In other words, a company, acting on behalf of its own shareholders, tells a government, which represents 100% of the citizens in a given territory, to shove its legislation where the sun doesn’t shine. And not only is this not inherently absurd, but it also stands a significant chance of succeeding in getting the government to comply.
They probably wouldn’t have had to if the school system hadn’t dropped language arts from most curriculums ages ago. Students now are getting a markedly shitter education and don’t even know they’re being fucked over.
It’s by design, the politicians only need 28% to win, easier to scrape those votes off the bottom of the barrel of knowledge
What really stings is watching groups and communities which historically have been supportive of each other getting fragmented by overt social media operations. It’s asinine and just makes it easier to marginalize and oppress the people that most frequently need a voice.
Our country is now run by Twitter and Truth Social, and too many people are already lost to social media disinformation campaigns (counter-intelligence)
Feel like that speech would have meant more when he still had the power to do anything about it. Instead of going to war against this oligarchy he chose to cash his political capital on a rushed pull out of Afghanistan, and to kill a bunch of Palestinians.
Instead of going to war against this oligarchy he chose to cash his political capital on a rushed pull out of Afghanistan
I don’t see how this is laid on Biden since Trump agreed to the withdrawal and timeline, and then R relentlessly hammered Biden for not getting on it, then relentlessly hammered him for the problems related to rushing it.
I agree with the rest of your comment.
don’t see how this is laid on Biden since Trump agreed to the withdrawal and timeline
Trump made the original withdrawal date and Biden arbitrarily stuck to it when he came into office.
He was under no real obligation to stick to the timeline and it was a betrayal to every Afghan citizen that worked with us. I don’t really care what Republicans bitch and moan about.
Fair opinion I guess, but I think there are plenty of things you can cleanly give Biden shit about before you get all the way down to complying with the troop withdrawal schedule that Trump committed us to.
Eh, I guess it’s a matter of opinion. To me knowingly finishing your opponents mistake is worse than making an honest one yourself.
I may be a little biased though, as I have had the opportunity to provide healthcare to a few of the Afghan interpreters that were lucky enough to evacuate and make it state side.
I work in orthopedics and rehabilitation, so they had all been pretty banged up, missing limbs, or had lower limbs injuries that affected their mobility. But their personal injuries were nothing compared to how much uncertainty they faced about not knowing about the well being of extended family and friends still in Afghanistan, a home they will likely never have the chance to ever visit again.
All fair points, but what do you suppose the Taliban would have done to those same people and more if the US had not pulled out when Trump told them we would?
I chose to see this as a glass half full situation. I hope that in four years we see this speech as a starting point in which the Dems run on a platform of economic populism.
You may call me overly optimistic. However, the reason I am even remotely hopeful is that the very rich (and the media they own) are fully realigning with the GOP. This means Democrats will receive far less large donations in the future, and things will get shaken up, whether leadership likes it or not.
It felt miraculous for me that, for a while, tech companies appeared to comply to regulation (doing the bare minimum, as slowly as possible, but it kinda worked).
My hypothesis is that they now except political support from Trump administration and to pressure the EU?
My hypothesis is that they now except political support from Trump administration and to pressure the EU?
Yes. We will now export our fascism, making it essentially just the same imperialism we’ve been engaged in forever.
To be fair, you haven’t invented fascism.
Although, in France we have a sort of proverb that says that what happens in the US happens here 10 years later. I hope we will manage to dodge what’s coming at us, this time…
Me too!
Bingo. Trump already started playing with his corporate finger puppets, emboldening some, threatening others.
Same reason Zuckerberg, surely the expert on the matter, had this weird rambling about “masculine energy” very recently. What a Trumpian phrase.
stands a significant chance of succeeding in getting the government to comply.
<EU> Яндекс it is or you can Bing It.
A government … only in theory does. Like a church represents God, because humans are too dumb to understand him directly.
“Fact-checking” is preserving a certain model of censorship and propaganda. “No fact-checking” is moving to a new model of censorship and propaganda.
Both sides of this fight prefer it being called such, so that one seems against misinformation, and the other seems against censorship, but they are not really different in this dimension. They are different in strategy and structure and interests, but neither is good for the average person.
