EU Commission: ‘No longer acceptable’ for platforms to take key decisions alone

They allowed FB and Google to gobble up competitors unimpeded.

Amazon is another. Their integration and breadth are a threat to businesses and consumers alike but we’re too busy enjoying next day deliveries to care.

You ask for competition but these behemoths either buy them out or smother them via anti competitive behavior; at that point breaking them up is very palatable.

"We took Trump's voice away, we can do it to you too. We pushed anti-Trump rhetoric and silenced pro-Trump rhetoric... do I need to replace Trump with your name if you don't do as we say?" If there is no fallout for Twitter, how far can they push it? What if Biden decides to do some policies that Twitter isn't in favor of? Does he get shut out too? The EU can see very well that the same thing can happen to them easily as well. Shit, even the ACLU threw an objection and concern over this and they hate Trump just as must as any other democrat. The big problem is, and you have to be fair, Trump put up a hell of a PR fight the past 4 years and did rather well up until the very end. Most politicians have crumbled from less pressure than what he experienced. Not many others will be able to hold out as long as he did. This extra weapon of social media and Silicon Valley taking down the public voice of politicians is really fucking dangerous, no matter the political spectrum. They're a handful of billionaires or near to billionaires who have direct control of what a large portion of the human population sees as fact and truth... and they have no one to oversight them.

Ben Thompson's idea that social networks shouldn't be able to buy other social networks would be better IMO for avoiding problems like Facebook having too much power from also owning IG and WhatsApp. Not sure what a good solution would be for other companies such as Amazon having so much power.

Penalties for insufficient reaction by the platform are steep and of course set after the fact. Therefore platforms will err on the side of caution and delete far more than they would have to.

And people like Merkel who are responsible for that law have the gall to complain when something their censorship law stipulated is done to a fellow politician...

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-trump-germany-twitter/ge...

Big Tech destroyed this hope the moment it banned Parler and everyone cheered this ideological censorship.

Big Tech crossed every line in launching a coordinated attack on a rival. The damage this has done cannot be quantified. The ideal way to have gone about this is involvement of Courts/Legislature to decide if Parler should be banned or not. Not a group of private companies deciding to fuck a competitor. It is a horrible horrible precedent which has absolutely zero excuses.

What adverts and next to what contents they can shown.

You could keep right to free speech but you don't have right to monetizing any speech.

Here's a less flattering angle on the same worry. Europe is caught pants-down. They are realizing how weak they are in tech and scrambling to fix it. The facts:

- None of the 20 most valuable companies in the world are European. Most are US or China based, and many are tech.

- A tiny number of successful startups are European. I think their biggest in the last 20 years is Spotify...

- This is a sad showing for a continent with a $20t GDP and 500 million citizens (EU + UK).

- Software is eating the world. This was a lukewarm take when pmarca wrote that famous essay a decade ago, now you could almost restate it past-tense.

Europe is simply not participating in that process meaningfully. Sure, there have been vast shifts in many aspects of life--Europeans spend just as much time on their iPhones as we do, on Twitter, no FB, on Insta, on Gmail. But they neither invented nor control the development of any of those things.

So yes, European world leaders are belatedly realizing that a guy in SF with a footlong beard could ban them from Twitter at will. But that is the tip of the iceberg. They have developed deep dependency on US tech in all kinds of ways. If GSuite or O365 went down tomorrow, how many EU governments would be able to get any work done?

This situation mirrors the (more extensively discussed) military situation. Europe has complacently decided that the US can manage it for them, and are now experiencing a rude awakening.

So long as there is room for interpretation, and the consequences (politically, economically, etc.) of those interpretations are potentially far reaching, leaving it up to private companies with no oversight isn't a good option.

Ability to selectively enable or disable people from being able to access voters is tantamount to having a huge influence on election results.

While in the past you could avoid using social media, today this is THE way to reach most of voters. Most people no longer pay substantial attention to what happens on television, forgot what radio is (it is a little bit of noise your car gives so that it is not quiet) and don't read printed papers.

