"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 to implement such measures, in order to prevent the risk of serious harm to the collective interests of consumers:
- to remove content or restrict access to an online interface or to order the explicit display of a warning to consumers when accessing the online interface;
- to order a hosting service provider to remove, disable or restrict the access to an online interface; or
- where appropriate, order domain registries or registrars to delete a fully qualified domain name and allow the competent authority concerned to
register it;"
Seems similar to already existing measures against infringement of copyrights, except that thing about circumventing the courts, as Reda writes. Could this possibly mean websites such as Facebook could be blocked on the grounds of protecting consumers? The document defines 'widespread infringement' as
"(1) any act or omission contrary to Union laws that protect consumers' interests that harmed, harms, or is likely to harm the collective interests of consumers"
"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.
The EU isn't perfect... But this sounds a lot like an attempt to give consumer protection agencies the powers to block scam sites.
From what I could see Julia Reda (MEP - German Pirate) wasn't unhappy about the intents of this legislation. Merely concerned about:
A) Website blocking without judicial oversight
B) Existence of website blocking infrastructure
C) Inability to force compensations
D) No restitution of illicit profits
I suspect (B) is already a reality, but yeah, I'm no fan.
I agree that (A) is concerning, but wording suggests this can ONLY be applied when "no other effective means" are available. As I understand it that implies it can only be used when the owner can be found, sued or prosecuted by other means.
I read that as this applies to faceless scam sites without an address or anyone willing to take responsibility.
As for (C) and (D) I would love to see more of that. But the idea in her blog post that illicit profits (B) could be used for found consumer protection agencies is not something I agree with.
But who decides what an "effective means" is, and which are available? Without judicial oversight, this seems rather easy to bypass.
I personally find filtering of any sort to be fundamentally wrong. A website is nothing but information, and find censoring/filtering to be wrong on counts of violating free speech and free access to information. I believe that illegal content should be handled by going after those that operate the site, rather than touching the distribution channel.
What if the persons operating the site are unknown or living in a country where what they are doing is not illegal? I don't support outright blocks or the specifics of this new legislation, but I think there are cases where the distribution channel is the right point to intervene; e.g. by displaying an interstitial "This site has been found to be a scam, don't give them your money. Do you want to continue anyway?".
I don't think "This site has been found to be a scam" should be done in the distribution channel, but rather like Google's safebrowsing initiative... Just, maybe not Google-operated.
To me, I think I would imagine a website doing something illegal to be more akin to a newspaper ad that sells something illegal. It's not illegal for me to bring a newspaper home from a country with ads about services that are legal where the newspaper is from, but illegal in my home-country. So, why should bringing the ad over digitally be any different?
The illegal may only occur once the service is ordered/used, and only so if it is illegal to be the recipient/import (sometimes things are illegal to sell, but legal to buy).
Ah, I'm sorry, I of course meant filtering of information from the public, not any personal filtering in a wider sense. I may have been wrong to expect that this was clear.
Feel free to wear sunglasses, welding helmets, use ad blockers ("content filter"), attach ND filters to your camera lenses, water filters to your water filtration systems, HEPA filters to air filtration systems, etc.
> The EU isn't perfect... But this sounds a lot like an attempt to give consumer protection agencies the powers to block scam sites.
It sounds more like an attempt to give somebody powers to block potentially copyright infringing sites, under the pretense of consumer protection, through the roundabout justification that consumers "collectively" benefit from strict enforcement of copyright.
The copyright infringing sites can already be blocked, so this can't be about that. It seems likely to me that it's actually about consumer protection, unlike the existing copyright legislation.
Do you have any evidence to support your claims of corruption or are you just loud mouthing based on what you feel is true?
I ask because the EU already has the ability to block sites infringe on copyrights.
To me this law is one of the reactions taken to the fact that foreign powers are using completely faked news papers and social media pages to influence out elections.
Right now consumers have very little ammunition against companies like Facebook. In the EU we have the right to everything they’ve gathered on us and to demand they delete it, but if they went full retard we couldn’t legally block them.
As a European, I find both the ability to force others to not distribute information, and the ability for others to restrict my access certain types of sites to be a disgusting violation of free speech. I would expect this in a certain country in Asia, not in bloody Europe. Not only does it violate free speech, the new ability to perform website takedowns bypass proper law and order, by not leaving any ability to defend oneself in a proper court of law. A copyright infringement claim may be false, for example.
The ability to block content country-wide won't help reduce misinformation, which will always have ways to spread. What are we going to do, make it illegal to be uneducated, have unpopular opinions or be a bad person? Instead, this new power can easily be abused to stop the spread of real information, and unpopular (for example, government-opposing or religious) opinions.
The original ability to delete information is absurd in a similar way, but more limited, as only the subject can request it. Yet it still bypasses a proper trial, leaving it up to you and the service provider to conclude if the information was useful to the "general public". That's definitely going to result in deletion of valuable information.
If you want to give people a way to defend themselves against harmful information, give them the right to amend it instead. Deleting it is wrong. If you want to avoid fake news like you state, educate. Controlling people by removing information is wrong.
>Not only does it violate free speech, the new ability to perform website takedowns bypass proper law and order, by not leaving any ability to defend oneself in a proper court of law.
