New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection

In 10/20 years time if the US falls off its number 1 perch, this will law will be quietly dismantled and it'll be open season on our collective cultural heritage instead of pandering to the US's crazy protectionist copyright laws. It'll probably result in a golden age of culture in the EU instead of being ruthlessly oppressed by the US.

The irony being a lot of US "copyright" is based on EU folk tales and music they took with them and copied.

It sounds more like an attempt to give somebody powers to block potentially copyright infringing sites, under the pretense of consumer protection, through the roundabout justification that consumers "collectively" benefit from strict enforcement of copyright.

I personally find filtering of any sort to be fundamentally wrong. A website is nothing but information, and find censoring/filtering to be wrong on counts of violating free speech and free access to information. I believe that illegal content should be handled by going after those that operate the site, rather than touching the distribution channel.

Internet has always been full of shit. It's up to us to educate and teach people who are weak to this kind of behaviour.

Black List websites = Censorship.

Internet is not a product, it's our freedom.

To all people who try to "regulate" this, piss off.

The ability to block content country-wide won't help reduce misinformation, which will always have ways to spread. What are we going to do, make it illegal to be uneducated, have unpopular opinions or be a bad person? Instead, this new power can easily be abused to stop the spread of real information, and unpopular (for example, government-opposing or religious) opinions.

The original ability to delete information is absurd in a similar way, but more limited, as only the subject can request it. Yet it still bypasses a proper trial, leaving it up to you and the service provider to conclude if the information was useful to the "general public". That's definitely going to result in deletion of valuable information.

If you want to give people a way to defend themselves against harmful information, give them the right to amend it instead. Deleting it is wrong. If you want to avoid fake news like you state, educate. Controlling people by removing information is wrong.

Then why not phrase it explicitly? For example:

For protection of citizens against online interfaces which either:

1. Consistently promote determinably false information with the intent to deceive on a mass scale;

OR

2. Attempt to profit through deception by false advertisement of goods or services.

Instead they create some vague, weasly language that can be used to basically block any service for any reason, so long as a group of EU citizens looked at it.

I don’t know much about narrowing powers, judicial reviews or any of that. I’m not all that concerned with the EU’s specific legal setup (even though I live here). I guess judicial review is better than none, but I think it’s probably rather meaningless long term. What judicial review means and how restrictive that is is completely unpredictable, across all the times and places this kind of norm will have influence.

I’m more worried about the norms. How those norms are evolving, in a wider context. In particular, how comfortable member states will feel taking actions (for example) like the Spanish government is currently taking. How easy will it be for non-eu governments (EG Turkey, Israel, Egypt..) to justify their own actions because “it’s an international norm.” How easy it will be to get Google, FB, AWS, ISPs, etc. to do any country's dirty work, because they will all have a “compliance” department responsible for this. The self regulation that will come from a need to avoid such hassles.

Framing this the way lawyers like to frame it, as if it were an isolated rule applying narrowly and in isolation means I already lose. My eggs come with spam.

The norm being established/advanced here is the same most of these laws in most the places are advancing (1) Unlawful websites are subject to sanction (2) To investigate lawfulness and enforce sanctions, authorities can force “third parties in the digital value chain” to cooperate.

IE, any service from DNS servers, search engines, ISPs, Twitter… every part of the internet needs to with every local, national and super-national government to police every other part of the internet.

10 years ago there were no channels for IP domain blacking/seizing/de-indexing. No templates for new rules. No ways for 3rd parties to be forced to cooperate. No way to regulate the web.

I know the days when only nerds like you knew about it and society at large neither knew nor needed it seem romantic now. But today the net matters to a lot of people, and they bring with them their trusted tools for defending their interests.

Go visit irc if you want those heady days where only things you didn't like where censored.

I think these two things are completely disconnected from each other. What we're talking about here is legislation, and legislation has not slipped towards censoring free speech more and more in the last seventy years (in France and Germany).

Basically none of the other parties in the government want to even consider cooperating with them, it'll fizzle out soon enough.

And anyway posted letters are still a very free medium, with better privacy assurances than email ever had.

Back to the subject, what if a law is bad, but the mere act of saying publicly that the law is bad is, in itself, breaking the law? That's where this is all heading.

It starts with prohibiting the utterance of specific words because they hurt someone's feelings, but hidden under "consumer safety" or "public order." No one speaks against it because "of course we shouldn't hurt the feelings of others with mean words."