What a weaselly term. Bet they spent months trying to come up with something that didn't sound ridiculously biased/anti-consumer and that's the best they came up with. So obviously corrupt.
Sources please.
The EU isn't perfect... But this sounds a lot like an attempt to give consumer protection agencies the powers to block scam sites.
From what I could see Julia Reda (MEP - German Pirate) wasn't unhappy about the intents of this legislation. Merely concerned about:
A) Website blocking without judicial oversight
B) Existence of website blocking infrastructure
C) Inability to force compensations
D) No restitution of illicit profits
I suspect (B) is already a reality, but yeah, I'm no fan. I agree that (A) is concerning, but wording suggests this can ONLY be applied when "no other effective means" are available. As I understand it that implies it can only be used when the owner can be found, sued or prosecuted by other means.
I read that as this applies to faceless scam sites without an address or anyone willing to take responsibility.
As for (C) and (D) I would love to see more of that. But the idea in her blog post that illicit profits (B) could be used for found consumer protection agencies is not something I agree with.
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.
To me, I think I would imagine a website doing something illegal to be more akin to a newspaper ad that sells something illegal. It's not illegal for me to bring a newspaper home from a country with ads about services that are legal where the newspaper is from, but illegal in my home-country. So, why should bringing the ad over digitally be any different?
The illegal may only occur once the service is ordered/used, and only so if it is illegal to be the recipient/import (sometimes things are illegal to sell, but legal to buy).
And, changing your DNS server is easy to us, not easy to "common folks" who have no clue what DNS is.
Feel free to wear sunglasses, welding helmets, use ad blockers ("content filter"), attach ND filters to your camera lenses, water filters to your water filtration systems, HEPA filters to air filtration systems, etc.
I ask because the EU already has the ability to block sites infringe on copyrights.
To me this law is one of the reactions taken to the fact that foreign powers are using completely faked news papers and social media pages to influence out elections.
Right now consumers have very little ammunition against companies like Facebook. In the EU we have the right to everything they’ve gathered on us and to demand they delete it, but if they went full retard we couldn’t legally block them.
Now we can.
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.
This is especially a problem since it's very hard to limit access for the underage population who's a lot more prone to being influenced by extremist ideologies.
But of course the counterpoint is that this would create an infrastructure which could be abused to manipulate the population. I think there's a compromise to be found here but I don't know where to start.
You may see that as an infringement on your free speech, but your approach to "freedom" is rapidly ending democracy in the free world. Keep in mind that the totalitarian voices you're using free speech to defend, won't show you the same curtesy, once they take over.
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.
The law explicitly states itself to be a last measure when a court of law is not an option (ie, overseas or anonymous parties)
It is a last resort by consumer protection agencies when they can't use a court or the other party is unwilling to cooperate with their jurisdiction. That is not equivalent to "bypass proper law and order". It's enforcing it. That is the job of the CPA's.
>disgusting violation of free speech.
Yes but in some parts of Europe there is no Free Speech. Germany for example has Free Opinions, which is a narrower field of speech.
People aren't vaccinating their children, bringing back deadly disease that were almost wiped out in western society.
A rising number of people believe the earth is flat.
Two of the mos popular pro-Brexit sources on social media turned out to be fake accounts run by Russia.
America elected Trump.
I mean, those things aren't great but at least they won't wipe us from existence. Unlike climate change, which an increasing number of people think is an act of God...
I don't like totalitarian approaches, but your approach to "freedom" is not only rapidly ending democracy and the free society, it's quite literally going to kill us all.
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.
"business which we want to cultivate a protected local equivalent of"
China figured it out; the EU is just playing catch-up.
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.