By a vote of 438 to 226, the massively confused and lobbyists-owned EU Parliament has preliminary passed horrific Article 11 and Article 13, aimed at turning ordinary users into the slaves of government-based Internet censorship and abuse.
The war isn’t over, however. These articles now enter a period of negotiation with EU member states, and then are subject to final votes next year, probably in the spring.
So now’s the time for the rest of the world to show Europe some special “tough love” — to help them understand what their Internet island universe will look like if these terrible articles are ever actually implemented.
Article 11 is an incredibly poorly defined “link tax” aimed at news aggregators. If Article 11 is implemented, the reaction by most aggregators who have jurisdictional exposure to the EU (e.g., EU-based points of presence) will not be to pay the link taxes, but rather will be to completely cease indexing those EU sites.
Between now and the final votes next year, news aggregation sites should consider temporarily ceasing to index those EU sites for various periods of time at various intervals, to give those sites a taste of what happens to their traffic when such indexing stops, and what their future would look like under Article 11.
Then we have Article 13’s massive, doomed-to-disaster content filtering scheme, which would be continually inundated with false matches and fake claims (there are absolutely no penalties under Article 13 for submitting bogus claims). While giant firms like Google and Facebook would have the resources to implement Article 13’s mandates, virtually nobody else could. And even the incredibly expensive filtering systems built by these largest firms have significant false positive error rates, frequently block permitted content, and cost vast sums to maintain.
A likely response to Article 13 by many affected firms would be to geoblock EU users from those company’s systems. That process can begin now on a “demonstration” basis. The IP address ranges for EU countries can be easily determined in an automated manner, and servers programmed to present an explanatory “Sorry about that, Chief — You’re in the EU!” message to EU users instead of the usual services. As with the Article 11 protest procedure noted above, these Article 13 IP blocks would be implemented at various intervals for various durations, between now and the final votes next year.
The genuinely sad part about all this is that none of it should be necessary. Article 11 and 13 mandates will never work as their proponents hope, and if deployed will actually do massive damage not only to EU (and other) users at large, but to the very constituencies that have lobbied for passage of these articles!
And that’s a lose-lose situation in any language.
–Lauren–