Comment by RealityVoid
3 days ago
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.
Blocking huge swaths of the internet skips right past IP protection in my opinion.
No, it is censorship. IP protection would be punishing the pirates after they do something illegal. I think what you're sensing is that it is censorship in support of intellectual property rather than censorship aiming at political repression.
There's something similar in RealityVoid's comment where it is identified that EU law promotes censorship, but that is discounted because the understanding is it in aid of privacy rather than politically motivated. Although given Europe's rich history of sliding into authoritarianism that does seem like an optimistic take on where the European elite are heading. A part of political censorship is making it hard for people to realise that popular political viewpoints are being censored and providing cover by claiming the censorship is for some good cause would be pretty routine.
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.