Same goes for your countries own election cycle.

Now I know some nations within the EU have proportional voting but I have to ask, how difficult is it to unseat a politician? How difficult is it to do so within their party, are there the equivalent of the US primary system?

For the US, unless they are not running the chance of reelection is very high so without some sort of political shift not governed by one of our two parties is near impossible.

To be honest in France almost nobody knows who is seating at the European Parliament, we have absolutely no visibility to what is being voted, even less who voted what.

A commonly accepted view (at least around me, I might be biased) is that our representatives there are useless, whoever they are. We had about 60% abstention in 2014's elections, I think that says it all.

It should be available on the site of the european parliament as well.

Isn't it nice that the people deciding about the future of internet are doing that by passing around word documents like it's 2001? I wonder how many people here can imagine a more readable presentation of such data...

To quote J-Cole's BRACKETS

I'll write a check to the IRS, my pockets get slim

Damn, do I even have a say 'bout where it's goin'?

Some older nigga told me to start votin'

I said "Democracy is too fuckin' slow"

If I'm givin' y'all this hard-earned bread, I wanna know

Better yet, let me decide, bitch, it's 2018

Let me pick the things I'm funding from an app on my screen

Better that than letting wack congressman I've never seen

Dictate where my money go, straight into the palms of some

CDU/EPP does not help with that

> much stricter control of my country's borders

Do I need to remind which party Merkel is from? CDU

> better support for entrepreneurs

If you're a big German industrialist you'll get all the help from them, anything else? Nah

Have fun with your totalitarian nationalist utopia: if you think anything referencing technologies like "upload filters" (their simple EXISTENCE!) is about anything then enabling tools of totalitarian mass control of sheeple.

In a normal open society people are free to put whatever they want up online. Now if someone else realizes afterwards that it violates their copyright, they can ask for it to be taken down in a certain interval of time, and if you or the platform don't agree about this, you proceed to settle the dispute in court. Even DMCA and such kind of work this way: after something ends up online you can solicit it to go down!

Same with people: you allow people in, and if they do illegal stuff (this may include whatever your laws want to say, including staying too much without holding a job or creating a business, whatever, write it in your laws) you kick them out or throw them in jail.

If go the other way, it's easy for the "Overton window" to slide over you and you'll go from "innocent until proven guilty" to "guilty until you can prove innocence (or racial purity or whatever)" in a jiffy...

Once you're talking "walls" and "upload filters" you're on the path to some kind of fascism or natzysm, regardless of how you call it, and whether it's state or corporate powered (yeah, Google and Facebook will be more than happy making profits selling "upload filters" or "border control people screening technologies" just as well, they don't care where the $ comes from)...

Sorry, but you have it backwards. It isn't some "totalitarian nationalist utopia" that passed those laws, but the "European union".

And nation states are not by any definition "totalitarian". If anything, the rise of democracy in the modern world came along with the rise of the nation states.

What we had before was feudal kingdoms and autocratic empires. People revolted, spilt blood, and fought, to have their own nation states and be able to govern themselves directly, according to their will, custom, and local interests.

European Union, which nobody asked for, wasn't a grassroot movement, but a high-level top-down project (from rich industrialists, diplomats, and others post WWII) that was imposed upon Europe's nation states step by step. It has met longstanding popular reaction long before today (from the late 70s, onto Maastricht and Lisbon treaties, the Euro-constitution being discarded by popular vote again and again, referendums from different countries ignored or repeated (repleat with propaganda) until EU bureucrats got the results they wanted, etc, and so on, to today's Yellow Vests.

EU is a bureaucratic regression to empire-dom, only instead of an emperor there are private interests and bureaucrats ruling it.

And the popular vote is so removed from the actual decision making, and so diluted among dozens of states with different interests (some of which have big economies and influence, bribe, or threat a number of satellites and dependents for their political alliance) that might as well not exist.

That's what we're "enjoying" today with this vote, not some "dark" national dystopias...

(A united Europe under common government was, incidentally and ironically, the dream of a famous German firt-half of 20-th century state figure...)

