I also love how most mainstream media does not report this or cover it at all. Yeah they might have the odd article but nothing else. I personally would be extremely happy, if this pile of shit passes, to see FB and google block all EU news outlets and drive them to the ground. I mean that should be the price to pay when meddling with the freedom of information.
Having your revenue down by 50-60% (hopefully) because you’re dumb enough to think that your lobbying is the smartest idea sound like justice.
I just can’t believe that the EU is actually doing this. It puts a really bad taste in my mouth that it tries to regulate something it does not really understand just because of large lobbyist corporations.
> I just can’t believe that the EU ... actually ... tries to regulate something it does not really understand just because...
This is generally how government works! But it's even worse than usual in the EU, since it's an unaccountable transnational mega-bureaucracy; MEPs are not directly elected, they are appointed by their political party after proportional representation votes (which haven't had turnout higher than 50% since 1994).
You think Congress is beholden to lobbyists now? Imagine how bad it'd be if state representatives could get "re-elected" each term without ever having to put their record to a public vote!
Actually not 100% true with the MEPs because it's up to each individual member state.
I think in Bulgaria you had to vote for a political party and a person from it. Then add proportianl representation and the ppl with the most votes in each party will go into the EP based on their respective % of the total votes. (idk if this makes sense as it might sound a bit confusing)
I think the EU understands perfectly fine. It is the Internet that doesn't understand how copyright works. Most countries don't have comprehensive fair use. Copyright rules and e.g. quotation rights are fairly 'weak' exceptions. Various people and organization, like Lawrence Lessig and the Pirate Party, have advocated for reform. Companies like Google and Facebook have instead basically made it their business to abuse copyright, which especially online most people seem happy with. Unfortunately reality tends to catch up with you and 2018 is turning out to be the year when grace period on how to operate the Internet is running out.
According to what? Because as I said, as far as I know, many European countries have a limited right to quote something. If the law is written to let people quote other people under specific conditions and one entity uses that to quote everyone then that is, whether you like copyright or not, an abuse of copyright. The reasonable position here is either something like what the EU wants or to reform copyright to allow this kind of use, not "Google has such a large legal team that they can get away with it until they don't".
Google shows a lot more than a link and increasingly is tailored to answer your question and prevent you from going to the site that provided the information in the first place.
In the US, factual information can not be copyrighted.
I believe it can in the EU, although I might be misrepresenting their official stance. At the very least, I'm pretty sure that the EU allows you to copyright databases. I'm sure EU residents can correct me if I'm missing some kind of subtlety.
At least in the US though, there is nothing remotely illegal about looking up a fact on a website and then giving it to someone else directly, even if that diverts traffic away from the original site. Copyright was never intended to cover stuff like that.
> It is the Internet that doesn't understand how copyright works.
I agree.
The vast majority of the world disagrees with copyright. They participate in violations on an everyday basis. Many of them possibly hundreds of times per day.
Essentially, we have a distributed proof that your "copyright" is damage to be routed around. Nonsense. Piffle.
Lawmakers will not win this fight except by enslaving their population. People _do not want_ this. Empirically, provably, visibly.
To give an example of this: around 10 years ago I was co-running a website on a fairly narrow topic. One that most of the time is not relevant but every once in a while gets popular.
We happened to have some recent news stories related to the topic plus a very relevant, recent photo.
This was reused (without asking) by a major news outlet. The photo especially bumped their views numbers.
When we enquired about their use of our content, they said they were quoting and, after further prodding, that they could pay us a nominal fee.
Notice a problem with that?
We had to:
1. Be aware that our content is being used,
2. Be the side that is active in seeking renumeration,
3. Try to fight a major news organisation if we wanted a real cut of their ad revenue.
How do you do this if you are small?
Changing the balance and the burden is definitely a move to the right direction, in this case.
The big media and ad companies (Facebook, Google) are effectively making money off someone else's work. I could understand it when they were new and their market was still developing, today however they've grown too strong, I feel.
> The big media and ad companies (Facebook, Google) are effectively making money off someone else's work.
This seems like a cultural difference between copyright proponents and critics (both in the US and EU). To me, this criticism is meaningless. I think that the whole point of modern society is to allow people to make money off of other people's work.
I think there some people who look at a business being built off of other's work, and they say, "By default, we should be suspicious of this with a few exceptions. Unless the public good is enormous (arguably search engines still qualify there), if I make something, only I should profit from it."
Other people look at those businesses and say, "By default, this is the system working completely as intended. Unless the public harm is enormous, if you make something, other people should be able to make things with it."
It's worth noting that in the example you bring up, the news outlet wasn't doing anything with linking or user generated content. Their editorial board just stole your photo. You'd be in the exact same position after this law, because they weren't doing anything that would pass your photo through an upload filter, and they (probably) weren't directly linking to the photo on your site.
Given that the example you list is very clearly something that is not fair use, it seems to me like an even bigger jump than normal to move from "sometimes people steal stuff" to "Google in specific is stealing stuff."
What will happen is that the publishers will make an agreement with Google and Co, cementing their monopoly and making it impossible for challengers such as DuckDuckGo to compete with them.
From the sound of things, the proposal is designed to make this more difficult to do, since that's effectively what already happened in Germany and Spain.
> Recital 32 suggests that (1) anyone who wants to link to the news has to have a separate, commercial license; and (2) news companies can't waive this right, even through Creative Commons licenses and other tools for granting blanket permission.
Unless they're enforcing across-the-board licenses with standard fees though, it's difficult for me to imagine how you would force a publisher not to enter into some kind of special agreement, so I don't know how extensive these kinds of restrictions can actually get in practice.
Well, that is the double edged sword. For two decades or more we enjoyed an internet that was more or less free from regulation because the politicians of the era didn't really use it or understand it. Now the politicians do use it (I doubt they understand it) and are happy to regulate it, I imagine we can expect much more like this from the EU.
Human society is full of problems. Now most of human society uses the internet and not only the more educated, privileged ones. So obviously all the ordinary problems came to the internet.
