It's also a form of control.

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

> There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them.

I guess it’s true that some people in positions of power view themselves as rules over others, but I always thought that most people here in the western world held the view that the government exists to serve the people, not the other way around. Is this not the case?

There is plenty of things the government can spend their time on that is actually beneficial to its people, including:

- Regulating industry where necessary to protect employees and the public from harm; physical, economical, psychological, privacy, or otherwise.

- Negotiate with other countries so that mutually beneficial agreements are reached with regards to import and export of goods, as well as immigration, emigration and travel relating to the exchange of labor forces.

- Creating and enforcing laws for how the public is allowed to act so as not to cause harm. Things like laws that prohibiting DUI etc.

- Coming up with ways to protect and help people that get sick or have permanent illnesses or handicaps, to ensure that everyone can have quality of life.

That is what government should be about, not about control for the sake of control itself.

> but I always thought that most people here in the western world held the view that the government exists to serve the people, not the other way around. Is this not the case?

You can say that it exists to serve people but then you have to say which people exactly :) Because I think the willingness of the government to serve people is directly proportional to the depth of the pockets of the people in question.

But if this process like most things has diminishing returns, then wouldn't after a while government use up all the "easy wins", leaving only things to do that have a mix of good benefits and bad side effects. And once the best of these things were done, the remaining options would be more and more "bad side effects" and less and less "good benefits".

I appreciate the Dr. Ferris quote. It's pretty scary to see so much of Atlas became reality.

>The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.

This just isn't true. The rest is garbage in, garbage out.

Such an unrelated libertarian quote that gets blindly posted and blindly upvoted. The EU is having a problem with the US companies running the show over their internet space. They don't intend to lock ordinary people up with this law. So you think it' be better for the companies to hold unlimited power and control people? That'd be much worse than moderate and sensible government regulations.

An apt quote indeed.

- Ayn Rand.

Does the EU have a problem with wealthy donors? I've heard this criticism levelled against US politicians and it's justified, but in this case I think it might just be sheer ignorance on the part of the EU legislators.

Not in the same way as in the US, and I don't think campaign contributions are a thing, at least not at the same level as in the US.

But there are many, many lobbyists active in the EU, and some of them have a surprising amount of influence over politicians. There has even been a case where two different parties, independently from each other, introduced the exact same bill, which had been written by a lobbyist.

What leverage do they use for lobbying, if campaign contributions are off the tables?

Bribery. I'm only half joking.

There's lots of dark international money slushing around out there that happens to make it into someone's wife's friend's company.

This is one mechanism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)

The art of lobbying doesn't have anything to do with contributions. They will typically donate equally to all viable candidates and sitting politicians to avoid becoming anyone's enemy.

The leverage they use is their relationships with other politicians to engage in vote trading.

They are still (ostensibly) the subject matter experts so politicians defer to them. This in itself isn’t a problem: they should defer to experts on complex matters. And often these experts are organised in industry interest groups. The problem arises when opposing view-points are downplayed.

In the current case this is done because the industry interest groups backing the legislation are predominantly European content rights owners. Whereas the interest groups opposing the legislation appear mostly organised by non-EU groups, and therefore thus are less of a concern for EU legislators, and potentially don’t have the same kind of immediate access to them.

The politicians are still very well connected with the industry. For example there was somebody who retired from the EU Commission a while ago and immediately went to the board of a company or something. The same shit as in the US just a bit less extreme.

Everywhere has this phenomenon in some guise, it's only the US that's self absorbed enough to think it is unique.

That's essentially a religious argument. Please provide evidence for your claim.

> That's essentially a religious argument.

?

Corporations exist

That's not much of an argument. Have a nice day.

Don’t know how common it is, but it has happened

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_cash_for_influence_scan...

That's outright bribery. Lobbying usually implies that it's legal.

Not quite as brazenly corrupt as it is in the US but it is still a huge problem.

That is certainly how they are often used in the America and the West today, but always seems a gross exaggeration. For example, regulations against child labor.

Note that Article 2 point 4(b) appears to entirely excludes from Article 13 rules organizations that are "small" or "micro," which, unless I am mistaken, means organizations that have less than 50 employees and €10m turnover or balance sheet value.

I imagine that Google Europe and Facebook Europe will just slice themselves up into a swarm of subsidiaries that each have less than 50 employees and less than €10m turnover.

Don't they already have a corporation in Ireland with almost no employees and no profits due to selling licensed software made by the parent company at cost?

They employ many thousands of people in Ireland. So many that they've driven up property prices and rents beyond what the natives can afford in Dublin. Many employees are immigrants, for language reasons (Customer support, etc,) and programmers from East Europe. They typically service Europe, Mid-East, African markets from Ireland and sometimes elsewhere too.Brian at Netsso, worried about link tax, etc.