So we now got our own SOPA to deal with. Important note: the bill now goes to trilogue before it's ready to face a plenary vote. Though I'm not holding my breath.
I'm European but as many don't have a clear idea of how this will work.
At my understanding, there will be discussions about the amendments and another vote, like the one we had two months ago. Is it right? There is still time to act, right?
Also, is there a place to see who voted what? Elections are close and those choices could impact the vote of many. I knew Votewatch but I don't know if it still doing it, saw some excel file going around last time and wondering if they are being updated, to see who changed ideas.
> Any amendments approved on Wednesday will be subject to further negotiations between politicians and member states in a closed-door process known as “trilogues.” Whatever emerges from those debates will be subject to a final vote by the EU Parliament in January. After that, it will still be up to individual member states to interpret the directive and turn it into law.
A couple of YouTubers from the UK went to EU Parliament to make the case against Article 13. Unfortunately, their pleas mostly fell on deaf ears. They discuss the (undemocratic) process here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHwaA3fMPgc
I'm getting the impression that many Europeans don't seem to have a grasp on how their laws are passed. Is my impression correct? I'm baffled by the commission, Parliament, individual states, and how they interact to make laws. Is this topic teachable to 3rd graders in Europe?
Yes, that is unfortunately the case. Exactly this is creating a feeling amongst many of us that something is fundamentally wrong with the EU as governing and legislative body. Of course, you could reverse that and say: People have to inform themselves properly. But that's just the situation were in right now.
Most of those citizens don't speak any of the languages that the EU operates in. And the EU only translates the result of the legislative process, not the process, so participating in Polish or Greek ... or even French ... is almost impossible. Eventually the outcome of the whole process is translated, but that's it.
And starting next year there will be exactly 0.9% [2] of the citizens that speak the language that the EU government conducts itself. Now it is 13.9% [1], which is not exactly a good number. As if it wasn't already a huge problem that the French and German governments essentially control the EU.
Combine that with the fact that large blocks hate eachother. Like famously the French and German governments, for example, but those are hardly the only examples. Some blocks have actually recently had shooting conflicts with deaths (the Catalan and Spanish governments, if you're wondering, and yes, both have representation, even though the Catalan government gets no representation in the commission or council, the only institutions with real power in the EU).
UKIP and the Green Party joined forces to prevent Article 13 from getting rammed through without a public discussion. It was a good first step, but here we are, 2 months hence, and it was passed with virtually no amendments to the original text.
This is an abhorrent decision by people who have no idea how the internet works. Markus Meechum (aka Count Dankula) was at the hearings, and reported that MEPs voting on the issue could not, or refused to, explain why they supported the bill. You can see him discussing the result in the immediate aftermath here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISyiTcA6RIw
If you want a quick example of why this is bad take a look at fair use and YouTube. Article 13 would make YouTube liable for copyrighted content on its service.
Much of YouTube content is (perfectly legal) remixes, responses, or criticisms of other YouTube content that embeds part of the referenced video in their own video. There is more content uploaded to YouTube than can possibly all be manually reviewed. Aggressive automated content filtering to comply with Article 13 would mean that these videos would straight get filtered out.
I think it's going to work like jaywalking - it's illegal, but I've done it, and it's fine as long as it doesn't cause a bigger issue, and as long as enforcer isn't overzealous. It's true though, that it's a weapon waiting to be used for political reasons, and the perspective of that happening is no good for anybody.
Yes, the OP did also state that point as well. The comparison was just to illustrate that this law is unenforceable at large scale so people might just disregard it. The danger is, as he and yourself have both stated, you then have a situation where the law becomes a weapon to be abused rather than legislation to safeguard businesses or consumer interest.
Unfortunately, it's quite enforceable. That's the whole point of this legislation - it goes after those entities that it can be enforced against (businesses), forcing them to turn around and enforce it against the smaller fish in their domain.
You're missing the point being made. We are not saying "it cannot be enforced, period". What we are saying "you cannot police every single website on the internet." Thus what will happen is this law will be used as a weapon to target sites that publish reviews that paint a particular product in a bad light, or user contribution sites that compete with big social networks. Or even, in the worst case scenario, forums which are critical of a particular government party.*
A law like this can and likely will be selectively enforced since it will be impossible to police every single independent thought published on the internet.
* I appreciate those points may not be in breach of the new legislation per se. But there is a pretty good chance that some content on sites of those style would be in breach. So it's a little like police using a broken tail light as an excuse to stop and search a car.
You cannot police every website on the Internet, but you certainly can scrap the Internet. It is easy to forget how much regulation surrounds the physical infrastructure of the Internet and how easily the government could just shut it all down. A key property of the Internet is that there is a single public IP address space; there is no technical reason why the address space could not be divided into "client" and "server" addresses, with only "servers" being allowed to host applications, and we are already halfway there with NAT (IPv6 does not help either, as it could easily be fragmented and we already have things like ULA). It would be easy to require a special license to receive a "server IP address" and I can see the EU doing exactly that based on their recent pattern of behavior.
Europe has a long history of doing such things when confronted with new, disruptive technologies: the effort to license printing presses in various European countries is what eventually led to copyright law as we know it today.
The copyright law introduced during the invention of the printing press is nothing like the copyright law we know today.
Back then ideas were still believed to be free so the point of copyright law was just a short term reward for the author. A bit like how patents are supposed to work.
I would normally post some citations here (like a famous quote about copyright from one of the British monarchs) but on phone about to drop kids off at school so apologies there.
You don't need to police every comment. You just need to randomly poke at things, and make an example of anyone who lets something slip thru. Then individual businesses are going to be scared into policing their specific turfs. And when it's decentralized like that, it's quite possible to police every single website on the Internet (or at least on your section of it).
Why do you think so? The question isn't whether sites distributing pirated stuff exist - the question is, how many more would have existed if not for policing, and how many people would have used them that are deterred under the existing regime.
Effective policing generally doesn't mean that people can just flout the law whenever they want. That would suggest to me that particular law cannot be effectively policed. However I'm willing to concede that "effective" is a subjective term so we could both argue our points are correct.
I think this is spot-on. Laws like this are inherently unenforceable at a global scale, and therefore are selectively enforced. The enforcement agencies have limited resources and therefore will focus on politically strategic targets. This is a political weapon.
Unfortunately, the downstream effects will hurt everyone else.
No enforcement agency is required to enforce this law. Rightholders will sue non-filtering platforms over potentional lost sales due to their "wilful negligence".
And if the offending platform has any business in Germany (or another country with similar laws) this will be a gold mine for any law business issuing cease and desist letters in the name of competing plattforms.
And as long as you aren't of the wrong demographic. Laws that are selectively enforced allow racism and sexism to flourish among the police. In consistent enforcement of a law should be a valid defense of violating the law, and a very cheap one to employ.
The likes of YouTube will be affected the least. They already have aggressive copyright enforcement measures in place, and they can afford to do that.
Smaller, more independent platforms will not be able to afford to implement compliance with these new regulations, and will potentially be driven out of business.
Yes, the Googles and Facebooks of the future will be affected the most.
This is consolidation of power, finally locking down the Free Internet just as we've done with every other industry. Stripping the power to change from the small.
While I agree that regulation favours big companies, potential competitors will base themselves offshore, or create distributed apps that have no jurisdiction.
'Normal' people already use distributed content: Google and Facebook's content is held in data servers all across the planet. The next stage is to distribute the governance of that content, which similarly, most users won't be aware of.
This type of law is only effective due to centralisation of Internet services. If everyone self-hosted and was accountable for their own content there would be no scope for such legislation. All HN would hold would be linked-lists of URLs, no actual comment content.
Imagine a decentralised, federated HN where each comment originated from its owner's site.
>This type of law is only effective due to centralisation of Internet services.
This type of law encourages that very centralization. Look at the provisions of GDPR, for example. Do you think a two-person startup is going to have the resources to deal with all of its provisions? Or in this case: do you think that a new video-sharing startup is going to have the resources to deal with the more stringent copyright enforcement requirements?
The EU has, in effect, made a Faustian bargain with Google, Facebook and Twitter: if you accept our regulation, we'll ensure that you have no competitors.
But what kind of startup doesn't handle personal data? All companies have that in the form of customer and supplier account information needed for billing purposes -- especially if they're not in the advertising business.
Absolutely, and that's kind of my point. Even a single person operation can comply with the GDPR, as most of the policies to do so should alreay be state-of-the-art for companies who handle personal data (in a non-malicous way). I agree there is some annoying administrative overhead, but it's definitely manageable (speaking from experience here).
It can't be everything all at once. "They process personal data" is equivalent to "they exist" and the compliance cost is non-trivial (or what is everybody complaining about?). The only remaining option is that it's destroying a significant percentage of startups and creating a moat around incumbents.
The only argument you can make at that point is that it's worth the cost, but is it? The damage to privacy of having everyone's data in the hands of conglomerates that are no longer subject to competitive pressure has got to be worse than Mom and Pop occasionally mishandling the information of their two hundred customers. Just having the centralization at all is worse than anything that could happen to any given 0.5% subset of it, because every misuse or compromise is 200 times worse even if they only happen 10% as often.
The operating part is "should already be state-of-the-art". The typical programmer already knows that personal data is sensitive and treats it that way. Maybe there are some adjustments here and there, or some oversights or things-that should-have-been-fixed-months ago. But most of what needs to be done has already been law in one form or another, so the programmer is trained to do it correctly. There are retention laws for tax data and business communication of 7 years and longer, which override the GDPR, so the startup will most likely be out of business before any deletion is required.
So what remains for the business part of the startup is to make sure the necessary contracts with all third parties are in place (the pressure-the-conglomerates-part), and to explain it to the users. This is annoying, but also not much worse than the typical legalese stuff the CEO has to deal with. The data privacy policy of a certain privacy activist reads, in essence: "We store only what we need, and delete it as soon as we can, as long as we are not required by law to store it for any longer." You don't even need a law degree for that, as you shouldn't, because the text should be readable for the end user.
> What is everybody complaining about?
I don't know, the GDPR is basically German data privacy law, and it hasn't stopped Berlin from becoming a startup center in Europe. I guess if you don't want to be GDPR compliant due to the effort that's fair, but you should know that there are much worse things ahead for a company.
However, if you are not _able_ to be GDPR compliant as a small organization, while many of your competitors are, you should absolutely not be entrusted with personal data.
> The operating part is "should already be state-of-the-art". The typical programmer already knows that personal data is sensitive and treats it that way.
The expense doesn't come from that. Even if you're doing the right thing in spirit, now you have to compare what you're doing to a complex regulatory framework. That's pure overhead that you pay even if you don't even have to change anything.
> This is annoying, but also not much worse than the typical legalese stuff the CEO has to deal with.
You're saying that this thing that harms small businesses and entrenches incumbents is like the other things that harm small businesses and entrench incumbents. But that's the problem. Each one you add is an incremental burden that moves the margin for how many startups you kill by another kilometer in the wrong direction.
> The data privacy policy of a certain privacy activist reads, in essence: "We store only what we need, and delete it as soon as we can, as long as we are not required by law to store it for any longer." You don't even need a law degree for that, as you shouldn't, because the text should be readable for the end user.
That is a very aspirational privacy policy that also happens to be very strict and trivial to violate unintentionally. And what are the consequences for not following your own very strict privacy policy?
This is why most of the big companies have one that says something to the effect of "we promise to use your data for things we want to do" but then have to be carefully crafted by lawyers to simultaneously minimize liability and hold up under scrutiny.
> I don't know, the GDPR is basically German data privacy law, and it hasn't stopped Berlin from becoming a startup center in Europe.
It's all relative. If Germany has a significant regulatory burden but Greece is a hotbed of corruption, Germany can still do better than Greece. But not as well as it could have done with less overhead.
> However, if you are not _able_ to be GDPR compliant as a small organization, while many of your competitors are, you should absolutely not be entrusted with personal data.
The pretense that complex regulations only cost you if you were previously doing something wrong is empirically false. The cost of complying with the regulation is in addition to the cost of doing the right thing and is still paid by everyone who was doing the right thing already. And it can be enough to destroy a company that was not actually mishandling data but merely had low operating margins.
I'm not arguing against any of that, including your statement that the GDPR might be the last drop to destroy a compliant-in-spirit company which has been surviving just so. I'm merely questioning the scale of the problem (based on my own experience implementing the GDPR in a low operating margin context) and their right to exist to begin with (based on my personal view on the sad necessity of data privacy regulation).
Most of the rules in GDPR apply only to personally-identifiable information that is not strictly required for business operations. The law recognizes that, when you want to ship some goods to a customer, you will have to process and store their address, and no opt-in is needed because the customer explicitly gives that information to you.
Explicit opt-ins are only required when you record personally-identifiable information surreptitiously, or share these information with other parties.
> Most of the rules in GDPR apply only to personally-identifiable information that is not strictly required for business operations.
I'm sure there are some provisions intended to help out smaller entities. But the compliance cost is the cost of understanding the legislation so you can comply with it. You still have to pay it even if it turns out not to apply at all -- because you can't know that until you go through all of it first.
“copying restrictions were authorized by the Licensing of the Press Act 1662. These restrictions were enforced by the Stationers' Company, a guild of printers given the exclusive power to print—and the responsibility to censor—literary works”
YouTube, the company, will be fine. They'll just ban any content that triggers their enforcement systems. I'm worried about YouTube, the platform, and the bastion of free exchange of information and ideas that is has been until now. A response-type video or movie review will almost certainly be false-flagged by a system like this.
Of course, I agree with you that independent platforms are going to have a rough time. They either have to manually review all content themselves, not allow any user-uploaded content, or pay a company to do this for them.
Well, of course the law applies to them too. But what happens in the instances that they don't comply? Laws are enforced by incentive structures, such as punishment. Who gets punished or otherwise incentivized to make PeerTube comply with the law, and what effect will that have on the functioning of PeerTube?
That's EU after all. They will mass punish everybody, then try to ban traffic.
> “Thousands of Swedes have received threatening letters from law firms which accuse them of illegal downloading. They are asked to pay a sum of money, ranging from a couple of thousand Swedish Kronors up to several thousand, to avoid being brought to justice,” Bahnhof Communicator Carolina Lindahl notes.
> “During 2018 the extortion business has increased dramatically. The numbers have already exceeded last year’s figures even though four months still remain.”
> This year to date, 49 separate court cases have been filed requesting ISPs to disclose the personal details of the account holders behind 35,711 IP-addresses. As the chart below shows, that’s already more than the two previous years combined.
> Also, the number of targeted people exceeds that of all US and Canadian file-sharing cases in 2018, which is quite extraordinary.
There are three main ways to do P2P content distribution. One is like BitTorrent, where you only host the content you yourself wanted. This has obvious privacy issues. Anyone can tell what you read/view based on what you host.
The second is you distribute content to random hosts, who don't even know what it is (so they can't associate it with whoever is downloading it). This solves the privacy problem and has adequate performance but it only works if you don't have bad laws that impose liability on people even if they aren't knowingly hosting something illegal. Otherwise the government can prosecute a couple of random innocent people and put enough fear into everyone else that they move back to Facebook.
The third is onion routing. Then it's hard to shut down specific hosts (you don't know who they are), but it's slow and if your laws are sufficiently bad it can be made illegal to use it at all even if you aren't doing anything wrong. At that point you go down the road into Tor Project vs. Chinese Firewall, but that's just a disgraceful way to have to operate your communities in a democracy. And for every bug an innocent person goes to prison.
Thats so depressing that we have to have serious discussions about technical countermeasures against our oppressive EU regime. Just because of some old ignorant evil assholes. Time to leave the EU I suppose.
If the solution were technical we would need a combination of 2 and 3. Distributed hidden services. Is this even possible?
The problem with technical solutions is basically Child Abuse Images. I am a big believer in freedom and privacy. I am also a big believer in protecting children. Many people understandably prefer protecting children to seemingly (to them) abstract concepts like freedom. Any technical solution needs a method to remove certain content - and as soon as such a method exists people will want to abuse it for political reasons.
The solution has to be political not technical - somehow we need a political situation where basic freedoms are respected. This can only exist as revisions to countrys' constitutions. Simple laws protecting freedom are too easy to overturn. And we can't carry on resisting re-heated versions of the same stupid law every two years.
> If the solution were technical we would need a combination of 2 and 3. Distributed hidden services. Is this even possible?
It is possible.
> The problem with technical solutions is basically Child Abuse Images.
This is a fake reason which is only used as a justification for censorship technologies. In practice it's better to allow distribution so that it happens in the open and new images can be discovered sooner and traced back to the perpetrators who created them. If you shut down a distribution network every time you find it then the only ones that exist are the ones you don't know about, which means you have no source of evidence to make cases against unknown active pedophiles.
The FBI had a successful campaign where they quietly seized a distribution server and then continued operating it so they could collect evidence and make cases against those using it. Naturally the headlines were "FBI distributes child pornography" rather than "FBI arrests many child pornographers" as though preventing distribution is somehow more important than arresting the creators and rescuing the children.
No, that's not true. If the law mandated running content filtering system that costs $10M/year to run (in addition to any existing systems), then it'd be worse for YouTube, but they will survive. It would absolutely kill smaller providers dead.
Unless by participating in free, decentralized, federated platform you expose yourself to legal liability for any content present on the network and passed through your node. In which case you probably can't afford it.
> When defining best practices, special account shall be taken of fundamental rights, the use of exceptions and limitations as well as ensuring that the burden on SMEs remain appropriate and that automated blocking of content is avoided.
> A response-type video or movie review will almost certainly be false-flagged by a system like this.
To be fair, that hypothetical problem is caused by a broken classifier and not the law. After all, youtube already blocks and removes content like you've described but no one is accusing the classifier of stiffling free speech.
What about distributed systems without central control? Will the new laws force them to introduce filtering into the software (which could e.g. be open source and forkable by anyone)? Or does this only apply to systems with a centralized repository?
You can look up the legal actions related to Usenet to see an example of US State Attorneys General banding together to attack a distributed system because a few people were posting bad stuff on it.
"What about distributed systems without central control?"
