19 ms·

The greatest irony is EU regulators whining about the dominance of Google, Facebook, etc, while passing regulations like this which make it impossible for anyon

The greatest irony is EU regulators whining about the dominance of Google, Facebook, etc, while passing regulations like this which make it impossible for anyone to compete with their ilk. Google and Facebook will have no trouble building the automated filters that are mandated by this legislation. The impact of this will be felt entirely by smaller companies with either will shut down, or, more likely, will never be founded.

giancarlostoro 8y ago
And companies will neglect the EU market altogether. The great legal firewall of the EU. We can pass laws to make things better without any technical competence! Lets go after cryptography next!
- quanticle 8y ago
  Australia is already on the case, re: cryptography: https://protonmail.com/blog/australia-anti-encryption-law/ https://protonmail.com/blog/australia-anti-encryption-law/
- dithering 8y ago
  > And companies will neglect the EU market altogether As an EU citizen (until April, anyway), can I live in that future please?
krageon 8y ago
If you actually looked at how these laws are worded (ie given specific provisions for the capability of a company), you would see that this kind of right-wing capitalist propaganda-like rhetoric holds no water.
kodablah 8y ago
Despite best efforts, there's just no way around the general notion that affecting the tide affects all boats. You take the bad with the good of an internet with fewer restrictions, or you add both bad and good for everyone with restrictions. Even attempts to target legislation tend to have an unquantifiable ripple effect beyond the foresight of naive legislators.
- Silhouette 8y ago
  Despite best efforts, there's just no way around the general notion that affecting the tide affects all boats. Of course there is. You just add a minimum scale requirement before these obligations kick in, so they only affect sites that are big enough both to cause significant problems with illegitimate uploads and to have the resources to do something reasonable about it. Laws are written like this all the time in places with more sensible legal cultures, but the EU is infamous for not understanding why that is useful, and that brings us back to quanticle's point.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    > Of course there is. You just add a minimum scale requirement before these obligations kick in, so they only affect sites that are big enough This is what I'm referencing in my last sentence, "Even attempts to target legislation tend to have an unquantifiable ripple effect beyond the foresight of naive legislators." This naive view doesn't respect the intertwining nature of businesses of all sizes that work in the industry nor does it take into account the chilling effects on growth (the latter being less of an issue). Small businesses lean on larger ones that might be targeted in a myriad of ways including infrastructure, standards, software, employment, acquisition potential, marketing, etc. Targeting them is like targeting me and to say "only affect sites that are big enough" is part of the classist dialog that too often exists in a utopian vacuum that assumes all results are the exact representation of their intentions.
    - Silhouette 8y ago
      You are trying to make this into more than it is. The principle that some things are too small to be concerned about is a long-standing legal tradition, hence de minimis and so on. In my own country, the UK, many rules do not fully apply to very small businesses and various extra allowances are made financially, precisely because imposing the same rules on a five-person start-up as a 2,500-person international corporation may be disproportionate. There is nothing at all unusual or naive about this. It's done all the time. It's just not something the EU in particular has ever been very good at understanding or dealing with. For example, by their own admission, several of the key officials involved in the VAT changes a few years ago literally did not realise that many thousands of microbusinesses that would also be covered by the new rules even existed, nor that the new rules would essential cause them to not exist any more. The new copyright regime we're talking about here is a different context but still has the same underlying problem.
johnchristopher 8y ago
It was also believed that Facebook and Google were GDPR ready and only them could be. That's not what happened.
- throwaway123mmm 8y ago
  That's the case though.
  - FranzFerdiNaN 8y ago
    It isnt. Being GDPR ready is not that hard. It just takes time and resources, but following the law always takes that. And leave it to businesses to complain about anything and everything.
    - quanticle 8y ago
      >It just takes time and resources, but following the law always takes that. Right, and that's why laws should be worded to minimize the time and resources required to comply with them. Laws like GDPR and Article 13 are like a nominal tax on every business. It's easy for Google and Facebook to throw a few million dollars and a few thousand engineer-hours to take care of compliance with this stuff. It's much more difficult for a 10-person startup with a fixed runway. Saying "It just takes time and resources to deal with that," is a vacuous statement. It takes time and resources to deal with anything, no matter how large or small. The key factor is how much time? How many resources? And finally, how do the time and resource requirements compare to the time and resources you have on hand?
- parrellel 8y ago
  Just because they only went after a subset of companies, doesn't mean that everyone isn't still non-compliant with that mess.