Empires bring civilization and prosperity - from The Roman Empire to The British Empire and The French "Empire(s)", to the decades of "American imperialism", if you objectively weigh the good and the bad, they've all brought humanity together and pushed it further in science and technology and integration.

A combination of "empires" or "federations-of-federations", whatever you'd want to call then, and "swarms of city-states" (depending on the preference for more anarchy or more centrallization of each region) would be the ideal way to organize and develop humanity in my way.

"Nations" and "national culture" are an illusion that only brought pain and suffering: the great genocides of the first and second world war were precisely the result of thinking in terms of nations, and of distorting this concept to become "race-nation" or something else. If you just wipe the N-word form conceptual landscape and dictionaries, there's simply nothing left for evil authoritarian dictators to distort... humanity falls back to "an organic order" that naturally leads to micro-tribes and micro-city-states that organize themselves inside empire-federations ("anarchy in the small" + "hyper-integration in the large", "order powered by chaos" in a way) bringing greater freedom for us isolated individuals, because and imperial authority's hand is always far away, easy to hide from it when it threaten's your freedoms if you're smart enough and know how to dissimulate what you're actually doing (and "more freedom for the cleverest" is what you'd want anyway), whereas local power is always close and inescapable.

The whole idea of "direct democracy" and "local decision making" above micro-level (province-size tribe, city etc.) is bad imo. These "local decisions" are always crap. They only satisfy local power hungry manipulative psychopaths. You can't solve planetary climate-change and ecological destruction with local decision making!

And EU's latest legislative decisions are crap precisely because they are made from a point of weakness, the bureaucrats have retreated in a small "holdout" and they started thinking like a "nation"! If they would think more like an empire, they would think at the technical efficiencies of how exactly technically a law impacts at the scale of an empire and the timeframe of centuries (because, at least in spirit and produced knowledge, empires and imperial cultures are meant to last thousands of years) the economy, and they'd realise that a strong EU doesn't need to "squeeze some petty cash" from corporations in the short term, it plans to out-grow and out-power any imaginable corporation (because it could operate beyond the "sandbox" of monetary economy and because it would be something people could believe in, like in a god, and be 100x more motivated / loyal / "fanatical" maybe than any profit driven corporate drones).

Anyway, I just hope that once humanity gets over the current "bottleneck" with some technical breakthrouhgs (let's say... going multi-planetar and developing self-replicatable intelligent technologies), we can get our heads out of our asses and reinterpret history in a more sensible way and refashion politics accordingly. The current worldview is "OK & safe for keepings us all alive and not killing each other" in this delicate phase, but utterly suboptimal, nonsensical, and hardly worth living for imo.

No, Empires destroy regional governments, customs, and cultures, and bring upon them iron peace, of enforcing the will and customs of the winners. It's the peace of the graveyard.

And while the Roman empire is too far back, the crimes of the British, French, and other modern empires are too close for anyone to have the gal to call them "peace".

That's what jingoists and racist creeps called them in their time -- doing their "white man's burden" to bring civilization to those pesky Africans, Indians, and so on.

There have been lots of turf wars in History. None where more unjust, more unwarranted, bloodier, and more sick than the colonial wars and enslavement of over a billion people.

After the peoples in Europe fought to bring down the old empires and feudal kingdoms, and establish their own nation states, the ruling classes went for colonialism to expand their rule and build new empires, this time by exporting the exploitation globally (not that they gave up domestic exploitation completely, until the collapse of colonial empires after WWII reduced the power of the elites, and forced them to content -and deal with- their own population).

From the Belgians, who killed millions in the Congo, maimed kids, slaughtered whole villages, to the French, who killed thousands of protesters asking for their country's freedom as close as the 1960s, to the British, who gauged out prisoners eyes with spoons, and exhibited the last native survivors of their atrocities as museum pieces...

Hitler, even numerically, had nothing on those people. He just did those things to Europeans. Had he done them to Africans, Native Americans, Asians, Indians, etc, there would be people still applauding his empire and "peace" today.

And unlike the wars of the long past history, the people who ordered and performed the colonial "imperial" atrocities didn't have any excuse of not being well educated and well bread "gentlemen" of means...

