8 ms·

A big part of the problem is that there is no single entity that defends the citizens interest in this instance. You have the Disney's of the world heavily lobb

A big part of the problem is that there is no single entity that defends the citizens interest in this instance. You have the Disney's of the world heavily lobbying to pass reforms like these, but who protests against it? - Online signatures? Gets laughed out of the room. They could be fake, they don't mean anything, they are paid, etc.. - Voting? Voting cycles are too long and voting decisions cannot be made on a single issue, so this is ineffective at best. - Street Protests? It seems this is the only option. But as said in the article, even the credibility of these can be put into question. So what do we do?

zaarn 8y ago
EU Elections are coming up. Vote for the pirate faction in your country or check who voted what and only vote for those parties that voted against A13 or if there are none, parties that are vocal against A13. Same goes for your countries own election cycle.
- Shivetya 8y ago
  American here. Now I know some nations within the EU have proportional voting but I have to ask, how difficult is it to unseat a politician? How difficult is it to do so within their party, are there the equivalent of the US primary system? For the US, unless they are not running the chance of reelection is very high so without some sort of political shift not governed by one of our two parties is near impossible.
  - nickcotter 8y ago
    Just to clarify - all European Parliament elections (not member state elections) have to use proportional representation. What exact type they use varies.
  - zaarn 8y ago
    Depends on the memberstate, in germany the politicians are seated by the parties with longer lists on which you can vote.
  - mantas 8y ago
    It's more about changing power ratio between parties rather than unseating a specific politician. If a known politician fucks up badly, they can get elected next time even if their party support drops a lot. And that's still a win for the opponents.
  - jnaddef 8y ago
    French here. To be honest in France almost nobody knows who is seating at the European Parliament, we have absolutely no visibility to what is being voted, even less who voted what. A commonly accepted view (at least around me, I might be biased) is that our representatives there are useless, whoever they are. We had about 60% abstention in 2014's elections, I think that says it all.
- trickstra 8y ago
  where can I get the lists of names and how they voted for this specific bill?
  - zaarn 8y ago
    You'd have to look for your country, Julia Reda (senficon on Twitter) published a list, I'm unsure if it's for all MEPs, Martin Sonneborn (MartinSonneborn on Twitter) published a simple graphic for german MEPs.
  - tutanchamun 8y ago
    Julia Reda has posted the raw data: https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/copyrightvote.pdf https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/copyrightvot... It should be available on the site of the european parliament as well.
    - trickstra 8y ago
      Thanks, I just found it too on the EP website, however without the explanation of the votes and buried in the middle of a 300 page word document. Isn't it nice that the people deciding about the future of internet are doing that by passing around word documents like it's 2001? I wonder how many people here can imagine a more readable presentation of such data...
      - mpfundstein 8y ago
        Even rappers realize this. To quote J-Cole's BRACKETS I'll write a check to the IRS, my pockets get slim Damn, do I even have a say 'bout where it's goin'? Some older nigga told me to start votin' I said "Democracy is too fuckin' slow" If I'm givin' y'all this hard-earned bread, I wanna know Better yet, let me decide, bitch, it's 2018 Let me pick the things I'm funding from an app on my screen Better that than letting wack congressman I've never seen Dictate where my money go, straight into the palms of some
  - petre 8y ago
    Here: https://saveyourinternet.eu/act/ https://saveyourinternet.eu/act/
- i6tjvo 8y ago
  Let's be honest here, I have much bigger fish to fry. I like a free Internet, but it's low on my list of concerns, way below affordable housing, much stricter control of my country's borders, better support for entrepreneurs, more security and better police, etc. I'm not going to vote for a "pirate party" as if that was the most important thing in my life.
  - zaarn 8y ago
    You just watched conservative MEPs completely ignore all expert advice, all protesting, all petitions in favor of listening to lobby advocates and you still think that if the same happens on a problem you care about they will suddenly listen to you instead of the lobby?
  - nnq 8y ago
