8 ms·

In a weird way, this might be EU's strategy to finally deal significant damage to Google and Facebook, as this law will encourage development of alternatives on

In a weird way, this might be EU's strategy to finally deal significant damage to Google and Facebook, as this law will encourage development of alternatives on decentralized peer-to-peer technologies. However, I'm not sure if EU politicians are that smart...

jaabe 8y ago
It’s not made by EU politicians, it’s made by a combination of lawyers, engineers and public administration majors. In many ways the EU is a functioning technocracy, and if you ever read through the actual EU documents it shows. They are almost always sound, they are also massively bureaucratic and around 90% longer than necessary, but I’ve never read through something that wasn’t sound. Disclaimer: I haven’t read up on article 13, but I do read (and sit through) a good deal of EU standards and proposals for EU wide Enterprise Architectural principles, and they are never thwarted by politics.
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  >the EU is a functioning technocracy, only it's not really functioning is it?
  - sexydefinesher 8y ago
    What do you see as not functioning in the EU?
    - DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
      have you ever been to rural Germany, Italy, France or heard of gilets jaunes? Any idea why they might exist? I live in a very poor EU country (out of choice) and most young people fuck off to Germany or France because their home states have no jobs for them. They don't come back either which causes a massive brain drain on these places. Ask the so called middle class in Croatia, Slovakia, Italy what they think of the EU and how well it works for them. Avg salary in these places is 500 to 1000 EUR. And if you visit supermarkets all they have is shit. Literally everything like fresh veg tastes like feet because the good stuff that is locally produced gets exported to the rich places. Companies have 2 production lines making low-grade products (despite being the same brand) for these markets. I'm not an arm-chair bureaucrat who forms his opinion on Google. I actually live in these placed because despite all this shit and poverty the people are actually warm. One more example: thousands of people wiping arses in nursery homes in Germany are working through shady polish, slovenian, etc outsourcing companies where they're stripped of all benefits that a German would enjoy. They work for 500 to 1000 / month (in a high cost country) because their home country has no jobs for them. Then they're being exploited by the rich EU countries. Again I lived in Germany, ran 2 companies there, lived in France (operated 3 businesses), now I live in Eastern EU. As much as I want the EU to succeed I can't be blind to the hypocrisy that I see every day on the streets in my own surrounding.
      - Spooky23 8y ago
        That’s happening everywhere. One of the reasons you have the wacky politics that you have now in the US is that the people left in flyover country aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed. Russia is the most extreme example of the phenomenon.
      - eecc 8y ago
        thank you for posting this
        spiderfarmer 8y ago
        Shame it's not very informative.
      - Lucadg 8y ago
        Food in Italy is of extremely good quality and variety. I live in Bulgaria and fruits and vegetables are exceptional and extremely cheap. If you refer to supermarket food I may agree.
        DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
        indeed Italy (and France) has some o the best food I ever bought. Germany can't compare even with what's available in a Le'clerc or Carrefour in France. yes I was mainly talking about supermarkets. In my current home I only buy stuff at the wet-market - e.g. directly from farmers because the chains just deliver crap. Even the higher prized items in supermarkets (which cost the same as Germany despite the salary differences) are terrible quality - literally nobody in Italy or France would eat those veg.
        Lucadg 8y ago
        Exactly. The more corporations are involved the worst the food gets.
        ben_w 8y ago
        I wasn’t that impressed with French supermarkets, including Carrefour. Sure, Germany is the home of Lidl, Aldi, and Netto, but Rewe, Edeka, Kaufland, and Biomarkt are all at least as good as what I saw in France. On the other hand, in the UK, Tesco, Waitrose, and Sainsbury’s are all at least as good as their German equivalents; and (beyond the EU) even the worst EU supermarket was better than almost every supermarket I saw in the USA.
  - iagooar 8y ago
