I am curious about other interpretations of the impact this law will have. Would it encourage the development of more peer-to-peer sharing networks, which lack a central space to upload?
I wish we had the kind of concerted effort that the copyright lobby is able to launch, but focused on issues that reduce the net benefit of these platform more than copyright infringement: hate speech or intentional misinformation.
Maybe not encourage, but it will increase the incentives for those to pursue other options if complying will get increasingly more expensive. Though I doubt traditional corporations will be able to take advantage of it since they will be tied by the rules to continue their advantage in the status quo.
Maybe that is the point. We need services not products, and maybe limiting the viability of traditional centralised (risk, data, prestation) products could allow a new category of distributed (risk, data,...) services to fill in the need.
The popularity of modern streaming services combined with the shortage of IP addresses and subsequent spread of carrier-grade NAT will make it a bit difficult for regular P2P networks to make a come-back. I can, however, imagine this will have result in a small boost for self-hosted content.
I can imagine someone writing a TOR-based eMule client or something along those lines but it won't be anywhere near as common as it was back in the days; ease of use has always been an important factor and today we actually do have commercial alternatives in place this time.
As I see it, the main impact will be for social networks and other sites that allow user uploads. There's an actual chance the people behind the law simply don't understand that what they're asking isn't possible, and that many politicians think we just need to solve this with blockchains and machine learning (because that's apparently how to fix everything nowadays). In the real world, however, I really see no way to comply with that law without mass-monitoring and very far-reaching automatic censorship of uploaded content.
Your startup idea was to host large amounts of copyrighted material for profit, without checking who had the rights to distribute that material?
In some parts of the EU that's already illegal. Not just a civil tort for which you can be sued, but an actual criminal offence for which you can be prosecuted.
> Your startup idea was to host large amounts of copyrighted material for profit, without checking who had the rights to distribute that material?
of course not don't be silly.
but so far liability was on the uploader, when the police comes knocking you gave out user data and that was it. see, for example, the jsfiddle constant issue with illegal content: https://remysharp.com/2015/09/18/jsbin-toxic-part-5
people miss here that any user generated content could be part of a copyright. even text if they are lyrics. there's NO user platform that's safe.
That's why more and more people feel resentment towards their states and the EU. This is a blatant corruption and this is only going to get worse. There should be an investigation of all the people involved, money traced even for distant family members and acquaintances. If any shady behaviour is discovered then the justice should be dispensed. Any politician that abuses his position to serve company interest in exchange for money should receive a capital punishment as a deterrent
Bloody hell that's rather terrifying. After GDPR I was thinking Europe would be the bastion of the internet, now it looks like it's time to decentralise the internet completely. Which is going to surely have it's own issues I'm sure.
Therein lies the problem of regulating something like the internet. It’s impossible for regulating bodies to find the perfect balance and then just stop.
So usenet is dead, right?
90%, usenet ISPs are a download server pretenting to be a mail server so they can claim safe harbour. If they are responsible for auditing their content, presumably this isn't viable anymore...
The GDPR has already resulted in quite a few websites simply refusing to serve the EU. Will this clinch it? Will the EU be cut off form the internet due to over-regulation that no one wants to put themselves at risk over?
I've so far only noticed the blocking on (tabloid) US news sites which when visited with a VPN are full of trackers and overflowing with ads. It didn't feel like a loss to me but would be curious to know if there are services which people feel they really needed/wanted but now can't access w/out VPN?
Instapaper was a sort of nice utility that blocked EU users after May last year. Fortunately there are alternatives, some of them arguably superior (pinboard?).
The Chicago Tribune is not a tabloid, and it blocks EU visitors now, nor are many TV stations that now block people from outside the US. Even a VPN doesn't always solve the problem, unfortunately. It's also very annoying that Google News still shows links from those sites even though you can't actually visit them.
I was actually searching for this very example but incorrectly remembered it as LA Times (but it was the Chicago Tribune). Not sure if this is a loss to people in the EU if the CT would go dark for them. Maybe annoying to expats but not sure if anyone here would cry over them. This might have in fact been the reason why they didn't bother with compliance in the first place (no subscribers/reader from EU)?
Agreed, it's a way over the top. However, I would like the EU, or the US, to tell Facebook to get their data collection and reselling under control. The GDPR should have taken care of that issue, but until someone drag Facebook to count over a GDPR violation and wins, nothing is going to change.
no it doesn't. facebook was always pretty good at asking for permission. it showed you that so and so app will have access to this and that. and people blindly clicked it, because they wanted the maffia wars, the mob wars, the farmville, the latest zinga shitclick time waster to one up their friends in imaginary internet point games. (I tried them too, then luckily the fad wore off.)
FB has to show who they sell data to, that's the new part basically. They will probably show a long list of random companies. It'll look a bit scary, people will get accustomed to it. (FB will find a dark pattern that minimizes the attrition due to any permission/consent step in their money machine.)
But that is the thing. The regulation is still in effect, even after they gave the permission.
The identifiable information still has to be encrypted. They still need to specify exactly where the information will go and why. And if a new company wants to access the data or even wants to use the provided Information for something new, Facebook has to ask permission again.
Once again telling the user why that company needs permission and why as well.
It's doubtful that the current blanket prompt is enough. But it remains to be seen wherever the law will be enforced and it's of course possible,that nothing will change and regulator's never act on the law
FB will have to do the aggregation themselves, and then the sell the aggregated data. no PII. and they are doing that, allowing targeting and stopped the messaging legacy APIs, now if an app wants to read your messages it has to ask for permission. (I don't even know if there is such a permission anymore.)
That said, I hope the EU courts will look at them the first time they fuck up. (And that might be right now. But so far I'm not aware of any recent FB data/privacy abuse.)
Businesses cannot afford it and no, it is not happening. Also, abusing GDPR is one thing, how about all these companies start to pay VAT and taxes on sales originated from EU.
Business currently just state they comply with GDPR, but really they don't.
All these big blanket OK consent buttons we see on landing pages have already been shown in court do not constitute informed and freely given consent. The real impact has het to come, hopefully after some stiff fines are handed.
And you are right: I also wonder about enabling large scale VAT dodging by sites like aliexpress.
I assume you'd be happy for EU businesses to reciprocate and pay US sales taxes on goods & services sold into the US?
Even if you are, I'm not actually sure that would be better for anyone involved. Seems like it would essentially stop or severely diminish online commerce between US/EU as too much hassle.
GDPR caused some non EU media businesses to preemptively block EU users because their primary readership is not in the EU and their primary business model is abusing their users in ways that GDPR restricts.
GDPR did not really change the media landscape in the EU. Business as usual here. Mostly companies went through a brief period where they had to consult lawyers and expensive agencies on how to cover their asses. Mostly good things have started happening after that. Some companies that were doing technically unacceptable things under pre-GDPR legislation have now grudgingly stopped doing those things.
The only thing I've noticed is even more website popups about cookies that make it hard to anything but give the go-ahead to all the cookies, but I'm not sure whether that is a result of GDPR.
That's pre-GDPR (barely), and the original idea was that users should be able to opt out of cookie tracking. But instead most web sites just added that super-annoying (particularly when it covers the whole page) pop-up giving you one option: Accept cookies or else. That was not the intention of the regulation at all. So far I've seen only a single web site that actually gave you the option to not use cookies (yes/no, not just yes).
I suspect that this is mostly the results of the all or nothing being the easier to implement solution. I've seen several websites that do a offer a more advanced tool where you can opt-out of some cookies (3rd party tracking mostly) but still use the main site.
Yes, it's normally websites run by "good people" (some non-commercial organisation) that let you easily say yes/no. Media websites implement the dark pattern of Yes/[wilderness of options page].
This is pre-GDPR, but it feels like since GDPR there's been a real uptick in this.
I’ve seen a lot that give you yes/no options. Some of them tell you that you can’t use the site, sorry, when you click no, but I’ve noticed many let me continue on anyway.
Of course, I’ve seen even more that give you only an accept option... that, or as sibling commenter said yes/wilderness of options.
now you should be free and bold to click the disagree / refuse / no-cookies button and get the experience you expect.
because if the tracking/ad/shit/any cookies are not fundamentally required for the page to show, then denying you the usage of the site is a violation of your privacy (because you can't give selective consent to specific data uses)
sure, a lot of sites throw up the ugly banner, but now you can click fuck cookies, because fuck cookies if you only want to read a fucking HTML page with pictures. they can still make stats about your visit and aggregate them, but tracking cookies are absurd. (they can filter out repeated visits by looking at IP addresses and browser fingerprinting and/or they can ask you nicely to help them get better stats, but now they have to unbundle that from the ad tracking purpose.)
>now you should be free and bold to click the disagree / refuse / no-cookies button and get the experience you expect.
This button doesn't exist in 90% of cases. Websites tend to dump you into a complex, deliberately tedious to edit options UI rather than providing a "No" button.
yeah, then those sites are not compliant at all. just yesterday on a news site there was just an accept button. it was sort of cute, that it was very stark colored floating on the bottom of the page, so it allowed the reader to view the article, but there was no refuse option. (at least for my browsing sample these are becoming a rarity.)
It’s too early to say how GDPR has impacted the landscape as no significant enforcement has happened.
Their are major complaints outstanding against Google, Facebook & the IAB that will define how online publishers can be funded once they are litigated.
I think calling GDPR over-regulation is extremely suspect. The GDPR does a good job in codifying basic privacy principles of what you can do with personal data. Clear communication, consent, control over your own data and data protection principles. Things that should be self-evident but we have been failing with forever, and something that has become an extremely widespread widespread in an online society. The only reason to call it over regulation is if you're spoiled about not being regulated beforehand - but there was a clear need for such a law and codifying reasonable privacy principles. I don't understand why I hear so few Americans about wanting this in their own country.
