
Article 13 Is Back On: Worse, Not Better - walterbell
https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/article-13-worse/
======
mcv
You'd think those law makers would learn. Or maybe we're the ones who should
learn.

When the original proposal was shot down, we were happy because we
thought/hoped it was shot down for our reasons, but even then there were signs
that some parties in the EU opposed it because it wasn't quite terrible
enough. So now they made it worse.

I hope we can keep getting this shot down, but it seems to be important enough
for the copyright monopolists to keep pushing this, and public opinion may
eventually tire of this.

The good thing is that EU elections are coming in May. We need to know which
parties support this so we can campaign against them. Let them bleed in the
elections if they won't listen.

~~~
yeahitslikethat
They have learned. 2 decades worth of learning from the failed dmca, which
basically granted Google immunity from copyright violation.

Why should companies like Google be allowed to profit off content creators'
work without complying with those content creators' licenses?

~~~
mcv

      > Why should companies like Google be allowed to profit off content creators' work
      > without complying with those content creators' licenses?
    

If it's about profit, simply having YouTube pay all revenue from infringing
videos to the real owner, might be a much better idea than to block all
content.

The process might work like this: A publishes something, gets revenue from it.
B claims copyright. YT suspends payment to A until the issue is settled. When
B turns out to be right, B gets all the withheld revenue plus however much YT
already paid to A, either to be paid by A, or to be withheld by YT from other
payments to A.

~~~
RHSeeger
Or it turns out B was wrong, willfully so, and A just lost their income.
Sadly, this was A's most popular content and, since A was living paycheck to
paycheck, they were unable to pay their rent and were evicted.

B went on to do the same to many other small content creators, because B has
100 million dollars in the bank.

~~~
killaken2000
Then A disputes the claim a YouTube asks B if the they are sure its infringing
on their copyright. B lies and says yes, then YouTube sides with B while A
gets a copyright strike, 3 of which and you lose your channel.

Scammers are also extorting money from Youtubers using this feature of
Youtube's claim process. See: ObbyRaidz

~~~
mcv
In case of conflict, YouTube shouldn't blindly side with the most powerful
party as they're currently doing. Legally the fairest way would be an
impartial judge, but in practice small players can't afford the legal
representation for that.

------
lbj
This has happened countless times: A very ill received proposal meets
sufficient public resistance to be publicly labeled as "defeated", only to
resurface in an almost identical version months/years later. It seems obvious
that strong powers playing the long game are lobbying to see this passed.

~~~
afpx
This seems to have become standard operating procedure in the US, and it
really kills peoples' trust of our legislative system. It's saddening to hear
that the EU is not immune to it either.

~~~
lbj
I would say it's standard in most western countries.

~~~
jandrese
Eastern countries too, unless they're too totalitarian to hold votes.

~~~
chme
That is probably a property of representative democracy.

~~~
jandrese
It's a property of all systems. Some asshole is going to try to abuse it to
enrich themselves. That's why checks on power are so important.

------
kevin_b_er
This will kill any form of free expression on the Internet in Europe. Join me
in considering France, and soon the EU, as an enemy of human rights. The
European Convention on Human Rights, Article 10, is dead.

~~~
Mirioron
I used to be in favor of the EU, but over the last decade the more I learned
about how it operated and what kind of regulations they passed, the more
opposed I became to it. Just the fact that they're bringing this proposal back
_again_ means that the "lawmakers" have zero respect for the general public.

~~~
jplayer01
I agree to an extent. If France decided to implement these laws in their own
country, 30 something other countries could shrug and do their own thing,
while the French could attempt to fight it on a local or regional level. While
the EU has enabled plenty of good, it's also the perfect platform to implement
less good policies such as this in the interest of corporations or
rightsholders on an intranational level in a way that wasn't possible before.
It's also much harder to be heard as a citizen on the EU-level. I'm not sure
what the solution should be, since overall I support the EU.

~~~
anticensor
France is an unitary state with provinces and cities. Copyrights are a
national matter in unitary states.

~~~
jplayer01
It's not like there's a national place where you can set up shop and protest
or strike. It happens on a local or regional level just because of how
geography and people work. If the national government doesn't give a shit
either way, then I'm not sure what I can realistically suggest here, but it's
irrelevant to the point I was making.