The copyright industry and their bought-and-paid-for politicians have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no mental model for such forms of distribution. Have you forgotten the panic that ensued fifteen years ago, when the music industry was suing middle schoolers?
(The irony is that the very same platforms these industry lobbyists are whining about only became popular because they killed P2P via the courts.)
This is wrong. Small and micro platforms are excluded from directive’s scope.
Source from legislation: In particular, small and micro enterprises as defined in Title I of the Annex to
Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC, should be expected to be subject to less
burdensome obligations than larger service providers. Therefore,
taking into account the state
of the art and the availability of technologies and their costs, in specific cases it may not be
proportionate to expect small and micro enterprises to apply preventive measures and that
therefore in such cases these enterprises should only be expected to expeditiously remove
specific unauthorised works and other subject matter upon notification by rightholders.
The problem is that the gap between such platforms and Youtube is enormous, and long before they are even remotely competitive they will be required to spend vast sums of money on compliance. A secondary effect will be a reduced willingness to invest in small-to-medium sized competitors due to the regulatory costs and the risks of non-compliance, further hampering growth.
Much as I hate to admit it, the biggest reason US tech companies have been so much more successful than European tech companies is that the US imposes far fewer regulations, which allows companies to use more of their revenue on growth.
Yeah, it seems to me UKIP has good track record of things "getting rammed through without a public discussion" by now, like the 350 million for the NHS with Brexit.
Interestingly, Farage wasn’t actually a part of that, BoJo wouldn’t let him join the official Leave campaign. So you can blame UKIP for lots of things, but not the bus.
Such as what? I hear UKIP demonised a lot, but I genuinely don't know of anything they've done that is bad that wasn't simply political disagreement (wanting to leave the EU) or talking about contentious issues in a clumsy and ham-fisted way (immigration).
I disagree, I think it's perfectly fine to want to leave the EU on principle. For example, the principle of not wanted to be ruled by unelected oligarchs who can pass laws like Article 13 which affect UK citizens.
Unelected oligarchs like the House of Lords? The UK has absolutely zero legs to stand on with regards to "unelected" or "undemocratic" arguments.
(For years I tried to be a "sensible Eurosceptic", but recent events have highlighted that the EU is a bastion of sanity compared to our current local politics)
See, the problem is that here we don't need principles. We need real facts and real solutions.
Many - across Europe - want to leave the EU on principle. The UK is giving the perfect example to everyone that principle is not aligned with reality in this case.
Because having politicians work directly in the Tory part to serve the interests only of their rich donors, their partners, and themselves is so much better than being ruled by elected representatives and those chosen by those representatives (whom you call oligarchs) in Europe?
Perhaps if we hadn't been fooling around trying to destroy the project for cooperation across Europe we could have taken part in making this new legislation better?
I guess it comes down to whether you're willing to accept peace and prosperity above less power for the Tories and a few wayward laws. As we get wayward laws already in the UK (we'd get Art.13 anyway if it serves media conglomerates interests), then it comes down to whether you want to buy back greater power for the Tories at a cost of greater UK poverty, and less international cooperation.
your comment doesn't leave much room for nuance. You're just setting up a narrative of the Evil Tories who Eat Babies versus the Noble European Union and its Band of Merry Altruists. You must know that this absolutist duality is not an honest representation of reality.
You’re forgetting that Corbyn is a staunch Leaver, he opposed the EU his entire parliamentary career. That is a matter of public record. And most Leave voters were in traditional Labour areas and most Remainers were traditionally Tory voters.
Sufficient stupidity applied to contentious issues is a disaster. That's how we get measles outbreaks.
Failing to present a coherent, workable programme for how we'd leave the EU and at what cost is leading us to a situation where the government is doing civil contingency planning as if we were going to be hit by a hurricane rather than a self-inflicted disastrous choice.
I'm in complete agreement, but I don't think the desire to leave is particularly contentious if it's backed by reasonable arguments (and Farage was always very keen on talking about why he didn't like the EU). The real problem comes in when we get to the point of "OK, we want to leave the EU" but immediately trigger the process without planning a strategy first. Especially with reluctant and un-aligned (May was a remainer) leadership in place.
To be fair to UKIP that was the Tories job. UKIP had ?one? MP and have never been near to government. The Tories called the referendum. They were in government. The Tories should have been ready to govern. They should have had plans in place.
Disclaimer I am a remainer and dislike UKIP as much as anyone.
it's no mystery to me, but downvotes don't really bother me. The opportunity to engage in genuine cross-political discussion is worth the negligible cost to my ego.
I may be naive in saying this, but I believe the law is made with good intentions in mind. The real problem lies in the laws it relies on, namely the extremely stringent copyright laws and the weird fair use.
> Much of YouTube content is (perfectly legal) remixes, responses, or criticisms of other YouTube content that embeds part of the referenced video in their own video.
As weird as it sounds, you are wrong. In a short summary:
1. Fair use is a very small exception to some very broad rights.
2. Fair use almost definitely does not apply to most youtube content : if you use content other people made (video games or music immediately come to mind) you are infringing copyright holder rights.
3. If you rely on fair use rights, then you might find yourself in trouble.
What's even worse is that right holders can pick and choose who to bust, and they don't need to be consistent about it. So even if they rarely go after small groups, they can still shut down bigger ones.
I have a childhood friend who is now a copyright lawyer and I sometimes jokingly ask him whether something is copyright infringing. Other than yes, the most frequent answer I get is "I don't know, it depends. Both sides have arguments so ultimately it's down to the judge." It's just bad law. The only difference between then and now is that now we have the technology to actually enforce it.
That's an interesting point. It's true that the issue wouldn't be quite as terrible if IP laws were more reasonable to begin with. We shouldn't have to wait for literal centuries before a work becomes public domain for instance.
Fair use (in the US) is actually designed to provide for the ability to comment on, or criticize another work. You can’t do that effectively without showing the subject matter you are discussing.
There are absolutely well defined “fair use” exceptions which a stringent filter will block.
> Other than yes, the most frequent answer I get is "I don't know, it depends.
This is the only answer a lawyer will basically ever give you.
I don't believe this is true. Every legitimate YouTube fair use case that I've seen go to court has gone in favor of the fair user.
The biggest name one so far is the H3H3 trial.[1] One that looks to be settled soon is Akilah Hughes suing Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad), where all that Benjamin does is edit together two of Hughes videos with the only original addition being a new title. This is almost certainly going to go in favor of Sargon, yet YouTube's algorithms turned up to the nth degree would almost certainly have blocked it.[2]
If you go outside of YouTube, fair use law in the United States is very broad. Just look at what Richard Prince does with others' art. [3]
Combining two videos in this way would be unlawful in the UK, where we have the very restricted "Fair Dealing" concessions, because downloading the videos in the first place is a tort[0].
Combining them is another, sharing them is another.
We basically have no concept of personal use in our
copyright.
[0] if they were broadcast you can record but only for time-shifting, you can only watch once (alone!) and then are obliged to destroy the copy; you aren't allowed to format shift.
The lack of any remaining semblance of balance in copyright between the rights of the demos and media interests shows how badly distorted our Western democracies have become from representing the rights of people in general above the rights of the rich.
Compare that to my country, where it's perfectly legal to download whatever music or movies you like from the internet for personal use, pirate websites or not. Also a western democracy. So it's not so bad everywhere.
Though a price for this is that we pay a special tax on every storage device we purchase.
My mind jumped to Canada when I read the above comment, but really there are a number of countries that fit the mould. Most western countries have a special levy on blank media, including all EU member states except Luxembourg. I don't know which countries don't prohibit the downloading copyrighted material similarly to how they prohibit sharing that media, but Canada is one of them.
Before this law, I would've retorted that it's not the Western democracies that are broken, just the US, and it's padawan, the UK. Now, however, I have to agree. Even the US-like fearmongering and terrorism of armed forces within EU cities is getting more prevalent lately.
If rights-holders and/or YouTube had to pay a monetary penalty every time they screwed up (by taking down content that was fair use), perhaps it might level the playing field?
Are you basing this on law in the EU? Because as far as I know, "fair use" is purely a US thing that doesn't even exist in the EU -- although specific countries may have laws that do somewhat similar things.
Copyright owners have successfully lobbied with the argument: "It is soooo much effort to go after each case, and these platforms make it so easy to infringe they are essentially complicit".
Just extending your thought farther, why have police then as well? Shouldn't an individual protect themselves? If I am stronger then you and you can't protect your rights does that mean I am now right by taking them away for myself? If everyone was required to protect their own rights things would get messy fast.
I do look forward to the day, and I believe it will come, where companies and individuals will be handsomely fined for any false copyright claims.
There is no copyright police. People do defend themselves - they pay the police to do so and so do businesses. EU is not instituting a copyright police- it is asking internet media to set it up and pay for it.
> The real problem lies in the laws it relies on, namely the extremely stringent copyright laws and the weird fair use.
Real problem is the negative incentive to be correct.
The rule penalise you harshly if you serve copyrighted content, but there is nothing if you decide to not serve non-copyrighted content and there is so much content on the internet, that "market pressure" simply isn't going to work. If you are a small publisher of free content, there is a huge risk for content platform to serve your content and no reward if they do.
And that's the best case scenario, where all actors have good intentions. But in the real world we know that large copyright holder are very often bulk claiming bulk content. There is no penalty, so that would be crazy for them no to do it.
The laws is also talking about terrorist content and the need to remove it within 1 hour or risk up to 4% turnover fine ! There is not going to be any manual check done within 1 hour, and anyway the risk is so great you may as well have a blanket no-question ask removal policy.
I fail to see the "good intentions in mind" you mention. MEP are some of the most successful politicians, they would be Olympic level is it was a sport. Their field of expertise is the people and public relation. I can believe they are naive with technology (like encryption or monitoring actual capabilities) but I can't accept they are candid about businesses or individual motivations. Any negative consequence of this law is there on purpose.
> MEP are some of the most successful politicians, they would be Olympic level is it was a sport.
I don't think so. I think MEPs are much closer to members of a state-congress in the US than member of congress. With the equivalent of a member of the US congress being a member of some national parliament.
My criterium here is how fierce the campaign is to get elected. At the very least here in the Netherlands, the campaign for the European Parliament is nearly an afterthought in the news. It ranks far below the campaign for the German parliament, let alone our national parliament.
>> MEPs are much closer to members of a state-congress in the US than member of congress
What's the salary and expenses package like in a state congress?
"[..] expense payments of €4,416 per month are given to MEPs as a lump sum in addition to their regular pre-tax monthly salary of €8,611. They are not required to provide any proof of how the money is spent"
To a first approximation there is no such thing as "non-copyrighted content" except for very old content. If you're the creator you already have to license your creation to the platform.
> you may as well have a blanket no-question ask removal policy
The directive (Article 13(2b)) requires the service providers to provide an "effective and expeditious" complaint mechanism for unjustified removals with human review, though.
>> 2. Fair use almost definitely does not apply to most youtube content : if you use content other people made (video games or music immediately come to mind) you are infringing copyright holder rights.
Have you read the YouTube terms for original content uploaded by individuals? I'm not so sure doing remixes isn't allowed. If you don't want people doing that to your stuff, keep it off YouTube. I could be wrong, it's been many years since I read their ToS.
I believe this is in reference to US "fair use" in a separate legal sense, not the YouTube Terms of Service.
Many times simply claiming "fair use" is the defense of the layman online in regards to virtually anything involving someone else's intellectual property, which in fact it's fairly well defined and limited.
> I believe the law is made with good intentions in mind
I disagree, no other utility is blamed for the actions of its users, if I use an electric drill to hurt some one I am at fault not my electricity provider, but if I do something illegal on the internet like piracy its some how my internet providers fault?
I also don't like making excuses for policy makers who "don't understand the internet", its not the 90s, ignorance is no longer an excuse, these people know what the internet is, and they know exactly what they are doing.
if I use an electric drill to hurt some one I am at fault not my electricity provider
The physical equivalent is more like you sending pirated dvd's through the mail to your entire neighborhood. The equivalent law would then require the post office to check all packages upon sending to verify that they contain only content which is not pirated, which for privacy reasons they do in an automated way that sometimes blocks the package with the family movie you're sending to your mom (because your daughter was wearing mickey mouse ears and the automated check thought it was a disney movie).
Oftentimes when you physicalize online legislation it becomes apparent just how invasive and silly it is.
> I believe the law is made with good intentions in mind.
"He looked down at the broad steps they were climbing. They were something of a novelty; each one was built out of large stone letters. The one he was just stepping on to, for example, read: I Meant It For The Best. The next one was: I Thought You’d Like It. Eric was standing on: For the Sake of the Children. “Weird, isn’t it?” he said. “Why do it like this?” “I think they’re meant to be good intentions,” said Rincewind. This was a road to Hell, and demons were, after all, traditionalists. And, while they are of course irredeemably evil, they are not always bad. And so Rincewind stepped off We Are Equal Opportunity Employers and through a wall, which healed up behind him, and into the world."
> Much of YouTube content is (perfectly legal) remixes, responses, or criticisms of other YouTube content that embeds part of the referenced video in their own video.
That actually isn't legal in many countries and is e.g. why regional wikipedia sites don't show movie posters.
Sometimes I feel like the whole world is ruined by ignorant people in power. As for the Internet, it is exclusively being ruined by ignorant actors in positions of state power. All the while, armies of good people make the Internet better every day.
If those were the only interested parties against it in the UK then that doesn't bode well for us getting rid of it in a few years, even if we don't negotiate away our right to. Shame.
He was the first one to report the decision on Twitter, and was literally livestreaming in that link I provided before the news was reported anywhere. I'm sorry that he's not on your approved list of people to report on this event.
Nazi Dog Guy is a perfect example of what’s wrong with the EU/Britain. He got in trouble for offending people. That is ridiculous that there are laws against offending people.
>> If you want a quick example of why this is bad take a look at fair use and YouTube. Article 13 would make YouTube liable for copyrighted content on its service.
using your analogy, youtube would be the paper maker and most importantly, the newspaper that publishes those words.
rightly, they're going after the newspaper.
it's disingenuous to suggest youtube only makes tools for video content distribution whilst omitting the fact that they are the only consumers of those tools.
Do you think that if I wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Times that included plagiarised content, that they could, should and would detect that prior to publishing?
This can have a chilling affect on content creation, and thus the dissemination of ideas. YouTube will have to create a filter that covers their liability. They might be able to automate, but it depends on the jurisdiction. For example, the US has fair use laws. A person may copy a segment of a copyrighted work to comment on it. There are territories in the EU where they can't. How does YouTube filter this?
If the new product was produced in the US and references material from the EU, should YouTube allow the content to go public? According this and GDPR, the EU has the ability to cross territorial boundaries. So YouTube now has to ban such a work in the US even though our legal system allows it.
Essentially, YouTube will have to create a new process where by all content must go past the censors, who are probably people and not machines. Otherwise YouTube will quickly die due to death by a thousand fines. So much for a free and open exchange of ideas.
As many probably realize, the fact that "online videos" == Youtube for many members of the general public means that it is by far the number one source for both posting and watching videos online in a self-reinforcing loop. I think that it cannot be overstated how much the existence of platforms like that (e.g. video sharing websites, 2D art websites, music boards) drive non-professional creators to create, given the fact that for the first time, they can actually get an audience. So it is not so much that Youtube and similar platforms are necessary for content creation (which is a ridiculous claim that no one made), but that the absence of such platforms seems likely to result in the previous system where media was very rarely shared by the non-professionals.
If you are arguing that massive content consolidation platforms such as Youtube do not have a highly significant impact on content creators as a group though, then I do not know what to say to that.
You can sell your farm fresh strawberries in the backwoods of Alabama, doesn't mean you'll get any traffic that'll grow your business/platform/identity.
Not everybody, a small minority of the planet actually (the EU is a mere ~6.7% of the planet's population). The ideal solution if you're a US service like HN, is to ignore EU laws like this, as HN is governed by US law. For YouTube, it's a lot more difficult.
Put simply, if you're a US (or Australian, or Brazilian, or Japanese, etc) service: tell the EU to go fuck itself. US courts will laugh at their attempts to enforce EU law over US law.
Keep your servers in the US, if that's where you're located. If you have no need to do business in the EU, then you have almost nothing to worry about. The EU's reach largely stops at its borders unless you're operating in their jurisdiction.
For my service as a US operation, EU copyright law is meaningless. I'll continue to allow EU users to sign up, and entirely disregard EU law.
Ultimately the only way the EU can truly enforce their backwards policies against a global Internet, is to set up a Chinese firewall and hold EU persons as captives of that creeping authoritarianism.
> This can have a chilling affect on content creation, and thus the dissemination of ideas.
I'm not sure it's reasonable to conflate ripping off creators by enabling massive commercial use of unauthirized copies of their original content with actually creating something.
> YouTube will have to create a filter that covers their liability
I believe they already did that for some years now.
Here is an analogy - imagine we crack down on theft at the source by massive fines for receiving stolen property. Sounds good? Try to sell anything secondhand then.
Nobody wants to engage in the secondhand market because of the massive liability. Sure you own it but can you prove it to their satisfaction? You could be lying and that is mo excuse on their part. You try to sell crafts you made yourself instead but nobody can be sure you didn't just steal them because you aren't a big name crafter. Big corporations can sell directly but small manufacturers and businesses are SOL. And worse yet this includes petitions and pamphlets too!
Except this isn't backed up by empirical evidence, in reality flea markets and used good stores are widespread despite the existence of laws against trafficking in stolen goods. Just because you can imagine a bad outcome doesn't mean it's inevitable or even probable.
You missed the point - those laws have limits to secondary liability based on knowledge precisely because of that! At worst they just need to return stolen goods even if they paid for them. I am pointing out how draconian and stupid the law is. A law with similar strictness would destroy secondary markets.
This law requires websites to /know/ the copyright to be covered. And that is an impossible task if no false negatives are accepted. Old usenet pirates would use base64 strings to spread contents and there are countless ways to obfuscate to algorithms while remaining human recognizable. Which means to remain safe one needs to not even accept and display text input from users.
Copyright databases would be of no help here given both automatic copyright and the ease of dodging hashes. And a complete set would be massive and hillariously defeat the point by giving any implenter all of the media in the world.