    ...then you're free to enjoy the "advantages" of "stricter borders" together with messed up copy right laws that will stop you from creating and sharing on open platform websites, you deserve them both :) Have fun with your totalitarian nationalist utopia: if you think anything referencing technologies like "upload filters" (their simple EXISTENCE!) is about anything then enabling tools of totalitarian mass control of sheeple. In a normal open society people are free to put whatever they want up online. Now if someone else realizes afterwards that it violates their copyright, they can ask for it to be taken down in a certain interval of time, and if you or the platform don't agree about this, you proceed to settle the dispute in court. Even DMCA and such kind of work this way: after something ends up online you can solicit it to go down! Same with people: you allow people in, and if they do illegal stuff (this may include whatever your laws want to say, including staying too much without holding a job or creating a business, whatever, write it in your laws) you kick them out or throw them in jail. If go the other way, it's easy for the "Overton window" to slide over you and you'll go from "innocent until proven guilty" to "guilty until you can prove innocence (or racial purity or whatever)" in a jiffy... Once you're talking "walls" and "upload filters" you're on the path to some kind of fascism or natzysm, regardless of how you call it, and whether it's state or corporate powered (yeah, Google and Facebook will be more than happy making profits selling "upload filters" or "border control people screening technologies" just as well, they don't care where the $ comes from)...
- dekajoo 8y ago
  Where can I find such list ?
- petre 8y ago
  Can't do that. The party that mostly voted agsonst it are crooks. My best bet are independent candidates that voted against it, provided they will run again. As far as I'm concerned with, voting doesn't work, the democratic process in the EU doesn't work.
golergka 8y ago
You could vote for your country to exit EU.
- rmind 8y ago
  It is not the EU which is the problem. It is the reluctance of the political establishment (both within the countries and across the EU) to acknowledge the opposition to such laws.
  - golergka 8y ago
    With structures such as EU, the distance between the voter and decision-making center gets longer, and voter's influence smaller. Exiting these structures, just as limiting the power of any central or federal government in favour of moving this power to lower-level elected authorities (such as states in US or Russia) decreases this distance.
    - atq2119 8y ago
      This is fine in theory, with a big caveat. Our lives are increasingly dominated by big entities, and the political ones are often small fish compared to giant international corporations that can play smaller political entities off against each other (example: Amazon headquarters). The idea of limiting the size of political entities has merit, but it will backfire unless you also limit the size of economic entities. (And you need to do this first or possibly somehow simultaneously, because once you reduced the size of political entities, it may no longer be possible to limit the size of the economic entities.)
      - golergka 8y ago
        This argument has solid logic, but I don't agree with underlying view of the world. The governments of the world can, and do force tech companies to do whatever they want in terms of privacy, security and other stuff. GDPR and Article 13, Net Neutrality, censorship and privacy issues in Russia and China... The only pushback I've seen by corporations is by PR and lobbying, and in the end, politicians seem to do whatever they want. Yes, company may be even wealthier than the government - but as long as government has monopoly on violence and can enforce it laws, corporations would only be comparable to banana republics and african failed states.
onlydeadheroes 8y ago
Torify all the things. Let them legislate over a graveyard.
- zoobab 8y ago
  Exactly.
- dorgo 8y ago
  Even better: upload to a blockchain. Let them try to get it out of the bitcoin blockchain :-P
rmind 8y ago
Realistically: 1. Establishing and consolidating a strong lobbying organisation. There are some NGOs and other interested parties (e.g. companies like Google or supporting organisations like Wikipedia), but they are not united. A united body brings coordination and single, quite more substantial, budget. Then you can efficiently deploy: 1) lawyers 2) accredited lobbyists in the corridors of Brussels 3) public relations professionals running far reaching campaigns. 2. Voting in the EU elections. There are various parties which are consistent in their opposition to such laws (e.g. "Pirate" parties, some Greens and Liberals). It might be a difficult choice, as there may be other positions of such parties you disagree with, depending on your political views. However, such voting could be considered as "tactical" i.e. with a goal to increase their presence or force coalitions, rather than driven by the desire to see them fully in power. It is a question of your priorities.
- sc11 8y ago
  EDRi[1] attempts what you describe in your first point. It's an association of European NGOs to unite efforts on a European level, with an office in Brussels. They recently funded travel costs for citizens to go to Brussels to talk to MEPs about this directive, for example. [1] https://edri.org/about/ https://edri.org/about/
Aaargh20318 8y ago
> A big part of the problem is that there is no single entity that defends the citizens interest in this instance. Isn't the European Parliament supposed to be this entity ? The real problem is that if you have a single entity, then that entity can easily be corrupted by those who have the means to (read: money). This problem is unsolvable because those who have or profit from this power are also the people who get to decide if we want to do something about it.
