EU Internet Companies Warn EU Parliament Not To Vote For Articles 11 & 13; Say They'll Hand The Internet To Google

from the don't-do-it dept

Just as so many sites are protesting today, and people plan to be protesting this weekend, 130 EU-based internet companies have signed a powerful letter to the EU Parliament explaining why it must reject Articles 11 and 13. It goes through many of the same explanations many of us have made over the past few months, but also (importantly) highlights that passing this legislation will basically hand the internet to Google, one of only a very tiny number of companies who can actually deal with the consequences and requirements of such heavy-handed, poorly drafted laws:

The companies signing this letter to the European Parliament are urging you to vote against Articles 11 and 13 of the proposed copyright directive. The text of the trilogue agreement would harm the European economy and seriously undermine the ability of European businesses to compete with big Internet giants like Google.

We support the goal of the legislation to protect the rights of creators and publishers, but the proposed measures are inadequate to reap these benefits and also fail to strike a fair balance between creators and all other parts of society. The success of our business enterprises will be seriously jeopardized by these heavy-handed EU regulations.

The letter -- written and signed by people who have helped build key components of the internet, explain just how Article 13 will undermine the internet ecosystem, and Article 11 will ruin a bunch of important businesses:

Especially Article 13 is dangerously experimenting with the core foundation of the Internet’s ecosystem. Making companies directly liable for the content of their users forces these businesses to make billions of legal decisions about the legality of content. Most companies are neither equipped nor capable of implementing the automatic content filtering mechanisms this requires, which are expensive and prone to error.

Article 11 is creating a completely new intellectual property right for press publishers. The experience with similar laws in Germany and Spain raises serious doubts about the expected benefits, while the negative impact would be very real. An additional layer of exclusive rights would make it harder to clear the necessary legal hurdles to start new projects. It will make entrepreneurs more hesitant to just launch new projects. Europe would lose any chance to play a significant role on the world stage. Startups that build services based on aggregated online information would go out of business, and every company that publishes press summaries of their appearance in the media would be in violation of this law.

And then it highlights (again, because some of us have been pointing this out), that for all the talk of how Articles 11 and 13 were needed to push back on the big American internet companies, all they will really do is lock them in, and harm all of the EU internet companies who signed the letter:

Although the purpose of these regulations is to limit the powers of big US Internet companies like Google or Facebook, the proposed legislation would end up having the opposite effect. Article 13 requires filtering of massive amounts of data, requiring technology only the Internet giants have the resources to build. European companies will be thus forced to hand over their data to them, jeopardizing the independence of the European tech industry as well as the privacy of our users. European companies like ours will be hindered in their ability to compete or will have to abandon certain markets completely.

Given all of these issues it is noteworthy that the final trilogue agreement lacks meaningful safeguards for small and medium enterprises. The broad scope of this law would most likely lead to less new companies being founded in Europe and existing companies moving their headquarters out of Europe. For all those reasons we urge every pro-Startup politician to vote against Article 11 and Article 13.

One hopes that the EU Parliament will actually listen -- though I can't wait to hear Axel Voss and friends explain how this letter from Google's competitors who are warning about how the bill will entrench Google and limit competition is really "Google shilling."

It remains truly disappointing to me how few Article 13 supporters have actually been willing to engage on the specific concerns and criticisms of the bill. No matter what anyone says -- even those who explain how it will lock Google into a dominant position are dismissed as promoting Google's message. The lack of intellectual honesty displayed by supporters of Article 13 is truly a shame.

Filed Under: article 11, article 13, censorship, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, europe
Companies: google

The 2012 Web Blackout Helped Stop SOPA/PIPA And Then ACTA; Here Comes The 2019 Version To Stop Article 13

from the how-to-make-bad-ideas-politically-toxic dept

Remember SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act)? Back in 2012, they threatened to cause widespread damage to the online world by bringing in yet more extreme and unbalanced measures against alleged copyright infringement. Things looked pretty bad until a day of massive online protest was organized on January 18, 2012, with thousands of sites partially or totally blacked out. Politicians were taken aback by the unexpected scale of the anger, and their support for SOPA and PIPA crumbled quickly. That success fuelled protests in Europe against ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), which also sought to bring in harsh measures against online infringement. After tens of thousands of people took part in street demonstrations across Europe, many politicians wanted nothing to do with the by-now toxic proposal, and it was voted down in the European Parliament in July 2012.