    You can say anything you want about the EU, but it's perfectly functioning and always has been.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      "Perfectly functioning and always has been"? That is beyond delusion. The EU is co-ruled by an opaque system of non elected bodies, under the table deals, and backroom diplomacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_deficit_in_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_deficit_in_the_Euro... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/09/brexit-eu-democratic-britain https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/09/brexit... https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/03/23/how-to-address-the-eus-democratic-deficit https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/03/23/how-to-a... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1007/S12290-012-0213-7 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1007/S12290-012-021... https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/opinion/the-euros-democratic-deficit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/opinion/the-euros-democra... https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/11/i-was-teenage-europhile-eu-s-sadistic-austerity-and-lack-democracy-changed-my-mind https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/11/i-was-teenage-... https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/books/adults-in-the-room/ https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/books/adults-in-the-room/ And those are mostly official establishment narratives -- if you look at critiques from the left (and libertatians) the picture is much much bleaker.
      - isostatic 8y ago
        > The EU is co-ruled by an opaque system of non elected bodies The EU council (comprising of democratically elected heads of government from the 28 member countries) The EU parliament (comprising of directly elected MEPs from the 28 member countries) The EU commission president, nominated by the council, approved by the parliament, and standing on a ticket to be EU Commission president during the parliamentary elections The EU commissioners, appointed by the democratically elected heads of government from the 28 members Laws are only passed by agreement by the democratically elected council and the democratically elected MEPs.
        8y ago
- Kiro 8y ago
  Please read Article 13 and tell me it's sound. Spoiler: it's not.
- deltron3030 8y ago
  >but I’ve never read through something that wasn’t sound. Sound in respect to very general interpretations and "common sense". The problem is that general laws can touch topics that are way beyond common sense, the room of interpretation is then just so big that it's like a weapon to take out anybody if you only dig deep enough and frame it as a problem for the common good.
felix99 8y ago
yes, this could be called the "anti-google act" of 2019 ... google is basically the only company it applies to. facebook has never been a major venue for piracy (afaik?) so i don't think it even affects them much. however, it is a good thing. youtube has always been a massive for-profit piracy operation, and they just license and pay the people who are big enough to threaten them. all small content creators get the shaft. even google search is mostly a form of piracy. taking other people's content and slapping ads on it. google needs to die and it is nice to see the EU helping here.
DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
FAANG will be pissed but I doubt it really makes a dent. Their focus is Asia (has been since 2 decades now). Us Europeans are just a sleepy backwater of old people with lot of history which makes for nice tax havens and retirement homes.
- Normal_gaussian 8y ago
  2 decades is somewhat of an overstatement.
  - DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
    The focus of growth has always been on Asia afair (I can only speak for what I witnessed since the 70ies), ... first Japan, India & Tiger countries, later China. Even Brazil and LATAM for a long time had more focus then backward and technophobic Europe. It's not just demography because an old person in Asia will embrace new ideas and tech (my japanese father in law is 90ies and still excited over a new iPhone while my parents already gave up on anything digital in their 50ies - "just too hard they say")
    - Normal_gaussian 8y ago
      your comment was about FAANG, of which Facebook wasn't founded, Amazon, Netflix, Google were all in their infancy. Maybe apple,
- oaiey 8y ago
  Even worse. They will be the ones which can comply. They can write legal terms, they can check real government identities and create a significant upload filter strategy. They are the winners, not the losers here.
  - DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
