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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Good news (more infrastructure in the critical sphere is always welcome) but the real endgame is buried deep down:

> 12. Lawful filtering: Filtering of URLs leading to illegal content based on legal requirements applicable in the EU or in national jurisdictions (e.g. based on court orders), in full compliance with EU rules.

But yeah, it's the sort of thing that it's better done at EU level rather than in 27 different, weak and uncoordinated ways. Offices and schools would be very happy to use it, I bet.

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What about?

> 5. Premium and wholesale services: Provide opt-in paid premium services for enhanced security (e.g. ad hoc filtering, monitoring, 24x7 support), tailored to specific sectorial needs (e.g. cloud, finance, health, transport), as well as wholesale resolution services for other digital service providers, including ISPs and cloud service providers.

5. and 12. are really concerning. IMHO the EU should invest in a DNS Infrastructure that is resilient to censoring (copyright or political) and operate it as non profit.

Edit: to be clear, non profit doesn't mean it can't charge money, profit shouldn't be a concern/target.

Are we talking about the same EU? The EU does this for censoring and monitoring, not against it - and they're totally open about it too. Google "Zensursula"...

Then the EU shouldn't invest any money. Cause if you can't improve the situation, stop wasting money on it.

From the perspective of public accountability, this is a step forward compared to the current status quo - where some countries implement blacklists and some don't, some are accountable and some aren't, etc etc. The EU dns would then work as public registry of such activities, also clarifying and harmonising the bar for acceptable censorship (i.e. opposition activity in Hungary? Not bannable...).

I would expect quite a lot of resistance to monitoring efforts, even if they are paid opt-ins (which will mostly be used by schools and employers, the same way they already use similar services that do the same).

Censoring of illegal content is much less controversial, and already happening to various degrees at the ISP provided DNS servers. You can make good arguments for transparency and oversight by the courts, but that's as far as it usually goes. Hard to argue that illegal things should be publicly accessible.

It's not at all hard to argue that illegal things should be publicly accessible. I find it impossible to argue that governments should be able to decide what information is publicly accessible. There is no relationship between legality and morality.

I don't see a problem with some commercial element in public services, as long as it's reasonable and transparent. As long as the public mission is still satisfied, it's just a good way to reduce reliance on general taxation.

The amount of such services you can provide for DNS is quite limited anyway. Maybe you can guarantee higher QoS on response times where this is critical, but that's about it. Maybe they can make non-EU-based businesses pay to use it.

> But yeah, it's the sort of thing that it's better done at EU level rather than in 27 different, weak and uncoordinated ways. Offices and schools would be very happy to use it, I bet.

No, 27 uncoordinated ways means 27 ways of going around. That's better in this case. No government the size of EU should have control of the internet.

For what it's worth, the EU is not a government. There will still be 27 countries implementing it - like browser vendors implementing a spec - and, again much like browser vendors, they won't be doing it in a well-coordinated fashion. It will be rife with <blink>s.

(Also, just for future reference, it's _the_ EU. Americans have a habit of doing this, also with the UK, and I don't understand it at all because your country is _the_ US.)

You're wrong about the EU, the setup you're talking about is long gone - since the Treaty of Lisbon to be specific, ratified over 10 years ago.

EU regulations are effective even without any mention in the local law. EU directives must be implemented within the time limit or the state will be sued at the EU court (not local court!) and made to pay fines until it's implemented. Thus, the EU quacks just like a government.

> and, again much like browser vendors, they won't be doing it in a well-coordinated fashion. It will be rife with <blink>s

Hopefully, but most definitely not simply because "the EU is not a government". It is enough of a government to avert this issue - e.g. see vaccination passports.

> (Also, just for future reference, it's _the_ EU. Americans have a habit of doing this, also with the UK, and I don't understand it at all because your country is _the_ US.)

I'm Czech, not American. My native language doesn't use "the" or "a" at all. I'll watch my English better.

> I'll watch my English better.

I think your english is perfectly fine and that "mistake" wasn't worth nitpicking over. We're an international community and we need to let some things go for the sake of maintaining our sanity.

