Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/14/french-companies-will-have-one.html
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Indeed, the only practical way to obey the laws will be to make the process as automatic as possible, which is surely the point.
There is one more way, possibly more practical depending on the fines. Don’t do business in France.
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Seems like we are going to have a bunch of separate internets soon. Chinese internet, Russian internet, Western European internet, Murican internet …
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…forcing honest citizens to the dark web…
I don’t think this is going to help the police the way they think it will.
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Although it was probably a decade or so ago, and has long since become untenable, I loved the way the French media regulator once told a French public service TV station’s news dept to stop publicising their twitter contact details on air, as 'other social media were available and this was tantamount to the publicly funded news programme recommending a private company and was thus contrary to regulations, being partisan towards one particular social media competitor selectively.
French bureaucracy is the best!
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You know we’re all f*cked when the country that brought the world “liberte, egalite, fraternatee” is pulling the opposite of all that good stuff.
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Rousseau been dead a long while now
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Kind of hard to do. A better “law” would be one that attacks the root cause of the problems this censorship is trying to “solve” … Lawmakers cannot help but try to triage and bandage issues; later rather than sooner will people find out that it is much easier to make the populous content enough to not wish to do crime. Surely capitalism would have to end prior to that happening though … the acquisition of wealth and power is a driver of much of this.
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If google or facebook said “We’re blocking French IPs”, how long do you think this law would last? It would be in their best interests to do something like this so there’s no mishmash of laws to worry about.
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It would be a dumb game for Google or Facebook to play. A national government can hurt a company really bad if they want to. Even if they folded, it would just be begging for some brutal EU regulations that can’t be escaped.
Google and Facebook are just going to comply. They are not going to sacrifice their profits in France, and the EU in general, to defend French liberty. They are going to setup a portal that the French police can use to censor whatever they feel like for French citizens (if not everyone). If the French don’t like that their government can demand companies censor stuff with no oversight or resistances from companies, the citizens of France should probably do something about that.
I don’t think the citizens of France are going to do something about it.
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Good luck with that, france.
I think we’re about to get an early preview of whatever copyright directive filtering boondoggle the EU are cooking up. It’ll fail for the reasons rob stated, even with google/fb’s massive resources, so robo-overblocking for the win. Meanwhile, any tech companies below ‘god-level’ can go fuck themselves.
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It’s obvs closely related to Italian bureaucracy, and some S American countries inherited the same sort of thing.
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And that is an intended consequence of both this law and EU wide copyright filters. In the end there will be just a few monopolies left, like Facebook for social media and Youtube for videos.
The same law will be pushed EU-wide, disregarding any protests, like it was done with copyright directive.
The effects of such laws are already visible - large fraction of US sites linked on BBS are not available in EU, and that number will only increase.
Such legislation will also make it really easy to destroy open source projects managed by nonprofit foundations. Some offensive user-posted comment and takedown order emailed at 2am, then a large fine for not reacting within 1 hour, repeated a few times will destroy any company (not counting the larges ones) that allows any kind of user content. This could be also easily used to harm Wikipedia.
It reminds me of methods of destroying companies (that didn’t do anything wrong) previously used Poland, based on EU laws around CE compliance declarations.
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I have to wonder how much of this is clueless “something must be done so we are doing something!”; how much is petulance (France, at least at the legislative level, seems to bitterly resent American tech giants; but have no idea how to deal with them by encouraging actually effective alternatives; and seems to have slumped into a willingness to cement their hegemony so longs as they get some options to punish them periodically); and how much is just a backhanded request for the installation of an EZ-takedown interface, to be made available to the local authorities.
Given how difficult it is to handle takedowns within the hour internally(unless you just let anyone auto-takedown stuff); if it becomes a requirement I suspect that the ‘compromise’ position of only giving the cops an auto-takedown interface, and at least avoiding the more prolific griefers, would be easy to impose on a great many outfits; and all kinds of handy if you need to memory-hole uppity yellow vests and such.
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That motto was coined by Maximilien “Reign of Terror” Robespierre, so its realisation was a bit tenuous from the start.
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Is that like the manatee’s brother? (Sister manatee = sororitee. Mummy manatee being MAnatee, obvs.)
(Sorry, I’ll get my coat.)
Fraternité (fraternity)
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Ça ira! Ça ira! Ça ira!
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I did not know this.
Looks like I need a history lesson.
I think you understand how I meant it, basically, what I was trying to convey was pretty straightforward. The French, one thing I felt was understood to be baked into their social consciousness was the idea of real liberty, which was borrowed and expanded upon by the American founding fathers, along with many ideals of the Enlightenment. Where we get the modern understanding of real liberty and “freedom” from, as well as the general human colloquial understanding of those concepts.
Basically I was getting at the idea that if even the French are pulling this shit, the people who were one of America’s foremost inspirations for a modern free democracy and against totalitarianism, at least historically in ideal, then a so called bastion of liberty is falling, and we should all view it as a fall towards totalitarianism in general worldwide.
And I tried to do this using a quote I presumed to understand origins of, but apparently not well enough.
My bad.
(Can you believe I work as a machinist? I really am in the wrong profession…)
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Yeah, if you want to absolutely entrench the massive tech companies as gatekeepers of the internet then this is how you go about it. I was talking to a music creator before the EU copyright directive passed and he was all in favour of it, under the belief (mistaken IMHO) that it’ll be beneficial to people like him. I tried explaining this very point to him and his response was that they dominate anyway and the sad thing is i suspect many people feel that way so why even try to fight it. Severe overblocking is going to be the thing with this and we already have content ID to compare it to, something that has cost over $100 million, blocks stuff like bird song and mozart and is abused by copyright grifters all the time.
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This is, of course, the same country that fined Google a couple of billion Euros for its failure to observe proper privacy rules regarding its clients, and is now criticising Google and Apple over the privacy baked into their C19 tracing app, demanding they break the rules that Google was fined for.
Catch 22 in action, along with clear state hypocrisy.
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