As Techdirt pointed out last year, the proposed EU Copyright Directive is even worse than ACTA. As such it clearly merits serious, large-scale action of the kind that stopped SOPA/PIPA and ACTA. And it's happening. The German-language version of Wikipedia, the second-largest by number of articles, has announced the following (original in German):

On Thursday, March 21, the German-language edition of the online encyclopedia will be shut down completely for 24 hours. In this way, Wikipedia activists want to send a signal, in particular against the introduction of the controversial Articles 11 and 13 in the [EU's] copyright reform.

It is expected that a number of other major sites will be joining in the protest. Meanwhile, another German organization is campaigning against Article 13. In an open letter to MEPs, its supporters write:

We are the operators and administrators of more than 400 German-language discussion forums with more than 18 million members. We are united by the great concern that the EU Copyright Directive will endanger the existence of our forums and thus the discussion culture on the Internet.

The public discussion on the EU Copyright Directive revolves almost exclusively around YouTube and other large US platforms. In doing so, we lose sight of the fact that discussion forums of all sizes will also be affected by the new directive.

That's an important point. Supporters of Article 13 try to give the impression that only deep-pocketed companies like Google will be hit by the new law. As the discussion forum operators point out, their organizations will not be exempt from the requirements of the EU Copyright Directive. Its effects will be devastating:

Because of these uncertainties and the legal and financial liability risk, many discussion forums will close, as small associations or voluntary operators cannot bear this situation. Commercial operators are also endangered in their existence if they have to conclude fee-based licenses and are obliged to install expensive upload filters.

Uncertain regulations for us means years of legal uncertainty, legal risk and potential legal costs, which no operator can afford in the long run as forums usually do not generate a large amount of revenue.

As a result, the discussion culture on the European Internet will be severely impaired, and many citizens will lose their digital home in discussion forums.

Internet startups in the EU will face the same insurmountable problems thanks to Article 13's impossible demands. Many will be forced to shut down. It's an irony that many have already pointed out. A law that supporters claim is designed to tackle the disproportionate power of companies like Google and Facebook will end up entrenching them more deeply, and wiping out much of the EU's own digital ecosystem. Let's hope 2019's big blackout grabs people's attention as the one in 2012 did, and that MEPs drop Article 13 just as they dropped ACTA.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: article 11, article 13, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, eu parliament, europe, germany, march 21, protests
Companies: wikimedia, wikipedia

Why Europe Will Never Build Its Own Digital Giants

from the getting-it-all-wrong dept

A few years back, I was asked to create a presentation for a few visiting European executives, to explain "what makes Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley." It was a fun presentation, and one of the people who saw it later had me give it to an ever rotating crew of visiting European execs and policymakers (I even got to give the talk once over in the UK). I believe I did the presentation half a dozen times or so. The person who set up most of those talks later moved on to another job and it's been years since I last gave the presentation. It always led to an interesting discussion, though, because so much of what I talked about seemed to go against their core instincts about innovation (the presentation also debunks some of the common myths about the success of Silicon Valley). Maybe, one day, I'll get to give the talk again.

However, what fascinated me most was the general resistance to understanding the fundamentals of both innovation and the internet. But in the past few years, it's become increasingly clear that the EU's concept of the internet is almost entirely out of sync with how digital innovation works, especially with the ways in which the EU has gone about regulating the internet -- from the GDPR to the Copyright Directive, to the antitrust efforts, to the Terrorism regulation.

The Economist recently explored this issue, suggesting that Europe will never produce its own Google. While there are a few European tech success firms, they're still greatly limited and there are a lot fewer of them than elsewhere:

London, a global tech hub, is home to DeepMind, a leading artificial intelligence (AI) outfit; Stockholm is home to Spotify, a dominant music-sharing service; Cambridge-based Arm makes processor chips for almost all the world’s smartphones.

