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Comment by madhadron | Hacker News Reader

Another possibility: the EU is serious and wants the content farm to show ads business model to die.

If they're serious about that, then why are they reinforcing the monopolies of the two greatest offenders, YouTube and Facebook? YouTube and Facebook already have the market dominance and engineering talent necessary to build whatever content blocking filters that are mandated by the EU's boneheaded regulations. This regulation will hurt them, sure, but the worst outcome for YouTube will be a bunch more videos that are "unavailable in your country". Same thing with Facebook -- it already shows different posts to different users based on geography; this will be merely one more criterion to filter posts on. What this will kill is all the companies that could compete with Google and Facebook. No one is going to found a media-sharing startup when even a single slip up can leave them liable for an eight or nine-figure sum.

My theory is that, despite their rhetoric, the EU is actually okay with monopolies. Monopolies are easier to extract rents from, in the forms of fines and taxes. It seems like the EU would rather have a single Facebook, a single YouTube, a single Google, etc. than many competing smaller firms.

What's you definition of a content farm? This bill essentially targets online online medium you can upload and share content on. This should be reworded to the EU is serious and wants to go back to Web 1.0

Maybe that's not a bad thing. Most of the policies that have emerged from the EU and US recently would mostly affect the users of large platforms like YouTube and Facebook. If content creators were to host content on a website they own, they would have complete control (well mostly, the web host would be responsible too, but that worked pretty well before) over their content and what they can and can't share.

I agree, kind of. My projection for a future with stricter copyright laws is a rise of or at least stronger development of subcultures that produce their own content which slips under the filter radar because of non-mainstream memes and references. Also more poeople will be attracted by subcultures because the mainstream becomes more regulated and boring as nobody will be able to freely mix and advertise it. Though what would really happen is that the media industry will be able to exert more control over influencers and we get sth. like a TV 2.0.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q&t=1s

This does a very good job of explaining how small content creators are practically powerless now on the web in terms of protecting their content being stolen.

Ads have nothing to do with this. It's not aimed at business models that show ads, it's aimed at business models that host user content.

The whole point is to put content exclusivity back in the hands of traditional publishers.

And how do "business models that host user content" generally generate revenue?

Well, traditional publishers that have a complete hosting infrastructure.

How does it apply to ISPs by the way?

There are obviously some serious problems with ad-driven businesses on the net. But they have also done a lot to put technology in the hands of poor people. Any plans to replace them with paid-only services need to figure out some way to make them available to people on very limited incomes.

A few examples of what you are describing would be very welcome.

IIRC, Facebook, Twitter and Gmail don't make you pay to sign up, meaning people who can't afford to pay end up enjoying those services for "free".

(At least, I think that's what parent was getting at, not saying I super agree with it).

That's literally the only redeeming aspect of ad-driven model I'm aware of. It's good you point this out, personally I don't have good alternatives if one were to just burn advertising industry to the ground (something I fantasize about).

Still, advertising is a Red Queen's race; once a party achieves some advancement (like animated ads, video ads, tracking, etc.), everyone else has to follow suit. The relative situation of player is ultimately unchanged, but the baseline is more user-hostile. So there's plenty of possibility for regulators to simply roll adtech back to 1990s, and advertisers would still make their money.

You would have to be at the extreme bottom end of the scale to not be able to afford the cost of hosting some content on the internet (maybe 3 euros per month?). It is something you could find space for in your budget unless you are literally starving and have absolutely 0 space in your budget for anything. If that were the case, I doubt this hypothetical person would be spending a lot of time on the internet in the first place.

And let's not forget these ads are all clamoring to make people spend money on things they "didn't know they needed", so it's not like they're materially doing someone who is very badly off any favours.

That would be a really bad thing, too.

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