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EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

bbc.com

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Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#121

Post by throwaway894345 »

jariel wrote: post #72
throwaway894345 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A interesting point missing from the BBC article is that they have different levels of expectations between small to medium businesses and large ones, to avoid regulatory capture ? : It's easy to overlook, but the BBC article does have this line: > It introduces a sliding scale, under which firms take on more obligations the larger and more influential they are. > Another interesting tidbit is the answer to the com…

I think you have the FB issue upside down. Do you think the EU is interested in 'free speech'? No, the EU want to make sure that they able to suppress language they don't like. In some cases, it's probably for the common good, but in many others ... not so much. The EU, US and other actors definitely want FB et. al. to suppress information which they deem as 'factually innacurate' (things that can sway elections, sca…

I didn't mention Facebook at all...? My comment certainly wasn't intended to be subtext about any particular Facebook drama.

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#122

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

mrtksn wrote: post #99
baxtr wrote: 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…

>The American capitalist bankrolled all the internet when there was no clear path to make money from it.

Umm, no, the US DARPA bankrolled the intrnet, then corporations took it mainstream and for profit, not for loss. The modern WWW originated at CERN in Switzerland.

>Simply, there is no that kind of money in Europe.

Europe definitely has money to throw away, just look at Berlin airport and all the useless projects being bankrolled from EU tax money. How many startups could that have funded?

>If you made the YouTube in Europe you would go bankrupt because you wouldn’t be able to pay the server bills.

Edit: Dailymotion(not Vimeo) is European and it seems to be able to pay their server bills.

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#123

Post by [deleted] »

baxtr wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#124

Post by revax »

rodgerd wrote: post #63
iguy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, 10% overall probably means a much higher share in some countries. Doesn't seem like a crazy threshold.

In the EU context, it would mean 100% of several countries, or 80%+ of one of the big EU nations (France, Germany, Italy, etc).

It is 10% users, not people in general if I understood correctly.

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#125

Post by mrtksn »

baxtr wrote: post #111
mrtksn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having your communication run by foreign entities is dangerous. it’s no longer even direct communication, it’s curated. It can be used to create political problems, social unrest or movements, it can be used as commercial advantage on other areas.

China happened to actually have a true competitor, TikTok and the first instinct of the USA was to try to ban it or force acquisition.

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#126

Post by buisi »

fadsfsafadf123 wrote: post #53

Sometimes I think GDPR was secretly pushed by Big Tech to make it harder for smaller business's to compete. It was basically useless. I wouldn't even be surprised if Google or Facebook helped write the legislation. Whatever noise EU is making now I have very little hope for. If the US government was so fearful that a fun video app made in China had the power of compromising National Security, stealing and spying on c…

The GDPR is good in spirit as it forces a certain standard of privacy, but it is extremely vague (which means countries can effectively neuter it, or it could be over-enforced), and there is an extraterritorial component which set the precedent for global take-downs of content.

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#127

Post by Silhouette »

avianlyric wrote: post #83
jariel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"do, it’s also why democracy is such a big thing" Voters of France and Netherlands strongly rejected the treaty upon which the EU derives is legitimacy. Referendums were cancelled elsewhere. Ursula von der Leyen did not receive any votes, she wasn't even part of the process, she was an unknown German figure until after the election, when she was plucked from obscurity by actors acting in total opacity, behind closed…

The EU democratic structure is complex, that for sure. But it's hardly undemocratic. The EU has always struggled to explain how it works, why it's structure works the way it does. But all the leaders in the EU are elected, just not always via direct elections. A process that actually isn't that unusual in the world. The US is actually a bit of an outlier, because they have direct elections for almost every position i…

The EU democratic structure is complex, that for sure. But it's hardly undemocratic.

I don't really want to start a rehash of the entire Brexit debate we had in the UK, but the EU does have a serious democratic deficit.

Ask yourself this simple question: Can a citizen who is governed by the EU meaningfully influence who is doing that governing? In particular, can a large group of citizens affect who holds power within the EU and vote out those individuals they don't want, so any individual office holder has some degree of personal accountability to the electorate?

It would take quite a leap to argue that the European Commission, which is where most of the real power still lies in practice, would meet any of those standards.

It is debatable whether even the European Parliament does, though it is at least more directly affected by the public vote.

For example in the UK our prime minister isn't directly elected, the general public didn't "choose" Boris Johnson. Instead the conservative party did, via its own methodology which it can change any time it does.

Our arrangement here in the UK suffers from a similar problem of failing to faithfully represent the will of the electorate. FPTP is a deeply flawed voting system on purely mathematical grounds, and then the mechanics through which the PM and by extension the government come to power once MPs have been elected can be even more distorted.

If you don't think it matters that many of our population have little influence over who occupies Number 10, I would respectfully remind you that one of the first things each new PM does is handwrite four letters that could literally cause the end of the world as we know it.

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#128

Post by dragonwriter »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #117
dragonwriter wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You're conflating several things. Yes, censorship by a third party has similar effects to government censorship, but we treat them differently

My post was discussing whether censorship occurred and whose freedom was affected. While it did mention certain explictly public schemes, it nowhere argued that other schemes should be treated as government censorship, so you are inventing a position here for the sole purpose of claiming it is in error and a conflation of different things.

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#129

Post by rrdharan »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #122
mrtksn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The American capitalist bankrolled all the internet when there was no clear path to make money from it. Umm, no, the US DARPA bankrolled the intrnet, then corporations took it mainstream and for profit, not for loss. The modern WWW originated at CERN in Switzerland. >Simply, there is no that kind of money in Europe. Europe definitely has money to throw away, just look at Berlin airport and all the useless projects b…

No, Vimeo is based in New York City and I believe always has been?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimeo

Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

#130

Post by avianlyric »

buisi wrote: post #116
avianlyric wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The internet is not the only place the social changes happens.

Equally the EU isn't applying the same regulation to every company, the most significant ones only apply to companies with 10% market share. It would be quite plausible for gay friendly social networks to spring up to fill that gap, and I would entirely expect it to happen. Apps like Grindr basically proves it would happen.

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