Frankly it sounds to me like a "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" kind of operation. France and the UK, and judging by yesterday's speech by the PM of Spain maybe the whole EU might be looking to do what China and Russia did earlier on and start cracking down on foreign social media by making it impossible to operate without total alignment with their vision and not just their (new) rules. Together with a push for local alternatives, that currently don't seem to be there, it may spell the end for a big chunk of the Global social network landscape.
I still believe that the EU and aligned countries would rather have America to agree to much tighter speech controls, digital ID, ToS-based speech codes as apparently US Democrats partly or totally agree to. But if they have workable alternatives they will deal with them from a different position.
Yes, if you don't follow EU laws prepare to not do business in Europe. Likewise, if you don't follow US laws I'd advise against trying to do business in USA.
>Yes, if you don't follow EU laws prepare to not do business in Europe.
Sure, that's what laws are for. Surely we can still point at those laws and question their motives though.
Spanish PM plainly stated a sort of editor framework of responsibility for platforms. This is the same country that strongly advocates for Chat Control within the EU, also looking for a similar under-16 ban on social media.
So the same government is at once looking to deanonimize social media users, revoke their privacy regarding communications, and to enforce moderation standards never seen before. This is, supposedly, a center-left + left coalition mind you.
Same country that blocks a chunk of the internet when a LALIGA football match is on, too. Lawfully of course. All of this is preposterous, making it the law doesn't make that better it makes it far far worse.
If X/Twitter was to be banned in the EU, and some of its citizens still wanted to access X/Twitter, let us say for the sake of getting alternative points of view on politics and news, would it be a good or a bad thing if accessing X/Twitter by IP was stopped?
As in, a citizen of an EU country types x.com/CNN, because he or she wants to know the other side of some political issue between the EU and the USA, and he or she feels that the news in the EU might be biased or have misunderstood something. Would it be good or bad if the user was met with a "This website is by law not available within the EU"?
Generally speaking I wouldn't support blocking their IP, but rather I'd block the ability of European companies to pay for ads on X unless they fixed their shit and paid any damages. That might of course lead X to block Europe visitors in turn but that is a different discussion.
Or in other words: I would block the do business-part, not the access part.
Like anything involving hundreds of millions of users, there's going to be good or bad effects. However I have been on the internet long enough to have concluded that the idea that local law has _no effect at all_ on websites is not good. Ultimately if they don't comply they would probably have to be blocked.
CNN is a very silly example though, because .. you can just go to the CNN website separately. The one that is blocked is Russia Today and various other enemy propaganda channels.
there's a push to end with VPNs in the UK and in the EU because it's clear that this is a very plausible endgame
currently VPNs are too easy to use for the leadership of autocracies like the EU or the UK to be comfortable with them, so at the very least they will require for backdoors to see which citizens are watching what, and have them visited by fellows in hi-vis jackets
> there's a push to end with VPNs in the UK and in the EU
No there isn't.
Governments discussing such things doesn't _remotely_ mean there is a political will for them, or that they will be voted into law.
Governments are expected to research and discuss paths of legislation (and in this case, come to the conclusion banning VPNs is both harmful and ridiculous). This is how our democracies work!
Reporting government discussions as approved legislation is, at best ignorant, at worst trolling.
I’m reminded of Lord Haw-Haw, an English-speaking Nazi propagandist during WW2 that garnered quite a bit of attention for his radio broadcasts.
There’s an interesting tidbit that he gained quite a few listeners when he started releasing casualty information that the British government withheld to try to keep wartime-morale high.
Lord Haw-Haw then tried to leverage that audience into a force of Nazi sympathy and a general mood of defeatism.
Anyway, fun anecdote. Enemy propaganda during wartime (or increased tensions) is harmless until it isn’t.
I would have thought that the Great Firewall of China would be a more obvious thing to be reminded of. Especially since there is no world war currently, yet, at least, and communication might help stop one.
Also, Godwin's law, strangely.
Once there’s a fascist regime with ambitions of world domination that documents their horrors more thoroughly (and has their enemies document their horrors more thoroughly) than the Nazis then we can start referencing that regime instead.
Conveniently, at least in the US, WW2 is old enough to be “history” rather than “politics”, compared to Korea and Vietnam. Or, at least that’s the excuse I was given in AP US History when the curriculum suddenly ended at 1950. So WW2 will continue to be the most well-documented topic that we’re all educated enough about to collectively reference.