I don't think every spelling correction has to be taken as an attack, as is implicit in your comment. I'm glad to have people correct me when I'm wrong, since it makes me better at whatever I'm doing. It seems to me what's unhelpful is not correction, but the feeling that one must always be correct, that there's no room for growth.

That being said, I think it's absolutely fair enough for the parent commenter not to know that. Their English is certainly better than my Czech. For Americans - divided by a common language - it's a more bewildering (and bewilderingly common) mistake.

English is defined by usage. If enough people make the same “mistake”, it’s not a mistake.

Haha, yes, we're not nearly at that point yet. It's not quite that common...

Oh I didn't see it as an attack, just not that necessary. Also I'm based in Scotland and english is my first language, but I've learned to relax a bit as I get older, even with Americans and their torturing of the language :)

> You're wrong about the EU, the setup you're talking about is long gone

Sure, the EU might have more authority than you would like, or more than it used to, but 'government' has a specific meaning - and the EU is not that.

The EU doesn't have a monopoly on the use of force. It can make regulations, and countries may follow them for whatever reason, but ultimately their regulations have no more intrinsic force than me saying "I command that everyone wear clogs on the bus".

I can see that your comment tries to trace the EU's regulations back down to some meaningful authority over the sovereign countries, and stops at 'made to pay fines in an EU court'. 'Made' is doing a lot of work here. There is nothing 'making' the countries pay those fines, besides a desire to stay on good terms within the EU.

Again, I too can issue the country of Italy a fine, and they may even choose to pay it if they sufficiently value their relationship with me, but that doesn't represent legal authority. Compare it with what happened to southern states during Reconstruction, or in the 1960s when they tried to refuse the federal government's directive to integrate schools. Indeed, compare Brexit with the American Civil War. Monopoly on the use of force within a certain territory.

This is a fascinating topic, and a very subtle one, but it's more interesting to think about if you go at it without an axe to grind.

> I'm Czech, not American. My native language doesn't use "the" or "a" at all. I'll watch my English better.

Ah, fair enough. It's mostly Americans who do it, and they have no such excuse, haha.

As far as I know, no definition of "government" requires it to have monopoly on force. A "state" as defined by Weber should have it, but Weber's own definition says governments and states are separate things - especially in a multi-layered system like the EU (Wikipedia lists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois#Iroquois_Confederacy as an example of this situation).

I think that cat is already out of the bag.

I love DNS based filtering because it is so easy to circumvent. Even nontechie friends I just tell to enable dns-over-https in FireFox. Welcome back TPB (which is DNS blocked in my country).

I am surprised with such sentiments every time I hear them. How do you envision running a server in EU without complying with the EU laws and obeying the court orders?

There's a significant stretch between "running a server [...] complying with the EU laws" and using DNS to do mass censorship.

Censorship is abhorrent, and mass, government-mandated censorship even moreso. End to end encrypted DNS resolution (via DoH) needs to be widely deployed. Using unencrypted, unauthenticated protocols in 2022 is madness. DNS is closer to Telnet than it is to the modern web.

The thing is there's not exactly one unified EU legislation. You would need to abide by the laws and regulations of the country hosting your server, yes. But that country may have regulations that are incompatible with EU laws: for example France's data retention laws are illegal by EU standards (like many other human-rights-infringing laws in France).

Then of course i can see valid reasons not to obey unjust laws whether that's in Europe or elsewhere.

And the next step is that it is mandatory, and they block all other DNS provisioning.

And who do the brown shirts then go after next?

Yes they won't have to depend on private companies to suppress inconvenient content. You will probably never learn about many things in the future.

> But yeah, it's the sort of thing that it's better done at EU level rather than in 27 different, weak and uncoordinated ways.

Sure, let's give Kaczynski and Orban the keys to censoring LGBT content or regime critical media across the entire EU.

Sarcasm aside: any kind of censorship infrastructure will get abused sooner or later. No matter if it's criminals, trolls, religious fundamentalists (particularly where it concerns LGBT matters, sex work or gambling) or plain old wannabe dictators.

