German Data Privacy Commissioner Says Article 13 Inevitably Leads to Filters

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/03/german-data-privacy-commissioner-says-article-13-inevitably-leads-filters-which

by DiabloD3 • 7 years ago

152 57 7 years ago

adventured• 7 years ago

I'm waiting for the inevitable EU firewall that will ultimately be required to aggressively control all Internet usage for anyone in the EU.

It can end no other way than that. Particularly as these draconian regulations continue to get worse. How else will they enforce these policies against foreign entities that can trivially ignore them while still serving EU users? They have to put a stop to that, as it's an easy circumvention.

I can build a service in the US. Allow EU citizens to sign up. Entirely disregard most, if not all, EU laws. Monetize the huge US market first as a cash springboard. Acquire scale. Then turn on EU monetization when it's convenient to deal with the regulatory challenges there. There might be considerable retroactive fines involved for ignoring EU law over time while still taking on EU users (when you attempt to monetize the EU users, requiring business on the ground in the EU, that's when they'd land punches financially; the retroactive approach would be the solution the politicians would come up with as a desperate stop-gap against this approach); so what, I'm now a monopoly platform, I already won, hit me with your speeding ticket. If you make the speeding ticket too large, I'll demonetize the EU users, remove all business from the EU, ignore any fines, retain the EU users anyway to prevent competition, and keep going (come back later and see if I can lobby/bribe the EU politicians in some kind of fine settlement).

The sole means to stop that scenario - which is almost obnoxiously beneficial to furthering US dominance in platforms - is to lock down all Internet usage in the EU and dictate by permission what sites may be used. The tighter they get with Article 13 style regulations, the more likely they have to implement an EU firewall.

ovi256• 7 years ago

The scenario you described, unfortunately, makes too much sense.

Furthermore, I think this type of legislative arbitrage has already been in play, for the current compliance requirements. It sometimes works the other way around too, and I'd say Spotify was a succesful play that bypassed the negative US climate for media streaming startups, left by Napster.

pluma4• 7 years ago

What makes you think this would be even remotely reasonable to conclude?

The Great Firewall exists to prevent Chinese citizens from accessing politically subversive content. The only EU equivalent I can think of is Germany blacklisting certain illegal content providers (i.e. nazis and child porn) that can't easily be shut down.

The reason access to child porn (or marketplaces for illegal substances) is prohibited is that possession and distribution is illegal and therefore even mere use of the services may constitute a crime (even if users don't distribute the illegal goods themselves).

The reason access to nazi sites is disrupted is that these sites are actively inciting racial hatred, holocaust denialism etc. So if you want to make a Great Firewall analogy this is probably the closest equivalent.

The GDPR specifically defines human rights and a mechanism to enforce those for EU residents (i.e. reporting violations to supervising data protection agencies which may use fines when the violator refuses to comply or acts too maliciously). Blocking those sites wouldn't make sense as the users aren't doing anything wrong by accessing those sites (it's the sites that are abusing the users).

The copyright reform also doesn't really target users -- article 13 just eliminates the safe harbor provision that allows file sharing services to distance themselves from the content they host. Access to those sites is not illegal and access to illegally hosted content is treated no differently in the EU than in the US.

In other words, aside from the usual anti-consumerist fearmongering about the GDPR your argument could have been made equally well when the US started shutting down the initial wave of file sharing services (from Napster all the way to MEGA). But instead it turned out to be more profitable to just sue people on a case by case basis.

pluma4• 7 years ago

The sheer irony of hearing people get their tinfoil hats in a bunch over the inevitability of an EU firewall because of a copyright reform that neatly dovetails the copyright overreach the US has tried to push in Europe for decades just because this time it's European newspaper publishers instead of RIAA and MPAA is physically painful to me at this point.

yorwba• 7 years ago

This "EU firewall" already exists. If a website violates European law but is hosted in a foreign country, ISPs may be ordered to block access to it. The US has a similar system in place, I believe.

StavrosK4• 7 years ago

Which draconian regulations continue to get worse? I'm only aware of article 13, which hasn't passed yet.

