4 ms·

Please do not make another law. Most of the laws produced by the EU in regards to the internet do usually not help anything, but just place another burden on th

Please do not make another law. Most of the laws produced by the EU in regards to the internet do usually not help anything, but just place another burden on the shoulders of small to midsized companies. Look at the VATmess or the stupid cookie law. Some possible outcome could be that you are forced to offer your service in the whole EU, even if you are just a small, online fan shop for a second liga soccer club. All those EU laws usually just help the big multinational companies to keep startups out of the market. The EU should stop producing any laws at all and concentrate on harmonising the endless supply of inconsistent laws in their member states.

djsumdog 10y ago
> EU in regards to the internet do usually not help anything "We use cookies to blah blah..." Has that peace of legislation actually improved privacy or just make websites more annoying?
- tobltobs 10y ago
  It didn't improve privacy a bit, but it produced costs and enabled lawyers (at least in Germany) to earn some easy money with a new breed of "Abmahnungen".
  - elcapitan 10y ago
    I would say it worsens the situation because it trains people to just click on every banner that says something like that. People are lazy and I would argue that once you have to do that a dozen times a day you are probably more likely to also give up on even base-checking EULAs, new service conditions etc.
- taejo 10y ago
  That particular piece of legislation is just annoying. Some of the other privacy legislation is very good, though, as is the extension of consumer protection laws to online shops.
zanny 10y ago
This. The answer to geoblocking is to just pirate the content if its unavailable to you. Don't whine that international corporations cannot profit off you. If you are somewhere they decide not to support paying them, you were never a part of the decision to make the content for profit in the first place. They have economic pressure on them right now to broadly accept payments from as many places online as possible, because its effectively free money. We don't need legislation when the market is already set up to correct for the behavior.
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  They have economic pressure on them right now to broadly accept payments from as many places online as possible, because its effectively free money. We don't need legislation when the market is already set up to correct for the behaviour. I don't think that's actually the case. I'd argue that market segmentation can allow larger companies to extract more money from the market through agreeing territorial exclusivity with distributors. In other words, they can extract more money by restricting services. It's not always that content isn't available, but that the market is unfairly segmented. See the current hoo-ha over pay TV services, for example (http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-15_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-15_en.htm) But aside from that, it offers the opportunity to fix a broken part of the market – content providers want to restrict territory, but I'll be distributors don't! Don't you think that Netflix would much rather have the same catalogue throughout the EU? It's not them who are preventing it, and the same problem is going to challenge any innovative businesses involved in digital content in the future.
  - studentrob 10y ago
    > But aside from that, it offers the opportunity to fix a broken part of the market – content providers want to restrict territory, but I'll be distributors don't! Are you sure about that? Netflix built its business around contracts with content creators. I doubt Netflix would support this new law. This law would not require content creators to make content available on Netflix. My guess is, if such a law were passed, then Netflix would either (a) pull out of the EU or (b) restrict available content even further. And that's why you may not see support for such a bill. Legislators will hear that message from both Netflix and Hollywood. Your governments may either quietly ignore this campaign, or if it gets big enough, make some attempt to share the reasoning with the public. If you did manage to elect someone who could pass this law, I'll bet you find it hurts the available content more than it helps. There's still plenty of room in the world for a Netflix competitor, particularly, locally based ones. Ironically, this law would hurt such startups more than it would help them. The fact is, content providers have good reason to limit consumption to certain mediums and areas. Making content costs money, just like anything else. Content creators have a right to choose where and how to do business, just like any other company. Content creators lose money in