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EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

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111–120 of 332 posts

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#111
post #99
post #75

Ok, I will probably get downvoted for this. But I will still speak my mind: I am an EU citizen and I don’t think that’s the right approach because it’s distracting from what really happened: We missed the big Internet bus because we were so much focused on keeping things the way they were. Now we try to regulate us out. It makes me unbelievably sad. And it continues. The car was invented here but it takes an Australi…

Europe didn’t miss the internet bus because of regulations, there were no regulations until the dust settled. The thing is, there’s no US style capital in EU. The American capitalist bankrolled all the internet when there was no clear path to make money from it. I remember when YouTube was burning billions per year, Facebook being labeled as “would never be profitable”. Is there the kind of money in Europe that would…

I totally agree with you all your points.

Just to be clear: I never said we missed the bus because of regulation. But the fact that we react like that now shows we don’t have other ideas or means to respond.

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Small fries" and 24%... Anyway you're right but it's like, how would any of this concretely improve competition? In my experience, the problem is that giant companies steal your stuff, whether it's your code or your users, and that even when you want to enforce something like that, they can afford better lawyers than you. Like nobody here is working on social networks, cellphones or web browsers. I bet you interact…

> "Small fries" and 24%... Everythings relative. You've got to start somewhere. > Anyway you're right but it's like, how would any of this concretely improve competition? I don't think this is just about competition. There has to be a recognition that social networks etc are natural monopolies, it's very hard to have competition there. Regardless of HNs utopian view of open protocols and distributed and federated soc…

> it's about making sure that mega-corporations like Facebook can't amase more power than democratically elected governments

It's about the resentment of not having European GAFA and wanting to "milk the cash cow" with bs. regulations.

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#113
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU didn't create its citizens (unlike Apple which created its products); saying that the EU 'owns' their market is quite a big step in assuming control over the lives of residents.

> quite a big step in assuming control over the lives of residents. Have you heard of laws and governments before? This is exactly what they do, it’s also why democracy is such a big thing. If you’re gonna give that much power to an organisation, you want to make sure you can change it if start going off the rails. > The EU didn't create its citizens (unlike Apple which created its products); It might not have “creat…

> Have you heard of laws and governments before? This is exactly what they do, it’s also why democracy is such a big thing.

The EU has been designed to be as anti-democratic as can be, from its very inception.

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#114
post #43

Doesn't look like the type of regulation we were hoping for. The regulation seems to apply to content moderation and controlling information. Basically the exact opposite of what we need.

Yeah, based on the article Facebook reactly quite positively to the proposed laws, which isn't a good sign. I'd like to be proven wrong, and there are some parts I like, such as not allowing preinstalled/unremovable apps. But on the whole I think the increased moderation/verification burdens are just going to cement existing companies in their market position, and create all kinds of oppurtunities for corruption in h…

Well corruption in how disputes are handled might not be a huge issue.

As a first step the companies are required to allow you to appeal takedowns and account suspensions/terminations (for TOS or illegal content reasons, not for non-payment reasons) for a 6 month period.

Further, if you appeal a takedown or account suspension and the company rejects your appeal, the law will allow you to take the matter to binding arbitration. If the user wins, the company pays all costs, and must reinstate the content or account. If the user loses, they only pay their portion of arbitration costs. (The company's portion are just part of doing business in the EU).

Oh and the user (not the company) get to decide which arbitrator to use, from among those that have been certified by any Member state, with the relevant expertise for the type of social network and content or TOS violation in question.

Obviously all of this is subject to change if the proposed law is changed before being enacted.

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#115
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU didn't create its citizens (unlike Apple which created its products); saying that the EU 'owns' their market is quite a big step in assuming control over the lives of residents.

Of course the EU created her citizens, do you think European citizenship is some sort of fact of nature? Like people woke up in Europe in a cave and were like "Yeah of course we're cosmopolitan citizens of the United European states" ? All the rules, all the borders, all their values have been created, quite hard earned in fact, with a lot of blood and sweat along the way I might add, even more so than at an Apple sm…

There is no such thing as "EU citizenship".

I am a French citizen, my passport says I am a French citizen, and I do not have a SINGLE legal document mentioning "European citizen".

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#116
post #95

> The focus of the Digital Services Act is to create a single set of rules for the EU to keep users safe online, protect their freedom of expression and help both them and local authorities hold tech companies to account. You can either have freedom of expression or safety online. You can't have both. And the second might be an impossible goal regardless.

The world isn't so black and white. Even in the US, the home of free speech, you can't post child pornogaphy online. You could easily put forward the argument then that freedom of expression doesn't exist in the US. Freedom of expression has never really meant you're completely free to say and anything (at least no in a civilized world). There are always going to be gray areas, but equally there are areas where expre…

Let us say the internet was created 50 years ago, and Facebook decided to eradicate all homosexual content. Perhaps, not even maliciously but as collateral damage for another goal. Would it have been as shocking or obviously bad?

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, movie and music ratings aren't censorship. Moreover, only broadcast television and radio are censored (perhaps because radio waves are a public platform?). I'm not going to argue that censoring broadcast is ideal or valid, but I'm certainly less sympathetic to the plight of massive media companies than I am to millions of private citizens.