Mirioron5• 7 years ago

GDPR. It has some good parts, but a lot of bad in it as well.

hvidgaard• 7 years ago

There is other ways to curb that though. I doubt the current POTUS is willing to play ball, but a future one might sign a mutually beneficial agreement that enables the courts of the EU to go after US based companies for things like taxes and fines, and visa versa, for a small well defined set of things. I think this is just as much a possibility since the internet is truly international and require international corporation.

L_226• 7 years ago

To implement an internet 'firewall' in the EU first they will first have to come up with a less contentious term than firewall. Too many negative connotations re. China and authoritarianism. Even non-tech people in the EU would get riled up about any EU firewall.

Mirioron5• 7 years ago

EU politicians are experts at rebranding stuff like this. Just look at the article 13 discussion. They started out with upload filters, but when people criticized that they changed the wording so that it doesn't say upload filters, but it will still bring upload filters. Or look at Macron. He's railing against nationalism while instituting national service for 16 year olds "so they can learn to be more involved in society" and mandates French flags in classrooms.

EU politicians love rewording things and pretending that they're different.

AnonymousPlanet• 7 years ago

I think it's going to be more like a reverse firewall, so to say: non-EU companies geo blocking IP addresses of EU origin. This is already happening because of the GDPR. We might lose access to sites like Reddit and maybe even GitHub from inside the EU. I don't think the parties pushing for this legislation are fully aware of how deeply this might impact the technology sector, directly and especially indirectly.

raverbashing3• 7 years ago

Github is (thankfully) excepted

m_fayer• 7 years ago

Don't get why this is getting voted down. This scenario is on the gloomy side, but also insightful and a little too plausible for comfort.

adrianN• 7 years ago

This comes as a surprise to no one but Axel Voss.

raverbashing3• 7 years ago

Nah there are a lot of artists that think it's just fine to censor the entire internet so that they can make more money

James Blunt is one of them https://twitter.com/CDU_CSU_EP/status/1098531302490468352 and "helping" the CDU campaign

jackewiehose2• 7 years ago

According to the following tweets, this video is not in regard to article 13. They just reused some old video there and put it falsely into this new context.

eveningcoffee• 7 years ago

So we will have automated censoring. What a world we have to live in. Do the MEPs really do not understand what they are building?

lstodd• 7 years ago

Why, they do perfectly - their careers and their retirement plans.

mcv3• 7 years ago

Not if we can get everybody to vote them out. We need more public attention for this. There are plenty of people who will be hurt by this who blindly vote for the parties that support this.

reubeniv• 7 years ago

I'm not sure this is MEPs doing, laws are made by the council I think, and then voted on by MEPs

gjsman-1000• 7 years ago

Only a few days from most signed petition in human history? If true, very impressive.

I_am_tiberius3• 7 years ago

Why aren't American Internet giants react like it was done with SOPA?

nerdponx2• 7 years ago

Because they benefit.

I_am_tiberius3• 7 years ago

How? E.g.: Google wouldn't be able to display website content descriptions for free anymore (OK, they are allowed to display a few words of the description).

I understand that content creators will benefit most (e.g. news sites).

Velchronus• 7 years ago

The author of the piece take a guess:

But if a company is too small to afford licenses, it's also too small to build filters. Google's Content ID for YouTube cost a reported €100 million to build and run, and it only does a fraction of the blocking required under Article 13. That means that they'll have to buy filter services from someone else. The most likely filter vendors are the US Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook, who will have to build and run filters anyway, and could recoup their costs by renting access to these filters to smaller competitors.

expertentipp• 7 years ago

If advisory of German specialists from the either side will make the internet in the EU anything like the internet in Germany, in any regard, people will be really pissed. Kindly bugger off and let decide those from the places were the internet works.

ahartmetz• 7 years ago

That comment makes no sense in this context.

jplayer012• 7 years ago

It does in a way. Article 13 is largely a product of French and German politicians. Just because the German data commissioner says something like this doesn't mean there aren't plenty of German politicians eager to implement Article 13.

pluma4• 7 years ago

It's omitting a lot of context.

Article 13 (and 11) is heavily inspired by pre-existing laws and drafts in Germany (and France), which are heavily lobbied by print publishers (much like US copyright law legislation is heavily lobbied by the MPAA and RIAA).

