
A Copyright Vote That Could Change the EU’s Internet - campuscodi
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/09/11/copyright-vote-change-europes-internet/
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RcouF1uZ4gsC
The tech world is going to have to decide pretty quickly what it wants to be:

1\. A set of dumb pipes and a public square for information.

Or

2\. A curated community built for advertising where things that offend people
are censored.

Right now tech has chosen option 2, but in answer to any regulation it doesn't
like, it pretends it has chosen option 1 and loudly screams "free speech".
Tech is trying to have its cake and eat it too. I think more and more people
are becoming cynical that the tech companies really care about free speech as
a principle, and so we will see more and more of these type of laws.

~~~
TheDong
You can have both, and we largely already do.

Interconnects and ISPs are largely dumb pipes.

Individual websites can choose whether they're curated or shitshows. Sites
like 4chan do exist, as well as other "wild wests" of freedom.

Sites like facebook where the actual user curates their own information (via
following or not certain people) do exist and seem to do particularly well.

And on the final side, personal sites, like "Alice's Blog" do exis, where all
content is curated by the central person running the site and all users get
the same experience.

I don't get why you say "OR" or say that tech has chosen particular options.
Each website gets to make its own choice and deal with various consequences.

The parts between a user and a given webpage -- the isp, interconnects, bgp
routing, dns, and hosting/vps-providers/clouds -- have largely chosen to be
dumb pipes offering services to anyone who pays.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> The parts between a user and a given webpage -- the isp, interconnects, bgp
> routing, dns, and hosting/vps-providers/clouds -- have largely chosen to be
> dumb pipes offering services to anyone who pays.

I say we have not seen this recently. DNS and hosting providers are deciding
that some websites are too offensive for them to host. DDOS protection
providers, for example Cloudflare also the same. Search engines also now
downgrade content that they view as extremist. Large social networks will
censor user produced content that they find offensive. All these examples
could be considered as modern infrastructure between the user and content
generated by another user.

With the ongoing centralization of the internet, what is considered as
infrastructure is going to have be more than just ISP's and Interconnects. The
internet is no longer spread out over a billion websites. Probably 95% of
content that people access is probably a few dozen sites at most, and the long
tail of other sites is found through a search engine like Google. In addition,
the ability to monetize a site is controlled by just a few companies. This has
profound implications for the social principle of free speech.

True, these companies are private companies and thus are not bound to the laws
of free speech as they are not a government entity. They are fully within
their rights to determine who they provide service to. However, in decrying
this regulation, they are appealing not to the law, but to the social
principle of free speech. If they plan to appeal to the social principle of
free speech in decrying certain regulations, they should be adhering to the
social principle of free speech, or the public is going to get cynical fast.

------
asymmetric
Another good summary[0], written by a member of the Pirate Party.

[0]: [https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/](https://juliareda.eu/eu-
copyright-reform/)

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pmontra
Very bad reform. Among the other things, it makes any site directly
responsible for every copyright violation of its users.

For a change, this is as bad for big and small companies.

Not even Facebook can policy all the posts of their users for words, pictures,
sounds and videos. FB won't get a takedown notice, it could be sued directly.

~~~
jjawssd
Facebook will have a lobby that carves out an exception for itself while
simultaneously shutting down any threat to its monopoly through this
legislation.

~~~
AJ007
In the EU, maybe not.

This may be a signal that the internet has become way too centralized.

The irony of the centralization of a decentralized platform is suddenly
enforcement of regulations like these become feasible. The nuclear-war proof
internet is suddenly vulnerable to people sitting behind desks or whatever the
hell they do in Europe.

~~~
runeks
The EU is the very reason we see this sort of legislation. Everything has
positive and negative sides, and for the EU the negative side is giving
lobbyists a 28-for-1 offer: lobby a single parliament, and have your
legislation implemented in 28 different countries! The mileage of a European
lobbyist has never been greater than it is now.

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baxuz
Dunno what else is in the document, but the thing I'm looking forward to is
the single digital market.

I'm frankly pissed that a ton of services are unavailable outside the few
European posterboy countries.

~~~
Matt3o12_
Could you electorate what services are missing? The only thing I noticed is
that the catalogue of streaming services is smaller in some European countries
but I don’t think a "single digital market" would help much. The single
digital market is oriented towards lowering trade barriers and having unified
regulations instead of splitting local monopolies such as media companies and
phone companies (which would help Netflix and amazon)

~~~
vanderZwan
I haven't looked at the idea for the single digital market, but I can share
some context about how the EU has traditionally worked regarding trade
regulations.