Yet still Europe lacks large firms in areas like social media, e-commerce and cloud computing comparable in scale to America’s Google and Microsoft, or China’s Alibaba and Baidu. Of the world’s 15 largest digital firms, all are American or Chinese. Of the top 200, eight are European. Such firms matter. They operate dominant online platforms and are writing the rules of the new economy in the way Cockerill’s innovations did in his day.

Unfortunately, rather than focusing on the constant regulatory attacks by EU policymakers on the key elements of innovation in the digital age, the Economist article falls back on the same old excuse we've heard from Europeans for years and years: the country has too many different languages and a complex set of different laws in each country:

Today, however, Europe’s patchwork is a disadvantage. New technologies require vast lakes of data, skilled labour and capital. Despite the EU’s single market, in Europe these often remain in national ponds. Language divides get in the way. Vast, speculative long-term capital investments that make firms like Uber possible are too rarely available on European national markets. True, there is progress. European universities are working more closely together, and in 2015 the EU adopted a new digital strategy that has simplified tax rules, ended roaming charges and removed barriers to cross-border online content sales. But about half of its measures—like smoother flows of data—remain mere proposals.

And while I'm sure there's some truth to that stifling some aspect of European success, it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. After all, most of the giant American internet firms have figured out how to work in those vastly different European markets, despite not even being headquartered there. So clearly it can be done.

The larger problem, it seems has much more to do with the general distrust for disruptive innovations. The European approach, consistently, appears to favor slowing (or stopping) innovation unless all possible "harms" are minimized, even if this comes at the expense of the benefits. There are arguments to be made for this approach -- preventing harm is a laudable goal. But it leaves out the other side of the equation: it kills off massive amounts of benefits. This is not to say that the general approach should be a free for all, or that potential harms should be ignored. Nor is it to say that we should be purely utilitarian and weigh the two sides. But, an innovative approach that enables experimentation and learning, and a focus on providing much more benefits for the public seems to be much more effective at creating incredibly valuable services.

There is, of course, much more involved in building out a successful innovation ecosystem that builds hugely powerful services, but the EU seems to have little to no interest in actually figuring out how it can work.

Filed Under: eu copyright directive, europe, gdpr, innovation, silicon valley

In A Speech Any Autocrat Would Love, French President Macron Insists The Internet Must Be Regulated

from the hate(d)-speech dept

Props to French President Emmanuel Macron, who had a busy week last week, what with the observance of the World War I armistice centennial, the Paris Peace Forum, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and various other related events. All drew attendees and attention from around the world to his capital city, and all required his participation in some significant way, including through the delivery of several speeches that each surely required substantial preparation to deliver so capably. Techdirt has already covered a few minor aspects of the IGF speech: the announcement that France would embed officials with Facebook, and reference to the "Paris Call." But in terms of the major substance of the speech, there are few compliments that can be paid.

At best it was the sort of speech that someone completely new to tech policy might have come up with. Someone who, upon finding an imperfect situation, presumes that they are the first to notice the issue. And then takes it upon themselves to heroically step in to address the problem, despite the fact that their proposed "solution" reflects an incomplete understanding of the matter.

There are a number of ways this incomplete understanding infected his speech and undermined the quality of his recommendation. There was, for instance, his erroneous declaration that the Internet today is too much about content distributors not enough about content creators. This declaration alone suggests a very poor understanding of all the myriad ways people all over the world use the Internet to create and then disseminate their expressive works themselves. In and of itself it calls into question whether his overall suggestion is capable of being adequately protective of all this expression.

Because it appears not, and not just because of this limited understanding of how the Internet is used. It also ignores the critical countervailing concerns that have long deemed his proposed "fix" to be an unacceptable one. Because the "cure" he proposed — greater regulation of the Internet — is a dangerous one that would destroy all that he purports to want to protect.