But I don't see how regulation would have prevented that, nor any improvement of any regulation so far.
It seems a little disingenuous to say that you can't see how the GDPR has improved the privacy situation online, unless you didn't care about it before it was a thing and still don't care about it now.
Well then tell me: did it stop anyone from tracking me?
Did it stop facebook from manipulating the communication of their users? Did it stop google from harvesting data out of most websites?
It mostly just created work and more annoying banners for people to click away, but no real improvement I see. But you see more?
Maybe you mean the recent discussion in germany that landlords might have to remove the names on the door? Or new opportunities for bored and greedy lawers to sue websites who did not care or knew enough and don't have lawers on their own?
I have succesfully used it to get my data removed from services where that would be impossible in the past (most notably, everyone who sends me emails that they feel I desire). There are more examples (like companies that finally have to think about what they're collecting and how), but on a personal level I think that's the most tangible and best one.
If people actually implemented a cookie banner that was compliant, I would like that they are there. Because that means I could filter them away and I could be safe in the knowledge there were no tracking cookies. As it stands, you can see a lot of angry people making things that sound acceptable in the US (by continuing to browse, you agree to [...]) but is actually just not compliant. That's a sad state of affairs, but it's not the fault of the GDPR in my view.
Yesterday I sent two GDPR requests to two companies that would not stop spamming our address with physical junk mail, addressed to us by name.
In the request I requested all the data they had on us, their reason for keeping it and how they obtained it.
Secondly, I demanded they remove us from all of their databases, including those of their vendors.
This is now my good right under the GDPR and I am very happy that these tools exist to allow simple citizens like me to reign in untouchable companies' use of my personal data. It measurably improves my life.
I don't see how the GDPR not preventing Google from harvesting website data is in any way relevant or a measure of GDPR usefulness.
It definitely has not. Let's say company X allows company Y to access data that is personally identifiable. X is located in the EU, whereas company Y is not. Y promises to allow persons to delete their data upon request. However, there is no way that a person know their data has been shared from X to Y until they want to delete their data. At that point, who knows how far the data has spread or if it is even possible to track down. Y could have shared the data with any number of third parties, or may even be incapable of finding every reference to an individual and since it is not EU governed it will be difficult to ever bring Y to court.
Beyond the giants the only thing the GDPR practically did was double the amount of cookie popups you see on the web, and the suppoused harsh consequences don't work if so many organizations are doing it that the bureaucracy can't keep up
I'd say the internet is better and more useful than it's ever been. Some parts can be improved, but if we look at the track record of regulations so far it definitely looks more 'cure is worse than the disease'.
No, you can’t. Not unless you stop living in Europe or the US or any other place that has internet. I don’t have a Facebook account, but I’m certain Facebook knows all it needs to know from friends who shared pictures and tagged me, from people who uploaded their address book which included my phone number, from companies that uploaded my data as part of a targeted audience list. You cannot opt out of this part of the data collection. And all the policies that Facebook promotes, all the social dialogue it shapes, this affects me, too. I cannot possibly opt out of that either.
Facebook under GDPR isn’t allowed to create a shadow profile of EU citizens: all consent has to be opt-in. OK, so they could have some legitimate interest argument, but I find it hard to believe that’d fly in an EU court. They’re also not allowed to use the consent of your associates to process your personal information without your own opt-in consent. So it’s going to be interesting when the first court case with Facebook as a defendant against the GDPR happens.
Let’s see if that happens, but that’s tangential to the point. The GP was asserting that you can just ignore Facebook/Google and that act alone will remove all (ill) effect it might have on your life. I’m asserting this is false. If that effect is reduced by regulation, then this is the opposite of ignorance, it’s actively shaping what these actors can and cannot do.
As far as “social dialogue,” who cares? There is nothing on Facebook that is actually important unless you let it be. Not a single thing happening on Facebook makes one bit of difference to my daily life.
A huge chunk of people uses Facebook, like it or not. Facebook shapes what they see and how they see it, it at least partially shapes their perception of society. And even if you and me opt out of Facebook, the way Facebook shapes that dialogue for that huge chunk of people does affect your daily live.
A few billion in fines for anti competitive behavior would disagree. Google does not want you to have a choice.
> You can still live outside of the Google/Facebook world happily.
Can you? Most restaurants in my area publish their hours and menus using Facebook, others integrate themselves with Google. And how could I fault them? It certainly is cheaper than what they did in the past, paying for a minimal website to do the same. Unless some government comes down on them hard they will continue to infect every aspect of modern live.
I may be an anomaly, but I live in Mountain View and never once looked up restaurant hours on Facebook. Yelp (which I despise,) Google, TripAdvisor and other sites generally have business hours. You could even call the restaurant to get hours! Old fashioned, I know. Maybe I am in a bubble in Silicon Valley but I never have to interact with Facebook to get things done. My kids school, frustratingly, has a What’s App group for parents, but I don’t even need to interact with that to know what’s going on.
All the people lamenting Facebook: simply stop using it.
Yes, you can. Nobody is holding a gun on your head to use Facebook and Google. You don't have to look up restaurants using these services, and if your restaurant is not listed there, you can go in person, or call you know? Or avoid such restaurants altogether. There is absolutely no obligation except habits that have formed over time. And habits can be broken.
It has nothing to with any politicians using or not using the internet. It simply was "unregulated" because it has less impact on the world, and because existing laws were by and large adequate to capture everything that did happen (contrary to popular opinion, the internet has always been subject to regular laws, and some fraud on E-bay is not materially different from offline fraud)
No. What happened is politicians have found a new avenue for indirect taxation and the pay off long term is in the hundred of billions if not trillions of dollars over decades.
The simplicity of it all is that it relies on the same two methods most indirect taxation works, ignorance and exploitation of jealousy. The ignorance part is easy, the public doesn't understand the scope of the issue or how it is a tax on their activities. The jealousy is sold by portraying those being taxed directly as not paying their fair share and such. Indirect taxes are the unseen but real burden on your paycheck
I suppose you can reduce the fact that some people don't like that international tech giants effectively don't pay the same amount of taxes as the homegrown competition as "jealousy" but it's not extremely constructive.
