There seems to be a growing reluctance to accept that a person or a group being allowed to exist on a platform does not in any way serve as an endorsement of that person or group. I believe that the copyright legislation in Europe, for example, has very little to do with copyright, and very much to do with holding platforms accountable for the content that their users produce. The net result is the platforms necessarily invoke nuance-less strategies for sanitizing the content according to a narrow band of what is acceptable.
Europe's Article 13 and its companion will make sure that NEVER happens.
The EU audience merely has to be willing to tolerate the latency of being served content from outside of the EU.
The only answer that the EU has to that approach, is to institute a Chinese style blockade and limit access to the Internet (it would become something else, the EUnet, with restricted access to the Internet). The question is whether EU citizens will tolerate that next, required step. Without an EU wall, they can't stop the trivial dodging of their laws by setting up services outside of their jurisdiction and serving to EU users. The US market is profitable enough to trivially support serving to EU users without any regard for making money there (Facebook could operate profitably with 2.2 billion global monthly actives with only monetizing the US market; Google could serve its search engine to a global audience profitably by only monetizing the US).
> How is that inconsistent? Both things are a law.
On the one hand, Article 13 compromises the online publishing capability of anyone (either individuals or businesses) who lack the ability to hire both large legal departments and large developer teams who can implement content filters. It entrenches the power of the 800lb media gorillas and kneecaps everyone else. It also enables censorship systems by crippling the capability of individuals and small hosting businesses to publish material at will.
But on the other hand, the GDPR is a law with serious teeth that takes power back from those 800lb gorillas that rely on unethical bulk-surveillance business models. It empowers individuals to regain some privacy should they choose to exercise that power. Businesses with ethical user-fee business models have nothing to fear from the GDPR, because for them, the protection of customer data from advertisers isn't an undue hardship. It's a core feature of their service. And let's not forget that the GDPR actually has quite broad exceptions for news agencies. The GDPR can't be used as a censorship tool in the same way that Article 13 can.
I thought Reddit has never been profitable?
The whole GDPR, Content Filtering thing seems like a massive opportunity for a savvy, unregulated South American, African or Asian company to take advantage of.
Why lump privacy protections together with upload filters as if they're both bad. If you service doesn't abide by the GDPR, I'd try to avoid it. On the other hand, upload filters are a disaster and not at all comparable to GDPR, not in terms of what they do to the end-user, not the burden they place on service providers.
For what it's worth, it would only have to be out side Europe. If a firm has no office in Europe, it would be difficult for Europe to enforce its laws. Extradition requires it be a crime in both countries.