    right! in a way it creates a couple of jobs but only for those who can program - somebody has to implement these policies into technical reality. looking at GDPR (which I fully support) it has created quite a large niche of specialized lawyers and people are now busy educating themselves about how to isolate PII. No doubt this bill will also produce quite a bit of demand for specialists. But it's hardly innovation. As you say the small start-ups in Berlin & Paris are left in the dust because only the big ones have the resources to take care of this bureaucratic horse-manure. In the long run we'll continue to dig our own graves while China and the US laughs.
krona 8y ago
The strategy is legal, political and economic harmonisation. It does this by passing vague legislation that requires its own court to interpret. Everything else, literally everything, is secondary. And so a nation state is born.
tpetry 8y ago
No, FAANG will not be targeted. Even GDPR which would have been able to piss of facebook was not used to attack them. Only small companies have been attacked because of GDPR violations. Inoffically they have told people they will not attack the big ones because they have enough lawyers so an attack on e.g. facebook will be too time consuming.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  This is bullshit. EU was never too shy at attacking big American companies when they crossed the line.
  - dang 8y ago
    When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "This is bullshit. 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
jsty 8y ago
Alternatively, with a little lobbying and a few tweaks, any 'platform' deemed not to be implementing sufficiently advanced filtering could be subject to ISP-level blocking / filtering. This one's a double edged sword.
squarefoot 8y ago
"I'm not sure if EU politicians are that smart..." They are, just in a more traditional way. They're now collecting bribes from whoever bought them to pass this law, as tomorrow they will collect other bribes to modify the law.
jkukul 8y ago
If this is their intention, then the measure might be totally counterproductive. Regulations very often hit small businesses harder than big ones, because big businesses have capacities to deal with them. In this example, Youtube or Facebook will have more resources to (automatically) detect copyright content than a small content-oriented startup. This only increases "barriers to entry" for new companies and strengthens the position of incumbents. According to the article, politicians initially addressed the problem: > TBC Platforms run by startups (small and micro-sized businesses) are exempted from the law. but this at risk of being dropped: > This was one of the European Parliament’s main improvements to the text. Unfortunately, it is now in danger of being dropped in negotiations.
zmix 8y ago
> However, I'm not sure if EU politicians are that smart... Even if they would be, they still are too corrupt, to stick to their own senses.
glenrivard 8y ago
If that is the intention then they are doing 180 degrees from what they should be doing. New regulations almost always helps the big guys and hurt the little ones. This will be a big boost to Google and Facebook and hurt everyone else. Just like GDPR and the shopping changes in the UK. Both really helped Google and to a lesser extent Facebook.
Nasrudith 8y ago
The fact that they only know how to tear down and not to build will make it futile. At best it will create a divergent protectionist demense while doing nothing to aid viability outside the market - and its help inside is dubious. Even outright banning Google and Facebook won't suddenly make Bing and Yahoo the next big thing. At best they will be the postum to the real coffee.
kodablah 8y ago
> [...] might [...] Punitive measures on information like this rarely encourage anything. The worst part is people look at the intent and potential effects of legislation as though it is the actual, realized result. I have to assume the reason is a mix of naive optimism, anti-big-web-tech, and the inability to take the bad with the good so e feel obligated to keep shaping things. Real, actual teaching and encouraging and efforts and money and motive and all of that is far different from what's happening here.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
"In a weird way, this might be EU's strategy to finally deal significant damage to Google and Facebook," Yes, it' a strategy of their failing commercial entities to wring a profit out of entities like FB and G who they think are profiting. Of course it's among the worst strategies available. What they need is more innovation, not more regulation.
nkkollaw 8y ago
How. They are the ones who have the lawyers to protect themselves. It's the small platforms that will suffer, and creating startups in the user-generated content will be too risky.

