If the past few months have taught us anything, it's that Europe is so cowed and poorly-led that they'll knuckle-under and submit to whatever. In fact, if this is true, they probably won't even invest in local alternatives for fear of retaliation.
That said, the correct response would be to slowly and silently divest from US-based Big Tech, fork whatever can be forked, and invest heavily in local services and infrastructure.
This is aimed at the European Union, India and Brazil, who have all recently been mulling Big Tech regulations. It seems to be the reward for the massive support Trump has been given by the tech sector.
It's likely the EU will cave but together with other ongoing threats, this might throw India and Brazil closer to China's orbit.
As a Brazilian, I'm a bit torn on this issue. On the one hand, our social media regulations are terrible, are being approved without due process, and will certainly be used for (political) censorship. On the other hand, it's annoying that the US has to interfere, and concerning that they even can interfere in the first place.
The EU and their regulations didn't do that. This was solely the implementation the industries choose to force on us to comply with the law. There is absolutely no need to run your website with cookies/trackers.
The EU built an anti-coercion instrument that allows for all sorts of trade measures, including bans from public tenders and no longer recognizing intellectual property. It was built specifically for cases like this and only requires a qualified majority of member states in order to be used.
> What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.
I'll call another one: The US is only going to do this to the EU and maybe a few other countries whose populace has zero spine and will just submit. A great example of a country that in effect has regulated US big tech far, far more strongly than the EU, and to far more effect, is South Korea. But ironically, this is really never brought up in international spaces, it's always about EU regulation, when they're pretty mild.
I'm willing to bet money the US won't threaten Korea much at all, because its public would rightly tell them to fuck off and it would cost the ruling party significant votes. The politicians would have to be super discreet about somehow deregulating without the public noticing.
I say this spending my time between both Europe and Korea and being ingrained in both culturally.
The European Union needs to immediately build its own sovereign ecosystem where its citizens will finally be able to enjoy the full protections of EU regulations, such as chat control, digital ID laws and censorship of vaguely defined "hate speech".
We need to fight the Washington fashists who want to deprive us of our "democracy with european characteristics".
- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The way we think of it, is that government has no business shaping the speech of the people, because the speech of the people can shape the government. Government has to be able to flexibly change to meet the times and if governments decides it doesn't want to change, it can just silence people who would risk changing it without making it obvious they are being targeted. We all know that whenever government thinks it sees a threat to society or to the country, real or imagined, it will lash out in all directions to solve it. We just want to make sure speech control is not one of those directions.
Now, we have the internet and it is not escaping regulation. Companies can be free to decide what is and isn't on their platforms. They are not the government and the first amendment is not about all forms of censorship, just government influenced censorship in spirit.
Obviously, the big tech companies operate in many countries with many different languages and in cases where the local government requires censorship in some language most people in the US don't even speak, the negative impact is limited. A lot of people speak English, however and increasingly whenever some censorship law is applied in some new country its influence on English speaking content grows the more people from those countries use the same platforms as people in other countries do.
- "The Digital Services Act, a flagship EU law, requires large online platforms to take stronger action against illegal content, including hate speech and child sexual abuse material. The law, according to EU officials, aims to make the digital environment safer while preserving freedom of expression."
- "U.S. critics, however, argue that the DSA imposes "undue" restrictions on free speech and disproportionately impacts American platforms. In an internal directive issued in early August, Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed U.S. diplomats across Europe to raise objections to the law and encourage EU governments and digital regulators to consider amending or repealing it."
That law came into effect in 2022 and in can be viewed as bad in multiple ways:
1. It is government regulating "speech" in a more broadly defined way at an also broader scale, not companies. This would be considered unconstitutional here in the US.
2. The technical complexity of it encourages applying a lowest common denominator censorship across all content, applying it to even countries where the laws aren't applicable (for example, inside the US). So, it is effectively being applied in the US already and would be unconstitutional.
3. Many of the forms of censored speech are more commonly applied to conservatives and this can decrease the conservative participation on these platforms, which then means increasingly people are exposed to much higher majority left-leaning content.
