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New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection

juliareda.eu

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Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection

#91

Post by simias »

pawy wrote: post #82
eksemplar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence to support your claims of corruption or are you just loud mouthing based on what you feel is true? I ask because the EU already has the ability to block sites infringe on copyrights. To me this law is one of the reactions taken to the fact that foreign powers are using completely faked news papers and social media pages to influence out elections. Right now consumers have very little ammuniti…

Do you realise what Chaos you are bringing up on us ? Internet has always been full of shit. It's up to us to educate and teach people who are weak to this kind of behaviour. Black List websites = Censorship. Internet is not a product, it's our freedom. To all people who try to "regulate" this, piss off.

I'm torn on this issue. On one hand american-style free speech where you can basically say anything you want as long as you don't target a specific individual is tempting. On the other hand you don't have to look very far online to find groups of people online who get in too deep into a web of lies, disinformation and confirmation bias that leads to some extremism with real world consequences.

This is especially a problem since it's very hard to limit access for the underage population who's a lot more prone to being influenced by extremist ideologies.

But of course the counterpoint is that this would create an infrastructure which could be abused to manipulate the population. I think there's a compromise to be found here but I don't know where to start.

Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection

#92

Post by yorwba »

arghwhat wrote: post #88
jopsen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So obviously corrupt Sources please. The EU isn't perfect... But this sounds a lot like an attempt to give consumer protection agencies the powers to block scam sites. From what I could see Julia Reda (MEP - German Pirate) wasn't unhappy about the intents of this legislation. Merely concerned about: A) Website blocking without judicial oversight B) Existence of website blocking infrastructure C) Inability to force…

But who decides what an "effective means" is, and which are available? Without judicial oversight, this seems rather easy to bypass. I personally find filtering of any sort to be fundamentally wrong. A website is nothing but information, and find censoring/filtering to be wrong on counts of violating free speech and free access to information. I believe that illegal content should be handled by going after those that…

What if the persons operating the site are unknown or living in a country where what they are doing is not illegal? I don't support outright blocks or the specifics of this new legislation, but I think there are cases where the distribution channel is the right point to intervene; e.g. by displaying an interstitial "This site has been found to be a scam, don't give them your money. Do you want to continue anyway?".

Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection

#93

Post by dingaling »

eksemplar wrote: post #68
mattmanser wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"risk of serious harm to the collective interests of consumers" What a weaselly term. Bet they spent months trying to come up with something that didn't sound ridiculously biased/anti-consumer and that's the best they came up with. So obviously corrupt.

Do you have any evidence to support your claims of corruption or are you just loud mouthing based on what you feel is true? I ask because the EU already has the ability to block sites infringe on copyrights. To me this law is one of the reactions taken to the fact that foreign powers are using completely faked news papers and social media pages to influence out elections. Right now consumers have very little ammuniti…

> To me this law is one of the reactions taken to the fact that foreign powers are using completely faked news papers and social media pages to influence out elections.

Then why not phrase it explicitly? For example:

For protection of citizens against online interfaces which either:

1. Consistently promote determinably false information with the intent to deceive on a mass scale;

OR

2. Attempt to profit through deception by false advertisement of goods or services.

Instead they create some vague, weasly language that can be used to basically block any service for any reason, so long as a group of EU citizens looked at it.

Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection

#95

Post by germanier »

germanier wrote: post #80
neximo64 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if it actually protects consumers instead of national interests. In the EU 'consumer protection' is the guise of protecting suppliers. For example, protecting consumers from Buffalo Mozzarella means that only 4 regions of Italy may produce it (via the Protected designation of origin scheme) (it doesn't matter if the recipe/methods are correct). This way the consumer is 'protected' from being sold Buffalo Mozzare…

Anybody anywhere can produce Buffalo Mozzarella. The protected term in the EU is "Mozzarella di Bufala Campana" which has the region already in it's name. The scheme has been introduced as trademarks protection of such terms that often have been associated with a specific region for centuries is not possible. It's really no different than regular trademarks for modern brands. Historically those schemes were introduce…

"than copyright protection" should read "than trademark protection", sorry.

Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection

#96

Post by acdha »

jopsen wrote: post #75
acdha wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumption of inevitability is self-fulfilling. Things would be a lot different if everyone who pessimistically disengages instead tried to use the democratic process.

Should we perhaps try to get the "cookie law" fixed :)

Yes: if the politicians never hear about things like that they're going to assume nobody dislikes it very much.

Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection

#97

Post by [deleted] »

simias wrote: post #91
pawy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you realise what Chaos you are bringing up on us ? Internet has always been full of shit. It's up to us to educate and teach people who are weak to this kind of behaviour. Black List websites = Censorship. Internet is not a product, it's our freedom. To all people who try to "regulate" this, piss off.

I'm torn on this issue. On one hand american-style free speech where you can basically say anything you want as long as you don't target a specific individual is tempting. On the other hand you don't have to look very far online to find groups of people online who get in too deep into a web of lies, disinformation and confirmation bias that leads to some extremism with real world consequences. This is especially a pr…

[deleted]

Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection

#98

Post by majewsky »

zaarn wrote: post #79
atmosx wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not yet, but if something doesn't change dramatically in the EU the countries you mentioned are on their way extremism (AfD, LePen)

The AfD has no real power in Germany. They may have swayed a few votes but in one or two legislation periods their voter base will have been quietly absorbed into the establishment (CDU and SPD) or the opposition (Greens, The Left) or the parties nobody likes (FDP). Basically none of the other parties in the government want to even consider cooperating with them, it'll fizzle out soon enough.

It's cute how you classify the Greens as opposition, and how you describe a party that just got 10.75% of the national vote two months ago as being liked by nobody.

Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection

#99

Post by dalbasal »

nine_k wrote: post #60
pilsetnieks wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The direction is monodirectional The obvious tautology aside, I wouldn't agree with this in case of the EU (the US, probably.) To me, the EU feels more like two steps forward, one step back - this being the step back but, for example, the GDPR being the two steps (or leaps) forward. In any case, this regulation seems more misguided rather than malicious. It's targeting real problems that have to be tackled but it d…

How would you narrow down such powers?

D'you you prefer spam eggs bacon and spam, or bacon eggs spam and spam? I don’t like spam. :(

I don’t know much about narrowing powers, judicial reviews or any of that. I’m not all that concerned with the EU’s specific legal setup (even though I live here). I guess judicial review is better than none, but I think it’s probably rather meaningless long term. What judicial review means and how restrictive that is is completely unpredictable, across all the times and places this kind of norm will have influence.

I’m more worried about the norms. How those norms are evolving, in a wider context. In particular, how comfortable member states will feel taking actions (for example) like the Spanish government is currently taking. How easy will it be for non-eu governments (EG Turkey, Israel, Egypt..) to justify their own actions because “it’s an international norm.” How easy it will be to get Google, FB, AWS, ISPs, etc. to do any country's dirty work, because they will all have a “compliance” department responsible for this. The self regulation that will come from a need to avoid such hassles.

Framing this the way lawyers like to frame it, as if it were an isolated rule applying narrowly and in isolation means I already lose. My eggs come with spam.

The norm being established/advanced here is the same most of these laws in most the places are advancing (1) Unlawful websites are subject to sanction (2) To investigate lawfulness and enforce sanctions, authorities can force “third parties in the digital value chain” to cooperate.

IE, any service from DNS servers, search engines, ISPs, Twitter… every part of the internet needs to with every local, national and super-national government to police every other part of the internet.

10 years ago there were no channels for IP domain blacking/seizing/de-indexing. No templates for new rules. No ways for 3rd parties to be forced to cooperate. No way to regulate the web.

Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection

#100

Post by zaarn »

arghwhat wrote: post #85
eksemplar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence to support your claims of corruption or are you just loud mouthing based on what you feel is true? I ask because the EU already has the ability to block sites infringe on copyrights. To me this law is one of the reactions taken to the fact that foreign powers are using completely faked news papers and social media pages to influence out elections. Right now consumers have very little ammuniti…

As a European, I find both the ability to force others to not distribute information, and the ability for others to restrict my access certain types of sites to be a disgusting violation of free speech. I would expect this in a certain country in Asia, not in bloody Europe. Not only does it violate free speech, the new ability to perform website takedowns bypass proper law and order, by not leaving any ability to def…

>Not only does it violate free speech, the new ability to perform website takedowns bypass proper law and order, by not leaving any ability to defend oneself in a proper court of law.

The law explicitly states itself to be a last measure when a court of law is not an option (ie, overseas or anonymous parties)

It is a last resort by consumer protection agencies when they can't use a court or the other party is unwilling to cooperate with their jurisdiction. That is not equivalent to "bypass proper law and order". It's enforcing it. That is the job of the CPA's.

>disgusting violation of free speech.

Yes but in some parts of Europe there is no Free Speech. Germany for example has Free Opinions, which is a narrower field of speech.

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