Google has told the EU that it will not comply with a forthcoming fact-checking law.
Perfect time to implement sky-high fines for non-compliance.
Ah, but that’s why US Big Tech is splooshing cash all over President Felon and hoping he saves them from evil communist European consumer protections.
Yep, they’re hoping Trump will pressure the EU to get rid of their pesky consumer protections. They don’t even make any profits for billionaires!
Yes, the EU will certainly kowtow to him and bend the knee. 🙄
I mean Putin’s weaselly little far right lackeys are scarily close to being in government in a few European countries now (or already are, Hungary and Slovakia). So who knows
The good news is that, when Putin goes, they’ll go too. There are some other dependancies that you can easily work out.
I’m not convinced Putin isn’t an immortal Reptilian
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Time for EU to simply ban Google then for non compliance.
In other words, a company, acting on behalf of its own shareholders, tells a government, which represents 100% of the citizens in a given territory, to shove its legislation where the sun doesn’t shine. And not only is this not inherently absurd, but it also stands a significant chance of succeeding in getting the government to comply.
They probably wouldn’t have had to if the school system hadn’t dropped language arts from most curriculums ages ago. Students now are getting a markedly shitter education and don’t even know they’re being fucked over.
It’s by design, the politicians only need 28% to win, easier to scrape those votes off the bottom of the barrel of knowledge
What really stings is watching groups and communities which historically have been supportive of each other getting fragmented by overt social media operations. It’s asinine and just makes it easier to marginalize and oppress the people that most frequently need a voice.
Feel like that speech would have meant more when he still had the power to do anything about it. Instead of going to war against this oligarchy he chose to cash his political capital on a rushed pull out of Afghanistan, and to kill a bunch of Palestinians.
Instead of going to war against this oligarchy he chose to cash his political capital on a rushed pull out of Afghanistan
I don’t see how this is laid on Biden since Trump agreed to the withdrawal and timeline, and then R relentlessly hammered Biden for not getting on it, then relentlessly hammered him for the problems related to rushing it.
I agree with the rest of your comment.
don’t see how this is laid on Biden since Trump agreed to the withdrawal and timeline
Trump made the original withdrawal date and Biden arbitrarily stuck to it when he came into office.
He was under no real obligation to stick to the timeline and it was a betrayal to every Afghan citizen that worked with us. I don’t really care what Republicans bitch and moan about.
Fair opinion I guess, but I think there are plenty of things you can cleanly give Biden shit about before you get all the way down to complying with the troop withdrawal schedule that Trump committed us to.
Eh, I guess it’s a matter of opinion. To me knowingly finishing your opponents mistake is worse than making an honest one yourself.
I may be a little biased though, as I have had the opportunity to provide healthcare to a few of the Afghan interpreters that were lucky enough to evacuate and make it state side.
I work in orthopedics and rehabilitation, so they had all been pretty banged up, missing limbs, or had lower limbs injuries that affected their mobility. But their personal injuries were nothing compared to how much uncertainty they faced about not knowing about the well being of extended family and friends still in Afghanistan, a home they will likely never have the chance to ever visit again.
It felt miraculous for me that, for a while, tech companies appeared to comply to regulation (doing the bare minimum, as slowly as possible, but it kinda worked).
My hypothesis is that they now except political support from Trump administration and to pressure the EU?
A government … only in theory does. Like a church represents God, because humans are too dumb to understand him directly.
“Fact-checking” is preserving a certain model of censorship and propaganda. “No fact-checking” is moving to a new model of censorship and propaganda.
Both sides of this fight prefer it being called such, so that one seems against misinformation, and the other seems against censorship, but they are not really different in this dimension. They are different in strategy and structure and interests, but neither is good for the average person.
Damn.
Wish the rest of us could just ignore all laws & not face any consequences.
What a fucking joke this entire system is.
They don’t have a problem giving someone 100 years for a quarter bag of weed though. For a first time offense.
Oh that was long ago. it’s for not having a baby if you’re female now. Megacorps run usa and now the worst (which is best for some reason) ceo in the history of man will again be president and continue the clear path to government dismantling
Google, this is t he EU, not America, they’re not going to suck up to you.
Unbelievable 2025 is turning out to be a stellar year
Fuck Google
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That’s pretty bold for a really fucking useless search engine. The EU could just block it and redirect google.com to a gov run searxng instange and everyone in europe would be better off overniggt
It would likely be impossible to redirect google.com without either sparking a cyberwar or building something like the great firewall of China, quite possibly both.
Blocking is somewhat possible, but to redirect, they would have to forge google certificates and possibly also fork Chrome and convince users to replace their browser, since last I checked, google hard-coded it’s own public keys into Chrome.