jaabe 8y ago

It’s not made by EU politicians, it’s made by a combination of lawyers, engineers and public administration majors. In many ways the EU is a functioning technocracy, and if you ever read through the actual EU documents it shows. They are almost always sound, they are also massively bureaucratic and around 90% longer than necessary, but I’ve never read through something that wasn’t sound. Disclaimer: I haven’t read up on article 13, but I do read (and sit through) a good deal of EU standards and proposals for EU wide Enterprise Architectural principles, and they are never thwarted by politics.

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
>the EU is a functioning technocracy, only it's not really functioning is it?
- sexydefinesher 8y ago
  What do you see as not functioning in the EU?
  - DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
    have you ever been to rural Germany, Italy, France or heard of gilets jaunes? Any idea why they might exist? I live in a very poor EU country (out of choice) and most young people fuck off to Germany or France because their home states have no jobs for them. They don't come back either which causes a massive brain drain on these places. Ask the so called middle class in Croatia, Slovakia, Italy what they think of the EU and how well it works for them. Avg salary in these places is 500 to 1000 EUR. And if you visit supermarkets all they have is shit. Literally everything like fresh veg tastes like feet because the good stuff that is locally produced gets exported to the rich places. Companies have 2 production lines making low-grade products (despite being the same brand) for these markets. I'm not an arm-chair bureaucrat who forms his opinion on Google. I actually live in these placed because despite all this shit and poverty the people are actually warm. One more example: thousands of people wiping arses in nursery homes in Germany are working through shady polish, slovenian, etc outsourcing companies where they're stripped of all benefits that a German would enjoy. They work for 500 to 1000 / month (in a high cost country) because their home country has no jobs for them. Then they're being exploited by the rich EU countries. Again I lived in Germany, ran 2 companies there, lived in France (operated 3 businesses), now I live in Eastern EU. As much as I want the EU to succeed I can't be blind to the hypocrisy that I see every day on the streets in my own surrounding.
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      That’s happening everywhere. One of the reasons you have the wacky politics that you have now in the US is that the people left in flyover country aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed. Russia is the most extreme example of the phenomenon.
    - eecc 8y ago
      thank you for posting this
      - spiderfarmer 8y ago
        Shame it's not very informative.
    - Lucadg 8y ago
      Food in Italy is of extremely good quality and variety. I live in Bulgaria and fruits and vegetables are exceptional and extremely cheap. If you refer to supermarket food I may agree.
      - DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
        indeed Italy (and France) has some o the best food I ever bought. Germany can't compare even with what's available in a Le'clerc or Carrefour in France. yes I was mainly talking about supermarkets. In my current home I only buy stuff at the wet-market - e.g. directly from farmers because the chains just deliver crap. Even the higher prized items in supermarkets (which cost the same as Germany despite the salary differences) are terrible quality - literally nobody in Italy or France would eat those veg.
        Lucadg 8y ago
        Exactly. The more corporations are involved the worst the food gets.
        ben_w 8y ago
        I wasn’t that impressed with French supermarkets, including Carrefour. Sure, Germany is the home of Lidl, Aldi, and Netto, but Rewe, Edeka, Kaufland, and Biomarkt are all at least as good as what I saw in France. On the other hand, in the UK, Tesco, Waitrose, and Sainsbury’s are all at least as good as their German equivalents; and (beyond the EU) even the worst EU supermarket was better than almost every supermarket I saw in the USA.
- iagooar 8y ago
  You can say anything you want about the EU, but it's perfectly functioning and always has been.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    "Perfectly functioning and always has been"? That is beyond delusion. The EU is co-ruled by an opaque system of non elected bodies, under the table deals, and backroom diplomacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_deficit_in_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_deficit_in_the_Euro... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/09/brexit-eu-democratic-britain https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/09/brexit... https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/03/23/how-to-address-the-eus-democratic-deficit https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/03/23/how-to-a... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1007/S12290-012-0213-7 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1007/S12290-012-021... https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/opinion/the-euros-democratic-deficit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/opinion/the-euros-democra... https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/11/i-was-teenage-europhile-eu-s-sadistic-austerity-and-lack-democracy-changed-my-mind https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/11/i-was-teenage-... https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/books/adults-in-the-room/ https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/books/adults-in-the-room/ And those are mostly official establishment narratives -- if you look at critiques from the left (and libertatians) the picture is much much bleaker.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      > The EU is co-ruled by an opaque system of non elected bodies The EU council (comprising of democratically elected heads of government from the 28 member countries) The EU parliament (comprising of directly elected MEPs from the 28 member countries) The EU commission president, nominated by the council, approved by the parliament, and standing on a ticket to be EU Commission president during the parliamentary elections The EU commissioners, appointed by the democratically elected heads of government from the 28 members Laws are only passed by agreement by the democratically elected council and the democratically elected MEPs.
      - 8y ago
Kiro 8y ago
Please read Article 13 and tell me it's sound. Spoiler: it's not.
deltron3030 8y ago
>but I’ve never read through something that wasn’t sound. Sound in respect to very general interpretations and "common sense". The problem is that general laws can touch topics that are way beyond common sense, the room of interpretation is then just so big that it's like a weapon to take out anybody if you only dig deep enough and frame it as a problem for the common good.

felix99 8y ago

yes, this could be called the "anti-google act" of 2019 ... google is basically the only company it applies to. facebook has never been a major venue for piracy (afaik?) so i don't think it even affects them much. however, it is a good thing. youtube has always been a massive for-profit piracy operation, and they just license and pay the people who are big enough to threaten them. all small content creators get the shaft. even google search is mostly a form of piracy. taking other people's content and slapping ads on it. google needs to die and it is nice to see the EU helping here.

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago

FAANG will be pissed but I doubt it really makes a dent. Their focus is Asia (has been since 2 decades now). Us Europeans are just a sleepy backwater of old people with lot of history which makes for nice tax havens and retirement homes.