- fs2 8y ago
  There is really no way for them to "spin" this into something positive for the people, because everyone can clearly see their ignorance and contempt for common people through legislation like this. It is fundamentally corrupt and should be abolished asap
  - toyg 8y ago
    > no way for them to "spin" this into something positive for the people I guess traditional content producers are not people, then. It's a complex world.
    - ameister14 8y ago
      they are people, they are not the people.
    - Aaargh20318 8y ago
      > I guess traditional content producers are not people, then. No, corporations aren’t people.
dredmorbius 8y ago
The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
Carpetsmoker 8y ago
> no single entity that defends the citizens interest in this instance Not just "this instance", it's a general problem we have with our democratic system. It's the cause of many problems/bad actions, not just this one. The solution is to reform the democratic system to be more, well, democratic. There are a bunch of ideas out there. I'm not really holding my breath though :-/
chli 8y ago
There is that: https://www.ch.ch/en/demokratie/political-rights/referendum/ https://www.ch.ch/en/demokratie/political-rights/referendum/ I consider myself lucky !
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> So what do we do? Are there good polls measuring popular backing for (or indifference to) these bills?
fit2rule 8y ago
>So what do we do? Whenever you start to feel encroached upon by the new world order, the best thing to do is build another one right on top of it. Build systems which route around this damage. It's the only way to be sure.
swebs 8y ago
I like the idea of referendums. It shows how much people care about important issues. Internet polls are useless since they can be cheated and petitions suck because they don't measure how many people are opposed to the petition.
- magduf 8y ago
  Referenda only work when the populace is informed and educated enough to make good decisions. Otherwise, you get Brexit.
- stordoff 8y ago
  _Only_ if they are adequately defined (and it's clear what the legal effect is). Two and a half years on from the Brexit referendum, we are still arguing about what it even _means_, and it's not clear if people even want to leave anymore. Ideally, they should be considered advisory only, otherwise you could end up with a tyranny of the majority situation (a very slight majority is probably not a good reason to make sweeping changes), or at least require a supermajority. I'd also say that in a lot of cases people do not understand the implications of what they are voting for, hence my preference for electing a representative to make these decisions, who are at least in theory elected to consider this effects.
closeparen 8y ago
Why would you want to do that? We have already established in the discussion around GDPR that EU regulators are omnipotent, perfectly represent the will of the people in every case, and can be trusted to wield unlimited and arbitrary power in reasonable ways. Could it be that EU regulatory bodies are normal government functions that run the risk of normal governance-related dysfunction and require the usual controls like limited power, rule of law, oversight, and less-than-worldwide jurisdiction?
C14L 8y ago
There have been huge street protests all over Europe. The MEPs didn't care. There are elections soon. But people will just vote for all the usual candidates, so why would they care? This is just one topic out of hundreds. And most people care more about the road in front of there house than about something as abstract as freedom of speech. Sadly.
Digit-Al 8y ago
Here's an idea I've been playing around with for a while now: A citizens lobbying service. It could be an independent non-profit allied to other non-profits like EFF. When one of these non-profits wants to run a campaign against a bad law being enacted they can run a "campaign". They can explain why it is bad, just as they currently do, but as well as asking people to write to their local government representative they can also ask for donations to the campaign. These donations would then be used by professional lobbyists to lobby in the same way large organisations do. It's probably a stupid idea, but I feel like it has the germ of something useful.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  Nonprofits already collect money (both in general and tied to specific efforts) and hire professional lobbyists to advocate for their causes. What is the third-party service doing here besides adding extra overhead?
- jackofall1 8y ago
  Yeah, we would need some kind of organization that lobbies according to the public's will. Of course people shouldn't just be able to join this organization and take over the reigns, so they would need to be voted in. Let's say each region of a country will have a couple of candidates and regular votes are held on who will get to join the organization for a limited time. With this organization in place, we will finally be able to truly voice the people's opinion and act on their behalf! There is something though about that idea that I cannot pinpoint. It somehow feels vaguely familiar. If I could just figure out how...