Technical details
I say blocking in somewhat possible, because governments can usually just ask DNS providers to not resolve a domain or internet providers to block IPs.
The issue is, google runs one of the largest DNS services in the world, so what happens if google says no? The block would at best be partial, at worst it could cause instability in the DNS system itself.
What about blocking IPs? Well, google data centers run a good portion of the internet, likely including critical services. Companies use google services for important systems. Block google data centers and you will have outages that will make crowd-strike look like a tiny glitch and last for months.
Could we redirect the google DNS IPs to a different, EU controlled server? Yes, but such attempts has cause issues beyond the borders of the country attempting it in the past. It would at least require careful preparations.
As for forging certificates, EU does control multiple Certificate authorities. But forging a certificate breaks the cardinal rule for being a trusted CA. Such CA would likely be immediately distrusted by all browsers. And foreig governments couldn’t ignore this either. After all, googles domains are not just used for search. Countless google services that need to remain secure could potentially be compromised by the forged certificate. In addition, as I mentioned, google added hard-coded checks into Chrome to prevent a forged certificate from working for it’s domains.
There’s probably a way to redirect without validation. Only respond to port 80 if needed, then redirecr. Sure the browser might complain a little but it’s not as bad as invalid cert.
Maybe for some rando site, Google and any half competent site has HSTS enabled, meaning a browser won’t even try to connect with insecure HTTP, nor allow user to bypass the security error, as long as the HSTS header is remembered by the browser (the site was visited recently, set to 1 year for google).
In addition, google will also be on HSTS preload lists, so it won’t work even if you never visited the site.
That makes me realize, what kind of country doesn’t cobtrol it’s dns space’s encryption certificates. That’s a major oversight.
What? What do you mean “DNS space”? Classic DNS does not have any security, no encryption and no signatures.
DNSSEC, which adds signatures, is based on TLDs, not any geography or country. And it is not yet enabled for most domains, though I guess it would be for google. But obviously EU does not control .com.
And if you mean TLS certificates, those are a bit complicated and I already explained why forging those would be problematic and not work on Chrome, though it could be done.
Yes I mean tls certs as those control what dns records are considered valid. The Eu should control which tls are considered valid within its territory and that should be considetedpart of their security apparatus. It’s crazy irresponsible to have left that up to unaccountable private foreign entities. This is what would make it difficult to control their own independant version of the dns namespace.
No. At the end of the day, I control which certificates I consider valid. Browsers just choose the defaults. There is no way I quietly let some government usurp that power, considering how easy to abuse it is.
Yes I mean tls certs as those control what dns records are considered valid.
No they don’t. That is not what TLS really does. But I guess close enough.
Nah. Demanding the ISPs to block traffic to Google domains would be quite effective.
This isn’t like the great firewall of chine where you want to prevent absolutely all traffic. If you make it inconvenient to use, because CSS breaks or a js library doesn’t load or images breaslk, its already a huge step into pushing it out of the market.
Enterprise market would be much harder, a loooot of EU companies rely on Google’s services, platforms and apps, and migrating away would take a lot of time and money.
Demanding the ISPs to block traffic to Google domains would be quite effective.
Filter it based on what? Between ESNI and DNS over HTTPS, it shouldn’t be possible to know, which domain the traffic belongs to. Am I missing something?
Edit: Ah, I guess DNS over HTTPS isn’t enabled by default yet.
China blocks ESNI and DoH. You have to find a DoH server that is not well known and have to fake the host name.
But if you actually do that, lol
without either sparking a cyberwar or building something like the great firewall of China
IP block it. Boom there goes eSNI and DNS.
Sure, it’s crude, but again: it doesn’t have to perfect, it just needs to create havoc with Google services to push away a regular user, who has no idea what DNS even is.
A better approach though is to fine Google, with a % of revenue increasing until compliance. They’ll very quickly be incentivised to comply or shutdown.
The whole argument was about blocking search only, considering the damages suddenly completely blocking google would do. Yes, you can block google data centers completely, but dude, would that cause chaos.
A better approach though is to fine Google,
I said that multiple times already.
Worthwhile chaos. It’s exactly that fear of consequences that enables their power
Unnecessary chaos
It would have to be an EU run search engine, otherwise which government?
Nah I don’t think the government should run a search engine
Agreed.
Who do you trust more, Google or the EU?
The EU. I don’t use google search. I use a degoogled android rom firefox and only use the bare minimum of google search engines. I think the government should promote conditions where fair competition against google is actually possible.
I trust neither
That’s fine, but then who does the search engine?
You can do things decentralized, and if you look into it, the EU is happy to fund projects to create decentralized internet services. Case in point, Lemmy’s primary funder is the EU.