We were off to a bad start with his initial skewering of net neutrality, a topic slated to be dealt with head-on by EU regulators next year. To summarize his general view on the subject: sure, we don't want certain ideas to be marginalized. We should defend people's access to the Internet, he said, but not always. He interprets the term "neutrality" to mean that all ideas have to be treated equally, but, in his view, some ideas are more equal than others. And this is what so offends him: net neutrality allows those who do not share "our values" to spread their ideas too.

This appeal to "values" was a recurring reference that underpinned his speech. Thanks to the Internet, Macron said, we saw an upsurge in democracy (i.e. Tahrir Square). Now, however, he complained, the Internet is being deployed by fringe elements to work against those democratic values. As he put it, in the name of liberty we are allowing the enemies of liberty to speak, and this, Macron insisted, needs to end through the imposition of regulation on the Internet and its actors.

Of course it's not that the values he champions are bad: liberal democracy and personal liberty are certainly worth defending. And he's right to recognize that the Internet can be a valuable tool for advancing those values. He's also right to observe that some use the Internet to advance contrary values. But any autocrat can make the very same argument about how regulation of expressive technology is necessary to preserve a society's "values," and nearly all do.

There is nothing magical about any particular set of values that makes regulation designed to enforce them better than regulation designed to suppress them. Regulation that gives someone the power to decide which values are the good ones and which are the bad is regulation that gives someone the power to suppress any values, including the ones you prefer. Indeed, that's the very point of the very values he champions, to ensure that no one gets that power. You simply can't create that power and expect it not to be used badly.

At some level Macron understands this problem. In the same speech he lamented the autocratic approach of "China Cyberspace" as being a poor choice for the Internet's future, and yet that's exactly the future he invites as he calls for the Internet to be as tightly controlled by his preferred regulators as China would want it to be by its own.

But Macron fears that the only other choice to the regulatory solution he proposes is "California Cyberspace," where California-based companies instead are the de facto regulators of the Internet.

Again, though, Macron misapprehends the current situation, in at least two significant ways. First, part of his objection to the Internet being "regulated" by California companies is that he didn't vote for them, and thus he fears that he has no way to ensure that they act in a way that he considers sufficient to protect the values he prefers. But installing governments, even elected EU governments, as regulators of the Internet provides no guarantee that these values will be any better protected. France itself has members of the far right making increased inroads into government, as does Germany. The democratically-elected government in Poland is busy attacking its independent judiciary for not being nationalistic enough, while Hungary's is currently attempting to ban protest. Just the day before Macron told the world how poisonous nationalism is, and yet the regulation he prescribes would give nationalists in governments the tools to cement their alternative values.

The other significant misapprehension upon which his proposal is based is that "California Cyberspace" is a lawless zone. But not all law must say no; the laws that have allowed the Internet to thrive in California and beyond have been laws that have said yes to innovation and expression and worked to protect them from interference, including Section 230, the First Amendment, and even, to a degree, the DMCA. All of these sorts of legal structures are what enable the actual protection of all those very same liberty values Macron says he wants to foster.

But that's not the sort of regulatory approach Macron proposes. He wants one that will say no to technology — and, importantly, the expression facilitated by this technology — when he believes technology should say no to expression. In his mind this is a modest proposal, one that simply calls for regulation by international consensus via organizations like the IGF. He said this was to help transcend the "rifts" caused by different nations' regulatory approaches. But given that next year's IGF has been scheduled over Thanksgiving week, thereby shutting out many of the American participants who would prefer to observe one of the most significant holidays in the American calendar with their family, as is traditional, rather than on their own, working to save the Internet a continent away, it hardly seems like international pluralism is really high on the IGF agenda.

Instead it seems that the goal is to empower his own government with the ability to decide for the world what the Internet can be used for. While his call for this regulatory crackdown may be packaged up in language touting freedom, democracy, equality, and international cooperation, it is still the cry of the censor keen for the power to refuse others' expression.

Filed Under: emmanuel macron, eu, europe, france, free speech, regulation

Red Bull Fails To Block Trademark Registration In EU Over Logos That Aren't All That Similar

from the locking-horns dept

While it is by no means the most litigious beverage company ever, Red Bull is not a complete stranger to trademark bullying. The last we heard from the iconic energy drink company, it was making legal arguments over bovines and their castrated status somehow rising to the level of trademark infringement. It seems that Red Bull typically likes to do its bullying during the trademark application status rather than in legal proceedings, but the universe is currently running an experiment to see just how hard and fast a rule this is for the company.

