German civil activists win victory in election case against X
reuters.com
reuters.com
Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
Also, maybe this linked article would be a better one that the one from Reuters.
[0] https://democracy-reporting.org/en/office/EU/news/court-orde...
In a way, this research would either prove or disprove your theory.
It seems a sizable number of people living in democracies would rather be living in non-democracies.
Is the key phrase here.
Good to see the EU recognizing there are innocuous things that when scaled to X- or Facebook- size produce systemic risks.
And if you want to be a platform that large, well, you owe additional societal responsibilities that your smaller competitors don't have to worry about (yet).
Because the language I'm reading here doesn't mean anything.
"Researcher" can mean anything. In the US we see DOGE people rifling through government finance records, pipelining the data to the executive, for targeting of specific political interests. "Research" means whatever the present democratically elected regime wants it to mean.
"Systemic risk" can mean anything. Last month in the US, millions of "undocumented" people were walking around relatively unconcerned. This month they're all a "systemic risk" and being actively hunted down for deportation or worse.
Maybe tomorrow you become a "systemic risk," and whomever is in elected office at that time designates and funds some academics to "research" all your X/Facebook/Mastodon/whatever activity. There is a non-zero possibility in Germany that AfD will one day get to designate what "research" means and what the "systemic risks" are. How does that sound?
So it's not the least bit difficult to understand why members of a supposed democracy might think this isn't a power "researchers" should have. It's only a problem for the naïve, who suppose the future is governed by only the right people.
This has fuck all to do with government overreach or access to private data.
It's not a perfect analogy, but we can consider the case of recording in public being legal and the majority of people feeling this is reasonable, versus people's gradient of unease with uniquitous CCTV surveillance, versus how people would feel if the government made sure a law that all CCTV cameras are made remotely accessible at all times.
I think if they'll ever be in a position to do that, they won't give two figs about prior norms and reticence and all this pearl clutching.
Observe the means through which a 49.8% mandate is doing just that in the US.
And systemic risk doesn't mean anything. It means what you continue to describe: context.
> a power "researchers" should have.
Again. It's about public data. Nobody can or would prohibit counting cars or pedestrians and nobody would try to make it harder than it already is. This applies to platforms like Twitter as well.
> It's only a problem for the the naïve, who suppose the future is governed by only the right people.
The naïve suppose that exactly those people will govern who want the job, which, judging from their experience, are neither engineers, nor hackers, coders, scientists or scientifically literate people and definitely nobody who was ever concerned with their own education.
I agree chucklingly that the statistical overrepresentation of lawyers in parliaments fits this assessment pretty well
Including a multistep application precess to be recognized as a vetted researcher.
In normal democracies searching through records require a court order.
The limit to "researchers" and "systemic risk" opens the door to cherry-picking the results - use a microscope to find issues when elections don't go your way, turn a blind eye when they do. The law is good (far better than not having it), but should be expanded, making the data available to everyone.
corporations aren't people, but i could see some people applying that argument in this case.
The Twitter API used to be extremely open way back in the day. This proved to be a boon for all kinds of social (and not so social) science research. In my mind, this was also one of the reasons for Twitter early growth as it made it trivial to build apps that interact with it. Over the years, the API got increasingly closed, making research in this area extremely difficult.
On the plus side, a decision like this can bring back the good old days of easy access for researchers. The down side, of course, is that it's almost impossible to define "researcher" in a way that prevents Cambridge Analytica like abuses from occurring again (not that the current owner is particularly interested in preventing them)
I think none of those things are happening here, do you agree with that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
The example in 2016 of one particular country's actions is more about what the establishment chose to report for political reasons, although obviously there is some novelty in the way influence efforts are changing over time to adapt to new technologies.
A good, obvious and well-documented example is that both British and German agents were spending millions to impact US elections in the WWII period. There are obviously today hundreds of lobbying groups dedicated to producing propaganda and swaying legislation in the US that benefits their country. Some of it is aboveboard, some of it is not.
Elections are won by people voting for issues that affect them, not a rich boogeyman
Yes, anonymized research data is very different.
X had not responded to a court request for information, the court added, ordering the company to bear the 6,000 euro ($6,200) cost of proceedings.
In Germany it's much harder to get money via lawsuit (vs the US), so that's kinda normal. If Twitter doesn't comply, the Staatsanwaltschaft will open a new lawsuit which will have a much bigger fine.
but yeah - 6k lawyers fee sounds like a joke, I guess it was a slam dunk case with very little time on the clock for the lawyers.