The appraisals of empires is because history is written by those who killed, not the killed. And the people doing the appraisals are the descendants of the murderers.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/22/britis...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/belgiums-genoc...

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/inglorious-empire-w...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/08/india-britain-...

https://www.history.com/news/native-americans-genocide-unite...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/04/the-k...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truganini

Some "peace"...

Agree, the colonial empires did unimaginable horrors, you're probably right on this, probably they should never be praised. ...my bad for ignoring the part of their history that happened outside Europe. Maybe the word "empire" is a bad one to use, too many bloody connotations for non-europeans.

But there is to be said that the industrial revolution and its consequences would likely not have happened without the colonial empires. And, as much as we want to consider our society the consequence of the French Revolution and the independence war and all those etc., I think our true culture we live in (not the one we imagine when we go to theatre or read some lofty philosophy) that brought us the current comforts, including the laptops we type from, is the (incredibly bloody) product of industrial revolution and industrial capitalism that was fuelled by imperialism. There's where we come from, and it just is, guild / shame etc. are practically useless with respect to a past longer than a lifetime, water under the bridge etc. We just need to be wise enough to not repeat the mistakes of the past. And honest enough to take ownership of the true foundations of our society. And to use the fruits of the spilled blood as much/best as we can and make them plentiful to all - the only thing to do about spilled blood is to make bloody sure it wasn't spilled for nothing!

And:

> reduced the power of the elites, and forced them to content -and deal with- their own population

...that's another issues. I'd rather have whatever elite crops up at the top of an empire fan out and dilute their exploatation as much as possible. Modern informational society will make it much harder for far off acts of bloody exploitation to go ignored and unnoticed anyway, with a globalist culture of social responsibility, call it a "global-PC-2.0" (hopefully less ridiculous than the 1.0 version of "political correctness") in lack of a better word.

These are the challenges I care about: (1) how to create a "globalism 2.0" that economically works (maybe the whole dystribute-everything and crypto things can be put to good use here) for the best and also produces "global culture" (the 90's brought some mildly successful examples of this), and (2) how to create some "global-PC-2.0" or "distributed global eco social responsibility" (this will need some true innovation, and it will need truly un-censorable and anonymous communication infrastructure too as a substrate to work on - think "global channels that could broadcast live and no nation state have the power to shut them down even if they discover it breaks their (local) laws").

Isn't the European Parliament supposed to be this entity ?

The real problem is that if you have a single entity, then that entity can easily be corrupted by those who have the means to (read: money). This problem is unsolvable because those who have or profit from this power are also the people who get to decide if we want to do something about it.

I guess traditional content producers are not people, then.

It's a complex world.

No, corporations aren’t people.

Not just "this instance", it's a general problem we have with our democratic system. It's the cause of many problems/bad actions, not just this one.

The solution is to reform the democratic system to be more, well, democratic. There are a bunch of ideas out there. I'm not really holding my breath though :-/

Whenever you start to feel encroached upon by the new world order, the best thing to do is build another one right on top of it.

Build systems which route around this damage. It's the only way to be sure.

The MEPs didn't care.

There are elections soon. But people will just vote for all the usual candidates, so why would they care?

This is just one topic out of hundreds. And most people care more about the road in front of there house than about something as abstract as freedom of speech. Sadly.

It could be an independent non-profit allied to other non-profits like EFF. When one of these non-profits wants to run a campaign against a bad law being enacted they can run a "campaign". They can explain why it is bad, just as they currently do, but as well as asking people to write to their local government representative they can also ask for donations to the campaign. These donations would then be used by professional lobbyists to lobby in the same way large organisations do.

It's probably a stupid idea, but I feel like it has the germ of something useful.

Of course people shouldn't just be able to join this organization and take over the reigns, so they would need to be voted in. Let's say each region of a country will have a couple of candidates and regular votes are held on who will get to join the organization for a limited time. With this organization in place, we will finally be able to truly voice the people's opinion and act on their behalf!

There is something though about that idea that I cannot pinpoint. It somehow feels vaguely familiar. If I could just figure out how...