The big problem for the EU is that the internet is effectively a border-less global playing field which makes is very hard to enforce laws, taxes and regulations locally. I agree that their current approach is deeply flawed but at the same time it doesn't seem like we're nearing any kind of global governance for the internet so it seems that the alternative is either Chinese-style crass protectionism or just giving up and letting Google and Facebook eat the European web without giving anything back. Pick your poison.
"letting Google and Facebook eat the European web without giving anything back. Pick your poison. "
Democracy means power of the people.
That is more than just voting.
If most of the people decide to use google and facebook although hating it, than maybe they deserve what they get.
I don't like Facebook, I don't use it.
I like google less every year, I use it less.
But I don't cry and whine for my politicians to tell those evil corporations to do what I want. They are free to offer me what they want. And I am free to decline and use something else.
And this may be smug, but if more people would act like that, there would be more real alternatives.
Except it's not as easy as that. Almost half the web is reporting your every click to Google, through Analytics, and plenty are also reporting to Facebook and others. If you use a Mastercard, Google is getting info on your purchases. If you email a Gmail user, they're getting it too. Your friends (maybe not yours, but many's) are backing up photos of you to Google Photos and sharing them on Facebook, Instagram and more. Your Wifi router is tracked and your house is photographed.
But I am free to use and support the other half of the internet.
And I am free to use adblockers.
And my home is free to be photographed from the outside from anyone. I do not loose anything because of that. Neither do I loose, if friends upload pictures they made. If I do not want to be on a picture I tell them the moment they make it. Or we consent on private use only. And if people make pictures without consent they are not my friends and there are laws for that. (but I actually do not care about that so much)
What I care about it is my communication. I want to be able to communicate with friends all over the world, without a company being able to control and influence that communication. Which is why I do not use Facebook at all.
And I am able to do that, with all the people important to me. The people who insist on facebook ... I can miss out.
And again: yes the situation IS shitty, but I don't see any improvement from regulations at all. Quite the contrary: we just got the annoying "We use Cookies" banners. But the tracking goes on as ever.
I offer a simple solution but nobody likes to hear it. The solution to legal tax avoidance is to stop using tax incentives to do public policy.
Set a single income tax rate for all businesses that they pay on revenue, not on profits. Do the same for individuals as well. No deductions, no credits. If you make $200k a year, your taxes are the same whether you have zero dependants or twelve.
Similarly, if you made $200M in revenue, you pay taxes on the $200M.
This is a little difficult because I have no idea how to account for Google putting ads for Pixel devices on Google search results or Facebook peddling their Alexa device in Instagram but there must be a way to force companies to report this as revenue. No idea how this will work for the Google home page for which there is no established price structure.
We can still keep a progressive tax regime. Maybe 0% income tax for revenues under a certain amount and higher taxes for higher brackets. But people never want to listen. They keep saying oh grocery stores will go out of business or whatever. I think it is pretty silly. We can't have it both ways. If we want to prevent legal tax avoidance, we must act to prevent tax avoidance.
That solution is not simple at all. Let's take the creation and selling of wooden chairs as an example.
Let's say chopping down trees costs $100, turning wood into chairs costs $100, and selling chairs also costs $100. Let's assume companies are non-profits (to make things easier).
Company A Spends $100 to create a unit of wood.
Company B spends $100 for a unit of wood, and spends $100 to make that into a chair, and sells for $200.
Company C spends $200 to buy a chair, spends $100 to have a nice shop and friendly sales people, and sells for $300.
Now let's add taxes! We'll do 10% to make the numbers easy.
Company A pays $10 taxes.
Company B pays $20 taxes.
Company C pays $30 taxes.
Total taxes paid on a chair bought at company C: $60.
Now we introduce company D. Company D is large, and can produce its own wood, has its own chair-making factory, and has its own shop. A chair at company D also costs $300. But company D only has to pay $30 in taxes!
In the real world, company D will immediately drive companies A, B, and C out of business (or acquire them!) because it can sell its chairs cheaper, because it only had to pay taxes once.
The problem with your suggested solution is that companies owning their entire production line get an immediate tax-advantage over smaller companies who do not. If implemented, there would still be legal tax avoidance by simply forming bigger companies.
That's not how VAT works. All three companies A, B, and C pay $10 each, because they have all added $100 value to the goods they have sold. Is that not how it works everywhere?
Apropos... popular macro-economic theory is based more or less on the idea that the economic financial system is not sensitive to conditions like these. As you just showed, it's actually quite trivial to demonstrate that it is.
That model is generally called "The Rally Stupid VAT". It bankrupts every single trading business, as well the majority of producers–essentially any value chain longer than 1.
All retail business will be the first to die. Because when your supermarket charges you $1 for milk, they would have to pay 20 cents (or whatever your tax rate is). They also have to buy the milk. Since margins are typically around 2% or 3% in this segment, any tax >3% will make retail impossible or dramatically increase prices.
So congratulation for effectively demonstration the danger of this ignorant trend of mindless hate of "government", and "experts": Those that believe they have easy solutions don't even notice when what they're proposing would cause widespread famine.
Thank you. I'm not married to my plan. I only bring it up because people were talking about tax loophole. I'm perfectly willing to let it die. I can't say retailers are exempt from my plan. I definitely cannot say tax domestic revenue minus domestic expenses. There is no way we can get all our trading partners to synchronize on a date to start doing this at the same time and without that synchronization I think this is against international trade agreements.
I offer a simple solution - tax on UK sales - UK costs. (For the case of the UK, but substitute your own country here). If the business is generally importing cheaply, marking up heavily and selling on then it will pay a large tax. If they employ loads of people and export then they'll probably pay not tax.
Taking on extra employees or switching to a local producer will reduce your tax bill. The government is then collecting payroll taxes from the new employee so it doesn't miss out too much.
If you're a global coffee chain that didn't make any 'profit' because you licence your logo from a subsidiary based in Switzerland. Well, that can't be deducted so you will be paying tax.
