>I'm stating that less intervention from government is better for business.
And I'm saying you're wrong since the Free Market and our current governance models and public buy-in and wealth distributions have led the greatest business success and innovation in the entirety of human history. Good intervention from government has been fantastic for business.
Then how you can explain gradual slow down in the rate of growth in the last decades? I think it is caused by increase in regulations. Any significant innovation beyond small incremental improvements in many industries is completely paralysed because of regulation. Internet and tech industry is on the same path, in my opinion.
The Free Market is one of the greatest economic tools we've ever discovered
...and one we've rarely employed. Most markets are absolutely not free in the libertarian sense, and while often for near-sighted politics—such as tariffs for goods—also sometimes for the greater good. For example, antitrust legislation is market regulation as truly free markets tend to converge in a winner-takes-all fashion. And once there are only a handful of large corporations left they tend to start shunning down the market from entry-level companies to help cementing their own position, via make-do regulation of their own and/or lobbying for more robust government-appointed regulation.
That's okay, because politics isn't just about helping businesses. It's mainly about helping people. Sometimes that means helping businesses, but sometimes it means harming them.
> politics isn't just about helping businesses. It's mainly about helping people
Many politicians are not about helping people, many are about helping themselves. Also, sometimes you can harm people with the intention of helping them
> So? The system isn't perfect. That doesn't help in deciding whether more or less regulation is better.
The entire concept of "more or less regulation" is partisan ideology. Every regulation has a cost and a benefit. Good regulations have benefits in excess of their costs.
The problem is that calculating the cost is very difficult. You may have a regulation that increases costs by $10 and produces a $12 benefit. But if the $10 cost increase drives a competitor out of business and allows the remaining provider to raise prices by $20 in total, you're now paying $20 for a $12 benefit.
They also have opportunity costs. You may have a regulation that consumes $20 of a $30 surplus but produces $50 in diffuse positive externalities, which sounds like a good idea. But if there is an alternative that also consumes $20 of the same $30 surplus and produces $500 in positive externalities, you can't have both ($40 > $30) and enacting the first one is really destroying $450 in benefits relative to the second. Trying to enact both is even worse, because then you get neither one and even destroy any benefits inherent in the original transaction.
It's so easy to screw this up that it's better to err on the side of not regulating something than to convince yourself you gained $30 when you really destroyed $1000.
The regulations you want are the ones that have unambiguous, huge net benefits, like prohibiting people from dumping toxic waste in the river, because the cost is low and the benefit is enormous. But even then you have to be careful, because if you're spending $50,000 to prevent $50,000,000 in harm, you could still be wasting $40,000 because there is a way to do it for $10,000.
And the incentives are wrong for people to carefully evaluate things like this, because the people paying the cost aren't the people creating the rules.
Which means "all regulation is bad" is false but "any given regulation is bad" is a solid heuristic.
> But even then you have to be careful, because if you're spending $50,000 to prevent $50,000,000 in harm, you could still be wasting $40,000 because there is a way to do it for $10,000.
Yes, but even if you create a regulation that is $40k more expensive to implement than the cheapest option, it still results in a $49.95M in savings (regardless of who would be picking up the bill, at least when you consider us as a society that depends on each other to function) compared to having not set up that regulation at all. The government spending e.g. 1M on experts hired to check whether, say, oil pipelines are built to spec and standards, and not break unexpectedly - is much better for everyone involved overall, than the company operating the pipeline paying hundreds of millions for the cleanup of the resulting environmental damage. Same goes for pretty much any and every other industry that we actually depend on. Yes, sure, be careful if possible - but personally, I’d rather see inefficient spending on necessary regulation than no regulation at all. Because then we’d definitely be picking up the bill for it, maybe not always directly with our wallets or government budgets, but we lose either way.
> Yes, but even if you create a regulation that is $40k more expensive to implement than the cheapest option, it still results in a $49.95M in savings (regardless of who would be picking up the bill, at least when you consider us as a society that depends on each other to function) compared to having not set up that regulation at all.
Which is why those kinds of regulations are the ones you want.
But it's still worth carefully revisiting them from time to time, because $40,000/company/year is still literally having each company hire a person to waste their entire working life. This is what regulators should optimally be spending most of their time on -- evaluating the existing regulations for ways to reduce the costs without losing the benefit.
Might it be perhaps worth considering that some approaches to consumer protections might, by accident and coincidence, have side-effects of encouraging oligopolistic strangleholds?
You're completely right. Antitrust and consumer laws are very different from those expressly designed to hurt consumers. However, it could be worth remembering that a law's intentions and a law's effects can be different.
You can make those kind of numbers say anything. Saying that a country like Sweden is "receding" in "digital evolution" is pretty ridiculous when almost everything is more advanced than 99% of the world. And on top of that most of these "stand out" countries have few to no technology businesses of note.
What makes you think this is a new development? When many of these large companies got started Europe was still recovering from World War II, even up until the '90s and continuing today. Europe isn't problem free, but in the grand scheme of things certainly getting better.