Given that it is inevitable that it will have a bad outcome. Even if it is left to rot on the books it becomes a tool of tyranny via selective enforcement.
> I'm not sure it's reasonable to conflate ripping off creators by enabling massive commercial use of unauthirized copies of their original content with actually creating something.
Here's an example: What about movie review channels like Wisecrack, Film Theorist, Cinema Sins, Filmjoy etc.? While discussing movies, they naturally have to show excerpts: short clips of the movie that relate to their explanations. Those guys are absolutely "creating something". And if anything, they're driving more people to watch those movies. A five-minute analysis of a movie is usually not a valid substitute for watching the actual movie.
I imagine that many of these channels will become unavailable in the EU in the near future. Time to get a US-based VPN.
They can't and flag and take down your video until you prove it. The burden is on the uploader not the distributor. Which we know how Youtube is with that...
So if ISP's are required to install monitoring software, what does that mean for HTTPS, or other end-to-end encryption schemes, that prevent the ISP from doing packet inspection?
This is just a guess but I don't think ISPs are expected to do any form of DPI. The most likely question they will have to answer is "who is this IP address assigned to?" and possibly "who communicated with that IP?". Neither require any form of packet inspection that goes beyond what is needed to perform routing.
> This is an abhorrent decision by people who have no idea how the internet works.
Same sad song as it ever was. Keep giving more control to the government and they'll keep ratcheting down the screws on you.
An economic union should be about tariffs and the free movement of goods, not an entirely unelected bureaucratic federal government. Centralizing authority only benefits the well connected political class.
An economic union should be about tariffs and the free movement of goods, not an entirely unelected bureaucratic federal government.
The vote that occurred today was by the EU parliament, which is entirely elected. The directive was prepared inside the JURI committee, which also exists entirely out of elected representatives.
Also, you can't have a single digital market without a single copyright regime. The economic union implies the single market which implies a single copyright directive. I agree that the contents of that directive is lamentable, but the need for one is clear, even for those opposing this particular directive, provided you buy into the notion that single markets should exist at all.
> Also, you can't have a single digital market without a single copyright regime. The economic union implies the single market which implies a single copyright directive.
If, for instance, the left side of your single digital market has a copyright duration of 70 years after the death of the artist, and the right side has 90 years instead, then in effect, it's 70 years even on the right side because anyone can just go to the left side, trade copies of the expired works without paying licensing fees, then come back to the right side with those copies (because it's a single market).
So in effect, the regulation of the whole market is the weakest regulation of any part of it.
I agree with your sentiments, but couldn’t one argue that this is in fact an issue regarding goods/services/trade/economy? It’s not clear to me what would set this apart, just looking for more clarification.
I find many can't separate the idea of government and society. Government should serve society, not control it. Every societal issue is not in the purview of the government.
>The legislation approved today still faces a final vote in the European Parliament in January (where it’s possible, though very unlikely, it will be rejected). After that, individual EU member states will still get to choose how to put the directive in law. In other words, each country will be able to interpret the directive as they see fit.
It's not totally over yet, both the final vote and the implementation in member countries can disarm the worst parts of the directive.
Individual countries cannot "interpret the directive as they see fit". Transposition has to match the directive, otherwise the whole excercise would be pointless.
Not true. Many of the directives differ in countries (even major ones - for example countries in EU that don't use Euro). EU wants people to believe it is USA but it is not. The directives are not enforceable directly but if you want to be good EU country (which has its benefits) then you need to behave :)
Directives have to be transposed but, again, transposition has to match the contents of the directive otherwise there is no point.
It is possible to lodge a complaint with the Commission if transposition is deemed inadequate (and I'm sure copyright holders would do exactly that), and the Commission may bring a case against the country before the ECJ.
They can interpret anything sufficiently vague as they see fit. For example Article 10 of Directive 2004/38/EC states that a government shall only require "a document attesting to the existence of a family relationship", which most people would consider to be a marriage certificate, it also states the residence permit will be granted within 6 months of presentation of the documens. Article 25 limits the cost of the issuance of the residence permit.
Unlike many EU countries, the Netherlands requires that the marriage certificate is "legalised" and charges for the process. They will not even accept the documentation before you go through this extra legal procedure thereby increasing the total time to over 6 months. Under some interpretation of article 10 and 25, this would be illegal, they have a different interpretation.
You can find various compliance studies for directive 2004/38/EC and other directives as well. It is just a fact in Europe that the transposition into local law leads to inconsistent application of the law. Applying for the same visa (from the European perspective) in the Netherlands and in Germany can be two wildly different experiences.
The point is that, overall, the requirements of the directive must be met
Your example is actually a good one: The Netherlands might have added that the document must be legalised but their law still matches the directive's requirement and the added restriction is neither unreasonable nor onerous and might keep in line with the country's practices.
The bottom line is that those who hope that transposition will change the directive in any meaningful way are going to be sorely disappointed.
You see where this at national level, I have some access and ability to plead against it. But instead we've three MEPs serving a constituency of near 800,000 and they're never around.
I hate the removal of substantive access to local politicians that the EU has.
the European Parliament (here the body making a decision) is the EU institution that supposedly does not have the "democratic deficit", they are elected by the citizens. So in what way is this different from what we expect in democracies?
Isn't this the same attitude as "it's the user's fault if they click OK" on shrink-wrap legalese, repetitive security prompts, and the like?
People are constantly overwhelmed with choices, and eventually they start to economize on their decision-making to focus on immediate needs. Certain systems (particularly those designed by marketers and politicians) are set up to take advantage of this trait.
1) You could argue whether the EU Parliament has democracy deficits or not. I assume it has (based on the legislation process itself with involvement of the Committee, but also based upon unequally weighted votes of citizens from different countries).
2) However, the most important point is that this law is considered as a "techie niche" by the vast majority of citizens. Also, EU topics as such suffer from a very narrow attention in the general public. Having said this, it is far easier for lobbyists to place such an initiative "under the radar" than it would be to lobby in 28 countries. In techie speak, a centralized entity like the EU is more or less a single point of failure for the unavoidable "bugs" of a democracy.
Well, first of all I have yet to hear about this vote from any of my local news sources. If I didn't browse hackernews I likely wouldn't know about it.
Secondly I don't recall voting for any MEPs, as far as I can tell it's similarly not reported on. Besides given the lack of news about what any of the parties are up to it's hard to say anything about who you should even vote for.
Thirdly just because somewhere at the end a vaguely democratically elected group of people get to make a decision about it that doesn't somehow absolve the rest of the process from being undemocratic and seemingly driven by corporate interests. The biggest problem being that the decisions on what should be voted on and how seem to be mostly taken by an unelected group of people, who will evidently (given the way Selmayr was promoted) vote for anything if it gets them better pay and pensions.
Actually this proposal was a commission proposal, so the democratic deficit here is that this proposal could have gone through, EVEN IF it was voted out.
So that's one, in my opinion very big problem.
Second, people are just not aware of what power the EU has. And the politicians I speak to actually see this as an advantage. One told me specifically that without power like this we would still have the insanity of driving on the left of the road in Norway, or would still have the separate currencies (which of course, would also have prevented a lot of problems in Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, and provided better lives for probably 100 million (!) people).
So that's the second part. Nobody cares about the EU, because there is no unity. Europeans don't feel part of Europe. They feel they're part of France, Belgium, UK, but not of Europe. So they don't care. There is little to no local presence of any EU agency.
> Actually this proposal was a commission proposal, so the democratic deficit here is that this proposal could have gone through, EVEN IF it was voted out.
No! If the parliament had rejected the proposal, then the "ball" would have come back to the Commission, which would have had to amend their proposal, pass it through the Council again, and if successful, returned it to the Parliament, which would be again given the choice of rejecting or passing the amended proposal. (This is similar to what happens in other entities/countries with bicameral legislatives — e.g. the US senate vs. the House of Representatives.) Importantly, without the EU Parliament's approval, the proposal could never become law.
Now, granted the situation is more complex than just that the commission can push through whatever it wants, but the following statements are true:
1) the commission can block whatever it wants (ie. it has a monopoly on legislative initiative). So it has a negative veto, and can prevent (and does prevent) anything it wants.
2) the commission can, in cooperation with the EU council, create and adopt legislation, without anything more than getting the Parliament's position (but not approval) [1]
3) they can even use other procedures to get what they want [2]
In practice the commission and council requiring each other is essentially the commission doing what it wants because it's mostly the same people, and even when not, they're necessarily from the same country and party (well, everyone in one has a counterpart in the other that's from the same country and party).
So no. The EU is a dictatorship. The commission has the only lawgiving power, and can block anyone else's initiative. The parliament ... is better paid but no more powerful than my cat ... (plus the politicians in there couldn't organize their way out of a paper bag whereas my cat has claws).
(and let's ignore the fact that the commission also controls the EU court of justice)
I won't deny that the local press is at fault, however it's too simple to just blame them and release the EU from any responsibility. You can't have a democracy without public oversight, so if it's lacking then blaming other people for it isn't particularly persuasive. As it is the EU seems perfectly happy to keep things this way.
> Well, first of all I have yet to hear about this vote from any of my local news sources. If I didn't browse hackernews I likely wouldn't know about it.
Where do you live if I may ask? here in austria it was everywhere before the vote and now new articles with the result.
Technically, we can say no. But our politicians never do. My guess is that they do not want to step on any toes, which could make getting a sweet job in Brussels after their term ends harder.
If there is great resistance from the public after it becomes a disaster for all eu-countries it is much more likely to not go through than in an eu-country with resistance.
Do you really believe this is something politicians came up with in the first place?
This is another example of the classic lobbies-driven political decision where politicians pass legislations as a favour to their friends in corporate A or corporate B.
Also, if they think this will fix the revenue problems of the majority of newspaper publishers they are certainly wrong, newspaper are not dying because people read news on Google.
> This is another example of the classic lobbies-driven political decision where politicians pass legislations as a favour to their friends in corporate A or corporate B.
It's still the politicians passing the law. The fact that back-handers might be involved only makes them potentially even more corrupt.
Well, yes. Politicians created the system where it was possible for this to go through without any support from citizens, because they have simply no idea what is going on inside the EU.
TL;DR, politicians created the EU, it currently sucks even if they pass some very good laws sometimes. Now it's time for some very bad laws, the issue is that these laws is so bad the good laws seems very small in comparison.
>Rightholders are liable for unjustified takedowns
That's potentially interesting, what does it mean in practice though? How would they be liable? If there was a monetary penalty attached, the record companies would be bankrupt in a day based on the false positives of the youtube content ID algorithm.
This is somewhat true, but are national legislatures really any better? There's nothing quite like Brexit to convince me that my local legislature is completely refusing to listen to me (or anyone with any sense) at all on even the most basic issues.
National legislatures are better to the extent that the populace exerts direct electoral control over their representatives.
If the election of Trump or Ocasio-Cortez taught us anything, it should be that appealing to voters can get you into office, even with powerful entrenched interests running against you.
Elected politicians are 100% beholden to their voters, now more than ever.
If you think being outside the EU will stop politicians voting for these types of laws, here's a nice UK example for you that "make administrators and moderators of certain online forums responsible for content published on those forums"
The users certainly don't, but I think that Hiroshimoot will be rather miffed if he starts getting shit from the EU for not complying with these insane rules.
Just imagine how easy it's going to be to screw over other websites, just by making an account, uploading material that could in some way be construed as violating copyright but passes the filter because it cannot be perfect, and then reporting the site to one of the bodies responsible for upholding this directive.
Hell, just by doing that you could probably end any potential upholding of this system really fast.
Chans allow anonymous users to upload images and historically this leads into a lot of illegal content, especially stuff like child porn, to be uploaded unless you have strict moderation.
That's 4chan. The other big site is 8chan, where users can create their own boards and there are less rules, which makes it much harder to moderate. Then you also have all of the smaller chans which tend to get spammed by bots posting illegal stuff like child porn.
Maybe someone (with a big following on Twitter, let's say) needs to start compiling a list of national government and EU websites that publish user generated content, for example petition sites. If the law goes through, people can go to those sites and post "unexpectedly copyright infringing" content, such as a paragraph from a book (perhaps a self-published one that consists of just seemingly contextless paragraphs).
(Inb4 the national laws end up including huge exemptions for site run by the government or political parties).
A more technical campaign would be reverse engineering the filtering algorithms (censorship machines) that sites end up forced to install, and finding a way of generating new copyrighted content that has the equivalent of a "hash collision" against already popular (or political) content hosted on websites using the filter.
I wish the EU would, so that it stops damaging things for the rest of the planet. Eventually the costs of complying with the EU's decrees will get high enough where it will make more sense for companies to block European traffic than comply.
If (cost of providing content to EU visitors) > (revenue generated from separate non-personalized ad network for EU visitors) { turn off EU visitor access }
Nor me, but I would guess that blocking EU traffic is neither necessary nor sufficient for avoiding compliance with EU law. Not doing any business in the EU would seem to be a more obvious general solution.
For example, you may block EU traffic, but if you have a bank account in the EU, and if an EU citizen discovers somehow, perhaps while travelling abroad, that you are misusing their personal data...
There are some projects going on to do just that. Another (now dead) comment mentioned Zeronet, which is a good start. There's also IPFS, and some other lesser known ones. I think there were some based on Ethereum and other crypto as well.
The problem with all of these projects is content. Because there is low usage and a technical barrier to entry, nobody is bothering to put up interesting content that would attract users. (Except for some, ahem, "fringe" interests.) It's a chicken-and-egg problem. I keep hoping that one of these regulations will rekindle interest in distributed hosting, but it hasn't happened yet.
If some advocates would be willing to convince (and possibly help) some major OSS-related resources to establish a beachhead, it might help draw in some of that crowd at least. Adoption there would probably improve the systems, gradually bringing in people from the outside like with the original Internet.
the EU's capability to be authoritarian (and from what I gather, propensity to use this authority) was one of the reasons I voted to leave. The central dictation of "how it shall be", reality be damned, reminds me of the Soviet Union. Obviously not to the same extent and severity, but the EU is making the same mistakes in thinking that broad-brush central planning of a huge geographic region isn't a fundamentally flawed concept.
If you voted for Britain to leave the EU because of the EU's "capability to be authoritarian", then perhaps you should have already voted (with your feet) to leave Britain because of its much worse capability to be authoritarian.
For example, it was Britain that introduced the Snoopers' Charter:
you're not wrong, I'm fairly anti-state-overreach so I'm also really unhappy with the Snoopers Charter and just so, so many things my government does. But hey, given two layers of authoritarian rule if I get an option to remove one of them you can be sure I'll take it. Especially if it's the one that I can't affect democratically.
> Out of interest, can you name another example where the EU was authoritarian (acting in a way that the British government wouldn't have)?
I can't really speak to things the EU would do that the British government wouldn't - as you've already said, the UK government is pretty bad too. But we have more democratic control over the UK government than we do the European, because it's more localised. I've heard many examples of overreaching EU directives through listening to parliamentary debates but my memory sucks, so I'll give you a couple of examples that I can remember without re-researching the topic: the EU national fishing quotas (famous for decimating the British fishing industry), and the EU's "enthusiasm" for collective bargaining at the WTO. Rather than negotiate directly, many of Britain's trade agreements are bundled up into the EU's and then the EU makes special concessions to Britain. We've actually been historically quite good at forcing the EU to give us trade concessions so as far as I am aware it's not been too harmful to our prospects (I welcome a correction from anyone more well-versed in the UK's international trade standing) but it's still an example of EU authoritarian practices.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. You start by saying that you can't affect the EU democratically (even though you have much more democratic control over your MEP than you do over the House of Lords or your monarch), but then correctly point out that one of the important factors is how localised the decision making is. It's true that your MEP has a wider constituency than your MP, for example, but as I see it, the "less democratic" EU is actually undoing the authoritarian tendencies of the British government, rather than adding to them (in net, I suppose, especially since this copyright law hasn't actually been finalised yet).
Excuse the triple pun, but speaking of "in net", I don't see how EU national fishing quotas are an example of authoritarianism. I suppose you are saying it is an example of state-overreach, but my understanding is that the quotas are set to avoid over-fishing of British waters (a problem which has historically done more to decimate fish populations than any EU politician has), and to allow an open market for deciding which fishing companies are allowed which part of the quota (leading to better prices for the consumer). You may not like the idea that non-British citizens can fish in British waters, but it could equally be argued that it would be state-overreach for the British government to effectively raise the price of fish to give a subsidy to British fish catchers.
> You start by saying that you can't affect the EU democratically (even though you have much more democratic control over your MEP than you do over the House of Lords or your monarch)
This is true, but the Queen's job to sign new laws is purely ceremonial at this point, and while I can't democratically affect the House of Lords, I can affect the House of Commons and the Cabinet. The House of Lords is a bit of a relic at this point and though I don't know of any bad things they've done, I am skeptical of their existence.
> It's true that your MEP has a wider constituency than your MP, for example, but as I see it, the "less democratic" EU is actually undoing the authoritarian tendencies of the British government
This is not the EU's job. It is the remit of the British people to hold our government to account, not an even higher, more abstracted government that is even less accountable to the people. The EU can make good decisions and bad decisions, but in either case it is unaccountable to the people it is supposed to serve.
> I suppose you are saying it is an example of state-overreach, but my understanding is that the quotas are set to avoid over-fishing of British waters
This is the same as above. As an island nation with limited resources we have to manage our ecology and stocks of fish. The EU is not in the right position to do this. Our fishing industry has been suppressed leading to even less job opportunities in the coastal North, but then Norway (which is not an EU member but has mutual fishing agreements with it) is permitted to come in and fish our waters. So you don't even get the theoretical benefit of the EU's legislation in this case, because the EU has handed the supposedly-restricted fishing rights to another country that is only bound by trade agreements, not membership under a unified international court. And I have to ask - who benefits? Because the EU negotiates over all its member states, and this arrangement certainly doesn't do Britain any favours. I did enjoy the pun though ;)
> it could equally be argued that it would be state-overreach for the British government to effectively raise the price of fish to give a subsidy to British fish catchers.