What is the third-party service doing here besides adding extra overhead?

1. Establishing and consolidating a strong lobbying organisation. There are some NGOs and other interested parties (e.g. companies like Google or supporting organisations like Wikipedia), but they are not united. A united body brings coordination and single, quite more substantial, budget. Then you can efficiently deploy: 1) lawyers 2) accredited lobbyists in the corridors of Brussels 3) public relations professionals running far reaching campaigns.

2. Voting in the EU elections. There are various parties which are consistent in their opposition to such laws (e.g. "Pirate" parties, some Greens and Liberals). It might be a difficult choice, as there may be other positions of such parties you disagree with, depending on your political views. However, such voting could be considered as "tactical" i.e. with a goal to increase their presence or force coalitions, rather than driven by the desire to see them fully in power. It is a question of your priorities.

[1] https://edri.org/about/

https://www.ch.ch/en/demokratie/political-rights/referendum/

I consider myself lucky !

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

Are there good polls measuring popular backing for (or indifference to) these bills?

Could it be that EU regulatory bodies are normal government functions that run the risk of normal governance-related dysfunction and require the usual controls like limited power, rule of law, oversight, and less-than-worldwide jurisdiction?

Our lives are increasingly dominated by big entities, and the political ones are often small fish compared to giant international corporations that can play smaller political entities off against each other (example: Amazon headquarters).

The idea of limiting the size of political entities has merit, but it will backfire unless you also limit the size of economic entities. (And you need to do this first or possibly somehow simultaneously, because once you reduced the size of political entities, it may no longer be possible to limit the size of the economic entities.)

If you have a small business that only operates in New York, they don't care what the law in California is, it doesn't affect them. Walmart and Amazon care, because it does. And what they want is for the law to be the same everywhere, and for that law to be the one that benefits them. So they get that law passed by the central government. Then they take over everywhere because a) all the laws are the same, so there is no opportunity for a local business to carve out a local niche, b) the laws being the same increases economies of scale and lowers compliance costs for huge companies that operate everywhere but has no advantage for companies that only operate locally, so it increases the scale advantage of being large, and c) larger entities are the ones large enough to have a voice in the central government, whereas local entities have a stronger voice in local governments, so the laws that do get passed centrally are the ones that benefit the large players over the smaller ones.

We also have really bad central policies like the federal tax laws that make it so that when companies return profits to shareholders they pay heavy taxes but companies that retain the profits or use them to buy other companies do not, which naturally promotes mergers and consolidation and hoarding cash which then becomes a lobbying piggybank for huge companies.

So your theory is that we need a large government to rein in large entities. But the large government is already owned by the large entities. It isn't reining them in, and it won't. But the smaller governments could do so locally if they weren't being preempted at the federal level -- good luck being a huge conglomerate when every state is passing laws to give their local businesses a different advantage over you.

Sure, companies can use regulatory harmonization to their advantage, but they can also use tax and labour law competition between localities to their advantage.

First, it still can be. If the US has one set of laws and the EU has another set, a conglomerate has two sets of laws to navigate. That is still much easier for them than having dozens in each place.

Second, companies do their "harmonization" game with treaties as well, which of course only works by having a sufficiently powerful central government that can be controlled to sign onto such treaties and use their power to get other governments to do the same, using many of the same problematic shenanigans that happen at the federal level to create bad federal laws.

> Sure, companies can use regulatory harmonization to their advantage, but they can also use tax and labour law competition between localities to their advantage.

But that has nothing to do with entity size, and in fact is the opposite. If one state has advantageous laws then local companies there have an advantage over companies of any size that operate elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in the real world, tax havens are tiny jurisdictions for very good and well-understood reasons and the companies operating out of them are not in any meaningful sense "local", and the downward pressure on workers' rights is much stronger when multinationals can credibly threaten to relocate to one of several other jurisidictions with relevant manufacturing industries if new labour laws are passed locally rather than by a large trading bloc. And navigating 100 sets of copyright regulations rather than two is a challenge for a startup but something Amazon has ample resources to do where there's sufficient money in it to be worth bothering.