The "digital evolution" article is just ridiculous. Sweden which is "receding" has had three exits of more than a billion dollars in the last 12 months. Switzerland which is a "stand out" has, as far as I can tell, one tech startup valued at a billion dollars ever. Both countries have similar population and history.
No offense, but maybe the market cap of the wealthiest corporations in the world isn't the measure we should be looking at for society health. And given where the world is headed, maybe we should be thinking about stifling tech.
I think its an valid indicative that EU is doing worse than the US, even if you disagree with the way wealth is distributed.
I think tech (FAANG and what not) is over hyped. But broad tech is also the future, people's lives have seen a night and day difference around the world because of it.
If we need to put up with some evil (wealth inequality) in order to have that much good, I'd say we should be at least careful stifling tech.
Market cap is a pretty poor indicator of that. FAANG are so big mostly due to concentration and lack of competition in their sectors; EU antitrust/consumer legislation is more focused on providing consumer choice of businesses, whereas US antitrust is focused on competition of service.
I think that in the current environment, the US is swinging way too heavily to overconcentration, crazy unicorn valuations and hype.
Great and all, but the US cannot even manage to fund their public pension funds. What's the point of innovation when only the rich benefit, like in the States?
Inovation is not dying in Europe. Just the bubble is not growing at a rate like it is in SV. What inovations have therenos or uber made? Yet they are or where worth billions.
Why remove “How” from the original title? "How the EU will force all artists to use Youtube, forever".
Edit: even the original title is misleading: it should be something like "How the EU may force all artists to use Youtube, forever, if that EU proposal is approved".
There is a character limit. I'm on my phone, so checking character count isn't convenient for me at the moment, but that's a common reason to drop words that add little meaning.
I have had countless times these problems with the hn character limit. It is really tricky deciding which words to cut out or how to reframe titles when the hn limit sets in. Somebody is always going to be unhappy (if the submission ever makes it ot the front page).
But the original title doesn’t even come close to the character limit. "How the EU will force all artists to use Youtube, forever" is 57-characters-long while the submission limit is 80. A quick look at the current homepage shows that exactly a third of its titles (10 out of 30) are longer than 57 characters.
Looks like the submitter was helpfully trying to adhere to HN title conventions. But in this case I don't think "How" is so bad. Also, we'll put "may" above, since you make a good point there.
This sounds like a horrible law, with some really bad consequences. That said;
> This is an extinction-level event for the internet, folks.
Hyperbole like this doesn’t help, and in fact often turns off people whom you might be able to sway to your cause.
The immediate reaction of most people to an absolutist phrase such as that is skepticism, which naturally leads to disbelief and scorn - not what you’re likely looking to foster in your readers.
> Hyperbole like this doesn’t help, and in fact often turns off people whom you might be able to sway to your cause.
I disagree; sometimes hyperbole is an effective way of waking people up to how they perceive the world. In this case I think it's fairly effective, and also worth it.
But it's false. The loss of net neutrality didn't end the internet like everyone said it would.
Instead, it's going just like the realists said: every couple months or so, Comcast and co do a new little fucky thing, slowly becoming shittier and shittier while dangling out carrots (that are later revoked) so people don't realize it.
It's the same as why asking kavanaugh whether he'll overturn roe vs Wade is a pointless question.
I think we should tell people what they realistically should be looking for. I think doing otherwise just gives opponents more ammunition. "See, net neutrality was repealed and nothing happened!"
But it's false. The loss of net neutrality didn't end the internet like everyone said it would
It seems too early to tell how that's going to play out since it's such a political change -- I wouldn't expect providers to make any significant changes to take advantage of Network Neutrality at least until the midterm elections are over, no point investing in a business model if it's likely to change with the election.
Well that's kind of my point. But even after the midterms I wouldn't expect to see packaged website deals for at least another decade, when society has had time to adjust to the little levers they flip leading up to it.
I don't think many people were claiming that ending net neutrality would end the internet overnight, which is patently ridiculous since 100K employee companies can't change strategy that fast.
But if the lack of net neutrality rules/laws continues, of course every big ISP is going to take advantage of the new rules to the detriment of customers.
I think 10 years is too long of a timeframe, I'd expect significant changes to take advantage of no NN rules within the next 5 years.
"Instead, it's going just like the realists said: every couple months or so, Comcast and co do a new little fucky thing, slowly becoming shittier and shittier while dangling out carrots (that are later revoked) so people don't realize it."
...which eventually leads to the end of the Internet as we know it.
> The loss of net neutrality didn't end the internet like everyone said it would.
It's just taking some time. ISPs are huge behemoths that don't turn on a dime. I know some product owners at ISPs, and they'v told me that it's their primary goal right now.
I don't know, I can't take any of this seriously because of all the hyperboles thrown around left and right, without any seemingly level-headed analysis.
Agreed. I suppose if it passes, it's going to be another application of John Gilmore's excellent "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".
Can someone explain which large organizations within the EU are pushing for article 13 and why? The more I read about this law the more stupid it seems.
