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US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

reuters.com

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Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#411

Post by oezi »

deaux wrote: post #330
oezi wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key thing to understand is that Europeans want clear rules around hate speech, online harassment and such. Thus lawmakers are acting to find laws which encapsulate these. In Germany, we have some simple ones surrounding using Nazi symbols and speech. These rules generally work well in our civil law context. Civil law usually is rather broad strokes and there might be cases where something injust happens which req…

> The key thing to understand is that Europeans want clear rules around hate speech Regardless of my personal thoughts on this (complicated), simply putting "many" in front of "Europeans" does a lot to diminish further alienation of those who don't, helping you achieve your goals. It takes 0.5 seconds.

Agreed

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#412

Post by badgersnake »

jeroenhd wrote: post #408
gpt5 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Reuters, it will essentially be a free VPN. https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-...

That may be pretty useful for torrenting, actually.

Oh they’re definitely going to be watching for that. You can have the propaganda but if you start stealing from rich people they’ll be after you.

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#413

Post by AdamN »

exe34 wrote: post #405
nomilk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might do that too , but access to information is just so utterly critical, and exponentially moreso in circumstances where government brutally cracks down on it, as we saw in Egypt during the Arab Spring and we're seeing in Iran presently.

Will it work when the US government is the one cracking down, banning interviews, etc?

In some cases yes. Tor for instance was created by the USG and is not easily controlled by the USG.

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#414

Post by badgersnake »

jadenPete wrote: post #107

Then won’t foreign governments just ban freedom.gov? This problem has already been solved with networks like Tor and I2P. It seems like it would be more strategic to fund those projects instead.

Yes. And then, if he doesn’t like the regime because they haven’t done him enough favours the orange one will rage about it on his social network.

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#415

Post by roenxi »

touwer wrote: post #83
mlh496 wrote: post #64

Sad that western Europe is pushing so hard for limits to free speech & privacy. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless.

It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that. We know, we had the Nazis. Seems the US still has to learn a lesson or two, considering the current political situation. Hope it will not be as bad

> It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that.

Blatant lies have to be legal. Firstly because it isn't philosophically possible to tell if someone is lying, it can only ever be strongly suspected. Secondly because it is a bog-standard authoritarian tactic to accuse someone of telling a blatant lie and shut them down for challenging the authoritarians.

Banning "blatant lies" is pretty much a textbook tell that somewhere is in political trouble and descending into either a bad case of group-think in the political community or authoritarianism. The belief that it is even possible to ban blatant lies is, if it has taken root, itself a lie people tell themselves when they can't handle the fact that some of the things they believe and know are true, aren't.

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#416

Post by NewJazz »

seattle_spring wrote: post #172
0xy wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thousands of people in the UK have been arrested for social media posts, some for speech recognized as protected by international organizations. Germany is currently actively campaigning to force everyone to use their real names on all social media and force ID checks to do so, a clear chilling effect for free speech. Macron has been railing against free speech specifically in recent months, calling it "bullshit". Eu…

> some for speech recognized as protected by international organizations. Can you share some concrete examples from reputable sources that show these? Every examples I've seen have been clear-cut calls for violence, or unambiguous harassment.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/palestine-action...

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#417

Post by anthk »

drnick1 wrote: post #335
amarant wrote: post #168

What content bans does Europe have? /Confused European

Porn (now requires age verification), online libraries, movies, some news websites, sports (because of obscure copyright laws) and countless other things.

Spaniard here. No, we don't. Every country has different laws. The European Union share some laws but not these.

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#418

Post by sssilver »

microtonal wrote: post #404
sssilver wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would this work? Wouldn't a reciprocal tariff with identical parameters by the US against EU tech companies completely obliterate EU tech landscape?

Most EU tech companies probably have primarily European customers (given that services export from the US to the EU is much larger than the other way around). Second, all those EU customers are looking for EU alternatives that do not have a huge tariff. Reciprocal tariffs would (for the EU) hurt export of goods much more, since that is where the EU has a large surplus.

The number of tech companies matters less than their scale. SAP, Spotify, and Dassault Systèmes likely have more economic impact than ten thousand tiny software shops combined. And notably, all three derive a huge portion of their revenue from the US market.

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#419

Post by oezi »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #386
oezi wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key thing to understand is that Europeans want clear rules around hate speech, online harassment and such. Thus lawmakers are acting to find laws which encapsulate these. In Germany, we have some simple ones surrounding using Nazi symbols and speech. These rules generally work well in our civil law context. Civil law usually is rather broad strokes and there might be cases where something injust happens which req…

I think if you come from a German context the concept of free speech is probably strange to you in general - because no one in living memory has ever had it. Not in Weimar, not in the Nazi period, not in East Germany and not in the Federal Republic. Unless you understand concepts like "Natural Rights" the idea of a government not being able to curtail what you say will remain completely foreign to you.

That isn't really what we perceive (at least if educated). We see that Free Speech is not an absolute right, but is secondary to the most important right which for Germans is Human Dignity. It might be foreign to you because your constitution and history doesn't put the same value on it than our history taught us.

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#420

Post by ascorbic »

petcat wrote: post #196
reactordev wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because your client is in Switzerland and your data center is in Germany, doesn’t mean a data center in Virginia doesn’t have a copy. https://youtu.be/JR6YyYdF8ho That was 14 years ago… We have MUCH more capabilities today.

The datacenter is in Utah, not Virginia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

It's referring to us-east-1
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