Article 13 is fundamentally different from the GDPR. The fundamental problem is that I think (and most people hopefully do) user privacy is an ethical good, and I don't believe (much of) copyright law is an ethical good. If you fundamentally believe copyright must be defended vigilantly Article 13 is not an unreasonable consequence at all - I just don't agree with that premise one bit.
Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR, I say good riddance. If you really feel you cannot uphold the basic privacy principles posited, then screw you too. But for Article 13, the laws are only in the interest of big corporations. I don't care about those.
There is a cost to businesses in complying with and implementing regulations, regardless of the size of the business and how good or bad their behaviour has been with respect to the intention of those regulations. You can't deny over-regulation by assuming only the badly-behaving people are burdened by it.
Besides, there is also a cost to me: the never-ending pop-ups and acceptance dialogues, inability to access information in a straightforward manner for those that choose to block, etc.
What is the percentage of users who actively control their privacy as a result of GDPR (and still happily use the website)? What is the percentage of badly -behaving businesses who will be prosecuted?
> There is a cost to businesses in complying with and implementing regulations, regardless of the size of the business and how good or bad their behaviour has been with respect to the intention of those regulations. You can't deny over-regulation by assuming only the badly-behaving people are burdened by it.
Indeed - the lack of this cost of business was causing (1) reckless and (2) (deeply) unethical behaviour to become rampant [0]. I think it was fair to say it was not acceptable anymore, and I think the GDPR does a good job of formalizing rules of basic common sense about personal data protection. There's really nothing in the GDPR that I can point to that is overbearing, although of course many businesses do implement unnecessarily overbearing UX on top of it.
Processing personal data should be a risk to business, and I think some basic rule of law was warranted for this risk to be clear to business.
I'm not saying there is no cost to regulation. But the cost needs to be proportional to the good it achieves and I think the GDPR does that quite well. Article 13 - in my opinion - clearly will not.
You can avoid the burden of GDPR entirely if you simply don't collect user data, and you can avoid most of it if you only collect data that you actually need.
> I think calling GDPR over-regulation is extremely suspect.
I don't. I find it an egregious example of over-regulation. I think not recognizing the obviously large scope of such regulation is extremely suspect.
> The GDPR does a good job in codifying basic privacy principles of what you can do with personal data
By what measure do you define "good job"?
> The only reason to call it over regulation is if you're spoiled about not being regulated beforehand
I admit being this kind of spoiled. But it's ridiculous to say that's the only reason. There are measured ways to go about things and to so blatantly say that this is the only reason one might view it as over-regulation (despite real reasons such as size and scope and ineffectiveness of predecessors/enforcement) destroys our ability to have real conversations about the many alternative ways to solve some of the problems we have. Such a black-and-white absolutist view is harmful.
> I don't understand why I hear so few Americans about wanting this in their own country.
Can't speak for all, but for many, it's because they recognize the difference between what would be ideal and what would actually happen. Large anti-company (especially against companies that users prefer to use) laws have a chance to be frowned upon, despite ridiculous promises/optimism/naivete by the hopeful.
> Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR, I say good riddance. If you really feel you cannot uphold the basic privacy principles posited, then screw you too.
These are not how chilling effects work. You don't get to say "well, if they choose not to do business where a law is, they must not be able to uphold that law". There are compliance costs/risks. The amount of assumptions concerning this topic, whether assumptions that the law is good or assumptions that those disagreeing with it are of a certain ilk, need to stop. You only hurt your cause discussing things in this manner.
I'd like to point out that you're responding to me as if you assume I have no to little experience with this law and its consequences for organizations. That's not a reasonable assumption - my post is speaking from organizational experience. You're not talking to some outsider of all of this.
If you have specific problems with GDPR or that it goes too far, I'd like to know what those specific aspects are. In my view, there's some basic rules on how to deal with personal data that the GDPR codifies, and it does that surprisingly (for the EU) reasonably. It starts from simple principles of citizen rights and ethical behaviour and writes a complete rulebook on how to apply them - that's my definition of a good job.
It might be difficult for business to adapt to actually now considering processing personal data a risk. But that by itself does not make GDPR "overregulation" - that just makes it a difficult regulation change to process. I won't shed a tear about business having a difficult time going through that process - I'm incredibly happy that they are forced to consider processing personal data a risk, because it is.
Also note I specifically said "Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR" - not "Companies that are not sure they can comply with GDPR yet". There's a reasonable difference, I agree. But, yes, if you find that your business intrinsically cannot comply with GDPR or you don't want to - it's time to take a good hard look in the mirror.
But it's in a website's favor to serve as many consumers as possible, won't any group that isn't willing to conform to EU standards be out competed by those that do?
If a few major sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook decide to not service EU any longer, I think it won't take long before that regulation is rolled back.
I have a software product. People resell it on marketplaces. They make €30~50,000 per year from doing this. When I contact the marketplaces they hide behind safe harbour - yes, they suspend the user account but the same user will register the next day under a different name and keep the same practice. The responsibility of the content published should be shifted from the author to the platform so abuse like this is not repeated.
> The responsibility of the content published should be shifted from the author to the platform
How is the platform going to know what's legally published and what isn't? In some cases I suppose you can work with an industry, like YouTube's Content ID for music, however even with Google's resources Content ID still has severe glitches[1] (should they be legally responsible for false positives too?). Otherwise what, hire an army of mechanical turks to manually review every single thing that's uploaded?
At best I think under this kind of system you're going to get a stagnant landscape where only corporate giants with deep pockets and/or industry connections can create new innovative products. There's going to be no more upstart Instagrams, Snapchats, Soundclouds, whatever if the company can get sued into oblivion if some rando takes a pic or uploads a snippet of copyrighted material.
> I have a software product. People resell it on marketplaces.
Can you elaborate on why this is occurring in an illegal fashion? UsedSoft v Oracle [1] and Aleksandrs Ranks and Jurijs Vasiļevičs [2] seem to broadly suggest that reselling used software is legal.
I'm worried about influencing outcomes in the EU due to language barriers, especially on boring and "unsexy" issues like Internet regulation. It'd be important for the EU to be able to vote for representatives regardless of your primary jurisdiction.
Even if I manage to convince most of the representatives from my region, they will be outvoted by the French who had a big hand in passing the proposal forward the last time... It's like they reside in a completely different universe, with no hope of meaningful communication.
Edit: adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is.
I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty of picking up a highly tonal language like Mandarin, if only exposed to the 44 phonemes of English well into adulthood...
English is a second language for me and compared to many other languages it's comparatively very simple, or at least you can start to understand and speak it at very basic level incredibly quickly. The biggest issue with English is completely inconsistent and illogical pronunciation, you can have two words that have the same spelling but different meaning depending on how they are pronounced - read and read for example. But the grammar is almost laughably simple and the lack of any sort of variation when it comes to gendered adjectives and verbs puts it firmly in the category of easy languages to learn.
> But the grammar is almost laughably simple and the lack of any sort of variation when it comes to gendered adjectives and verbs puts it firmly in the category of easy languages to learn.
This just sounds like cherry-picking. You're completely glossing over the issue of spelling being insane and concluding that the language is easy because there are no gendered adjectives and many tenses, even though the existing tenses are largely completely irregular.
Yet it's the language with
- the most available teaching services
- the most available free teaching resources
- highest percent of use-cases in the world
- easiest methods of finding a training companion anywhere in the world
It's just so far ahead in these structural things that supporting any other language does not seem to make any sense anymore at this point.
I spoke German and Italian before learning English, and English didn't seem that terribly hard. Most words have the same stem as latin or germanic languages so it's easy to remember the vocabulary. The grammar isn't very complex. And there aren't special letters in the alphabet.
Only the pronounciation is complex, because things are often spoken differently than how they are written.
You basically spoke the two languages English is made of, so naturally it was easy to remember the vocabulary for you. Special letters in the alphabet is only hard when you're trying to write the words, but English spelling being mostly unrelated to pronunciation is a major source of pain for learners. Tenses are formed irregularly, much of the language is phrasal verbs which there's no way around learning, and since English is basically two languages you have double the difficulty because words only relate to their half.
On the other hand you don't need to worry about cases, gender etc with English, as it jettisoned those features. No need to memorise what gender a table is, or wondering which one of 14 cases to use.
Every language is irregular because humans are irregular, but I don't think it is justified to paint English as somehow more difficult than other languages. The difficulty of a language just depends on the languages you already know, prior exposure, available resources to learn it etc - and the last two of these are typically much better for English than most other languages.
However I'm just looking at my kids that are tri-lingual at the moment with fourth in the works and they prefer to use English even though we actively force them to speak my wife's and my native languages at home... which are of European group too, so not even close in complexity to Chinese or Arabic. English has less exceptions, there is no conjugation, no gender-specific adjective forms, not that many verb tenses, etc. It's just that - it's an uncomplicated language.
> It's just that - it's an uncomplicated language.
I disagree. It might not have conjugation, genders, etc, but it managed to more than make up for the lack of complexity with superb amounts of complexity in spelling, phrasal verbs, irregular verbs, etc.
English is pretty easy due to the insane amounts of English media we consume.
I could speak and understand decent English when I was less than 10 or so due to watching so many subtitled shows and playing video games.
My native language is Finnish. Which is farther from English than Hindi (Which is in indo-european language tree unlike Finnish).