Local regulatory innovation gives us a lot more Google Bermudas and goods exported from Special Economic Zones designed specifically to privilege their patron corporations than local search engines and consumer electronics industries.

Tax havens are nonsense created by governments that want to impose taxes that aren't actually on anything.

If you want to tax companies who employ workers where you are, impose payroll tax. If you want to tax companies who sell to your people, impose VAT. If you want to tax companies that operate facilities, impose property tax.

If you want to tax nothing, tax "profit" and then watch how the "profit" is promptly removed from your jurisdiction. Because if the profit is a result of something that is actually connected to your jurisdiction in some way then you're really just taxing that thing and calling it income tax, but if it isn't then the company has no reason not to just declare the "profit" as having happened somewhere else where the rate is lower.

And then the local business can't do that, which is why those types of taxes should cease to exist in favor of the ones that tax something that actually happens where you are.

> and the downward pressure on workers' rights is much stronger when multinationals can credibly threaten to relocate to one of several other jurisidictions with relevant manufacturing industries if new labour laws are passed locally rather than by a large trading bloc.

This, again, has nothing to do with multinationals, and is in fact the opposite.

If California has more stringent worker protections than Texas this benefits local businesses in Texas. It only benefits multinational businesses if they move to Texas, and only to the extent that they move to Texas -- and if they move their entire operation to Texas then they're a local business and not a multinational.

Meanwhile what a multinational company can do that a local one can't is hire people in Asia or South America, which is a serious problem for a local business in Texas who is trying to compete with that multinational and suddenly has a bunch of requirements imposed by legislators elected by California who neither the business, nor its local employees who lose their jobs, actually wanted.

> And navigating 100 sets of copyright regulations rather than two is a challenge for a startup but something Amazon has ample resources to do where there's sufficient money in it to be worth bothering.

Which is why central control is problematic. You should only have to comply with the laws in effect where you actually are, so that you only have to comply with 100 sets of copyright law if you physically have operations in 100 different jurisdictions.

Look at what happened when people tried to introduce Linux in the public sector in early 2000s at regional level - Microsoft promptly bought up anyone who could be bought, country by country, with discounts and (likely) bribes.

Sigh, how many times do we have to confute this lie?

The real power is in the European Council, aka national governments assembled.

That's the body that sets the agenda. The Commission takes its marching orders from the Council, then goes to the Parliament to figure out what it will accept.

The Commission is a smokescreen, it's your national governments who desperately wanted this. They pushed and pushed until they got it, because it benefits the national press -- whose support they need for re-election. Commissioners don't care, their jobs have different rules.

the issue is too much power too far from constituents and with little balances to prevent easy lobbying of few key people - it's basically broken at its core.

"just vote for different people next time"

yeah as if people don't say one thing and then do another. and once in power a rotation is simply too long, searching a candidate by trial and error to weed out the liars* would require a lifetime of committment, meanwhile the young generation would outweigh all the voting of those that have been keeping track of the politician scores by sheer demographic.

*spoiler alert: they all lie to some extent, or "compromise" if you prefer. but it's easy to fool voters on technical issues like these while gaining consensus with the popular topics of taxes, jobs and housing.

I’ll repeat: the problem lies with national governments asking for bad laws to be made, and then with MEPs for not voting them down (this one was very close, to be fair). That would have happened at any level. Do you know how many stupid decisions are taken at town-council level?

Democracy is difficult and imperfect, but it’s still the best we got.

(Yes, something like direct democracy would fix this. But exiting the EU wouldn't get you that)

> A person contravenes this subsection if the person makes pornographic material available on the internet to persons in the United Kingdom on a commercial basis other than in a way that secures that, at any given time, the material is not normally accessible by persons under the age of 18.

> [A notice that the section above is being contravened] must[ ... ]require the internet service provider[...] to prevent persons in the United Kingdom from being able to access the offending material using the service it provides;

That's hardly better for the Internet, and copyrighted material can _already_ be blocked by Court order - it's a small step to making that more widespread. Leaving the EU does not _necessarily_ solve this (it just moves the problem).