But definitely not something that's going to happen within the next weeks, sorry if I made it sound like that.
Let's say German court rules that X cannot operate in Germany. X decides to shut down any brick&mortar locations in Germany including any data centers located in Germany, but they do not stop Germans from accessing a public web service located outside Germany. What's the point? Will they then go after Germans continuing to use X?
In other words, a German court ruling against a non-German company can only go so far. However, IANAL, so willing to learn how a German court ruling would be anything other than a nuisance to a non-German company
X's website was blocked, and then the courts looked at how Musk operates his business interests and decided that Starlink was a valid recipient of the penalty fines, and Musk gave in.
Also, ignoring the court order would be a possible violation of the DSA, which can be fined at 6% of a company's global turnover.
Musk may put himself in a rather awkward position, as the CEO of a company actively refusing court orders. He may be arrested and prosecuted for his actions, so it'd be unwise for him personally to visit his European offices. I'm sure he has committed some form of crime throughout the past couple of years they can jail him by.
In practice, we'd probably just see a short-lived domain block. Jailing Elon will probably set off Trump and his cronies so the EU will probably not bother to go after him.
No need to, he could simply be bounced at the border.
Some edgy kids may use a VPN or something to bypass the ban, but 95% of people will simply move on to the next usable thing.
Another route is to tell financial institutions that payments to X must not be processed. That will immediately shut down advertising revenue from German companies, which will mean Germans will become less profitable users for X.
So... Yeah, Twitter may flout the ban, some users too, but most users and, more importantly, German banks won't.
The point is that Twitter makes money by advertising, and if they can't operate in Germany, they can't do business with German companies that want to use it to advertise. So it stops making money.
And if he doesn't comply, and continues doing so, contrary to court orders, they can also put injunctions against Starlink, start seizing Tesla assets, etc.
In the case of SpaceX, it would be even less feasible in that it’s a major DoD provider and there are defense treaties between the US and EU member states.
What others share just info for free?
https://democracy-reporting.org/en/office/global/collection?...
Here's the press release TFA is based on:
https://democracy-reporting.org/en/office/EU/news/court-orde...
Given it's a legal obligation? The ones whose boss isn't personally interfering with a foreign election.
If there's a specific platform you're thinking of, there's probably someone in here that can direct you to the right place. What platform are you thinking of?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia#German...
Do German courts not review the facts before granting injunctions?
That’s kind of the inherent tradeoff for courts being able to make really rapid decisions. It’s useful if say someone’s house was going to be destroyed tomorrow you can’t exactly do a lot of fact checking or the damage will have been done, but it means a lot of seemingly silly things happen.
The goal is prevent harm while doing basic fact checking in preparation for some longer review, and again 2 days later the court didn’t extend the injunction after review.
I don't agree, but it's a legal reality.
> Wer in Beziehung auf einen anderen eine Tatsache behauptet oder verbreitet, welche denselben verächtlich zu machen oder in der öffentlichen Meinung herabzuwürdigen geeignet ist, wird, wenn nicht diese Tatsache erweislich wahr ist, mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu einem Jahr oder mit Geldstrafe und, wenn die Tat öffentlich, in einer Versammlung oder durch Verbreiten eines Inhalts (§ 11 Absatz 3) begangen ist, mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu zwei Jahren oder mit Geldstrafe bestraft.
I'll just translate the important condition for being punished for defamation ("Üble Nachrede"):
> [...] if not this fact is demonstrably true [...]
I've intentionally kept the somewhat weird word order while translating. It's just as weird to read for a German. It's an old law.
indeed as a german i have a hard time to read this in any way other than "if the fact is not demonstrably true", which means if it was true it would be allowed. but intuitively it does make sense that true statements can be used to defame someone and that should be limited. among other things the right to be forgotten is relevant here, and also the problem of taking things out of context and beyond the audience it was intended for. a statement that i make among my friends should not allow anyone to defame or embarrass me by making it public to a wider audience.
But I'm not sure what the researchers are trying to find that's not already in plain sight. By now it's pretty clear that the network is actively driving discourse in one specific direction. And with Musk's involvement in the US admin, it's even more officially a non-friendly foreign actor than tiktok is.
Research is exactly about not just taking a look and declaring something "pretty clear". Also what "a direction" is not clear, or the dynamics of what affects the direction etc.