zaarn 8y ago

EU Elections are coming up. Vote for the pirate faction in your country or check who voted what and only vote for those parties that voted against A13 or if there are none, parties that are vocal against A13. Same goes for your countries own election cycle.

Shivetya 8y ago
American here. Now I know some nations within the EU have proportional voting but I have to ask, how difficult is it to unseat a politician? How difficult is it to do so within their party, are there the equivalent of the US primary system? For the US, unless they are not running the chance of reelection is very high so without some sort of political shift not governed by one of our two parties is near impossible.
- nickcotter 8y ago
  Just to clarify - all European Parliament elections (not member state elections) have to use proportional representation. What exact type they use varies.
- zaarn 8y ago
  Depends on the memberstate, in germany the politicians are seated by the parties with longer lists on which you can vote.
- mantas 8y ago
  It's more about changing power ratio between parties rather than unseating a specific politician. If a known politician fucks up badly, they can get elected next time even if their party support drops a lot. And that's still a win for the opponents.
- jnaddef 8y ago
  French here. To be honest in France almost nobody knows who is seating at the European Parliament, we have absolutely no visibility to what is being voted, even less who voted what. A commonly accepted view (at least around me, I might be biased) is that our representatives there are useless, whoever they are. We had about 60% abstention in 2014's elections, I think that says it all.
trickstra 8y ago
where can I get the lists of names and how they voted for this specific bill?
- zaarn 8y ago
  You'd have to look for your country, Julia Reda (senficon on Twitter) published a list, I'm unsure if it's for all MEPs, Martin Sonneborn (MartinSonneborn on Twitter) published a simple graphic for german MEPs.
- tutanchamun 8y ago
  Julia Reda has posted the raw data: https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/copyrightvote.pdf https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/copyrightvot... It should be available on the site of the european parliament as well.
  - trickstra 8y ago
    Thanks, I just found it too on the EP website, however without the explanation of the votes and buried in the middle of a 300 page word document. Isn't it nice that the people deciding about the future of internet are doing that by passing around word documents like it's 2001? I wonder how many people here can imagine a more readable presentation of such data...
    - mpfundstein 8y ago
      Even rappers realize this. To quote J-Cole's BRACKETS I'll write a check to the IRS, my pockets get slim Damn, do I even have a say 'bout where it's goin'? Some older nigga told me to start votin' I said "Democracy is too fuckin' slow" If I'm givin' y'all this hard-earned bread, I wanna know Better yet, let me decide, bitch, it's 2018 Let me pick the things I'm funding from an app on my screen Better that than letting wack congressman I've never seen Dictate where my money go, straight into the palms of some
- petre 8y ago
  Here: https://saveyourinternet.eu/act/ https://saveyourinternet.eu/act/
i6tjvo 8y ago
Let's be honest here, I have much bigger fish to fry. I like a free Internet, but it's low on my list of concerns, way below affordable housing, much stricter control of my country's borders, better support for entrepreneurs, more security and better police, etc. I'm not going to vote for a "pirate party" as if that was the most important thing in my life.
- zaarn 8y ago
  You just watched conservative MEPs completely ignore all expert advice, all protesting, all petitions in favor of listening to lobby advocates and you still think that if the same happens on a problem you care about they will suddenly listen to you instead of the lobby?
- nnq 8y ago
  ...then you're free to enjoy the "advantages" of "stricter borders" together with messed up copy right laws that will stop you from creating and sharing on open platform websites, you deserve them both :) Have fun with your totalitarian nationalist utopia: if you think anything referencing technologies like "upload filters" (their simple EXISTENCE!) is about anything then enabling tools of totalitarian mass control of sheeple. In a normal open society people are free to put whatever they want up online. Now if someone else realizes afterwards that it violates their copyright, they can ask for it to be taken down in a certain interval of time, and if you or the platform don't agree about this, you proceed to settle the dispute in court. Even DMCA and such kind of work this way: after something ends up online you can solicit it to go down! Same with people: you allow people in, and if they do illegal stuff (this may include whatever your laws want to say, including staying too much without holding a job or creating a business, whatever, write it in your laws) you kick them out or throw them in jail. If go the other way, it's easy for the "Overton window" to slide over you and you'll go from "innocent until proven guilty" to "guilty until you can prove innocence (or racial purity or whatever)" in a jiffy... Once you're talking "walls" and "upload filters" you're on the path to some kind of fascism or natzysm, regardless of how you call it, and whether it's state or corporate powered (yeah, Google and Facebook will be more than happy making profits selling "upload filters" or "border control people screening technologies" just as well, they don't care where the $ comes from)...
dekajoo 8y ago
Where can I find such list ?
petre 8y ago
Can't do that. The party that mostly voted agsonst it are crooks. My best bet are independent candidates that voted against it, provided they will run again. As far as I'm concerned with, voting doesn't work, the democratic process in the EU doesn't work.