I cannot really tell what your supposedly "simple solution" actually is. But it seems just a restatement of OPs, but filtered through a Brexiteer's compulsion to add a bit us-vs-them to the mix.
In that case it suffers from the same failures as OP: Starbucks would seize to exist because coffee still makes up 50%+ of their cost of doing business. And it adds an extra layer of "but why?" with an artificial distinction between domestic and foreign-produced goods.
It is more like politicians realised they can make a lot of money creating regulations in the internet space for whoever pays more. Just like they do with anything else. They just need to wrap it with nice words and public is going to buy anything, you just need to cook it in the media for a bit. I am being cynical but there are no good intentions in the politics, it is only about power and money. They just need to be careful to not anger the Plebs too much.
my country's government (EU-based) uses GDPR in order to hide corrupt state employees from public scrutiny.
last time it was used to hide identities of local police who were caught on tape causing grievous bodily harm to protesters. the state refused to name the culprits due to GDPR.
the same GDPR is also currently used to turn people away from hospitals, as those require tens of pages of signatures in order for them to be able to treat you.
does it matter to the state that they're abusing gdpr? to the contrary. they've just found another toy to fuck us over.
meanwhile I'm not only abused by the state, but a bunch of US-based websites basically cut off europe from the rest of the world.
in the end all I can say is that while I support the principle behind most EU ideas, the actual law that gets adopted is usually a far cry from what it should have been. also, this sort of naivety when it comes to the state power is still mind boggling. if you think google is bad, you have no idea.
I wouldn't want my government to release the names of state employees, corrupt or not, to the people - especially if those people can become the target of mob justice.
Of course, they should still be brought to trail or whatever when they are corrupt, but if that doesn't happen, then that is the problem - not that they're not being exposed to public rule.
Correct; if the state can no longer democratically be controlled by citizens, revolution is the only option.
However, when the state is protecting bad actors, one should not call for the law to be adjusted to allow for mob justice, but for a functioning judiciary branch.
Well the EU was originally supposed to be a club of like minded elites. Now countries like Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg share the EU with Bulgaria.
Now if the EU was just an economic Union like the old EEC this wouldn't be a problem but we are long past that. This was all foreseen by the way but it was expected that the new member states would be uplifted like Spain and Portugal where in the 1970s.
The problem is that the only way a lot of these EU regulations can get through is by general directive: the intents and goals are agreed upon as a group, the implementation is left to the individual state. You can imagine how impossible it would be to get all European countries to agree on anything otherwise. On top of that, a lot of these rules do really need to be adapted to local national contexts to makes sense.
However, that also leaves plenty of room for exploitation, like the stuff you mentioned. I'm sorry to hear the GDPR is being abused this way.
Perhaps if it's hard to get agreement that's a good thing? Then only things that are truly agreed to would happen at the EU level. That seems like a feature of the system, not a bug.
The GDPR was implemented as a Regulation, not as a Directive, which means it wasn't adapted; the original text was directly applied to every EU nation.
Of course, there's still the problem between the law and its enforcement. But that's often a problem even inside a single country.
I'm with EFF on many things, but "link tax" is a non-starter for any serious discussion. There is no "tax" at all here, and the copyright reform isn't about "links". It's about clarifying the legal situation of search engines and news aggregators previewing large parts of other site's content, which has always been copyright infringement. "Link tax" FUD doesn't contribute.
I'm lost on their first excerpt (recital 32) and their interpretation about compulsory commercial license and how it kills Creative Commons. Maybe I'm slow but that quoted text implies no such things, so the EFF makes claims without backing them up (without properly doing the work of explain the steps of how they derived those consequences).
>> Such protection should be effectively guaranteed through the introduction, in Union law, of rights related to copyright for the reproduction and making available to the public of press publications in respect of digital uses in order to obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for such uses.
Which makes some sense. If you have a digital version that needs to still give you money but them:
>> In addition, the listing in a search engine should not be considered as fair and proportionate remuneration.
Says you will have to pay in a different from just driving traffic to those ppl.
Now if I’m a Creative Commons news outlet there is no way for me to waive that extra payment. The law states that just listing me somewhere is not enough and I need to be paid in a different way. I may not want that but the law INSISTS that I get paid in a different way.
Why is there no way to waive that right? It's not a criminal statute.
I'm not saying the recital 32 is great, and clear and amazing. It's not, but it doesn't mean much until it gets into a draft regulation/directive, gets challenged in court, etc.
"In addition, the listing in a search engine should not be considered as fair and proportionate remuneration."
seems to be specifically targeted at search engines. I'm not sure how this is about a "link tax" more than it is about a "search engine tax". I'm fairly certain we will still be able to share our links on Facebook and Twitter, the embedded excerpts might be in jeopardy though.
>> The Directive is extremely vague on what defines a "link" or a "news story" and implies that an "excerpt" consists of more than one single word from a news-story (many URLs contain more than a single word from the headline).
So it is based on the link and also the main point is to force news outlets to get more money for nothing more than a link which drives traffic to them anyways...
Okay maybe the most correct definition should be: “search engine link tax” from this specific excerpt but it is also left very vague. What’s is a search engine. Is github a search engine? Are links to news articles on GitHub issues the same fate as on google?
So then you go back and think of the potential “search engines” out there and it does start to feel more like a “link tax” because most things can be considered a search engine.
//OFFTOPIC: I mean is anything built with full text search a where clause not close to a search engine (in theory)? Lol
I totally agree with this comment; it would be great to have an honest discussion around the proposed laws.
The law is supposed to prevent re-publishing of content with minor attribution ala Google News or this type of thing[0] from Boing Boing. The proposed law states specifically that "the act of hyperlinking" is excluded[1] and even says that "insubstantial parts ... (for instance very short excerpts)" would not be against the law[2].
I always assumed the search engines and aggregators just pulled from the open graph tags. What happens if a legit person summarizes the story? What if an algorithm summarizes it?
If Google creates their own journalism arm, or some variant (e.g. YouTube for News), does that bypass this?