The biggest obstacle to using something like Mandarin is the writing system. Hieroglyphs are imho just fundamentally inferior to systems using alphabets.
>English is pretty easy due to the insane amounts of English media we consume.
As an American, I've been studying German for about 15 years, but although I've never officially studied Spanish, I speak and understand casual Spanish better then I do German. I wouldn't be able to read a Spanish novel like I can in German, but I can understand Spanish speakers and text message Spanish speakers far better than I can in German. All of this is from picking up the language through media, listening to Spanish speakers in my town, and hearing some of my wife's family speaking Spanish to each other.
German, on the other hand, is very difficult for me to encounter on the street and nearly as difficult to find cultural material to consume (Amazon carries German-language Harry Potter, 50 Shades of Grey, and that's about it).
There is a lot to be said about passively learning a language just from hearing it constantly.
English is indeed one of the simplest languages to learn, as is Mandarin. English, Mandarin, and Latin are the standard examples for the theory in linguistics that simplicity in a language is caused by absorbing a large number of speakers who had to learn as adults.
Surely the case for English as a working language is now stronger. Previously it could have been seen as unfair to use one member state's language over another...
Now if Britain is leaving, English could be considered as a neutral language so no country has an advantage.
It is also still the only language that is taught as a foreign language in close to all primary and secondary schools in the Union. It's the most spoken language in the Union. It's relatively easy to learn as a foreign language. It's also the de facto language of international trade, of science, of culture and of international diplomacy (sorry France).
True, but Ireland is less than 5M, 13 seats in the EU parliament. They are not seen as a competition to anyone. The UK is 66M with 73 seats in the parliament, member of G7 and one of the most important economies in the EU.
We already have a common language that's widely known across Europe (English), it just doesn't have the reach that the native language does.
Some countries are also really self centered in terms of news, etc. Here in Spain, for example, most national news deal mostly with corruption scandals, political issues in Catalonia, sports, and little else. Geopolitical and/or European issues are given surprisingly little time considering we're the fifth largest economy in the union (about to be the fourth after/if the UK leaves).
It's quite different. The UK hasn't sent police to stop the Scottish referendum and beat up voters and the EU has not sought the extradition of Nigel Farage.
I believe the poster was meaning that the UK press is insular and doesn't report on wider European issues like the Spanish press and not commenting on Catalonia or making a comparison with Scotland.
This is the reason that all proposals to the EU are translated to the native language of every nation. As of writing this the documents are available in 24 languages.
Language barriers are overplayed. If they were so important then EU institutions would simply not work...
Now, I don't know where the majority stands on this issue but being outvoted by the majority is called democracy.
The French, even assuming French representatives in the EU are all on the same side, cannot force EU legislation. Any legislation has majority support (including at member states' governments level).
I find that unlikely to believe. Yes, the de-facto working languages in Bruxelles are English and French, but chances are everyone knows both (or even English better). If you send material to MEPs of any country, they will be able to read it if they want - there are dedicated translation services, as you might imagine in an org working with dozens of different ethnicities.
Language acts simply as a constituency signal (“not in my language? Not a voter of mine...”). That is expected and even legitimate - why should a MEP listen to other voices over the ones of people they actually represent? If you really want to influence a MEP, you would get better chances by finding allies in his constituency. This is not really different than with national parliaments.
In terms of this or that national block outvoting a position, it is less frequent than one would expect, and depends largely on how European parties organise. Most parties have some sort of nominated board that agrees a line for the entire group, regardless of national boundaries. Some countries might have a larger influence on the group because of their electoral dynamics (German MEPs for the Greens, for example, will outnumber Italian ones to ridiculous degrees; and some parties are single-country, typically the isolationist ones), but that’s usually not the case in major parties (PSE and PPE).
Correct - this proposal is coming from the EPP, the largest party in the EU parliament. Predictably, most of their MEPs will just blindly vote for it along party lines. Language barriers are crucial in terms of their constituency universe (plus the older demographic skew). Their voters don't read Reddit, Twitter or anything in English and this issue is nowhere near their radars.
> Their voters don't read Reddit, Twitter or anything in English
That's a bit patronizing, and a view of internet users that belongs to the '90s. These voters might (for example) like memes and forums very much, but not value them enough to shift political alliances over a proposal like this. Not everyone lives 10 hours a day on the internet.
> adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is.
This is a very interesting twitter thread. The script, and the posted screenshots, repeatedly demonstrate the solution to a single very simple math problem for particular values of input variables. It seems that Alec Muffett is relying on the idea that he wrote a script -- a script which was easy to write and solves a very easy problem -- to provide more credibility than the laws of probability have in their own right, which is -- to me -- 100% backwards. If your script disagrees with the math, particularly at this level, the odds are overwhelming that your script has a bug, not that the math was wrong.
This wil change nothing that is not already in effect for most sites. Try to upload a movie to Youtube, it will be removed. But only when the owner/author complains or some automatic filter is triggered.
There is also too much content to check and enforce it all.
yeah, youtube is already there, but with the amount of copyright system abuse there are, I personally dont want others to become like youtube in regards to copyright/legality.
Not most sites. In fact, youtube is somewhat the exception; they developed censoring capabilities only because their size made them too big of a target to dodge legal pressure.
There are bazillions of other sites who don’t (and often can’t) police anything of what they host unless they are threatened with litigation.
YouTube has stated that if this passes, "EU residents are at risk of being cut off from videos that, in just the last month, they viewed more than 90bn times" – i.e. despite all the overblocking and mistakes, still too much slips through ContentID for them to take the risk of direct liability. https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2018/11/i-support-go...
In all likelihood, EU users will just end up using VPN-type services to bypass the blocks... rather than talking to their MEPs.
(I don't blame them to be fair, I've gone down the MEP route - they replied with a form letter to the effect of "this is party policy and I'll support it because it's for your own good, and I'm not discussing it further")
In a weird way, this might be EU's strategy to finally deal significant damage to Google and Facebook, as this law will encourage development of alternatives on decentralized peer-to-peer technologies. However, I'm not sure if EU politicians are that smart...
It’s not made by EU politicians, it’s made by a combination of lawyers, engineers and public administration majors.
In many ways the EU is a functioning technocracy, and if you ever read through the actual EU documents it shows. They are almost always sound, they are also massively bureaucratic and around 90% longer than necessary, but I’ve never read through something that wasn’t sound.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read up on article 13, but I do read (and sit through) a good deal of EU standards and proposals for EU wide Enterprise Architectural principles, and they are never thwarted by politics.
have you ever been to rural Germany, Italy, France or heard of gilets jaunes? Any idea why they might exist?
I live in a very poor EU country (out of choice) and most young people fuck off to Germany or France because their home states have no jobs for them. They don't come back either which causes a massive brain drain on these places. Ask the so called middle class in Croatia, Slovakia, Italy what they think of the EU and how well it works for them. Avg salary in these places is 500 to 1000 EUR. And if you visit supermarkets all they have is shit. Literally everything like fresh veg tastes like feet because the good stuff that is locally produced gets exported to the rich places. Companies have 2 production lines making low-grade products (despite being the same brand) for these markets. I'm not an arm-chair bureaucrat who forms his opinion on Google. I actually live in these placed because despite all this shit and poverty the people are actually warm.
One more example: thousands of people wiping arses in nursery homes in Germany are working through shady polish, slovenian, etc outsourcing companies where they're stripped of all benefits that a German would enjoy. They work for 500 to 1000 / month (in a high cost country) because their home country has no jobs for them. Then they're being exploited by the rich EU countries.
Again I lived in Germany, ran 2 companies there, lived in France (operated 3 businesses), now I live in Eastern EU. As much as I want the EU to succeed I can't be blind to the hypocrisy that I see every day on the streets in my own surrounding.
That’s happening everywhere. One of the reasons you have the wacky politics that you have now in the US is that the people left in flyover country aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed.
Russia is the most extreme example of the phenomenon.
Food in Italy is of extremely good quality and variety. I live in Bulgaria and fruits and vegetables are exceptional and extremely cheap.
If you refer to supermarket food I may agree.
indeed Italy (and France) has some o the best food I ever bought. Germany can't compare even with what's available in a Le'clerc or Carrefour in France. yes I was mainly talking about supermarkets. In my current home I only buy stuff at the wet-market - e.g. directly from farmers because the chains just deliver crap. Even the higher prized items in supermarkets (which cost the same as Germany despite the salary differences) are terrible quality - literally nobody in Italy or France would eat those veg.
I wasn’t that impressed with French supermarkets, including Carrefour. Sure, Germany is the home of Lidl, Aldi, and Netto, but Rewe, Edeka, Kaufland, and Biomarkt are all at least as good as what I saw in France.
On the other hand, in the UK, Tesco, Waitrose, and Sainsbury’s are all at least as good as their German equivalents; and (beyond the EU) even the worst EU supermarket was better than almost every supermarket I saw in the USA.
shopping at carrefour Antibes with over 100 cashiers you could buy wines from €15 - €1500 in the same shop. Not just wines but fresh fish section that is bigger than some Kaufstadt shops in Germany themselves. The level of choice there was phenomenal (closer to US than anywhere else in Europe). Fresh whipped cream from the Normandie that costs €30,-- for 500ml (and you could taste it) ... exotic meats (goat, horse, pigeon, rabbit, fresh fois-gras ...). At the same time Germany had scandals with their "Klebefleisch" essentially meat that consists of lips+arseholes glued together to make it look like genuine ham ...
