Article 13 is almost finished and will change the internet as we know it

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.

> 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

"internet platforms that organise and promote large amounts of copyright-protected works uploaded by their users in order to make a profit" Would include https://news.ycombinator.com as well. It does organize and promote user comments, quotes, references which are of course copyright-protected works as anything created in the EU member states is, including user comments. Now "Hacker News" does not make a direct profit of the content. It is a side-line to a profitable business. It is however trivial to argue that the fact it is a side-line by a for-profit company it must in some way contribute to that. This has been done before. The term upload does not exclude anything, because there is no legal or technical distinguishable difference between upload and post. The law could have read 'provided by their users' and the legal implications would be the same. All sites that are for profit and allow anything from their users are affected by this. This would also include online games that allow users to chat.

I don't agree that its intentions are that clear. Nobody likes a leech, but that does not mean that we should kill all animals to prevent leeches.

"And if it changes the internet as we know it today, is it that bad? It will push people to self publish instead of relying on "platforms", like the old internet."

This seems to be a call to the internet being just for the technologically savvy. No great number of people are going to self host and any form of support for people self-hosting from a for profit company will run into article 13. Moreover what I remember from the old internet is not self publishing, but the social gathering on IRC, newsgroups, etc. Something that will be impossible to do at our current scale without for profit companies or government backed services. The first will run into article 13, the second one is a non-starter.

I don't agree that if a business chooses not to operate in a country, because it's unwilling to spend the money required to comply with the country's laws, that that is equivalent to censorship.

Another person's personal information is not protected speech.