Why does it feel like the EU caught herpes from the USA lately? Get your shit together EU.
The problem is that the internet is fucking global. As long as that is the case, it is simply not possible to fix this problem.
You can put whatever regulations you want on online content, and some provider from a different jurisdiction is going to say screw you I abide by the laws of my own jurisdiction. The restricted citizens will use that company.
It is like making drugs illegal when there is still an illegal drug dispenser in every home. It doesn’t work.
The most you can do is try to block this at the payment level, but that requires setting up a very intrusive payment blacklist or whitelist system. And then some VPN provider will just make themselves ad supported and you are back at square one.
And that doesn’t even touch the issue of torrents, p2p file sharing, and decentralized networks. Go back to the early to mid-200s and everybody used those things because most of the content they wanted wasn’t easily available legally. Then it became easily available and people started paying for it. But you throw enough roadblocks, make people subscribe to too many streaming services, require too much age verification type crap, and the world will sail the high seas once again.
If you’ve ever been on the internet in China, Russia, or Iran you can get a taste for how powerful this kind of regulation can be. Correct, there are loopholes but it can be made quite difficult to access the things you take for granted when you experience this kind of lock down.
I really hope Iceland rejects this madness and votes against joining the EU. They should protect their sovereignty and continue to be a haven of internet freedom.
Meanwhile, kids are drawing on mustaches to bypass it. Fucking idiots.
If only we’d had age verification back then, Epstein and his ring of sex traffickers would never have been able to abuse those children!
/s
what’s funny is that this age verification shit is only going to make it easier to track children online and target them.
Ug this whole thing is so stupid and predictable. Who could have seen this coming?
I hate when people do this. “The EU does X”.
No, it does not. There’s no law, no resolution, no recommendation towards doing this from the EU.
The European Parliamentary Research Service is a think-tank that’s supposed to inform the MEPs. So, the actual title should be: “a think-tank in Europe calls VPNs ‘a loophole that needs closing’”.
It’d be nice if there was a way to de-clickbait article titles automatically.
Even better if the think tanks had to state their funding sources by human name in the title.
Children don’t use VPNs! You know what does? Your job. Applications. MPLS and SD-WAN connections that every company uses to secure their data over the Internet.
This is about control and monetization. We cannot allow this lunacy to take hold in any part of the world.
I keep telling this story on every opportunity. I found out that IT blocked some game on my kids school network, and their peers were sharing this wisdom to get around it: "go on the app store, search free VPN and install the first one that comes up.
That is how this backfires. It just sets kids up as targets of the worst scum. And turns their devices into good little botnet nodes.
My kids devices went on my own tailnet that night so they could play the game.
I mean , web is gonna become more and more separate and nation clustered. It’s inevitable.
I don’t think I’d say “inevitable”. Possible, maybe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet
The splinternet (also referred to as cyber-balkanization or internet balkanization) is a characterization of the Internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors, such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and divergent national interests. “Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it”, wrote the Economist weekly in 2010, arguing it could soon splinter along geographic and commercial boundaries.[1] The Chinese government erected the “Great Firewall” for political reasons, and Russia has enacted the Sovereign Internet Law that allows it to partition itself from the rest of the Internet.[2][3] Other nations, such as the US and Australia, have discussed plans to create a similar firewall to block child pornography or weapon-making instructions.[1]
Clyde Wayne Crews, a researcher at the Cato Institute, first used the term in 2001 to describe his concept of “parallel Internets that would be run as distinct, private, and autonomous universes.”[4] The concept itself dates back at least to pair of articles in the journal Science and at the International Conference on Information Systems by Marshall van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson in 1996 and 1997.[5][6] They argued that it the Internet and related technologies “have the potential to fragment interaction and divide groups by leading people to spend more time on special interests and by screening out less preferred contact.” They dubbed this effect “cyberbalkanization” and developed a set of formal measures.[7]
Crews used the term in a positive sense, but more recent writers, like Scott Malcomson, a fellow in New America’s International Security program, use the term pejoratively to describe a growing threat to the internet’s status as a globe-spanning network of networks.[8]
Kids smart enough to use VPN’s shouldn’t need age verificaiton.
The EU can kiss my loophole
VPNs have always been a loophole… how about listening to what your citizens want, rather than shareholders, mostly of American companies?
EU tries to encourage technology advances in EU and promote digital sovereignity. EU wants to impose restrictions on any advances without really understanding why, or what they are talking about.
The HBO series Silicon Valley was right. We need a new Internet.
Either that or keep meddling politicians from further fucking up the one we already have.
The internet isn’t the problem. The capital is.
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