Excluding transportation costs, this might be true. But we're not talking about an open market - the EU licenses which countries can fish British waters. If Norwegian fishing boats are collecting British fish and selling them from Norway, there are two options: 1) they aren't selling them to Britain, leading to a simple drain on our natural resources, and 2) they are selling to Britain, adding transport costs (both fiscal and ecological) to the production of fish, meaning increased costs. I agree with the need to regulate the waters, but it should be Britain that manages its own resources (after all, the incentives are aligned to provide for future generations, 5-year election cycle notwithstanding) by capping the fishing, but choosing for itself which fishing vessels get to harvest our waters. This way Britain can balance its own interests between increasing supply of locally-caught fish, and exchanging use of our natural resources in mutually-beneficial international exchange.
>> It is the remit of the British people to hold our government to account, not an even higher, more abstracted government that is even less accountable to the people.
Why does it stop exactly there in the multiple layers of goverment we have? Because you say so? Why is the remit of a citizen of say, Ipswich, to hold the Ipswich City council to account, the Suffolk County Council to account, the British government to account, all elected with ever larger constituencies, each more abstract and less accountable than the last, but not the EU government?
> Why does it stop exactly there in the multiple layers of goverment we have? Because you say so?
I think you're misunderstanding me - granted, the sentence was ambiguous. I was saying that it is not the remit of the EU to hold the British government accountable.
> This is true, but the Queen's job to sign new laws is purely ceremonial at this point,
The fact that her role is purely ceremonial (at least the parts of it which the British public are privy to) just means that her powers are either unexercised (potentially a dereliction of duty) or are exercised by the Prime Minister, concentrating too much power in one person's hands. If Britain had an elected head of state, with a democratic mandate, then there could be a proper separation of powers, and a less authoritarian executive.
> and while I can't democratically affect the House of Lords, I can affect the House of Commons and the Cabinet.
You may be able to affect one seat in the House of Commons, but the Prime Minister (and the Cabinet) are determined by an extra layer or two of abstraction (just as EU commissioners and the members of the European Council are chosen).
> The EU can make good decisions and bad decisions, but in either case it is unaccountable to the people it is supposed to serve.
I suppose you are saying it is "not sufficiently accountable" or "not as accountable" rather than completely unaccountable. I would say that there is a trade-off between how accountable/local the government is, and how effective it is at protecting rights and producing positive outcomes for citizens. At one extreme, we'd all be kings of one-person kingdoms, as sovereign individuals, not subject to any other laws, and at the other extreme we'd have a global government with perhaps log2(7 billion) levels of indirect elections. While there might be an intuitive appeal to the idea that the correct balance is for all decisions to be made no further away from you than London (as if there are no decisions made outside the country that can affect Britain), I personally feel that having the EU as an extra level of accountability for the British government is, in practice, beneficial for British citizens (and European citizens generally, to whom the EU is accountable).
> Our fishing industry has been suppressed leading to even less job opportunities in the coastal North, but then Norway (which is not an EU member but has mutual fishing agreements with it) is permitted to come in and fish our waters.
If non-EU member Norway has decided it is in their interests to enter a bilateral agreement with the EU regarding fishing, then I don't think we can rule out the possibility that Britain would end up in a similar agreement with the EU next year.
> the EU has handed the supposedly-restricted fishing rights to another country that is only bound by trade agreements, not membership under a unified international court
The existence of a bilateral fishing agreement with Norway doesn't mean there are no restrictions on fishing (indeed, it proves that there are restrictions, otherwise there would be no need for an agreement). Also, I'm afraid you're wrong about Norway not being part of a unified international court, since the EFTA Court exists and Norway is subject to its jurisdiction.
> And I have to ask - who benefits? Because the EU negotiates over all its member states, and this arrangement certainly doesn't do Britain any favours.
Is it really certain that carrying out negotiations at the EU level doesn't do Britain any favours? By "negotiations" I assume you are talking about trade negotiations, since the size of quotas is based on scientific evidence, and the allocation of them based on market forces. It seems intuitive to me that when a large economic entity is negotiating with a small economic entity, the larger entity has more bargaining power, since they have more to offer. Therefore Britain is (in general) more likely to receive a favourable deal when negotiating as part of the largest economic bloc in the world (rather than treating that bloc as a competitor in a zero-sum game). Also it's not accurate to treat all trade as being subject to negotiation at the EU level, since Britain can and does ne...
I concede your point that arguably, the UK is not democratic in that the final word on laws is held by a monarch. Personally, I like the Royal Family on a cultural level and am largely ambivalent on a legislative level because as far as I'm aware, they've never done anything to a bill that gave me cause to dislike them. That doesn't preclude their having done so though.
> You may be able to affect one seat in the House of Commons, but the Prime Minister (and the Cabinet) are determined by an extra layer or two of abstraction (just as EU commissioners and the members of the European Council are chosen).
Given that our general elections are held against parties, there's 1. nomination of a party leader by party members and 2. election of a party by the population. But election of the ruling party is in my mind important but complemented by the real power of the populace in democracies - the power to influence the government through protest, petition the Prime Minister, to write to our MPs, and so on. This is part of the reason I dislike the "distance" between the EU and the public - a protest in a large city is going to definitely get the council/MP's attention and probably get talked about in parliament, but to get the EU to act it needs to be passed on by the MEP and then the other nations (all of whom are still separate entities with their own concerns) need to express interest in solving the problems of the protesting nation. Plus any motion has to go through the "democratic deficit" portions of the EU.
I suppose at the root of my issue is that the EU is made of nation states that are vastly different both culturally and economically. Within the UK there's a lot of difference of opinion, but we're still bound by the same culture, land mass and national economy, so that helps to hedge the divisions between us (North/South, England/Scotland/Wales/N. Ireland, London/Everywhere Else etc). We can have internal disagreements but that bond still exists. I don't harbour any dislike or ill will towards the other European nations (some are strangers to me, others I really love), but I recognise that they have little reason to sacrifice their interests to support Britain and we have little reason to sacrifice our interests to support theirs. This is where international agreements work better than a shared supranational entity - we can find mutually beneficial agreements and are never forced to go along with something we dislike that another country wants. I think this is why the UK is known in the EU as having been a royal pain - we keep demanding exceptions and concessions and different rules, because we just aren't that similar to Germany or France or Belgium or Italy. I guess it comes from being an island nation.
> If non-EU member... next year.
And that's a good thing, if we can negotiate such a deal to our benefit as a sovereign nation. My issue is where Britain has to sacrifice its interests for the sake of other nations, when we get such a small say in the decision. To be honest, I would prefer it if this "coming together based on mutual interests, not hierarchical authority" were to operate at even more local levels, but the nation-state model isn't something that's likely to devolve any time soon.
> The existence of... its jurisdiction.
I'll concede you that point. The point I was trying to approach rather ham-fistedly is that the natural rights to the UK's resources are (from what I can see) being packaged up and sold off, to the detriment of the British fishing industry. If Britain were to do that as an independent entity it would still suck but at least you could be reasonably sure (corruption aside) that it was in exchange for something that would, in return, net-benefit the national economy. When it's the EU doing the bargaining, the benefit we get in return isn't so clear. Is the EU trading British water...
> as far as I'm aware, they've never done anything to a bill that gave me cause to dislike them. That doesn't preclude their having done so though.
There are bigger questions than just whether the royals have done something that you personally don't like (or failed to do something that you would have liked them to have done). It is worth considering whether their power has legitimacy in a democracy (including whether they are illegitimately taking power away from the role of an elected head of state, who could veto bad legislation, for example), and whether there is sufficient scrutiny of their actions that we can feel confident that they really aren't acting against your interest without you knowing it. For further reading, I offer:
> Given that our general elections are held against parties, there's 1. nomination of a party leader by party members and 2. election of a party by the population.
We are told that our general elections are about local candidates and not parties (as an excuse to avoid certain types of voting reform), but moreover I don't think that there is a requirement that parties have to let their entire membership have a say in who is selected as party leader. In any case, parties generally do not allow you to be a member of more than one at a time, so most of the UK population cannot influence your option 1, and parties generally don't win the support of the majority of the population, so most people are unhappy with the outcome of option 2 as well, even before the party has a change of leader mid-term.
I'm sure you know all that already, so I'm just reiterating that there are abstractions, and distance, and "democratic deficits" in the UK system too, and that you may be more comfortable with them because you are more familiar with them (and perhaps the problems tend to work in your favour over all).
> I suppose at the root of my issue is that the EU is made of nation states that are vastly different both culturally and economically. Within the UK there's a lot of difference of opinion, but we're still bound by the same culture, land mass and national economy ... we just aren't that similar to Germany or France or Belgium or Italy. I guess it comes from being an island nation.
I think this gets to the core difference between our two perspectives. I would say that I have more in common with a German, French, Belgian, or Italian person that had a similar profession to me, a similar age, and similar politics, than I might do with someone living across the street from me. Indeed, I've met, and lived with, and worked with, people who have travelled from across Europe, and I felt I could trust their input into the political processes that affect me (on a supra-national level) than apparently the average British voter. That doesn't mean I want someone in France deciding what the income tax rate is in the UK, or someone in Italy deciding whether to send British troops to war, but these are examples of political decisions which are deliberately left to member states (and we're not talking about one country deciding another's policies, we're talking about an electorate of equal individuals collectively deciding the evolution of their shared environment).
> the natural rights to the UK's resources are (from what I can see) being packaged up and sold off, to the detriment of the British fishing industry.
It's a bit ironic, since the very first thing I see when I visit the link is a giant banner to consent to being tracked, or visit each and every third-party advertiser's opt-out site from the giant list of advertisers present on Vox's platform. Said list carries the explicit note "We provide the table below as a courtesy, but we are not obligated to maintain or update it. We are not responsible for third-party sites and their privacy practices as it relates to opt-outs from tracking activities."
Bureaucracy, compliance cost, uncertainty of enforcement... The category doesn't need to be the same, just the pile upon pile of anti-(small)business regulation.
You say "anti-business", I say "consumer rights" (and more importantly "human rights").
As a small business you can comply with the GDPR fairly easily unless you have no regard for anyone's privacy to begin with. And even if you're not 100% compliant you won't be insta-sued to bankruptcy, you'll only be reported and the relevant data protection agency will check on you. The GDPR encourages data protection agencies to help businesses fix their problems and only use fines as a last resort for gross violations and wilful negligence.
Unless you're storing/processing information that has special protections (e.g. religion, sexual orientation, medical data) the bureaucracy is also fairly tame, especially for small businesses, especially for businesses that aren't at their core based on processing personal information (e.g. not online dating startups).
Compare this with the "upload filter" as it has been interpreted in the media so far: allegedly every website that allows users to upload content would have to implement their own Content ID database and sign deals with publishing companies or license filtering services.
GDPR is TOTALLY different. If you can't run a business under GDPR legislation then what you're doing is almost certainly unethical or at worst mismanaged and irresponsible with customer data.
On the other hand this legislation will completely change the internet as we know it.
I don't believe that. If a compagny has no idea where does their data goes and what their use is, they have shitty practices and / or are incompetent. Good riddance
All you need is a privacy policy and the ability to delete / return customer data when requested. But that doesn't have to be in real time/automated, you can just set up an email address and respond manually. It's rare you'll even get a request if you're a company with such a small IT budget.
All the other things (double opt-in email, not contacting your customers in an unsolicited way) are process changes that can be implemented without IT cost.
Good riddance then. Not gonna cry for them like I'm not gonna cry for a restaurant that gets shut down because complying with health standards is too expensive.
maybe - but the philosophy behind it is similar. The EU lawmakers just cannot stand to the existence of unregulated area. Everything gotta be under their control. Unfortunately, once you support pro-strict regulations, then there is no going back. One day, I believe, the internet as we know today won't exist in the EU.
"Article 11 is intended to give publishers and newspapers a way to make money when companies like Google link to their stories…”
Is there anything stopping a search engine like Google choosing not to link to a newspaper? Surely they can’t be required to link to a newspaper AND then pay that newspaper to do so?
The trade-off if Google chose not to link to the newspaper would be a (slightly) less useful search engine, but the cost to the newspapers would surely be higher in the long term…or am I missing something?
That's funny. In a minute you'll be saying that one will be enforced in Europe. I mean perhaps they're racist enough to enforce it against Google, but they won't prevent monopolies.
(Europe, where near everything is mono/oligopolized and the behavior of those companies is abhorrent. From beer in Belgium (they own the cafes or loan them money and force out competing beers from the menu), to cheese in France (import and health regulations mean almost no non-French cheese and French producers are exempt from even most of those health regulations). To German cars (read how Dieselgate played out in Germany, ie. German manufacturers got exempted from ... car regulations ... not even joking ... or what keeps happening to startup car manufacturers in Germany and France, ...)
Basing a decision on nationality is. Does it really make that much difference that it's a company rather than a person ? I mean, it does, but ... on the other hand companies are nothing but groups of people.
It's far less than actual racism, but it's still not right.
This already is in progress on Youtube (an Alphabet company). There is significant push to onboard the well known cable news brands on Youtube, on preferential conditions as compared to the regular, individual youtubers.
It is an intended block on convincing people through facts. In all reality, the EU is ruled by old bureaucrats and they see internet like a commodity that needs to be controlled and regulated. Make a joke on the internet? Think twice your IP will be your liability.
Germany was a pioneer with its "Leistungsschutzrecht" and German publishers indeed wanted to force Google to show their news snippets (and therefore pay for them).
Their reasoning was that Google as a monopoly position and therefore they have to show news from all publishers equally.
Equality really wasn’t what the german publishers had in mind. They wanted Google to pay for being able to show a snippet of their content in News. A ridiculous idea, that was countered by the only sensible answer: Google asked publishers if they wanted to continue to have their content listed in Google News for free or if their content should be removed. Needless to say that almost all of the proponents, including the most vocal publishers, agreed to keep their content indexed, thereby rendering the law useless.
Tells you something about Google. They seem to think they're just another company doing business. They're not - they are a monstrous monopoly, quoted response is clearly bullying and should be treated as such.
I disagree. The publishers line of thought is absurd.
How can anyone reason that publishers should be paid for the major share of visitors Google forwards to their content? Of course publishers have every right to de-index their content from news, search or both and the tools to do so have always been available. However apparently they had to be reminded explicitely.
Google, or similar services like Apple News, certainly can't be forced to pay for content they don't want or need.
The problem is that Google is without question a monopoly, and so I think that there is a valid argument that it needs to be regulated and be forced to be impartial in the results shown. The fact that they show people's content without giving them page views (in a world where page views are how you get significant amounts of money, not to mention subscription opportunities) is a conscious decision to implement a feature that arguably impacts revenue. I think there is also a valid argument for this as well.
But I do think that the EU copyright law is significantly flawed because it's purpose is to further extend the already ridiculously over-extended draconian copyright laws that exist in the EU. I don't think the issues they (ostensibly) set out to solve are something that should be ignored though -- Google acting as a biased monopoly which implements features that impact people's ability to make money is a real problem that needs to be solved somehow.
ooh the widget content. wow that’s huge, most google results have some kind of widget content be it q&a results or images or even key excerpts. never really thought that it’s reducing a lot of page views but with enough of those little widgets it probably adds up. If you’re getting what you’re looking for right on the results page then why click on a link?
> The problem is that Google is without question a monopoly
This is just false. bing.com exists. news.ycombinator.com exists. reddit.com exists....
> The fact that they show people's content without giving them page views..
This is just false. Google shows at most an excerpt (that is defined by the publisher) or a headline (on news.google.com). Unless you're talking about AMP, but that's a decision made by the publisher too.
Does 92% usage make something a monopoly? 95%? 99%? 100%?
I think that the percentage argument is not the only important thing to consider, there are other anti-competitive practices which (when practiced at a large enough scale) become a monopoly even if "only" 50% of people use the product (friendly reminder that 50% of internet users is more than a billion people -- much larger than the population of most countries).
My point is not that Google is doing something illegal (and thus arguing over the legal definition of a monopoly is not helpful -- just like arguing over the legal meaning of the US 1st Amendment is not helpful in discussions over the concept of free speech). I'm arguing that it is a monopoly in the ordinary meaning of the word, in that effectively everyone uses Google and Google exerts a massive amount of power over their users.
But for a pseudo-legal argument: Google participates in a form of product tying[1] by requiring you to create a Google account in order to access Google Groups (which are publicly-run mailing lists and an unrelated product to their account service). Now since you don't pay for Google accounts this isn't a strict violation of anti-trust laws, but it is very close in concept to the sort of thing anti-trust laws protect against.
> But for a pseudo-legal argument: Google participates in a form of product tying[1] by requiring you to create a Google account in order to access Google Groups (which are publicly-run mailing lists and an unrelated product to their account service).
That seems to be false; I can read mailing lists hosted at Google Groups without logging in (for instance https://groups.google.com/a/groups.riscv.org/forum/#!forum/i... opens for me without asking for a login). I'm subscribed to that mailing list from an email address which is not a Google account, and I didn't have to log in to any Google account when I subscribed. I can post to that mailing list directly from a normal email client, through a non-Google email provider.
The link you just posted requires me to log in, and I've had this problem with go-nuts and the OCI mailing list in the past. It's strange this doesn't happen to you -- maybe it's a geographically specific thing (I'm connecting from Australia)?
Of course you don't need to login in order to post on the mailing list, but I think that's only one of the three main features of a mailing list (broadcast, subscription, and archival) that I can do without logging in.
> Does 92% usage make something a monopoly? 95%? 99%? 100%?
100% certainly would.
> I'm arguing that it is a monopoly in the ordinary meaning of the word, in that effectively everyone uses Google and Google exerts a massive amount of power over their users.
What do you mean by "the ordinary meaning of the word" here? It's also not clear to me that "effectively everyone uses Google".
91% of internet users is about 3 billion people. They control a platform that affects more people than any single nation state (2-3x larger than the largest nation state and larger than the top 3 countries combined). For instance, changes in PageRank (which is an unaccountable and unauditable algorithm) affect every user of their site in terms of what links they see, what articles they read, and by extension what they think.
