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Comment by deugtniet | Hacker News Reader

This proposal is very bad. But luckily it is only a proposal. The council and parliament will still vote for this, before it becomes European law. Both bodies will likely oppose, and the proposal will be significantly amended. I honestly don't see the commissions reasoning on why this is a good proposal. But I don't see how the EU as an institution is bashed for this. This is a similar process as occurs in any other member state and other democracies. Not to mention the US, with it's secret laws and national security letters.

My personal opinion is that illegal content (CP, inciting violence) should be moderated quickly, where failure to act has big consequences. What I don't like about the proposal is that it is enforced by governments, and not some judiciary body. I hope the council and parliament will amend the proposal in such a way this is reflected in a final law.

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Yes, in fact, that's why it's good that Mozilla's on top of this early in the process. Let's hope they manage to remove the problematic parts they outline in this post.

When you say "quickly", do you also mean "within the hour"? If so, what about a small webhost that gets abused?

I think the shortest period that's considered quick enough and would at least make somewhat sense is "before something manages to spread widely", but that's still murky and still has many problematic practical concerns.

It is normal political procedure to have an aweful initial proposal so that amendments seem like a lesser evil, while still being bad.

I doubt we really have a need to act on these issues in the first place and that was explicitly not the goal of those who initiated this proposal. You just need to take a look at who proposed it.

So the question about illegal content is completely misplaced.

That's why we need tools to permanently ban politicians from law making if their proposal is awful enough.

Kind of "[X] No and don't ask again", democracy version.

Having thought of it, the main problem here it's no longer "Political party versus political party" when speaking about law making, but "Parliament versus public". For some reason they have shared agenda instead of competing on it. They all unanimously want to sell us to copyright holders and secret services so bad, it's only our stupid resistance is what's holding them. Hence, proposal adjustments tricks.

> Both bodies will likely oppose, and the proposal will be significantly amended.

They want to pass a few laws that are very bad. They create a horrible proposal and they amend it so that it becomes just very bad, and they've achieved what they wanted, with other politicians feeling good about themselves because they didn't give in into the opposition's horrible requests.

I use the same tactic with my stepdaughter: she wants ice cream for dinner, I want pasta. I propose broccoli, we agree on pasta (like I wanted).

Criminal.

Many countries in the EU have already passed or are in the passing of local similar legislation including Germany: https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Gesetzgebungsverfahren/Dokume...

> I don't see how the EU as an institution is bashed for this.

I think people are seeing a general trend of internet laws and bashing their creators. One could argue that this stage of the process is where bashing should occur. When it did with other ridiculous legislation, on both sides of the Atlantic, nobody excused the institutions making the suggestions. To many, myself included, this trend has to stop and sadly there isn't enough bashing to curb it, especially as there are so many cheering it on.

Law enforcement is is routinely conducted by government agencies, including on these issues, nothing new here.

E.g., in most EU countries with relevant laws, 'illegal content' in public spaces may be removed (with your being arrested) by the police. Then the courts are involved.

Same here, it seems. Courts would be involved, and not only re. penalties: " Effective judicial remedies will also be provided by national authorities and platforms and content providers will have the right to challenge a removal order."

(from: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-area-o... )

> Not to mention the US, with it's secret laws and national security letters.

Don't even need laws or national security letters. Just keep inviting the CEO's of leading social media platforms to congressional hearings and demand they do more to fight "terrorist propaganda and child pornography", for a more current context "Russian election interference".

Then these platform holders will kickstart a whole content-moderation industry on the other side of the planet, all properly outsourced so nobody could claim they are censoring themselves.

The result is a surface web that has been sanitized for years already, but with barely anybody noticing or caring.

In a system like that the notorious "Vietnamese Napalm girl" gets deleted because it's childporn. A painting depicting a nude Donald Trump with a small penis? Deleted, that's pornography. A US soldier intimidating a tied and gagged prisoner with a dog in Abu Ghraib? That's a known torture method by Al-Qaeda, deleted.

Note: I made none of these last examples up, they all happened like that and very likely keep happening on a daily basis [0].

That's why I think it's dangerous to throw the term "illegal content on the Internet" around as haphazardly as many people often tend to do.

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-09-29/the-cleaners-...

I don't know. Extreme proposals have a history in EU. the gdpr is extreme in its measures, and it was written by a green leftist. yet it passed

The bigger question is: Who asked for this?

> and it was written by a green leftist

What do you mean by this? How is this relevant?

That it didn't come from the larger political groups which means it's more likely to express the positions of a vocal minority. Which is important, considering that eu regulations are barely if at all debated as part of national politics, and most people become aware of them only after they are voted ^1. In the case of GDPR for example i am not aware of any kind of debate with local (e.g.) IT or engineer unions or groups before it was finalized.

^1 https://yougov.co.uk/topics/finance/articles-reports/2018/03...

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