Is the endgame of these EU laws full vertical integration, so you have one company paying itself, no 'third party cookie' because there's only a first party, etc?
The EU is usually open -- see the TTIP negotiations.
The EU Parliament is elected based on popular vote. If populists like Farage are in the parliament, that's only because people vote for them. Hardly undemocratic.
The EU Council comprises the elected head of government of each member state. Hardly undemocratic.
The EU Commission comprises a president, who is selected by the EU Council and approved or denied by the EU Parliament. The Council also appoints the members of the commission, each country appoints 1 person. In the UK this is no different to the PM appointing ministers.
For this law to pass, not only does the parliament of elected MEPs have to pass it, but so does a majority of the Council, elected leaders.
While it suits heads of various EU governemnts to blame 'the EU', it's entirely in their control to approve or reject the directive, and it's entirely in your MEP's control to approve or reject it.
This is not true for the Congress which is the comparable institution to the European Parliament.
Each state is apportioned a number of seats which
approximately corresponds to its share of the aggregate
population of the 50 states.
... The method of equal proportions minimizes the
percentage differences in the populations of the
congressional districts. [1]
Some outliers exist, because states are guaranteed at least one seat (compare that with 6 for Luxembourg)
I don't get your point. you say it is not true and then you agree that some outliers exist. this is exactly the point, that there are outliers like this in US Congress, just like there are in the EU parliament. Probably the value is higher in the EU, but I think that's fair to protect the smaller states.
His argument is that the 11:1 ratio of MEPs is not democratic, but the 2:1 ratio of Congress is democratic.
The UK has a system, widely known as democratic, where the government of the day (with the exception of 2010), does not have the support of the voting population. In 2015 David Cameron and his Tory party got 100% of power in Parliament, and thus 100% of power in the executive, based on 36.9% of the voting public.
The U.S presidential elections are also classed as democratic, despite that twice in the last 20 years more people have voted for a different candidate than the one who became president.
(It's actually worse than 11:1 ratio -- Podlaskie and Warmian-Masurian has 1.3m voters per MEP, Malta has 70,000, that's a 19:1 ratio)
However I've never heard people complain that Malta, Luxemboug, Slovenia, Cyprus etc hold the cards, people always complain it's Germany and the UK that call the shots.
The senate was never meant to be democratic; the state of US government classes must be atrocious these days, because people never seem to understand this. Senators have only been directly elected at all for 100 years, they were supposed to be a check on populism from the lower house, and a way for smaller states to block large states from ramrodding through nationwide legislation.
They (the EFF and Cory Doctorow) do, it's not secret.
I'm not saying the EU internal negotiations are open to all and wonderful examples of democratic policymaking, but the documents are public (thanks to an EU court ruling).
There are two possible outcomes from Article 11. Either it will backfire and large Internet networks like Google or Facebook will start removing links to news sites which will have the opposite result from what the latter where hopping when they were lobbying for a new copyright law, or it will kill the web as we know it at least in Europe. I'd put my money on the first scenario.
Worst case is adding a little more bureaucracy. Google will stop listing news sites, or at least summaries. The number of visitors will crash and the news sites will be forced to give Google (and others) a free license to link to their content.
It not going to be an issue, some newspapers already allow to access to articles for free is you come directly from a search engine.
The part I find troubling is filtering user uploaded content, that's simply not going to work.
In the end Google said "ok, then we'll stop listing you" and suddenly the publishers that wanted this law gave Google permission to link to them without cost. Sounds okay in theory, but every minor search engine or news aggregator which doesn't have the defacto monopoly of Google still suffers from it.
which then had the interesting effect of actually being great for Google, it will effectively prevent any competition of google news forever. Politicians are all corrupt/payed for, they have absolutely no concept of what they are doing and could not care less about its collateral damage.
>the news sites will be forced to give Google (and others) a free license to link to their content.
The insidious thing - a free license can't even be offered under the law. I presume it's meant to preclude both the repeat of the case you mention, and prevent "race to the bottom", i.e., news providers competing with each other on price on resource that has near-zero marginal cost (an article being linked to/snippeted from).
From TFA:
>Recital 32 suggests that (1) anyone who wants to link to the news has to have a separate, commercial license;
>and (2) news companies can't waive this right, (...)
The most bothering part is not the objective, or the nature of the law. That we can argue.
But it's the absurdity of the fact that the EU can pass a law which has such massive and widespread implications - where the wording is unclear, bizarre, makes little sense, and can hardly be applied.
Surely there are smart people working on this, but collectively they are morons. Utter idiots.
Whatever it is, it has to be clean, simple, effective, spelled out ... or else there just shouldn't be a law.
> Surely there are smart people working on this, but collectively they are morons. Utter idiots.
Laws are supposed to be readable by everyone, you can't expect everyone to be a tech expert. If you feel like non-experts are "morons" or "idiot", you should take a break and talk to your grand-parents. Explain to them your work field, and you will realize most of the work we do everyday is artificially complex to keep everyone busy. There is actually a tendency for tech people to retain knowledge in order to acquire an advantage and power from the entire society. Tech moves fast, but the rest of us can't follow, it creates inequalities, so here are the regulations.
The laws have to be technically correct, if legislators do not understand the internet it behoves them to hire experts that do.
Can you imagine them writing similar, nonsensical health related laws?
Moreover - the issues are not that complicated, they can be explained in an hour.
They are idiots, and also too lazy to learn trivial, common things.
Don't underestimate the arrogance and entitlement of European legislators: they went to expensive schools, they've mingled with the intelligentsia all of their life - of course they must 'know better' than the common person! (sarcasm).
Given I'm European, I prefer to trust my democratly elected politicians rather than a comment from a random stranger on the internet. Sorry, but thanks for the attempt.
You are also a 'random person on the internet' to all of us, so your logic as an argument does not very well apply.
(Also - the EU is not Europe. It's a terrible habit that some Europeans have of conflating the two)
The legislators who design these laws are not elected, and you have absolutely no ability to influence the direction of these laws. As an EU citizen, you should be more informed as to how this process works legally, but also materially. Legally, there's no relationship between voters, and the Commission designed with writing laws. They are absolutely not elected, and they don't take populist needs into consideration - in fact, it's designed specifically to not be democratic.