GDPR compliance isn’t that hard but Article 13 is bad enough that it gives a compelling reason to just ignore the EU market for lots of applications. And it’s really going to up the costs of unseating internet incumbents
There's some irony in posting this here, given this is a user-generated site and all, but I'd love to see all the safe-harbor provisions be seriously rethought. It would wreck the tech industry, but save the internet by decentralizing it, and kill off cesspools where idiots wreck society while profiteering scum become billionaires amid the carnage.
That would do massive harm to transparency due to making it harder to find anything. Not to mention the effective end of anonymous speech - either they host wrote or reuploaded it and either way they can be attacked for it. Which means vanishingly few would upload content from another.
Really the tear it down and build something new mentality is faulty. You don't tear your house down and then build a new one before you die of exposure, you build the new one then abandon or tear down the old one.
We had a (mostly) working house, then money happened to it, driven by legislation which let the VCs and their friends avoid the liability that prevented others from doing the same before.
What we needed was tools to make it easier for people to publish to the shared internet. What we got was a centralized mess -- the bastard child of AOL and the advertising industry.
The past 20 years of growth in the internet have been a mistake. Not a "small, needs a bit of tweaking" sort of mistake, but a "burn it all" mistake. Twitter is a garbage fire. Facebook is a garbage fire. The world would be better without them. Not a "slightly modified" version. Burned to the ground.
The liability insurance required to hold data on a billion people should be unaffordable. Services at that scale should not exist.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but I did read these articles back when the vote was up a few months ago and my interpretation was not that it is a requirement to have an automated evaluation system.
Sure youtube will of course implement an automated system but my point is that if you setup your own Peertube instance you can still screen content and let users report possible copyrighted content to you for manual screening.
So small scale, self-hosted or themed instances will still be possible but they will have to moderate their content and they will have to act on received copyright violation reports.
The author seems to be pointing out that small players cannot compete with Youtube because Youtube will have the means for automated large scale content screening.
Well small players can do it manually. It will only work up until a certain level but it still enables people to host small themed instances of peertube for example.
From what I remember, you're right that it doesn't strictly require an automated system, but the only way to practically do it is with an automated system. With current safe harbor provisions in the DMCA, if someone uploads copyrighted content, the host isn't liable as long as they take it down when notified. The new EU rules would make the host liable for any copyrighted content uploaded by a user, no safe harbor provisions. So you're options are automated filtering/blocking of all uploaded content, or roll the dice and hope that if a user uploads copyrighted content, that you find out before you get sued by the copyright owner.
This is how centralization and sweeping censorship/fascism seems to work in the new modern era we live in. Govt bodies react to pressing problems by increasing regulatory footprint so much that only companies like Facebook, Google/YouTube, Twitter, could possibly comply with. At the same time, these companies are at increasing pressure both from frequent public outrages to politicians to do something about users and types of content shared on their network. It’s easy to dismiss how these companies comply with regulatory bodies and react to public pressure to ban certain types of content and users so long as it is possible to create alternative networks. With stuff like this, it’s not so far fetched to imagine it increasingly difficult to launch platforms similar to YouTube and Facebook/Twitter, if not prohibitive without special deals and partnerships with major media companies. We need a new internet
Most people will always flock to the “free” option that all their buddies are on. It’s entirely possible for me to host streaming video on my web server that I pay for. Hell, it may even be within my skill set to deploy it. But if you watched my video(s) on my sever, there would be no easy, one-shot way to populate similar videos on all my friends own web servers. The same applies to (micro)blogging services like Facebag and the Tweeter.
You get what you pay for, and most don’t want to pay a subscription fee to watch random cat videos whenever the feeling strikes.
> This is how centralization and sweeping censorship/fascism seems to work in the new modern era we live in
With thunderous applause. It's amazing if we take a retrospective look at how big web tech became the enemy, how the feeling was derived, our ideas of perceived harms, and our perception of helplessness of both the masses and existing laws. It reminds me of terrorism a generation before, drugs a generation before that, communism a generation before that, etc. There's little comfort knowing we cannot grow beyond our sheparded-sheep ways.
So-called "public pressure" is often made up. It usually goes like this - a lobbying company pays journalists to run a story that X causes Y. Journalists look in their network for people willing to confirm X causes Y and that they are outraged. The story is then exaggerated and run numerous times so that people get an emotional connection with the actors and start to believe X causes Y. This is an opportunity for a politician to offer a "solution". In the end, a company gets favourable legislation, a politician gets points and media get clicks and views. But society loses.
The point I think is important here, is that (in my opinion) it's lobbied censorship/control though. This isn't the Government forcing their ideology through regulation - this is Corporations lobbying and buying out politicians, and the Government is the accessory to it.
Have you ever considered that this might be the inherent nature of politicians, and that we might be better to go without them and their local-monopoly called "government"?
Which pressing problem is this solving? I agree with the rest of your statement for the most part but I disagree with your initial framing that all of this is the result of governments trying to solve "pressing problems".
