49 ms·

> leads straight into the dystopia that Stallman warned us about IMHO, the push for age verification is just a stepping stone towards requiring a mandatory ID

by nextos 1y ago

> leads straight into the dystopia that Stallman warned us about IMHO, the push for age verification is just a stepping stone towards requiring a mandatory ID for all social media posts made from EU. Given the current trends against freedom of speech, it's not unreasonable to think that by the end of the decade any site, including HN, might need to link usernames with their respective eIDs in case posts come from EU IP addresses. > officially sanctioned hardware and software Right now, if you want to run an alternative OS, it's already an uphill battle to use tons of member state services, as well as to do banking. Even if you have microG available, the situation is terrible. I imagine it's going to become harder. I cannot understand why the European Commission wants to reduce our reliance on FAANG services, and at the same time they make Google Play a de facto standard, reinforcing the mobile duopoly. In this context, free alternative mobile platforms, such as Sailfish, cannot flourish.

tonyhart7 1y ago
"a mandatory ID for all social media posts made from EU. Given the current trends against freedom of speech" what?? how is this againt freedom of speech???, south korea implement this ages ago and there is nothing like that
- userbinator 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_South_K... I wouldn't consider South Korea as having any meaningful freedom of speech; in fact they seem closer to China than the EU.
- numpad0 1y ago
  SK had this, and it appeared to have turned their entire WWW into 4chan with cult radicalisms. Their state of online speeches and its real world negative consequences are crazy. People on permanent records in real name never backs down because they more tangibly feel their mistakes as threats, and if you think about it, people who never backs down even if they are in wrong are effectively cultists. It's clear what these types of totalitarianism do and where this path ends. It's crazy EU don't get that.
  - tonyhart7 1y ago
    lol. its echo chamber on internet if you talk to people directly, no one said that
    - numpad0 1y ago
      Every cultures has echo chambers, I'm talking about which one is the worst and which parts of laws are likely fueling it
yorwba 1y ago
There's not a trend against freedom of speech so much as existing laws outlawing certain categories of speech being applied to the internet. If you lie in a commercial context, that's fraud; if you lie in court, that's perjury; if you tell your buddies to go do crimes together, that's conspiracy to commit; if you tell someone to give you money or else, that's blackmail... If you come from the perspective that there used to be freedom of speech and now there's all those pesky laws restricting what you can say, it looks like a slippery slope. If you realize that people have been required to check ID when selling material unsuitable for minors in physical stores since before the internet existed, it seems a bit more unlikely that ID requirements will expand to cover everything else.
- mytailorisrich 1y ago
  There is no "freedom of speech" in the US sense in the EU/UK. That's often a cause for misunderstanding between the two sides of the Pond. There are many things that you are not allowed to write or say by law in EU countries simply because the legislator has decided that they are wrong opinions, and it is generally accepted that the State can and should implement such controls. Note that lying is not a crime in general. Your examples are for very specific contexts.
  - af78 1y ago
    That's a common misconception. The European Convention on Human Rights guarantees freedom of expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_Rights#Article_10_%E2%80%93_expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R... and is legally binding in all member states. Sure, there are exceptions but in the USA too freedom of speech is not absolute either. Moreover, in practice, there is more freedom of speech in most EU countries than in the USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-index https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...: USA: 0.89 France: 0.96 Germany: 0.94 Czechia: 0.96 etc.
    - mytailorisrich 1y ago
      Including things like "media bias" and other dubious criteria in freedom of speech rankings is obviously skewed. Whatever the ECHR might say what I wrote in my previous comment is factual. In Europe "freedom of speech" comes with a long list of small print. In fact, this is so embedded that the article of the ECHR you quote provides for restrictions and even states that they are "necessary": "subject to certain restrictions that are "in accordance with law" and "necessary in a democratic society"." QED
swiftcoder 1y ago
> I cannot understand why the European Commission wants to reduce our reliance on FAANG services, and at the same time they make Google Play a de facto standard It seems to be different branches of the EU? This has been a recurring problem in EU tech legislation - the EU government bodies are sufficiently autonomous that the right hand seldom knows what the left is doing...
- lynx97 1y ago
  "right hand" pretty nicely fits. The EU/EVP is much more conservative/right wing then many of its citizens are prepared to accept. Its a pretty nice propaganda-machinery that made this possible. Ask a random EU citizen if they are aware that conservatives are leading the EU since 30 years... You'll be surprised.
  - pantalaimon 1y ago
    The current push for more censorship is a left talking point though
    - andrepd 1y ago
      Yeah right... That's why the left wing parties in the EP voted against and the conservatives / neoright parties voted in favour of censorship. -.-
- SirHumphrey 1y ago
  To quote Yes, Minister: > Hacker: One of your officials pays farmers to produce surplus food, while on the same floor, the next office is paying them to destroy the surpluses. > Maurice: That is not true! > Hacker: No? > Maurice: He is not in the next office, not even on the same floor!
- qcnguy 1y ago
  They aren't autonomous at all though. All EU law comes from the Commission, which is a singular body run by a single appointed president, with everyone reporting directly to her. The Commission answers to nobody and the Parliament can't tell it what to do, just rubberstamp what it produces. This is the best case scenario for coherency in law making. It's designed to be as undemocratic as possible, so there's no need to make compromises or engage in pork barrel politics to get stuff over the line. The incoherency of the EU's approach is just a consequence of the incoherent thinking coming from the top. The EU always has extremely powerful but very low competency presidents, always for some reason those who were failures at national politics.
miohtama 1y ago
VPN ban is coming next.
- miohtama 1y ago
  VPN ban coming now in the UK https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722216
kubb 1y ago
I would honestly love that. No more paid trolls on social media, the democratic process has a chance to adapt to technology, we can avoid the fate of the US.
- exe34 1y ago
  Only until the next Reichstag fire, I suspect, because by then there won't be any more democracy.
  - kubb 1y ago