“Fact-checking” is preserving a certain model of censorship and propaganda. “No fact-checking” is moving to a new model of censorship and propaganda.
Dude, facts are facts or they are not. There is no rejection of fact checking that will result in more truths being exposed to the world, only less.
You give authority to define “facts” to a fact checking institution. That institution may not be sufficiently independent. Because of meddling the institution spreads lies under the claim they would be facts and declares actual facts as lies.
Just think about a fact checking under the authority of Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, AIPAC…
That’s a solvable problem, not a reason to reject fact checking as a concept.
So if the US would make obligatory fact checking under a Trump administration. How would you solve that problem?
In the end it always boils down to the current administration getting to decide what the facts and what the disinformation is.
This is easily abusable and for instance Goerge Orwell predicted such problems with the “Ministry of Truth” in his book 1984.
It’s not that I don’t understand those concerns, I just don’t think those are reasons to reject the concept, nor the obligation to make an effort.
How would you solve that problem?
I doubt I have the necessary understanding of the nuance to propose any good solution. That’s not evidence that one doesn’t exist, however. And if the folks who should be responsible for such things are choosing to abdicate that responsibility, I’m going to need a better reason than “because it’s hard.”
you seem to think that this would be some arbiter of truth with no recourse, but we have courts that deal with defamation all the time, and the scientific method… these are all tools we use to, as a collective, come to conclusions about objective (or as realistically close to) truth as we can get
And we keep the government out of finding scientific truths for good reasons. Independence of science is crucial. Also scientific trith is not absolute. No scientist worth his salt will say “x is true and y is false”. They would say “we have strong evidence to support x and we have strong evidence that y is not the case under all tested circumstances.”
Courts move slow and only in acvordance with the lae. For instance in my country politics decided to define Afghanistan as a secure country of origin by law, to make it impossible for people to seek Asylum from there. That was the legislative opinion of “fact”. And that also was while the Taliban was retaking large swaths of the country and months later took full control. Iirc. it was only stopped when the constitutional court decided much later, that clearly this is wrong.
I am not against fact checking. But if you mandate it by law, you must observe the adherence to the law. And for that you ultimately need to grant the government the definition of what is true and what is not, simply in order to measure the adherence to the law by.
this is mostly an american take, and most of the rest of the world tends to disagree with this “free speech absolutism”
it’s the slippery slope fallacy
No, it is not the slippery slope fallacy. If you create an instrumemt that obligates fact checking, you have to give someone authority to define what are facts and what arent. And as this is obligatory by law, these fact checkers are subject to supervision or are directly part of the government.
So now the government gets to decide what are facts and what are not. Which can easily be abused. Especially as disinformation through so called fact checkers can move as fast as any other disinformarion.
So at the very least you need to create a sanction regime, e.g. criminal punishment for the abuse of the fact checking, as well as a right for people to have the fact checking checked and challenged, if they think it spreads lies against them. This way you can have it analysed by courts, as the most neutral authority in a state of law.
I dont get how people in Europe, where i live by the way, especially with the experience of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco fascism, as well as all the Warsaw pact authoritarianism, GDR surveillance, red scare policies in the Western countries during cold war, etc. are just treating this so lightly.
Authoritarian regimes based on lies and forbidding the truth are not some abstract. They are both an extensive reality of the recent past as well as looking at Orban, Melloni, Wilders, Merz and many others they are reemerging right now.
If you create an instrumemt that obligates fact checking, you have to give someone authority to define what are facts and what arent
yeah… and some things are just straight up facts… this is literally the perfect example of slippery slope
Facts are facts, and nothing a human says is a fact, it’s a projection of a fact upon their conscience, at best.
And those doing the “fact checking” are humans, so they are checking if something is fact in their own opinion or organization’s policy, at best.
These are truisms.
There is no rejection of fact checking that will result in more truths being exposed to the world, only less.
This is wrong. People like to pick “their” side in power games between mighty adversaries, and to think that when one of the sides is more lucky, it’s them who’s winning. But no, it’s not them. If somebody’s “checking facts” for you and you like it, you’ve already lost. Same thing, of course, if you trust some “community evaluations” or that there’s truth that can be learned so cheaply, by going online and reading something.