There were a few shifts that happened:
1. Musk bought twitter
2. Musk, despite being the wealthiest person on earth and running companies that are genuinely fascinating, has nonetheless—against overwhelming odds—been considered a loser.
3. Because of (2) and his fragile ego (part of the reason he was widely considered a loser in the pre-Musk dominant circles) he went hard to the right. Petty grievances, anti-free speech, “burn it down”, etc.
4. Twitter made changes under Musk that compensated large accounts based on the number of views or engagements.
Effectively a rev share for ad spend
5. Because Musk can massively amplify content and has a fragile ego, aligning yourself with Musk’s pet issues directly affects income for influencers. Accounts in the other direction can be demonetized and deprioritized on feeds.
This has led to large accounts, in the run up to the election, being very vocally trump even when they’ve had publicly leftist leanings in the past. It wasn’t a shift in policy positions. It was a shift to ragebait and memes that were more likely to get Elon’s attention and retweets.
So it is both pretty clear and a result of active decisions in one specific direction. We don’t need a multi-year quintuple blind study by esteemed Ivy League research fellows to do the basic observation and deduction of the situation.
Of course not, they're going to provide more precise data and facts. Perhaps many don't need the data to arrive at conclusions the data will point to but that does not obviate the utility of the research. Really, if you think their data will point to these conclusions, one would think you'd be that much more interested to see that the research is being conducted.
Furthermore, these points don't give any analysis of how this change has evolved, exactly how the messaging has changed, what's been the timeline etc.
Not checking your assumptions with data, and furher rejecting attempts to do this, is what I think is a large part driving what's happening. But for sure I'd like a reality check for my thinking.
I've never heard or seen that. Musk is a public figure and subject to much criticism, but so are all public figures and Musk actively provokes it (that is, Musk trolls for it).
> 3. Because of (2) and his fragile ego (part of the reason he was widely considered a loser in the pre-Musk dominant circles) he went hard to the right. Petty grievances, anti-free speech, “burn it down”, etc.
Lots of wealthy SV people have gone hard right; they don't all have relatively fragile egos. Musk is following the herd.
It's pardoxical that people think Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. are geniuses when they both follow the herd and have chosen a herd that is running off a cliff. They did not invent this ideology (who did?).
This is such a weird take. While I don't disagree about Musk's ego, it should be quite obvious that there's something else at play here, considering an unhinged convicted criminal won the popular vote and became a president. I've personally seen multiple people go through the same shift to the right as Musk. Are they all losers? Or maybe, just maybe, some of the more insane policies of the current American left have pushed them there?
But I think that more people were affected by these things:
The continued lack of funds allocated to education resulting in a terrible lack of critical thinking
The constant bombardment of social media
The influence of russia et al on social media
The gaming of recommendation algorithms by the far-right resulting in the pipeline to hatred
The crisis of masculinity where today's men don't feel they fill the same roles as their grandfathers, leading some to fall down the pipeline to hate
The gerrymandering of districts
Election rolls/registers being purged of historically left leaning people
USA supreme court rulings like Citizens United
Congress being so utterly out of touch with average Americans
And congress' age issue
Of course, there's many more points that people could argue about all day, and I don't think we're going to find out any real reasons here on HN. Maybe in 100 years time, if there's anyone left, the historians will be able to find the root issues.
Genuinely I can't imagine two things less to do with more people associating with the right in America than these two. It looks as though the Democrat party has gone further and further to the hard left, and more and more people in the US have felt they have no option but to vote for change over the status quo. Mostly because of economics.
Twitter can be mercilous. Musk wants so badly to be liked, didn’t get it (in part because it was so obvious), and went full Ben Shapiro aggrieved middle schooler.
Left complains and comments about Musk, republicans and conservatives turned out to be entirely right. They were called paranoid and unfair.
Perhaps, left reacted to what right does, plans to do and was entirely correct. Perhaps, what happens now is the fault of moderate right and center who fed these people, celebrated these people, voted for these people and defended these people.
Well, there is one thing the left should definitely be blamed for: alienating their own electorate. It's always "it's not our fault, it's their fault", without a shred of self-reflection. Why did previously left-leaning and left-voting people suddenly switch to vote right? And it's not because they're "hard-right", "fascists", "idiots", "racists" or "nazis" (if they were they wouldn't have voted left in the first place).