> To be clear, movie and music ratings aren't censorship. To the extent they are incorporated with schemes that limit access to the rated content imposed by powerful entities outside of the transaction, they are part of schemes of censorship. (Public censorship schemes that incorporate movie ratings, and thus delegate to movie raters the role of public censor, are common.) > I'm not going to argue that censoring broa…

> To the extent they are incorporated with schemes that limit access to the rated content imposed by powerful entities outside of the transaction, they are part of schemes of censorship. (Public censorship schemes that incorporate movie ratings, and thus delegate to movie raters the role of public censor, are common.)

No doubt they are part of "schemes of censorship" in some literal sense, but if someone publishes a rating and another chooses to use that rating as the basis of censorship, the onus is still squarely on the part of the censor and not the rater.

> Censorship by a third party equally impacts the rights of the parties on both sides of a potential transaction; broadcast media censorship restricts the freedom of both massive media companies and millions of private citizens.

You're conflating several things. Yes, censorship by a third party has similar effects to government censorship, but we treat them differently because the government is a special entity (ultimately because it enjoys a monopoly on violence and force). There are legitimate questions about when a third party becomes so powerful that it can unilaterally affect government (as with social media companies being a vector for the manipulation of elections), but this is the purview of anti-trust as I understand it (and I strongly support anti-trust action against social media corporations for precisely this reason).

The other conflated issues are "freedom to speak" vs "freedom to hear". Yes, restrictions on the content of broadcast media corporations limits the "freedom to hear" of millions of citizens as it does with restrictions on social media; however, restricting social media also infringes on millions' freedoms to speak.

Indeed, when you consider that the volume of communication in a social media network is combinatorial, the impact on regulations is far greater than for restrictions on traditional broadcast media.

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#118
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU didn't create its citizens (unlike Apple which created its products); saying that the EU 'owns' their market is quite a big step in assuming control over the lives of residents.

Governments do however create corporations, which is an artificial structure that can only exist due to government control over the intersection between the marketplace and the legal system.

I'd be tempted to think the concept of "corporations" pre-dates "government" as we know them today, and these secular traditions were merely enshrined in Law.

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#119
post #99
post #75

Ok, I will probably get downvoted for this. But I will still speak my mind: I am an EU citizen and I don’t think that’s the right approach because it’s distracting from what really happened: We missed the big Internet bus because we were so much focused on keeping things the way they were. Now we try to regulate us out. It makes me unbelievably sad. And it continues. The car was invented here but it takes an Australi…

Europe didn’t miss the internet bus because of regulations, there were no regulations until the dust settled. The thing is, there’s no US style capital in EU. The American capitalist bankrolled all the internet when there was no clear path to make money from it. I remember when YouTube was burning billions per year, Facebook being labeled as “would never be profitable”. Is there the kind of money in Europe that would…

You describe the post-1993 evolution of the internet, but I feel the need to add that in 1993, the internet had already been in constant operation for 24 years; it was already the largest network of computers ever. And many could see that it would probably transform society (which I know about from personal conversations with people before 1993). And before 1993 there was basically zero investor interest in the internet.

Before 1993 the internet was funded mostly by the US Government, which started funding research into packet-switched networking in 1961. In 1977, unhappy with the cost of operating the network, the US Government offered the internet to AT&T for a token sum. AT&T could see no way to make money from it, so declined. In 1987, they offered it to them for a token sum again, with the same response.

(Some pedants maintain the internet did not begin until 1987 with the introduction of the TCP/IP protocol, and that before then there was the ARPAnet. I feel that using the word "internet" for the network before 1987 is justified because the same services, e.g., email, mailing lists, ftp, telnet, netnews (what we now call Usenet, i.e., the newsgroups) that ran on the 1987 internet ran on the ARPAnet. Many users of the network probably didn't realize (or were only dimly aware) that anything had changed!)

Starting about 1986 for-profit corporations started offering access to the internet for a fee, but before 1993 even the largest of these for-profits -- Netcom probably -- was small as American corporations go. I would not be surprised if most of Netcom's revenue came from renting out shell accounts on Unix boxes with internet connections for $20 a month to individuals. (Before for-profit ISPs, the way an organization got on the internet was basically to lease a dedicated phone line from a telephone company. The organization at the other end of the dedicated phone line rarely charged money for routing the new organization's traffic.)

Aside from government contractors (e.g., Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc, and the Mitre Corporation) and the early ISPs I just described, possibly the largest internet for-profit at the start of 1993 was Brad Templeton's Clari-Net, which posted the output of some "news wire" (e.g., Associated Press or such) to netnews. (Netnews was much bigger then the web at the start of 93.) I doubt Clari-Net ever had more than 3 employees. It probably only ever had one.

In comparison, before the start of 1993, the US government had spent many billions of dollars on the internet -- over the course of 32 years if we count the package-switching research, not just when the internet got deployed in 1969.

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange argument your making there. One of the interesting side effects of free speech rights is also the prevention of forced speech. After all how can you have free speech if someone else can force to express views you don’t hold? Why should my right to free speech trump your right to not be forced to speak? Equally what right to I have to force any corporation to publish and distribute speech they don’t agree with…

A fairer comparison is Facebook as a community bulletin board in a public space but that is privately owned. What the conclusions should be and whether technical, philosophical, or practical matters should take precedence, I’m not entirely sure.

It’s a bulletin board with a bunch of hired people with megaphones around it. The company decides which announcements the people with megaphones shout out. It’s free to decide not to.
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