Consumer protection is a bad thing?
Nope! We should also ban steak because babies have a hard time eating it.
New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection
41–50 of 125 posts
Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection
#42This feels like a fight we're going to lose eventually. Proposals come up.. most fail. I admire those responsible for putting up resistance. But.. some succeed. Others partially succeed. Limited to stopping pedophilia, piracy, nazis... Those are bridgeheads. The direction is monodirectional. Eighty six proposals can fail, but if the eighty seventh succeeds that's just as good. There is no going back. Win, good. Lose,…
That assumes advocates for end-user rights are always on the defensive. Why can't laws be debated and passed that enhance privacy?
Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection
#43We must realise that there is nothing like "rights". There is only what we can secure for ourself, by way of voting or by way of revolution. You must fight for your rights, always. The moment people start thinking that their rights are inalienable, government starts eroding them.
Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection
#44This feels like a fight we're going to lose eventually. Proposals come up.. most fail. I admire those responsible for putting up resistance. But.. some succeed. Others partially succeed. Limited to stopping pedophilia, piracy, nazis... Those are bridgeheads. The direction is monodirectional. Eighty six proposals can fail, but if the eighty seventh succeeds that's just as good. There is no going back. Win, good. Lose,…
> The direction is monodirectional. Eighty six proposals can fail, but ...
This kind of thing is true in every domain of legislation and regulation. Indeed wherever officials have wielded power since the before the building of Babylon. And yet the world has not, in the large scale, been on a march towards ever more tyranny. How is that?
I don't fully understand the process by which freedom has increased in most countries through history but it does exist. So it makes sense for people of good will to think, and discuss and act so as to help it along.
Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection
#45I don't see the relevance of Ms Reda's example of Catalonian domains being taken down. Using such an example seems more like a scare tactic than anything else. The EU law she discusses seems clearly focused on (e-)commerce, and it instructs the government to have websites taken down only when that's the only way to protect consumers from being harmed (e.g. defrauded) by those websites. News websites, even those encou…
The relevance is direct - while the argument may be about some specific case, the power given does not have any limitations to this case, except vague requirement to serve "collective interest" of consumers, whatever that could be. It also builds the legal framework for extrajudicial control over the content on the Internet, which means the government may now control speech in order to serve "collective interest" of the consumers, which will inevitably be defined by the government itself, in a self-serving manner. This opens wide potential for abuse, and a stepping stone for implementing other extra-judicial limits on speech - if it's ok to protect consumer from fake watches, why not from fake news? Why not from "bad" viewpoints and "harmful" information? Thus the government gets full control over the online speech, for your own good, of course.
An example of how that happens and why it is dangerous is the Catalan domains story. The Spanish government is obviously trying to limit speech which is not in its interests.
Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection
#46I think this is the relevant paragraph in the document (page 27 in http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/commissions/imco/inag/... ) linked from the article: "3. Competent authorities shall have at least the following enforcement powers: (e) where no other effective means are available to bring about the cessation or the prohibition of the infringement including by requesting a third party or other public authority t…
In the EU countries there are already blockades of some sites which allow people to access the links to the copyrighted content privately uploaded by some web users. Specifically, I know that providers get the court backed demands to block the sites, and they do that.
But if you consider, youtube is exactly the same kind of site, having the copyrighted content uploaded by some web users there since Youtube exists and -- nobody blocks Youtube. And Youtube even still profits from that content as it serves its own ads on it.
And do the biggest pay the taxes?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/05/04/google-pay-...
"Google will pay €306m (£259m) to settle a tax dispute in Italy and end a criminal investigation into whether it avoided paying the full amount on its revenues in the country for more than a decade."
Italy is just one of the EU lands.
Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
"risk of serious harm to the collective interests of consumers" What a weaselly term. Bet they spent months trying to come up with something that didn't sound ridiculously biased/anti-consumer and that's the best they came up with. So obviously corrupt.
Let me translate: "business which we want to cultivate a protected local equivalent of" China figured it out; the EU is just playing catch-up.
It's not the EU that benefits out of this, it's the US. The US owns all the copyrights.
In 10/20 years time if the US falls off its number 1 perch, this will law will be quietly dismantled and it'll be open season on our collective cultural heritage instead of pandering to the US's crazy protectionist copyright laws. It'll probably result in a golden age of culture in the EU instead of being ruthlessly oppressed by the US.
The irony being a lot of US "copyright" is based on EU folk tales and music they took with them and copied.
Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection
#48Man am I naive. I read the title as the EU wanting to provide a way to block web sites that do things like track consumers.
Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection
#49This feels like a fight we're going to lose eventually. Proposals come up.. most fail. I admire those responsible for putting up resistance. But.. some succeed. Others partially succeed. Limited to stopping pedophilia, piracy, nazis... Those are bridgeheads. The direction is monodirectional. Eighty six proposals can fail, but if the eighty seventh succeeds that's just as good. There is no going back. Win, good. Lose,…
> The direction is monodirectional The obvious tautology aside, I wouldn't agree with this in case of the EU (the US, probably.) To me, the EU feels more like two steps forward, one step back - this being the step back but, for example, the GDPR being the two steps (or leaps) forward. In any case, this regulation seems more misguided rather than malicious. It's targeting real problems that have to be tackled but it d…
> the GDPR being the two steps (or leaps) forward.
> does have the fault of granting overly broad powers to the respective institutions.
You praise the GPDR in the same comment you lament overly broad powers. Surely the contradiction is clear? Maybe in your case, the fault is not the power but rather that you disagree with the specific uses? I wonder if politicians can differentiate between forms of internet restrictions as easily as we can.
Re: New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection
#50This can be used to shut down services like Bitcoin, can't it?