------
kmlx
we're getting the the Great Firewall of Europe in small but important steps.

expect to see more "Banned because you're from Europe" messages plastered all
over the Internet.

except for VPN and moving to another country, is there any other way for a
European to avoiding EU regulation?

~~~
mcv
Vote. Write and talk about this. Create awareness.

We need to shoot this down again and again until they learn. We need to vote
them out of office and fix this corporate corruption in our government.

Most importantly, we need to get non-geeks to care about internet freedom,
because as long as they believe the talk about how this is necessary, or
simply don't care, the copyright monopolists will be able to get away with
pressuring governments to undermine our freedom.

~~~
makomk
I don't think we even can vote them out of office. All proposed EU laws are
created by the European Commission, which is made up of unelected political
appointees that aren't even meant to represent the views of ordinary citizens.
We really have little say. The European Council is a little better in that it
represents member governments which could be voted out of power, but unless
there's a huge number of single-issue voters in multiple states who care only
about this I can't see this having much effect.

Democratic accountability in the EU is incredibly weak, and the member
governments seem to love it because it's great for creating laws they couldn't
get away with at the national level.

~~~
SCHiM
> unelected political appointees

This has no bearing on the legitimacy of the EU. Members of the commission are
selected by the democratically elected government of their respective
countries.

People that downplay the democratic legitimacy of the EU really, truly,
unequivocally do not understand what they are talking about or have a
malicious intention.

~~~
mcv
Legitimacy maybe, but democratic legitimacy is absolutely lacking. A country
governed the way the EU is, would not be considered sufficiently democratic.
The democracy for the commission is very indirect.

People vote for their national parliament. Parliament appoints a government.
Those appointed governments then discuss who to appoint in the commission.
Europarliament gets a say, but can only accept or reject the entire
commission, not specific members in it.

The Europarliament is the only democratically elected body on the EU level,
and its power is sorely lacking.

------
bsaul
As a french i beg other european nations : please, don't let french law makers
decide the future of european internet. They don't understand a thing about
technology (or science in general) and have a passion for ideology and state
regulation.

One of the reason we have had riots every single week for the last 3 months is
because of their inability to make smart and pragmatic regulations. Don't
listen to them.

~~~
entity345
French lawmakers do not decide.

EU legislation passes through majority support.

This is not a national issue so let's not try to make it one.

> One of the reason we have had riots every single week for the last 3 months
> is because of their inability to make smart and pragmatic regulations

Except that many rioters want a rollback on pragmatic measures for purely
ideological reasons, of course.

~~~
Mirioron
> _EU legislation passes through majority support._

Due to the way the EU is set up and the "EU parties" are set up, this
basically means that France and Germany have a ridiculous amount of sway on
the issue.

~~~
entity345
Number of MEPs is proportional to population... That's called democracy.

~~~
Mirioron
And democracy is the tyranny of the majority.

Also, the way EU parties are structured, you can't even really consider it in
that sense. It's possible to divide MEPs from France and Germany between EU
parties in a way that voting along party lines would always give a positive
outcome for Germany and France. (If you don't get what I mean by this, then
think about how gerrymandering allows for a minority to take control over the
majority. You can do the same with EU parliamentary groups.)

~~~
entity345
Well if you have a better alternative to democracy we're keen to hear it...

> It's possible to divide MEPs from France and Germany between EU parties in a
> way that voting along party lines would always give a positive outcome for
> Germany and France

That's not how it works.

The way it works is the same as in most countries: There are a number of MEPs
per constituency and then the people vote to decide which party get those
seats (proportionally to number of votes).

This has nothing to do with gerrymandering.

Your suggestion is plainly nonsensical.

~~~
explainplease
Well, for example, the U.S. federal government was designed to cope with that
problem: the Senate represents the states equally, regardless of population,
and the President is elected by the electoral college, limiting the ability of
large population centers to overwhelm the rest of the country. It's not a
perfect system, and there will never be one, because humans are humans. But
these problems are not new, and people were dealing with them a long time ago.
Did the design of the EU not take them into account?

~~~
entity345
The US Senate and the Presidential election processes are certainly not things
to try to copy...

They can both lead to anti-democratic results. In fact the Presidential
election process was originally designed purposely to avoid giving the people
a direct and full say.

That being said, the EU already has something similar... the member countries
represented equally by their governments.

~~~
explainplease
Raw democracy can also lead to undesirable results. It's not true that
whatever 51% of the population wants is right or good. Do you disagree?

> They can both lead to anti-democratic results. In fact the Presidential
> election process was originally designed purposely to avoid giving the
> people a direct and full say.