The only hope you have might be to have MEP's amend legislation as it passes by, but almost nobody in Europe has an awareness of this process, they don't know who their MEP is, they don't know what they stand for. Can you tell me right now, without looking it up, the name of your MEP and what they represent?
But this is all moot. The legislation is objectively stupid. It makes no sense. It will cause essentially an internet meltdown the likes of which nobody has ever seen. EU legislators are worrying about 'Brexit'? How are you going to live if Google, Bing, Wikipedia, and every other search engine goes black? Or when your newspapers instantly go out of business because the legislation meant to protect them kills them?
The issue of 'democracy' and even 'good intent' are secondary to the fact that the legislation is very materially and very damagingly stupid. This legislation is the equivalent of making chemical weapons in your own home as a 'fun experiment' and then dying from it ...
Even beyond the damage the legislation could do - it makes the Commission look basically incompetent, and it erodes the goodwill that they need to stay alive, as Euroscepticism grows on the continent.
How will the plebes react if even just wikipedia goes black for whatever reason? It would be like the internet version of a 'bread revolt'.
> The legislators who design these laws are not elected, and you have absolutely no ability to influence the direction of these laws.
Correct, but all 'designed' laws must be approved by the European Parliament, which is elected.
> Can you tell me right now, without looking it up, the name of your MEP and what they represent?
No, and I don't need to, because I eventually vote for a long-term political view and ideology, not for specific people.
> Or when your newspapers instantly go out of business because the legislation meant to protect them kills them?
You try to install a climate of urgency and fears, which is a tactic from far-right political groups. Building the European Union took times, and it is still being built.
A legislation is not set in stone, it can be changed, by the same system, with adequate discussions and processes.
It is known than the democratic system, with separated powers, is the least worst system of the political systems. So, at the end of the day, I have still more trust in the Commission and Parliament processes to defend my European rights than trust in your alarmist, pessimistic and defeatist opinion.
They are not idiots: they work to save a dying industry (most news outlets are running on public subventions) that is beneficial for them by presenting their political opponents in a bad way. How poor the law is is not their concern.
Could we leave this one-sided manichean rhetoric to Reddit and Twitter? Saving the industry is clearly a key motivation but the tinfoil hat theory makes no sense, in most European countries subventions cater to the entire spectrum of the press regardless of political opinion. If anything destroying the press would make it even easier to control the narrative.
It's not just the press either, it's the whole cultural industry that they try to save. I'm not a big fan of protectionism but if you look at the French cultural industry for instance (and contrast it with, say, Italy's) we've had some moderate success preserving it through protectionist regulations (quotas, fixed prices for books, regulations regarding advertising of movies etc...). I'm not very happy with that but pragmatically I can't completely dismiss these regulations since they appear to have had a positive effect on the local industry.
I'm not saying this is the right way to go but I'm always a bit frustrated that many on HN seem to lose all sense of measure and intellectual honesty every time government or regulations are mentioned.
I think this "link tax" is a bad thing but at the same time I also see the very real problem the regulators are trying to fix.
> they work to save a dying industry (most news outlets are running on public subventions)
In my home country you could trace most news outlets back to a few big players and those tend to be in the top 100 rich people of the country. If they are getting public subventions I would see it more as a way for politicians to keep the coverage positive.
I think there is an earnest attempt to save journalism overall ... but also consider that European industries are static, and especially the press are owned by old, rich families who have considerable influence.
Not only that - there is absolutely no accountability for those laws. If whatever they pass turns out to be a disaster, nobody would go to jail for that and public wouldn't be compensated. Worrying fact is that they are constantly pushing it to test how far they can go.
Why cannot we see how MEPs voted? Smearing them in local media for their votes would quickly put a stop to this and other nonsense being passed in EP. Without electronic vote tracking, MEPs are free to vote for lobbyists while sweet-talking the public.
I see them now. Thanks. I wish there was a clean website where this information could be easily found by picking legislation on one side and MEPs on the other side.
The EU has already destroyed the web surfing experience for everyone, with their cookie laws. Now most sites require users to click on some banners that cover half of the screen on mobile, just to get to the content, on some random site they might only visit once. Argh!
I wonder what they'll do next. At some point in the future we're going to need a "new internet".
So ban the EU then. The market will find another venue if the service is useful enough.
If a website is obnoxious about its GDPR compliancy, I just close it. Coincidentally, it has never happened on something I really needed (technical documentation, scientific journals, etc.)
I don't necessarily agree with how the GDPR was created, or maybe even why, but to say it's worse than the information tyranny being built in the world today? Pft.
HN doesn't set tracking cookies, for example. The only two cookies set are the cloudflare uid and a user login cookie, both of which are hardly meant for tracking.
As long as analytics don't produce any personal data of an individual and only aggregate data or even anonymized data, it should be perfectly fine to do without any banner.
Of course, if you use Google Analytics, you can't guarantee what Google is doing, so you'll need some banner to get consent before you can perform any analytics through GA (which means you need to disable GA until the user agrees, which barely any site does anyway).
If you can guarantee that the analytics won't produce or store personal data, you don't need to disable it or produce a banner.
> As long as analytics don't produce any personal data of an individual and only aggregate data or even anonymized data, it should be perfectly fine to do without any banner.
Even if they did produce personal data, they very likely wouldn't need a banner. For processing personal data you merely need a lawful basis and documented processes, and asking consent is (intentionally) the least attractive lawful basis for using personal data. Consider for example the "legitimate interest" lawful basis:
> processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child.
If you're using analytics to, say, optimise accessibility/usability of the site, then it should be fairly straight forward that the legitimate interest of both you and user (of improving the site) outweighs the "privacy harm" of processing that personal data. (Of course, using it for anything else will land you in hot water if you argue this).
Even a 3rd party data processor like Google Analytics would be fine, if they're 1) GDPR compliant and 2) you have a data processing agreement with the provider.