That experiment takes the form of Red Bull attempting, and failing, to oppose the trademark registration for a beverage company called "Big Horn" over the following logos.

Now, the link above is from a site dedicated to "brand protection", so all of the language in the post is of the variety that thinks Red Bull was totally right and the decision against the opposition was wrong. But, come on, how much public confusion is there really going to be over those logos? To be fair to that original post, it points out that Big Horn uses this logo on beverage cans that do call back to Red Bull's, but Red Bull didn't make that argument in its opposition. Instead, it simply argued that the logos were too similar. They're not, even when you try to parse things out with language such as:

Red Bull based its opposition on the registration of the two bulls logo, i.e. without the word Red Bull. If you compare this with the Big Horn logo they are quite similar, given that both depict two animals leaping towards each other with a yellow ball in the background.

"Yellow ball." That's the sun, actually. In the case of the Big Horn logo, it's the sun rising over mountains, which aren't present in Red Bull's logo. And the animals in question are different. As are the color schemes. Not to mention that Big Horn has their big name pasted in big letters over the logo. It makes perfect sense that EUIPO thought that Big Horn had enough of a case if this ever goes to a trademark lawsuit to defend itself, no matter how many citations of EUIPO making the opposite and wrong decision on Red Bull oppositions the original post can make.

So, we'll wait and see if Red Bull actually wants to take this trial. If that happens, I would think that demonstrating real or potential public confusion would be pretty difficult.

Filed Under: eu, europe, trademark
Companies: big horn, red bull

Yet Another GDPR Disaster: Journalists Ordered To Hand Over Secret Sources Under 'Data Protection' Law

from the this-is-messed-up dept

When the GDPR was being debated, we warned that it would be a disaster for free speech. Now that it's been in effect for about six months, we're seeing that play out in all sorts of ways. We've talked about how it was used to disappear public court documents for an ongoing case, and then used to disappear a discussion about that disappearing court document. And we wrote about how it's been used against us to hide a still newsworthy story (and that leaves out one other GDPR demand we've received in an attempt to disappear a story that I can't even talk about yet).

When I wrote about all of this both here on Techdirt and on Twitter, I had a bunch of "data protection experts" in Europe completely freak out at me that I had no idea what I was talking about, and how any negative impact was simply the result of everyone misreading the GDPR. I kept trying to point out to them that even if that's true in theory, out here in the real world, the law was being used to disappear news stories and was creating massive chilling effects and burdens on journalists. And the response was the same: nah, you're reading the law wrong.

And now we have an even more horrifying story of the damage the GDPR is doing to journalism. There's a Romanian investigatory journalism publication called RISE Project that has reported on corruption in Romanian politics. Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy about that. OCCRP -- the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project -- a partner to RISE Project has the worrisome details about how the very Romanian government that RISE Project has been breaking corruption stories on has magically found the need to use the GDPR to demand the journalists turn over their sources.

The full story is a bit complex, but in reporting on Liviu Dragnea, the president of the ruling party in Romania, RISE Project made some connections between Dragnea and a local Romanian company, Tel Drum SA, "currently involved in a massive scandal in Romania."

RISE Project journalists found proof that Dragnea and his family benefited from Tel Drum SA money and had close relationships with the corporation’s executives. They spent holidays abroad together, went hunting together and Tel Drum SA paid for various construction, maintenance and beautification works at properties belonging to Dragnea’s family. Some of these were posted on RISE Project's Facebook page.

And, magically, soon after that, the Romanian Data Protection Authority (ANSPDCP), whose boss was appointed by Dragnea's party (and who is facing some corruption accusations as well), started demanding all sorts of info from RISE Project under the auspices of the GDPR.

Among the demands?