That is one way to characterize it. Another way is that the process was
designed hundreds of years ago, before electronic communication, air travel,
etc. It was not possible for every citizen to see and hear the presidential
candidates before an election. So, like the rest of the representative
government, citizens delegated their votes to delegates, who would gather in-
person, see and hear the candidates, and select one.

So do you really think it's truthful to claim that the _purpose_ of the
presidential election process was to avoid giving citizens a full say?

I feel like you're being intellectually dishonest in this thread.

------
Aeolun
I find it hard to understand how anyone can think this law is a good idea.

Who exactly are they claiming to protect?

~~~
marcus_holmes
Because of the structure of the EU, the process of creating new laws is
extremely vulnerable to lobbying. Parliament can only vote down laws, which
can only be proposed by unelected officials.

So the leverage that the average EU voter has is only applicable at one very
narrow point in the process (the vote to approve), while lobbyists can always
buy influence with the lawmakers all they way through the process.

And this is the result. Though it does have to be said that the same process
came up with the GDPR and that was a decent (and necessary) piece of
legislation.

I do wonder why FAANG aren't more active lobbying the EU, though

~~~
YetAnotherNick
> I do wonder why FAANG aren't more active lobbying the EU, though

I think they know that article 13 is going to be beneficial for them. If law
requires costly content ID, it will make half of companies go out of business
or non profitable in Europe. I really think many companies are going to ignore
Europe as a whole.

~~~
adventured
The approach that will continue to work for start-ups (both from Europe, eg
Sweden is good at this, and the US), is to build out your service in the US
first, monetize it there, and then push into the EU once you can afford
compliance. This is already the ideal approach, anything the EU does to make
regulation worse will merely increase the advantage of using the US as the
springboard market. There's absolutely nothing stopping EU start-ups from
first focusing on capturing the US market and then turning their focus back to
the EU.

There's another approach that is less legally certain. Build up users in both
the US and EU, and only monetize the US users while entirely ignoring all EU
law. You allow EU citizens to sign up, and do not place any infrastructure in
the EU or do any business there initially. Jurisdiction will be in the US. The
monetized US users, which will remain lucrative, subsidize building out into
the EU member state markets without any revenue generation. You capture the EU
userbase in this approach, then later comply with EU law and monetize that
userbase after you're compliant. Would work best for ad platform businesses
like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc.

If I'm operating a service in eg Brazil, I have zero obligation to comply with
EU law (depending on treaties of course), nor do I have any responsibility to
block EU citizens from signing up for my service. Let the EU users come in,
comply with EU law later when you have to in order to monetize the market.
Retro fines are one potential concern at scale, however that ends up being the
equivalent of a speeding ticket and you own the market.

One of the mistakes that keeps being made by EU tech promoters, is thinking
that they should be concerned with competing with the existing US mega
platforms (such that the EU needs to build a search engine to rival Google,
photo platform to rival Instagram, mobile platforms to rival iOS or Android,
etc). That battle was over a decade ago or more in some cases. The focus has
to be on the next inflection point opening that allows for a creation of the
next mega platforms. With platforms and the Internet, if you don't capture the
US market first, the winner in that market will almost always smash you (or
buy you) unless you bar access to your market as in the case of China. That's
due to the enormous monetary value of capturing the US market (and you pretty
much get Canada with it automatically, a $1.7 trillion economy), it acts as a
perpetual well of resources to over-spend on then divide and conquering other
markets like the EU.

~~~
marcus_holmes
> If I'm operating a service in eg Brazil, I have zero obligation to comply
> with EU law (depending on treaties of course)

this is not actually true. There are lots of examples, but the best two are
probably:

Yahoo (a US company operating entirely in the US) being forced to stop users
from selling Nazi memorabilia because it's illegal in France.

Kim Dotcom fighting extradition to the US from New Zealand, for Mega.
Everything he did is perfectly legal in New Zealand, but that doesn't seem to
matter to the US legal system.

If your service reaches EU customers, then the EU will apply their laws to
your service. If you break those laws, then you may find yourself facing legal
problems (extradition if available, from Brazil or any country you travel to
that has an extradition treaty with the EU).

------
jelly
It's almost unbelievable that they want to remove the single piece of
protection that makes Article 13 remotely acceptable to me: exemption for
SMEs. If many small European internet platforms were allowed to grow in place
of the existing American megaplatforms we could have a more competitive
ecosystem (i.e. platforms couldn't suddenly change their policies or UIs
without risk of significant user losses) and upload filters wouldn't be a
legal requirement.

~~~
azinman2
But that’s been the case as we haven’t had article 13 yet, meanwhile where are
all these competitive ecosystems?