countries with insufficient copyright controls. My guess is every country in the EU does not have the same copyright controls, and this is a major sticking point for content creators. And, in many cases, the content may not be findable via torrents etc. It does not hurt content creators to withhold certain content. People made up money. Nobody really owns information or physical objects. Some people think all information should be free because it happens to be easier to acquire information than objects. Yet these same people will freely admit that authors and programmers deserve to be paid. It takes as much energy as physical labor. You need food, shelter and security to do it. One could argue that money is the problem, though I'd point out that moneyless societies have their own downsides, and historically, people don't want to be forced into them. Poor people are not chomping at the bit to move into communist societies, nor is any such society welcoming the world's poor with open arms. The few times that has happened successfully, it's been a call to arms, and the success is brief. Deng Xiaoping and Gorbachev's reforms made clear what works, which, love it or hate it, is some form of capitalism. It allows us to compete without killing each other.
izacus 10y ago
Or you know, those "stupid" laws that let you live anywhere in EU, study anywhere in EU, work anywhere in EU and buy things anywhere in EU and carry them anywhere else in EU. The utter stupidity of the fact, that you can drive 20km over Austrian/German border, buy a DVD, then drive back (which EU demands to be allowed) and then be denied streaming that exact same content is staggering.
- tobltobs 10y ago
  > Or you know, those "stupid" laws that let you live anywhere in EU, study anywhere in EU, work anywhere in EU and buy things anywhere in EU and carry them anywhere else in EU. How are those related to the internet? I did wrote "laws in regard to the internet" ....
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    You also did say "The EU should stop producing any laws at all". As a european benefiting every day from fantastic laws (including internet laws, by the way - privacy matters), I entirely disagree and I doubt I'm the only one.
matthewmacleod 10y ago
Some possible outcome could be that you are forced to offer your service in the whole EU, even if you are just a small, online fan shop for a second liga soccer club. If you are offering digital goods, then isn't that actually a reasonable requirement? Obviously if you're offering physical goods or services, there are legitimate barriers to distributing them. But wouldn't it be awesome if membership of the single market meant you were entitled to purchase digital goods from anywhere in it, without anyone artificially preventing you from doing so? All those EU laws usually just help the big multinational companies to keep startups out of the market.* That doesn't seem true. What's more likely – that a large American company can negotiate the required 20-some licenses required to stream content, or that a startup can do it? The EU should stop producing any laws at all and concentrate on harmonising the endless supply of inconsistent laws in their member states. That's really the main goal of a lot of EU directives – harmonisation across the single market.
return0 10y ago
What about the data roaming costs laws? Well, the EU is a common market, it's appropriate that it expands in that respect. The VAT law was ill-thought, it should have gone to the opposite direction to make a seamless VAT area. As for the cookie law , i can only attribute it to senility.
c3o 10y ago
Europe's startup lobby AlliedForStartups supports the demand to end geoblocking. It is in fact the business practice of geoblocking and the legal framework of 28 different copyright territories & laws that: * Most serves the big players distributing the most popular content, who are able to cut 28 licensing deals. For non-blockbuster productions, it mostly results in turning away customers/audiences. * Keeps European VoD startups small. What's the only VoD service available in all EU countries? Netflix. Only 5% of VoD services you can subscribe to in the UK are from other EU countries -- 95% are either national (= forever small) or from overseas. We are artificially making it harder for EU startups to compete internationally. Plus: It is the EU's stated mission to remove barriers to a common market and to eliminate discrimination of Europeans in Europe by country of origin. Curtailing geoblocking advances both. Action on geoblocking is not arbitrary burdensome regulation. It's exactly fulfilling the purpose of the EU, it would be popular among the public -- and it would enable/help startups.
- studentrob 10y ago
  What if a startup wants to focus on serving video to a local community, rather than making it available to the world, which would cost the startup more bandwidth?