I never paid attention to the price of groceries when shopping in Germany because growing up poor I always had the attitude not to be stingy with food and only buy what appealed the most. Coming to France I had to pay attention and actually look at the label because I might pick stuff that I simply couldn't afford. Doing this in Germany I might end up paying for regular groceries 250,-- (avg feeding a family), while in France I might pay 800 or more if I didn't pay attention. The first few times had to actually return once the cashier presented my bill.
two line stuff is straight out lie?!
I live in a small european country (same level as croatia, slovakia etc....) stuff in markets is good quality. local stuff stays here and gets sold to locals.
Not all of this is the EU - which is not exactly some super-state that controls every aspect of life on the continent.
Almost all of these things are in the jurisdiction of the member states themselves, and the EU has little power to control them.
If the EU didn't exist, Germany would still be staffing its nursing homes with cheap(er) foreign labour, just done under a visa rather than EU freedom of movement.
If the EU didn't exist, companies would still produce high-quality products for rich markets, and low-quality products for poor markets. (If you want a fascinating example of this, read this Twitter thread about the manufacture of sanitary pads in Africa - https://twitter.com/aprzhu/status/1083278476310913024)
If the EU, ceased to exist, would eastern European supermarkets no longer be filled with "shit", or would local producers continue to export their good produce where they can get the most money for it?
There is a tendency to avoid criticism of the EU and congratulate it for things it does not do, but it is also a mistake to assign all the ills of Europe to it, when blame for them is much more accurately laid on national governments.
> If the EU didn't exist, Germany would still be staffing its nursing homes with cheap(er) foreign labour, just done under a visa rather than EU freedom of movement.
Or worse: the care would be become too expensive and peoples arses wouldn't be wiped at all..
Datapoint: UK family have been looking at such services for a relative with Alzheimer’s. ~£1,000/week, compared to the ~£60/week the government pays in benefits to those looking after relatives.
That's not really the EU failing, that's just poor countries being poor. A smart businessman will export his goods for the highest price to make more money if he can. That will lead to shittier products sold in poor countries, but it also brings food to the table of the farmers.
It's not as if Poland and Hungary would have been booming economic superpowers if it hadn't been for the EU. The people fleeing their country because of the lack of jobs won't suddenly find new jobs if they can't leave.
The exploitation of cheap, foreign labour is an issue though and it's not just hurting the people being exploited; the natives of the country the exploitation takes place in will see their wages drop if some shady outsourcing company can have the same work done for half the price. Those old people don't want their assets wiped by someone who can barely understand their language either but they need to put up with it because of cost-saving measures that has degraded the level of care. This is something the EU can change, but the many labourers who'd be out of a job if the EU added more restrictions to foreign travel wouldn't agree with changing the policy to make them unemployed.
The double production line issue would just come back in a different fashion if quality goods weren't exported; there'd be no money to be made selling most of the goods, so they either become a luxury product or only the cheap, garbage production line remains.
Despite all the known problems, countries like Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia are all applying for (or already negotiating) a position within the EU. If they would really be better off without the "dysfunctional" EU, they'd form their own bloc or remain independent. Even for poor countries, the EU brings benefits.
No. The EU is a scam. The tax payer is being used to develop markets that will be exploited for a small minorities gain and the profits siphoned away offshore. Socialism is bullshit. The eastern countries are presently queuing up to get their payoffs. Again the politicians are getting their silver pennies and selling the people out. Will it work? As soon the rates of interest kickin and people are squeezed they will head back to the Russians - with their new infrastructure etc.. The EU is a very, very bad joke..
>Despite all the known problems, countries like Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia are all applying for (or already negotiating) a position within the EU. If they would really be better off without the "dysfunctional" EU, they'd form their own bloc or remain independent. Even for poor countries, the EU brings benefits.
do you know why they do this? They can see how easy it is to milk the EU for money in ways that benefit these mafia states. The major of Zagreb is connected to the Bosnian Mafia, he just spent some time in hospital (the mafia put him there but you won't read this in the news). The top lawyer of Zagreb is an asset for the mob. If you want to kill somebody here it's possible to make that happen for very little money. Have you been to Albania, or Macedonia? You should seriously go there before assuming that absorbing them in the EU is a good idea. I'm all for bringing in the people of these countries but before that can be done the organized crime there needs to be cleaned up. The result otherwise is that you'll enrich those that don't deserve it.
The TV series McMafia was set in Croatia (even the non-fiction book and the TV show plays out in a global theater). There are good reasons why that country was chosen for the series. You want to meet some dangerous people? I can introduce you to the guy who shot the Minister of Tourism here not so long ago - he is my age and now runs a drug ring in Austria. This is common knowledge here and as normally talked about as the weather.
My GF's sister was recently alerted by the owner of the building that the mob has asked them to isse them with keys to their flat because they refused to sell it. The person refused to hand it over and alerted her. The poor girl now lives in fear every day.
The Balkan is the wild fucking west. I live in one of the most civilized parts of the region and love it here, because it's also easy to stay away from this all. If you think for one second that the state would want to ( or even could) protect you, you'd be wrong because they're all part of it. If you're rich you don't pay any fines, if you're poor you get fucked. It's always been this way and thanks to globalization it's getting worse (more ruthless competition from foreign mobs fighting over territory).
I can go on and on ... but Misha Glenny's "McMafia" really explains it all rather well.
free movement should be a human right. I lived a decade in Asia before returning to EU. I'd also move to different countries even if it would require a visa. That has never stopped me. I hope to go to India next year. Has little to do with the EU "giving me the benefit". I alone make that possible not some political entity.
yeah. I was ignorantly thinking of those that follow the law, are highly skilled and are welcomed into the country but didn't consider the folk who immigrate for economic reasons or refugees etc. sadly many will be prevented by a barrier if they have "the wrong type" of passport
The EU maybe is functional maybe not, but one thing is for sure: The Kremlin anti-western propaganda machine is obviously highly functional. More and more people are blaming their countries poverty on the EU while being oblivious to the actual scope of the EU jurisdiction, to the detriment of both their home country and the EU. Without the EU the poor countries would be way, way worse off.
Yeah, those silly people, blaming an EU that enforces a monetary policy for the benefit of Germany, imposes pro-corporate and anti-labour laws and agreements (Maastricht, Lisbon treaty, etc), and is ruled by backroom deals and "might is right", for their countries ills...
Obviously they were victims of the "Kremlin anti-western propaganda"...
after 2008 the EU had a gun to their had and were made to sign loans that they could never ever repay. they were lent that money because private citizens mostly owned their homes.
Asset stripping is generally what happens to those who are in default on their debts. The EU reduced that asset stripping from what the creditors could’ve demanded — but did not eliminate it entirely.
> I live in a very poor EU country (out of choice) and most young people fuck off to Germany or France because their home states have no jobs for them. They don't come back either which causes a massive brain drain on these places.
> because the good stuff that is locally produced gets exported to the rich places
The cynic in me would say this is an example of the EU functioning very well, for it's intended purpose of funnelling resources to those of the equal who are more equal than others? ;)
With respect, the examples you gave seem like more of a problem with employment law and governance in individual countries than with the EU as an institution.
The gilet jaunes were/are angry about a carbon tax and lack of wealth taxes. Not Brussels or brain drain.
The EU's Common Agricultural Policy, though not perfect, keeps huge swathes of rural Europe afloat. Its regional development funds builds infrastructure in areas that can't afford it.
You can't really blame the EU for bland vegetables either. That's just silly. The French aren't exactly appropriating Croatian tomatoes by force. It just means that (thanks to the EU) producers can get a higher price for their goods by exporting tariff-free to another country, so they do. Why wouldn't they?
Most of it does not sound like issue with EU, but issue with specific countries. Polish people working through shady Polish companies in Germany is not EU issue, it is mostly Polish issue and partially German issue.
All of your examples strongly pattern-match to my sister-in-law. From a poor nation, moved to a rich one, brain drain, local economy a mess.
Trouble with your argument is she’s from the Philippines, which isn’t in the EU.
It’s not even a problem with globalisation, the usual next scapegoat, but a problem with unequal gains being combined with literally exponential growth. The EU does at least try to counteract that by getting all nations to invest 1% GDP in EU projects including projects designed to lift the poorest EU regions out of relative poverty.
Brain drain is a thing that exists, but I argue it's not really a problem. I'm not going to address the other aspects of your comment for now at least.
I live in India, where complaints of brain drain are the main topic of discussion among adults here, and the main thing politicians love to blame when looking for excuses. There are no feasible ways to ""solve"" brain drain without either a) taking away people's choices - North Korea has no brain drain, or b) Making your country's incentives better so the problem becomes irrelevant. If you want b, then the term "brain drain" is bad because it is almost always seen as an attack on the choice of people moving out. Use a different, more specific, and more understandable term.
No, but I really believe those at least represent the public and private interests of their own country, not some big-dog country to the detriment of the periphery...
> The EU is co-ruled by an opaque system of non elected bodies
The EU council (comprising of democratically elected heads of government from the 28 member countries)
The EU parliament (comprising of directly elected MEPs from the 28 member countries)
The EU commission president, nominated by the council, approved by the parliament, and standing on a ticket to be EU Commission president during the parliamentary elections
The EU commissioners, appointed by the democratically elected heads of government from the 28 members
Laws are only passed by agreement by the democratically elected council and the democratically elected MEPs.
That's the version told to high schoolers in "How the EU works" lessons.
In actual EU, decisions are made by informal bodies like the Eurogroup, meeting under close quarters and with no documentation, with economic and diplomatic pressure from top dog countries, with satellite states vote how their sugar daddy states ask them, and a whole lot more besides.