Now, this time it happened for Trump and we can discuss whether this was or was not a good decision, but the question is who is going to wield the power like that in the future and whether it is even permissible do to something like that.

On one side you have the idea of free speech, but then added to social media you have inevitable disinformation as anybody can get amplified and amount of information is such that it is not possible to verify and vet it.

In the past you would have handful of news-generating organizations and it was easy to spot and call false information. But this is forever gone, there seems to be a need to find out some kind of new equilibrium that will allow detect and filter misinformation without anybody having power to singlehandedly "vanish" people from public life.

I'll bet $100 that companies would love to wash their hands of a lot of this stuff, and just be able to 'comply' with some regulatory things so they can't be blamed or get into trouble one way or another.

Selective enforcement of private contracts is totally legal, and the EU('s executive branch) is uncomfortable with the public policy implications of that when it comes to social media and would like new laws passed to add extra regulation on uniformity and specificity of moderation policies.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12...

--- https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

Article 10

Freedom of thought, conscience and religion

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right includes freedom to change religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or in private, to manifest religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.

2. The right to conscientious objection is recognised, in accordance with the national laws governing the exercise of this right.

Article 11

Freedom of expression and information

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.

2. The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.

Any ban or removal should come from the elected Government. In this case it is the US Congress. This is what the World expects as this is how all Democratically elected Governments all over the World function. It is the Government which has a final say.

Now when Big Tech unilaterally decides to censor a sitting US President and bans a rival competitor this will cause every World leader and Government to sit up and take note. Everyone will ask themselves: are we now supposed to trust US Government for its word? What if tomorrow a private company decides to censor the US Government? If they can ban the US President's account they wield more power than even elected representatives. Why then should we liaison with US Government and why not directly talk to Big Tech as they seem to hold the power over even the US President.

Then it goes further than that: how do we trust that the incoming President won't be censored? Since all communications happen through a digital forum where one of the Big Tech companies is an intermediary in relaying such communications what is the guarantee that the communication is not tampered with? When Big Tech enjoys so much power in US, that it can censor the Government itself, then why can't this also be possible? If Big Tech can attach disclaimers to a sitting US President's content then why can't they tamper with the messaging too?

This sort of confusion existed for countries like Pakistan which has dual power centers: the elected Government and the military. You won't know whom to talk to as one can override the other. Which is why you have so many successful coups in Pakistan. What Big Tech has done is set a very dangerous precedent. Now no World leader will trust the word of the American Government at face value and will double/triple check every communication.

add political views into the list of non-discrimination laws and let the courts decide, if it's important enough to have to be legislated, that's the closes framework upon which to model it.

That's what judges and courts are for. Neither government nor platforms should be able to make these decisions unilaterally.

Leaving B2B aside, for B2C it is basic consumer protection laws common in EU. If a service is offered to a general public, then provider may not arbitrarily exclude someone from using it. If a provider excludes someone for violating ToS, then the excluded one may dispute that at appropriate authority / state office.

If both Apple and Google ban your app when the app is legal and useful, is it good for society that there is no way around this?

You local electrical company probably can't shut off the power even to a meth lab as long as they are paying their bills, and even if they do not you are usually required to go through a rigorous process before you can take action.

This isn't really about freedom of will, this is about the bottom line and companies trying to score cheap points. If it was pretty darn clear that no amount of pressure that does not go through the courts could make Amazon or Twilio cancel Parler there wouldn't be as much noise about it.

There's a reason why no one is tweeting at the power or water companies to cut off their services to the Trump campaign, it's not because there aren't people that would like to see that happening, but because even the most deranged of them know that it cannot happen.

You already have precedence for this, back when corporate towns were a thing that's where the public square concept emerged despite the entire town technically being corporate property it was deemed that people cannot be silenced on the streets or in the town square.

The issue here is that the Internet isn't treated as a public square but as solely corporate property and yes sadly without a bunch of corporations the internet doesn't actually exists.

