EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by tekknik » Thu, May 31, 2018, 1:37 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #207

tekknik wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulations increase the cost of entry, which means less competition, which means it hurts the free market. It really is as simple as that and you can most definitely group all regulations into the same category in this case.

Regulations can help free markets too. For example, restaurant health regulations make people more willing to patronize different establishments. If a new restaurant can’t get off the ground because those health regulations are too difficult to comply with, that sure sounds like a good thing to me (assuming the regulations themselves are reasonable).

sure, reasonable regulations, meaning those designed to protect human life. how exactly do these regulations do that again?

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

#222

Post by speedplane » Sat, Jun 02, 2018, 8:24 AM UTC

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #114

speedplane wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 land…

Absolutely, but not getting linked to has always been an option. Publishers want Google to link to their content. At the same time they want Google to pay for the honor and prevent competitors from letting Google link to their content for free. The only reason this ridiculously brazen set of demands doesn't get laughed out of the room is that these publishers have tremendous political clout.

Google's stated goal is to provide people access to information. But in reality, they provide access to what's easily accessible to them. Any robots.txt tool is far too blunt of an instrument. It does not respect other highly valued goals of privacy, competitive fairness, and comprehensiveness, among others.

To put it more starkly, to assist with privacy, there should be a robots.txt tag/line that allows scraping, but prohibits indexing anything that is tagged as "personally identifiable information". It should be easy to Google what the newest bankruptcy law is, but should be a bit harder to figure out if a specific person filed for bankruptcy.

Similarly, with comprehensiveness, robots.txt should be able to say "don't index these pages unless you also index those pages". For example, a medical site should be able to say, you can index these several name-brand drugs but only if you also index their generic equivalents.

And as far as fairness, a better robots.txt should be able to tell Google to index the portions of its content to attract clicks, but prevent them from scraping their most valuable content. For example, Yelp may allow them to index a restaraunt's overall rating, but not summarize their reviews.

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

#223

Post by arpa » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:32 AM UTC

MrEldritch wrote: post #215

arpa wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fight is far from over. We still have crypto. If that is outlawed, we'll have steganography. When that's outlawed, well, we'll still have sneakers. Iron curtain and Stalins' organs failed. Stasi failed. War on drugs is failing. We, the people, shall prevail. Have hope, brother.

A niche, encrypted deep-web for cypherpunks to serve as a channel for La Resistance(tm) would be a web that had already lost any actual reason to use it. I use the Web to talk to people, learn things, and explore cool stuff other people made. If those other people aren't using the niche crypto/stegano services, then what am I going to use them for? Yes, there will always be some way to have privacy online, if you're…

People made copies of "forbidden" material on x-ray photos. There was samisdat (underground press). There were anticommunist anecdotes told at night in soviet kitchens. And somehow these people managed to do that without explicit permission of their government, and even under the proespect of severe punishment: incarceration, torture, labor camps and death penalty in extreme cases. Thing is, it was worth it for people who did that. Now, ask yourself: is the web as important to you that you would start using deep web, steganographics, etc., or are you just a consumer who just needs mass production? Because facebook and google and their services are here to stay: they're bigger than china and you need not worry about them; me - over the years of them fighting the web it has lost only one thing: its' individual freedom. Thing that you call the network effect, i call the tvisation of the web: there are no blogs, no self-hosted material, no homepages, only content "channels" owned by the select few: facebook and google. It has, for me, no appeal of the early, wondrous thing, only ad-riddled cancer. And so, my friend, the web is already dead in that aense, but it will continue evolving, and what i hope for is that some iteration of niche cyberpunk web will bring back the wondrous thing that was before.