~~~
jelly
Failing to overcome the network effect unfortunately. My (perhaps naive) hope
for this copyright directive was that it would add a cost or limiting factor
to the network effect, i.e. after your platform grows past a certain size you
are accountable for every user and have to filter uploads at great cost.

------
thecleaner
I think that all data scientists can pick up the baton here. Maybe we could
have a nice analysis about the evolution of Article 13 and who supported what
clause. Given that elections are in May this would be valuable information.
For the DS people it could be a great example of how to communicate complex
ideas in a simple manner. Just a project suggestion for ones portfolio.

------
ohthehugemanate
Personally I'm rooting for the worst possible version of Article 13.

Feed the lawyers, starve the businesses. Make the starkest possible contrast
between countries where the lobbyists win, and everyone else. Sometimes you
need to get bitten to learn to avoid the snake.

The EU can be to copyright law what Brexit is to internationalism and free
trade. A brutal, public, and visible example that completely fucks a major
economic player, to the obvious benefit of its neighbors.

The Internet is global. It is much easier to move a digital company than a
bricks-and-mortar one, and this would give ample incentive. We will continue
connecting the world, continue progressing, and continue making great money
doing it. And all the EU citizens will be shut out of that for as long as our
government can keep its eyes shut.

Their eyes will open a lot faster under visible economic pain and
international embarrassment than they would on the present course.

~~~
koonsolo
Yeah, in a way, I hope after this Article 13, we (Europe) get blocked from all
major "user generated content" sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc.

Try to explain it then to the general public.

------
bubblethink
What constitutes a European website ? As long as you are not accepting local
currency and don't have a registered company in Europe, are you still affected
by this ?

~~~
sametmax
Good question.

I host [http://0bin.net/](http://0bin.net/).

I comply to the regular take down notices, but by its very nature, I cannot
filter the service since I cannot see what's been pasted.

Would it mean I'll have to move the server outside europe ? Would it mean I'll
have to block european IP ?

~~~
c3o
This doesn't seem to be a for-profit service, so it's outside of the scope of
the latest drafts of Article 13 thankfully. As long as you never put ads on
it, you're good.

~~~
zaarn
The french draft includes services older than 3 years.

The new proposal that the french are pushing has the following conditions
which must ALL be met:

    
    
        Available to the public for less than 3 years
        Annual turnover below €10 million
        Fewer than 5 million unique monthly visitors

~~~
c3o
Another provision of the article limits its scope to services that "organise
and promote" user-posted/uploaded content "for profit-making purposes".

The 3 criteria you quoted then further narrow which of the services matching
the above provision need to deploy upload filters.

Come to think of it, the pastebin-like site is actually already excluded by
the "organise and promote" criterium, regardless of whether it's profit-
oriented or not.

------
TomMarius
The top-rated comment when they cancelled it last time was "seems like the
system is working". So is it?

~~~
ailideex
Depends on who you are and your perspective - it definitely is working for
someone - just that someone is not representative of EU population.

------
onlydeadheroes
Sadly, it is time we join the pedos and traffickers in Tor sites. Our
discussion sites, our culture creation sites, all of those should be divorced
from law enforcement's reach and be moved to safety. It might seem ridiculous
to move a site like HN to tor, but it is ridiculous right up to the day it
isn't, and then it is too late. We would also free ourselves of copyright,
which in the current state only restricts creativity (the things you would put
effort in, risky) and in practice fully allows duplicating complete works
(effortless, no risk).

The time of running the web on the simplest paradigms (direct connection) that
facilitate meddling has come to an end as any bovine lawmaker can give us
impossible instructions that they do not understand themselves. It is time to
assert the power of mathematics, let them stew in it a little while, let them
realize they can't just shut the whole thing down anymore, and maybe in a
couple generations they will have cleaned up their lawmaking act and we can
try to join lawful society again. Maybe. But I expect that in time a fully
torified core of sites will be considered a foundation of freedom, and not
something to give up in any circumstance.

~~~
jackjeff
EU laws do not apply to the rest of the world. No need to spin up TOR. Put
your site in California that should be enough. I don't see HN caring a rat ass
about EU law, in the same way that HN did not ask for a publishing license
from the Chinese department of communication.

The irony is that the French are the first ones to complain about the hegemony
of sites like Google (burning tons of tax payers' money on useless projects
like the Quaero search engine), but when they're given an opportunity to shoot
themselves up in the foot repeatably, and to kill __ANY __hope of having __ANY
__European site that __EVER __competes with the __US __then they seize on it.
It 's the apex of stupidity.

I'm going to write an angry mail to my French representative tonight.