The law explicitly states itself to be a last measure when a court of law is not an option (ie, overseas or anonymous parties)
It is a last resort by consumer protection agencies when they can't use a court or the other party is unwilling to cooperate with their jurisdiction. That is not equivalent to "bypass proper law and order". It's enforcing it. That is the job of the CPA's.
>disgusting violation of free speech.
Yes but in some parts of Europe there is no Free Speech. Germany for example has Free Opinions, which is a narrower field of speech.
People aren't vaccinating their children, bringing back deadly disease that were almost wiped out in western society.
A rising number of people believe the earth is flat.
Two of the mos popular pro-Brexit sources on social media turned out to be fake accounts run by Russia.
America elected Trump.
I mean, those things aren't great but at least they won't wipe us from existence. Unlike climate change, which an increasing number of people think is an act of God...
I don't like totalitarian approaches, but your approach to "freedom" is not only rapidly ending democracy and the free society, it's quite literally going to kill us all.
Wait, you advocate for a law that would grant citizens the right to rewrite server responses on the wire? Because the context here is action against sites where no physical or legal person associated with the site can be found within the EU, so its either blocking server responses or rewriting them in flight...
> To me this law is one of the reactions taken to the fact that foreign powers are using completely faked news papers and social media pages to influence out elections.
Then why not phrase it explicitly? For example:
For protection of citizens against online interfaces which either:
1. Consistently promote determinably false information with the intent to deceive on a mass scale;
OR
2. Attempt to profit through deception by false advertisement of goods or services.
Instead they create some vague, weasly language that can be used to basically block any service for any reason, so long as a group of EU citizens looked at it.
I'm torn on this issue. On one hand american-style free speech where you can basically say anything you want as long as you don't target a specific individual is tempting. On the other hand you don't have to look very far online to find groups of people online who get in too deep into a web of lies, disinformation and confirmation bias that leads to some extremism with real world consequences.
This is especially a problem since it's very hard to limit access for the underage population who's a lot more prone to being influenced by extremist ideologies.
But of course the counterpoint is that this would create an infrastructure which could be abused to manipulate the population. I think there's a compromise to be found here but I don't know where to start.
As opposed to the orderly wold we live in now? I'm honestly done protecting the right to flat out lie and manipulate on the internet.
You may see that as an infringement on your free speech, but your approach to "freedom" is rapidly ending democracy in the free world. Keep in mind that the totalitarian voices you're using free speech to defend, won't show you the same curtesy, once they take over.
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.
As if the ICANN compliance department don't already have enough on their plate squaring the circle over the WHOIS / GDPR / RA / RAA imbroglio. 'in with the good''out with the bad'
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.
"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."
The sites blocked are typically things that nobody will take responsibility for.
Note: this law also says, "where no other effective means are available". Prosecution in court or civil law suites are certainly "effective means". But for some websites they are not available.
On Android I am using Flym, though it doesn't seem to get old entries upon subscription. It is built on the sparse rss app, it is GPLv3 and it has a newer relative spaRSS https://github.com/Etuldan/spaRSS which is more recently maintained.
Thanks for bringing that to my attention! spaRSS is a decent contender. It's pretty, fast and it looks like it does what it should. One small wrinkle: it doesn't seem capable of importing opml files on newer android devices. A bug was filed 2 years ago, but it was closed without being fixed.
One factor often overlooked is energy availability (the link touches it somewhat). EDIT: Wikipedia on coal, for instance, states "The development of the Industrial Revolution led to the large-scale use of coal" - rather than coal being the enabler what, with forests probably being exhausted at the time...
Important in automation is work done by a machine, enhancing or replacing labor. Machines require energy, both for running, and for construction and processing of the material in their constituent parts. Energy was present in the English Midlands in the form of coal. By burning this coal in a glorius steam engine, of which models were improved on from the 1600s and onwards, wonders arose.
I think that energy availability is overlooked because it doesn't seem to be an especially proximate cause of the Industrial Revolution. Many other countries have coal. People in the UK knew of the existence of coal for centuries (millennia?) before the IR. A lot of times and places had fossil energy stores available in the abstract. Why did it take so long before any people performed mechanical work with fossil fuels, and why did the first outbreak of industrialization occur in the UK instead of (e.g.) China or Germany?
Yeah, it is an ultimate cause I suppose, with other factors mentioned above my post as proximate causes. One needs to know how to utilize the resource, and to have the incentive to use it, economically and culturally. A lot of knowledge was lost after the Romans retreated, and coal is, even if more energy dense, more polluting than wood, for ordinary urban heating purposes and thus in less use.
Looking forward, Germany started industrializing some time after, and China is now reducing their coal-dependence. Now we are asking how India will industrialize without coal - underlining the importance of energy in industrialization.
"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 to implement such measures, in order to prevent the risk of serious harm to the collective interests of consumers:
- to remove content or restrict access to an online interface or to order the explicit display of a warning to consumers when accessing the online interface;
- to order a hosting service provider to remove, disable or restrict the access to an online interface; or
- where appropriate, order domain registries or registrars to delete a fully qualified domain name and allow the competent authority concerned to register it;"
Seems similar to already existing measures against infringement of copyrights, except that thing about circumventing the courts, as Reda writes. Could this possibly mean websites such as Facebook could be blocked on the grounds of protecting consumers? The document defines 'widespread infringement' as
"(1) any act or omission contrary to Union laws that protect consumers' interests that harmed, harms, or is likely to harm the collective interests of consumers"