The need for European digital sovereignty cannot be overstated.
The UK's Online Safety Act's main effect is to strengthen big tech and protect them from competition, and make self hosing prohibitively expensive for many.
European governments will talk about digital sovereignty but will do nothing that involved actually spending money, or regulating the private sector or anything actually effective.
And everything on European goverments being available as FOSS OS friendly, not Windows/macOS/iOS/Android only.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44720103
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705240
There have been many, many other examples over recent years. Anyone making any claim to the superiority of the EU regulation state in how it respects digital rights for individuals is full of shit or sheerly ignorant.
The EU is a huge organization and too often the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing.
But, the EU isn't alone in curbing digital rights for individuals, it's a worrying trend all over the world even over here in the states, with congress introducing a bill of our own along the same lines (Kids Online Safety Act) - we'll see if it goes anywhere, but the overton window is shifting to being in favor of regulation like this, unfortunately.
Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere, and rapidly.
You can really feel the "big tent" nature of the GOP when these bills are being pushed despite being absolutely abhorrent to large swaths of Republican voters.
The constitutionality of the current laws was upheld on the basis of treating age verification for access to porn as an incidental burden, and thus warranted only intermediate scrutiny.
My (naïve?) hope is that any future mission creep will be rejected by the Supreme Court under strict scrutiny, especially as it extends into general and political speech.
However, once you have the legal and technical frameworks in place, mission creep is almost inevitable, and it could easily take years of litigation to resolve.
“Think of the children” has always been the thin end of a wedge used by those looking to incrementally dismantle inconvenient civil liberties.
All that said, we’re in a much better position in the US under the first amendment. The UK’s “online safety bill” is already targeting a myriad of forms of political speech, and is just the latest example of the significant shift towards the curtailment of free speech across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
But yeah, keep railing against the GOP.
I’m just so tired of “fuck the GOP” when, as you say, it was inevitable. People love to hate a villain, I get it. “It was Hilarys turn, we will just keep marching forward” really didn’t work out. This GOP narrative is basically screaming into a mirror. Not your GOP narrative, not picking on you. Just frustrated.
We have left leaning main stream media organizations implying that a jeans commercial is a nazi rallying cry because it features a white woman. I just cant vote how I used to vote and look my young sons in the eye. The Dem party is gone.
I completely understand and empathize with why some people are upset or even dismayed at what he’s doing though; i just think it’s necessary.
When you consistently deride and undermine a demographic, they see what you’re doing, and don’t like you very much for doing it.
I've always been a Dem and was right up until Biden's term. I've never seen anything like it. Maybe I was just blind to the creep before that. First time I noticed it was the DEI training at work. I did not like that at all. I'll never vote Dem again, the risk to my kids is just to great. So to the right we will go.