As someone living in an EU state who has to regularly turn my VPN on and off to have full internet access, I can't agree with you that it's a "hoax". It's inconvenient enough for me that I'm looking into having a custom router that will switch between VPN destinations depending on what site I'm accessing.
Also "EU countries have higher press freedom than the US" is a strawman argument. We're not talking about press freedom. It's also an example of the fallacy of relative privation ("X isn't bad, because Y is worse than X"). It's like saying "It's a hoax that the US executes some prisoners, because Iran executes even more".
> who has to regularly turn my VPN on and off to have full internet access,
Is this because the EU or your country has blocked access, or some news site from the US blocking access from the EU because they don't want to deal with GDPR?
Italy. Examples of sites I can't access without VPN: torrent sites (including legal uses), betfair.com (which I use as a more accurate political predictor than polls), and various non-EU sites which block access because they've decided it's easier than complying with extra-territorial requirements imposed by the EU (this one isn't direct EU censorship, but it amounts to the same thing indirectly.
Sometimes I set my VPN destination to the UK (my country of origin) to get around these. Then I find that I have other problems. For example, certain Reddit posts are unavailable to me because someone has posted a comment that some algorithm has decided is NSFW (and therefore triggers age verification under the UK Online Safety Act 2023).
The result is that I have to turn my VPN on and off depending on what I'm trying to do.
I'm unfamiliar with Italian piracy laws and surveillance but I can tell you that accessing torrent sites for me was a simple matter of choosing a proper DNS provider.
This is a definition of censorship that seems to equate restrictions to any website or data stream as freedom, not whether the content of the site breaks local laws. This is a bit extreme, since most countries have laws against gambling, and if you could get around it by just setting up servers abroad, what value are local laws?
I'm not sure I see any practical difference between a government saying "we will block website X because we don't like it" and "we will block website X because we say that website X is illegal". For example if Iran blocks a website which is critical of the regime, do you consider it important whether such criticisms are against the law or not in Iran? I think most people would consider it censorship either way.
If you want to make gambling illegal, then make gambling illegal and then enforce that law. You don't need to resort to indirect measures that go beyond the law (e.g. by preventing me from merely viewing the odds on a gambling website).
Make gambling legal and regulated? Or tell citizens they are on their own and may be violating the law if they gamble, then look the other way and occasionally promote stories about citizens losing their money to illegal gambling.
US citizens living in states without legal gambling can often drive across state lines or to the nearest Native American reservation to gamble. There’s no way of preventing this nor does there need to be.
Why make gambling legal just to satisfy people who are circumventing the laws? That too by basing themselves outside of the country, as opposed to state lines.
Indian society is unconcerned, if not outright supportive of this law.
Your counterpoint zeroes in on the specific example, but in addressing it avoids the spirit of the issue.
People want certain laws and restrictions. You are arguing that if people choose to circumvent those laws, tough beans.
Heck, you could just have nations destabilize neighbors by this lassiez faire approach.
Because what you’re asking for is untenable in a world of billions of people scattered across countless nations, at least without cutting off the internet outside your borders entirely like North Korea. And trying to force the issue domestically just results in oppression and restriction of human rights. The global digital world is a formless, borderless space; this “freedom VPN” thing, Tor, I2P, v2ray, satellite internet, etc, you will simply never be able to fill all the gaps. Those who want to will get around it.
Even China, who has probably the most sophisticated information controls in the world, can’t prevent leaks through the Great Firewall. They just rely on it being “good enough” to restrain the general public.
Put another way, your country can make all the laws it wants, but it can’t change the laws of another country or force them to change how their network behaves, at least not without a fight. And in a world of billions of people, the global network will always be doing something that you don’t approve of, somewhere!
In which case the country with the least laws decides how everyone else functions.
Remember we started are working from here
> If you want to make gambling illegal, then make gambling illegal and then enforce that law. You don't need to resort to indirect measures that go beyond the law (e.g. by preventing me from merely viewing the odds on a gambling website).
From your argument the only option is to not make anything illegal that is legal in the nation of minimum laws.
Are you arguing that nations - voters - should have no say in what laws they want to live under ?
Do note that I am all for less government control. But our current regulatory and rights landscape is not resolving the questions our voters and infrastructure is throwing up.
Eventually, everything runs on some infrastructure. Control will be forced.
If we want to prevent it, we need to have answers to the issues being thrown up by users.