You might argue it's the fault of users for not being informed, but I think that if a company has a significant impact on the lives of 3 billion people (which again, is a larger influence than any single government on this planet -- and nation states have constitutions and laws specifically to ensure that they serve the people and are accountable) then it has reached the point where it either needs to be broken up or be regulated. I don't care which, I just think that this cowboy mentality (that software is somehow special and lives in a world where regulation is always an unreasonable viewpoint to have) has to stop at some point.
Regarding the term monopoly, there are different views on what precisely the term means. Google does have anti-competitive practices which you might argue make them act as a monopoly. You can argue they have a monopoly on internet searches because whenever they change PageRank in a way that negatively impacts some users (or when they make changes to GMail's spam filter so that it starts blocking valid emails) there isn't a rush to a different service because there is no way to co-ordinate such a rush. Instead you have other secondary industries like SEO which exist purely to try to keep websites reachable from Google. The fact they have the power to manipulate how the majority of sites operate clearly means they have significant (and in my view monopolistic) control over the market.
They also have a market share that is actually incomprehensible. Microsoft was indicted under anti-trust laws because of Internet Explorer being bundled with Windows. I think Google acts as much more of a monopoly than Microsoft did in the 90s, and "good guy Google" really is an outdated mental model for a company with that much influence over people's lives.
Monopoly doesn't mean that there's only one company in the market. It means that one company has an overwhelming amount of market share. Google unquestionably fits this description when it comes to internet search, outside of China at least.
Generally it's measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index - HHI.
Though the word implies otherwise a monopoly is not defined by the lack of competitors. At least not in a legal sense anymore.
It is defined by it's marketshare. And google search is by and large a monopoly in this regard having ~90% market share in virtually all segments of the market.
>[..] a monopoly is not defined by the lack of competitors.[..]It is defined by it's marketshare.
No, I can't agree. I don't even consider Microsoft a monopoly, even though their product comes pre-installed on every PC you can buy in shops. If you can't get any alternative ISP (to e.g. AT&T) where you live, by any means, now that is a monopoly.
Move house? To where? In areas with only a single ISP, and that ISP 'owns' the poles/whatever, you can move as much as you want. Nothing changes.
Or did you mean moving to another city? Another part of the country? Really?
It should be obvious that it's perfectly possible to define something as a monopoly in a certain area. If a monopoly could only be defined as a monopoly if it were global, there wouldn't be many.
For the record, I do agree that ISPs are monopolies (or oligopolies) in many parts of the US and other countries as well. However they are not the only form of monopoly, and I don't understand why you seem to be saying that the statement "Google is a monopoly" is implicitly saying "ISPs are not a monopoly". They're both monopolies, just different kinds -- the geographic argument doesn't make sense for websites for instance (outside of countries that massively censor the internet).
> Though the word implies otherwise a monopoly is not defined by the lack of competitors. At least not in a legal sense anymore.
Yes, it is, though in practice that's based on complex factual analysis of whether there is real competition not whether there are other players in the same descriptive market.
> It is defined by it's marketshare.
No, marketshare is a “same descriptive market” test that people casually talking about competition use; legally, the more relevant tests are things like pricing power—can the alleged monopolist raise prices in some range without losing sales to a competitor. You can have a very large marketshare in a descriptive market but lack pricing power, or have small marketshare in a descriptive market and have pricing power because the market described is really multiple segregated markets in practice.
> [Google being a monopoly] is just false. bing.com exists. news.ycombinator.com exists. reddit.com exists....
I don't think the existence of other websites on the internet is not really an argument against Google being a monopoly. Without question, the vast majority of the population (outside China) uses Google. This means that the majority of people who use the internet are using Google as their method of accessing websites, and thus Google has an effective monopoly on what links people see (and thus by proxy what articles they read and what they think about topics).
I'm arguing all of this from a point of view where you don't really care how Google or anything behind the scenes works -- most people view Google as a utility that just tells you what "the internet" has to say on a topic. Given it's prevalence and significant impact on people's decision making, it should have far more accountability.
> Google shows at most an excerpt (that is defined by the publisher) or a headline (on news.google.com).
Google also has their Q&A thing where they parse the contents of web pages to answer questions you ask Google -- so you don't end up on the person who wrote the answer's website. I think that is pretty clearly an example of Google showing people's content without giving them page views (whether or not you agree that it is an issue).
If there are viable competitors then can’t consumers simply move to different platforms? I primarily use DuckDuckGo, so how is Google search a monopoly?
If you’re going to base it solely off number of users then you’re effectively punishing businesses for being successful and NOT from harming consumers.
Google can (and has) changed large things about their platform that may negatively impact their users (~90% of the internet population which is ~3 billion people -- larger than the population of any single country) and their users don't really have much of a choice.
For instance, changes to PageRank have negatively impacted websites and business consistently in the past (so much that there's an industry around making pages cater to the whims of an unauditable algorithm -- SEO). I think the fact that websites obviously cannot just switch to a competitor (unless they want to stop catering to a potential market of 3 billion people) rules that as being monopolistic behaviour.
That's what I mean when I refer to a monopoly. If you have exclusive control over an algorithm that affects more people than any government body on earth, then you are a monopoly. Same argument goes for quite a few of their other products (if your personal mail server isn't effectively "blessed" by GMail you cannot communicate with the majority of internet users), but Search is the most obvious one.
> The problem is that Google is without question a monopoly
Is it? I mean, sure, far more people use Google than, say, Bing or DuckDuckGo. But there's nothing actually stopping them from using those alternatives, other than the fact that they're not as good.
That's obviously correct, but it seems weird to use a different metric for market share and lock-in. If you define Google's customers as ad buyers, then they're very much not a monopoly, have way less than 91% market share, and their competitiors don't have a lack of users.
If they have a monopoly on search because of their share of searches, then surely the relevant lock-in would be how easily users of search can move to competitors?
Think about it this way: there are plenty of products and services that you can't advertise anywhere else but on google search, so Google has a monopoly on that. This monopoly exists because of Google's abusive practices to prevent competition from entering the market it wants to own.
>The fact that they show people's content without giving them page views (in a world where page views are how you get significant amounts of money, not to mention subscription opportunities) is a conscious decision to implement a feature that arguably impacts revenue
Think about how grossly afflicted with clickbait the news ecosystem is today, and then imagine how much worse it could get if Google were legally prevented from even attaching a blurb to the links that it shows users.
> I think that there is a valid argument that it needs to be regulated and be forced to be impartial in the results shown
I agree that regulation might be useful here, and impartial search results are a good goal. But linking fees go against that. If newspaper A wants a fee from google for showing its links but newspaper B doesn't, it would be unfair to the entire market to force google to include both A and B equally. If A and B agree to charge google the same fee, that sounds a lot like a cartel doing price fixing, which is already illegal. The government could set a fixed price google has to pay, but at that point we have given up on finding a free market solution, so that's a last resort that isn't nessesary yet.
It's fine that people can demand money for links, but I don't see any scenario where this would happen in reality.
How do you judge impartial objectively? You can't even handle fake news without it being a cudgel for censors denying reality. Pure stats won't work and as seen with the moderation problem with Facebook not advocating their partisan view sets off their persecution complex.
Also by previewing they prevent load as well and boost relevance. That favors real data instead of SEO page caching garbage that tries to get matched to every common keyword. You do not have a right to a business model, much less it being unchanged by time.
About 10 years ago, newspapers got together to try and get Google to give them some money, for the content Google was indexing to populate their news search results.
Google's response was to give them better ways of de-indexing content. IE, a way to opt out. Take it or leave it. Naturally, few newspaper took leave it, preferring to get readers & no revenue than no readers and no revenue.
Since then, efforts have focused on turning that around. Give Google a take it or leave it option. Either shut down Google news or pay newspapers somehow. So far, Google have walked a couple of times, when such laws were passed locally.
On the other hand, newspapers were a lot less rubbish two decades ago when they could still afford to employ many journalists. That is what they're trying to get back to with legislation like this.
I think they went rubbish before the internet in search of profits. Remember the old meme about whenever the news covers something you know well it is bullshit but you trust it in areas you don't know about? I recall it being obviously worse in the early established days of the internet where there was enough to fact check but not mainstream enough that journalists knew about it to make their jobs easier.
Admittedly I bear a hard grudge against them from my youth and how they would scapegoat and stir up moral panics about the youth and their media. Rainbow parties, bullshit claims about video games and anime, etc. They still love to use Millennials as a slur.
I personally suspect that demographic warfare came back to bite them hard as they grow up and don't trust the ones constantly talking shit about them on garbage grounds.
And that would clearly be ridiculous (though believable that the EU would try). Are they going to fine Google for monopolising weather queries next? How about putting Casio out of business by abusing search monopoly to provide a free calculator?
No we don't. I get my news from public broadcasters. They have the bonus of not pushing the owner's political agenda and being subject to public oversight.
Not always true, although they do tend to be soft on their own country. In either case you can solve that just by reading multiple countries' public news.
Yeah. Start a newspaper that talks about such issues honestly, not like those so-called journalistic conglomerates that curate "local" newspapers across whole countries.
The issue comes from companies that were too powerful before they went to ask google for money.
I think newspapers tend to forget we don't need them either as there are many choices for news that are legit. They have for far too long used to captive audiences and that obviously is not the case. however like most industries which had captive audiences they fall back on regulations to protect their bottom line rather than improve their offerings.
I’m under the assumption you have to setup your site and apply for Google News before they start indexing your articles. Of the
Big publications opt out it just leaves space for smaller outlets to grow.
If I'm not mistaken, it's still an option out basis. Google crawl, index and search everything by default and allow content owners some controls, either via site manager or via flags in your html.
Google should resolve this by conspicuously refusing to link to newspapers. There should be a banner saying "results from certain news sites are not available in your country", like the existing chillingeffects one.
(This dealt with an earlier local version of this in some European countries)
Google’s end goal is that the only way to monetise content is by one of their ads. That’s not a world good for either democracy or journalism or any artistic work.
Didn't Spain news media ram through some kind of link-tax laws to try and extricate money out of Google, and that's why we don't hear any news out of Spain any more?
Yes, Spain has been shut out of Google News since December, 2014. It's a good example of regulation that can actually go so far that even the biggest companies will stop doing business in your country.
Google News for Spain certainly closed in response to that law. I guess that Google News for other countries then also doesn’t link to spanish newspapers, since those could still somehow sue google as a company that operates in Spain.
Is the license fee really for a simple link? I'd think the other publishers would love for sites like Google to be linking content and driving traffic to their platforms.
If it's about scraping content and presenting it in a separate feed or otherwise outside of the source platform, I can see why they would not want that.
I was wondering the same thing then read in the article that links with 'single word' descriptions are ok. So my guess is that it's aimed a "linkers" who quote a significant fraction of an article (I.e. eliminating the reason to click on the link)
> I was wondering the same thing then read in the article that links with 'single word' descriptions are ok. So my guess is that it's aimed a "linkers" who quote a significant fraction of an article (I.e. eliminating the reason to click on the link)
Wouldn't that also preclude inclusion of the title? How would single word descriptions even be meaningful beyond being used as citation link anchors?
I don't understand why any of this was necessary in the first place, the only reason I can think of is this being on the wishlist of a powerful lobbying bloc.
There is something suspect about the EU's cavalier attitude in churning out internet regulations, they generally favor old industries and incumbents.
Google being a monopoly that applies biases to the results it shows (in a way that has no public accountability) is a significant problem -- as well as the fact they implement features which effectively take away revenue from websites by showing their content without giving them page views. That is (ostensibly) the justification for these kinds of laws. I think that they are flawed because they focus on further copyright extensions that I find draconian, but the problem itself I think is pretty obviously a real problem.
I don't agree with the legislation in question (the upload filter is an awful idea, and the link tax is a really bad way of attempting to solve a real problem because it clearly exists to make sure German publishing houses get even more money).
But I don't see why this is relevant to my point that there is actually a real issue here, and ignoring it is going to cause even more laws like these to be passed because the narrative from publishers (that they are losing business because of internet companies that have a cavalier attitude about the people they are cutting off) is not entirely fictitious. When's the last time you saw Google telling large websites about changes in PageRank that will negatively impact them?
Newspapers are dying and try to find a way to make money from their content. They find that the big user distributor Google doesn't give them their fair share and therefore try to make him pay. They get supported by other content producers and now we all are facing another absurd law.
I am a big fan of the GDPR, because it protects the rights of the users. But this time they are building a law to ease the fight of large corporations, affecting everone else in the process... not cool.
I think the upload filters are meant to serve a peeking hole for EU governments to listen to what people share on the internet, as this bypasses the encryption. This will enable governments to stop content harmful to the regime from being shared and also track individuals who are working against the government. This all happened before in all socialist regimes. I remember it well, when I was phoning someone there were censors actively listening to the conversations. This is being transplanted on the internet. It is ironic how people fought this through the 80s only to have it reinstated.
The one case where I can see it being useful is when 1 news site has some exclusive content that they post, and then every other news site copies the story by linking to the original and paraphrasing the whole thing. I see this happen a lot and I can totally see how it disincentives creating original content when every other news story just copies the story and users only read the first article they see about it.
I overheard some discussion of the "upload filter" on the radio. It was very simplified, all about big rights-holders that have to ensure they get paid, and nothing about the power of consumers or even journalists or those acting like that (review/commentary).
If you accept visitors from the EU, you have to abide by their laws. If you're exclusively based outside of the EU, you could just ignore the laws. But Google has offices inside the EU, so they can't.
Wouldn't they still get cash from advertisers? The sites are still accessible from the EU, it just means local businesses who want to advertise need to pay the US division?
As a general rule, in most jurisdictions, you cannot do business across international borders in this way, no. As soon as someone from the EU pays Google while they are physically inside of the EU, that business is subject to the EU's laws.
If someone in the EU buys it while they are in the EU, you just imported something to the EU and the EU's laws apply to you, yes. If that person buys it from you in the US and then carries it back to the EU, they have the liability for following law, paying duties and taxes, etc. When it comes to things that are completely digital, I believe where the money is changing hands is what matters most.
Google benefits from this and almost certainly secretly lobbied for it.
This is great for the FAANG providers who already have automated content control tools and massive help centres to act on anything 24/7. It is a death-knell to any upstart startup who would challenge Youtube or Facebook however.
Do you think that after GDPR and the fact that everyone actually took it seriously the EU is trying to see if they can keep pulling the same string and making the world dance?
If this directive is voted, it will be interesting to watch the aftermath. Copyright is a legacy concept that is incompatible with digital media. This will make the absurdity of owning an idea and profiting from it virtually forever (at least as a ratio of human life) stand out. I hope it leads to a changes in the mindset/laws regarding IP.
I think it will change only when the world order changes, which may be soon. Many Western countries operate on untenable platforms in the long term that are designed to preserve existing order in the short term (uncontrolled creation of Fiat money, uncontrolled welfare programs). This just adds to the list and hastens the change.
I emailed my 10 UK MEP "representatives" about this law, explaining why it was bad news and encouraging them to vote against it.
I received one "pre-canned" email acknowledgement from UKIP, attempting to make the bill into an "EU bullying us" issue, and nothing from anyone else. One politician I tried to call had a published phone number that connected to a commercial money lending service.
And mainstream political parties wonder why people feel disenfranchised. They have become a professional political class, completely disconnected from the people they purport to represent. The result is protest (Trump, Brexit et al).
> And mainstream political parties wonder why people feel disenfranchised. They have become a professional political class, completely disconnected from the people they purport to represent. The result is protest (Trump, Brexit et al).
Just wait until you walk around Brussels. EU politicians don't mix with the locals. They've got separate everything. They have reserved parking spaces, separate taxes, separate restaurants, separate social security, separate supermarkets, schools and swimming schools that the locals are excluded from.
Needless to say, all are vastly superior to what the locals get.
Compared to that, I would argue you're wrong. I don't know how UK politicians live, but I very much doubt it is half as "separate class" as the EU class in Brussels. In Brussels the politicians live like the politicians in Beijing live.
1,056 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadAt my understanding, there will be discussions about the amendments and another vote, like the one we had two months ago. Is it right? There is still time to act, right?
Also, is there a place to see who voted what? Elections are close and those choices could impact the vote of many. I knew Votewatch but I don't know if it still doing it, saw some excel file going around last time and wondering if they are being updated, to see who changed ideas.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/11/17845394/eu-copyright-dir...
Me personally I'm not into that kind of generalisation.
And starting next year there will be exactly 0.9% [2] of the citizens that speak the language that the EU government conducts itself. Now it is 13.9% [1], which is not exactly a good number. As if it wasn't already a huge problem that the French and German governments essentially control the EU.
Combine that with the fact that large blocks hate eachother. Like famously the French and German governments, for example, but those are hardly the only examples. Some blocks have actually recently had shooting conflicts with deaths (the Catalan and Spanish governments, if you're wondering, and yes, both have representation, even though the Catalan government gets no representation in the commission or council, the only institutions with real power in the EU).
[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(british+population+%2B...
[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(irish+population)%2Feu...
This is an abhorrent decision by people who have no idea how the internet works. Markus Meechum (aka Count Dankula) was at the hearings, and reported that MEPs voting on the issue could not, or refused to, explain why they supported the bill. You can see him discussing the result in the immediate aftermath here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISyiTcA6RIw
If you want a quick example of why this is bad take a look at fair use and YouTube. Article 13 would make YouTube liable for copyrighted content on its service.
Much of YouTube content is (perfectly legal) remixes, responses, or criticisms of other YouTube content that embeds part of the referenced video in their own video. There is more content uploaded to YouTube than can possibly all be manually reviewed. Aggressive automated content filtering to comply with Article 13 would mean that these videos would straight get filtered out.
A law like this can and likely will be selectively enforced since it will be impossible to police every single independent thought published on the internet.
* I appreciate those points may not be in breach of the new legislation per se. But there is a pretty good chance that some content on sites of those style would be in breach. So it's a little like police using a broken tail light as an excuse to stop and search a car.
Europe has a long history of doing such things when confronted with new, disruptive technologies: the effort to license printing presses in various European countries is what eventually led to copyright law as we know it today.
Back then ideas were still believed to be free so the point of copyright law was just a short term reward for the author. A bit like how patents are supposed to work.