Unfortunately from what I've seen instead of taking a step back and reevaluating their approach the left is just doubling down on what they've been doing, sticking fingers in their ears and indiscriminately calling anyone who disagrees with them far right fascists. It's astonishing how far the Overton window has shifted. I just hope people come to their senses, or else we'll end up with another clown in the White House once the current one vacates it in four years.
The way Musk acted before buying twitter, insulting and mocking people makes him someone who has no business to complain when they respond in kind after he fails. So, Musk buys twitter for political reasons, mocking employees, owners and those he considers to be on the left. He claims to make it more performant, fails, get mocked back.
It is getting tiresone. Musk had few minor left leaning opinions and tons of right wing ones. Notable, his got given right to control everything, be no subject to the law since he is rich and succesful in business. His few left opinions failed to made him admired on the left.
I don't think this is clear at all.
It shouldn't be too hard to find evidence of a more direct link from Twitter itself given the general vibe there, but until there's concrete proof there's nothing much people and countries can do.
Before foreign influence laws can be applied, you need proof. Without proof, Twitter could sue governments and make a hefty additional profit. Lack of quality research has previously gotten Intel off the hook for their illegal dealings, costing the EU half a billion in interest once the dust settled.
We need either cold, hard facts or more vague laws to pull off something like a TikTok ban in the EU.
Now in the US, right-wing powers have campaigned to shut down disinformation research, often via lawfare and apparently via influence on major universities. Also, the Trump administration has made clear it is against much scientific research, especially when results conflict with political goals, and has already interfered in significant ways with research (and also culture). I think the Trump administration would agree with that description.
There's no war yet that will devastate the US economically, but the Trump administration is willing to risk that. Even without a war, it's not hard to imagine disinformation researchers moving to Europe now, and also scientists and also artists generally. Again, I think the Trump administration would endorse that.
This is especially rich in the context of a post pedestaling against disinformation.
To be more specific, I mean Germany and environs, for what it's worth.
The Nazis' base was largely made up of disaffected people down on their luck. And in this era of Germany there were vast numbers of them.
Your assumption was just absurdly wrong. While the Nazis never gained majority support in a fair election, they did gain near 40% with a message that would scarcely resonate with anybody able to have a remotely pleasant, or even 'normal', life.
This is also why the Treaty of Versailles was so completely idiotic. Make life awful enough for a people and they'll start to feel they have nothing to lose. We effectively guaranteed WW2.
> 1920s-1930s Germany was "a/the center of research, culture, etc."?
To me, your immediate parent comment seems to be about a completely different topic, though in the same country at the same time. What does your comment say about Germany being "a/the center of research, culture, etc."?
Everywhere, in schools, in cafes, the bus stop people would tell you crazy things and people would argue about whether it is true or not. If you really wanted to settle it you would need to find an encyclopedia, but most of the time you would need to go to a public library and find a book or go through microfilms for hours, make a copy and show it to everybody to fight disinformation.
Depending on the country, the government had a tight or tighter control on what was in that library.
Some country would also tightly control what was said in a bar or cafe like in East Germany.
So thinking we are in a life threatening misinformation epidemic is just false if you compare to just a few decades ago.
The trouble from 80's is different. We've shifted power vacuum, but whilst doing so the rich have become very much more rich, and [generally] they don't want to take responsibility; they want raw power. Things like bullshit (lies, conspiracies, manipulation), drama (such as creating friction between poor and middle class), obliteration of facts and science, cryptocurrency to avoid sanctions and law, and criminal behavior (including methods to avoid paying tax) are each tools for achieving more of such power.
UFOs are one of such, too. They're a tool to accelerate the distrust in government. For the acronym UFO itself is broad. A meteorite or Starlink satellite could be mistaken for an alien spaceship. Furthermore, drugs, hallucination, psychosis and the power of suggestion alone are strong tools to feed such fables.
I am well aware fans of conspiracies can very well be fans of X-Files but it is fiction first and foremost, plus don't forget Scully's role and background.
These are your words, your interpretation. Not mine.
Moreover, the meaning of UFO is Unidentified Flying Object. That could be anything, from Starlink to a swarm of drones to a SR-71 to a meteorite or some fireworks. Or just someone's vivid imagination, LSD or opioid trip, lying in a death bed, hypnosis, etc.
Now with social media I not only get my local Dale Gribble, I get your local Dale Gribble too, and numerous other Dale Gribbles.
