its not going to happen. Quite the opposite. The EU's age verification app will only work on Google attested (i.e. controlled by American big tech) smartphones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705240
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.
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.
> 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.
The unfortunate truth is that all governments suck at dealing with technology in a positive way. The EU has some wins, the US has some wins, and so on... but they all have significant fails too. It's a question of which bad things you can live with, more than a question of who doesn't do bad things.
Correct I’ll take the cluster F of what we have now over the UK style of the government watching over my shoulder as they force me to give up anonymity on the web for those sites that most require it
If you live in one of the states that hasn't yet added
one of these laws. I expect it will become a federal bill in a year or two so there aren't 20 variants of the same law.
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.
Looking at how they are pushing mandatory backdoors and surveillance it can only be worse than what we get now.
its not going to happen. Quite the opposite. The EU's age verification app will only work on Google attested (i.e. controlled by American big tech) smartphones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705240
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.
Like mandatory encryption backdoors and VPN criminalization?
First we need to actually start having European OSes like SuSE being offered on shopping malls, with 100% hardware support, followed by Jolla phones.
And everything on European goverments being available as FOSS OS friendly, not Windows/macOS/iOS/Android only.
Watching the rollout of speech laws like the “online safety act” in the UK makes me rather dubious of the wisdom of that idea.
And that just in the UK. For the EU's own shenanigans, we have persistent attempts such as these examples of fuckery:
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.
> 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.
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The unfortunate truth is that all governments suck at dealing with technology in a positive way. The EU has some wins, the US has some wins, and so on... but they all have significant fails too. It's a question of which bad things you can live with, more than a question of who doesn't do bad things.
Correct I’ll take the cluster F of what we have now over the UK style of the government watching over my shoulder as they force me to give up anonymity on the web for those sites that most require it
If you live in one of the states that hasn't yet added one of these laws. I expect it will become a federal bill in a year or two so there aren't 20 variants of the same law.
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.
10 replies →