~~~
deadbunny
> Put your site in California that should be enough

What if you want the strong(er) privacy protections of the EU?

~~~
CorvusCrypto
Then just wait till next year when CCPA comes into effect.

~~~
anticensor
CCPA will not be enough. US needs a GDPA (General Data Protection Act).

------
crsmithdev
I wonder if at some point it will just make good business sense _not_ to offer
your service / product in the EU? I imagine the cost of developing and running
software to comply (plus the fines for anything but perfect compliance) would
exceed potential revenue from EU customers in many cases.

~~~
Cynddl
Do you mean as someone not living in the EU? More than 500M people live there
and their primary market, when offering a service or a product, is indeed the
European market.

~~~
crsmithdev
Yes. Of course, if you are living in the EU, you are stuck with that market :)

------
amyjess
Stuff like this is why I've gone from being horrified by Brexit to hoping for
a hard Brexit. The UK can do better than being stuck with Article 13.

~~~
pygy_
The same lobbies exist in the UK, I'd expect a copycat law to land as well.

------
moby_click
At least they added an explanation with regard to "best efforts":

> When assessing whether an online content sharing service provider has made
> its best efforts according to high industry standards of professional
> diligence, account shall be taken of whether the service provider has taken
> all the steps that would be taken by a diligent operator [...] taking into
> account best industry practices [...]

Further, they added "future developments" to the state of the art of existing
means.

Page 7, [https://www.politico.eu/wp-
content/uploads/2019/02/Mandate-R...](https://www.politico.eu/wp-
content/uploads/2019/02/Mandate-Romania-February-8.pdf)

------
kragen
The admin of my Mastodon instance tells me he'll have to shut it down if this
passes:
[https://nerdculture.de/@ij/101541005474837977](https://nerdculture.de/@ij/101541005474837977)

------
crb002
And they wonder why the Brits want out of this.

------
anticensor
HackerNews with Turnitin/Copyscape would be far worse than what it is now
like. Really, there are just a few companies which can implement a "copyright"
filter.

For text:

    
    
      *Copyscape
      *Turnitin
    

For the rest:

    
    
      *Google+Amazon+Apple (ContentID)
      *Microsoft+Facebook+Netflix ("Microsoft Rights", anyone?)

------
Shivetya
to be honest, after reading this post and the julia link I understand why the
law is bad but the idea it is worse simply because it applies to more groups
is wrong. a bad law is always a bad law.

the small business exception merely turns a bad law into a bad law as a money
grab because penalties will be assessed on a company with deeper pockets and
likely increased just because of that.

the whole idea of exceptions to internet related laws recently based on size
of the organization or just as worse, its "for profit" or "not for profit"
method of business is just politicians moving their weaponization of laws into
a new forum

------
rmbeard
Perhaps the internet is only temporary and will soon be gone, at least in some
parts of the world. Perhaps it will be confined to only a few countries.
Perhaps something will be developed to replace it.

------
DigitalWheelie
This is a depressing thread. :(

------
wslh
Liberte fraternite egalite

~~~
emersion
(It's the other way around -- "liberté égalité fraternité")

------
titanix2
Bravo la startup nation !

------
ddebernardy
Better source:

[https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/article-13-worse/](https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/article-13-worse/)

~~~
dang
OK, we changed to that from
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190204/09090341521/artic...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190204/09090341521/article-13-is-
back-germany-caves-to-france-as-eu-pushes-forward-ruining-internet.shtml).
Thanks!

------
Kenji
One day nobody will care about this back and forth between EU politicians and
they will finally pass a law that will destroy the internet as we know it.
It's inevitable because we have to win every single time, they only have to
win once. My point being: Harbours for creative and intellectual people will
always be under fierce attack by the common fool, and they will always have to
occupy a niche, hidden from the intolerant eye.

~~~
jplayer01
You're entirely right. Defending against the encroaching of our rights and the
freedoms afforded by the internet (or freedoms in general) requires constant
vigilance. A one-time win doesn't matter - big interest groups continue to
exist and continue to pour money intro ensuring their interests are
disproportionately represented.