> Everywhere, in schools, in cafes, the bus stop people would tell you crazy things
Where and when is this supposed to be?
Even taking that at face value, at MOST every living person could be talking about one crazy thing at the same time, and then there would be nobody to listen. Or half of them could talk, the other half would listen. With the internet and bots, there is no upper limit. For every person, there can be 50 trillion bots chirping at them.
> So thinking we are in a life threatening misinformation epidemic is just false if you compare to just a few decades ago.
Is this supposed to be an argument against researching it over taking your word for a world where everybody was telling everybody else crazy things all the time? If there is no problem, then all the less reason to be coy with the data, right?
Why should we operate under the assumption any policy implemented by any politician (German or otherwise) is inherently good by default? Specifically in the case of Germany, we have many recent and historical examples of not great ideas being implemented...
Might be good to be willing to question these things instead of retorting "THE LAW IS THE LAW" and bowing to the overlords with the rubber stamps, no?
The whole point of the Uber and Airbnb strategy was to force each market to re-evaluate whether long-standing laws (protecting special interests like the taxi lobby) were actually desirable by bringing legal challenges to them in each market after already winning the support of the people.
They were largely successful at this. Most markets democratically voted to change previous laws.
I know for people on the spectrum the idea of rules brings lots of comfort, but you do realize the whole point of a democracy is that rules can be debated and changed?
That's not loudly voicing an opinion. Nobody said you should "operate under the assumption". If you have a criticism to make, make it.
> Specifically in the case of Germany, we have many recent and historical examples of not great ideas being implemented...
And we have many recent and historical examples of Germany taking human rights more seriously after WW2 than people who haven't had their whole continent ravaged by war in living memory can even fathom. That you talk of "overlords with rubber stamps" to project the ambition for private corporations to have ZERO accountability just shows me that that you live on a wholly other planet than Germans do, and that you're playing to an American audience. These laws aren't there to please non-German companies, they are here to protect Germans.
That's not my experience. Try arguing in favor of European hate speech laws, healthcare, consumer protection regulations, rent control, social democracy or anything else at odds with libertarianism and you'll get heavily downvoted both here and on US-centric subreddits.
If there is one thing very common among Americans, it is the belief of "American exceptionalism" despite more than enough evidence that whatever Americans are doing is just outright Not Working At F...ing All.
The thing is most Americans just don’t think much about Europe at all. Outside of the UK, I saw far more films from Hong Kong or Japan in normal movie theaters while growing up than all of Europe combined. It might be different for someone on the east coast but for most Americans, the EU just doesn’t have much impact culturally or in business either.
Well they don't even know what's out there. 40% of Americans never left the US, 11% never even the state they were born in [1]. And even if you travel to another state, culturally it will be pretty similar to where you came from - same language, same TV/radio stations, same car dependence, same politics.
In contrast, in Europe... pretty much anywhere outside of Russia only needs about two to three hours worth of car drive and you're in a country where you don't know anything, in the Balkans you won't even be able to read because Serbs write in Cyrillic, and on the eastern border you can even play warzone tourist if you don't mind the risk of getting arrested or shot (or you can sign up for a combat tour with the Foreign Legion). Every one of our countries does stuff differently and you have so many opportunities of learning, it is mind blowing sometimes.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lealane/2019/05/02/percentage-o...
America is a huge country, but don't underestimate its cultural or linguistic diversity. It's had large immigrant populations from far flung places around the world for a very long time, whereas most of Europe has only become like this in the past generation or two.
In any case, your comment is missing the point. However little you believe Americans understand about the world, we get more media, cultural influence and business influence from places outside of Europe. Half the cartoons I grew up watching were from Japan, my family had Japanese cars and video games, popular business books talked about Japan and a lot of people saw it as almost a futuristic place. Hong Kong exported quite a bit of its culture through movies in the 90s and early 2000, and in recent years, Korea has become a major cultural force as well, while China has become the the key market to understand in terms of business opportunities.
Merriam-Webster > a: supreme power especially over a body politic > b: freedom from external control : autonomy > c: controlling influence
Wikipedia > Sovereignty can generally be defined as supreme authority.[1][2][3] Sovereignty entails hierarchy within a state as well as external autonomy for states.[4] In any state, sovereignty is assigned to the person, body or institution that has the ultimate authority over other people and to change existing laws.
None of these match Germany. Maybe you have your own one that does, and I'm fine with that.
