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The European Union versus the Internet

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Re: The European Union versus the Internet

#71

Post by Nursie »

joshuakarjala wrote: post #65
emilfihlman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR is absolutely not the shining beacon of success. Let's review at some glaring, obvious and 100%-lets-make-this-law-shite points: 1. Application and enforcement: GDPR is 100% arbitrarily enforced, it is a "trust us, we could do no harm, trust us" law, that is extremely well suited to adding other such "trust us" laws. 2. Absolutely ridiculous overreach: on a technical level, GDPR is braindead. It applies ridiculo…

3. No, you cannot serve any EU customers if there is not option to "opt out" of any unnecessary processing

In theory, very true.

I've noticed quite a few US sites, particularly some large news orgs, have been going the "accept this or leave" route, and some are going the "accept this or click on the entrance to our insane maze of links that will confuse you until you give up"

They are non-compliant, guess we'll see what happens.

Re: The European Union versus the Internet

#72

Post by Nursie »

deltron3030 wrote: post #41
mrmekon wrote: post #18

In my network of friends, which is within the EU and comprised entirely of EU citizens and spans multiple EU tech companies from dinky startups to Giant Unicorn, GDPR has been almost universally approved. We had to implement it, and generally feel better for having done so. The Giant Unicorn employees were dismayed by how little time they were given for such a giant task, but were in support of the law. Everybody is…

>GDPR is not a law about "The Internet", it is a law about company records. It applies to Google, but it also applies to the Pakistani food stand on the corner. It affects Google a lot more, sure. It's about full stack owners vs. people who depend on modules to operate, not size of the company. And controlling or maintaining consistentcy across all those modules might be difficult when it comes to GDPR. Just think ab…

If you're using that many modules that you don't understand what's happening with your customer's data and can't easily control where it goes or what it's used for, I'm sorry, but I don't want to do business with you.

Re: The European Union versus the Internet

#73

Post by davemp »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #58
no1youknowz wrote: post #4

It's not just the EU that the Internet is in danger of. A Labour MP in the UK announced a bill that wants to curtail "closed" forums on social media [0]. Analysis on the topic [1]. [0]: https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/3062557/mp-plans-laws-to-ope... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eobVBf5S8uM

That's absolutely ridiculous. Is she going to let us listen in on all her private phone calls? Read all her emails? Please tell me this has no hope of passing...

Whoever purposes such an irresponsible and evil law should also have no hope of a future in politics.

Re: The European Union versus the Internet

#74

Post by notemaker »

joshuakarjala wrote: post #65
emilfihlman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR is absolutely not the shining beacon of success. Let's review at some glaring, obvious and 100%-lets-make-this-law-shite points: 1. Application and enforcement: GDPR is 100% arbitrarily enforced, it is a "trust us, we could do no harm, trust us" law, that is extremely well suited to adding other such "trust us" laws. 2. Absolutely ridiculous overreach: on a technical level, GDPR is braindead. It applies ridiculo…

3. No, you cannot serve any EU customers if there is not option to "opt out" of any unnecessary processing

The reality however, after GDPR was implemented, is 95% of the time GTFO or click accept.

Re: The European Union versus the Internet

#75

Post by hyperman1 »

kodablah wrote: post #37
digikata wrote: post #25

So there's a lot of coverage about the EU parliament process, but where did the drive for this copyright directive come from? There seems to very little coverage on how this directive came about. Whose interests are being represented by these changes?

> but where did the drive for this copyright directive come from? A similar yet more apt question might be, where did the idea that parliament can get away with such large internet regulations come from?

The fiction of every law making organisation is that they can get away with creating every law they want. If they did not believe this fiction, the whole idea of law as something that applies to everyone becomes meaningless. In practice, the power of a lawmaker is limited by if he can get the law applied.

For example, multiple muslim countries have laws banning women walking around without head scarf. Not only in their country, but everywhere in the universe. In practice, you see many women walking around without one, and the relevant lawmakers dont know or care. But suppose one of these women is in such a country, gets summoned in court for this, and proof is given she violated the law, even outside the country, then the judge has only one option: Guilty. Society runs on hoping this does not happen, i.e. selective enforcement.

For Europe, the situation is clear: They can get away with any law in Europe, as long as it doesnt cause them to be voted out. And it seems the general public is not going to vote them out, so they can easily get away with this.