“Pressing problems” is an umbrella term I’m using to describe things that are lobbied for, corporations, copyright holders, foreign interference/ misinformation campaigns, botnets issues.. etc. Basically whatever issues are the current topic of debate either politicized or lobbied for by the public or private enterprise
When I was young and stupid, I thought tech would be an unfettered, unassailable force for individual liberty. Now, I realize that people like Evgeny Morozov were right all along and that the internet is a tool for totalitarian thought control like the world has never seen.
Car makers support safety regulation because it further entrenches their position and increases barriers to entry.
That does not mean that safety regulations are wrong, or that they need to be rolled back in the name of innovation.
The mantra that any imposition on innovation is bad just does not hold true. There will be services that challenge YouTube's dominance, and there will be innovation in the copyright protection space to enable that.
You might believe that the increased cost to market entry is detrimental, but you have to actually explain why the inability for garage-startups to compete with YouTube is materially bad for artists, rather than taking it as an article of faith.
Car makers were vehemently opposed to seatbelt requirements, and actually sent women after Ralph Nader in an attempt to discredit him when he was advocating for it:
Auto makers are also far less vulnerable to being unseated by startups than tech companies, due to the capital intensive nature of their business and the maturity of their market.
The author of this article is a genius, able to express the problem so clearly. These types of regulation that have been coming through the EU are good for the biggest of businesses. Complex and difficult to follow regulation allows the big companies to build a big moat, they have the money to build systems to satisfy the regulations, even to game the regulations. And no new companies will be able to disrupt them. Who's going to risk $60 million dollars on your startup before they get anywhere, just so they can comply with regulations?
EU, get ready for Google, Apple, Amazon, Disney, and Coca-Cola to choose what services and products you get, and how much you pay for them.
If a law is going to require an algorithm, the algorithm should be supplied by the government, open and free for all to use and they should be responsible for the correctness of the results.
1. Youtube, right now, flagrantly violates copyright - search for Peppa Pig - oh look dozens and dozens and dozens of videos on crappy channels. Same goes for pretty much anything. Maybe Disney does a good job
2. As such attribution is shit. youtube kiddies regularly strip something and post it for the "hey look" value. Trying to find the original creator of day an animated short you find on youtube is frankly impossible. This in a world wide web designed explicitly to be attribute friendly is crazy
3. However, having one, government mandataed IP database is an even bigger crazy and Article 13 shoukd die. The point of the web and domain names is to solve this - surely?
/rant
Edit: What I have realised is that I think content publishers should be liable for the content on their platforms... Senator :-)
Frankly that solves pretty much everything. Want free speech? sure fine no one is stopping it.
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[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadRegardless of whether the cause is ignorance or cynicism; have there been other examples of times in US or EU history that governments passed such clearly 'anti-people' (for lack of a better term) laws?
Few companies I work for have their stuff stolen and posted on youtube constantly. It took 3 months to get any response from Youtube. That times goes down to 3 weeks IF you have attorney representing you. Over 70 vidoes I have worked with lawyers to get removed, we always been looked at as the real criminals; we have to upload and prove all sorts of things just to get pass by the submit form. Longest case took us 5 months and $3,000 to remove a 45 seconds of stolen material.
Yes, DMCA works pretty decent; for lawyers that charge per hour.
On the other hand, the 45 seconds of stolen material you refer to sounds like you may be going after uses that may fall under fair use, in which case you should absolutely expect to have a fight on your hands, though only after going through the DMCA takedown notice and counter-notice dance.
Can you explain what 45 seconds of video was worth $1 to get off the internet. 45 seconds isn't a song length let alone a video of note.
Here is a random guess here. The 45 seconds was damaging in some way to the client and they really wanted to bury something.
Only innovations that neatly fit the copyright industries' business models. Innovations that totally break business models based on centralized distributors selling to consumers -- P2P filesharing systems, for example -- have been stifled. If you want to build your own DVR using an HDMI capture device, get ready to do business with some Chinese electronics makers, because nobody in the US can innovate in the market for that sort of hardware.
Just because the EU is doing something worse does not mean the DMCA is "decent." It is still a terrible law even if the EU manages to create something worse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts
They hang the man and flog the woman Who steals the goose from off the common Yet let the greater villain loose That steals the common from the goose.
In fact the history of European and American law tended to emphasize draconian punishments for minor crimes against the landed gentry, nobility, and aristocracy. If you want a present example consider the real impact of the war on drugs, and cui bono.
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. John Erlichhman
As someone who runs dozens of side-projects with thousands of users, I didn't even have to change anything. All it took was to not be shitty to begin with.
Have you learned anything interesting from that?
> If I say no, they have to refrain from using it, they can't just say "well tough luck, we have it now".
Have you been doing that?
> If I give my email for a contest, they can't keep spamming me with crap.
That was already a thing in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003
> If I tell them to forget I exist, they have to do it.
That could be useful, I suppose. Although to be honest, it's likely to be used to erase bad behavior that we'd rather have public much more than any legitimate privacy concern, i'd guess.
No, the few I asked turned out to have as much data as I shared, which is almost nothing.
> Have you been doing that?
Yep.
> That was already a thing in the US:
Good to know.