golergka 8y ago

You could vote for your country to exit EU.

rmind 8y ago
It is not the EU which is the problem. It is the reluctance of the political establishment (both within the countries and across the EU) to acknowledge the opposition to such laws.
- golergka 8y ago
  With structures such as EU, the distance between the voter and decision-making center gets longer, and voter's influence smaller. Exiting these structures, just as limiting the power of any central or federal government in favour of moving this power to lower-level elected authorities (such as states in US or Russia) decreases this distance.
  - atq2119 8y ago
    This is fine in theory, with a big caveat. Our lives are increasingly dominated by big entities, and the political ones are often small fish compared to giant international corporations that can play smaller political entities off against each other (example: Amazon headquarters). The idea of limiting the size of political entities has merit, but it will backfire unless you also limit the size of economic entities. (And you need to do this first or possibly somehow simultaneously, because once you reduced the size of political entities, it may no longer be possible to limit the size of the economic entities.)
    - golergka 8y ago
      This argument has solid logic, but I don't agree with underlying view of the world. The governments of the world can, and do force tech companies to do whatever they want in terms of privacy, security and other stuff. GDPR and Article 13, Net Neutrality, censorship and privacy issues in Russia and China... The only pushback I've seen by corporations is by PR and lobbying, and in the end, politicians seem to do whatever they want. Yes, company may be even wealthier than the government - but as long as government has monopoly on violence and can enforce it laws, corporations would only be comparable to banana republics and african failed states.

onlydeadheroes 8y ago

Torify all the things. Let them legislate over a graveyard.

zoobab 8y ago
Exactly.
dorgo 8y ago
Even better: upload to a blockchain. Let them try to get it out of the bitcoin blockchain :-P

rmind 8y ago

Realistically: 1. Establishing and consolidating a strong lobbying organisation. There are some NGOs and other interested parties (e.g. companies like Google or supporting organisations like Wikipedia), but they are not united. A united body brings coordination and single, quite more substantial, budget. Then you can efficiently deploy: 1) lawyers 2) accredited lobbyists in the corridors of Brussels 3) public relations professionals running far reaching campaigns. 2. Voting in the EU elections. There are various parties which are consistent in their opposition to such laws (e.g. "Pirate" parties, some Greens and Liberals). It might be a difficult choice, as there may be other positions of such parties you disagree with, depending on your political views. However, such voting could be considered as "tactical" i.e. with a goal to increase their presence or force coalitions, rather than driven by the desire to see them fully in power. It is a question of your priorities.

sc11 8y ago
EDRi[1] attempts what you describe in your first point. It's an association of European NGOs to unite efforts on a European level, with an office in Brussels. They recently funded travel costs for citizens to go to Brussels to talk to MEPs about this directive, for example. [1] https://edri.org/about/ https://edri.org/about/

Aaargh20318 8y ago

> A big part of the problem is that there is no single entity that defends the citizens interest in this instance. Isn't the European Parliament supposed to be this entity ? The real problem is that if you have a single entity, then that entity can easily be corrupted by those who have the means to (read: money). This problem is unsolvable because those who have or profit from this power are also the people who get to decide if we want to do something about it.