    Can you phrase your thought as a causal chain so that I don’t have to guess what you mean?
    - BiteCode_dev 1y ago
      In the 1930s, the Dutch government conducted a census that included religion. The Netherlands, after all, had a comprehensive population registry system (Bevolkingsregister) established in the 19th century. This registry was centralized, continuously updated, and included religion, addresses, family connections, and occupations. After the German occupation in 1940, the Nazis accessed and exploited the Dutch population registry, including religious affiliation. About 75–80% of the ~140,000 Jews in the Netherlands were killed. This is the highest percentage in Western Europe. Compare that to France, which had a more fragmented administrative system, and less complete central records and 25% of Jews in France were deported and killed — a much lower percentage than the Netherlands. As usual, when reaching the Godwin point, the idea is not for you to take it at face value, but to extrapolate to your situation. The concentration of power and centralized people tracking are eventually always abused, and once your system becomes less free (which has historically eventually happened on a long enough timescale), you will pay the price for it. In our case, having a full history of all opinions, interactions, locations, and behavior linked to full identity of people is what we are ultimately talking about here. It's already well on its way, but it will make it worse. The more you concentrate power and feed data about people, the greater the potential damage. And of course, it doesn't need to be a full-on dictatorship to get problems with those. It's a spectrum of increasing problems you will get, the more you lean into it.
perihelions 1y ago
> "it's not unreasonable to think that by the end of the decade any site, including HN, might need to link usernames with their respective eIDs in case posts come from EU IP addresses." A rule of thumb that works too often is "how is mainland China doing things?"[0], and assume the West will follow behind shortly. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/15/china-digital-id-internet-surveillance/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/15/china-digita... ("Big Brother gets new powers in China with digital ID system") (tl;dr: Mandatory digital ID, with central government attesting and holding personal data in escrow. The "privacy-preserving", "least-bad option" a sizeable portion of even HN itself advocates for). > "This means that companies, like social media site Weibo or online shopping behemoth Alibaba, will no longer be able to see the personal information of their users with digital IDs — but Chinese authorities will be able to see the real identity behind online accounts across a range of sites."
- Yeul 1y ago
  Oh well at least the Chinese aren't Christians.
  - viridian 1y ago
    Believe it or not, China has far and away the largest Christian population in the world. (I know, I know, culture, percent of the population, etc, this is just a fun fact that runs counter to intuition.)
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  Is it worse than requiring a phone number?
DocTomoe 1y ago
> In this context, free alternative mobile platforms, such as Sailfish, cannot flourish. If you are a system that depends on people being constantly under the yoke of your jurisdictional powers, you do not want a strong, free, ecosystem. You want as little diversity as possible, ideally two so there is an illusion of choice.
miki123211 1y ago
Good luck convincing America to go along with this, especially in the current political climate. The EU doesn't have power beyond their jurisdiction, as much as they may pretend otherwise. Facebook and Google go along with what the EU wants because they make money there, and have physical properties located on the continent. YC does not.
- White_Wolf 1y ago
  EU doesn't need to convice anyone. They can just make it mandatory and block anyone that doesn't comply.
flyinghamster 1y ago
> I cannot understand why the European Commission wants to reduce our reliance on FAANG services, and at the same time they make Google Play a de facto standard, reinforcing the mobile duopoly. It's called bad faith, and it's an all too common problem with politicians and business types alike.
- mvieira38 1y ago
  In this case it seems more like incompetence mixed with classic Euro bureacracy. The suits don't know better and consumers are braindead so won't even notice
- qcnguy 1y ago
  Von der Leyen and the rest of the Commission aren't politicians nor business types. They don't run for election, they're all appointees. And most of them have never run a business either.
  - Muromec 1y ago
    Von der Leyen and the rest of executive branch of EU are appointed in a same way a lot of countries appoint their executive branch members — by a vote in legislative branch.
    - qcnguy 1y ago
      That's not how the EU works. The EU Parliament was given a vote on von der Leyen. It was a ballot with a single name on it: hers. By the time it go to the rubberstamping stage the decision was already made. The MEPs couldn't propose other candidates for the vote, and the Parliament can't propose changes to the law either, so it's not the legislative branch of the EU. The legislative branch of the EU would be... the EU Commission. Which is also its executive. The way von der Leyen was selected is a secret. Nobody knows how it happened. She didn't run in a democratic process of any kind, so she isn't a politician. If you ask EU fans they'll tell you the heads of state selected her. We have no evidence of this. That's the written process, but no records were produced of any such meeting, or a vote, or however it is that this decision was theoretically made. She could have been presented as a fait accompli by a single country, other countries could have been bribed, they could have been excluded entirely. We'd never know.
andrepd 1y ago
It's already close to impossible. Banking apps and government apps are close to mandatory to function in today's society, yet they plain do not work on Lineage, even with microg, or they work but need ridiculous workarounds. Never mind other "soft mandatory" things like messaging apps or whatever. I'm dedicated and I have a literal PhD in computer science, yet I'm fucking exhausted fighting this battle all the time. 0.1% chance someone has the capability to, and willingly goes through all this bother. Then tfa is just a nail in the coffin.
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  Can't you have two phones: a Lineage phone for personal stuff and a Big Brother phone for banking and government and everything else uninstalled or disabled?
GoblinSlayer 1y ago
>any site, including HN, might need to link usernames with their respective eIDs I think, keybase already does it, and there are users here with signed proofs of identity.
Idesmi 1y ago
> I cannot understand why the European Commission wants to reduce our reliance on FAANG services, and at the same time they make Google Play a de facto standard You'll be surprised, most of the time it's simple ignorance: the people making decisions don't know everything about everything. Hence democracy comes to rescue. But the way the European Commission takes decisions is anti-democratic (secret draft documents, undisclosed lobbying, overlooking the role of the Parliament…)