> it's likely to be used to erase bad behavior that we'd rather have public much more than any legitimate privacy concern, i'd guess.
I'm not sure I agree with that, but I also don't agree that people's bad behaviour should remain public forever.
Not "hire", "designate". The data protection officer is just a role that someone in the company takes on, it does't have to be their only role.
Oh, and I understand that some don't realize it, but some of us out here running and working for companies affected by these rulings are people too. I wish everyone would stop pretending who they hoped would be affected and see who actually are so we can move from politics to reality.
And as an individual consumer, I'm comfortable in saying that it is a really not great law for me (ie, YMMV). It's impeded some of the content I access and for many sites it's like having cookie notices on steroids. It's a pain in the arse.
You also always have recourse against unjust or excessive fines, as per established EU law.
It's not "you will be fined 4% for every breach". It's "you can be fined up to 4%", the GDPR actually states that the punishment should be proportional to the damage caused.
Here's the specific language form the English language version of the GDPR [1] (I suggest you read the whole page):
> Each supervisory authority shall ensure that the imposition of administrative fines pursuant to this Article in respect of infringements of this Regulation referred to in paragraphs 4, 5 and 6 shall in each individual case be effective, proportionate and dissuasive.
If you accidentally send customer data to Google Analytics without their permission, and rectify the issue when it's discovered, you're not going to get slapped with a multi-million dollar fine.
[1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-83-gdpr/
Hopefully. It seems like the law is completely open to the judge's discretion, so for risk assessment purposes it should be assumed that the full fine will be granted, because you can't bank on a lenient judge - especially if you're one of the earliest cases and they decide to make an example of you.
Can you list others besides GDPR? I'm ignorant, but interested.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/eus-strict-new-privacy-law-is-s...
Not surprising, expensive regulations reduce competition and benefit the largest players.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(novella)
No, the issue is not advanced technology but special interests. When the later take priority over resolving troubling consequences, you get results like those two articles.
Politicians are not meant to understand the areas they regulate. Even if they were IT professionals, they still would not understand all the other professions.
Most voters don't vote for a candidate on the basis of the candidate's tech-literacy. Most voters don't understand complex tech issues themselves, so they couldn't even if they wanted to.
And I doubt it will be simple.
Either way, it’s still an absurd idea, regardless of whether it’s doable in reality.
You don't need every single startup to build a $60 million Content ID equivalent.
You just need one startup to build Content-ID-as-a-Service.
Which actually looks like a pretty good startup idea right now.
Some torrent trackers have pretty good databases of content. They can make some side cash instead of relying on donations. Win-win for everyone.
Also noticed this trend is now happening into youtube creators using leased music from their creator company or 3rd party youtube music provider.
How the heck is Youtube able to identify music if Shazam cant?
They are working on this regulations that stifle tech and are losing.
The EU had 16B VC investments agains 60B in the US, the market capitalization of Top 500 companies has been declining. [1]
Of the 50 countries studied in the Digital Evolution Index, which tracked the levels of digital development and attractiveness to global businesses and investors, the bottom 9 were European. [2]
From the video [1]: "Loser: Europe, which is becoming irrelevant when it comes to innovation. Only six of the world's most valuable companies are based in Europe, and venture capital funding has declined."
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiTz-NTEXAM&feature=youtu.be... .
2. https://hbr.org/2015/10/europes-other-crisis-a-digital-reces...
The EU seems to tax quite heavily compared to the US, and also the salaries are also quite lower there too, I checked the cost of living in some EU cities compared to Austin and the salaries are not great.
I am only looking into Europe because the immigration system there seems to be much better than the US, otherwise the US would be much better option.
In a related note Teachers salaries don't seem that different.
I read that health insurance in the US costs 1000$+ per month, and even then you pay thousands out of pocket. Same for social security.
I believe that if you take this into your calculations the difference is not so bad
This is not the reason for lack of innovation. If that was the case, China would have not moved up the ranks with a legal environment that makes this law look like nothing. The reason why nobody competes with youtube is because youtube is big because of platform and network effects, so the distribution of users basically looks like a power law distribution.
The only way to compete is actually to move towards a closed internet. Shut Youtube down in Europe and build a national champion that provides the same service. It's fine to defend the open internet, but it's got nothing to do with innovation. Europe lacks in this regard for very different reasons, among them non-existent of VC funding and no concentrated knowledge networks. Europe has no Silicon Valley. The Silicon (semi-conductor) part of that name being vital.
here's a comparison of the platforms. Vimeo has shrunk to less than 1% and Youtube captures the lion share of the market.
Hey, I wonder which search engine 90% of people use…
I don't know if copying China is a great move for innovation though.
The EU would have to become much more powerful to be able to do that, which is scary to me seeing what happens in China.
I think you are right, maybe they should look into creating a tech hub somewhere in Europe, maybe reduce taxes or regulations there, but who knows.
Antitrust laws and consumer protections are very different from something like this designed to maximize profits for record labels and publishing companies in character and effect on the world at large. Some regulations are essential to a functional society, while others, like this, are disastrous and serve only to reinforce monopolistic strangleholds.