fs2 8y ago
There is really no way for them to "spin" this into something positive for the people, because everyone can clearly see their ignorance and contempt for common people through legislation like this. It is fundamentally corrupt and should be abolished asap
- toyg 8y ago
  > no way for them to "spin" this into something positive for the people I guess traditional content producers are not people, then. It's a complex world.
  - ameister14 8y ago
    they are people, they are not the people.
  - Aaargh20318 8y ago
    > I guess traditional content producers are not people, then. No, corporations aren’t people.

dredmorbius 8y ago

The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

Carpetsmoker 8y ago

> no single entity that defends the citizens interest in this instance Not just "this instance", it's a general problem we have with our democratic system. It's the cause of many problems/bad actions, not just this one. The solution is to reform the democratic system to be more, well, democratic. There are a bunch of ideas out there. I'm not really holding my breath though :-/

chli 8y ago

There is that: https://www.ch.ch/en/demokratie/political-rights/referendum/ https://www.ch.ch/en/demokratie/political-rights/referendum/ I consider myself lucky !

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> So what do we do? Are there good polls measuring popular backing for (or indifference to) these bills?

fit2rule 8y ago

>So what do we do? Whenever you start to feel encroached upon by the new world order, the best thing to do is build another one right on top of it. Build systems which route around this damage. It's the only way to be sure.

swebs 8y ago

I like the idea of referendums. It shows how much people care about important issues. Internet polls are useless since they can be cheated and petitions suck because they don't measure how many people are opposed to the petition.

magduf 8y ago
Referenda only work when the populace is informed and educated enough to make good decisions. Otherwise, you get Brexit.
stordoff 8y ago
_Only_ if they are adequately defined (and it's clear what the legal effect is). Two and a half years on from the Brexit referendum, we are still arguing about what it even _means_, and it's not clear if people even want to leave anymore. Ideally, they should be considered advisory only, otherwise you could end up with a tyranny of the majority situation (a very slight majority is probably not a good reason to make sweeping changes), or at least require a supermajority. I'd also say that in a lot of cases people do not understand the implications of what they are voting for, hence my preference for electing a representative to make these decisions, who are at least in theory elected to consider this effects.

closeparen 8y ago

Why would you want to do that? We have already established in the discussion around GDPR that EU regulators are omnipotent, perfectly represent the will of the people in every case, and can be trusted to wield unlimited and arbitrary power in reasonable ways. Could it be that EU regulatory bodies are normal government functions that run the risk of normal governance-related dysfunction and require the usual controls like limited power, rule of law, oversight, and less-than-worldwide jurisdiction?

C14L 8y ago

There have been huge street protests all over Europe. The MEPs didn't care. There are elections soon. But people will just vote for all the usual candidates, so why would they care? This is just one topic out of hundreds. And most people care more about the road in front of there house than about something as abstract as freedom of speech. Sadly.

Digit-Al 8y ago

Here's an idea I've been playing around with for a while now: A citizens lobbying service. It could be an independent non-profit allied to other non-profits like EFF. When one of these non-profits wants to run a campaign against a bad law being enacted they can run a "campaign". They can explain why it is bad, just as they currently do, but as well as asking people to write to their local government representative they can also ask for donations to the campaign. These donations would then be used by professional lobbyists to lobby in the same way large organisations do. It's probably a stupid idea, but I feel like it has the germ of something useful.

dragonwriter 8y ago
Nonprofits already collect money (both in general and tied to specific efforts) and hire professional lobbyists to advocate for their causes. What is the third-party service doing here besides adding extra overhead?
jackofall1 8y ago
Yeah, we would need some kind of organization that lobbies according to the public's will. Of course people shouldn't just be able to join this organization and take over the reigns, so they would need to be voted in. Let's say each region of a country will have a couple of candidates and regular votes are held on who will get to join the organization for a limited time. With this organization in place, we will finally be able to truly voice the people's opinion and act on their behalf! There is something though about that idea that I cannot pinpoint. It somehow feels vaguely familiar. If I could just figure out how...