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0 pointsihatethem7y ago0 comments

I don't understand why any of this was necessary in the first place, the only reason I can think of is this being on the wishlist of a powerful lobbying bloc.

There is something suspect about the EU's cavalier attitude in churning out internet regulations, they generally favor old industries and incumbents.

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arendtio7y ago

Newspapers are dying and try to find a way to make money from their content. They find that the big user distributor Google doesn't give them their fair share and therefore try to make him pay. They get supported by other content producers and now we all are facing another absurd law.

I am a big fan of the GDPR, because it protects the rights of the users. But this time they are building a law to ease the fight of large corporations, affecting everone else in the process... not cool.

unexpectedcharm7y ago

I think the upload filters are meant to serve a peeking hole for EU governments to listen to what people share on the internet, as this bypasses the encryption. This will enable governments to stop content harmful to the regime from being shared and also track individuals who are working against the government. This all happened before in all socialist regimes. I remember it well, when I was phoning someone there were censors actively listening to the conversations. This is being transplanted on the internet. It is ironic how people fought this through the 80s only to have it reinstated.

mrep7y ago

The one case where I can see it being useful is when 1 news site has some exclusive content that they post, and then every other news site copies the story by linking to the original and paraphrasing the whole thing. I see this happen a lot and I can totally see how it disincentives creating original content when every other news story just copies the story and users only read the first article they see about it.

cyphar7y ago

Google being a monopoly that applies biases to the results it shows (in a way that has no public accountability) is a significant problem -- as well as the fact they implement features which effectively take away revenue from websites by showing their content without giving them page views. That is (ostensibly) the justification for these kinds of laws. I think that they are flawed because they focus on further copyright extensions that I find draconian, but the problem itself I think is pretty obviously a real problem.

candiodari7y ago

Yep, Google is causing harm by filtering what people see, and dammit, the EU commission wanted to do that harm themselves.

Sarcastic joke perhaps, but very true.

cyphar7y ago

I don't agree with the legislation in question (the upload filter is an awful idea, and the link tax is a really bad way of attempting to solve a real problem because it clearly exists to make sure German publishing houses get even more money).

But I don't see why this is relevant to my point that there is actually a real issue here, and ignoring it is going to cause even more laws like these to be passed because the narrative from publishers (that they are losing business because of internet companies that have a cavalier attitude about the people they are cutting off) is not entirely fictitious. When's the last time you saw Google telling large websites about changes in PageRank that will negatively impact them?

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arendtio7y ago

unexpectedcharm7y ago

mrep7y ago

cyphar7y ago

candiodari7y ago

Yep, Google is causing harm by filtering what people see, and dammit, the EU commission wanted to do that harm themselves.

Sarcastic joke perhaps, but very true.

cyphar7y ago

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