A European Union research service publishes a paper about calls for VPN regulation, noting that they’re ‘increasingly used to bypass online age verification.’
For every door that is closed, we break open another
Are they going to ban tor too?
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Truly a “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” moment.
We live in an unprecedented time where American technological hegemony is being rejected globally, but especially in Europe. People want performant, durable, respectful software offerings, and are increasingly looking away from the Valley and the Street for answers.
So let’s jump on board with becoming part of the extended American surveillance state! Yee fucking haw.
While I don’t disagree that most countries ought to be looking for what you imply, I think there’s a somewhat interesting counter point to it. The anonymous aspect of online interactions/actions has contributed to some really negative trends.
One easy recent example: private citizens in the Netherlands, having taken a course on ‘faceless influencing’, used youtube to push out a bunch of videos encouraging the breaking apart of Canada, while pretending to be Canadians. They allegedly did it because the rage-bait clips generated lots of clicks, and ad revenue paid to them by Google, a company which also worked to amplify their fraudulent personas – a company that’s also tied closely with America, given the administration’s ‘tight’ ties with their tech oligarchs, a country which has overtly expressed interest in breaking apart Canada. The anonymity of those users basically allowed America to crowdsource their nation-destabilizing work.
With AI junk, that’s all going in to over-drive. The ability to fake ‘people’ is likely a big part of why govts have changed their tune on trying to ID people online. Demanding transparency is likely viewed as almost a necessary evil to combat the deluge of propaganda that’s coming out of places like America these days.
There’s also the general tone of online interactions, and the breakdown of certain social-communal parts of offline-life. “The male loneliness epidemic” for example, being partly born out of guys being captured by the manosphere, or being isolated ‘in real life’ due to their excessive presence online. Also the generally combative tone most people take on sites like lemmy / reddit – which pairs with the structure of most media content, which tries for sound bite click bait rather than nuanced constructive thought: you get way more upvotes, if you respond to a small out-of-context shock-value clip with your own short one liner type rebuttal, than if you actually engage with the other parties comment more genuinely.
Like the people generally demand transparency on government actions/decisions, because having those decisions exposed, and the people making them accountable for their actions, helps to reduce corruption / bad behaviour. Same general principle when anonyuser204956 is busy spouting nazi shit, if suddenly their friends/family/coworkers can easily see what they’re doing. People keep other people in check.
The EU has a lot of positives but at the end of the day it’s still a bourgeoise capitalist project
You can say the whole “buy EU” movement is kinda nationalism. I said instead of “stop buying from US” it should be “stop buying from big corp” and everybody got mad
Yep EUs end goal is to become like US, USs end goal is to become like russia.
I’m not entirely sure that’s true, but I’m not gonna argue
For many people, especially politicians, it was always about this. It’s a rejection of the unregulated “wild west” internet, built on US ideals of free speech.
Germany used to have a fairly successful Facebook clone. Once it was a bit successful, it was forced to split up. Minors had to get their own separate service, where they could not be contacted by adults. It wasn’t a hit. The “American technological hegemony” is the result of deliberate policy choices such as that.
Demanding age verification of websites and services is Europe sticking to its guns; European values.
So… Make vpn do the opposite if it’s very purpose. Excellent. We’re cooked.
that is 1000% the intention
Trying to solve social problems with technology always works.
When are they gonna ban fake mustaches and makeup?
What’s to stop people buying Mullvad with XMR?
The EU blocking mullvad ips unless they remove XMR as an option
Great Firewall of Europe
I don’t want to start a war here, but I don’t get why people argue that the EU is better than the US because X or Z. We just side with who is the “less bad” and who action’s directly affect us less or more according to our standards and reality.
This is just plain bullshit, at this point why they don’t just convert their hidden dictatorships to real dictatorships? Let’s censure everything, everything is bad, fuck that.
I don’t want to start a war here, but I don’t get why people argue that the EU is better than the US
Probably because the EU is better than the US. Just because its not perfect and has flaws, doesn’t make it as bad or worse as the US.
is better than the … “less bad”
Semantically equivalent. Nitpicking this wording is pointless
In the absence of a good option, “less bad” will have to do.
Semantically equivalent, but not the same. Especially emotionally, which humans are prone to be. Context, and matrix, matter.
Fewer bad ;)
Thank you for letting me know, I’m not an native english speaker as you can clearly see, and honestly I just type as I believe it can be understandable.
There are plenty of stupid ideas being pushed everywhere. In general, the EU has better checks and balances to weed out the awful ones. Not always obviously, but no system is perfect.
Yeah, that’s my point, maybe I redacted wrongly my comment, I genuinely want to know why people say that the EU is better than the US, and they are VERY probably right.
I just find funny this “EU vs US” everywhere.
better social safety net. also from over here it seems like there is less overt systemic racism there.
Which hidden dictatorships specifically?
The people who is behind and promotes stupid laws like this one
Well, this isn’t a law and nobody is promoting it. It’s the result of some research funded by the EU. If a law ever comes of it, it is going to go through a whole pile of democratic hurdles within the EU, and then again within each individual member state.
So again I ask. Which hidden dictatorships within the EU specifically are you referring to?
Will send people to Tor more than likely and that’s all I think it achieves, so bit of an own goal.
