Will the European Union ruin the internet?

Discussed previously:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17354442" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17354442</a>

I think this proposed law is completely absurd. People who obviously don’t understand how the internet works have created it.<p>For those not familiar. There are two main points that are quite harmful:<p>#1 Mandatory filtering of uploaded user content. This is to prevent possible copyright infringement. There are two things that will happen: the large companies will generate upload filter mechanism that won’t work perfectly so they will deny many uploads. Smaller companies won’t be able sustain an upload functionality. Thanks for killing innovation and supporting large monopolies<p>#2 Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content. This is to prevent google and the like to profit from publishers content without “paying” for it. This is totally absurd. Again, two things will happen: large corporations will stop linking to publishers site (see how google Spain stopped their news offering) and second everybody posting links online publically will become an outlaw.<p>The whole thing is nuts. Please, if you live in the EU, call your MEP about this. @senficon is leading the fight on this.

What is happening here to the internet is what as happened to any other sector that was innovative at the time.<p>Bureaucrats who have a complete disconnect with what they are legislating but that somehow need to keep justifying their own job existence, will go ahead and vote regulations one after another even if they are unnecessary or harmful.<p>Bureaucracies will keep themselves alive by inventing new rules constantly and the EU is no different.<p>GDPR was not that bad though, it was about making sure that our personal information is not being sold to third parties like HR companies that provide services like telling companies your sexual orientation and other things of that nature.<p>GDPR was about telling the consumer what is being done with their data and about transparency, so at least it was for the people.<p>But this link tax is beyond absurd, and the content upload copyright infringement is only enforceable by the biggest companies.<p>In practice, Amazon S3 and Google Cloud will implement this on their cloud services and probably charge for it directly or indirectly to SaaS companies, and there will be a couple of years of a grey zone period where the law will not be actively enforced.

It&#x27;s somewhat amazing how, between GDPR and this, I&#x27;ve gone from hardcore pro-EU to moderate Euroscepticism. Curious to see if this is personal or part of something broader.

The problem is that industry has been involved in EU politics for decades, they have their people and lobbyists well in place and they are able to make the politicians believe that they not only represent the industry but also the consumers&#x2F;users and the creators. Of course this is not true.<p>For example Netopia which is sponsored by the film and music industry and the Premier League says consumers are diverse and that is why EU wide licensing is a bad idea.<p>An organisation of the picture industry claims directly to speak for photographers, even though they are their suppliers<p>But it works, politicians of all parties argue that those copyright regulations will help creatives and creators, that those people need platforms to present their art is not important, they are supposed to go to the old players (gatekeepers).<p>P.S. Platform company are also not speaking for creators and creatives. I think HN is full of links to articles about how YouTube isn&#x27;t listening to the creatives who use their site. And how YouTube is changing the site to make is worse.

I&#x27;d say it should be possible to circumvent the &#x27;snippet tax&#x27; (which is what the &#x27;link tax&#x27; really seems to come down to) by using a generated summary of the linked article instead of a snippet. It would be a good project for some student looking for a real-world application of natural language processing. A quick-and-dirty solution is already at hand: feed the snippet to a translation engine, translate it through a chain of one or two well-supported languages to end up with the original language again. Here&#x27;s how it would look, using the first sentence of this text on Google Translate:<p>English -&gt; German: &quot;Ich würde sagen, dass es möglich sein sollte, die &quot;Snippet-Steuer&quot; (auf die die &quot;Link-Steuer&quot; tatsächlich zu kommen scheint) zu umgehen, indem Sie eine generierte Zusammenfassung des verknüpften Artikels anstelle eines Snippets verwenden.&quot;<p>German -&gt; French: &quot;Je dirais qu&#x27;il devrait être possible de contourner la &quot;taxe de snippet&quot; (que la &quot;taxe sur les liens&quot; semble en fait arriver) en utilisant un résumé généré de l&#x27;article lié au lieu d&#x27;un extrait.&quot;<p>French -&gt; English: &quot;I would say that it should be possible to bypass the &quot;snippet tax&quot; (which the &quot;tax on links&quot; actually seems to arrive at) by using a generated summary of the linked article instead of an excerpt.&quot;<p>Close, but not identical. Using different translation engines gives results which differ more from the original text at the cost of accuracy, e.g. feeding the French text to Bing Translate renders the following in &#x27;English&#x27;:<p>(Bing) French -&gt; English: &quot;I would say that it should be possible to bypass the &quot;snippet Fee &quot; (which the &quot;tax on the links&quot; actually seems to happen) using a generated summary of the linked article instead of an excerpt.&quot;<p>Not perfect but certainly usable.

Not before the USA, that&#x27;s for sure.

NB.<p>This is just a committee vote. It&#x27;s not law yet. The overall vote is in July.

Maybe instead of altering the Internet globally, the EU should be regulated to modified browser clients that expose hooks into EU mandated policies like GDPR, link tax and elimination of memes? Address the problem where it is being consumed in the EU instead of pushing the solution upstream where it would feed many different branches.

So this is how the internet dies. Repeatedly stabbed by the ignorant minions of the old elite corporations.

as a european: where is a comprehensive list of our representatives? Given that I live in european country X, who do I contact about this? such a list would be immensely useful for spreading around to friends and acquaintances! (and for personal usage too, ofc)

I thought the USA would, but Net Neutrality was fortunately repealed.

Seeing the number of people using the phrase &quot;link tax&quot; in here is fucking baffling. This is a propaganda phrase that doesn&#x27;t reflect what the law actually says.<p>If you think the law establishes a link tax you should be able to link to the article that does so.