Why Is a British Baroness Drafting California Censorship Laws?
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
I remember some commenter writing off Twitter's governance team on the basis that it had "some British baroness on it", where the lady in question was Martha Lane Fox
That being said, the Baroness thing is flamebait; her crusade against the open Internet is what deserves criticism and derision.
Anyway, it seems like the clickbait here is "British" and the article would have taken exactly the same angle if her title was Senator.
However I must disagree with "Why is a prominent British film-maker"... nobody would click..
At least for me, and I assume many others in the US - Seeing:
British X about Censorship - is a thing.. just like when we see British comedians talk about gun rights or British news people talk about Y thing.
When it things in the Bill of Rights or similar documents, we are going to take influence differently than if it was British person X talks about Tea or Ships or something.
> However I am against this because we should let UK politicians stay politicking in the UK!!!
That’s hilarious, you said you understand it very well then immediately made it clear you don’t understand it very well.
The peasant-aristocrat economic and social systems of Europe are in full swing in the US.
Whether its a political family or rich ones, they stand on a peerage, exalted as demi-gods of the Americas. No different than a European title of nobility.
(And Americans in fact fought a war because they didn't want to pay taxes to fund their own defense)
It works to get people clicking and engaging with the content. Click bait won't go away because it continues to work as seen in this thread.
Would it? Senators are elected and have democratic legitimacy, which Life Peers do not.
And I'm not sure the democratic legitimacy of the role she was appointed to in the UK has much to do with her entirely separate organization's involvement in petitioning elected politicians in California. If you want to argue for improving the UK legislative approval process by reforming its second chamber I'm all in favour, but that has nothing to do with 'OMG! British Baronesses! In our country' tone of the article.
In the case of the UK, a baroness title is granted but also can be inherited (at least according to Wikipedia. I didn’t know how it worked.) doesn’t this increase the likelihood of confusion for foreigners. I, for one, have a vague sense of how these work in the Uk and France - because I’ve heard of actors/musicans winning accolades there, but otherwise I’m pretty ignorant and if I was going to invest in learning more about those countries, this isn’t an area that would be high on the list.
> the bill pretextually claims to protect children, but it will change the Internet for EVERYONE. In order to determine who is a child, websites and apps will have to authenticate the age of ALL consumers before they can use the service. NO ONE WANTS THIS. It will erect barriers to roaming around the Internet. Bye bye casual browsing. To do the authentication, businesses will be forced to collect personal information they don’t want to collect and consumers don’t want to give, and that data collection creates extra privacy and security risks for everyone. Furthermore, age authentication usually also requires identity authentication, and that will end anonymous/unattributed online activity.
The UK safety tech sector appears to be quite good at lobbying.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/safer-technology-...
That is sinister.
The 'British Baroness' phrasing seems like they just thought it was better clickbait than 'a company' - surely the actual issue the article has, by the end, is just this process that allows companies to draft Californian law; not that in this case the company happened recently to hire a British baroness...
Well frankly it does. As the article says, "with close ties to Hollywood (any time there’s an internet destructive law happening, if you scratch hard enough, you’ll find Hollywood somehow connected)." And if you read techdirt with any regularity you'll find Hollywood is indeed almost always involved in some anti-internet efforts.
"No one would listen and I was determined – and that was it, I ruined my career. I stopped making films and I started campaigning for children to be given a fair deal online. Cut to 10 years later, this is what I do.”
Her peerage is directly relevant to this legislation.
Nobody said that the fact the matter became law was down to her exclusively, but the fact she is a Baroness is directly relevant to the passage of the legislation in the UK and therefore her attempts to export it, much more so than her film career.
> It was founded by a Baroness with close ties to Hollywood (any time there’s an internet destructive law happening, if you scratch hard enough, you’ll find Hollywood somehow connected).
I would like to hear more about what the ramifications of the bill are.
Yeah I was the same way but they link to their analysis.
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/06/29/california-legislators-s...
There’s lots of very vague language in the bill that we’re going to need to wait for the agency to actually define in regulation. The article authors would rather the law more clearly define things to keep the agency from overreaching.
https://www.wkyc.com/amp/article/news/local/ohio/hidden-role...
> This turns the bill into a trojan horse for comprehensive regulation of Internet services and would turn the privacy-centric California Privacy Protection Agency/CPPA) into the general purpose Internet regulator.
This would be very bad for tech business in California
We’ll have to see what things look like, after it becomes law (which seems to be happening). It’s entirely possible that it’s toothless. A lot of these types of things are. Politicians like to have them, so they can point to their “accomplishments,” at campaign time, but they don’t actually move the needle.