You cannot get to the point that you need to essentially become a global Tier 1 ISP before you can put on a service that does not break any laws but that would essentially be immune to being canceled, and if you want to monetize it you probably need to become major payment processor if not an an acquiring and and issuing bank too because as we've seen in the past PayPal/PCI can easily prevent you from taking any payments.

We do not have an open and distributed network a handful of companies can block any content they want at any time, TOR, VPN's or anything else won't save you and won't help you your ISP can block anything it wants with a single line in a config file and if it's not on Google it might as well not be accessible. Your hosting options today are rather limited especially for a platform that needs to have a global reach and that you couldn't take down with a single 5G connection.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft and a tiny handful of others are the only ones who can provide you with that infrastructure, if you are going with a smaller or more traditional hosting provider then there are only a handful of CDNs that can provide you with content distribution and DDOS protection/mitigation services.

If you want to grant companies the same freedom you grant to people when it comes to making decisions you need an actual free market for that, but globally the internet isn't a free market and no one can make the argument that it is free yet alone a free market when in order to provide a legal service (regardless of how distasteful it is) without any of the existing market players being able to completely shut you down you have to build a Bank of America, a Visa,a DeepOcean and a Cloudflare first.

I don’t see why a business that presents itself as a quasi-public space that is generally open to all at no cost should not have some duty to be faithful to the way it represents itself and to treat its users fairly.

Large part of the bill of rights exists to protect individuals from the majority.

Anti-discrimination, fair housing many other laws exist to protect against majority.

Democracy is not autocratic rule of the majority. It is rule by compromise.

Tech benefited enormously from moving fast and being mostly unregulated as a result. Looking at the finance industry though, every new law was written in blood or tears over the course of centuries. Now blood has been spilled by social media in the US Capitol and the world has taken notice.

It's not going to be easy or fast, but good policy can help keep Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg from controlling the political outcomes of every democracy in the world.

The leak of the Parler content shows that they were actively moderating the platform to push it on the far right side, using millions of fake accounts with admin privileges.

So Amazon terminated their account.

The ban of Trump from social networks is a different topic, I don't think Trump has a big fan base in EU, but it's the perfect excuse to demand what many have been advocating for years now: political control of the social network decisions, given that they can influence the public opinion (Facebook admitted today that their platform was used to spread violence in Myanmar)

I have personally advocated for putting social network under public scrutiny or close their operations in EU.

I am glad that the European Union is finally taking steps in that direction.

EDIT:

source -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25731121

The two persons you mentioned as "fairly normal republicans" had their contact information carried by an armed terrorist who invaded the Capitol on the hunt for "bad guys": https://twitter.com/johnkruzel/status/1349061894418685953

The danger is that almost any difficult decision has some kind of danger associated with it. Disagree with Covid restrictions ? Dangerous. Challenge the efficacy of a vaccine? Dangerous.

But I think we’d be better off if the decisions on takedowns and censorship of those positions were legislated in courts of law that yield clear guidance, not decided arbitrarily by a select few members of an oligopoly.

Facebook, Twitter, et al are going to regret the pandora's box of unintended consequences they just opened up with this move.

In USA they still make most kids recite this every day in school:

> I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance

Being a private company has never meant you're allowed to rule as you wish on your turf. I believe the history of company towns in the US provides plenty of reasons for that.

While platforms can't really be compared to company towns, social networks now constitute an essential part of where public discourse happens, and I don't believe it would be too hard for Europe to make a case that public interest requires regulation and oversight.

In the long run, both sides start to see this modus operandi as completely normal. Censorship and vengeance to the other side are completely acceptable.

As a libertarian, I am utterly horrified.

There are people on the left and right that are power hungry and make decisions only to benefit themselves...however some people actually care about freedoms and fairness. Bad and illegal behavior will happen in any system with freedoms...banning those systems is not the answer.