If you delete your FB account and they remove you from the public but still use your data privately, for the average Joe, does it really matter? Also does Joe care?
I think Joe doesn't care, and the negatives will outweigh the positives.
Tech (FAANG) probably should have some regulation, but I am really concerned with the tech people (HN) being so acceptive of regulations that are obviously bad.
I'd say defending terrible regulation is not better either.
I don't see where all regulations were labeled. What's counterproductive is to ignore an obvious trend. And despite the differing motives of the recent tech legislation, their effects are similar and can be summarized by these effects as a whole. I'm not sure where this trend of looking at what laws are "designed" for vs what they actually do came from, but I hope pragmatism returns one day. In the interim, I wish legislators would just sit on their hands.
Things like the new roaming rules are essentially universally followed. It used to be extremely cumbersome to get mobile data when travelling, today it is essentially a non-issue. SEPA payments is another similar thing.
Other regulation isn't for users at all, but for other businesses. Most users won't directly notice the revised payment directive, but they will very likely get a lot of new service.
That's the problem. When enforcement is rare but with complex rules and huge penalties, it causes everyone to have to hire an army of lawyers to make sure it isn't them who the government is able to arbitrarily make an example of. The less common the enforcement the harder it is to predict how to stay on the right side of the line.
What you want instead is clear, simple rules with proportionate penalties that are rigorously enforced -- ideally with notice to give the company a chance to correct its behavior before any penalties have to be put on the table.
The thing that hurts investment the most is surprise. The investors are already taking the risk that the new business may fail. Add an uncertain regulatory environment on top of that and investment will walk away in droves.
This is Europe we're talking about. You are using your liberal American mind set to create issues that don't exist here.
> What you want instead is clear, simple rules with proportionate penalties that are rigorously enforced -- ideally with notice to give the company a chance to correct its behavior before any penalties have to be put on the table.
This is exactly how rules is enforced in Europe. Pedagogy first and after that the stick for those who are purposely break the rules or are malicious.
There is also quite a bit of vested interrest protectionism and permission culture run amok there like the link tax to subsidise utterly stupid greedy losers who were complaining about free advertising and wanting more that failed in Spain and yet they want everywhere and right to the memory hole - a more accurate description of right to be forgotten. Then there is the utterly stupid reason one abombinable trade bill failed, not the horrible corporate sovereignty portion that would allow for tobacco companies to sue for antismoking campaigns but thinking they could push the new world into accepting their region naming restrictions when they have been making parmesan cheese for centuries already.
"This is Europe" doesn't mean anything. Do companies in Europe just violate all the laws constantly and hope the government leaves them alone? Why even have laws then instead of just a king that decides what they don't like after the fact?
If you pass a law that is complicated and hard to understand, complying with it will be arduous and inefficient. "But we didn't mean it that way" doesn't save you from businesses and investment moving elsewhere over compliance costs.
> This is exactly how rules is enforced in Europe. Pedagogy first and after that the stick for those who are purposely break the rules or are malicious.
The EU didn't ask Google to change its practices first. The opening volley was billions of dollars in fines, and then billions more for other things that they also didn't advise them to stop doing (and give them a chance to challenge the interpretation) before imposing huge penalties.
When you have broad, ambiguous laws with arbitrary enforcement, how do you expect anyone to comply with them? Or even know what compliance looks like?
I'm not saying that we don't need any regulations at all, but I think we should strive to keep it to absolutely bare minimum.
1.) Pretty much any regulation harms business.
2.) Also, consumer pays for any regulation costs anyway,
If consumers pay for the regulation, then the business is not harmed. But think about how silly that would sound if you said that to a business person: "Don't worry about government regulations, because your customers will pay for them!"
This is an old fallacy:
"consumer pays for any regulation costs anyway"
Consumers don't pay for regulations except in those situations where demand for a product/service outstrips supply, and therefore the businesses are able to pass the cost along to the consumers. But wherever supply outstrips demand, then the businesses pay for the regulation themselves, via reduced profits and therefore reduced market value.
This is simple supply and demand. It is remarkable that so many people are often mislead on this subject.
This doesn't make sense. Demand may outstrip supply at a certain price, but that just means that the price must go up.
If a market is clearing, then the regulation (or a tax) will be borne by buyers or sellers in proportion to the relationship between the supply and demand elasticities.
That's ridiculous. The Free Market is one of the greatest economic tools we've ever discovered, and hybrid distributed representative/micro constitutional monarchies a successful governance/innovation model. Together they're the foundation for most of modern business and are a direct creation of regulation and maintained by the same. The Free Market has requirements for operation like any tool. I really have trouble understanding how you could argue that business would be better off under mercantilism and aristocracy or any other older, less efficient system. They don't work as well in known theory and haven't worked as well in practice either.
Good vs bad governance is very important, but "more" vs "less" not so much. Just like anything else implementation matters the most.
And I'm saying you're wrong since the Free Market and our current governance models and public buy-in and wealth distributions have led the greatest business success and innovation in the entirety of human history. Good intervention from government has been fantastic for business.
http://www.multpl.com/us-population-growth-rate
Maybe we just don't need more stuff.