I reckon the opposite will happen - no single government will be able to implement unreasonable censorship, because there will be a higher bar for accepting blocks. Or are you arguing that Orban and Kaczynski have more control in Bruxelles than at home? Because that's definitely not the case; if anything, they are more isolated at European level than they are in their own countries.

Yes because countries like France or Germany have such a better record when it comes to censorship! /s

Germany famously hunted down Indymedia and tor supporters a few years ago, and privacy-friendly ISP Freifunk had to fight its way through constitutional court. France had trials against alleged contributors to self-organized media outlets (from reseaumutu.info federation, more specifically iaata.info instance), had many many films censored (such as Afrique 50 or La bataille d'Alger), and has strong regulations outlawing critiques of police and/or president.

Creating a broader power never results in mitigating power abuse. If anything, it helps it foster by piling on layers of abstraction/bureaucracy which diminish accountability in the long run.

That doesn't sound like good news at all. Anything that makes the internet easier to censor and control is very bad news.

The world's largest bureaucracy (EU) will continue with its bullying of everyone with different opinions. In a worst case scenario, this won't be optional, and they will cancel everyone with different opinions, like Hungary and Poland.

What “opinions” do Hungary and Poland hold?

hating on gays, muslims and separation of judiciary from executive are definitely opinions

An opinion is something that can be represented as a proposition about the world. It's the non-factive superclass of a fact: i.e. the structure of a fact, but not requiring/entailing the property of truth. Hatred is not an opinion, it's an emotion.

For more information, have a look at this fantastic Buzzfeed article: https://www.buzzfeed.com/ludwigwittgenstein/fantastic-ways-t...

"opinion" is probably the wrong word when we are talking about countries but people in Hungary and Poland seem to favour more nationalistic and conservative politics and have a thing for strong leaders.

It's a bit like California v.s. Alabama situation. Also, not limited to Poland and Hungary, it pans along the West v.s. East, so it's like North vs South in the US.

For example, EU says you have right to bring your partner to EU. Then Denmark says that you can register a long term relationship and have the full rights without a formal marriage, Poland will say that you need to marry.

It also goes beyond the social issues as the strong leaders tend to mangle with the judiciary system to make their ways and EU is really not happy about it. When that happens, the countries get fined and their leaders will bash EU in a similar way like some American politician bash the federal government.

You can check for your self in the username of your parent comment, which includes a racial slur. This specific slur is common in Hungary so make of that what you will when judging the amount of bias in that comment.

On a side note I am not sure if that username complies with HN TOS.

The entire point of the EU is to form consensus for the betterment of Europe. Different opinions are important but create friction. Agreement, yes sometimes against ones own opinion, is necessary to strengthen the EU. Individuals in an alliance that regularly strive against agreements and consensus are hurting the alliance, hurting Europe.

If consensus is apparently not desired we can go back to the European patchwork where the rules change significantly every 100km and doing trade is 10x harder.

Sadly the UK took that hit for the others, making the disadvantages of leaving very clear. So these guys will continue staying in the tent while pissing inside of it, sadly. But sooner or later a reckoning will happen, either in Europe or in their own countries.

If the opinions are homophobic as they are in case of Hungary, I'm very happy that the EU is "bullying". I wish it would also be the case with the ongoing corruption in Hungary.

> everyone with different opinions, like Hungary and Poland

The human rights of LGBT people and refugees or the right to freedom of the press or to a fair trial in front of an independent court are valid EU wide, guaranteed by the contracts that Hungary and Poland signed when they joined the EU.

Opposing these human rights is not an "opinion", it's an assault on the core values that make up the European Union - and the rest of the EU (particularly Germany, given that the former Chancellor's party was a sister party of the Fidesz for a long time!) has stayed silent for far too long.

Ah yes, opinions like "promotion of homosexuality or other disorders of sexual behavior" should be punished with up to eight years in prison. (A proposed amendment to the Hungarian constitution.)

Or opinions such as the government take-over of all independent broadcasters in Poland.

I mean, hey, SCOTUS decided in Citizens United that political donations were constitutionally protected expressions of opinion, so all bets are off...

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