It's somewhat amazing how, between GDPR and this, I've gone from hardcore pro-EU to moderate Euroscepticism. Curious to see if this is personal or part of something broader.
Anyway, now it is not the time to stay idle, it is time to call your MEP and campaign against link tax (article 11) and upload filters (article 13). https://saveyourinternet.eu/
After that the next fight will be when the trilogue between Commission, Council, and Parliament is done.
GDPR is one of those things.
You mention forgeting to file some paperwork: here's an example of an organisation handling sensitive medical data who, by law, have to register with the regulator. They didn't register.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-26/u-k-healt...
> The U.K.’s Data Protection Act requires all organizations processing personal information to register with the U.K. data regulator. Although handling sensitive data on recent patients and those needing regular health care, Cera also failed to register with the Information Commissioner’s Office until February this year. The ICO said in a statement that it would only consider “enforcement action” if a company failed to register despite ICO advice.
They didn't even get a fine. (Maximum available fine at the time: £500,000.)
Also, this whole "GDPR has good intentions therefore it's good" idea that is cropping up on this thread is very problematic. We don't judge laws by their intentions but by their outcomes.
Copyright came about to support and foster creativity, it was meant as new form of property because creativity has no clear boundaries.
About the intentions of the GDPR, they were clearly to give people more control over their data and give business more restriction. The basic rule of the GDPR that companies should only store the data they really need at that time not more, not less. Overall this is what the GDPR does. My issues are more like, in some cases the burden for SME are too high and too weird for consumers. Like increasing the age limit from 13 to 16 or demanding complex privacy policies which no-one reads
The GDPR should have been the basic privacy policy for everyone, only if you do something different you have to transparent about it. Like transferring data to a third party.
I have the strong suspicion that the EU parliament is acutely aware of its situation. That's why they pushed for a lot of pro-consumers laws, as part of the their PR campaign to make them seem as a benevolent force of good. After people have their guard down, they can start with phase two do what politicians do best.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_legislative_p...
Sounds a bit un-democratic, no?
But many times it's not. Any Congressman or Senator can introduce legislature onto the floor of their house. The requirement that proposals originate in the Commission is problematic.
The Council, moreover, is analogous to a meeting of State Governors or Attorneys General. The only truly democratic arm of the EU is the Parliament. Its role at the end of the chain is problematic. (Contrast that with the analog in the American system, the House of Representatives, where appropriations bills are required to originate.)
The problem with democracy is people vote once every few years and see that as their voice being heard. In the meantime governments are free to do whatever they want just so long as they can win back public support in the weeks leading up to the next election.
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/01/18/more-surveillance-pleas...
Overall, the UK population has consistently supported stronger surveillance powers for a long time and by a clear margin. For better or worse, we tend to trust our authorities here. And to be fair, most of the time, our authorities do seem to use their powers responsibly, so to some extent that trust has been earned.
One problem with this is that whenever surveillance issues have been discussed in the media and these polls have been carried out, they invariably talk about giving powers to the most serious policing and national security organisations using the powers to defend against the most serious of crimes and security problems. However, the reality is often that the laws allow for much more than that, with many more people getting powers and access to surveillance data, with much less control and oversight than the public might expect, to deal with minor issues where intrusive surveillance is wildly disproportionate, but most people who aren't heavily into tech or civil liberties don't realise any of this at all.
The Commission (a vast body of appointees controlled totally by just one man) is the only EU institution that can actually initiate changes to the law. Every other body merely gets to slow it down. This means that if something is on the Commission's agenda, it gets proposed, and if the Commission disagrees, the views of the other institutions are worth nothing.
This setup is very clever because it allows the EU to look superficially democratic without actually being so. Look at all the people saying "write to your MEP" on this thread. It's useless, because of the following process:
1. The European "Parliament" cannot initiate changes to the law (i.e. it's not really a parliament). It can ask the Commission to do it on the Parliament's behalf, but the Commission can say no or propose something different.
2. Therefore, political parties in the EP don't have any real policies. They can't: creating a political party that e.g. campaigns for better immigration control is meaningless in the EU because the Commission will just say no.
3. Therefore, the sort of people who go to sit in the EP and try to win EP elections are basically yes-men, people so enthralled with the whole concept of the EU they just want to be a part of it in some small way, along with a small collection of people who are there only to troll and try to get their country to leave at the EU's expense, like Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen.
The entire system is designed to LOOK like a democratic government but without ever having to respond to what voters actually want.
> The entire system is designed to LOOK like a democratic government but without ever having to respond to what voters actually want.
The same could be said for any major democracy I've followed. How often is it UK voters get the policies they (we) want? Who actually voted for the snoopers charter (etc)? What about American voters? Policy over there is often biased against the average voter. The depressing reality is that normal voters opinions don't generally amount for much when it comes to law making.
I think Sir Winston Churchill put it best when he said:
> Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
MPs didn't want Brexit. Voters did, now it's happening (maybe, unless the government blinks first in the MAD standoff the EU insists on).
Voters wanted stricter immigration, even though many MPs are convinced immigration is a net positive. They are getting it.
Voters refused to contemplate tax rises, or so it was believed, so reducing the deficit has been done primarily through spending cuts and the growing economy.
Voters are obsessed with the NHS - just a few days ago there was an announcement of a huge pile of new money for it, wasn't there?
Seems like whilst it can take time and of course politicians can pass laws nobody asked for, if you take the top 2-3 priorities of the voters at any point, the government is usually responding to them in some way.
.. according to Dominic Cummings, this was because they were promised a huge amount of money for the NHS. This has been re-announced by Theresa May with no real explanation of where it would come from.
And now ... what exactly is happening? There's still a horrifying lack of confirmed detail.