That’s pretty bold for a really fucking useless search engine. The EU could just block it and redirect google.com to a gov run searxng instange and everyone in europe would be better off overniggt
They could even make it look exactly like Google. What’s Google going to do about it? Get wrecked is what.
It would likely be impossible to redirect google.com without either sparking a cyberwar or building something like the great firewall of China, quite possibly both.
Blocking is somewhat possible, but to redirect, they would have to forge google certificates and possibly also fork Chrome and convince users to replace their browser, since last I checked, google hard-coded it’s own public keys into Chrome.
Technical details
I say blocking in somewhat possible, because governments can usually just ask DNS providers to not resolve a domain or internet providers to block IPs.
The issue is, google runs one of the largest DNS services in the world, so what happens if google says no? The block would at best be partial, at worst it could cause instability in the DNS system itself.
What about blocking IPs? Well, google data centers run a good portion of the internet, likely including critical services. Companies use google services for important systems. Block google data centers and you will have outages that will make crowd-strike look like a tiny glitch and last for months.
Could we redirect the google DNS IPs to a different, EU controlled server? Yes, but such attempts has cause issues beyond the borders of the country attempting it in the past. It would at least require careful preparations.
As for forging certificates, EU does control multiple Certificate authorities. But forging a certificate breaks the cardinal rule for being a trusted CA. Such CA would likely be immediately distrusted by all browsers. And foreig governments couldn’t ignore this either. After all, googles domains are not just used for search. Countless google services that need to remain secure could potentially be compromised by the forged certificate. In addition, as I mentioned, google added hard-coded checks into Chrome to prevent a forged certificate from working for it’s domains.
Nah. Demanding the ISPs to block traffic to Google domains would be quite effective.
This isn’t like the great firewall of chine where you want to prevent absolutely all traffic. If you make it inconvenient to use, because CSS breaks or a js library doesn’t load or images breaslk, its already a huge step into pushing it out of the market.
Enterprise market would be much harder, a loooot of EU companies rely on Google’s services, platforms and apps, and migrating away would take a lot of time and money.
Demanding the ISPs to block traffic to Google domains would be quite effective.
Filter it based on what? Between ESNI and DNS over HTTPS, it shouldn’t be possible to know, which domain the traffic belongs to. Am I missing something?
Edit: Ah, I guess DNS over HTTPS isn’t enabled by default yet.
Just filter out googles ASN and ip’s. And stop peering with them on BGP. Simples
Im not supporting this by the way. I think the internet should be free and open, without governments blocking what I can access.
The onpy free internet will be tor. The normie internet has been too naughty and spawned shitty giants who think they can treat us like cattle. Break the critical mass and network effects, kill the blitzscale cheaters trying to enslave us. We do not need them, they need us.
China blocks ESNI and DoH. You have to find a DoH server that is not well known and have to fake the host name.
But if you actually do that, lol
without either sparking a cyberwar or building something like the great firewall of China
IP block it. Boom there goes eSNI and DNS.
Sure, it’s crude, but again: it doesn’t have to perfect, it just needs to create havoc with Google services to push away a regular user, who has no idea what DNS even is.
A better approach though is to fine Google, with a % of revenue increasing until compliance. They’ll very quickly be incentivised to comply or shutdown.
The whole argument was about blocking search only, considering the damages suddenly completely blocking google would do. Yes, you can block google data centers completely, but dude, would that cause chaos.
A better approach though is to fine Google,
I said that multiple times already.
Worthwhile chaos. It’s exactly that fear of consequences that enables their power
Unnecessary chaos
Just block payments from advertisers by revoking their business licence.
Yes, I mentioned that in a comment deeper down. And even before that, just fine them. Chances are they will pay and if not, you can probably seize some bank accounts.
I am not trying to say Google can afford to completely defy the EU, just found it interesting how hard it is to block just google search specifically.
PS: Also mentioned in a burried comment, there actually is a way for ISPs to block google, since DNS over HTTPS is not enabled by default yet in browsers I think. I forgot this since I enabled encrypted DNS like 8+ years ago for myself and just assumed people also have it by now.