I would normally post some citations here (like a famous quote about copyright from one of the British monarchs) but on phone about to drop kids off at school so apologies there.
Unfortunately, the downstream effects will hurt everyone else.
Smaller, more independent platforms will not be able to afford to implement compliance with these new regulations, and will potentially be driven out of business.
This is consolidation of power, finally locking down the Free Internet just as we've done with every other industry. Stripping the power to change from the small.
And what are we doing about it?
PS: Jonathan Strange: Great books and even better TV.
The problem is that 'normal' people don't know how to use most distributed/encrypted/stick-it-to-the-man products, nor do they care.
Make our own content and host it ourselves?
This type of law is only effective due to centralisation of Internet services. If everyone self-hosted and was accountable for their own content there would be no scope for such legislation. All HN would hold would be linked-lists of URLs, no actual comment content.
Imagine a decentralised, federated HN where each comment originated from its owner's site.
This type of law encourages that very centralization. Look at the provisions of GDPR, for example. Do you think a two-person startup is going to have the resources to deal with all of its provisions? Or in this case: do you think that a new video-sharing startup is going to have the resources to deal with the more stringent copyright enforcement requirements?
The EU has, in effect, made a Faustian bargain with Google, Facebook and Twitter: if you accept our regulation, we'll ensure that you have no competitors.
GDPR is a bad example, because yes, that's definitely possible. And it should be, if that startup handles personal data.
The only argument you can make at that point is that it's worth the cost, but is it? The damage to privacy of having everyone's data in the hands of conglomerates that are no longer subject to competitive pressure has got to be worse than Mom and Pop occasionally mishandling the information of their two hundred customers. Just having the centralization at all is worse than anything that could happen to any given 0.5% subset of it, because every misuse or compromise is 200 times worse even if they only happen 10% as often.
So what remains for the business part of the startup is to make sure the necessary contracts with all third parties are in place (the pressure-the-conglomerates-part), and to explain it to the users. This is annoying, but also not much worse than the typical legalese stuff the CEO has to deal with. The data privacy policy of a certain privacy activist reads, in essence: "We store only what we need, and delete it as soon as we can, as long as we are not required by law to store it for any longer." You don't even need a law degree for that, as you shouldn't, because the text should be readable for the end user.
> What is everybody complaining about?
I don't know, the GDPR is basically German data privacy law, and it hasn't stopped Berlin from becoming a startup center in Europe. I guess if you don't want to be GDPR compliant due to the effort that's fair, but you should know that there are much worse things ahead for a company.
However, if you are not _able_ to be GDPR compliant as a small organization, while many of your competitors are, you should absolutely not be entrusted with personal data.
The expense doesn't come from that. Even if you're doing the right thing in spirit, now you have to compare what you're doing to a complex regulatory framework. That's pure overhead that you pay even if you don't even have to change anything.
> This is annoying, but also not much worse than the typical legalese stuff the CEO has to deal with.
You're saying that this thing that harms small businesses and entrenches incumbents is like the other things that harm small businesses and entrench incumbents. But that's the problem. Each one you add is an incremental burden that moves the margin for how many startups you kill by another kilometer in the wrong direction.
> The data privacy policy of a certain privacy activist reads, in essence: "We store only what we need, and delete it as soon as we can, as long as we are not required by law to store it for any longer." You don't even need a law degree for that, as you shouldn't, because the text should be readable for the end user.
That is a very aspirational privacy policy that also happens to be very strict and trivial to violate unintentionally. And what are the consequences for not following your own very strict privacy policy?
This is why most of the big companies have one that says something to the effect of "we promise to use your data for things we want to do" but then have to be carefully crafted by lawyers to simultaneously minimize liability and hold up under scrutiny.
> I don't know, the GDPR is basically German data privacy law, and it hasn't stopped Berlin from becoming a startup center in Europe.
It's all relative. If Germany has a significant regulatory burden but Greece is a hotbed of corruption, Germany can still do better than Greece. But not as well as it could have done with less overhead.
> However, if you are not _able_ to be GDPR compliant as a small organization, while many of your competitors are, you should absolutely not be entrusted with personal data.
The pretense that complex regulations only cost you if you were previously doing something wrong is empirically false. The cost of complying with the regulation is in addition to the cost of doing the right thing and is still paid by everyone who was doing the right thing already. And it can be enough to destroy a company that was not actually mishandling data but merely had low operating margins.
Explicit opt-ins are only required when you record personally-identifiable information surreptitiously, or share these information with other parties.
I'm sure there are some provisions intended to help out smaller entities. But the compliance cost is the cost of understanding the legislation so you can comply with it. You still have to pay it even if it turns out not to apply at all -- because you can't know that until you go through all of it first.
“copying restrictions were authorized by the Licensing of the Press Act 1662. These restrictions were enforced by the Stationers' Company, a guild of printers given the exclusive power to print—and the responsibility to censor—literary works”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
Of course, I agree with you that independent platforms are going to have a rough time. They either have to manually review all content themselves, not allow any user-uploaded content, or pay a company to do this for them.
> “Thousands of Swedes have received threatening letters from law firms which accuse them of illegal downloading. They are asked to pay a sum of money, ranging from a couple of thousand Swedish Kronors up to several thousand, to avoid being brought to justice,” Bahnhof Communicator Carolina Lindahl notes.
> “During 2018 the extortion business has increased dramatically. The numbers have already exceeded last year’s figures even though four months still remain.”
> This year to date, 49 separate court cases have been filed requesting ISPs to disclose the personal details of the account holders behind 35,711 IP-addresses. As the chart below shows, that’s already more than the two previous years combined.
> Also, the number of targeted people exceeds that of all US and Canadian file-sharing cases in 2018, which is quite extraordinary.
https://torrentfreak.com/more-than-35000-pirates-targeted-in...
The second is you distribute content to random hosts, who don't even know what it is (so they can't associate it with whoever is downloading it). This solves the privacy problem and has adequate performance but it only works if you don't have bad laws that impose liability on people even if they aren't knowingly hosting something illegal. Otherwise the government can prosecute a couple of random innocent people and put enough fear into everyone else that they move back to Facebook.
The third is onion routing. Then it's hard to shut down specific hosts (you don't know who they are), but it's slow and if your laws are sufficiently bad it can be made illegal to use it at all even if you aren't doing anything wrong. At that point you go down the road into Tor Project vs. Chinese Firewall, but that's just a disgraceful way to have to operate your communities in a democracy. And for every bug an innocent person goes to prison.
The problem with technical solutions is basically Child Abuse Images. I am a big believer in freedom and privacy. I am also a big believer in protecting children. Many people understandably prefer protecting children to seemingly (to them) abstract concepts like freedom. Any technical solution needs a method to remove certain content - and as soon as such a method exists people will want to abuse it for political reasons.
The solution has to be political not technical - somehow we need a political situation where basic freedoms are respected. This can only exist as revisions to countrys' constitutions. Simple laws protecting freedom are too easy to overturn. And we can't carry on resisting re-heated versions of the same stupid law every two years.
It is possible.
> The problem with technical solutions is basically Child Abuse Images.
This is a fake reason which is only used as a justification for censorship technologies. In practice it's better to allow distribution so that it happens in the open and new images can be discovered sooner and traced back to the perpetrators who created them. If you shut down a distribution network every time you find it then the only ones that exist are the ones you don't know about, which means you have no source of evidence to make cases against unknown active pedophiles.
The FBI had a successful campaign where they quietly seized a distribution server and then continued operating it so they could collect evidence and make cases against those using it. Naturally the headlines were "FBI distributes child pornography" rather than "FBI arrests many child pornographers" as though preventing distribution is somehow more important than arresting the creators and rescuing the children.
If the PDF (https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copyright_Se...) posted elsewhere in this discussion is accurate, Article 13 paragraph 3 was amended:
> When defining best practices, special account shall be taken of fundamental rights, the use of exceptions and limitations as well as ensuring that the burden on SMEs remain appropriate and that automated blocking of content is avoided.
SMEs = Small and Medium-sized enterprises
To be fair, that hypothetical problem is caused by a broken classifier and not the law. After all, youtube already blocks and removes content like you've described but no one is accusing the classifier of stiffling free speech.
I'm curious how this is supposed to work.
The copyright industry and their bought-and-paid-for politicians have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no mental model for such forms of distribution. Have you forgotten the panic that ensued fifteen years ago, when the music industry was suing middle schoolers?
(The irony is that the very same platforms these industry lobbyists are whining about only became popular because they killed P2P via the courts.)
Source from legislation: In particular, small and micro enterprises as defined in Title I of the Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC, should be expected to be subject to less burdensome obligations than larger service providers. Therefore, taking into account the state of the art and the availability of technologies and their costs, in specific cases it may not be proportionate to expect small and micro enterprises to apply preventive measures and that therefore in such cases these enterprises should only be expected to expeditiously remove specific unauthorised works and other subject matter upon notification by rightholders.
Much as I hate to admit it, the biggest reason US tech companies have been so much more successful than European tech companies is that the US imposes far fewer regulations, which allows companies to use more of their revenue on growth.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farag...
Such as what? I hear UKIP demonised a lot, but I genuinely don't know of anything they've done that is bad that wasn't simply political disagreement (wanting to leave the EU) or talking about contentious issues in a clumsy and ham-fisted way (immigration).
And also the entire immigration discussion was some bs considered the non-EU migration is been higher than EU one for decades https://fullfact.org/immigration/eu-migration-and-uk/
(For years I tried to be a "sensible Eurosceptic", but recent events have highlighted that the EU is a bastion of sanity compared to our current local politics)
Many - across Europe - want to leave the EU on principle. The UK is giving the perfect example to everyone that principle is not aligned with reality in this case.
Perhaps if we hadn't been fooling around trying to destroy the project for cooperation across Europe we could have taken part in making this new legislation better?
I guess it comes down to whether you're willing to accept peace and prosperity above less power for the Tories and a few wayward laws. As we get wayward laws already in the UK (we'd get Art.13 anyway if it serves media conglomerates interests), then it comes down to whether you want to buy back greater power for the Tories at a cost of greater UK poverty, and less international cooperation.
So the “Tories” narrative just doesn’t add up.
Failing to present a coherent, workable programme for how we'd leave the EU and at what cost is leading us to a situation where the government is doing civil contingency planning as if we were going to be hit by a hurricane rather than a self-inflicted disastrous choice.
He seemed to represent hatred of immigrants, but being married to a foreigner kind of suggests that's a lie in one way or another?
He thinks the EU parliament is a gravy train, which he happily guzzles from whilst doing no work to aid.
Could you please outline some of his reasonable arguments?
Oh its a lie alright, and it belongs to you.
Only in the leftist bizzaro world does love of country = hatred of immigrants. It's pathetic that this is what we are dealing with these days.
Disclaimer I am a remainer and dislike UKIP as much as anyone.
Flow my tears.
> Much of YouTube content is (perfectly legal) remixes, responses, or criticisms of other YouTube content that embeds part of the referenced video in their own video.
As weird as it sounds, you are wrong. In a short summary:
1. Fair use is a very small exception to some very broad rights.
2. Fair use almost definitely does not apply to most youtube content : if you use content other people made (video games or music immediately come to mind) you are infringing copyright holder rights.
3. If you rely on fair use rights, then you might find yourself in trouble.
What's even worse is that right holders can pick and choose who to bust, and they don't need to be consistent about it. So even if they rarely go after small groups, they can still shut down bigger ones.
I have a childhood friend who is now a copyright lawyer and I sometimes jokingly ask him whether something is copyright infringing. Other than yes, the most frequent answer I get is "I don't know, it depends. Both sides have arguments so ultimately it's down to the judge." It's just bad law. The only difference between then and now is that now we have the technology to actually enforce it.
There are absolutely well defined “fair use” exceptions which a stringent filter will block.
> Other than yes, the most frequent answer I get is "I don't know, it depends.
This is the only answer a lawyer will basically ever give you.
The biggest name one so far is the H3H3 trial.[1] One that looks to be settled soon is Akilah Hughes suing Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad), where all that Benjamin does is edit together two of Hughes videos with the only original addition being a new title. This is almost certainly going to go in favor of Sargon, yet YouTube's algorithms turned up to the nth degree would almost certainly have blocked it.[2]
If you go outside of YouTube, fair use law in the United States is very broad. Just look at what Richard Prince does with others' art. [3]
edit: added links
1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/41037631/youtube-stars...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LMgGBDZbJY
3. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/18/instagram...
Combining them is another, sharing them is another.
We basically have no concept of personal use in our copyright.
[0] if they were broadcast you can record but only for time-shifting, you can only watch once (alone!) and then are obliged to destroy the copy; you aren't allowed to format shift.
The lack of any remaining semblance of balance in copyright between the rights of the demos and media interests shows how badly distorted our Western democracies have become from representing the rights of people in general above the rights of the rich.
Though a price for this is that we pay a special tax on every storage device we purchase.
Not a western democracy, though.
And now we are stuck with upload filters.
Real problem is the negative incentive to be correct.
The rule penalise you harshly if you serve copyrighted content, but there is nothing if you decide to not serve non-copyrighted content and there is so much content on the internet, that "market pressure" simply isn't going to work. If you are a small publisher of free content, there is a huge risk for content platform to serve your content and no reward if they do.
And that's the best case scenario, where all actors have good intentions. But in the real world we know that large copyright holder are very often bulk claiming bulk content. There is no penalty, so that would be crazy for them no to do it.
The laws is also talking about terrorist content and the need to remove it within 1 hour or risk up to 4% turnover fine ! There is not going to be any manual check done within 1 hour, and anyway the risk is so great you may as well have a blanket no-question ask removal policy.
I fail to see the "good intentions in mind" you mention. MEP are some of the most successful politicians, they would be Olympic level is it was a sport. Their field of expertise is the people and public relation. I can believe they are naive with technology (like encryption or monitoring actual capabilities) but I can't accept they are candid about businesses or individual motivations. Any negative consequence of this law is there on purpose.
I don't think so. I think MEPs are much closer to members of a state-congress in the US than member of congress. With the equivalent of a member of the US congress being a member of some national parliament.
My criterium here is how fierce the campaign is to get elected. At the very least here in the Netherlands, the campaign for the European Parliament is nearly an afterthought in the news. It ranks far below the campaign for the German parliament, let alone our national parliament.
What's the salary and expenses package like in a state congress?
"[..] expense payments of €4,416 per month are given to MEPs as a lump sum in addition to their regular pre-tax monthly salary of €8,611. They are not required to provide any proof of how the money is spent"
sources: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/about-meps.html and https://www.politico.eu/article/european-parliament-corrupti...
The fact that MEP compensation is so good, whilst public scrutiny on who gets seats is so lax is even worse.
The directive (Article 13(2b)) requires the service providers to provide an "effective and expeditious" complaint mechanism for unjustified removals with human review, though.
Have you read the YouTube terms for original content uploaded by individuals? I'm not so sure doing remixes isn't allowed. If you don't want people doing that to your stuff, keep it off YouTube. I could be wrong, it's been many years since I read their ToS.
Many times simply claiming "fair use" is the defense of the layman online in regards to virtually anything involving someone else's intellectual property, which in fact it's fairly well defined and limited.
YouTube does have a reasonable page (https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/copyright/fair-use/) on fair use in this context which I think essentially says that they're interested in following the law.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
I disagree, no other utility is blamed for the actions of its users, if I use an electric drill to hurt some one I am at fault not my electricity provider, but if I do something illegal on the internet like piracy its some how my internet providers fault?
I also don't like making excuses for policy makers who "don't understand the internet", its not the 90s, ignorance is no longer an excuse, these people know what the internet is, and they know exactly what they are doing.
The physical equivalent is more like you sending pirated dvd's through the mail to your entire neighborhood. The equivalent law would then require the post office to check all packages upon sending to verify that they contain only content which is not pirated, which for privacy reasons they do in an automated way that sometimes blocks the package with the family movie you're sending to your mom (because your daughter was wearing mickey mouse ears and the automated check thought it was a disney movie).
Oftentimes when you physicalize online legislation it becomes apparent just how invasive and silly it is.
I disagree. This law was made with the intention of being selectively enforced. This is never a good intention.
the first time around? _maybe_
after the enormous backslash and numerous expert opinion pieces decrying the exact problems of the proposal? _hardly_
"He looked down at the broad steps they were climbing. They were something of a novelty; each one was built out of large stone letters. The one he was just stepping on to, for example, read: I Meant It For The Best. The next one was: I Thought You’d Like It. Eric was standing on: For the Sake of the Children. “Weird, isn’t it?” he said. “Why do it like this?” “I think they’re meant to be good intentions,” said Rincewind. This was a road to Hell, and demons were, after all, traditionalists. And, while they are of course irredeemably evil, they are not always bad. And so Rincewind stepped off We Are Equal Opportunity Employers and through a wall, which healed up behind him, and into the world."
That actually isn't legal in many countries and is e.g. why regional wikipedia sites don't show movie posters.
Sometimes I feel like the whole world is ruined by ignorant people in power. As for the Internet, it is exclusively being ruined by ignorant actors in positions of state power. All the while, armies of good people make the Internet better every day.
Do we really not have anyone better as a source than the Nazi dog guy? http://www.scotland-judiciary.org.uk/8/1962/PF-v-Mark-Meecha...
(Perhaps someone from Open Rights Group or EDRI?)
What exactly is wrong with that? Seriously.
rightly, they're going after the newspaper.
it's disingenuous to suggest youtube only makes tools for video content distribution whilst omitting the fact that they are the only consumers of those tools.
In practice, this constitutes the abolition of the "fair use" doctrine on the internet.
If the new product was produced in the US and references material from the EU, should YouTube allow the content to go public? According this and GDPR, the EU has the ability to cross territorial boundaries. So YouTube now has to ban such a work in the US even though our legal system allows it.
Essentially, YouTube will have to create a new process where by all content must go past the censors, who are probably people and not machines. Otherwise YouTube will quickly die due to death by a thousand fines. So much for a free and open exchange of ideas.
It in no way prevents anyone from creating content and publishing it on their own website.
You make it sound like the youtubes of this world are necessary for content creation.
