Just passing through. 🮲🮳
What exactly do you think a Commission blueprint is?
It’s nothing but soft power and hardly even that, little more than just thinking out loud. It has no implications whatsoever unless member states decide they want to implement the ideas nationally, in which case it’s on them. The Commission cannot implement EU law unilaterally.
As for chat contol, that’s about banning true encryption. Very different from regulating big tech.
I would like to know which EU law it is they are takling about, aa they proclaim pretty boldly that the Union is adapting “similar Regulations”. I follow EU politics somewhat closely and I have no idea what they are talking about.
The Commission has published some guidelines and recommendations, which are as legally binding as a fart.
As for chat control: With that attitude, probably.
Are you talking about chat control?
It was rejected once, and will be rejected again. At least if people mobilize a bit against it. There’s a long way from Commission proposal to law.
Equating the proposal of a law with the adaptation of it is highly misleading. The EU is a complex institution where different bodies are pulling in different directions.
Really good write-up.
RE: Too many cooks:
And that means people who are more likely to be harassed also end up having to do more of the work to prevent harassment.
This is true and a genuine problem, but also a lot better than the alternative, which is the commercial platforms where nobody gives a shit about them and they are harassed on a daily basis with nothing much they can do about it.
On Twitter, community notes were hailed as a success for giving the Community an entirely toothless form of moderation. On the Fediverse, the community has been given real teeth.
RE: Guilt by association
This has happened with several beneficial alternative technologies in the past, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the dark web and end-to-end encryption.
Nice reminder to spread the word about the wonders of P2P, Tor, and E2EE. Some people will always believe in the propaganda of the capitalists and the authoritarians seeking to undermine these technologies, but they are all very much alive and well, and I think most people are fine with the idea of having their nude selfies or whatever protected under E2EE.
Likewise, for sure Elon Musk will try to tell people the fediverse is full of pedos. Coming from him, that puts us in the same club as that diver who saved a bunch of children in a cave in Thailand. So in that sense I guess the point about commercial capture is more relevant: I’m more worried when people like Musk pretend to be our friends. But in all honesty, I’m not very worried about that either. I still rock an entirely independent e-mail provider, even after everything Microsoft and Google has done to undermine that technology.
The Commission has no law-making power on its own. They can open proceedings before the Court of Justice of the European Union to verify compliance with existing laws, or they propose legislation that will have to go through other EU institutions (the Parliament, which is elected, and the Council, which consists of representatives from Member State governments).
The job of the Commission is to propose laws. The job of the other institutions is to reject these laws if they are stupid. The Commission opening an investigation does not mean that the EU is “adopting similar regulations” - it is an extremely long way away from that.
And even the Commission itself is likely to contain a wide spectrum of opinions within it - it tends to be a strange political constellation. So until there’s a Commission proposal (as happened with chat control) there’s really nothing. After the Commission proposal, we need to make sure it’s stopped by pressuring national governments (Council) and elected MEPs (Parliament).