Query: if this directive passes and the outcomes are in line with the negative predictions, what happens?
If it becomes standard practice for all except certain large corporations to ban all EU addresses, how will this impact the web and the EU?
If it becomes standard practice for all except certain large corporations to ban all EU addresses, how will this impact the web and the EU?
That would be great, because better solutions with less monopoly would quickly spring up if those corporations don't make deals with publishers. That's just hypothetical, counterfactual speculation, though, since corporations like Google would make deals.
Like others have pointed out, these regulations will primarily have bad effects on small content providers such as individual authors, small forum sites, and not for profit information-providers.
Using VPN services would be far more practical. Although some sites do discriminate against VPN users, it's much less common than for Tor users. The EU could of course block access to VPN servers, just as China has done. But some VPN services use obfsproxy, and so can piggyback on obfuscation efforts by the Tor Project.
Sounds like a feature more than an issue.
As it is now, only serious criminals can manage it.
Manage what? Not having to use Google and Facebook?
Basically, you need clean IPs and mobile accounts. Tor and VPN exits don't work so well. Creating your own VPN in a VPS sometimes works. But I gather that the pros use botnet slaves with genuine residential IPs.
And that reminds me. I recently tried to create a ProtonMail account via Tor. But they wouldn't activate it without mobile and credit/debit card numbers. Ironic, no? And yes, I do get that many jerks have misused ProtonMail accounts.
Edit: I take that back about Facebook. Via the onion, it just wanted an email address to authenticate. I'm impressed.
As someone who has run both an image board and a decent IRC server in the past, it’s a choice between heavily scrutinizing tor connections or banning them outright.
wx13p 7 hours ago [dead] [-]
It works.
But someone did a manual override.
I am impressed. HN does allow throwaway accounts, when necessary to post anonymously. And making that possible via Tor is admirable. There's certainly potential for abuse. I see occasional spam, and angry insults, but nowhere near as much as one might expect. Which suggests either that shadowbanning works well enough, or efficient moderation.
This law is bad, but the negative predictions are unhinged.
There is no link tax. Article 11 is a requirement for commercial sites using copyright material as part of their commercial work to either get permission or pay a licence.
I'd be interested to know how article 11 is any different from existing law.
A German court ruled a few years back that use of a creative commons image by a non-profit publically funded television station was "commercial use" with the argumentation that "had the CC-NC image not existed they would have had to license an image and pay for it". Another German court ruling decided that a personal blog containing any sort of advertising qualifies as "commercial use" (in the context of the exemption from making the operator contact information visible on websites operated for personal use). The definition of commercial use is not clear-cut and definitely not in line with US rulings. This is why Art11 is a significant increase in reach. Small organizations and nonprofits operating mailing lists with a web interface would now have to screen all messages to make sure nobody quotes a news snippet. Same with forums and such. And of course it would shut down wikinews (wikipedia is explicitly and narrowly excluded, other wikimedia projects are not) and other user-operated news agregators where users are likely to quote parts of articles.
Erm, you say that like it's something we're supposed to disagree with?
https://netzpolitik.org/2014/urteil-des-lg-koeln-zu-creative...
Ideally, people would submit their own creative content. Personal blogging and vlogging would flourish. Gallery sites would expand exponentially with floods of new, self-made art. The Internet would shift back from primarily consumption to creation.
Ideally...
This is how Russia made Yandex censor the Russian web. Search about a gay topic? Sorry, comrade, we don't want to violate the law about promoting homosexuality to minors, so we're going to self-censor the result.
In Europe, this will make it unsafe to provide search results with anchortext or snippets that might be hate speech, Holocaust denial, or encourage sex trafficking. Choose your snippetizing algorithm carefully! Drop the wrong words and someone's going to jail.
The EU will be blocked out from the latest and greatest experiences on the web.
In China's case, there is a genuine (not that I like it) interest in blocking access to "disruptive" material.
American online services will be available without problems