by nextos 1y ago

tonyhart7 1y ago

"a mandatory ID for all social media posts made from EU. Given the current trends against freedom of speech" what?? how is this againt freedom of speech???, south korea implement this ages ago and there is nothing like that

userbinator 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_South_K... I wouldn't consider South Korea as having any meaningful freedom of speech; in fact they seem closer to China than the EU.
numpad0 1y ago
SK had this, and it appeared to have turned their entire WWW into 4chan with cult radicalisms. Their state of online speeches and its real world negative consequences are crazy. People on permanent records in real name never backs down because they more tangibly feel their mistakes as threats, and if you think about it, people who never backs down even if they are in wrong are effectively cultists. It's clear what these types of totalitarianism do and where this path ends. It's crazy EU don't get that.
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  lol. its echo chamber on internet if you talk to people directly, no one said that
  - numpad0 1y ago
    Every cultures has echo chambers, I'm talking about which one is the worst and which parts of laws are likely fueling it

yorwba 1y ago

There's not a trend against freedom of speech so much as existing laws outlawing certain categories of speech being applied to the internet. If you lie in a commercial context, that's fraud; if you lie in court, that's perjury; if you tell your buddies to go do crimes together, that's conspiracy to commit; if you tell someone to give you money or else, that's blackmail... If you come from the perspective that there used to be freedom of speech and now there's all those pesky laws restricting what you can say, it looks like a slippery slope. If you realize that people have been required to check ID when selling material unsuitable for minors in physical stores since before the internet existed, it seems a bit more unlikely that ID requirements will expand to cover everything else.