4. It would be good for the CCP. It wants to expand the censorship of speech so that other countries look more favorably at their internal approach to it. It also wants to expand the influence o...
In an ideal world, other nations would have been in a position to impose sanctions on the US and/or declare US (this administration, rather) a pariah state. We are definitely not there, for a variety of reasons. Let this be a cautionary tale. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the next best time is now.
22 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 46.7 ms ] threadAnd this is the only framework I can look to this news with. Either that or mercantilism, I'm told.
That said, the correct response would be to slowly and silently divest from US-based Big Tech, fork whatever can be forked, and invest heavily in local services and infrastructure.
It's likely the EU will cave but together with other ongoing threats, this might throw India and Brazil closer to China's orbit.
It's time to diversify our ridiculous export-based economies and invest into creating a strong internal market.
But each country/place will react differently. Europe, Canada, Japan, Mexico and UK will get scared and just obey, as they've doing all along.
India, Brazil and China will mostly just ignore this.
I say it's high time we threaten its use.
> What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.
I'll call another one: The US is only going to do this to the EU and maybe a few other countries whose populace has zero spine and will just submit. A great example of a country that in effect has regulated US big tech far, far more strongly than the EU, and to far more effect, is South Korea. But ironically, this is really never brought up in international spaces, it's always about EU regulation, when they're pretty mild.
I'm willing to bet money the US won't threaten Korea much at all, because its public would rightly tell them to fuck off and it would cost the ruling party significant votes. The politicians would have to be super discreet about somehow deregulating without the public noticing.
I say this spending my time between both Europe and Korea and being ingrained in both culturally.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44432419.
We need to fight the Washington fashists who want to deprive us of our "democracy with european characteristics".
In the US, our constitution's first amendment is taken fairly seriously (by many, not all):
- https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The way we think of it, is that government has no business shaping the speech of the people, because the speech of the people can shape the government. Government has to be able to flexibly change to meet the times and if governments decides it doesn't want to change, it can just silence people who would risk changing it without making it obvious they are being targeted. We all know that whenever government thinks it sees a threat to society or to the country, real or imagined, it will lash out in all directions to solve it. We just want to make sure speech control is not one of those directions.
Now, we have the internet and it is not escaping regulation. Companies can be free to decide what is and isn't on their platforms. They are not the government and the first amendment is not about all forms of censorship, just government influenced censorship in spirit.
Obviously, the big tech companies operate in many countries with many different languages and in cases where the local government requires censorship in some language most people in the US don't even speak, the negative impact is limited. A lot of people speak English, however and increasingly whenever some censorship law is applied in some new country its influence on English speaking content grows the more people from those countries use the same platforms as people in other countries do.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-admin-weighs-sanc...
- "The Digital Services Act, a flagship EU law, requires large online platforms to take stronger action against illegal content, including hate speech and child sexual abuse material. The law, according to EU officials, aims to make the digital environment safer while preserving freedom of expression."
- "U.S. critics, however, argue that the DSA imposes "undue" restrictions on free speech and disproportionately impacts American platforms. In an internal directive issued in early August, Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed U.S. diplomats across Europe to raise objections to the law and encourage EU governments and digital regulators to consider amending or repealing it."
That law came into effect in 2022 and in can be viewed as bad in multiple ways:
1. It is government regulating "speech" in a more broadly defined way at an also broader scale, not companies. This would be considered unconstitutional here in the US.
2. The technical complexity of it encourages applying a lowest common denominator censorship across all content, applying it to even countries where the laws aren't applicable (for example, inside the US). So, it is effectively being applied in the US already and would be unconstitutional.
3. Many of the forms of censored speech are more commonly applied to conservatives and this can decrease the conservative participation on these platforms, which then means increasingly people are exposed to much higher majority left-leaning content.
4. It would be good for the CCP. It wants to expand the censorship of speech so that other countries look more favorably at their internal approach to it. It also wants to expand the influence o...