I use brave, but only the search
Funding an existing project like Lemmy is different than hiring people to create a lemmy
They are not just funding existing projects like Lemmy, they are actively encouraging new projects by providing funding for “open internet” style stuff.
Though yes you are right, it is different from directly hiring people, since if they did that, it would be very hard to relinquish direct control of the project. Corps can’t act solely for the common good, governments have that as their stated mission.
The government, running a service that doesn’t suck? Call me when it happens
I live in the nordics, would you like a list?
List a country with a decent population of like at least 50 mio people that competes with companies successfully and fairly. Countries with a smaller population don’t have as much of a bureaucratic overhead. But even there… where do they offer a better service in a fair competition with companies
You are posting on a social media platform solely funded by the EU.
But I’ve heard the USPS is not shit either. Publicly funded and run universities in the EU also provide the same or better service as those in the US for pennies on the dollar. Also, a lot of European railways are state run, like a lot of other public transit companies.
Also, the only space agencies that ever got to the moon were public. So were the ones that put the first man in space, and the first man on the moon, and the one that sent the first satellite into orbit and the farthest man-made object from Earth.
Look, the goverment is good at providing a good starter set of things you need for life. Infrastructure has no real competition so the infrastructure needs to be state owned since we can’t have it fail. I would look favorably if the government funded an open initiative to build a FOSS search index… but I think a search engine isn’t something like core infrastructure that can only reasonably exist once.
Besides… SearxNG is just a relay engine and if every european used it and relayed the search request to other search engines without them getting a dime I don’t think that would be fair.
Lemmy also isn’t developed by the state. It might get funding from the goverment but thats a very different thing - Core research that doesn’t have a straight up ROI is also one of the things where everyone benefits of it long term falls under something the government should do. I just don’t think the government is good at running an economical business and I can’t imagine living in a country where every company was like state-run with a top-down system. Competition is good, what we have is a lack of competition
You asked me to name a good service a government provides for a large number of people successfully. I named several. I get that you have ideological problems with goverments doing stuff, but governments not doing stuff results in what you can see in the US right now.
The original post is also not about a hypothetical ideological question, but that the US government was captured and dismantled by its corporations, and those corporations want to continue that societal rot over here. The EU cannot tolerate that.
I would argue that “bureaucratic overhead” is missing in companies at least as much as it is excess in governments. These double checks and regulations help guard against things like companies externalizing environmental and health impacts. They also act as a check on tendencies towards consolidation (or rather should). Consequently, companies appear to operate more efficiently, but we will have to pay to clean up and handle their externalities eventually.
I’m all for legislation that properly makes companies price in external effects. What I do not support is the state taking an active role in the market. Legislation is created for a reason but needs to be reformed and slimmed down once in a while. The government does not adjust fast enough imo and I think it should focus on core tasks instead of creating search engines.
Google neither competes fairly nor provides a good service. We have to endure them because they have made investment in a competitor uneconomical.
I have switched away from google mostly. Most people can do so too. Yes they do have a monopoly on search and I think the government should take steps to ensure fair competition but I don’t think the ban hammer should be wielded this lightly. If they pay the fine. Searxng is just a relay search engine and I doubt it is legal for such a big instance to use search engines as back end, have them run it for free and then have the people use Searx instead.
This is a great way to do nothing and let the problem fester. The attitude behind every rotten thing we have to deal with now.
What is the search engine your government hosts? Or maybe they do email? Do tell
Those are some pretty specific additional qualifiers. Did I hit a nerve?
I’m responsing to someone claiming governments inherently cannot be good providers of essential services, which is patently untrue.
The nordics are home to numerous government institutions, providing a variety of services that are perfectly satisfactory, and often excellent.
Are you claiming that email or search engines not being among them today, means the rest mean nothing, or that they never will be?
If the current services are anything to go by, those things getting added to the list, will be fucking great.
Who said anything about essential services? It’s the nonessential services that I have a problem with
You classify email and internet search as non-essential?
And what does how they are classified have to do with the ability/inability of government to provide them in a sufficient manner?
You claimed something that HAS HAPPENED, could not. There’s no comeback here for you to find.
You think email is a human right? It’s a box to send password resets. If websites all used one time paaswords, I wouldn’t need my email. You don’t actually send messages to people over email, do you?
We have things like Signal and Matrix to facilitate actually communicating with people.
Last time I sent an email to someone it bounced. Imagine spending time writing a letter and the mailman returns it to you
lemmy.ml with the stupid authoritarian takes again.
believing instance url means anything is beyond stupid
People from hexbear or lemmygrad are atrocious tho. ML is a bit better but still
Lemmy provincialism wow
You think I even know a single thing about this lemmy. Ml thing? I wouldn’t even remember what the url is if you hadn’t told me. It’s irrelevant. I just picked a server at random, likely the first one in the list.