Do you really think that it would happen any differently, without the EU? There simply would be international treaties, which are even more opaquely-discussed, with no democratic oversight whatsoever and no recourse (national justice courts typically have no jurisdiction over international agreements).
With the EU, the process is formalized, opened up for scrutiny at many levels (sure, they could be more, there are people working on that problem), and then everyone can have a say through the European Court of Justice process.
The fact of the matter is that we live in an increasingly globalized world, and we must find ways to live together without resorting to the traditional genocidal ways (which are now practically unsustainable - a serious war on the continent would produce hundreds of millions of casualties). Somewhere, the political sausage-making has to happen.
"Eurogroup", which (like the Economic and Financial Affairs Council) would be meetings between the democratically elected finance ministers of the countries in the EU?
Representative democracy, with it's paltry accountability except every 4 years, gerrymandering-schemes (not a US-only problem), typically revoked election promises, backroom talks, corruption, and private interests paying politicians is already undemocratic enough as it stands.
And suddenly removing the voters even further (as in the EU Commission), or adding "bodies" with no officially defined role and protocol, and closed discussions, like the Eurogroup, is "democratic" because those involved were "democratically elected finance ministers" under unrelated to the EU national elections.
The EU is far from "perfectly functioning". It functions pretty well but it's not perfect. There's some non-negligible group in pretty much every country that rightfully has some major gripe with the EU. If there wasn't we wouldn't have things like Brexit. I get that you can't please everyone but if the UK GTFOing isn't indicative of some sort of imperfection than I don't know what is.
Brexit has nothing to do with the functioning of the EU, it’s a byproduct of a broken political culture. British politicians failed at their jobs for 20 years and then blamed others for it, simple as that. The EU could have been the most enlightened organisation on the planet, and the result would have been precisely the same.
>but I’ve never read through something that wasn’t sound.
Sound in respect to very general interpretations and "common sense". The problem is that general laws can touch topics that are way beyond common sense, the room of interpretation is then just so big that it's like a weapon to take out anybody if you only dig deep enough and frame it as a problem for the common good.
yes, this could be called the "anti-google act" of 2019 ... google is basically the only company it applies to. facebook has never been a major venue for piracy (afaik?) so i don't think it even affects them much.
however, it is a good thing. youtube has always been a massive for-profit piracy operation, and they just license and pay the people who are big enough to threaten them. all small content creators get the shaft. even google search is mostly a form of piracy. taking other people's content and slapping ads on it.
google needs to die and it is nice to see the EU helping here.
FAANG will be pissed but I doubt it really makes a dent. Their focus is Asia (has been since 2 decades now). Us Europeans are just a sleepy backwater of old people with lot of history which makes for nice tax havens and retirement homes.
The focus of growth has always been on Asia afair (I can only speak for what I witnessed since the 70ies), ... first Japan, India & Tiger countries, later China. Even Brazil and LATAM for a long time had more focus then backward and technophobic Europe. It's not just demography because an old person in Asia will embrace new ideas and tech (my japanese father in law is 90ies and still excited over a new iPhone while my parents already gave up on anything digital in their 50ies - "just too hard they say")
Even worse. They will be the ones which can comply. They can write legal terms, they can check real government identities and create a significant upload filter strategy.
right! in a way it creates a couple of jobs but only for those who can program - somebody has to implement these policies into technical reality. looking at GDPR (which I fully support) it has created quite a large niche of specialized lawyers and people are now busy educating themselves about how to isolate PII. No doubt this bill will also produce quite a bit of demand for specialists. But it's hardly innovation.
As you say the small start-ups in Berlin & Paris are left in the dust because only the big ones have the resources to take care of this bureaucratic horse-manure.
In the long run we'll continue to dig our own graves while China and the US laughs.
Nobody knows yet what will and will not be GDPR PII. The law handwaved like crazy and they haven't even finished hiring all the officials who will interpret it.
The strategy is legal, political and economic harmonisation. It does this by passing vague legislation that requires its own court to interpret. Everything else, literally everything, is secondary. And so a nation state is born.
No, FAANG will not be targeted. Even GDPR which would have been able to piss of facebook was not used to attack them. Only small companies have been attacked because of GDPR violations. Inoffically they have told people they will not attack the big ones because they have enough lawyers so an attack on e.g. facebook will be too time consuming.
Alternatively, with a little lobbying and a few tweaks, any 'platform' deemed not to be implementing sufficiently advanced filtering could be subject to ISP-level blocking / filtering.
"I'm not sure if EU politicians are that smart..."
They are, just in a more traditional way. They're now collecting bribes from whoever bought them to pass this law, as tomorrow they will collect other bribes to modify the law.
If this is their intention, then the measure might be totally counterproductive. Regulations very often hit small businesses harder than big ones, because big businesses have capacities to deal with them.
In this example, Youtube or Facebook will have more resources to (automatically) detect copyright content than a small content-oriented startup.
This only increases "barriers to entry" for new companies and strengthens the position of incumbents.
According to the article, politicians initially addressed the problem:
> TBC Platforms run by startups (small and micro-sized businesses) are exempted from the law.
but this at risk of being dropped:
> This was one of the European Parliament’s main improvements to the text. Unfortunately, it is now in danger of being dropped in negotiations.
The fact that they only know how to tear down and not to build will make it futile.
At best it will create a divergent protectionist demense while doing nothing to aid viability outside the market - and its help inside is dubious. Even outright banning Google and Facebook won't suddenly make Bing and Yahoo the next big thing. At best they will be the postum to the real coffee.
Punitive measures on information like this rarely encourage anything. The worst part is people look at the intent and potential effects of legislation as though it is the actual, realized result. I have to assume the reason is a mix of naive optimism, anti-big-web-tech, and the inability to take the bad with the good so e feel obligated to keep shaping things. Real, actual teaching and encouraging and efforts and money and motive and all of that is far different from what's happening here.
How. They are the ones who have the lawyers to protect themselves. It's the small platforms that will suffer, and creating startups in the user-generated content will be too risky.
I've already tried e-mailing the MEPs, it doesn't work. If you do get a response it goes in the lines of sorry mate, but you're wrong, here's why blah blah; our party consensus is that we're doing the right thing by voting for this controversial measure. Good luck with that.
That doesn't mean that contacting MEPs "doesn't work", you can't expect them to change their opinion immediately based on receiving one email from one of their constituents.
Use handwritten snail mail; generally the less effort a communication medium takes the less the politicians pay attention. Though with how many of them are on board you may want to start researching up on their opponents for the next election
It's unclear to me what "internet platforms that organise and promote large amounts of ... works uploaded by their users" really means. It presumably applies to Facebook. It presumably doesn't apply to e-mail. But if I had a social networking service that had no advertising and was only accessible to its paying users, would the law apply to it? What if postings were encrypted and could only be read by users that had requested access to them? Would the company running the service be expected to either backdoor the encryption or create bogus accounts and request access from those bogus accounts in order to monitor postings that might contain infringing content?
this ham fisted proposal was heavily pushed by France. Yet legislators have no idea why people hate Brussels and the EU? This is how people get red-pilled! But maybe it's what all us Europeans deserve ... Time to put on a yellow vest and add this to the agenda of demands. Go yellow or go home.
This has the potential of being a blessing in the disguise since these barriers will not hold for decentralized alternatives where there is no obvious platform operator to hold responsible.
only the centralized public trackers are "affected". and the fact that they are still around and kicking, and distributed decentralized anonymous reputation-market systems are pretty empty shows that that policing is rather weak (otherwise people would move toward the "policing resistant" networks)
I'd love to see a "cliff's notes" summary of what A13 means as it is right now.
Something like the "Doorstep EU" app does for Brexit-related news -- an actual, thought-out summary which links to authoritative reference material.
EDIT: Intending to provide a more useful response now, here are links from the post above to the articles[1] and recitals[2] of the current negotiations. I'm seeing relevant platform liability language in the row labeled 239. While marked for continued discussion, the proposed language is concerning to me:
"Licensing agreements which are concluded by online content sharing service providers
with right holders for the acts of communication referred to in paragraph 1...,
shall cover the liability for works uploaded by the users of such online content sharing services
in line with the terms and conditions set out in the licensing agreement,
provided that such users do not act for commercial purposes."
TBH it's not clear what it entails. Plus i m not sure which one is the latest directive.
More importantly i have never, ever heard of any local IT unions or societies being involved in the process of legislating these laws (same thing for GDPR). I don't believe this law will change things radically in europe, although i m a little worried with all this predatory lawmaking against US companies. The main issue remains that europe produces very little online (No european-superheroes memes? big whoop)
I don't think this will happen, but if this is actually made into a liability then this would create a rather interesting situation where a platform could be sued for blocking fair use content and miss-identified content.
I think the net result would probably be a rapid increase of the "451 Not Available For Legal Reasons" errors which have appeared post-GDPR.
That and a load of innovative start-ups simply setting up overseas instead of inside Europe, and perhaps major sites simply preventing any kind of contribution from European users.
After all, there's no A13 clause which says that if your US site allows uploads, your European one also has to?
To me it seems like EU is now in the same situatin as Galactic Senate before the rise of an Empire. They have almost the same problems... EU is shame of true democracy but is a gem when it comes to bureaucracy.
449 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadI wish we had the kind of concerted effort that the copyright lobby is able to launch, but focused on issues that reduce the net benefit of these platform more than copyright infringement: hate speech or intentional misinformation.
Social networks.
I can imagine someone writing a TOR-based eMule client or something along those lines but it won't be anywhere near as common as it was back in the days; ease of use has always been an important factor and today we actually do have commercial alternatives in place this time.