In simplified terms, all member countries agree on a set a set of shared
requirements for a type of product, and any product meeting those requirements
is allowed to be sold in all EU countries.

So where you earlier had to meet certifications _in each EU country_ , you now
have only _one_ standard to meet with your product. That's a big reduction in
red tape, saving a lot of time and money for everyone! (contrary to popular
opinion, the EU has _reduced_ bureaucracy more than it increased it)

Individual countries can deviate by have more _lax_ requirements (which is why
you can still buy _cazu marzu_ in Sardinia, despite it not meeting EU
regulations), but not _stronger_.

Remember, all EU countries have to agree to sign up, and this is also why it
can take many years and tweaks to come to such an agreement.

And the rabbit hole is deeper than you think. It isn't just fire safety
regulations for flags, making idiots look like idiots[0], it goes all the way
down to agreeing what kind of cardboard is acceptable for sending your mail
(IIRC, there were different standards in what chemicals were considered toxic
or not).

The thing is, I can't really imagine how one would apply the same kind of
principles to the Internet. What is there to unify? The internet doesn't
really have borders, does it? I mean I guess the underlying infrastructure
could be unified, but that's not really the "market" part, is it?

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px_M6weS8gY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px_M6weS8gY)

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hasenj
Without links to the actual proposal this sounds like a propaganda piece.

~~~
bigbugbag
Are you only discovering now that mozilla is into propaganda ?

~~~
hasenj
More or less yea. I've been recently discovering that a lot of entities I had
perviously thought of as trust-worthy are usually spreading propaganda and
misinformation under the guise of "spreading awareness".

This particular blog fits into that pattern, which immediately triggered my
skepticism.

~~~
vanderZwan
Mozilla is rather big, isn't it? I wonder if this isn't a result of Mozilla
being the kind of company that attracts the type of "activist" programmer to
write this kind of stuff, and also having the work environment where you can
get fanatic subcultures that just assert their beliefs.

This is not a dig at Mozilla specifically, this is a problem for any big
company or organisation really.

------
touristtam
Available version of the propose directive:
[https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/rep/1/2016/EN/1-201...](https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/rep/1/2016/EN/1-2016-593-EN-F1-1.PDF)

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danmaz74
I'm sorry, but an article like this should contain quotes or at least links to
the actual text under discussion. Like this, it's only an opinion piece.

~~~
r3bl
I might be wrong, but I think that they haven't posted any actual text because
the document(s) got leaked.

If you're looking for a proper discussion about this and the actual text, EDRi
(something like EU's EFF) is probably what you're looking for. They did an
extensive coverage of this in the last couple of days and have published the
leaked documents.

Some links:

[https://edri.org/leaked-document-eu-presidency-calls-for-
mas...](https://edri.org/leaked-document-eu-presidency-calls-for-massive-
internet-filtering/)

[https://edri.org/estonia-loves-digital-why-is-it-
supporting-...](https://edri.org/estonia-loves-digital-why-is-it-supporting-
the-censorshipmachine/)

[https://edri.org/six-states-raise-concerns-about-legality-
of...](https://edri.org/six-states-raise-concerns-about-legality-of-copyright-
directive/)

~~~
vanderZwan
> _I might be wrong, but I think that they haven 't posted any actual text
> because the document(s) got leaked._

You're wrong, but it's an easy mistake to make: the leak concerns the ongoing
diplomatic discussions between the nations voting on the proposal:

> _According to a new leak, a number of EU Member States share our serious
> concerns about the proposal for mass surveillance and censorship of uploads
> to the internet in Europe, included in the European Commission’s proposal
> for a new copyright Directive. Those Member States seem unwilling to build a
> censorship machine forcing EU countries to adopt Google’s current practices.
> They highlight that such practices should not be implemented without making
> sure of the consequences for fundamental rights and for the rule of law. The
> leaked document contains a list of questions posed to the internal legal
> service of the Council of the EU, signed by six EU Member States: Belgium,
> the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Ireland and the Netherlands._

The proposed directive itself is, as with all such proposals, open and
available for everyone in every official EU language:

[http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/rep/1/2016/EN/1-2016...](http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/rep/1/2016/EN/1-2016-593-EN-F1-1.PDF)

------
anentropic
I would love to read an analysis or critique of these laws that doesn't come
from the radical anti-copyright lobby

~~~
shmerl
The critique comes from the proponents of normal approach. It's the proposal
itself that comes from the radical copyright lobby.