Normal_gaussian 8y ago
2 decades is somewhat of an overstatement.
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  The focus of growth has always been on Asia afair (I can only speak for what I witnessed since the 70ies), ... first Japan, India & Tiger countries, later China. Even Brazil and LATAM for a long time had more focus then backward and technophobic Europe. It's not just demography because an old person in Asia will embrace new ideas and tech (my japanese father in law is 90ies and still excited over a new iPhone while my parents already gave up on anything digital in their 50ies - "just too hard they say")
  - Normal_gaussian 8y ago
    your comment was about FAANG, of which Facebook wasn't founded, Amazon, Netflix, Google were all in their infancy. Maybe apple,
oaiey 8y ago
Even worse. They will be the ones which can comply. They can write legal terms, they can check real government identities and create a significant upload filter strategy. They are the winners, not the losers here.
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  right! in a way it creates a couple of jobs but only for those who can program - somebody has to implement these policies into technical reality. looking at GDPR (which I fully support) it has created quite a large niche of specialized lawyers and people are now busy educating themselves about how to isolate PII. No doubt this bill will also produce quite a bit of demand for specialists. But it's hardly innovation. As you say the small start-ups in Berlin & Paris are left in the dust because only the big ones have the resources to take care of this bureaucratic horse-manure. In the long run we'll continue to dig our own graves while China and the US laughs.

krona 8y ago

The strategy is legal, political and economic harmonisation. It does this by passing vague legislation that requires its own court to interpret. Everything else, literally everything, is secondary. And so a nation state is born.

tpetry 8y ago

No, FAANG will not be targeted. Even GDPR which would have been able to piss of facebook was not used to attack them. Only small companies have been attacked because of GDPR violations. Inoffically they have told people they will not attack the big ones because they have enough lawyers so an attack on e.g. facebook will be too time consuming.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
This is bullshit. EU was never too shy at attacking big American companies when they crossed the line.
- dang 8y ago
  When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "This is bullshit. 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jsty 8y ago

Alternatively, with a little lobbying and a few tweaks, any 'platform' deemed not to be implementing sufficiently advanced filtering could be subject to ISP-level blocking / filtering. This one's a double edged sword.

squarefoot 8y ago

"I'm not sure if EU politicians are that smart..." They are, just in a more traditional way. They're now collecting bribes from whoever bought them to pass this law, as tomorrow they will collect other bribes to modify the law.

jkukul 8y ago

If this is their intention, then the measure might be totally counterproductive. Regulations very often hit small businesses harder than big ones, because big businesses have capacities to deal with them. In this example, Youtube or Facebook will have more resources to (automatically) detect copyright content than a small content-oriented startup. This only increases "barriers to entry" for new companies and strengthens the position of incumbents. According to the article, politicians initially addressed the problem: > TBC Platforms run by startups (small and micro-sized businesses) are exempted from the law. but this at risk of being dropped: > This was one of the European Parliament’s main improvements to the text. Unfortunately, it is now in danger of being dropped in negotiations.

zmix 8y ago

> However, I'm not sure if EU politicians are that smart... Even if they would be, they still are too corrupt, to stick to their own senses.

glenrivard 8y ago

If that is the intention then they are doing 180 degrees from what they should be doing. New regulations almost always helps the big guys and hurt the little ones. This will be a big boost to Google and Facebook and hurt everyone else. Just like GDPR and the shopping changes in the UK. Both really helped Google and to a lesser extent Facebook.

Nasrudith 8y ago

The fact that they only know how to tear down and not to build will make it futile. At best it will create a divergent protectionist demense while doing nothing to aid viability outside the market - and its help inside is dubious. Even outright banning Google and Facebook won't suddenly make Bing and Yahoo the next big thing. At best they will be the postum to the real coffee.

kodablah 8y ago

> [...] might [...] Punitive measures on information like this rarely encourage anything. The worst part is people look at the intent and potential effects of legislation as though it is the actual, realized result. I have to assume the reason is a mix of naive optimism, anti-big-web-tech, and the inability to take the bad with the good so e feel obligated to keep shaping things. Real, actual teaching and encouraging and efforts and money and motive and all of that is far different from what's happening here.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

"In a weird way, this might be EU's strategy to finally deal significant damage to Google and Facebook," Yes, it' a strategy of their failing commercial entities to wring a profit out of entities like FB and G who they think are profiting. Of course it's among the worst strategies available. What they need is more innovation, not more regulation.

nkkollaw 8y ago

How. They are the ones who have the lawyers to protect themselves. It's the small platforms that will suffer, and creating startups in the user-generated content will be too risky.