Edit: Carlin quote
Ever notice how your shit is stuff and other peoples stuff is shit?
...and one we've rarely employed. Most markets are absolutely not free in the libertarian sense, and while often for near-sighted politics—such as tariffs for goods—also sometimes for the greater good. For example, antitrust legislation is market regulation as truly free markets tend to converge in a winner-takes-all fashion. And once there are only a handful of large corporations left they tend to start shunning down the market from entry-level companies to help cementing their own position, via make-do regulation of their own and/or lobbying for more robust government-appointed regulation.
Many politicians are not about helping people, many are about helping themselves. Also, sometimes you can harm people with the intention of helping them
The entire concept of "more or less regulation" is partisan ideology. Every regulation has a cost and a benefit. Good regulations have benefits in excess of their costs.
The problem is that calculating the cost is very difficult. You may have a regulation that increases costs by $10 and produces a $12 benefit. But if the $10 cost increase drives a competitor out of business and allows the remaining provider to raise prices by $20 in total, you're now paying $20 for a $12 benefit.
They also have opportunity costs. You may have a regulation that consumes $20 of a $30 surplus but produces $50 in diffuse positive externalities, which sounds like a good idea. But if there is an alternative that also consumes $20 of the same $30 surplus and produces $500 in positive externalities, you can't have both ($40 > $30) and enacting the first one is really destroying $450 in benefits relative to the second. Trying to enact both is even worse, because then you get neither one and even destroy any benefits inherent in the original transaction.
It's so easy to screw this up that it's better to err on the side of not regulating something than to convince yourself you gained $30 when you really destroyed $1000.
The regulations you want are the ones that have unambiguous, huge net benefits, like prohibiting people from dumping toxic waste in the river, because the cost is low and the benefit is enormous. But even then you have to be careful, because if you're spending $50,000 to prevent $50,000,000 in harm, you could still be wasting $40,000 because there is a way to do it for $10,000.
And the incentives are wrong for people to carefully evaluate things like this, because the people paying the cost aren't the people creating the rules.
Which means "all regulation is bad" is false but "any given regulation is bad" is a solid heuristic.
Yes, but even if you create a regulation that is $40k more expensive to implement than the cheapest option, it still results in a $49.95M in savings (regardless of who would be picking up the bill, at least when you consider us as a society that depends on each other to function) compared to having not set up that regulation at all. The government spending e.g. 1M on experts hired to check whether, say, oil pipelines are built to spec and standards, and not break unexpectedly - is much better for everyone involved overall, than the company operating the pipeline paying hundreds of millions for the cleanup of the resulting environmental damage. Same goes for pretty much any and every other industry that we actually depend on. Yes, sure, be careful if possible - but personally, I’d rather see inefficient spending on necessary regulation than no regulation at all. Because then we’d definitely be picking up the bill for it, maybe not always directly with our wallets or government budgets, but we lose either way.
I do agree with the rest of your points.
Which is why those kinds of regulations are the ones you want.
But it's still worth carefully revisiting them from time to time, because $40,000/company/year is still literally having each company hire a person to waste their entire working life. This is what regulators should optimally be spending most of their time on -- evaluating the existing regulations for ways to reduce the costs without losing the benefit.
You're completely right. Antitrust and consumer laws are very different from those expressly designed to hurt consumers. However, it could be worth remembering that a law's intentions and a law's effects can be different.
You can say that about basically any studies, you can shuffle numbers around to fit whatever narrative you'd like.
I think the Top 500 companies in the EU not following the US Top 500 is pretty indicative.
The "digital evolution" article is just ridiculous. Sweden which is "receding" has had three exits of more than a billion dollars in the last 12 months. Switzerland which is a "stand out" has, as far as I can tell, one tech startup valued at a billion dollars ever. Both countries have similar population and history.
That being said, this isn't the way to do it.
I think its an valid indicative that EU is doing worse than the US, even if you disagree with the way wealth is distributed.
I think tech (FAANG and what not) is over hyped. But broad tech is also the future, people's lives have seen a night and day difference around the world because of it.
If we need to put up with some evil (wealth inequality) in order to have that much good, I'd say we should be at least careful stifling tech.
I think that in the current environment, the US is swinging way too heavily to overconcentration, crazy unicorn valuations and hype.
Edit: even the original title is misleading: it should be something like "How the EU may force all artists to use Youtube, forever, if that EU proposal is approved".
> This is an extinction-level event for the internet, folks.
Hyperbole like this doesn’t help, and in fact often turns off people whom you might be able to sway to your cause.
The immediate reaction of most people to an absolutist phrase such as that is skepticism, which naturally leads to disbelief and scorn - not what you’re likely looking to foster in your readers.
I disagree; sometimes hyperbole is an effective way of waking people up to how they perceive the world. In this case I think it's fairly effective, and also worth it.
Instead, it's going just like the realists said: every couple months or so, Comcast and co do a new little fucky thing, slowly becoming shittier and shittier while dangling out carrots (that are later revoked) so people don't realize it.