mytailorisrich 1y ago
There is no "freedom of speech" in the US sense in the EU/UK. That's often a cause for misunderstanding between the two sides of the Pond. There are many things that you are not allowed to write or say by law in EU countries simply because the legislator has decided that they are wrong opinions, and it is generally accepted that the State can and should implement such controls. Note that lying is not a crime in general. Your examples are for very specific contexts.
- af78 1y ago
  That's a common misconception. The European Convention on Human Rights guarantees freedom of expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_Rights#Article_10_%E2%80%93_expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R... and is legally binding in all member states. Sure, there are exceptions but in the USA too freedom of speech is not absolute either. Moreover, in practice, there is more freedom of speech in most EU countries than in the USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-index https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...: USA: 0.89 France: 0.96 Germany: 0.94 Czechia: 0.96 etc.
  - mytailorisrich 1y ago
    Including things like "media bias" and other dubious criteria in freedom of speech rankings is obviously skewed. Whatever the ECHR might say what I wrote in my previous comment is factual. In Europe "freedom of speech" comes with a long list of small print. In fact, this is so embedded that the article of the ECHR you quote provides for restrictions and even states that they are "necessary": "subject to certain restrictions that are "in accordance with law" and "necessary in a democratic society"." QED

swiftcoder 1y ago

> I cannot understand why the European Commission wants to reduce our reliance on FAANG services, and at the same time they make Google Play a de facto standard It seems to be different branches of the EU? This has been a recurring problem in EU tech legislation - the EU government bodies are sufficiently autonomous that the right hand seldom knows what the left is doing...

lynx97 1y ago
"right hand" pretty nicely fits. The EU/EVP is much more conservative/right wing then many of its citizens are prepared to accept. Its a pretty nice propaganda-machinery that made this possible. Ask a random EU citizen if they are aware that conservatives are leading the EU since 30 years... You'll be surprised.
- pantalaimon 1y ago
  The current push for more censorship is a left talking point though
  - andrepd 1y ago
    Yeah right... That's why the left wing parties in the EP voted against and the conservatives / neoright parties voted in favour of censorship. -.-
SirHumphrey 1y ago
To quote Yes, Minister: > Hacker: One of your officials pays farmers to produce surplus food, while on the same floor, the next office is paying them to destroy the surpluses. > Maurice: That is not true! > Hacker: No? > Maurice: He is not in the next office, not even on the same floor!
qcnguy 1y ago
They aren't autonomous at all though. All EU law comes from the Commission, which is a singular body run by a single appointed president, with everyone reporting directly to her. The Commission answers to nobody and the Parliament can't tell it what to do, just rubberstamp what it produces. This is the best case scenario for coherency in law making. It's designed to be as undemocratic as possible, so there's no need to make compromises or engage in pork barrel politics to get stuff over the line. The incoherency of the EU's approach is just a consequence of the incoherent thinking coming from the top. The EU always has extremely powerful but very low competency presidents, always for some reason those who were failures at national politics.

miohtama 1y ago

VPN ban is coming next.

miohtama 1y ago
VPN ban coming now in the UK https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722216

kubb 1y ago

I would honestly love that. No more paid trolls on social media, the democratic process has a chance to adapt to technology, we can avoid the fate of the US.

exe34 1y ago
Only until the next Reichstag fire, I suspect, because by then there won't be any more democracy.
- kubb 1y ago
  Can you phrase your thought as a causal chain so that I don’t have to guess what you mean?
  - BiteCode_dev 1y ago
    In the 1930s, the Dutch government conducted a census that included religion. The Netherlands, after all, had a comprehensive population registry system (Bevolkingsregister) established in the 19th century. This registry was centralized, continuously updated, and included religion, addresses, family connections, and occupations. After the German occupation in 1940, the Nazis accessed and exploited the Dutch population registry, including religious affiliation. About 75–80% of the ~140,000 Jews in the Netherlands were killed. This is the highest percentage in Western Europe. Compare that to France, which had a more fragmented administrative system, and less complete central records and 25% of Jews in France were deported and killed — a much lower percentage than the Netherlands. As usual, when reaching the Godwin point, the idea is not for you to take it at face value, but to extrapolate to your situation. The concentration of power and centralized people tracking are eventually always abused, and once your system becomes less free (which has historically eventually happened on a long enough timescale), you will pay the price for it. In our case, having a full history of all opinions, interactions, locations, and behavior linked to full identity of people is what we are ultimately talking about here. It's already well on its way, but it will make it worse. The more you concentrate power and feed data about people, the greater the potential damage. And of course, it doesn't need to be a full-on dictatorship to get problems with those. It's a spectrum of increasing problems you will get, the more you lean into it.