If you are arguing that massive content consolidation platforms such as Youtube do not have a highly significant impact on content creators as a group though, then I do not know what to say to that.
Put simply, if you're a US (or Australian, or Brazilian, or Japanese, etc) service: tell the EU to go fuck itself. US courts will laugh at their attempts to enforce EU law over US law.
Keep your servers in the US, if that's where you're located. If you have no need to do business in the EU, then you have almost nothing to worry about. The EU's reach largely stops at its borders unless you're operating in their jurisdiction.
For my service as a US operation, EU copyright law is meaningless. I'll continue to allow EU users to sign up, and entirely disregard EU law.
Ultimately the only way the EU can truly enforce their backwards policies against a global Internet, is to set up a Chinese firewall and hold EU persons as captives of that creeping authoritarianism.
I'm not sure it's reasonable to conflate ripping off creators by enabling massive commercial use of unauthirized copies of their original content with actually creating something.
> YouTube will have to create a filter that covers their liability
I believe they already did that for some years now.
Nobody wants to engage in the secondhand market because of the massive liability. Sure you own it but can you prove it to their satisfaction? You could be lying and that is mo excuse on their part. You try to sell crafts you made yourself instead but nobody can be sure you didn't just steal them because you aren't a big name crafter. Big corporations can sell directly but small manufacturers and businesses are SOL. And worse yet this includes petitions and pamphlets too!
That is exactly what secondary liability does.
This law requires websites to /know/ the copyright to be covered. And that is an impossible task if no false negatives are accepted. Old usenet pirates would use base64 strings to spread contents and there are countless ways to obfuscate to algorithms while remaining human recognizable. Which means to remain safe one needs to not even accept and display text input from users.
Copyright databases would be of no help here given both automatic copyright and the ease of dodging hashes. And a complete set would be massive and hillariously defeat the point by giving any implenter all of the media in the world.
Given that it is inevitable that it will have a bad outcome. Even if it is left to rot on the books it becomes a tool of tyranny via selective enforcement.
Here's an example: What about movie review channels like Wisecrack, Film Theorist, Cinema Sins, Filmjoy etc.? While discussing movies, they naturally have to show excerpts: short clips of the movie that relate to their explanations. Those guys are absolutely "creating something". And if anything, they're driving more people to watch those movies. A five-minute analysis of a movie is usually not a valid substitute for watching the actual movie.
I imagine that many of these channels will become unavailable in the EU in the near future. Time to get a US-based VPN.
How can YouTube check that?
This is just a guess but I don't think ISPs are expected to do any form of DPI. The most likely question they will have to answer is "who is this IP address assigned to?" and possibly "who communicated with that IP?". Neither require any form of packet inspection that goes beyond what is needed to perform routing.
Same sad song as it ever was. Keep giving more control to the government and they'll keep ratcheting down the screws on you.
An economic union should be about tariffs and the free movement of goods, not an entirely unelected bureaucratic federal government. Centralizing authority only benefits the well connected political class.
The vote that occurred today was by the EU parliament, which is entirely elected. The directive was prepared inside the JURI committee, which also exists entirely out of elected representatives.
Also, you can't have a single digital market without a single copyright regime. The economic union implies the single market which implies a single copyright directive. I agree that the contents of that directive is lamentable, but the need for one is clear, even for those opposing this particular directive, provided you buy into the notion that single markets should exist at all.
Why?
If, for instance, the left side of your single digital market has a copyright duration of 70 years after the death of the artist, and the right side has 90 years instead, then in effect, it's 70 years even on the right side because anyone can just go to the left side, trade copies of the expired works without paying licensing fees, then come back to the right side with those copies (because it's a single market).
So in effect, the regulation of the whole market is the weakest regulation of any part of it.
Give the government power to take away your rights, that's indeed what it will do.
It's amazing that people never see this issue. Everyone needs to stop making bigger and bigger governments.
It's not totally over yet, both the final vote and the implementation in member countries can disarm the worst parts of the directive.
It is possible to lodge a complaint with the Commission if transposition is deemed inadequate (and I'm sure copyright holders would do exactly that), and the Commission may bring a case against the country before the ECJ.
See: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-making-process/applying-eu...
Unlike many EU countries, the Netherlands requires that the marriage certificate is "legalised" and charges for the process. They will not even accept the documentation before you go through this extra legal procedure thereby increasing the total time to over 6 months. Under some interpretation of article 10 and 25, this would be illegal, they have a different interpretation.
You can find various compliance studies for directive 2004/38/EC and other directives as well. It is just a fact in Europe that the transposition into local law leads to inconsistent application of the law. Applying for the same visa (from the European perspective) in the Netherlands and in Germany can be two wildly different experiences.
Your example is actually a good one: The Netherlands might have added that the document must be legalised but their law still matches the directive's requirement and the added restriction is neither unreasonable nor onerous and might keep in line with the country's practices.
The bottom line is that those who hope that transposition will change the directive in any meaningful way are going to be sorely disappointed.
I hate the removal of substantive access to local politicians that the EU has.
After this goes through I will become a single-issue voter, to leave the EU.
People are constantly overwhelmed with choices, and eventually they start to economize on their decision-making to focus on immediate needs. Certain systems (particularly those designed by marketers and politicians) are set up to take advantage of this trait.
Not rly an MEP problem I think. Most people don’t care that much.
1) You could argue whether the EU Parliament has democracy deficits or not. I assume it has (based on the legislation process itself with involvement of the Committee, but also based upon unequally weighted votes of citizens from different countries).
2) However, the most important point is that this law is considered as a "techie niche" by the vast majority of citizens. Also, EU topics as such suffer from a very narrow attention in the general public. Having said this, it is far easier for lobbyists to place such an initiative "under the radar" than it would be to lobby in 28 countries. In techie speak, a centralized entity like the EU is more or less a single point of failure for the unavoidable "bugs" of a democracy.
Secondly I don't recall voting for any MEPs, as far as I can tell it's similarly not reported on. Besides given the lack of news about what any of the parties are up to it's hard to say anything about who you should even vote for.
Thirdly just because somewhere at the end a vaguely democratically elected group of people get to make a decision about it that doesn't somehow absolve the rest of the process from being undemocratic and seemingly driven by corporate interests. The biggest problem being that the decisions on what should be voted on and how seem to be mostly taken by an unelected group of people, who will evidently (given the way Selmayr was promoted) vote for anything if it gets them better pay and pensions.
This is definitely a deficiency of your local press.
> I don't recall voting for any MEPs
Elections are held every 5 years and organised by your local electoral authorities? Which country are you in and are you a national or a resident?
So that's one, in my opinion very big problem.
Second, people are just not aware of what power the EU has. And the politicians I speak to actually see this as an advantage. One told me specifically that without power like this we would still have the insanity of driving on the left of the road in Norway, or would still have the separate currencies (which of course, would also have prevented a lot of problems in Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, and provided better lives for probably 100 million (!) people).
So that's the second part. Nobody cares about the EU, because there is no unity. Europeans don't feel part of Europe. They feel they're part of France, Belgium, UK, but not of Europe. So they don't care. There is little to no local presence of any EU agency.
No! If the parliament had rejected the proposal, then the "ball" would have come back to the Commission, which would have had to amend their proposal, pass it through the Council again, and if successful, returned it to the Parliament, which would be again given the choice of rejecting or passing the amended proposal. (This is similar to what happens in other entities/countries with bicameral legislatives — e.g. the US senate vs. the House of Representatives.) Importantly, without the EU Parliament's approval, the proposal could never become law.
Now, granted the situation is more complex than just that the commission can push through whatever it wants, but the following statements are true:
1) the commission can block whatever it wants (ie. it has a monopoly on legislative initiative). So it has a negative veto, and can prevent (and does prevent) anything it wants.
2) the commission can, in cooperation with the EU council, create and adopt legislation, without anything more than getting the Parliament's position (but not approval) [1]
3) they can even use other procedures to get what they want [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_legislative_pro...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_legislative_pro...
In practice the commission and council requiring each other is essentially the commission doing what it wants because it's mostly the same people, and even when not, they're necessarily from the same country and party (well, everyone in one has a counterpart in the other that's from the same country and party).
So no. The EU is a dictatorship. The commission has the only lawgiving power, and can block anyone else's initiative. The parliament ... is better paid but no more powerful than my cat ... (plus the politicians in there couldn't organize their way out of a paper bag whereas my cat has claws).
(and let's ignore the fact that the commission also controls the EU court of justice)
Where do you live if I may ask? here in austria it was everywhere before the vote and now new articles with the result.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/elections2014-results/en/turno...
despite claimes on election night that turnout had (very slightly!) increased over the previous election
https://www.politico.eu/article/this-time-its-different/
Election turnout falling consistently as the elected body's powers increase consistently. Not great.
But I think this can have a significant impact on the perception of the EU on the general public
This law will be introduced in Switzerland, Norway and UK. Most probably UK will have to keep it after Brexit.
This is another example of the classic lobbies-driven political decision where politicians pass legislations as a favour to their friends in corporate A or corporate B.
Also, if they think this will fix the revenue problems of the majority of newspaper publishers they are certainly wrong, newspaper are not dying because people read news on Google.
It's still the politicians passing the law. The fact that back-handers might be involved only makes them potentially even more corrupt.
TL;DR, politicians created the EU, it currently sucks even if they pass some very good laws sometimes. Now it's time for some very bad laws, the issue is that these laws is so bad the good laws seems very small in comparison.
https://juliareda.eu/2018/09/copyright-showdown/
That's potentially interesting, what does it mean in practice though? How would they be liable? If there was a monetary penalty attached, the record companies would be bankrupt in a day based on the false positives of the youtube content ID algorithm.
If the election of Trump or Ocasio-Cortez taught us anything, it should be that appealing to voters can get you into office, even with powerful entrenched interests running against you.
Elected politicians are 100% beholden to their voters, now more than ever.
(also I find it odd when people apply this argument to the UK where we have a fully unelected upper house!)
https://services.parliament.uk/bills/2017-19/onlineforums.ht...
Same. This institution has given me enough. Not only in tech.
That will be funny
Hell, just by doing that you could probably end any potential upholding of this system really fast.
Moderation over the last years has been strict though. I haven't seen any illegal content on there in ages.
(Inb4 the national laws end up including huge exemptions for site run by the government or political parties).
A more technical campaign would be reverse engineering the filtering algorithms (censorship machines) that sites end up forced to install, and finding a way of generating new copyrighted content that has the equivalent of a "hash collision" against already popular (or political) content hosted on websites using the filter.
For example, you may block EU traffic, but if you have a bank account in the EU, and if an EU citizen discovers somehow, perhaps while travelling abroad, that you are misusing their personal data...
The problem with all of these projects is content. Because there is low usage and a technical barrier to entry, nobody is bothering to put up interesting content that would attract users. (Except for some, ahem, "fringe" interests.) It's a chicken-and-egg problem. I keep hoping that one of these regulations will rekindle interest in distributed hosting, but it hasn't happened yet.
If some advocates would be willing to convince (and possibly help) some major OSS-related resources to establish a beachhead, it might help draw in some of that crowd at least. Adoption there would probably improve the systems, gradually bringing in people from the outside like with the original Internet.
Maybe this is the one single solitary positive to Brexit...
For example, it was Britain that introduced the Snoopers' Charter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016
without any encouragement from the EU, and indeed that Act has since been found incompatible with European law.
Out of interest, can you name another example where the EU was authoritarian (acting in a way that the British government wouldn't have)?
> Out of interest, can you name another example where the EU was authoritarian (acting in a way that the British government wouldn't have)?
I can't really speak to things the EU would do that the British government wouldn't - as you've already said, the UK government is pretty bad too. But we have more democratic control over the UK government than we do the European, because it's more localised. I've heard many examples of overreaching EU directives through listening to parliamentary debates but my memory sucks, so I'll give you a couple of examples that I can remember without re-researching the topic: the EU national fishing quotas (famous for decimating the British fishing industry), and the EU's "enthusiasm" for collective bargaining at the WTO. Rather than negotiate directly, many of Britain's trade agreements are bundled up into the EU's and then the EU makes special concessions to Britain. We've actually been historically quite good at forcing the EU to give us trade concessions so as far as I am aware it's not been too harmful to our prospects (I welcome a correction from anyone more well-versed in the UK's international trade standing) but it's still an example of EU authoritarian practices.
Excuse the triple pun, but speaking of "in net", I don't see how EU national fishing quotas are an example of authoritarianism. I suppose you are saying it is an example of state-overreach, but my understanding is that the quotas are set to avoid over-fishing of British waters (a problem which has historically done more to decimate fish populations than any EU politician has), and to allow an open market for deciding which fishing companies are allowed which part of the quota (leading to better prices for the consumer). You may not like the idea that non-British citizens can fish in British waters, but it could equally be argued that it would be state-overreach for the British government to effectively raise the price of fish to give a subsidy to British fish catchers.
This is true, but the Queen's job to sign new laws is purely ceremonial at this point, and while I can't democratically affect the House of Lords, I can affect the House of Commons and the Cabinet. The House of Lords is a bit of a relic at this point and though I don't know of any bad things they've done, I am skeptical of their existence.
> It's true that your MEP has a wider constituency than your MP, for example, but as I see it, the "less democratic" EU is actually undoing the authoritarian tendencies of the British government
This is not the EU's job. It is the remit of the British people to hold our government to account, not an even higher, more abstracted government that is even less accountable to the people. The EU can make good decisions and bad decisions, but in either case it is unaccountable to the people it is supposed to serve.
> I suppose you are saying it is an example of state-overreach, but my understanding is that the quotas are set to avoid over-fishing of British waters
This is the same as above. As an island nation with limited resources we have to manage our ecology and stocks of fish. The EU is not in the right position to do this. Our fishing industry has been suppressed leading to even less job opportunities in the coastal North, but then Norway (which is not an EU member but has mutual fishing agreements with it) is permitted to come in and fish our waters. So you don't even get the theoretical benefit of the EU's legislation in this case, because the EU has handed the supposedly-restricted fishing rights to another country that is only bound by trade agreements, not membership under a unified international court. And I have to ask - who benefits? Because the EU negotiates over all its member states, and this arrangement certainly doesn't do Britain any favours. I did enjoy the pun though ;)
> it could equally be argued that it would be state-overreach for the British government to effectively raise the price of fish to give a subsidy to British fish catchers.
Excluding transportation costs, this might be true. But we're not talking about an open market - the EU licenses which countries can fish British waters. If Norwegian fishing boats are collecting British fish and selling them from Norway, there are two options: 1) they aren't selling them to Britain, leading to a simple drain on our natural resources, and 2) they are selling to Britain, adding transport costs (both fiscal and ecological) to the production of fish, meaning increased costs. I agree with the need to regulate the waters, but it should be Britain that manages its own resources (after all, the incentives are aligned to provide for future generations, 5-year election cycle notwithstanding) by capping the fishing, but choosing for itself which fishing vessels get to harvest our waters. This way Britain can balance its own interests between increasing supply of locally-caught fish, and exchanging use of our natural resources in mutually-beneficial international exchange.
Why does it stop exactly there in the multiple layers of goverment we have? Because you say so? Why is the remit of a citizen of say, Ipswich, to hold the Ipswich City council to account, the Suffolk County Council to account, the British government to account, all elected with ever larger constituencies, each more abstract and less accountable than the last, but not the EU government?
I think you're misunderstanding me - granted, the sentence was ambiguous. I was saying that it is not the remit of the EU to hold the British government accountable.
The fact that her role is purely ceremonial (at least the parts of it which the British public are privy to) just means that her powers are either unexercised (potentially a dereliction of duty) or are exercised by the Prime Minister, concentrating too much power in one person's hands. If Britain had an elected head of state, with a democratic mandate, then there could be a proper separation of powers, and a less authoritarian executive.
> and while I can't democratically affect the House of Lords, I can affect the House of Commons and the Cabinet.
You may be able to affect one seat in the House of Commons, but the Prime Minister (and the Cabinet) are determined by an extra layer or two of abstraction (just as EU commissioners and the members of the European Council are chosen).
> The EU can make good decisions and bad decisions, but in either case it is unaccountable to the people it is supposed to serve.
I suppose you are saying it is "not sufficiently accountable" or "not as accountable" rather than completely unaccountable. I would say that there is a trade-off between how accountable/local the government is, and how effective it is at protecting rights and producing positive outcomes for citizens. At one extreme, we'd all be kings of one-person kingdoms, as sovereign individuals, not subject to any other laws, and at the other extreme we'd have a global government with perhaps log2(7 billion) levels of indirect elections. While there might be an intuitive appeal to the idea that the correct balance is for all decisions to be made no further away from you than London (as if there are no decisions made outside the country that can affect Britain), I personally feel that having the EU as an extra level of accountability for the British government is, in practice, beneficial for British citizens (and European citizens generally, to whom the EU is accountable).
> Our fishing industry has been suppressed leading to even less job opportunities in the coastal North, but then Norway (which is not an EU member but has mutual fishing agreements with it) is permitted to come in and fish our waters.
If non-EU member Norway has decided it is in their interests to enter a bilateral agreement with the EU regarding fishing, then I don't think we can rule out the possibility that Britain would end up in a similar agreement with the EU next year.
> the EU has handed the supposedly-restricted fishing rights to another country that is only bound by trade agreements, not membership under a unified international court
The existence of a bilateral fishing agreement with Norway doesn't mean there are no restrictions on fishing (indeed, it proves that there are restrictions, otherwise there would be no need for an agreement). Also, I'm afraid you're wrong about Norway not being part of a unified international court, since the EFTA Court exists and Norway is subject to its jurisdiction.
> And I have to ask - who benefits? Because the EU negotiates over all its member states, and this arrangement certainly doesn't do Britain any favours.
Is it really certain that carrying out negotiations at the EU level doesn't do Britain any favours? By "negotiations" I assume you are talking about trade negotiations, since the size of quotas is based on scientific evidence, and the allocation of them based on market forces. It seems intuitive to me that when a large economic entity is negotiating with a small economic entity, the larger entity has more bargaining power, since they have more to offer. Therefore Britain is (in general) more likely to receive a favourable deal when negotiating as part of the largest economic bloc in the world (rather than treating that bloc as a competitor in a zero-sum game). Also it's not accurate to treat all trade as being subject to negotiation at the EU level, since Britain can and does ne...
