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EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

juliareda.eu

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Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#101

Post by salvar »

x0x0 wrote: post #95
_jn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be very interested in hearing the counterarguments to this comment instead of just seeing downvotes.

It's a lot more than a "small review", even for product focused sites not anywhere near the business of selling or monetizing personal data.

That's fair, but businesses need to do all kinds of things they'd rather not have to do, just to be able to do business. I'm not sure I really believe the sky is falling just because businesses need to take better care of user data.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#102

Post by beagle3 »

reaperducer wrote: post #90
beagle3 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"link tax" is aimed at mature aggregators and search engines, someone you can actually sue. GoogleBot, BingBot and friends do not change or spoof their user agents.

If you think being a large company means its user agent doesn't change, you haven't been monitoring user agents very long. The fact that you choose to use Bing as an example proves my point. Bing is only eight years old. Before that it identified itself as msnbot.

Wow. Once in 8 years. Quite a point you have there /s

Every single respectable search engines (which can be targets of lawsuits, and are thus targeted by this law) has proper identification.

If a content owner worries so much that their data might be available somewhere (search engine, aggregator, ...) they did not approve, they should whitelist rather than blacklist.

They can (and should) also whitelist/blacklist at the referrer level.

But a law actually lets them have it both ways; They only sue those that they dislike, after the fact, letting others keep linking. At least that's the thinking - in practice, if such a law is written (which has happened before), Google, Facebook and others will drop those sources that don't give the info for free, those sources will see their numbers drop 90% over a month, and come back begging to be reindexed.

I find it quite infuriating that laws are being put into place for problems which already have a very simple and precise technical solution.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#103

Post by yummybear »

jsnell wrote: post #12

I had not realized that this insane bit with an inalienable right to monetary remuneration had made it to the drafts. We already know from the past cases that if given the choices between paying for the privilege of linking vs. not linking at all, search engines and social networks will do the latter. The economic value of e.g. news searches must be miniscule. But maybe there is a little bit of value there, even if n…

I can imagine websites refusing to link and instead displays the URL so the user can enter it themselves.

A lot of new companies will pop up offering their LINKTAX compliant packages that offer automatic downgrading of off-site links to user-selectable link fields, some even with custom functionality to automatically place the link in the clipboard.

Tech savvy users will use adblockers to disable this auto-delinking script.

All uploads will go through the few behemoths of media that can implement the upload filtering, like YouTube.

User uploaded profile images will be substituted for generated images by the website.

Uploaded text content such as comments will be disabled for all but the websites that live off them. Get used to seeing "Your comment is not currently visible, but awaiting moderation".

What a miserable, sad web...

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#104

Post by shakna »

pjc50 wrote: post #14
greglindahl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an advisor to several startup European search engines which are likely to be annihilated by the combination of these changes and the GDPR.

Who would start a new search engine in this day and age? You'd need some really unique features which Google can't duplicate, and the only one which seems to have made it is DDG with their privacy promise.

There's one at the bottom of this page, Angolia.

There's a small space for niche search engines, for sites, wikis, blogs.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#105

Post by rqs »

fairpx wrote: post #6

It would be great if all these new regulations only applied to companies of X size. Scrappy startups with no access to good lawyers and understanding of these regulations are more likely to suffer vs the big guys who were the cause of all of these changes in the first place.

No no no, bad idea. Because then those big companies will just 'hire' small companies to do their dirty job.