As I see it, the main impact will be for social networks and other sites that allow user uploads. There's an actual chance the people behind the law simply don't understand that what they're asking isn't possible, and that many politicians think we just need to solve this with blockchains and machine learning (because that's apparently how to fix everything nowadays). In the real world, however, I really see no way to comply with that law without mass-monitoring and very far-reaching automatic censorship of uploaded content.
In some parts of the EU that's already illegal. Not just a civil tort for which you can be sued, but an actual criminal offence for which you can be prosecuted.
Which would you prefer?
of course not don't be silly.
but so far liability was on the uploader, when the police comes knocking you gave out user data and that was it. see, for example, the jsfiddle constant issue with illegal content: https://remysharp.com/2015/09/18/jsbin-toxic-part-5
people miss here that any user generated content could be part of a copyright. even text if they are lyrics. there's NO user platform that's safe.
Good talk from a few weeks ago: https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9941-how_facebook_tracks_you_on_...
(that's just android, but they do just as much web tracking through their pixel for example).
The regulation itself forbids their main income source
FB has to show who they sell data to, that's the new part basically. They will probably show a long list of random companies. It'll look a bit scary, people will get accustomed to it. (FB will find a dark pattern that minimizes the attrition due to any permission/consent step in their money machine.)
The identifiable information still has to be encrypted. They still need to specify exactly where the information will go and why. And if a new company wants to access the data or even wants to use the provided Information for something new, Facebook has to ask permission again. Once again telling the user why that company needs permission and why as well.
It's doubtful that the current blanket prompt is enough. But it remains to be seen wherever the law will be enforced and it's of course possible,that nothing will change and regulator's never act on the law
That said, I hope the EU courts will look at them the first time they fuck up. (And that might be right now. But so far I'm not aware of any recent FB data/privacy abuse.)
All these big blanket OK consent buttons we see on landing pages have already been shown in court do not constitute informed and freely given consent. The real impact has het to come, hopefully after some stiff fines are handed.
And you are right: I also wonder about enabling large scale VAT dodging by sites like aliexpress.
Even if you are, I'm not actually sure that would be better for anyone involved. Seems like it would essentially stop or severely diminish online commerce between US/EU as too much hassle.
GDPR did not really change the media landscape in the EU. Business as usual here. Mostly companies went through a brief period where they had to consult lawyers and expensive agencies on how to cover their asses. Mostly good things have started happening after that. Some companies that were doing technically unacceptable things under pre-GDPR legislation have now grudgingly stopped doing those things.
This is pre-GDPR, but it feels like since GDPR there's been a real uptick in this.
Of course, I’ve seen even more that give you only an accept option... that, or as sibling commenter said yes/wilderness of options.
because if the tracking/ad/shit/any cookies are not fundamentally required for the page to show, then denying you the usage of the site is a violation of your privacy (because you can't give selective consent to specific data uses)
sure, a lot of sites throw up the ugly banner, but now you can click fuck cookies, because fuck cookies if you only want to read a fucking HTML page with pictures. they can still make stats about your visit and aggregate them, but tracking cookies are absurd. (they can filter out repeated visits by looking at IP addresses and browser fingerprinting and/or they can ask you nicely to help them get better stats, but now they have to unbundle that from the ad tracking purpose.)
This button doesn't exist in 90% of cases. Websites tend to dump you into a complex, deliberately tedious to edit options UI rather than providing a "No" button.
Their are major complaints outstanding against Google, Facebook & the IAB that will define how online publishers can be funded once they are litigated.
It's like saying that criminal laws prevented people from getting happily scammed.
Article 13 is fundamentally different from the GDPR. The fundamental problem is that I think (and most people hopefully do) user privacy is an ethical good, and I don't believe (much of) copyright law is an ethical good. If you fundamentally believe copyright must be defended vigilantly Article 13 is not an unreasonable consequence at all - I just don't agree with that premise one bit.
Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR, I say good riddance. If you really feel you cannot uphold the basic privacy principles posited, then screw you too. But for Article 13, the laws are only in the interest of big corporations. I don't care about those.
Besides, there is also a cost to me: the never-ending pop-ups and acceptance dialogues, inability to access information in a straightforward manner for those that choose to block, etc.
What is the percentage of users who actively control their privacy as a result of GDPR (and still happily use the website)? What is the percentage of badly -behaving businesses who will be prosecuted?
The law doesn't ask for any popups, blocking is a dumb option that not many take, and for prosecutions we'll have to wait a bit longer before we see.
> There is a cost to businesses in complying with and implementing regulations, regardless of the size of the business and how good or bad their behaviour has been with respect to the intention of those regulations. You can't deny over-regulation by assuming only the badly-behaving people are burdened by it.
Indeed - the lack of this cost of business was causing (1) reckless and (2) (deeply) unethical behaviour to become rampant [0]. I think it was fair to say it was not acceptable anymore, and I think the GDPR does a good job of formalizing rules of basic common sense about personal data protection. There's really nothing in the GDPR that I can point to that is overbearing, although of course many businesses do implement unnecessarily overbearing UX on top of it.
Processing personal data should be a risk to business, and I think some basic rule of law was warranted for this risk to be clear to business.
I'm not saying there is no cost to regulation. But the cost needs to be proportional to the good it achieves and I think the GDPR does that quite well. Article 13 - in my opinion - clearly will not.
[0]: E.g. in unregulated countries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684
I don't. I find it an egregious example of over-regulation. I think not recognizing the obviously large scope of such regulation is extremely suspect.
> The GDPR does a good job in codifying basic privacy principles of what you can do with personal data
By what measure do you define "good job"?
> The only reason to call it over regulation is if you're spoiled about not being regulated beforehand
I admit being this kind of spoiled. But it's ridiculous to say that's the only reason. There are measured ways to go about things and to so blatantly say that this is the only reason one might view it as over-regulation (despite real reasons such as size and scope and ineffectiveness of predecessors/enforcement) destroys our ability to have real conversations about the many alternative ways to solve some of the problems we have. Such a black-and-white absolutist view is harmful.
> I don't understand why I hear so few Americans about wanting this in their own country.
Can't speak for all, but for many, it's because they recognize the difference between what would be ideal and what would actually happen. Large anti-company (especially against companies that users prefer to use) laws have a chance to be frowned upon, despite ridiculous promises/optimism/naivete by the hopeful.
> Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR, I say good riddance. If you really feel you cannot uphold the basic privacy principles posited, then screw you too.
These are not how chilling effects work. You don't get to say "well, if they choose not to do business where a law is, they must not be able to uphold that law". There are compliance costs/risks. The amount of assumptions concerning this topic, whether assumptions that the law is good or assumptions that those disagreeing with it are of a certain ilk, need to stop. You only hurt your cause discussing things in this manner.
If you have specific problems with GDPR or that it goes too far, I'd like to know what those specific aspects are. In my view, there's some basic rules on how to deal with personal data that the GDPR codifies, and it does that surprisingly (for the EU) reasonably. It starts from simple principles of citizen rights and ethical behaviour and writes a complete rulebook on how to apply them - that's my definition of a good job.
It might be difficult for business to adapt to actually now considering processing personal data a risk. But that by itself does not make GDPR "overregulation" - that just makes it a difficult regulation change to process. I won't shed a tear about business having a difficult time going through that process - I'm incredibly happy that they are forced to consider processing personal data a risk, because it is.
Also note I specifically said "Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR" - not "Companies that are not sure they can comply with GDPR yet". There's a reasonable difference, I agree. But, yes, if you find that your business intrinsically cannot comply with GDPR or you don't want to - it's time to take a good hard look in the mirror.
No idea if such a thing would happen though.
How is the platform going to know what's legally published and what isn't? In some cases I suppose you can work with an industry, like YouTube's Content ID for music, however even with Google's resources Content ID still has severe glitches[1] (should they be legally responsible for false positives too?). Otherwise what, hire an army of mechanical turks to manually review every single thing that's uploaded?
At best I think under this kind of system you're going to get a stagnant landscape where only corporate giants with deep pockets and/or industry connections can create new innovative products. There's going to be no more upstart Instagrams, Snapchats, Soundclouds, whatever if the company can get sued into oblivion if some rando takes a pic or uploads a snippet of copyrighted material.
[1]: https://twitter.com/SmellyOctopus/status/1082771468377821185
Can you elaborate on why this is occurring in an illegal fashion? UsedSoft v Oracle [1] and Aleksandrs Ranks and Jurijs Vasiļevičs [2] seem to broadly suggest that reselling used software is legal.
[1] http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=124...
[2] http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=184...
Even if I manage to convince most of the representatives from my region, they will be outvoted by the French who had a big hand in passing the proposal forward the last time... It's like they reside in a completely different universe, with no hope of meaningful communication.
Edit: adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is.
[0]: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1015594170424193024
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A better question is why not Spanish?
This just sounds like cherry-picking. You're completely glossing over the issue of spelling being insane and concluding that the language is easy because there are no gendered adjectives and many tenses, even though the existing tenses are largely completely irregular.
It's just so far ahead in these structural things that supporting any other language does not seem to make any sense anymore at this point.
Every language is irregular because humans are irregular, but I don't think it is justified to paint English as somehow more difficult than other languages. The difficulty of a language just depends on the languages you already know, prior exposure, available resources to learn it etc - and the last two of these are typically much better for English than most other languages.
Male
> or wondering which one of 14 cases to use.
14 cases (rules) are much easier to remember that thousands of specific cases.
