Comment by jbstack
3 days ago
As someone living in an EU state who has to regularly turn my VPN on and off to have full internet access, I can't agree with you that it's a "hoax". It's inconvenient enough for me that I'm looking into having a custom router that will switch between VPN destinations depending on what site I'm accessing.
Also "EU countries have higher press freedom than the US" is a strawman argument. We're not talking about press freedom. It's also an example of the fallacy of relative privation ("X isn't bad, because Y is worse than X"). It's like saying "It's a hoax that the US executes some prisoners, because Iran executes even more".
I really hope they go ahead and create the portal. I mean it.
> who has to regularly turn my VPN on and off to have full internet access,
Is this because the EU or your country has blocked access, or some news site from the US blocking access from the EU because they don't want to deal with GDPR?
DCMA. United states censoring all around the world. So please host a VPN to get around that.
I don't think high seas sites hosted in off-shore jurisdictions particularly care about the DMCA...
Most access blocking is through ISP DNS servers. Just set your DNS to an open one, no need for a VPN.
Which country ?
Italy. Examples of sites I can't access without VPN: torrent sites (including legal uses), betfair.com (which I use as a more accurate political predictor than polls), and various non-EU sites which block access because they've decided it's easier than complying with extra-territorial requirements imposed by the EU (this one isn't direct EU censorship, but it amounts to the same thing indirectly.
Sometimes I set my VPN destination to the UK (my country of origin) to get around these. Then I find that I have other problems. For example, certain Reddit posts are unavailable to me because someone has posted a comment that some algorithm has decided is NSFW (and therefore triggers age verification under the UK Online Safety Act 2023).
The result is that I have to turn my VPN on and off depending on what I'm trying to do.
Italian here. I can access most of the torrent sites and betfair.it (which I guess is the localized version) without vpn
I might have changed my dns in the past
I'm unfamiliar with Italian piracy laws and surveillance but I can tell you that accessing torrent sites for me was a simple matter of choosing a proper DNS provider.
This is a definition of censorship that seems to equate restrictions to any website or data stream as freedom, not whether the content of the site breaks local laws. This is a bit extreme, since most countries have laws against gambling, and if you could get around it by just setting up servers abroad, what value are local laws?
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I also live in the EU. betfair.com is not blocked by my ISP here. Rather, they are blocking my ISP ("[...] you may be accessing the Betfair website from a country that Betfair does not accept bets from [...]"). That the website not only prevents betting but also does not show any odds is a technical decision on their part. Gambling regulation is also usually domestic, and not EU law.
Websites deciding EU users are not valuable enough to comply with GDPR is, as you say, also not censorship. It is again the technical decision of some website owners to provide their content only in conjunction with illegal processing of your data.
I have not had issues accessing torrent indices from the EU. This too is usually handled domestically and has little to do with the EU.
There is legitimately dangerous (current and upcoming) EU legislation (Chat Control, eIDAS, age verification, previously the Data Retention Directive), so I don't think it necessary to weaken your argument by listing non-examples.
yeah, i'm calling bullshit. unless this person tries to surf the russian web or get behind the great firewall of china.
See my sibling comment to yours. I have no reason to lie.
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What content are you missing? Off the top of my head, the type of content most likely to ve missing in Europe would be:
- geofenced media
- commercial sites intentionally removing eu access because of gdpr.
That's it. Those are the only cases where I could not access sites from tbe EU. At least the ones I encountered.
And do notice, both of them are not filtered by the EU or anything like this. They are enforced at the publishing website. Would you call this censorship? It kind of feels like a stretch. If not a deliberate contortion of truth.
In Spain many parts of the Internet are shut down when there's a LaLiga match to "prevent piracy". They usually block Cloudflare as a whole but also Vercel, GitHub,... had issues. For example last Sunday I couldn't access some of the stories submitted here. I could also not access the documentation of hledger, a FOSS contability tool.
Piracy would be IP protection, not censorship / stopping dissidents/ controlling ideas. Plus this wouldn’t be an EU wide policy.
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Germany has an "Index" of banned media. Mostly nazi content, so if you're looking for that, freedom.org will be _right_ place for that.
Ah yes, the nazis. So yeah, censorship is great then because nazis. Is HN becoming reddit?
See my reply on the other sub-comment. There's no need to accuse me of deliberately contorting the truth. We can keep the discussion civilised. And yes, I would call at least the second point (GDPR) indirect censorship, because it's a consequence of the fact that the EU has imposed the requirements extra-territorially ("your website must comply with our rules even though you aren't within our jurisdiction, and your website is fully legal within your jurisdiction").
The GDPR does not dictate what websites can say, it dictates rules for handling collected personal information. Those are not the same thing, it’s not censorship.
[dead]
Notice how you went from "censorship is a hoax" to "not having access to these things is not important", while also implicitely assuming control of deciding the matter.
> EU state who has to regularly turn my VPN on and off to have full internet access
Because you really think this “portal” is going to let you access websites diffusing copyrighted content?
That's by far the most prevalent kind of blocking and I don't think the current admin is against that at all, they just want to to promote Nazi speech (which is barely blocked in the first place).
I wonder what they'll do about pedophile stuff though.