90% of websites who don't do shady things with your personal data should never require any banner or opt-in prompt. The fact that most of the web now does is incompetence, ignorance, intentional annoyance to provoke legislation change, or a mix of these.
Do you need banners for self hosted analytics not shared with 3rd parties? I'd be fine with clicking through countless banners if that pushes the industry even just slightly in that direction.
nope.. that is the point of these laws - if you are doing decent stuff they don't really make a difference. if you are doing dodgey stuff you just have to tell people you what you are up to.. but dodgey people don't like telling people they are dodgey - hence all the moaning!
I'm sorry, what? Did you forget the page-covering adds with fake close buttons? The hidden adds which played incredibly loud music at random intervals? The seizure-inducing flashing colours?
It's just as easy to escape GDPR banners: Just don't visit the offending sites. Free markets at work.
And similar to ads, I expect automated tools to emerge that eliminate most GDPR banners by granting the minimum consent required (optionally alerting the relevant regulator if that's excessively broad) and then revoking it immediately afterwards.
You can't escape bureaucracy, but you can escape the lazy companies who can't think of a better way to deal with bureaucracy than pushing it onto the user.
Not my favourite newspaper but the website design is great. Simple, fast, works with my default uBlock, Noscript,Privacy Badger settings! I wish more sites were like that.
in my opinion this is a total misunderstanding of the situation:
1. people are being taken advantage of
2. law is introduced to make it harder to take advantage of people
3. scummy people still try and take advantage by trying to confuse their users
and now please tell me why i should be on the scummy person side again?
you don't need a cookie notification if you don't serve cookies for other people. and you don't need any GDPR notifications if you are not selling sharing or needlessly storing peoples data.
you are going to websites run by scummy people, that is the problem not the law.
in essence if you are not shitty to people these laws really don't have much impact.
Isn't this against freedom of speech and thus against constitution in most member states? Nobody can stop me from disseminating my ideas free of charge, right?
Trampling of open content is a part of wider tendency of governments everywhere in the world to suppress and reverse automation by passing labor-intensive laws and subsidizing labor-intensive businesses. Every time we make progress with automation, they invent more work for us to do.
Open content is up to 100 times more popular. It therefore requires up to 100 times less work to satisfy demand. They just cannot let this happen.
This follows from the strange ethic of valuing hard work over efficiency. Labor is sacred. Avoidance of work is considered amoral. Economic output is supposed to be split according to the amount of work done, at least in theory. Any other alternative is considered communist. In order to maintain this moral system, people must be made to work even if the work is useless or subversive.
the fact that individual news organisations can't even waive this right, really makes this look lobbied, because the lobbyist corporations will definitely look bad if the others choose to not charge this tax
While this "link tax" is indeed rather stupid, the EFF is to a certain degree overstating their case.
If you check the current proposals (http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12513-2018-I...) you will find (page 93) that the Council inserted a specific exemption for wikipedia and open source code. That's in addition to a few passages that had already been included previously, and that pretty clearly show that any requirement to collect from people linking to you only applies to large, commercial publishers.
Many people attack this proposal with rather wild interpretations, often of the sort of hair-splitting non-lawyers consider very smart. Those usually just get a tired rolling of the eyes from judges.
Real life is nothing but nuances, yet laws need to be abstract, and provide enough guidance to adequately capture future situations. Since it's impossible to make laws for every individual case (and actually illegal in many jurisdiction), there is no way around some ambiguity in the text. Closing that gap is the fundamental task of judges, and they actually have a pretty good track record of finding equatable outcomes.
It's also worth to consider the problem the EU is trying to solve: journalism has seen its revenue crash by 50% to 75%, with the disappearance not just of readers, but classifieds and advertisers at the same time. Both in Europe and the US, local newspapers will be gone from vast swaths of the country. Those that remain are but shells of what they once were.
Not having some professionals who show up at the 8am city council planning session every week means citizen will be effectively cut off from accurate information about politics. Yet if you don't know what is happening, it's is impossible to make decisions in the voting booth. Without this essential loopback, politicians' career prospects become entirely divorced from their actions, rendering democracy meaningless.
This current proposal seems to be far too convoluted, and enough of the fears are credible to make it look like a bad idea to me.
But instead of spinning conspiracy theories of who paid whom, it would (have been) far more effective to try to find some other mechanism to ensure the survival of at least some journalism.
One idea I've been bouncing around for far too many years is an ad blocker that is smart enough to block only ads that are annoying or dangerous. I am quite sure that there's a balance that reduces annoyances by 80% while having far less of an impact on revenue.
If something like this had succeeded in easing some of the economic pressure, it would be far less likely that politicians feel the need to devote their time to such hard-handed measures such as link taxes.
> The definition does not include services whose main purpose is not to provide access to copyright protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from this activity. [...] Nor does this definition cover websites which store and provide access to content for non-for-profit purposes, such as online encyclopaedias, scientific or educational repositories or open source software developing platforms which do not store and give access to content for profit making purposes.
>> you will find (page 93) that the Council inserted a specific exemption for wikipedia and open source code.
Funny because EFF never once mentions Wikipedia in their statement on the problems with this law. So I am not sure why you believe they are "overstating their case" when their case has nothing to do with wikipedia nor open source code.
>>there is no way around some ambiguity in the text. Closing that gap is the fundamental task of judges, and they actually have a pretty good track record of finding equatable outcomes.
I have a feeling we will have massive disagreements on the track record of judges finding equatable outcomes. I could not disagree more this statement
>It's also worth to consider the problem the EU is trying to solve: journalism has seen its revenue crash by 50% to 75%,
It is not the proper role or function of government to protect the profits of any industry, and it is often very dangerous to society when they do.
>Not having some professionals who show up at the 8am city council planning session every week means citizen will be effectively cut off from accurate information about politics.
And this law will do nothing about that. Local News reporting has been on a downward spiral LONG before the internet, in fact one of the reasons people have turned to the internet for their news is because most local outlets are garbage. They love to blame everything but their own incompetence for this but at the end of the day they only have themselves to blame not google, reddit, or any other internet site.