However I'm just looking at my kids that are tri-lingual at the moment with fourth in the works and they prefer to use English even though we actively force them to speak my wife's and my native languages at home... which are of European group too, so not even close in complexity to Chinese or Arabic. English has less exceptions, there is no conjugation, no gender-specific adjective forms, not that many verb tenses, etc. It's just that - it's an uncomplicated language.
EDIT: You edited your comment, so:
> English has less exceptions
Where? Verb tenses form essentially at random.
> It's just that - it's an uncomplicated language.
I disagree. It might not have conjugation, genders, etc, but it managed to more than make up for the lack of complexity with superb amounts of complexity in spelling, phrasal verbs, irregular verbs, etc.
I could speak and understand decent English when I was less than 10 or so due to watching so many subtitled shows and playing video games.
My native language is Finnish. Which is farther from English than Hindi (Which is in indo-european language tree unlike Finnish).
The biggest obstacle to using something like Mandarin is the writing system. Hieroglyphs are imho just fundamentally inferior to systems using alphabets.
As an American, I've been studying German for about 15 years, but although I've never officially studied Spanish, I speak and understand casual Spanish better then I do German. I wouldn't be able to read a Spanish novel like I can in German, but I can understand Spanish speakers and text message Spanish speakers far better than I can in German. All of this is from picking up the language through media, listening to Spanish speakers in my town, and hearing some of my wife's family speaking Spanish to each other.
German, on the other hand, is very difficult for me to encounter on the street and nearly as difficult to find cultural material to consume (Amazon carries German-language Harry Potter, 50 Shades of Grey, and that's about it).
There is a lot to be said about passively learning a language just from hearing it constantly.
- Because English already has a great momentum (with the number of speakers of English as a second language, pop culture and the Internet)?
It is also still the only language that is taught as a foreign language in close to all primary and secondary schools in the Union. It's the most spoken language in the Union. It's relatively easy to learn as a foreign language. It's also the de facto language of international trade, of science, of culture and of international diplomacy (sorry France).
There’s still the Irish.
Some countries are also really self centered in terms of news, etc. Here in Spain, for example, most national news deal mostly with corruption scandals, political issues in Catalonia, sports, and little else. Geopolitical and/or European issues are given surprisingly little time considering we're the fifth largest economy in the union (about to be the fourth after/if the UK leaves).
TLDR: In an optimistic estimate, to stop 300 illegitimate copyright infringing posting, we would have to block 150.000 non-infringing posts.
Whoever suggests this as a policy, must have received serious payoffs to close their eyes for the overwhelmingly negative effects this law will have.
Now, I don't know where the majority stands on this issue but being outvoted by the majority is called democracy. The French, even assuming French representatives in the EU are all on the same side, cannot force EU legislation. Any legislation has majority support (including at member states' governments level).
Language acts simply as a constituency signal (“not in my language? Not a voter of mine...”). That is expected and even legitimate - why should a MEP listen to other voices over the ones of people they actually represent? If you really want to influence a MEP, you would get better chances by finding allies in his constituency. This is not really different than with national parliaments.
In terms of this or that national block outvoting a position, it is less frequent than one would expect, and depends largely on how European parties organise. Most parties have some sort of nominated board that agrees a line for the entire group, regardless of national boundaries. Some countries might have a larger influence on the group because of their electoral dynamics (German MEPs for the Greens, for example, will outnumber Italian ones to ridiculous degrees; and some parties are single-country, typically the isolationist ones), but that’s usually not the case in major parties (PSE and PPE).
That's a bit patronizing, and a view of internet users that belongs to the '90s. These voters might (for example) like memes and forums very much, but not value them enough to shift political alliances over a proposal like this. Not everyone lives 10 hours a day on the internet.
This is a very interesting twitter thread. The script, and the posted screenshots, repeatedly demonstrate the solution to a single very simple math problem for particular values of input variables. It seems that Alec Muffett is relying on the idea that he wrote a script -- a script which was easy to write and solves a very easy problem -- to provide more credibility than the laws of probability have in their own right, which is -- to me -- 100% backwards. If your script disagrees with the math, particularly at this level, the odds are overwhelming that your script has a bug, not that the math was wrong.
There is also too much content to check and enforce it all.
There are bazillions of other sites who don’t (and often can’t) police anything of what they host unless they are threatened with litigation.
(I don't blame them to be fair, I've gone down the MEP route - they replied with a form letter to the effect of "this is party policy and I'll support it because it's for your own good, and I'm not discussing it further")
In many ways the EU is a functioning technocracy, and if you ever read through the actual EU documents it shows. They are almost always sound, they are also massively bureaucratic and around 90% longer than necessary, but I’ve never read through something that wasn’t sound.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read up on article 13, but I do read (and sit through) a good deal of EU standards and proposals for EU wide Enterprise Architectural principles, and they are never thwarted by politics.
only it's not really functioning is it?
I live in a very poor EU country (out of choice) and most young people fuck off to Germany or France because their home states have no jobs for them. They don't come back either which causes a massive brain drain on these places. Ask the so called middle class in Croatia, Slovakia, Italy what they think of the EU and how well it works for them. Avg salary in these places is 500 to 1000 EUR. And if you visit supermarkets all they have is shit. Literally everything like fresh veg tastes like feet because the good stuff that is locally produced gets exported to the rich places. Companies have 2 production lines making low-grade products (despite being the same brand) for these markets. I'm not an arm-chair bureaucrat who forms his opinion on Google. I actually live in these placed because despite all this shit and poverty the people are actually warm.
One more example: thousands of people wiping arses in nursery homes in Germany are working through shady polish, slovenian, etc outsourcing companies where they're stripped of all benefits that a German would enjoy. They work for 500 to 1000 / month (in a high cost country) because their home country has no jobs for them. Then they're being exploited by the rich EU countries.
Again I lived in Germany, ran 2 companies there, lived in France (operated 3 businesses), now I live in Eastern EU. As much as I want the EU to succeed I can't be blind to the hypocrisy that I see every day on the streets in my own surrounding.
Russia is the most extreme example of the phenomenon.
On the other hand, in the UK, Tesco, Waitrose, and Sainsbury’s are all at least as good as their German equivalents; and (beyond the EU) even the worst EU supermarket was better than almost every supermarket I saw in the USA.
I never paid attention to the price of groceries when shopping in Germany because growing up poor I always had the attitude not to be stingy with food and only buy what appealed the most. Coming to France I had to pay attention and actually look at the label because I might pick stuff that I simply couldn't afford. Doing this in Germany I might end up paying for regular groceries 250,-- (avg feeding a family), while in France I might pay 800 or more if I didn't pay attention. The first few times had to actually return once the cashier presented my bill.
Almost all of these things are in the jurisdiction of the member states themselves, and the EU has little power to control them.
If the EU didn't exist, Germany would still be staffing its nursing homes with cheap(er) foreign labour, just done under a visa rather than EU freedom of movement.
If the EU didn't exist, companies would still produce high-quality products for rich markets, and low-quality products for poor markets. (If you want a fascinating example of this, read this Twitter thread about the manufacture of sanitary pads in Africa - https://twitter.com/aprzhu/status/1083278476310913024)
If the EU, ceased to exist, would eastern European supermarkets no longer be filled with "shit", or would local producers continue to export their good produce where they can get the most money for it?
There is a tendency to avoid criticism of the EU and congratulate it for things it does not do, but it is also a mistake to assign all the ills of Europe to it, when blame for them is much more accurately laid on national governments.
Or worse: the care would be become too expensive and peoples arses wouldn't be wiped at all..
Germany tackles benefit abuse as migration soars from eastern EU https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-immigration/germa...
Germany benefits from the exploitation of Eastern European workers – a shocking documentary of BR television channel https://trans.info/en/germany-benefits-from-the-exploitation...
Europe's 'food apartheid': are brands in the east lower quality than in the west? https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/sep/15/europes-f...
Food brands 'cheat' eastern European shoppers with inferior products https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/sep/15/food-bran...
It's not as if Poland and Hungary would have been booming economic superpowers if it hadn't been for the EU. The people fleeing their country because of the lack of jobs won't suddenly find new jobs if they can't leave.
The exploitation of cheap, foreign labour is an issue though and it's not just hurting the people being exploited; the natives of the country the exploitation takes place in will see their wages drop if some shady outsourcing company can have the same work done for half the price. Those old people don't want their assets wiped by someone who can barely understand their language either but they need to put up with it because of cost-saving measures that has degraded the level of care. This is something the EU can change, but the many labourers who'd be out of a job if the EU added more restrictions to foreign travel wouldn't agree with changing the policy to make them unemployed.
The double production line issue would just come back in a different fashion if quality goods weren't exported; there'd be no money to be made selling most of the goods, so they either become a luxury product or only the cheap, garbage production line remains.
Despite all the known problems, countries like Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia are all applying for (or already negotiating) a position within the EU. If they would really be better off without the "dysfunctional" EU, they'd form their own bloc or remain independent. Even for poor countries, the EU brings benefits.
Case in point, the EU is already working to prevent/mitigate this [1]: per 2021, local business must pay adequate local wages even to foreign workers.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-moves-toward-wage-equality-for-fore...
do you know why they do this? They can see how easy it is to milk the EU for money in ways that benefit these mafia states. The major of Zagreb is connected to the Bosnian Mafia, he just spent some time in hospital (the mafia put him there but you won't read this in the news). The top lawyer of Zagreb is an asset for the mob. If you want to kill somebody here it's possible to make that happen for very little money. Have you been to Albania, or Macedonia? You should seriously go there before assuming that absorbing them in the EU is a good idea. I'm all for bringing in the people of these countries but before that can be done the organized crime there needs to be cleaned up. The result otherwise is that you'll enrich those that don't deserve it.