Re: The European Union versus the Internet

#76

Post by JumpCrisscross »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #61
Joeri wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economic interests. EU governments are seeing the majority of digital revenues carted off to american coffers and want a bigger slice to remain in europe to bolster its lagging economy.

If this were the case, I think it's much more likely the EU would try and achieve this via changes to tax law for corporations operating within the EU than copyright directives. There's been a lot of press about how little tax the Google's and Starbucks of the world pay in the places they derive the revenue, and some of the highly creative ways they avoid (not evade) taxation. That would seem to point at issues with…

> it's much more likely the EU would try and achieve this via changes to tax law for corporations operating within the EU than copyright directives

Top income earning families in many EU states pay shockingly little in taxes. They're able to structure their gross income such that reportable income is virtually nothing. These families are rich and powerful, and go a long way towards explaining why the EU retains its complex tax code.

Re: The European Union versus the Internet

#77

Post by Nursie »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #45
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also found the reaction interesting because even techies here were overwhelmingly in favour of GDPR. Mainly because it is so similar to data protection that's been in place for 20 years and they have been used to implementing without problem. That included founders and executives within companies. Thanks to the profile of people I know that's been mainly in smaller companies. Most of the negative opinion I heard wa…

>and to deliberately misunderstand that a maximum penalty wasn't going to be the always penalty. This is the only way to view penalties like this that don't have clearly defined criteria. It's all up to a judge, and when so much is at risk, a company will assume the worse.

A very American view!

This just sort of proves the point the poster was making. People here don't assume that the worst case is going to happen. Most sorts of these laws so far result in initial action taken to help (or force) the company to comply. Fines are usually only considered for those who repeatedly refuse to come into line.

My view of the US is that there are many more aggressive public prosecutors who will swing for maximum penalties, in order to make a name for themselves.

But maybe I just watch too much tv.

Re: The European Union versus the Internet

#78

Post by Tharkun »

mrmekon wrote: post #18

In my network of friends, which is within the EU and comprised entirely of EU citizens and spans multiple EU tech companies from dinky startups to Giant Unicorn, GDPR has been almost universally approved. We had to implement it, and generally feel better for having done so. The Giant Unicorn employees were dismayed by how little time they were given for such a giant task, but were in support of the law. Everybody is…

I disagree with the GDPR "success story" part of your comment. So far it's backfired entirely. The goal was to provide users with more control, and (from the standpoint of such a user) to reduce relentless personal data harvesting.

That hasn't happened. What's happened is more annoying "we use cookies and track you"-banners all over the internet. As a user who doesn't use cookies, these damned things won't even go away and keep coming back. It hasn't given me more control. At all. If anything, it's made me more trackable on the internet (because now I'll have to use cookies to tell people I don't want their god damned cookies).

Online newspapers are the worst. "Here's a front page you can read, and maybe the start of an article, if you want more, you have to give us permission to track you -- or you can just fuck off". What exactly has GDPR solved here? Nothing. Before this nonsense, I could simply tell my browser not to accept cookies from these sites, and I could tell my plugins to ignore their tracking stuff. But at least I could read the newspaper without any hassle. Now all I get is more annoying popups and less contents. Thanks, GDPR.

Yes, I'm being snarky. Yes, I know the idea of the law is pretty solid. But no, I'm not at all happy with the outcome.

Re: The European Union versus the Internet

#79

Post by mdpopescu »

furgooswft13 wrote: post #14
reacweb wrote: post #12

The usage of natural language to write legislations about internet will always create ambiguities and loopholes. I think regulations should be writen in a mathematical language with proof of consistency and unambigous reference implementation of algorithms that are imposed to FAI.

Lets pass a law that states all laws must be written in Haskell! Best part about it is much fewer laws will be written since so few understand that language.

> Best part about it is much fewer laws will be written since so few understand that language.

Legalese didn't seem to have that effect.

Re: The European Union versus the Internet

#80

Post by ommunist »

malvosenior wrote: post #34
netsec_burn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised Tor usage hasn't skyrocketed.

Many sites (including this one) shadowban accounts created via Tor. So basically, you can't use Tor for social media.

you can’t use Tor for the Internet banking either
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