EU Commission: ‘No longer acceptable’ for platforms to take key decisions alone

"You voted for A a long time ago over there, who appointed B over here, who supported C up there, who finally backed D - the leader you never heard of - so it's all very democratic!"

Von der Leyen was not elected in any reasonable sense of the term.

Voters went to the polls without knowing who she was, or her platform.

They thought they were effectively voting for someone else.

They were told that the 'deal' was that so-and-so would be the victor - but at the last minute after the election the people with power changed their minds and changed norms, and in a completely untransparent backroom deal - they chose a different leader.

The President of EU Commission is a bad example of positive democracy and it's almost impossible to justify on those terms.

It is what it is unfortunately, I'm not sure what the right answer is, but the current situation isn't near perfect.

As for the statement - it's reasonable that there should be regulations - but the EU leadership shouldn't make such bold edicts: "You cannot do this, you must do as we say" - not a good way to start. They don't have this kind of legitimacy.

They should position it as: "We don't believe corporations should be making these decisions without a framework provided by the people of the EU, so we'd like to work with them to provide some regulatory leadership"

No, just have certain businesses operate just like utility providers do which means they can't decide who they provide service too as long as it's within their service area.

You local electrical company probably can't shut off the power even to a meth lab as long as they are paying their bills, and even if they do not you are usually required to go through a rigorous process before you can take action.

This isn't really about freedom of will, this is about the bottom line and companies trying to score cheap points. If it was pretty darn clear that no amount of pressure that does not go through the courts could make Amazon or Twilio cancel Parler there wouldn't be as much noise about it.

There's a reason why no one is tweeting at the power or water companies to cut off their services to the Trump campaign, it's not because there aren't people that would like to see that happening, but because even the most deranged of them know that it cannot happen.

You already have precedence for this, back when corporate towns were a thing that's where the public square concept emerged despite the entire town technically being corporate property it was deemed that people cannot be silenced on the streets or in the town square.

The issue here is that the Internet isn't treated as a public square but as solely corporate property and yes sadly without a bunch of corporations the internet doesn't actually exists.

You cannot get to the point that you need to essentially become a global Tier 1 ISP before you can put on a service that does not break any laws but that would essentially be immune to being canceled, and if you want to monetize it you probably need to become major payment processor if not an an acquiring and and issuing bank too because as we've seen in the past PayPal/PCI can easily prevent you from taking any payments.

We do not have an open and distributed network a handful of companies can block any content they want at any time, TOR, VPN's or anything else won't save you and won't help you your ISP can block anything it wants with a single line in a config file and if it's not on Google it might as well not be accessible. Your hosting options today are rather limited especially for a platform that needs to have a global reach and that you couldn't take down with a single 5G connection.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft and a tiny handful of others are the only ones who can provide you with that infrastructure, if you are going with a smaller or more traditional hosting provider then there are only a handful of CDNs that can provide you with content distribution and DDOS protection/mitigation services.

If you want to grant companies the same freedom you grant to people when it comes to making decisions you need an actual free market for that, but globally the internet isn't a free market and no one can make the argument that it is free yet alone a free market when in order to provide a legal service (regardless of how distasteful it is) without any of the existing market players being able to completely shut you down you have to build a Bank of America, a Visa,a DeepOcean and a Cloudflare first.

This argument doesn't work very well because even in Parliamentary systems there is good clarity as to what people are voting for.

Your arguments is resting on technicalities, but not on the realities of awareness and participation of voters.

Boris Johnson had a questionable first phase as PM due to his inherited position, a lack of confidence - so - there was an election. Not only did everyone in the UK know who they were voting for in terms of individual leadership, but very much in terms of policy. It was also an 'issue election'.

The affirmation of 'Boris to complete Brexit' was clear, democratic and decisive (however people may disagree with the result).

Voters clearly 'had their say'.

The EU does not have any such relevance in terms of issues, ideology, leadership, policy, participation, regulatory clarity, which makes it's democratic credentials kind of questionable.

They do some good work though, it's just going to be a problem when the are at odds with the people.

Edit: I should add, the fact there was no public awareness at all of Von der Leyen - there was no opportunity for scrutiny, press inquisition, background awareness - is obviously problematic from a democratic perspective.

I believe you're projecting a picture you'd like to see. One that is painting the side you consider yourself to be a part of as morally clean and just, while the other side is reprehensible and shameless.

It has little to do with reality, and it's obvious that you haven't spent time with conservatives. It's not useful to only learn about those who think differently from yourself by listening to what those who think like you say about them. Your perception seems heavily based on shrill far left voices. It's essentially a mirror image of what somebody on the far-right thinks about progressives after hearing about what they do/did/want to do by listening to shrill far-right voices.

This is so funny. It's like two people in a sword fight. But the sword handles are actual blades as well. So whenever someone draws his sword to cut the opponent, he also cuts himself. What a way to kick off 2020 vol. 2