Trust me, I’d much rather speak plainly about the horrors of the atrocities that the US committed in the 20th century American but we’re not there yet because the people who grew up in the nation while it committed those atrocities still run the government and basically the nation in general.
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> EU regulation isn't really there to be followed, it's there to extract cash from foreign companies
Compare the DOJ fines on European banks and automakers with European fines on tech companies and you'll realize how ridiculous this claim is.
Just to clarify – are we agreeing both are unreasonable, or is your point that both are reasonable and EU fines even more so?
If you're arguing that DOJ fines on European banks are more unreasonable than EU fines on US tech companies that's fine with me. But that wouldn't make either reasonable or my comment "ridiculous".
> EU might be looking to do what China and Russia did earlier on and start cracking down on foreign social media
For some reason you forgot to mention "Like the US did with TikTok".
that was decades later, but yea I don't think for a second that was justifiable - not even considering that China had completely closed shop for America decades earlier and this was a 1-way openness relationship for a long time; they could have sold this as a reciprocity issue but they didn't
esp. when America already controls the main outlets through Android Play Store and Apple Store, and yep, they have proven to control them not just happen to host them as a country
arguably America did have valid security concerns with Huawei though, but if those are the rules then you cannot complain later on
The old “Rules for thee but not for me”.
Even earlier: PokerStars.
It's worth pointing out that in France and the UK, the authorities involved are arms length independent of the political bodies - it's not like the US where if you give the President good vibes you can become head of the FBI, and all you have to do in return is whatever he says. There are statutory instruments (in France, constitutional clauses), that determine the independence of these authorities.
They are tasked - and held to account by respective legislative bodies - with implementing the law as written.
Nobody wrote a law saying "Go after Grok". There is however a law in most countries about the creation and dissemination of CSAM material and non-consensual pornography. Some of that law is relatively new (the UK only introduced some of these laws in recent years), but they all predate the current wave of AI investment.
Founders, boards of directors and their internal and external advisors could:
1. Read the law and make sure any tools they build comply
2. When told their tools don't comply take immediate and decisive action to change the tools
3. Work with law enforcement to apply the law as written
Those companies, if they find this too burdensome, have the choice of not operating in that market. By operating in that market, they both implicitly agree to the law, and are required to explicitly abide by it.
They can't then complain that the law is unfair (it's not), that it's being politicised (How? By whom? Show your working), and that this is all impossible in their home market where they are literally offering presents to the personal enrichment of the President on bended knee while he demands that ownership structures of foreign social media companies like TikTok are changed to meet the agenda of himself and his administration.
So, would the EU like more tighter speech controls? Yes, they'd like implementation of the controls on free speech enshrined in legislation created by democratically appointed representatives. The alternative - algorithms that create abusive content, of women and children in particular - are not wanted by the people of the UK, the EU, or most of the rest of the World, laws are written to that effect, and are then enforced by the authorities tasked with that enforcement.
This isn't "anti-democratic", it's literally democracy in action standing up to technocratic feudalism that is an Ayn Randian-wet dream being played out by some morons who got lucky.
> It's worth pointing out that in France and the UK, the authorities involved are arms length independent of the political bodies
As someone who has lived in (and followed current affairs) in both of these countries, this is a very idealistic and naïve view. There can be a big gap between theory and practice
> There are statutory instruments (in France, constitutional clauses), that determine the independence of these authorities.
> They are tasked - and held to account by respective legislative bodies -
It's worth nothing here that the UK doesn't have separation of powers or a supreme court (in the US sense)
i live in the UK and i completely agree with you and i believe that GP is "having a laugh" as we'd say over here
however it's a very mainstream point of view so i respect that he/she has laid it out pretty well, so i upvoted the comment
European courts have repeatedly said that in France the procureur (public prosecutor) isn’t an “independent judicial authority”.
The European Court of Human Rights has reminded this point (e.g. 29 Mar 2010, appl. no. 3394/03), and the Court of Justice of the European Union reaches a very similar conclusion (2 Mar 2021, C-746/18): prosecutors are part of the executive hierarchy and can’t be treated as the neutral, independent judicial check some procedures require.
For a local observer, this is made obvious by the fact that the procureur, in France, always follows current political vibes, usually in just a few months delay (extremely fast, when you consider how slowly justice works in the country).
There's a dissonance between the claim that it's "independent of the political bodies" and "held to account by respective legislative bodies". Are the legislative bodies not political? In the sense of aren't they elected through a political process?
This is kind of a genuine question from me since I have no idea how these authorities are set up in France or the UK...