France law on social networks not waiting for the DSA debate at EU level

>I wish Germany, France and the rest of EU would just push for more regulations and taxation of foreign digital companies

See, this is the problem. You're looking at the big EU countries and stopping there. Smaller EU countries in many ways feel the same about larger EU countries. Foreign banks basically took over the banking sectors of former Soviet states and then you got things like the Danske Bank money laundering case. When Bulgarian truck drivers tried to use their competitive advantage of lower average incomes, rules were drafted to bar them from it. On top of all that brain drain is still ongoing. The EU as a whole is one of the most unequal economic zones in terms of income.

If those countries did things like you propose then there wouldn't be an EU or it would be significantly smaller.

>Great EU firewall

I know what the internet is like under the lead of the US. It's not amazing, but it's pretty good. I'm afraid that EU-net will be a far worse place judging by how regulated many things are in Germany or how if things are against French (and other western European) interests then EU-wide rules are drafted to stop that.

Large EU countries along with the EU work as a good counterbalance to the US when it comes to the internet. But I fear that if you remove the US from the equation then you end to with something worse.

How are you defining Germany in a way that you are forgetting about Germans themselves? People are using these services largely because they derive benefit from them.

If I didn’t have access to Google during my scientific research in the country, I know my progress would have been much slower.

In an alternative universe, it would be interesting if the Internet was Balkanized and only the US had access to tools like Google scholar. How much would that affect the rate of research?

Google is immensely more valuable to people, than the profit it generates for it's investors.

Same for FB etc..

As a more acute example, consider that Amazon doesn't really make any money. They are a giant NGO in a way.

So when the consumer surplus is 100x the producer surplus, hurting the producer doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

There's literally no reason for the French people to use these services, it's fully their choice, and they are fully free.

[1] https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/188/concepts/definition-o...

This is why there's so much propaganda blaming George Soros for everything; his funding of the anti-totalitarian Open Society Foundation has supported all sorts of opposition and human rights NGOs which threaten the power of the Russian one-party state.

The transition of the 90s succeeded in making Russia "capitalist", but not in making it democratic. Installing democracy from the outside has turned out to be a much more complicated and fraught project than first thought, partly because people can be surprisingly comfortable with totalitarianism so long as it's aimed at someone else.

I fully support more regulation and draconian taxation of foreign digital companies. The only way to make profit should be linked to a free API to access data so a "facebook client" can be fully hosted and operated here in Europe.

Nowadays I'm leaning towards balkanization in a sense that big economic powerhouses should have their own "tech giants". Don't block small websites, but if the big ones aren't being fully cooperative, fuck em. Block em, invest in local alternatives, build your own Linux distros for public administration, regain your sense of sovereignty.

In other words: Facebook forking itself into an EU version that actually takes local context into account, employing people in the EU, and keeping the data within the EU = okay. One global Facebook that follows little to no rules and doesn't give anything back to local communities = not okay.

Destroy Facebook and other corporation will come back to do some morally questionable or society-breaking process that maximizes profit to shareholders.

The economic model of our society is the root of the problem. That is much more complex and difficult to solve or even just to talk about.

It saddens me that society's trend in fast paced, low attention, immediate gratification, and devaluation or intellectual disinterest of the humanities disciplines like philosophy, politics, economics, is making it so much harder to tackle this governance and societal problem. More or different tech is not a solution.

People enjoy alcohol too and alcohol isn't a net positive to society either.

> It's not clear to me what you think Facebook should do differently.

Not trying to avoid taxation by incorporating in tax havens would be a pretty clear start.

The traditional trick to stopping the government regulating you is to figure out roughly what problems the government is considering regulation to solve, form an industry body with your competitors, then come up with a code of conduct that addresses the problems but without draconian enforcement.

That way you don't have to follow rules written by politicians, get your house 100% in order, and have a regulator breathing down your neck: You've just got to follow rules you've written yourself, and get your house well enough in order that legislators have more pressing things to focus on than you.

That might sound difficult - but if it was easy to run a $700 billion company, everyone would be doing it.

They're in no way against censoring speech. They just want courts and governments to hold the monopoly over censoring speech.

Have they (and who are they? The ministers? Every Frenchmen alive?) said this themselves or are you spreading FUD?

Censoring speech is "removing something he said". France and Germany are for this. Censoring people is "removing a person because of what he said". France and Germany are both against this. Of course Facebook and Twitter take the easy way out instead of the ethical one.

It's not what happened and it has nothing to do with Facebook or twitter employees (who have almost zero power, they haven't even unionized yet!).

Facebook or Twitter could have banned Trump & al. for content policy violation years ago (and they probably should have actually, because you know, policy violation) but they did not because conservatives were in charge and then had power to retaliate. Now they are banning them now, because now the democrats are in charge, and they are definitely going to retaliate hadn't social network ban Trump.

American social networks will do things which don't annoy the American government too much, so it leave them alone. What's happening here, is European govts wanting the same level of power than the US one.

No has ever been kicked off Twitter for claiming that their left wing opponent's tax plan will have unintended consequences that can lead to long term slowdown of GDP growth or that a minimum wage increase will lead to higher unemployment.