So while the changes aren't as controversial in Germany (although e.g. the Leistungsschutzrecht is still fairly recent and controversial) they're not likely to be as easily accepted throughout the rest of the EU.

Of course the obvious caveat is that MEPs don't necessarily vote in alignment with their country's population. Because of the lower voter turnout they have fewer constituents while they're also a more lucrative target for industrial lobbying.

koonsolo• 7 years ago

I'm currently creating an online platform with user generated content.

I'm based in Belgium, but if this bill passes, it leaves me no choice but to take my company abroad. Funny how the EU tries to compete with US startups and multinationals, with various incentives, and then tries to get this crap enforced on all of these same companies within the EU.

Bunch of idiots.

Although I live within the EU, I hope various companies will block access to their services.

duado• 7 years ago

The EU doesn’t really need to compete since they can get as much revenue as they want with regulatory fines. They don’t care if you go abroad since if you get big they will find a way to get their money.

1waYstilltheree• 7 years ago

A little off-topic and a real mental leap, but wayback (hundreds of years), the katholic church was the one with a information-monopoly (dome-building, history and mint studies for example) crawled with the years by the principle of syncretism. All the katholic church had to do, was to use their 'Leitungsschutz' (german word) to make their bucks... history... info-bits -sure... ^^

rurban• 7 years ago

What Cory misses is that the proposed legislation is technically impossible to implement. Even giants like Facebook and Google cannot do content violation filtering on every media, like text submitted by text area boxes ("citations" over de copying the minimis limit), sound and video. Maintaining hashes of protected content is also technically impossible. Who's gone decide which data will get processed, and from where?

Only the previous legislation is technically implementable, the current proposal will make user input on all European websites illegal, like Hacker news, reddit, WordPress blogs with comments, wikis like wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook,... you name it. Since Article 13 is such a monumental fuckup people will either ignore it, leading to risk of becoming a random target, or disable all userinput at all. which will be the death of internet 2.0 in europe.

even a theoretical central filtering service will not be able to solve this problem, because registering and filtering all worldwide protected content is not feasible. there will be 5% of some big studios and press agencies content hashed, but not much else. adding legislation on this idea is just destructive. the previous legislation is the only practical and useful way.

type0• 7 years ago

Since Article 13 is such a monumental fuckup people will either ignore it, leading to risk of becoming a random target

Not random target, it's by design, first make a law that almost all website owners break, then you are free to punish whoever you want.

The future looks bleak for Europe. If this continues, in a few years you woldn't be able to criticize politicians online or uncover corruption they're involved in.

doh2• 7 years ago

Horrendous law with an incredibly severe consequences to us all. And I'm saying this as the one benefiting most as my company is the ultimate upload filter (we are orders of magnitude larger than Content ID [0]).

We are not going to stand by idly and let it to wipe out all competition because they can't afford to be compliant with this idiotic law. As such, we are making our services free to all rights holders and platforms [1]. This is the best way we, as a company, can fight the law and make sure that it will have the least negative impact as possible.

[0] https://twitter.com/synopsi/status/1102655191654981632

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CLybxCFg_gz4n62UqVr3XEsy...

jackewiehose2• 7 years ago

Well, thanks. But using your service doesn't feel like "fighting the law". It's just complying with the law by being dependent on one generous external company.

I (as a European consumer) would rather prefer that the big platforms like youtube/reddit/facebook just shut down their European presence in response to these kind of laws.

doh2• 7 years ago

I (as a European consumer) would rather prefer that the big platforms like youtube/reddit/facebook just shut down their European presence in response to these kind of laws.

You know the complete opposite will happen. Those are literally the only ones that can comply "easily" with the law. What about the rest?

Well, thanks. But it doesn't feel like "fighting the law". It's just complying with the law by being dependent on one generous external company.

I'm on this with you. I'm European living in US. I don't want this law any more you do. I'm still hoping the law is going to be dropped. But even then, the law will eventually come back in some form or shape. So we are trying to find a sustainable way for others to comply with it and be able to compete with the giants.

German Data Privacy Commissioner Says Article 13 Inevitably Leads to Filters

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