I concede your point that arguably, the UK is not democratic in that the final word on laws is held by a monarch. Personally, I like the Royal Family on a cultural level and am largely ambivalent on a legislative level because as far as I'm aware, they've never done anything to a bill that gave me cause to dislike them. That doesn't preclude their having done so though.
> You may be able to affect one seat in the House of Commons, but the Prime Minister (and the Cabinet) are determined by an extra layer or two of abstraction (just as EU commissioners and the members of the European Council are chosen).
Given that our general elections are held against parties, there's 1. nomination of a party leader by party members and 2. election of a party by the population. But election of the ruling party is in my mind important but complemented by the real power of the populace in democracies - the power to influence the government through protest, petition the Prime Minister, to write to our MPs, and so on. This is part of the reason I dislike the "distance" between the EU and the public - a protest in a large city is going to definitely get the council/MP's attention and probably get talked about in parliament, but to get the EU to act it needs to be passed on by the MEP and then the other nations (all of whom are still separate entities with their own concerns) need to express interest in solving the problems of the protesting nation. Plus any motion has to go through the "democratic deficit" portions of the EU.
I suppose at the root of my issue is that the EU is made of nation states that are vastly different both culturally and economically. Within the UK there's a lot of difference of opinion, but we're still bound by the same culture, land mass and national economy, so that helps to hedge the divisions between us (North/South, England/Scotland/Wales/N. Ireland, London/Everywhere Else etc). We can have internal disagreements but that bond still exists. I don't harbour any dislike or ill will towards the other European nations (some are strangers to me, others I really love), but I recognise that they have little reason to sacrifice their interests to support Britain and we have little reason to sacrifice our interests to support theirs. This is where international agreements work better than a shared supranational entity - we can find mutually beneficial agreements and are never forced to go along with something we dislike that another country wants. I think this is why the UK is known in the EU as having been a royal pain - we keep demanding exceptions and concessions and different rules, because we just aren't that similar to Germany or France or Belgium or Italy. I guess it comes from being an island nation.
> If non-EU member... next year.
And that's a good thing, if we can negotiate such a deal to our benefit as a sovereign nation. My issue is where Britain has to sacrifice its interests for the sake of other nations, when we get such a small say in the decision. To be honest, I would prefer it if this "coming together based on mutual interests, not hierarchical authority" were to operate at even more local levels, but the nation-state model isn't something that's likely to devolve any time soon.
> The existence of... its jurisdiction.
I'll concede you that point. The point I was trying to approach rather ham-fistedly is that the natural rights to the UK's resources are (from what I can see) being packaged up and sold off, to the detriment of the British fishing industry. If Britain were to do that as an independent entity it would still suck but at least you could be reasonably sure (corruption aside) that it was in exchange for something that would, in return, net-benefit the national economy. When it's the EU doing the bargaining, the benefit we get in return isn't so clear. Is the EU trading British water...
There are bigger questions than just whether the royals have done something that you personally don't like (or failed to do something that you would have liked them to have done). It is worth considering whether their power has legitimacy in a democracy (including whether they are illegitimately taking power away from the role of an elected head of state, who could veto bad legislation, for example), and whether there is sufficient scrutiny of their actions that we can feel confident that they really aren't acting against your interest without you knowing it. For further reading, I offer:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jan/14/secret-papers-roy...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/6-things-we-l...
> Given that our general elections are held against parties, there's 1. nomination of a party leader by party members and 2. election of a party by the population.
We are told that our general elections are about local candidates and not parties (as an excuse to avoid certain types of voting reform), but moreover I don't think that there is a requirement that parties have to let their entire membership have a say in who is selected as party leader. In any case, parties generally do not allow you to be a member of more than one at a time, so most of the UK population cannot influence your option 1, and parties generally don't win the support of the majority of the population, so most people are unhappy with the outcome of option 2 as well, even before the party has a change of leader mid-term.
I'm sure you know all that already, so I'm just reiterating that there are abstractions, and distance, and "democratic deficits" in the UK system too, and that you may be more comfortable with them because you are more familiar with them (and perhaps the problems tend to work in your favour over all).
> I suppose at the root of my issue is that the EU is made of nation states that are vastly different both culturally and economically. Within the UK there's a lot of difference of opinion, but we're still bound by the same culture, land mass and national economy ... we just aren't that similar to Germany or France or Belgium or Italy. I guess it comes from being an island nation.
I think this gets to the core difference between our two perspectives. I would say that I have more in common with a German, French, Belgian, or Italian person that had a similar profession to me, a similar age, and similar politics, than I might do with someone living across the street from me. Indeed, I've met, and lived with, and worked with, people who have travelled from across Europe, and I felt I could trust their input into the political processes that affect me (on a supra-national level) than apparently the average British voter. That doesn't mean I want someone in France deciding what the income tax rate is in the UK, or someone in Italy deciding whether to send British troops to war, but these are examples of political decisions which are deliberately left to member states (and we're not talking about one country deciding another's policies, we're talking about an electorate of equal individuals collectively deciding the evolution of their shared environment).
> the natural rights to the UK's resources are (from what I can see) being packaged up and sold off, to the detriment of the British fishing industry.
If the UK has "natur...
Oh, and by the way, as long as you show something to EU visitors (even an error page telling them to GTFO), you need a privacy policy.
As a small business you can comply with the GDPR fairly easily unless you have no regard for anyone's privacy to begin with. And even if you're not 100% compliant you won't be insta-sued to bankruptcy, you'll only be reported and the relevant data protection agency will check on you. The GDPR encourages data protection agencies to help businesses fix their problems and only use fines as a last resort for gross violations and wilful negligence.
Unless you're storing/processing information that has special protections (e.g. religion, sexual orientation, medical data) the bureaucracy is also fairly tame, especially for small businesses, especially for businesses that aren't at their core based on processing personal information (e.g. not online dating startups).
Compare this with the "upload filter" as it has been interpreted in the media so far: allegedly every website that allows users to upload content would have to implement their own Content ID database and sign deals with publishing companies or license filtering services.
They’re both controversial EU-wide regulations, for one.
On the other hand this legislation will completely change the internet as we know it.
All you need is a privacy policy and the ability to delete / return customer data when requested. But that doesn't have to be in real time/automated, you can just set up an email address and respond manually. It's rare you'll even get a request if you're a company with such a small IT budget.
All the other things (double opt-in email, not contacting your customers in an unsolicited way) are process changes that can be implemented without IT cost.
Is there anything stopping a search engine like Google choosing not to link to a newspaper? Surely they can’t be required to link to a newspaper AND then pay that newspaper to do so?
The trade-off if Google chose not to link to the newspaper would be a (slightly) less useful search engine, but the cost to the newspapers would surely be higher in the long term…or am I missing something?
More likely? They drop anyone who doesn't give them a free or very generous rate.
(Europe, where near everything is mono/oligopolized and the behavior of those companies is abhorrent. From beer in Belgium (they own the cafes or loan them money and force out competing beers from the menu), to cheese in France (import and health regulations mean almost no non-French cheese and French producers are exempt from even most of those health regulations). To German cars (read how Dieselgate played out in Germany, ie. German manufacturers got exempted from ... car regulations ... not even joking ... or what keeps happening to startup car manufacturers in Germany and France, ...)
It's far less than actual racism, but it's still not right.
That’s how it worked in practice.
How can anyone reason that publishers should be paid for the major share of visitors Google forwards to their content? Of course publishers have every right to de-index their content from news, search or both and the tools to do so have always been available. However apparently they had to be reminded explicitely.
Google, or similar services like Apple News, certainly can't be forced to pay for content they don't want or need.
But I do think that the EU copyright law is significantly flawed because it's purpose is to further extend the already ridiculously over-extended draconian copyright laws that exist in the EU. I don't think the issues they (ostensibly) set out to solve are something that should be ignored though -- Google acting as a biased monopoly which implements features that impact people's ability to make money is a real problem that needs to be solved somehow.
Are you talking about AMP?
This is just false. bing.com exists. news.ycombinator.com exists. reddit.com exists....
> The fact that they show people's content without giving them page views..
This is just false. Google shows at most an excerpt (that is defined by the publisher) or a headline (on news.google.com). Unless you're talking about AMP, but that's a decision made by the publisher too.
http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267161/market-share-of-s...
https://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.as...
I think that the percentage argument is not the only important thing to consider, there are other anti-competitive practices which (when practiced at a large enough scale) become a monopoly even if "only" 50% of people use the product (friendly reminder that 50% of internet users is more than a billion people -- much larger than the population of most countries).
My point is not that Google is doing something illegal (and thus arguing over the legal definition of a monopoly is not helpful -- just like arguing over the legal meaning of the US 1st Amendment is not helpful in discussions over the concept of free speech). I'm arguing that it is a monopoly in the ordinary meaning of the word, in that effectively everyone uses Google and Google exerts a massive amount of power over their users.
But for a pseudo-legal argument: Google participates in a form of product tying[1] by requiring you to create a Google account in order to access Google Groups (which are publicly-run mailing lists and an unrelated product to their account service). Now since you don't pay for Google accounts this isn't a strict violation of anti-trust laws, but it is very close in concept to the sort of thing anti-trust laws protect against.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
That seems to be false; I can read mailing lists hosted at Google Groups without logging in (for instance https://groups.google.com/a/groups.riscv.org/forum/#!forum/i... opens for me without asking for a login). I'm subscribed to that mailing list from an email address which is not a Google account, and I didn't have to log in to any Google account when I subscribed. I can post to that mailing list directly from a normal email client, through a non-Google email provider.
Of course you don't need to login in order to post on the mailing list, but I think that's only one of the three main features of a mailing list (broadcast, subscription, and archival) that I can do without logging in.
100% certainly would.
> I'm arguing that it is a monopoly in the ordinary meaning of the word, in that effectively everyone uses Google and Google exerts a massive amount of power over their users.
What do you mean by "the ordinary meaning of the word" here? It's also not clear to me that "effectively everyone uses Google".
You might argue it's the fault of users for not being informed, but I think that if a company has a significant impact on the lives of 3 billion people (which again, is a larger influence than any single government on this planet -- and nation states have constitutions and laws specifically to ensure that they serve the people and are accountable) then it has reached the point where it either needs to be broken up or be regulated. I don't care which, I just think that this cowboy mentality (that software is somehow special and lives in a world where regulation is always an unreasonable viewpoint to have) has to stop at some point.
Regarding the term monopoly, there are different views on what precisely the term means. Google does have anti-competitive practices which you might argue make them act as a monopoly. You can argue they have a monopoly on internet searches because whenever they change PageRank in a way that negatively impacts some users (or when they make changes to GMail's spam filter so that it starts blocking valid emails) there isn't a rush to a different service because there is no way to co-ordinate such a rush. Instead you have other secondary industries like SEO which exist purely to try to keep websites reachable from Google. The fact they have the power to manipulate how the majority of sites operate clearly means they have significant (and in my view monopolistic) control over the market.
They also have a market share that is actually incomprehensible. Microsoft was indicted under anti-trust laws because of Internet Explorer being bundled with Windows. I think Google acts as much more of a monopoly than Microsoft did in the 90s, and "good guy Google" really is an outdated mental model for a company with that much influence over people's lives.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Generally it's measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index - HHI.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hhi.asp
It is defined by it's marketshare. And google search is by and large a monopoly in this regard having ~90% market share in virtually all segments of the market.
No, I can't agree. I don't even consider Microsoft a monopoly, even though their product comes pre-installed on every PC you can buy in shops. If you can't get any alternative ISP (to e.g. AT&T) where you live, by any means, now that is a monopoly.
It should be obvious that it's perfectly possible to define something as a monopoly in a certain area. If a monopoly could only be defined as a monopoly if it were global, there wouldn't be many.
Yes, it is, though in practice that's based on complex factual analysis of whether there is real competition not whether there are other players in the same descriptive market.
> It is defined by it's marketshare.
No, marketshare is a “same descriptive market” test that people casually talking about competition use; legally, the more relevant tests are things like pricing power—can the alleged monopolist raise prices in some range without losing sales to a competitor. You can have a very large marketshare in a descriptive market but lack pricing power, or have small marketshare in a descriptive market and have pricing power because the market described is really multiple segregated markets in practice.
I don't think the existence of other websites on the internet is not really an argument against Google being a monopoly. Without question, the vast majority of the population (outside China) uses Google. This means that the majority of people who use the internet are using Google as their method of accessing websites, and thus Google has an effective monopoly on what links people see (and thus by proxy what articles they read and what they think about topics).
I'm arguing all of this from a point of view where you don't really care how Google or anything behind the scenes works -- most people view Google as a utility that just tells you what "the internet" has to say on a topic. Given it's prevalence and significant impact on people's decision making, it should have far more accountability.
> Google shows at most an excerpt (that is defined by the publisher) or a headline (on news.google.com).
Google also has their Q&A thing where they parse the contents of web pages to answer questions you ask Google -- so you don't end up on the person who wrote the answer's website. I think that is pretty clearly an example of Google showing people's content without giving them page views (whether or not you agree that it is an issue).
If you’re going to base it solely off number of users then you’re effectively punishing businesses for being successful and NOT from harming consumers.
For instance, changes to PageRank have negatively impacted websites and business consistently in the past (so much that there's an industry around making pages cater to the whims of an unauditable algorithm -- SEO). I think the fact that websites obviously cannot just switch to a competitor (unless they want to stop catering to a potential market of 3 billion people) rules that as being monopolistic behaviour.
That's what I mean when I refer to a monopoly. If you have exclusive control over an algorithm that affects more people than any government body on earth, then you are a monopoly. Same argument goes for quite a few of their other products (if your personal mail server isn't effectively "blessed" by GMail you cannot communicate with the majority of internet users), but Search is the most obvious one.
Is it? I mean, sure, far more people use Google than, say, Bing or DuckDuckGo. But there's nothing actually stopping them from using those alternatives, other than the fact that they're not as good.
If they have a monopoly on search because of their share of searches, then surely the relevant lock-in would be how easily users of search can move to competitors?
Think about how grossly afflicted with clickbait the news ecosystem is today, and then imagine how much worse it could get if Google were legally prevented from even attaching a blurb to the links that it shows users.
I agree that regulation might be useful here, and impartial search results are a good goal. But linking fees go against that. If newspaper A wants a fee from google for showing its links but newspaper B doesn't, it would be unfair to the entire market to force google to include both A and B equally. If A and B agree to charge google the same fee, that sounds a lot like a cartel doing price fixing, which is already illegal. The government could set a fixed price google has to pay, but at that point we have given up on finding a free market solution, so that's a last resort that isn't nessesary yet.
It's fine that people can demand money for links, but I don't see any scenario where this would happen in reality.
Also by previewing they prevent load as well and boost relevance. That favors real data instead of SEO page caching garbage that tries to get matched to every common keyword. You do not have a right to a business model, much less it being unchanged by time.
Google's response was to give them better ways of de-indexing content. IE, a way to opt out. Take it or leave it. Naturally, few newspaper took leave it, preferring to get readers & no revenue than no readers and no revenue.
Since then, efforts have focused on turning that around. Give Google a take it or leave it option. Either shut down Google news or pay newspapers somehow. So far, Google have walked a couple of times, when such laws were passed locally.
So yes, Google could end Google news search.
Many newspapers are rubbish and publish rubbish content anyway so that's the problem, not the copyright.
Now that I think of it more, what stops Google from charging the news services for the privilege of being included in the search results?
Admittedly I bear a hard grudge against them from my youth and how they would scapegoat and stir up moral panics about the youth and their media. Rainbow parties, bullshit claims about video games and anime, etc. They still love to use Millennials as a slur.
I personally suspect that demographic warfare came back to bite them hard as they grow up and don't trust the ones constantly talking shit about them on garbage grounds.
I sympathize with that. Google's market power is problematic. But.. this is not a solution.
People don't appear to want this, of course. Pity.
The issue comes from companies that were too powerful before they went to ask google for money.
https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/7526...
(This dealt with an earlier local version of this in some European countries)
If it's about scraping content and presenting it in a separate feed or otherwise outside of the source platform, I can see why they would not want that.
Wouldn't that also preclude inclusion of the title? How would single word descriptions even be meaningful beyond being used as citation link anchors?
There is something suspect about the EU's cavalier attitude in churning out internet regulations, they generally favor old industries and incumbents.
Sarcastic joke perhaps, but very true.
But I don't see why this is relevant to my point that there is actually a real issue here, and ignoring it is going to cause even more laws like these to be passed because the narrative from publishers (that they are losing business because of internet companies that have a cavalier attitude about the people they are cutting off) is not entirely fictitious. When's the last time you saw Google telling large websites about changes in PageRank that will negatively impact them?
I am a big fan of the GDPR, because it protects the rights of the users. But this time they are building a law to ease the fight of large corporations, affecting everone else in the process... not cool.
If they did so they can conveniently also ignore that $5B anti-trust fine.
This is great for the FAANG providers who already have automated content control tools and massive help centres to act on anything 24/7. It is a death-knell to any upstart startup who would challenge Youtube or Facebook however.
Just another in a long list of efforts by the copyright cartels to restrict access to information and culture.
I received one "pre-canned" email acknowledgement from UKIP, attempting to make the bill into an "EU bullying us" issue, and nothing from anyone else. One politician I tried to call had a published phone number that connected to a commercial money lending service.
And mainstream political parties wonder why people feel disenfranchised. They have become a professional political class, completely disconnected from the people they purport to represent. The result is protest (Trump, Brexit et al).
Just wait until you walk around Brussels. EU politicians don't mix with the locals. They've got separate everything. They have reserved parking spaces, separate taxes, separate restaurants, separate social security, separate supermarkets, schools and swimming schools that the locals are excluded from.
Needless to say, all are vastly superior to what the locals get.
Compared to that, I would argue you're wrong. I don't know how UK politicians live, but I very much doubt it is half as "separate class" as the EU class in Brussels. In Brussels the politicians live like the politicians in Beijing live.