What you write doesn't make much sense. The world isn't black and white, and left and right have whole spectrum. The ultra (left or right) never overthink their decision, always feel righteous even if heading straight to hell. If you think moderate left (ie EU from US perspective), it might be a correct assessment from certain point of view (not a big fan of EU here, I like the theory but not many things in practice).

Moderate right/centrists could be described exactly same things as you say about left.

Why right might beat left, at least in theory, is because it gives people more money directly. People like that. tey like to have some control over such an important thing. Instead of massive taxation, that in ideal world isn't stolen in some way (in reality much/most of it is, or at least very badly mismanaged) and spent in social, health, education, infrastructure etc.

Once folks see real money, they have at least some control/choice over it. Even if kindergardens cost a fortune (there are other options in some cases), and paid maternity leave is shorter (you can stay longer but unpaid). And health care might cost something (but apart from US its not a bad idea generally, works great in Switzerland for example).

Oh and don't forget the lean state aparate, very attractive unless you are actually some semi-useless otherwise unemployable state bureaucrat. And so on.

Maybe some hyper-partisan American concept of leftism.

I absolutely agree that the right is partly successful because it isn't afraid to punch down from the status-quo. I'm a centre-right liberal democrat (UK), so I'm no socialist - although I firmly believe that most right-wingers are of the "capitalism for you, socialism for me"-type in practice.

The left says "we're all together, but we should convince everyone to come to our side."

FUD and tribalism are easier to win with.

I fully agree on the notion that the right wields every power it can get, while the left doesn't.

We now have two years ahead of us where the Democrats are in full power of the US government. Let's see what they do with it. I'm especially interested if they are going to make sure to help themselves for the next election, by combating the voter suppression tactics that the Republicans use.

Does closing your eyes make the monsters under your bed go away?

I do think you have a point though, but you can't be liberal and authoritarian at the same time. So to push for liberal ideas and laws/rights, while also pushing to enforce it through anti-liberal means is pretty contradictory, and so it makes sense most liberals don't do so.

Also remember that liberal societies are the exception in human history, not the rule. Almost never have people rallied around the idea that each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property and governments must not violate these rights.

It has little to do with reality, and it's obvious that you haven't spent time with conservatives. It's not useful to only learn about those who think differently from yourself by listening to what those who think like you say about them. Your perception seems heavily based on shrill far left voices. It's essentially a mirror image of what somebody on the far-right thinks about progressives after hearing about what they do/did/want to do by listening to shrill far-right voices.

Look at the situation globally, over the 20th century and it doesn't look quite like that.

China, Soviets, Cuba, Venezuela, Poland, Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong etc. etc. there's a long list of various kinds of 'authorities' of every kind.

Von der Leyen's appointment, and the EU Commission, were both subject to approval votes by MEPs of the EU Parliament, who are elected by EU citizens in all member countries using proportional representation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_der_Leyen_Commission#Elect...

> On 16 July 2019, European Parliament took a vote on the proposal by the European Council and elected Von der Leyen with 383 votes (374 votes needed).

> The Commission was approved by European Parliament on 27 November 2019, receiving 461 votes, with 157 against and 89 abstentions.

But the key in my comment is the precondition the government is truly "of and for the people", and thus any moderation they did benefited "the people", and not the government which likely holds more power than the people.

What happened with Trump was that he convinced his followers that it was OK to only get their information from the places that agreed with him, de facto making anything he says the only trusted source of information. This is the essence of political censorship. By taking away competing sources of information, you can basically write your own rule book, because those that only hear from you couldn't fathom a different reality.

Information needs to survive the competitive landscape and emerge as valid. Information that isn't put through the wringer should not be trusted.

You have a valid note on the lack of democracy in the EU commission. But about the topic at hand, both Merkel (Germany) and Macron (France) have directly expressed this same opinion about Twitter, as the EU commission. And Merkel and Macron have more direct democratic leadership mandate, than the EU commission.

"Germany and France oppose Trump's Twitter exile"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-11/merkel-se...