It's the same as why asking kavanaugh whether he'll overturn roe vs Wade is a pointless question.
I think we should tell people what they realistically should be looking for. I think doing otherwise just gives opponents more ammunition. "See, net neutrality was repealed and nothing happened!"
It seems too early to tell how that's going to play out since it's such a political change -- I wouldn't expect providers to make any significant changes to take advantage of Network Neutrality at least until the midterm elections are over, no point investing in a business model if it's likely to change with the election.
But if the lack of net neutrality rules/laws continues, of course every big ISP is going to take advantage of the new rules to the detriment of customers.
I think 10 years is too long of a timeframe, I'd expect significant changes to take advantage of no NN rules within the next 5 years.
...which eventually leads to the end of the Internet as we know it.
It's just taking some time. ISPs are huge behemoths that don't turn on a dime. I know some product owners at ISPs, and they'v told me that it's their primary goal right now.
I think by now that saying has definitively proven false.
GDPR compliance isn’t that hard but Article 13 is bad enough that it gives a compelling reason to just ignore the EU market for lots of applications. And it’s really going to up the costs of unseating internet incumbents
Really the tear it down and build something new mentality is faulty. You don't tear your house down and then build a new one before you die of exposure, you build the new one then abandon or tear down the old one.
What we needed was tools to make it easier for people to publish to the shared internet. What we got was a centralized mess -- the bastard child of AOL and the advertising industry.
The past 20 years of growth in the internet have been a mistake. Not a "small, needs a bit of tweaking" sort of mistake, but a "burn it all" mistake. Twitter is a garbage fire. Facebook is a garbage fire. The world would be better without them. Not a "slightly modified" version. Burned to the ground.
The liability insurance required to hold data on a billion people should be unaffordable. Services at that scale should not exist.
Sure youtube will of course implement an automated system but my point is that if you setup your own Peertube instance you can still screen content and let users report possible copyrighted content to you for manual screening.
So small scale, self-hosted or themed instances will still be possible but they will have to moderate their content and they will have to act on received copyright violation reports.
The author seems to be pointing out that small players cannot compete with Youtube because Youtube will have the means for automated large scale content screening.
Well small players can do it manually. It will only work up until a certain level but it still enables people to host small themed instances of peertube for example.
Let me know when it's done; seems you've got your work cut out for you..
You get what you pay for, and most don’t want to pay a subscription fee to watch random cat videos whenever the feeling strikes.
With thunderous applause. It's amazing if we take a retrospective look at how big web tech became the enemy, how the feeling was derived, our ideas of perceived harms, and our perception of helplessness of both the masses and existing laws. It reminds me of terrorism a generation before, drugs a generation before that, communism a generation before that, etc. There's little comfort knowing we cannot grow beyond our sheparded-sheep ways.
We need better politicians.
Have you ever considered that this might be the inherent nature of politicians, and that we might be better to go without them and their local-monopoly called "government"?
Unfortunately, it can get soured through a variety of means, and it requires constant tending.
I find the alternatives (be it anarchy or tyranny) worse than the status quo.
Which pressing problem is this solving? I agree with the rest of your statement for the most part but I disagree with your initial framing that all of this is the result of governments trying to solve "pressing problems".
Bwahahahahahaahahaahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahah.
When I was young and stupid, I thought tech would be an unfettered, unassailable force for individual liberty. Now, I realize that people like Evgeny Morozov were right all along and that the internet is a tool for totalitarian thought control like the world has never seen.
This is a stupid regulation but it was never the case of "Private companies can do what they want".
That does not mean that safety regulations are wrong, or that they need to be rolled back in the name of innovation.
The mantra that any imposition on innovation is bad just does not hold true. There will be services that challenge YouTube's dominance, and there will be innovation in the copyright protection space to enable that.
You might believe that the increased cost to market entry is detrimental, but you have to actually explain why the inability for garage-startups to compete with YouTube is materially bad for artists, rather than taking it as an article of faith.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Industry_r...
Auto makers are also far less vulnerable to being unseated by startups than tech companies, due to the capital intensive nature of their business and the maturity of their market.
EU, get ready for Google, Apple, Amazon, Disney, and Coca-Cola to choose what services and products you get, and how much you pay for them.
1. Youtube, right now, flagrantly violates copyright - search for Peppa Pig - oh look dozens and dozens and dozens of videos on crappy channels. Same goes for pretty much anything. Maybe Disney does a good job
2. As such attribution is shit. youtube kiddies regularly strip something and post it for the "hey look" value. Trying to find the original creator of day an animated short you find on youtube is frankly impossible. This in a world wide web designed explicitly to be attribute friendly is crazy
3. However, having one, government mandataed IP database is an even bigger crazy and Article 13 shoukd die. The point of the web and domain names is to solve this - surely?
/rant
Edit: What I have realised is that I think content publishers should be liable for the content on their platforms... Senator :-)
Frankly that solves pretty much everything. Want free speech? sure fine no one is stopping it.