There is no answer except to sever yourself from the network. If you could somehow undo all of computing history and rebuild the internet on different principles, using completely locked down and centralized machines, then you could accomplish what you want to. But the tools to escape control are out there and are widely available. The skills to open new avenues outside of control are distributed among millions. The structure of the current network is woven into everything from banking to dishwashers.
You can make certain digital behavior illegal for your citizens, but enforcement is always going to be difficult. If you invasively spy on them to try and force them into your model digital behavior, it will cause unrest. If you try to block specific sites at the border, you will take down unrelated sites and breed contempt for the law. By pushing people farther and farther underground, you eventually connect them with organized crime and foreign governments.
In the long run, your insistence that the network be controlled is going to lead to either civil breakdown or totalitarianism. Perhaps that’s the inevitable consequence of connecting humanity as we’ve done. But I suspect that countries who are more digitally permissive will not face the same dilemma.
(Note that people usually accept laws where a victim can be identified. A digital crime with a real victim is still a crime, and standard policing methods can often track down the perpetrator. No need to break the internet for these cases.)
I also live in the EU. betfair.com is not blocked by my ISP here. Rather, they are blocking my ISP ("[...] you may be accessing the Betfair website from a country that Betfair does not accept bets from [...]"). That the website not only prevents betting but also does not show any odds is a technical decision on their part. Gambling regulation is also usually domestic, and not EU law.
Websites deciding EU users are not valuable enough to comply with GDPR is, as you say, also not censorship. It is again the technical decision of some website owners to provide their content only in conjunction with illegal processing of your data.
I have not had issues accessing torrent indices from the EU. This too is usually handled domestically and has little to do with the EU.
There is legitimately dangerous (current and upcoming) EU legislation (Chat Control, eIDAS, age verification, previously the Data Retention Directive), so I don't think it necessary to weaken your argument by listing non-examples.
What content are you missing? Off the top of my head, the type of content most likely to ve missing in Europe would be:
- geofenced media
- commercial sites intentionally removing eu access because of gdpr.
That's it. Those are the only cases where I could not access sites from tbe EU. At least the ones I encountered.
And do notice, both of them are not filtered by the EU or anything like this. They are enforced at the publishing website. Would you call this censorship? It kind of feels like a stretch. If not a deliberate contortion of truth.
In Spain many parts of the Internet are shut down when there's a LaLiga match to "prevent piracy". They usually block Cloudflare as a whole but also Vercel, GitHub,... had issues. For example last Sunday I couldn't access some of the stories submitted here. I could also not access the documentation of hledger, a FOSS contability tool.
No, it is censorship. IP protection would be punishing the pirates after they do something illegal. I think what you're sensing is that it is censorship in support of intellectual property rather than censorship aiming at political repression.
There's something similar in RealityVoid's comment where it is identified that EU law promotes censorship, but that is discounted because the understanding is it in aid of privacy rather than politically motivated. Although given Europe's rich history of sliding into authoritarianism that does seem like an optimistic take on where the European elite are heading. A part of political censorship is making it hard for people to realise that popular political viewpoints are being censored and providing cover by claiming the censorship is for some good cause would be pretty routine.
See my reply on the other sub-comment. There's no need to accuse me of deliberately contorting the truth. We can keep the discussion civilised. And yes, I would call at least the second point (GDPR) indirect censorship, because it's a consequence of the fact that the EU has imposed the requirements extra-territorially ("your website must comply with our rules even though you aren't within our jurisdiction, and your website is fully legal within your jurisdiction").
The GDPR does not dictate what websites can say, it dictates rules for handling collected personal information. Those are not the same thing, it’s not censorship.
Notice how you went from "censorship is a hoax" to "not having access to these things is not important", while also implicitely assuming control of deciding the matter.
> EU state who has to regularly turn my VPN on and off to have full internet access
Because you really think this “portal” is going to let you access websites diffusing copyrighted content?
That's by far the most prevalent kind of blocking and I don't think the current admin is against that at all, they just want to to promote Nazi speech (which is barely blocked in the first place).
I wonder what they'll do about pedophile stuff though.
Also "EU countries have higher press freedom than the US" is a strawman argument. We're not talking about press freedom. It's also an example of the fallacy of relative privation ("X isn't bad, because Y is worse than X"). It's like saying "It's a hoax that the US executes some prisoners, because Iran executes even more".