Last week, the Australian government tabled world-first laws to force tech giants like Google and Facebook to start paying for news content scraped from media outlets and to meet minimum standards, including giving notice of changes to their algorithms. The government says that its mandatory news media bargaining code was “designed to level the playing field”.
Other jurisdictions are also moving to rein in the Silicon Valley oligarchs: in the US, lawmakers are threatening to remove the “Section 230” protections which give broad immunity to social media giants, essentially allowing them to deny that they are “publishers”. The EU is unveiling draft rules with some similar provisions – but, the EU being the EU, the legislation is loaded down with globalist garbage clearly designed to curtail free speech.
The EU Commission is gearing up to present its long-trailed Digital Services Act and its accompanying Digital Markets Act to lay out strict conditions for internet giants to do business in the 27 countries.
EU sources told AFP on Monday the landmark legislation would see tech behemoths facing fines of up to 10 percent of their revenues for breaking some of the most serious competition rules.
It could also see some of the world’s biggest firms banned from the EU market “in the event of serious and repeated breaches of law which endanger the security of European citizens”, the sources said.
It’s this last which contains the globalist knuckle-duster hidden in the “anti-competition” glove.
The proposals – which could revolutionise how Big Tech does business – aim to tackle hate speech and disinformation online and curb the might of leading firms to dominate markets.
The largest companies would be designated as internet “gatekeepers” under the legislation, subject to specific regulations to limit their power over the market.
Some ten firms — including Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft — will be slapped with the designation.
Law reform around social media is long overdue – most laws haven’t changed since the early 2000s when many of the social media titans simply did not exist. But not all law changes are “reform”. Mixed in with the possibly-good in these laws is a whole lot of bad.
The Digital Services Act is being touted as a way to give the commission sharper teeth in pursuing social media platforms when they allow illegal content online.
Under the Digital Markets Act, the EU is seeking to give Brussels new powers to enforce competition laws more quickly and push for greater transparency in their algorithms and use of personal data.
Tech giants will need to inform the EU ahead of any planned mergers or acquisitions under the regulations, the bloc’s industry commissioner Thierry Breton said Monday.
There has been growing concern among European and US regulators that the big tech firms have used purchases as a way to nip in the bud potential rivals.
Examples include Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp as well as Google’s purchase of YouTube and Waze.
For the past decade the EU has taken the lead worldwide in trying to grapple with the insurmountable power of big tech, slapping billions in antitrust fines against Google, but critics believe the method has done little to change its behaviour.
The EU has also ordered Apple to pay billions of euros in back taxes to Ireland, but that decision was quashed by the EU’s highest court.
But, which aspects of the laws do you think the EU will really pursue? Will Brussels really take action to damage the world’s richest and wokest corporations?
Or is it far more likely that the laws will be used to further strangle free speech?
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