I think the problem here is some of the rules in GDPR is too overkill. Those rules need to be weakened/simplified a little to allowing companies in EU and actually everywhere to flourish without worrying too much about whether or not they will accidentally violates it.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#106

Post by IanCal »

jsnell wrote: post #12

I had not realized that this insane bit with an inalienable right to monetary remuneration had made it to the drafts. We already know from the past cases that if given the choices between paying for the privilege of linking vs. not linking at all, search engines and social networks will do the latter. The economic value of e.g. news searches must be miniscule. But maybe there is a little bit of value there, even if n…

I don't quite get this, the problem is not with linking, but the link previews.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#107

Post by tannhaeuser »

TLDR:

Excuse me, but MEP Julia Reda always uses strong languages and makes a civil liberties drama from everything (it's her job after all). AFAICT, the rights and interest at stake are

1. the commercial and moral rights of content creators (well not the content creators themselves but their original publishers)

2. the rights of providers of search engines (Google) to scrape content from news publishers to the extent that users aren't visiting the news site, but get everything from the SERP page already; it's a similar problem with Wikipedia articles presented in full or large parts on Google's SERP

3. and, unrelated but combined into the same directive, a new law that would require platforms to make an effort to detect "copyrighted" (if there were such a thing in EU law) content

Maybe there's also a law involved that would make linking to "illegally provided", "copyrighted" content unlawful.

The major pros/cons discussed are

- search engines argueing that they are executing fair use rights, and are helping to discover content which news publishers were happy with in the past and want them to continue to do

- restricting fair use rights creating a case for restrictions of other fair use such as academic or journalistic quotation

- content scanning only feasible for large platforms, thereby only helping defacto monopolies

- the two issues not belonging into the same law.

Please downvote or criticize if you have an issue with this synopsis.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#108

Post by speedplane »

jsnell wrote: post #12

I had not realized that this insane bit with an inalienable right to monetary remuneration had made it to the drafts. We already know from the past cases that if given the choices between paying for the privilege of linking vs. not linking at all, search engines and social networks will do the latter. The economic value of e.g. news searches must be miniscule. But maybe there is a little bit of value there, even if n…

There are a few less obvious reasons why you wouldn't want to allow people to link to your content:

- Privacy: You want to be in control of how the information on your site is procured. This is common on government sites that generally allow public access, but require all sorts of forms and certifications to gain that access.

- Competition: If you are competing with Google or another to create the user's initial landing page, you would reasonably want to prevent them to access your own landing page content.

- Trust/Reputation: Google tries to link to as many pages as it can, but it can't link to them all. If your goal is to provide a trusted comprehensive service, you may want to deter "easy" but "non-comprehensive" access to your content. For example, it's conceivable that a medical journal would prevent access because Google only indexes 40% of it's content, and end users may develop a false (and potentially deadly) understanding that Google is comprehensive.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#109

Post by techsin101 »

Here we go... Internet will soon be completely segerated by regions, clutched by regulations and policies, and under few.

Soon to make a blog you'd need to hire 30 developers and 40 lawyers to cover specific legal issues of China, Russia, USA, EU, India, UAE, and so on.

You'd have to apply for University Grant to open a blog on diy cleaning.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#110

Post by fauigerzigerk »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #74
mikeash wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a greatly oversimplified view of things. Regulations are tools. They’re not inherently good or bad. It depends on how you use them. If the bad regulations outweigh the good, the solution isn’t to give up on regulation, it’s to cut the bad ones. It doesn’t make sense to lump together regulations on the acceptable amount of lead in drinking water, regulations on operations of a commercial airline, and r…

> Regulations are tools. They’re not inherently good or bad. It depends on how you use them. It's not just that though. There are good and bad regulations in the sense that the law against murder is good and DMCA 1201 is bad, but there are also compliance costs for any regulation, even good ones. Economic transactions have a certain amount of surplus. The value of doing something is $100 and the cost of doing it is $…

No, I don't think what you're saying is true in general (even though it is certainly true in many individual cases).

Some regulations/laws increase efficiciency by reducing complexity or risk and therefore reduce cost as well.

Your logic is built on the assumption that without regulation there would be no need to agree on the things that we regulate.

But the alternative may in fact be endless piecemeal negotiation, duplication of work, great uncertainty, high hedging and legal costs and a lack of transparency that makes markets inefficient for long periods of time.

It's very difficult to get regulation right though. So I too think that erring on the side of less regulation is generally a good idea.

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