How could that be made to happen? Should EU somehow move to federated (let’s say per country) instances of Mastodon or something? Or one big platform? How would regular folks get used to it? And how could those initiatives be prevented from falling into irrelevance when network effects are at play?
I agree with the idea, it’s just that there’s the usual hurdles there aren’t necessarily good answers for that I know of.
Amazon/AWS tried this route with their "sovereign cloud" which still ends up being beholden exactly the same way as "real AWS", so what's even the point? Who is even falling for these "tricks"?
It might work, but it also might bloat the whole operation so much that the social network becomes non-functional.
>We already prevailed in a similar legal case in Germany in 2021-2023 in which we learned an important lesson: we tried to use geoIP blocking as a “hack” in a similar circumstance at the start of the legal proceedings, allowing us to continue services in Germany until the case concluded. The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.
I guess it was Germany after all.
If free DNS is supposed to be able to block people who use a VPN to circumvent a geoIP block, then the court is effectively demanding global reach for their blocking orders. It doesn't matter whether the court doesn't have the expertise in this, it only matters that they made such a moronic decision.
We had video streaming sites like youtube. We had cellphone manufacturers. We had chat applications.
But the conditions for these companies were better outside of Europe. Now we're stuck with everything not made in Europe. (South Korea is more relevant in consumer tech than the EU.)
European governments still haven't swapped off MS.
Could a European competitor have even existed when even youtube struggled with the GEMA lawsuit for over half a decade? And that by the end of it they still had to pay?
I realize these are heavy handed approaches - but shows what can get done.
Perhaps smaller scale things can work as well: Ie supporting alternatives when they occur - ie tiktok back when it was kinda Chinese - use the China threat to enforce objective standards - rather than just following the us stance.
Use existing monopoly legislation.
All creating an open market place for social media that allows for newcomers and local alternatives rather than the single monopoly that is the situation now.
They are the minimum.
And StudiVZ, which I never liked, made that slowly die out. Facebook came later.
I would very much prefer to still be part of local social media (where you could resolve issues with the admin directly), but federated to other networks.
Both the US and the EU are already doing this exact thing with cars, basically.
https://www.blast-info.fr/articles/2026/information-exclusiv...
But the reason is not sovereignty - it's to make sure people can't receive communications not approved by the (fascist*) French government.
* Please do not mince words or make excuses. We know they are fascist because they're shooting the population in the streets and turning off the internet, just like bad countries do. So far this is isomorphic to the Arab Spring.
B-but the EU can't do that!
It absolutely can. Just like it can push Chat Control down everyone's throats even though if you held a referendum on it it would be voted down (no, most Jacques the plumbers on the street don't want mass surveillance even if it's "against crime").
There is a national broadcast apparatus in Germany, directly funded by the people in form of mandatory household monthly contributions. It definitely needs improvements and is far from ideal but it doesn’t work at behest of government (budget pressures, etc.). It was designed to resist the top down pressure from the admins (lessons learned from what Nazis did). AfD along with some private news networks backed by the likes of Telekom are really pushing to abolish it.
That's how we can be sure it's worth keeeping.
I agree with the general claim of their safer space. Yet, I see several possibilities why that ended in an unnecessary aggression police operation -- esp. LKA in every federal state seems to overcompensate for non-action on devastating crime.
I don't see the connection. Explanation welcome. Esp. since I don't won't to have a last word on a topic I don't know enough about.
They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one. They have the resources to fight in court against decisions they don’t believe in, and all the lobbying they need to shape established laws.
They choose their actions, and their actions are their own. Every single dollar they donate to the current president but not the previous one is an admission of their allegiance and (lack of) morals.
Having principles and standing for them costs money, and these societal parasites subsist on money and influence. Make no mistake, they will sell their own mother to further their goals, but they don’t have to while they can keep selling everyone else’s.
The problem is that the same is true for many politicians. They do a lot of lobbying in Europe too.
That’s not the argument. Unfortunately, reading comprehension and engaging in good faith continues to decline rapidly on HN.
Not being beholden to someone does not mean you have power over them. For example: you are not beholden to me and thus don’t have to do anything I say; but that doesn’t mean I have to do anything you say either, I’m not beholden to you.
The administration can take over them with the snap of a finger if they so desire. They have absolutely no power.
The best example of that is the BBC suit, where the only reason it's happening is because the US doesn't have any control over the entity because it's British.
No, no they cannot. They sure want you to believe that, though, and the longer that fantasy is left unchecked, the more power it gets. The current administration is not omnipotent, and that is exemplified by the times it was pushed back (not by the bootlicker CEOs at major US tech companies, obviously).
Like John Oliver said, use the four key words that make weak bullies go away: “fuck you, make me”.
What's different for this administration is that neither the Congress, Senate or Supreme Court will opose them.