• The purpose and legal basis of publishing on the Internet (Facebook) of personal data, at the adress https://www.facebook.com/notes/rise-project/teleormanleaks/1937024593056150;
• The date/period of time when the said personal data was published on your Facebook account;
• The source from where the personal data published on Facebook was obtained;
• The support (electronic and/or physical) where you stored the documents/images published on Facebook;
• If the mobile storage devices (tablet, HDD, memory stick) were/are password protected or encrypted;
• If you have other information/documents containing personal data of the said people;
• If the personal data or documents that contain personal data of the said people were revealed in other circumstances - with the specification of these circumstances;
• The way in which you informed the said people, in conformity with Art. 13-14 of GDPR.

Now, I don't know about you, but given all of the circumstances, the idea that these demands have anything to do with "data protection," and not the government implicated by this reporting trying to find out who snitched on them, seems perhaps far fetched. But, the Data Protection Authority is warning RISE Project that if it fails to hand over all of the above information, it faces fines of up to €20,000,000. I am guessing that an independent investigative journalism operation doesn't have that much cash to spare.

This, of course, puts the organization is quite a tight spot. Giving up its sources is a massive journalistic sin, especially when the real reasons for the demands are so transparent. But the risk of being embroiled in deathly litigation can't be much fun either.

And I know (I know) those very same "data protection" geeks who were screaming at me a few weeks ago are already screaming about just how terrible this article is because clearly the GDPR has built in protections for media organizations, so obviously this is the Romanian Data Protection Authority abusing its powers. To paraphrase these GDPRbros, "the problem is clearly with the Romanian Data Protection Authority, not the law."

Once again, of course, this ignores the reality of what is actually happening today. Sure, it would be great if governments and the politically powerful didn't abuse the laws to their own advantage and against the public interest, but when has that happened recently? The backers of the GDPR brought us this mess, and created a law that can plausibly be used in a manner where the threats alone are chilling to journalism.

And if you think it's bad now, just wait until more and more powerful individuals and entities realize this. This (again) shouldn't surprise anyone. We've seen it for decades with the DMCA. Once it clicked in people's brains that "oh, hey, this is a tool for censorship," it got used widely as the tool to take down anything you didn't like. And it was pretty successful at that. The GDPR is an even more powerful tool, because the potential fines are orders of magnitude larger than a copyright infringement award. Anyone still insisting that the GDPR isn't a problem for journalists because they've written in exceptions -- after all this -- is not to be taken seriously. They are putting their heads in the sand and ignoring the reality around them to pretend that what they want to be true actually is.

Filed Under: europe, gdpr, journalism, liviu dragnea, romania
Companies: rise project, tel drum sa

Small And Medium Publishers Protest EU Link Tax, Which Will Harm Them, While Helping Only Large Publishers

from the shameful dept

As the EU continues to march towards wrecking the internet with a variety of dangerous proposals in the EU Copyright Directive, many are desperately trying to explain to policymakers there just how much damage they are going to do and asking them to take simple steps to prevent the worst possible outcomes. While most of the attention has been on the awful Article 13 upload filters, the Article 11 link/snippet tax is almost as bad.

Of course, to hear EU supporters of Article 11 explain things, such a brand new "publisher's right" is necessary to help save media organizations who have been undermined by the basic business model of the internet. This is already insanity (and, as we've pointed out, when both Germany and Spain passed similar laws, it harmed media sites, and did nothing to increase their revenue), but if that were the case, you'd expect most media organizations to be totally on board with the plan. That is not the case. A few of the very largest media sites are totally on board (with German publisher Axel Springer being the leading voice in support). But midsize and small publications recognize just how damaging this will be and they've now sent a letter to policymakers, who are working to finalize the Directive, calling out how the existing language puts them (the very entities policymakers claim this law will support) at great risk:

... we’ve noted with deep regret that both the European Council and the European Parliament are advocating for the creation of a new publishers’ right (Article 11 of the proposed Copyright Directive) instead of other alternatives, such as the presumption of rights, put forth by a wide range of stakeholders.

If the European institutions go ahead with the creation of such a right, we believe that it should incorporate key provisions that at least reduce some of the collateral damage to small and medium-sized publishers we expect, including with a view to transposition into national law.