This is a losing battle for us. It's a gradual chipping away at our rights
that will continue because it simply requires too much effort on the part of
citizens.

~~~
c3o
On the face of it, the fix is rather simple: Vote for politicians who listen
at least as much to civil society as they do to corporate lobbyists.

Unfortunately, the political system currently structurally incentivizes the
opposite, especially at the EU level, about which there is little reporting
because that is all organized at the national level. If Julia Reda weren't an
MEP and hadn't been sounding the alarm for years now, the first you heard
about Article 13 may have been after the final vote in which an even worse
version of it was enacted.

At this point, the Greens/EFA group in the EP is the only one which has even
taken the time to build infrastructure to voluntarily track (necessary to even
hope to achieve any kind of balance!) and transparently publish their lobby
meetings online. (Here's an ugly backend view, the pretty one is on individual
MEPs' websites: [https://lobbycal.greens-efa-
service.eu/all/](https://lobbycal.greens-efa-service.eu/all/))

------
simias
Surely there's a less inflammatory article out there discussing this?

~~~
sputr
Sometimes truth is inflammatory. Art 13. is a natural disaster in the making.
I've publicly debated many proponents, even had the plesure of debating mr.
Voss and ... they have no clue what they are doing. Remember the US congress
deposition of Google and Faceboko CEOs and how utterly uninformed they were?
Well the elected representatives in Europe are no better.

Their response to most arguments on how this will hurt creators is "we're just
trying to protect creators". No counter arguments, just "our intentions are
good". Yeah, I've almost given up at this point. Most legislators just don't
understand how modern economy and society works ... and the political groups
(like the Pirates) who do, are having a very hard time growing due to overall
apathy.

------
piokoch
EU slowly starts to resemble old monarchies, detached from reality, "solving"
problems that does not exists and totally missing important issues like Euro
currency zone crisis, immigration crisis, lack of common and cohesive policy
towards Russia and US, economic inequalities between old and new EU members,
southern and northern EU countries.

After Lisbon treaty EU became some kind of mixture of the union of independent
countries and a single organism. "The force" that is supposed to bind all
countries into a single organism are EU council, EU commission and EU
parliament. The real power is in the hands of the first two institutions -
that's the EU bureaucracy which became a modern days "monarchy" \- people does
not have any power to decide who is nominated to those bodies and those bodies
can do whatever they want. EU parliament is pretending to be some kind of
"democratic" control, but, at the end of the day, everyone votes "properly",
if not, voting is repeated again and again, MPs are disciplined, some words
are replaced with their smoother version and we get what we were supposed to
get.

~~~
ginko
Why are these articles always used for anti-EU tirades? Did people also call
into question the democratic legitimacy of the United States while SOPA was on
the table?

~~~
timrichard
The United States is pretty settled as a sovereign nation.

The EU is on a roadmap for complete integration along the model of the USA.

It's not unreasonable for people to stop and question whether this is what
they want when they see that they have no power to oppose disagreeable,
draconian laws like this one.

~~~
calcifer
> The EU is on a roadmap for complete integration along the model of the USA.

That's news to me, especially since multiple EU sources have repeatedly denied
this claim over the years. Could you provide a link to this roadmap of yours?

~~~
dageshi
Has there ever been a time when the EU has devolved power back to the nations
within it?

I can't ever recall something like that happening. But every decade or so
there's a new EU treaty that transfers more power to the EU, eventually you
end up with something that looks like the EU as the country and the old nation
states as the provinces, but it happens so slowly over time that nobody really
stops and asks if that's what everyone wants.

~~~
fmjrey
In France they did ask. In 1992 there was a referendum about Maastricht, where
the 'yes' had a tiny lead over the 'no'. In 2005 the French people voted a
resounding 'no' to the European consitution , so did the Dutch if I remember
well. EU then modified minor things and renamed it the Lisbon treaty, which
has been ratified by parliamentary procedure. So even when people opinion is
being asked, it's completely circumvented. It is very clear that EU has never
been about building a democracy, those that believe that are very naive.

~~~
timrichard
> In 2005 the French people voted a resounding 'no' to the European
> consitution , so did the Dutch if I remember well.

Along with this, The Irish were forced to vote a second time. Whether the same
happens in Britain remains to be seen.

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dsabanin
Article 13 looks like a really nice foundation for censorship.

It’s interesting for me to see how EU socialistic tendencies correlate with
things like “right to be forgotten”, “article 13” and other initiatives. It’s
as if party nomenclature is worried about their self preservation already.

It’s also telling to see how little effect citizens of EU have over these
decisions.

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jswizzy
Theses are the same law makers who passed Net Neutrality too and laughed at
Brexit.