djsumdog 10y ago

> EU in regards to the internet do usually not help anything "We use cookies to blah blah..." Has that peace of legislation actually improved privacy or just make websites more annoying?

tobltobs 10y ago
It didn't improve privacy a bit, but it produced costs and enabled lawyers (at least in Germany) to earn some easy money with a new breed of "Abmahnungen".
- elcapitan 10y ago
  I would say it worsens the situation because it trains people to just click on every banner that says something like that. People are lazy and I would argue that once you have to do that a dozen times a day you are probably more likely to also give up on even base-checking EULAs, new service conditions etc.
taejo 10y ago
That particular piece of legislation is just annoying. Some of the other privacy legislation is very good, though, as is the extension of consumer protection laws to online shops.

zanny 10y ago

This. The answer to geoblocking is to just pirate the content if its unavailable to you. Don't whine that international corporations cannot profit off you. If you are somewhere they decide not to support paying them, you were never a part of the decision to make the content for profit in the first place. They have economic pressure on them right now to broadly accept payments from as many places online as possible, because its effectively free money. We don't need legislation when the market is already set up to correct for the behavior.

matthewmacleod 10y ago
They have economic pressure on them right now to broadly accept payments from as many places online as possible, because its effectively free money. We don't need legislation when the market is already set up to correct for the behaviour. I don't think that's actually the case. I'd argue that market segmentation can allow larger companies to extract more money from the market through agreeing territorial exclusivity with distributors. In other words, they can extract more money by restricting services. It's not always that content isn't available, but that the market is unfairly segmented. See the current hoo-ha over pay TV services, for example (http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-15_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-15_en.htm) But aside from that, it offers the opportunity to fix a broken part of the market – content providers want to restrict territory, but I'll be distributors don't! Don't you think that Netflix would much rather have the same catalogue throughout the EU? It's not them who are preventing it, and the same problem is going to challenge any innovative businesses involved in digital content in the future.
- studentrob 10y ago
  > But aside from that, it offers the opportunity to fix a broken part of the market – content providers want to restrict territory, but I'll be distributors don't! Are you sure about that? Netflix built its business around contracts with content creators. I doubt Netflix would support this new law. This law would not require content creators to make content available on Netflix. My guess is, if such a law were passed, then Netflix would either (a) pull out of the EU or (b) restrict available content even further. And that's why you may not see support for such a bill. Legislators will hear that message from both Netflix and Hollywood. Your governments may either quietly ignore this campaign, or if it gets big enough, make some attempt to share the reasoning with the public. If you did manage to elect someone who could pass this law, I'll bet you find it hurts the available content more than it helps. There's still plenty of room in the world for a Netflix competitor, particularly, locally based ones. Ironically, this law would hurt such startups more than it would help them. The fact is, content providers have good reason to limit consumption to certain mediums and areas. Making content costs money, just like anything else. Content creators have a right to choose where and how to do business, just like any other company. Content creators lose money in countries with insufficient copyright controls. My guess is every country in the EU does not have the same copyright controls, and this is a major sticking point for content creators. And, in many cases, the content may not be findable via torrents etc. It does not hurt content creators to withhold certain content. People made up money. Nobody really owns information or physical objects. Some people think all information should be free because it happens to be easier to acquire information than objects. Yet these same people will freely admit that authors and programmers deserve to be paid. It takes as much energy as physical labor. You need food, shelter and security to do it. One could argue that money is the problem, though I'd point out that moneyless societies have their own downsides, and historically, people don't want to be forced into them. Poor people are not chomping at the bit to move into communist societies, nor is any such society welcoming the world's poor with open arms. The few times that has happened successfully, it's been a call to arms, and the success is brief. Deng Xiaoping and Gorbachev's reforms made clear what works, which, love it or hate it, is some form of capitalism. It allows us to compete without killing each other.

izacus 10y ago

Or you know, those "stupid" laws that let you live anywhere in EU, study anywhere in EU, work anywhere in EU and buy things anywhere in EU and carry them anywhere else in EU. The utter stupidity of the fact, that you can drive 20km over Austrian/German border, buy a DVD, then drive back (which EU demands to be allowed) and then be denied streaming that exact same content is staggering.

tobltobs 10y ago
> Or you know, those "stupid" laws that let you live anywhere in EU, study anywhere in EU, work anywhere in EU and buy things anywhere in EU and carry them anywhere else in EU. How are those related to the internet? I did wrote "laws in regard to the internet" ....
- scrollaway 10y ago
  You also did say "The EU should stop producing any laws at all". As a european benefiting every day from fantastic laws (including internet laws, by the way - privacy matters), I entirely disagree and I doubt I'm the only one.

matthewmacleod 10y ago

Some possible outcome could be that you are forced to offer your service in the whole EU, even if you are just a small, online fan shop for a second liga soccer club. If you are offering digital goods, then isn't that actually a reasonable requirement? Obviously if you're offering physical goods or services, there are legitimate barriers to distributing them. But wouldn't it be awesome if membership of the single market meant you were entitled to purchase digital goods from anywhere in it, without anyone artificially preventing you from doing so? All those EU laws usually just help the big multinational companies to keep startups out of the market.* That doesn't seem true. What's more likely – that a large American company can negotiate the required 20-some licenses required to stream content, or that a startup can do it? The EU should stop producing any laws at all and concentrate on harmonising the endless supply of inconsistent laws in their member states. That's really the main goal of a lot of EU directives – harmonisation across the single market.

return0 10y ago

What about the data roaming costs laws? Well, the EU is a common market, it's appropriate that it expands in that respect. The VAT law was ill-thought, it should have gone to the opposite direction to make a seamless VAT area. As for the cookie law , i can only attribute it to senility.

c3o 10y ago

Europe's startup lobby AlliedForStartups supports the demand to end geoblocking. It is in fact the business practice of geoblocking and the legal framework of 28 different copyright territories & laws that: * Most serves the big players distributing the most popular content, who are able to cut 28 licensing deals. For non-blockbuster productions, it mostly results in turning away customers/audiences. * Keeps European VoD startups small. What's the only VoD service available in all EU countries? Netflix. Only 5% of VoD services you can subscribe to in the UK are from other EU countries -- 95% are either national (= forever small) or from overseas. We are artificially making it harder for EU startups to compete internationally. Plus: It is the EU's stated mission to remove barriers to a common market and to eliminate discrimination of Europeans in Europe by country of origin. Curtailing geoblocking advances both. Action on geoblocking is not arbitrary burdensome regulation. It's exactly fulfilling the purpose of the EU, it would be popular among the public -- and it would enable/help startups.

studentrob 10y ago
What if a startup wants to focus on serving video to a local community, rather than making it available to the world, which would cost the startup more bandwidth?