The TV series McMafia was set in Croatia (even the non-fiction book and the TV show plays out in a global theater). There are good reasons why that country was chosen for the series. You want to meet some dangerous people? I can introduce you to the guy who shot the Minister of Tourism here not so long ago - he is my age and now runs a drug ring in Austria. This is common knowledge here and as normally talked about as the weather.
Ah yes the guy who now runs Rimac (the super-car company that competes against Tesla) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimac_Concept_One his father is also connected.
My GF's sister was recently alerted by the owner of the building that the mob has asked them to isse them with keys to their flat because they refused to sell it. The person refused to hand it over and alerted her. The poor girl now lives in fear every day.
The Balkan is the wild fucking west. I live in one of the most civilized parts of the region and love it here, because it's also easy to stay away from this all. If you think for one second that the state would want to ( or even could) protect you, you'd be wrong because they're all part of it. If you're rich you don't pay any fines, if you're poor you get fucked. It's always been this way and thanks to globalization it's getting worse (more ruthless competition from foreign mobs fighting over territory).
I can go on and on ... but Misha Glenny's "McMafia" really explains it all rather well.
- lived in France
- now I live in Eastern EU
Seems like you're getting plenty of benefits out of the EU.
Most of the issues you mention, while acknowledging that they're real, are not caused by the EU.
Yet it never is when crossing nations' borders, except within the EU. How can you then say that the EU is not functioning?
Agreed
> I alone make that possible not some political entity.
Except for the armed border guards, the national rules on who can work in a nation, the police who can deport you if you don’t obey the rules, sure.
Aren’t those often the same people?
Obviously they were victims of the "Kremlin anti-western propaganda"...
Yanis Varoufakis gives good insight into what happened. e.g. "The Euro Has Never Been More Problematic" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhSg9X3q2gc
Germany should not and can not be made responsible for bailing these countries out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtrrN2uWUl8
> because the good stuff that is locally produced gets exported to the rich places
The cynic in me would say this is an example of the EU functioning very well, for it's intended purpose of funnelling resources to those of the equal who are more equal than others? ;)
The gilet jaunes were/are angry about a carbon tax and lack of wealth taxes. Not Brussels or brain drain.
The EU's Common Agricultural Policy, though not perfect, keeps huge swathes of rural Europe afloat. Its regional development funds builds infrastructure in areas that can't afford it.
You can't really blame the EU for bland vegetables either. That's just silly. The French aren't exactly appropriating Croatian tomatoes by force. It just means that (thanks to the EU) producers can get a higher price for their goods by exporting tariff-free to another country, so they do. Why wouldn't they?
Trouble with your argument is she’s from the Philippines, which isn’t in the EU.
It’s not even a problem with globalisation, the usual next scapegoat, but a problem with unequal gains being combined with literally exponential growth. The EU does at least try to counteract that by getting all nations to invest 1% GDP in EU projects including projects designed to lift the poorest EU regions out of relative poverty.
I live in India, where complaints of brain drain are the main topic of discussion among adults here, and the main thing politicians love to blame when looking for excuses. There are no feasible ways to ""solve"" brain drain without either a) taking away people's choices - North Korea has no brain drain, or b) Making your country's incentives better so the problem becomes irrelevant. If you want b, then the term "brain drain" is bad because it is almost always seen as an attack on the choice of people moving out. Use a different, more specific, and more understandable term.
The EU is co-ruled by an opaque system of non elected bodies, under the table deals, and backroom diplomacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_deficit_in_the_Euro...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/09/brexit...
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/03/23/how-to-a...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1007/S12290-012-021...
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/opinion/the-euros-democra...
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/11/i-was-teenage-...
https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/books/adults-in-the-room/
And those are mostly official establishment narratives -- if you look at critiques from the left (and libertatians) the picture is much much bleaker.
So just like any other democracy in the world. Do you really believe things are different in the House of Commons or the senate?
The EU council (comprising of democratically elected heads of government from the 28 member countries)
The EU parliament (comprising of directly elected MEPs from the 28 member countries)
The EU commission president, nominated by the council, approved by the parliament, and standing on a ticket to be EU Commission president during the parliamentary elections
The EU commissioners, appointed by the democratically elected heads of government from the 28 members
Laws are only passed by agreement by the democratically elected council and the democratically elected MEPs.
In actual EU, decisions are made by informal bodies like the Eurogroup, meeting under close quarters and with no documentation, with economic and diplomatic pressure from top dog countries, with satellite states vote how their sugar daddy states ask them, and a whole lot more besides.
With the EU, the process is formalized, opened up for scrutiny at many levels (sure, they could be more, there are people working on that problem), and then everyone can have a say through the European Court of Justice process.
The fact of the matter is that we live in an increasingly globalized world, and we must find ways to live together without resorting to the traditional genocidal ways (which are now practically unsustainable - a serious war on the continent would produce hundreds of millions of casualties). Somewhere, the political sausage-making has to happen.
Representative democracy, with it's paltry accountability except every 4 years, gerrymandering-schemes (not a US-only problem), typically revoked election promises, backroom talks, corruption, and private interests paying politicians is already undemocratic enough as it stands.
And suddenly removing the voters even further (as in the EU Commission), or adding "bodies" with no officially defined role and protocol, and closed discussions, like the Eurogroup, is "democratic" because those involved were "democratically elected finance ministers" under unrelated to the EU national elections.
The EU is far from "perfectly functioning". It functions pretty well but it's not perfect. There's some non-negligible group in pretty much every country that rightfully has some major gripe with the EU. If there wasn't we wouldn't have things like Brexit. I get that you can't please everyone but if the UK GTFOing isn't indicative of some sort of imperfection than I don't know what is.
This is so deeply wrong it's offensive.
Sound in respect to very general interpretations and "common sense". The problem is that general laws can touch topics that are way beyond common sense, the room of interpretation is then just so big that it's like a weapon to take out anybody if you only dig deep enough and frame it as a problem for the common good.
however, it is a good thing. youtube has always been a massive for-profit piracy operation, and they just license and pay the people who are big enough to threaten them. all small content creators get the shaft. even google search is mostly a form of piracy. taking other people's content and slapping ads on it.
google needs to die and it is nice to see the EU helping here.
Maybe apple,
They are the winners, not the losers here.
As you say the small start-ups in Berlin & Paris are left in the dust because only the big ones have the resources to take care of this bureaucratic horse-manure.
In the long run we'll continue to dig our own graves while China and the US laughs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This one's a double edged sword.
They are, just in a more traditional way. They're now collecting bribes from whoever bought them to pass this law, as tomorrow they will collect other bribes to modify the law.
In this example, Youtube or Facebook will have more resources to (automatically) detect copyright content than a small content-oriented startup.
This only increases "barriers to entry" for new companies and strengthens the position of incumbents.
According to the article, politicians initially addressed the problem:
> TBC Platforms run by startups (small and micro-sized businesses) are exempted from the law.
but this at risk of being dropped:
> This was one of the European Parliament’s main improvements to the text. Unfortunately, it is now in danger of being dropped in negotiations.
Even if they would be, they still are too corrupt, to stick to their own senses.
New regulations almost always helps the big guys and hurt the little ones.
This will be a big boost to Google and Facebook and hurt everyone else.
Just like GDPR and the shopping changes in the UK. Both really helped Google and to a lesser extent Facebook.
At best it will create a divergent protectionist demense while doing nothing to aid viability outside the market - and its help inside is dubious. Even outright banning Google and Facebook won't suddenly make Bing and Yahoo the next big thing. At best they will be the postum to the real coffee.
Punitive measures on information like this rarely encourage anything. The worst part is people look at the intent and potential effects of legislation as though it is the actual, realized result. I have to assume the reason is a mix of naive optimism, anti-big-web-tech, and the inability to take the bad with the good so e feel obligated to keep shaping things. Real, actual teaching and encouraging and efforts and money and motive and all of that is far different from what's happening here.
Yes, it' a strategy of their failing commercial entities to wring a profit out of entities like FB and G who they think are profiting.
Of course it's among the worst strategies available.
What they need is more innovation, not more regulation.
And as sad as the damage of current internet culture will be, there are many potential unintended consequences that may be - at least - interesting.
EDIT: Intending to provide a more useful response now, here are links from the post above to the articles[1] and recitals[2] of the current negotiations. I'm seeing relevant platform liability language in the row labeled 239. While marked for continued discussion, the proposed language is concerning to me:
[1] https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Copyright-Di... [2] https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Copyright-Di...More importantly i have never, ever heard of any local IT unions or societies being involved in the process of legislating these laws (same thing for GDPR). I don't believe this law will change things radically in europe, although i m a little worried with all this predatory lawmaking against US companies. The main issue remains that europe produces very little online (No european-superheroes memes? big whoop)
I think I'd have a bigger chance of meeting a unicorn than a member of a "IT union".
Guess who is going to sell content-filter-as-a-service?
> Platforms run by startups (small and micro-sized businesses) are exempted from the law.
> This was one of the European Parliament’s main improvements to the text. Unfortunately, it is now in danger of being dropped in negotiations.
I don't think this will happen, but if this is actually made into a liability then this would create a rather interesting situation where a platform could be sued for blocking fair use content and miss-identified content.
That and a load of innovative start-ups simply setting up overseas instead of inside Europe, and perhaps major sites simply preventing any kind of contribution from European users.
After all, there's no A13 clause which says that if your US site allows uploads, your European one also has to?
Honest question here: What can I do to influence this decision?
Mmm...maybe you could write to your local/nearest European Parliament Representative...I think they call them MEPs...