Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/05/death-sentence-for-the-web.html
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Corporate greed is why we can’t have nice things.
This occurred to me while I was in the middle of destroying unsold product at the order of my manager, who had just finished writing up the entire staff for “chronic lateness” (not my fault the timestamp program is hosted on a laggy server and rarely works, second, one minute “late” really ain’t that bad).
Corporations want to always make more money while simultaneously paying workers less, which results on this constant constriction of the local economy.
The death of the open web was always inevitable. This was always going to happen at some layer, under some pretext - there are too few IXPs, too few top layer backbone providers, and too many dionsaurs trying to wring one last ever larger quarter from a stone.
Fuck Macron.
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This is fine. Who needs fake euro-Facebook anyway? Real Facebook is still free! /s
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They will try to push this until they succeed. They don’t care what citizens think about it, they don’t care how much harm it’ll do, the only thing they care about is to please their corporate masters and copyright collection societies.
Maybe Brexit is just the beginning and EU will collapse like Soviet Union. With each thing like that it becomes harder to care.
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This is a feature, not a bug. The politicians hate the fact that anyone can post anything on the web. I’d say the ability to censor dissent is at least as big a motivation for these politicians as the fact that their corporate bosses like it.
It’s sounding more and more like that would be a good outcome.
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Sadly if this directive is enacted, I’ll agree completely with you, but it would be way better if UK would decide to stay and help curtail things like excessive bureaucracy, mandatory adoption of Euro by member states, anticompetitive regulations, etc. instead of bailing out. EU could really be a good thing, but this is not where it’s going right now.
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The problem is that the EU was always intended to benefit corporate interests and was never designed to be a democratic institution. Maybe they need to scrap it and make something better from the ground up.
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Hell no. The problem is not EU, it’s corporate bastardry, and without EU, they would be targeting each country on its own. You are kidding yourself if you imagine a disunited Europe would be any better with this regard.
And this is of course without all the other positive things about the EU, political, economical, cultural, scientific and more.
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Context: France is in a major crisis at the moment with months of civil unrest, several persons injured, a general strike, stricter laws against demonstrations voted tomorrow, a series of scandals involving the government and the journalists who raised the scandals searched by police.
France is used to chaos, so this is still almost ok, but people are starting to wonder what they elected to “save them from the far right”.
The coming months will be interesting.
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The problem is that the EU has massive form for ignoring democracy (see referenda opposing the EU Constitution / Lisbon treaty) and it’s so big that it’s very hard to influence if you aren’t a massive multi-national. They can afford to have enough lobbyists and public affairs people to understand what influences politicians from Finland to Malta, and the PR people to do press releases in all those places. In fact, it’s a saving for them, because they get efficiency gains from minimising the requirements to lobby locally. Whereas, for the average citizen, or even small or medium sized enterprises, there’s little chance to influence what goes on. Some of us would argue that this is an inherent feature, not a bug, and that one of the core purposes of the EU was to moderate the populist democracy that saw Hitler and Mussolini elected…
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If this law passes, I’m going to try to put everything I have ever written – blogs, Facebook postings, poems, and other things that have never been in copyright, to their database. Can enough regular people who oppose this crash the system?
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You could write a script to submit things automatically. As far as I can see, there’s nothing preventing everyone in the US from doing this.
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Good to see that Merkel isn’t the sane voice in the choir of madmen (and the rarer mad women… Yes, I’m looking at you Ms.May…). I was getting worried that I could feel too much sympathy for her, and even be concerned that she leaves office…
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AFAICT, every article about this has Julia Reda, or Laura Kayali from Politico as the source. Is there any other primary source reporting that this is, in fact, happening?
On the behalf of Germany and all Germans that understand that these new Copyright regulations are utter BS:
Sorry for our idiot politicians.
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But that won’t be the end of the story. Everyone’s gotten used to the internet as it is - if it was taken from them, there will be fury. I mean burning down record executive’s houses fury. This may well end up as history’s greatest example of wishing for something and then regretting you got it.
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People would still have facebook, google, youtube etc. In the short run, for the average person, the discomfort from losing a few sites would be small. That the law would stifle further innovation and permanent the power of these companies is a bit too abstract to make people riot, I think.
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You could even make a script that downloaded all (or a random subset) text on Internet and made copyright claims on it. A few people doing that would make a mess of things.
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And if this would happen (a big if, as @Bernel said), in my opinion it would be the second most positive possible outcome of this story (the first being complete repeal of the directive). It could bring positive change to how EU is governed - it’s generally a good thing when politicians are afraid of citizens they should serve, they tend to listen more carefully then 
Maybe… But I don’t think the yellow vests are worried about the National Front. I would not be surprised (for all the desperate interpretations from Jacobin-ites, wishing for a genuine working class leftist uprising) if there was a large overlap between the anti-tax protesters and those who want to Make France Great Again.
No data. Just gut. Make of it what you will.
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