giancarlostoro 8y ago

And companies will neglect the EU market altogether. The great legal firewall of the EU. We can pass laws to make things better without any technical competence! Lets go after cryptography next!

quanticle 8y ago
Australia is already on the case, re: cryptography: https://protonmail.com/blog/australia-anti-encryption-law/ https://protonmail.com/blog/australia-anti-encryption-law/
dithering 8y ago
> And companies will neglect the EU market altogether As an EU citizen (until April, anyway), can I live in that future please?

krageon 8y ago

If you actually looked at how these laws are worded (ie given specific provisions for the capability of a company), you would see that this kind of right-wing capitalist propaganda-like rhetoric holds no water.

kodablah 8y ago

Despite best efforts, there's just no way around the general notion that affecting the tide affects all boats. You take the bad with the good of an internet with fewer restrictions, or you add both bad and good for everyone with restrictions. Even attempts to target legislation tend to have an unquantifiable ripple effect beyond the foresight of naive legislators.

Silhouette 8y ago
Despite best efforts, there's just no way around the general notion that affecting the tide affects all boats. Of course there is. You just add a minimum scale requirement before these obligations kick in, so they only affect sites that are big enough both to cause significant problems with illegitimate uploads and to have the resources to do something reasonable about it. Laws are written like this all the time in places with more sensible legal cultures, but the EU is infamous for not understanding why that is useful, and that brings us back to quanticle's point.
- kodablah 8y ago
  > Of course there is. You just add a minimum scale requirement before these obligations kick in, so they only affect sites that are big enough This is what I'm referencing in my last sentence, "Even attempts to target legislation tend to have an unquantifiable ripple effect beyond the foresight of naive legislators." This naive view doesn't respect the intertwining nature of businesses of all sizes that work in the industry nor does it take into account the chilling effects on growth (the latter being less of an issue). Small businesses lean on larger ones that might be targeted in a myriad of ways including infrastructure, standards, software, employment, acquisition potential, marketing, etc. Targeting them is like targeting me and to say "only affect sites that are big enough" is part of the classist dialog that too often exists in a utopian vacuum that assumes all results are the exact representation of their intentions.
  - Silhouette 8y ago
    You are trying to make this into more than it is. The principle that some things are too small to be concerned about is a long-standing legal tradition, hence de minimis and so on. In my own country, the UK, many rules do not fully apply to very small businesses and various extra allowances are made financially, precisely because imposing the same rules on a five-person start-up as a 2,500-person international corporation may be disproportionate. There is nothing at all unusual or naive about this. It's done all the time. It's just not something the EU in particular has ever been very good at understanding or dealing with. For example, by their own admission, several of the key officials involved in the VAT changes a few years ago literally did not realise that many thousands of microbusinesses that would also be covered by the new rules even existed, nor that the new rules would essential cause them to not exist any more. The new copyright regime we're talking about here is a different context but still has the same underlying problem.

johnchristopher 8y ago

It was also believed that Facebook and Google were GDPR ready and only them could be. That's not what happened.

throwaway123mmm 8y ago
That's the case though.
- FranzFerdiNaN 8y ago
  It isnt. Being GDPR ready is not that hard. It just takes time and resources, but following the law always takes that. And leave it to businesses to complain about anything and everything.
  - quanticle 8y ago
    >It just takes time and resources, but following the law always takes that. Right, and that's why laws should be worded to minimize the time and resources required to comply with them. Laws like GDPR and Article 13 are like a nominal tax on every business. It's easy for Google and Facebook to throw a few million dollars and a few thousand engineer-hours to take care of compliance with this stuff. It's much more difficult for a 10-person startup with a fixed runway. Saying "It just takes time and resources to deal with that," is a vacuous statement. It takes time and resources to deal with anything, no matter how large or small. The key factor is how much time? How many resources? And finally, how do the time and resource requirements compare to the time and resources you have on hand?
parrellel 8y ago
Just because they only went after a subset of companies, doesn't mean that everyone isn't still non-compliant with that mess.