Comment by nolok
5 months ago
Contrary to what seems to often be believed, the EU way of doing things is to try to make companies do their own agreement and policing, as to avoid the rigidity of regulation unless we absolutely have to.
Another example is how the EU asked the phone manufacturers to agree on a common charger for years on a good will basis, and only had to regulate when samsung said they were going to back out if no regulation was made because apple was not playing ball.
So the idea here is "guys, we really don't want to come here and make a law about what is or isn't allowed to be said or what has to be fact checked and everything, we want you to behave like adults and agree together about said rules".
I believe in this case, the fact that every company is part of the same country and same bunch of absurdly rich tech companies means it's never going to work at all.
> to try to make companies do their own agreement and policing, as to avoid the rigidity of regulation unless we absolutely have to.
This is precisely the censorship policy of the PRC. It ensures that nobody ever knows for sure what speech is permitted, so no speech is completely safe. Platforms compete for users by permitting marginally legal speech and compete for the favor of regulators by censoring it. This system is much more effective at suppressing political dissent than the US system, in which censorship decisions can be challenged in open court.
This is hyperbole.
The hardware and software industry has about a million standards that were collectively designed and adopted by the industry. Every single IETF RFC governing the internet and W3C RFCs governing browser standards for starters - we wouldn't be on this website having this conversation without those.
It's completely reasonable to say "multiple competing standards harms consumers with no benefit, come up with a common standard". This is what governments are supposed to do! If there is a single manufacturer not adhering to the standard it is reasonable to tell that manufacturer to comply. Is any reasonable person unhappy that we're all using common chargers for phones now?
Nor did this charger regulation seem to have negative consequences. Apple proactively licensed their wireless charging standard tech to the whole industry to get ahead of any legislation. Might not be great for Apple's profits, but I prefer that as a consumer.
It's not hyperbolic in any way. It's a simple, sober, literal explanation of how the Chinese censorship apparatus functions. I have no idea why you're bringing up electrical interface standards; they seem completely irrelevant to questions of civil rights to me. The W3C standards (which are not RFCs) seem barely less irrelevant; we are talking about what viewpoints people are or aren't allowed to hear, and the social processes that determine that, not file format evolution and the priority order of CSS selectors.
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As illustrated in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795679, the reason you think it's hyperbolic seems to be that you don't know what the word "hyperbolic" means.
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but in case of hate speech it is relatively clear in most cases what is and isn't hate speech even through people on both sides love to pretend it isn't
If people on different sides of political divides are investing a lot of effort in labeling one another's arguments as “hate speech”, which seems to be what you're saying, that sounds like pretty strong evidence that it is not in fact relatively clear what is and isn't hate speech. And, once a book, news article, or political platform has been successfully suppressed, it is of course no longer clear whether or not it was hate speech, because you can't tell what it said; you only know what its political opponents say about it.
In particular, right now, there are numerous credible claims of human rights violations by Israeli troops in Gaza, and widespread criticism of those violations is being labeled as anti-Semitic hate speech, correctly in some cases, while defenses of the same violations are being labeled as Islamophobic hate speech, also correctly in some cases.
These are among the reasons that hate speech is uncontroversially legal in the US.
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