That's like saying you're not free after you've entered a shopping mall and have to obey their house rules.
I guess people became used to assuming non American laws would not matter and I cannot blame them, it really looked like that.
The interesting point about trump is, that he is burning lots of “threat potential”: If I announce tariffs and withdrawal of military cooperation anyways I run out of threats at some point.
"The lawsuit is based on the Digital Services Act (DSA), which mandates platforms to provide researchers with access to relevant data."
See: https://algorithmic-transparency.ec.europa.eu/news/faqs-dsa-...
It's based on EU law.
“Privacy for me, but not for thee” appears to be the operative principle.
And it’s completely random. Transnational businesses have to expend enormous time and effort complying with privacy, right to be forgotten, data sovereignty, GDPR, etc. and then random courts and bureaucratic agency rulings carve out exceptions wherever they feel like.
I’m not excusing X for failing to respond to a court order, I’m just pointing out that the order itself was ad hoc and inconsistent like many others.
I might encourage X to volunteer this data, to the extent that things like privacy can be safe-guarded etc. But force them to with the strong arm of the law? No thanks. There's no rights basis here. We could benefit from the results of the research, for sure, but I don't think anyone has a right to the data other than those who produced it (individual users with respects to their personal data + X itself).
Why would you take a moral stance against that (as opposed to the obvious practical stance against it)?
Not everything that’s good in a broader sense aligns with what businesses are incentivized to do. The absence of a transparency-first company doesn’t prove there’s no demand—it just shows that the market structure doesn’t naturally reward it.
It would be one thing if the rules themselves were immoral or unreasonable, but I don't think this has anything to do with the rights of social media companies.
this isn't about private messages send on X
It's about being able to factually analyses and judge how various entities try to __publicly__ infer with elections through various means like propaganda posts and or ads.
Giving that there are a lot of indices that X did infer with US elections due to how it tuned itself to maximize the reach and effectiveness of right wing propaganda this is quite an important analysis.
And in difference to the US systematically spreading misinformation and hate speech to rile up people, or enabling/not preventing it as a platform, is illegal. Even highly so (on a constitutional level). Because you know last times it did end with WW2. Also as a fun fact: This and various other aspects of our constitution have been pretty much put in place by the US as a condition to give west Germany independence again after WW2. In general a lot of the German constitution is "lets start with the ideas behind the US constitution but then consider what didn't work out well and make it more prone against hostile somewhat elected governments undermining democracy".
Anyway if X insist in not helping to prevent or even detect/analyze people trying to infer with German elections it's probably time to kick them out of German. Like imagine some German company being suspected to be involved in election inference in the US and refuses to work with the US government to resolve any suspicions and doesn't even bother to pretend to cooperate, especially with the current government they would be banned in a matter of days. So it would be very dump to not do the same when the situation is the other way around.
This superficially reads like the left wing equivalent of the "facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop" conspiracy theory. Are you able to link to any evidence of this?
Didn't that one turn out to be true?[0]
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/zuckerberg-admits-fa...
and it is quite suspicious if someone decides to breach laws they had been complying with in the past just to prevent such analysis
Personal data is not the same thing as anonymised aggregate data.
Fine could be up to 6% of the annual income of X and in addition up to 5% of the daily turnover for continued non compliance.
The fact that Mr. Musk already stated that he would like to influence the elections would probably count as aggravating circumstances.
The only question is how fast the bureaucracy can work.
What law requires this? That data seems interesting, but it also seems odd to require a private platform to provide it. Is this directly legislated in the EU, or is this some kind of technicality?
> Providers of very large online platforms or of very large online search engines shall give access without undue delay to data, including, where technically possible, to real-time data, provided that the data is publicly accessible in their online interface by researchers, including those affiliated to not for profit bodies, organisations and associations, who comply with the conditions set out in paragraph 8, points (b), (c), (d) and (e), and who use the data solely for performing research that contributes to the detection, identification and understanding of systemic risks in the Union pursuant to Article 34(1).
Try to access an illegal online casino from Italy, for example.
Germany probably already has a system for the government to order ISPs to block certain domains. It would be surprising if any overbearing surveillance state didn't.
The US is/was asking a lot more from the private company TikTok iirc.
We can dislike these laws, but they’re not optional.
They’re going to find that Europe is much more dependent on access to US markets than vice versa. I would imagine top folks at LVMH and VW have to recognize the perilous course their governments have taken.