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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Very bad reform. Among the other things, it makes any site directly responsible for every copyright violation of its users.

For a change, this is as bad for big and small companies.

Not even Facebook can policy all the posts of their users for words, pictures, sounds and videos. FB won't get a takedown notice, it could be sued directly.

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Facebook will have a lobby that carves out an exception for itself while simultaneously shutting down any threat to its monopoly through this legislation.

In the EU, maybe not.

This may be a signal that the internet has become way too centralized.

The irony of the centralization of a decentralized platform is suddenly enforcement of regulations like these become feasible. The nuclear-war proof internet is suddenly vulnerable to people sitting behind desks or whatever the hell they do in Europe.

This. The Web should become re decentralized. Identity breaches now happening all the time. Central databases are crack to NSA, advertising agencies and others. But there is hope!

https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/centralization-and-o...

The EU is the very reason we see this sort of legislation. Everything has positive and negative sides, and for the EU the negative side is giving lobbyists a 28-for-1 offer: lobby a single parliament, and have your legislation implemented in 28 different countries! The mileage of a European lobbyist has never been greater than it is now.

Governments could take down fb (and google) if they chose to. They'll fight back but the Chinese have demonstrated that it's possible given sufficient will. With fb having recently been targeting Kremlin propaganda at voting populations I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they didn't get canned in the name of national security.

Is there any evidence to suggest that Facebook has very significant influence over any government in the world?

Reminds me of what I've heard of German law, regarding third-party content like website comments :

http://germanitlaw.com/liability-for-third-party-internet-co...

Why is this a bad thing?

I'm as happy as anyone to screw over Facebook, but this is actually really bad.

I run a forum with ~1000 users. It costs us ~$60 a month and the corporate infrastructure is me and one other guy. If we were vulnerable to actually being sued for an infringement on a user's part, we would probably just have to shut down; neither of us is up for running a legal battle.

Luckily we're US, not EU, but presumably there are small forum/blog operators in the EU as well.

I wonder what happens if you have some EU citizens posting copyrighted content on your site. I didn't check if they're going to make it a felony, but in that case are they going to ask for your extradition? If not, are they going to ask for damages? With no protection from the actions of our users it's a mess.

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