>One idea I've been bouncing around for far too many years is an ad blocker that is smart enough to block only ads that are annoying or dangerous.
Annoying is far too subjective to ever be codified into blocking software. The task of blocking on "dangerous" ads while allowing "good" ads is an unsolvable problem, akin to having a computer only run "good code" while blocking "dangerous code"
> I am quite sure that there's a balance that reduces annoyances by 80% while having far less of an impact on revenue.
It would be exponentially more difficult to convince every user not to block all ads, I don't think this is doable.
Instead we should think of how information and misinformation propagates in the era of www as opposed to the era of newspaper and tv. What we need is to keep the public informed, not to prop up a failing business sector.
For one, the www makes it much cheaper to spread targeted misinformation. That didn't happen before.
> professionals who show up at the 8am city council planning session
The promise of the internet was that we wouldn't need this person because we have direct access to the city council session, and it has largely delivered. The tech is there for the city council to make its sessions public. It is transparency that killed the journalist, not google.
That was my thought (the city council session should be on the web) at first, but I believe a person is still needed to make a summary, to explain certain things (sometimes people use lingo or refer to things you might not know), verify claims, etc.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me I have just described the job of a journalist.
Or of a reddit commenter. Or of an HN commenter. Or a peer reviewer. Or a blog poster. There is a wide selection nowadays. No need to channel everything through a handful of individuals.
Or a facebook post. Or a russian twitter bot. None of them you can trust. All of those selected for you to see by algorithms.
And you really want to tell me this is no different or definitively better than the last century's news systems? Or even that we understand what impacts the switch to social media will have?
Certainly it’s no worse than this century’s news system, which produces, as far as I can tell, journalists that do exactly the same thing.
Find a source you know (through research and watching over time) you can trust and read them, whether they publish in Reddit or USAToday. That’s something you can do today that wasn’t really possible before.
But the journalist is likely more of an expert on the issues. While there are great comments on HN and Reddit, there are also a lot of arm chair "experts," who now have just as much exposure as real experts. If these scheme is to be productive, we'd need to add some way to assess people's qualifications when we read their comments.
The media can "create" experts a lot more convincingly. In fact it's very hard for someone to gain "expert" status on reddit for example. It's hard to do it when your historic timeline is visible at every point (see also: paul krugman). It's easier for a mediocre journalist to hide behind her newspaper's brand (you see it every day with fluff filler pieces).
Expertise is a perception problem , and perception can easily be gamed. It happens in mainstream media too, but it's harded to measure there than on the internet. I don't think we need to regress back to experts, that's always a power play. Giving people a plurality of opinions works better.
It's not this specific decision, but this category of decisions. The EU seems to constantly legislate on "small" things that piss off some subset of the population in a country. Eventually there's a large enough number of annoyances that a majority of individuals are bothered by.
To take an arbitrary example - increasing the age required to obtain an unrestricted motorcycle license.
On the face of it it's not that significant. No-one really cares about this apart from in the abstract. It reduces death rates, and from that perspective it's a good thing.
But there's some small bit of the population that is now pissed off by this, you've told them "wait until you're older", and they don't like that and vote against you.
(It certainly annoyed me at the time despite already having a full licence and already being above the new cut off. No, not enough to vote Leave. I like my citizenship.).
Now multiply that by lots of issues which affect different people.
You don't consider this kind of crap to be one of the reasons why people voted for Brexit?
I voted for Brexit not because of most of the commonly touted but because of the breathtaking arrogance of the EU leaders. If you followed the series of referenda all around Europe regarding the EU's policies, you will see that in almost every instance the popular vote went against the EU, only for member countries politicians to ignore the peoples votes.
Britain is simply a country whose leaders promised to leave the EU if the public voted against it, and as far as we can see they are committed to honouring that promise.
It was the EUs handling of Jorg Haider's party's election victory that decided Brexit for me, ie about 8 or 9 years before the Brexit vote, and FWIW I am not white. Don't assume that all the reasons usually touted were the cause for the vote for Brexit.
Honestly, having read many EU standards, they are usually some of the most sensible, reasonable legislation you could ask, on both the consumer and producer side. Most silliness that gets blamed on them is either willfull misinterpretation of the rules ('EU says banana must be straight!'. No, EU says bananas must not be misshapen (by, for example, having a 90 degree bend in the middle of an otherwise normally shaped banana) if they are to be classed above a certain grade), or excessive risk aversion on the part of companies (usually driven by lawyers).
They claim their law applies to their citizens. Especially on the internet, where a company can be 'based' wherever will regulate them the least, this is a reasonable compromise.
National governments do crazy stuff like this constantly too. They also do useful things. So does the EU. The case (or at least this case) against the EU is pretty much the same as the case against all governments.
The right question isn't "does this organization do crazy things?" but "do the good things outweigh the bad, or the other way around?".
The other thing is that I think a lot of the "EU does crazy things" narrative is deliberately, and dishonestly, pushed by people who are more interested in making the EU look bad than in the truth. (I am not suggesting that sarcasmOrTears is such a person: only that their perception of what the EU does may have been affected by the long-running Make The EU Look Bad campaign.)
So does the EU. MEPs are elected just as democratically as MPs (in the UK), Representatives/Senators (in the US), etc.
Magna Carta was about the balance of power between the king and the barons; commoners' interests come into it only incidentally.
The American Revolution is a slightly better case, but note that its "No taxation without representation!" battle-cry wouldn't be any sort of case against the EU because (1) everyone in EU countries does have respresentation, and (2) while for some countries EU membership is a net cost (at least if you ignore the benefits of free trade, free movement, etc.) that cost is a tiny fraction of those countries' total revenue base; e.g., the UK's net contribution is about £8B/year, which is a little over 1% of total UK taxes.
Having your revenue down by 50-60% (hopefully) because you’re dumb enough to think that your lobbying is the smartest idea sound like justice.
I just can’t believe that the EU is actually doing this. It puts a really bad taste in my mouth that it tries to regulate something it does not really understand just because of large lobbyist corporations.