EU to move ahead with cultural quotas for streaming services

Here's the problem: if you believe that what you watch have an impact on how you think, and you believe that the government should decide what you watch, then this democracy is less than ideal. Because the government then decides how masses vote. It's not a theoretical problem, it's a real issue in many countries, many people still watch TV to get their news and to decide who do they want to vote on.

You heavily tax burger joints and then suddenly some homeless or very poor person becomes more hungry, taco business blossoms, and some other restaurants with poor quality food become more common because there's unfulfilled demand for cheap food. Society is a very complex system and it's hard to make it stable if it's not self-regulating. You can do a lot of harm having the best intentions in mind.

Even with perfect, uncorrupted, most well meaning, very intelligent and highly educated government (hah), just the amount of information about all different complicated cases, latency of it becoming available to it, time needed to process it and implement necessary changes makes it very hard to provide sensible regulation in today's very quickly changing word.

I'm not even going full Friedman here, I see what you mean, I just don't think this approach works well on the long run.

Instead of taxing burger joints, maybe include more education about balancing healthy diet in place of shellfish classification in the school.

But if you want to move forward, you must let people who make good choices be rewarded and those who make bad choices be punished. That's why you give them access to libraries, fast food joints and alcohol. And any site on the Internet they want to visit. If you force your wisest part of society to act with what you decided is best for the majority, they will flee the country or just die there without fully exploring their potential.

The US is incredibly culturally diverse, it's a nation of immigrants from all over the world. It's just not delineated by state. There are geographic pockets of one culture or another, but frequently a single geographical area has many different cultures in it, so it isn't as easy to draw a line around your culture and make laws to protect it. A culture lives and dies on its own efforts and merits.

>* Here's the problem: if you believe that what you watch have an impact on how you think, and you believe that the government should decide what you watch, then this democracy is less than ideal. Because the government then decides how masses vote. It's not a theoretical problem, it's a real issue in many countries, many people still watch TV to get their news and to decide who they want to vote on.*

Well, the government in this case is not deciding what the people should watch. They're deciding that they should not just be offered to watch stuff that comes 99.9% from one country, but that they should also have the chance (not the obligation) to watch their own content.

If the tables were turned and Americans suddenly had 99% e.g. EU content in their TV programming and online video services, there would be riots.

While Europeans watch tons of American movies, the US watches a tiny number of EU movies (and even those found tiny audiences). If it wasn't for anime (which is still a niche when it comes to mainstream audiences anyway) what Americans consume in foreign films would be a statistical error.

>Instead of taxing burger joints, maybe include more education about balancing healthy diet in place of shellfish classification in the school.

That doesn't have a chance with ads that hits people directly on evolutionary irrational parts of the brain -- or the abundance of fats, sugar, salt, and other substances in unheard of amounts (historically speaking) that directly create craving and addiction. Trying to get a kid to respond to healthy foods when they see a burger ad and taste a burger is like trying to talk logic to someone that tried a first hit of heroin.

No thanks. I wish bureaucrats have limited their ideas to their own lives. Fascism is creeping in from all sides in the EU, but people seem to live in denial.

>An Even Worse Thing is when we allow a super-governmental organisation to dictate what they deem to be acceptable level of non-culture to be forced upon us.

Only if what that "super-governmental organisation" dictates something against the wish of the people. I'm not a huge EU commission fan myself, but I surely do. And I'd bet at least the French, for one, are equally delighted with this (and I'd say Italians as well).

Unlike Americans who leave it all to the invisible hands of the market, and its "free" movements (easily distorted by all kinds of monopolies, power imbalances, private interests, foul play, cartels, and such), many Europeans (including me) believe in deciding as societies, and forcing our decision onto the corporations peddling their stuff.

And since you propose people to "vote with their wallet", so to speak, for that to happen people must have the option to do so, e.g. a variety to choose from. With these laws such services will be forced to give European people the option to watch EU content as well.

>I, as a Dutchman have, and I can say that most of them suck and there's a very good reason you don't see them on stuff like Netflix.

Well, there are people in EU who are hot on US culture and think that their own cultural production "sucks". But there are also people who think that its Hollywood films that suck, have naive simplistic plots and world-views, too much spandex and explosions, and so on.

When US films didn't dominate the market, we had lots of excellent European directors that have heavily inspired US filmmakers as well, as admitted by Coppola, Tarantino, Scorsese and so on.