perihelions 1y ago

> "it's not unreasonable to think that by the end of the decade any site, including HN, might need to link usernames with their respective eIDs in case posts come from EU IP addresses." A rule of thumb that works too often is "how is mainland China doing things?"[0], and assume the West will follow behind shortly. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/15/china-digital-id-internet-surveillance/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/15/china-digita... ("Big Brother gets new powers in China with digital ID system") (tl;dr: Mandatory digital ID, with central government attesting and holding personal data in escrow. The "privacy-preserving", "least-bad option" a sizeable portion of even HN itself advocates for). > "This means that companies, like social media site Weibo or online shopping behemoth Alibaba, will no longer be able to see the personal information of their users with digital IDs — but Chinese authorities will be able to see the real identity behind online accounts across a range of sites."

Yeul 1y ago
Oh well at least the Chinese aren't Christians.
- viridian 1y ago
  Believe it or not, China has far and away the largest Christian population in the world. (I know, I know, culture, percent of the population, etc, this is just a fun fact that runs counter to intuition.)
GoblinSlayer 1y ago
Is it worse than requiring a phone number?

DocTomoe 1y ago

> In this context, free alternative mobile platforms, such as Sailfish, cannot flourish. If you are a system that depends on people being constantly under the yoke of your jurisdictional powers, you do not want a strong, free, ecosystem. You want as little diversity as possible, ideally two so there is an illusion of choice.

miki123211 1y ago

Good luck convincing America to go along with this, especially in the current political climate. The EU doesn't have power beyond their jurisdiction, as much as they may pretend otherwise. Facebook and Google go along with what the EU wants because they make money there, and have physical properties located on the continent. YC does not.

White_Wolf 1y ago
EU doesn't need to convice anyone. They can just make it mandatory and block anyone that doesn't comply.

flyinghamster 1y ago

> I cannot understand why the European Commission wants to reduce our reliance on FAANG services, and at the same time they make Google Play a de facto standard, reinforcing the mobile duopoly. It's called bad faith, and it's an all too common problem with politicians and business types alike.

mvieira38 1y ago
In this case it seems more like incompetence mixed with classic Euro bureacracy. The suits don't know better and consumers are braindead so won't even notice
qcnguy 1y ago
Von der Leyen and the rest of the Commission aren't politicians nor business types. They don't run for election, they're all appointees. And most of them have never run a business either.
- Muromec 1y ago
  Von der Leyen and the rest of executive branch of EU are appointed in a same way a lot of countries appoint their executive branch members — by a vote in legislative branch.
  - qcnguy 1y ago
    That's not how the EU works. The EU Parliament was given a vote on von der Leyen. It was a ballot with a single name on it: hers. By the time it go to the rubberstamping stage the decision was already made. The MEPs couldn't propose other candidates for the vote, and the Parliament can't propose changes to the law either, so it's not the legislative branch of the EU. The legislative branch of the EU would be... the EU Commission. Which is also its executive. The way von der Leyen was selected is a secret. Nobody knows how it happened. She didn't run in a democratic process of any kind, so she isn't a politician. If you ask EU fans they'll tell you the heads of state selected her. We have no evidence of this. That's the written process, but no records were produced of any such meeting, or a vote, or however it is that this decision was theoretically made. She could have been presented as a fait accompli by a single country, other countries could have been bribed, they could have been excluded entirely. We'd never know.

andrepd 1y ago

It's already close to impossible. Banking apps and government apps are close to mandatory to function in today's society, yet they plain do not work on Lineage, even with microg, or they work but need ridiculous workarounds. Never mind other "soft mandatory" things like messaging apps or whatever. I'm dedicated and I have a literal PhD in computer science, yet I'm fucking exhausted fighting this battle all the time. 0.1% chance someone has the capability to, and willingly goes through all this bother. Then tfa is just a nail in the coffin.

GoblinSlayer 1y ago
Can't you have two phones: a Lineage phone for personal stuff and a Big Brother phone for banking and government and everything else uninstalled or disabled?

GoblinSlayer 1y ago

>any site, including HN, might need to link usernames with their respective eIDs I think, keybase already does it, and there are users here with signed proofs of identity.

Idesmi 1y ago

> I cannot understand why the European Commission wants to reduce our reliance on FAANG services, and at the same time they make Google Play a de facto standard You'll be surprised, most of the time it's simple ignorance: the people making decisions don't know everything about everything. Hence democracy comes to rescue. But the way the European Commission takes decisions is anti-democratic (secret draft documents, undisclosed lobbying, overlooking the role of the Parliament…)