> Voters wanted stricter immigration ... They are getting it.
Are they? Through which policy changes?
The "hostile environment" policy and promises that post-leaving, EU immigration will be controlled too.
What really worries me is that voters can't see the "flow" of immigration, they can only see the "level", and they're going to keep voting for more and more hostility so long as they keep seeing nonwhite faces or hearing people speaking Polish. Even if those people are in fact full British nationals.
Plus while I'm obviously not going to defend the EU's copyright reform proposal (hopefully it will be rejected in July) the other governments I've listed haven't got a much better track record for copyright reform themselves.
Would you rather have one set of rules for trade that you have to deal with, or thirty different potentially incompatible ones, not all of which are translated into English?
A study of American history reveals the wisdom of governments defaulting to inaction. If the country is split 50/50 on an issue, the proper thing to do is debate. Not wait until it's 51/49 and then pass a law half the population hates. We love to complain about gridlock in Congress but, most of the time, that is the system working as designed.
Twenty-eight countries would be harder to do business with. But as it is, GDPR will be interpreted by each of the the EU's twenty-eight national regulators. A single market the EU is not.
Co-ordinating twenty-eight nations to enact a treaty is a huge friction. But perhaps that is needed to counterbalance the continent's instinct for useless, often protectionist bureaucracy.
This is far more democratic than the secret processes of other international trade treaties like TTIP.
> wait until it's 51/49 and then pass a law half the population hates
.. which is what's happening with Brexit? I mean, the British system where a party is elected with ~40% of the votes and legislation is run through an entirely unelected upper house isn't an improvement. And don't get me started on the non-constitutional approach to devolution.
Here's an article about it:
> one set of rules for trade that you have to deal with
because it makes my life easier.
As a citizen:
> thirty different potentially incompatible ones
People in France and Greece and Poland have very different values.
Some countries think people should work for a large part of their lives and retire when they're old. Others think everyone should be able to retire much earlier and spend time with their families.
Some are liberal Christian / agnostic countries, others are conservative Christians.
None of those positions are right or wrong, but enforcing the views of 29 others on you and your citizens is fraught with trouble.
a) It's only potential incompatibility. Nothing stops governments bilaterally or multi-laterally synchronising their rules when the differences are trivial and unimportant.
b) What you describe as potential incompatibility, I call competition. If Spain and Germany wants to go off and try to extract money from Google for the "privilege" of linking to newspapers, they can do that, but it shouldn't impact everyone else. The EU artificially ties together many different policy areas that are unrelated and do not need to be take it or leave it, because they know full well that only a near-fundamentalist opposition to "cherry picking" as they arrogantly call it can ensure the bad ideas are universally adopted along with the good.
And as for not having English translations, that's on governments to fix. We live in a world where bilingual English speakers are not exactly hard to find.
Unfortunately, neither of those things happens consistently the way you might expect. One of the big problems with the EU VAT changes for digital services was that suddenly instead of just knowing your own country's tax rate and being able to apply it throughout the EU, you had to know each member state's tax rates and in some cases their oddities around things like invoice formats or special classes of products or services that carried different rates. In other words, those changes did essentially the opposite of what the EU is supposed to do.
Going the other way, if treating the whole EU as a single entity also means you can't offer products or services at different prices based on the widely different economic conditions in different member states, that is a large and entirely artificial distortion in the market, and it's a policy with questionable social and economic benefits.
It might be as simple as it being both.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2016/06/21/is-the-eu-reall...
A popular claim by many supporters of the Leave campaign is that the EU is run by ‘unelected bureaucrats’. How much truth is there behind that claim?
This claim mainly refers to the EU Commission: the EU’s executive body. It is true that the Commission President and the individual Commissioners are not directly elected by the peoples of Europe. So, in that sense, we cannot “throw the scoundrels out”. It is also true that under the provisions of the EU treaty, the Commission has the sole right to propose EU legislation, which, if passed, is then binding on all the EU member states and the citizens of these member states.
As opposed to the UK, which has one democratic house, an unelected one, and a (mostly) rubber-stamp unelected head of state.
Clearly, 51% are sufficiently convinced it's bad to want to leave.
The remainder are not made up of people who think it's good. Many of them also think the EU is bad or deeply flawed in various ways, but that either leaving is too risky due to the EU's stated guarantee of severe retaliation, or that the EU is bad but the UK could stay and fix it.
In my own family we split down the middle. Two voted out, two to remain. The two remainers voted to stay only because they feared the economic consequences, and the promised recession that was supposed to follow any vote to leave (it didn't). Neither of them are especially keen on the EU, although they don't dislike it either. They didn't really think about it much before.
It's in the nature of the institution that is has no personality or theoretical consistency beyond a very basic legal and cultural compatibility.
While it could get ratified into law, at this point it seems out of character of the EU in general. It might have been intended as a shot across the bow towards search engines, and to get a bargaining chips for some other legislation or initive that also somehow includes the search engines.
But whether it's ratified or not, a lot of damage has already been done, as this is just too easily made into very plausible EU-skeptic newbites even though some of the skeptic representatives had a hand in it.
I'm not a particular fan of several aspects of EU, but when the alternatives looks mostly the same old tired nationalistic yearnings if they are thought out at all, I'll take the EU any day.
The Maastricht Treaty explicitly formed a supranational organization [1]. We can debate whether the expansion of the original EEC was wise. But the expansion was mandated.
> The Maastricht Treaty explicitly formed a supranational organization
Their is not entirely the case though. The EU is able to deliver some pretty severe penalties to member states not complying with EU mandates laws and regulations.
This new copyright law though seems quite a departure. TBH a law that is practically speaking unenforceable is not a law. I'm surprised it has been allowed to get this far.
It is unhealthy.