Of particular concern is the idea that Article 11 might require licenses in order to index news content. That means even if a smaller site does not wish to be compensated by a news aggregator -- it has to set up a licensing scheme that requires payment. In effect, this outlaws Creative Commons and numerous business models and distribution strategies for the internet.

We would like to highlight a highly problematic provision adopted by the European Parliament: Article 11 (1) and Recital 32 introduce a remuneration principle which prohibits publishers from allowing indexing of their content online without remuneration. Recital 32 means that news aggregators, podcast aggregators and search engines would not be allowed to serve links with individual words and short extracts of news publisher content without a bespoke agreement stipulating payment – even when a news publisher wishes to be included.

We adamantly believe that any publisher’s right must give publishers the choice to consent to the sharing of their content online. Aggregators, search engines and other online services drive valuable traffic to publishers’ websites, particularly smaller or local ones; and this traffic referral creates huge opportunities to generate revenue through advertising.

Limiting publishers’ freedom in this way will result in detrimental consequences for us, as shown by a similar experience in Spain. The introduction of an unwaivable ancillary copyright in favor of publishers in Spain caused small publishers to lose as much as 15% of their web traffic. This is estimated to have cost the Spanish news publishing industry €10 million a year.

The key issue here is that if news aggregators -- who send sites plenty of traffic -- are required to set up licensing schemes and pay everyone they link to, it is most likely that they will only wish to negotiate with a few larger players, and simply avoid linking to smaller sites, if they continue linking at all. This will disproportionately benefit those large sites. And this would be true even if (as many predict) brand new collection society middlemen show up to collect and distribute such money.

We've already seen this in action. In the US, it's been widely reported how collection society ASCAP simply finds it impossible to track the number of plays of smaller, independent artists, and thus distributes their share to the most popular artists. It is literally taking from the smallest, independent artists, and giving their royalties to the wealthier and more successful ones. The same is likely true of any scheme for reimbursing news sites as well.

Hell, we're a news site here that is always open to new revenue streams, but I find it offensive that the government should step in to try to force other sites to pay us, and expect that even if it did apply to us, it would be such a huge bureaucratic clusterfuck that it wouldn't even be worth the effort to make sure we got paid.

So, really, the various policymakers in the EU should be required to answer a fairly simple question: if so many media sites are directly against this policy, and policymakers are claiming its necessary to help those very sites... then who are they really doing this for in the first place?

Filed Under: article 11, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, europe, link tax, neighboring rights, publishers

Just As Expected: GDPR Has Made Google Even More Dominant In Europe

from the not-like-we-didn't-warn-you dept

Oh, the EU, will you ever learn? Over the last few years, the EU has been screaming about the awfulness of evil large tech companies in the name of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple (sometimes called "GAFA"), though in reality, their biggest concerns are focused almost entirely on Google and Facebook. The EU keeps popping up with ridiculous laws, all of which are designed to hit Google and Facebook. The GDPR was a big one, and the latest is the EU Copyright Directive. And there are more as well. Some of us keep pointing out to the EU that if these laws are designed to go after Google and Facebook, they're going to miss their target quite a bit, because they'll mostly serve to lock in those companies as the dominant providers. That's because they're big enough to manage the regulatory burden, whereas startups and smaller competitors will not be able to and will suffer.

The first bit of data is in on the GDPR and of course it shows that the big winner under the GDPR is... Google. The biggest losers? Smaller competitors to Google. A bit surprisingly, Facebook did see its adtech marketshare decline (while Google's grew), but relative to everyone else, Facebook sill beat out all other competitors.

Now, the report does note that there are fewer ad trackers for users in the EU -- which is certainly a win for users -- but the fact that this is further cementing the dominant position of Google and Facebook should be a massive concern to people who value competitive markets and innovation.

This shouldn't be a surprising result at all. But if part of the goal of the EU is to reduce the reliance on Google and Facebook, the exact opposite is occurring. Just like lots of us predicted.

Filed Under: advertising, dominance, europe, gdpr
Companies: google