What a hopeless nerd you have to be to care about the dns instance name.
So much for having a reasonably discussion. Calling me a hopeless nerd. You sure must be fun to be around.
Its not just an server name since the moderators there remove stuff that doesn’t fit their narrative and people with according ideology often are on these servers. It makes a real difference. You can check it out because users that find an instance that fits their personal beliefs create their account there and its a Marxist Leninist community. But you don’t actually seem to care.
1/6 of all lemmy users are on that server. It has been the default recommended server long enough that nothing can be taken for granted about the users of that server.
And this idea that one should give a microsecond of attention to which server to create an account on, is why mastodon is a desert that even twitter refugee don’t want to go to.
Lemmy instances should not even know the usernqmes of their users. User accounts should just be encrypted files being served.
I hate community notes, it’s a cost free way of fact checking with no accountability.
I also hate these big international tech companies. Forget too big to fail, these are too big to change. We are all techno peasants and they are our tech lords
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When you stop to think, they really don’t offer us anything other than a named place we all agreed to meet
I hate community notes, it’s a cost free way of fact checking with no accountability.
I don’t think it’s necessarily bad, but it can be harmful if done on a platform that has a significant skew in its political leanings, because it can then lead to the assumption that posts must be true because they were “fact checked” even if the fact check was actually just one of the 9:1 ratio of users that already believes that one thing.
However, on platforms that have more general, less biased overall userbases, such as YouTube, a community notes system can be helpful, because it directly changes the platform incentives and design.
I like to come at this from the understanding that the way a platform is designed influences how it is used and perceived by users. When you add a like button but not a dislike button, you only incentivize positive fleeting interactions with posts, while relegating stronger negative opinions to the comments, for instance. (see: Twitter)
If a platform integrates community notes, that not only elevates content that had any effort at all made to fact check it (as opposed to none at all) but it also means that, to get a community note, somebody must at least attempt to verify the truth. And if someone does that, then statistically speaking, there’s at least a slightly higher likelihood that the truth is made apparent in that community note than if none existed to incentivize someone to fact check in the first place.
Again, this doesn’t work in all scenarios, nor is it always a good decision to add depending on a platform’s current design and general demographic political leanings, but I do think it can be valuable in some cases. (This also heavily depends on who is allowed access to create the community notes, of course)
I get what you’re trying to say, they can incentivise accuracy and they do at least prompt people to be more accurate lest the community holds them to account. But what i don’t like is that there is no standard that the notes are held to and there is no accountability if either the original post or the community note are wrong.
I also don’t like that the social media publishers are pushing the fact checkers onto the community to be done for free, but at the end of the day they own the community note and can delete it if they don’t like it. We are doing their work for them and taking accountability away from them
Ironically, for authoritarian communist countries that recorded high rate of newly minted billionaires in the past five years, China and Vietnam are doing something right cracking down on billionaires.
It’s possible to to the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Very fair, the persecution of Jack Ma was very interesting. Haven’t heard of what happened in Vietnam though?
You shouldn’t need to be authoritarian to crack down on these systems though. I really liked what I saw Lena Khan doing in the US, what Brazil did to twitter or what Julie Inman Grant did here in Australia
wish the eu would just actually ban american companies there is really no need for them anyway
I wonder how it will work and how can be enforced. Weekly I can easily find non fact checked article on “respectable” newspaper.
If its the newspaper themselves that prioritize click baiting over fact checking, I don’t know how can we ask Google or meta to fact check their userbase
Sovereign citizens are really getting out of hand. Oh wait it’s google.
So, another “cookie banner” coming then, but this one says: “facts not checked”
If the links in the article are accurate, this doesn’t seem to be a “law”, but this thing: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-disinformation
Anyone know more about it than I could quickly find? Is this in any way legally enforceable?
Obviously, I believe that governments have no legitimate business whatsoever telling us on the Internet what we can talk about, say to each other, etc.; but I would still like to know more about this particular attempt by the EU to do so anyway, so would appreciate more information.
It’s set to become mandatory, i.e. law. According to the article.
And this isn’t a free speech issue. It’s about disinformation. Folks can say what they want, but a political ad needs to clearly be a political ad. And disinformation can’t be profit motivated.
It’s all in the article you just linked. You can say what ever you want, but if it’s bullshit, Google will need to flag it or face fines.
It isn’t law yet though, and it is the current iteration that Google won’t follow. We have yet to see how they will react if it actually becomes law. My guess is that they will, begrudgingly, bend the knee.
I said it isn’t law yet. And the article states that the law is forthcoming, and that Google does not intend to follow the forthcoming law.
Yeah, I definitely misread the article, my bad! I doubt the EU will let it stand when it’s enacted.
