> Turkey can kiss EU membership ambitions goodbye.
Why? Single EU countries have widespread censoring infrastructure in place and IP-based bans are common and normal. They are just not at stupid to ban hi-profile sites yet.
Please note the common pattern of the justifications: censorship starts often with "terrorism/children abuse/pornography", then covers "counterfeit goods/media", finally "libel/hate speech".
Those are almost cases of illegal content being blocked or removed. Classified information, copyright violations. No one is having opinions or new repressed. Turkey is proactively silencing dissent that has no other channel. PM Erdogan was caught red-handed taking bribes and it seems the Turkish MSM is already intimidated into quiescence and now they try to block whole sections of the internet to hide the truth.
In all these country, ‘hate speech’ is generally clearly limited to destructive and politically irrelevant things: nostalgics of the Third Reich are illegal out of respect for history, not because the government expects to be over-turned in the short term. Ireland and UK might have some more recent problems with ‘The Troubles’, but both sides can freely exchange political ideas (as long as its not to call for terrorism-grade violence). I’m not seeing Netherlands on that list, but a decade ago, they had an… interesting discussion on what to do with a political party that wanted to abolish sexual majority or ‘specism’ i.e. make pedophilia and bestiality legal. I’m fairly happy under-age children were not meant to have an open access to those arguments to be made believed “this is OK”.
I don’t have a problem with any of these. I have even less a problem when every country on your list has had recent, vivid debate on extreme speeches, and tolerated everything that wasn’t clearly in categories that unambiguously deteriorate political discourse.
I understand that this might shock some Americans who don’t understand it, but the overwhelming majority of Europeans would not even hesitate a second to refuse US-like free speech were anything goes, and Koch brothers finance everything, from blatant hurtful lies, attacks on science and fuel race-hatred.
I fully expect that this comment, like every similar one on Hacker News I made prior, to be heavily down-voted by people who have no issue with the form of what I say (polite, argued and relevant) but disagree with my opinion. Doing so goes against the principles of this forum, and you should be ashamed to think about it.
> This proposal, which the Italian Parliament is currently debating, provides, among other things, a requirement to all websites to publish, within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image.
> Unfortunately, the law does not require an evaluation of the claim by an impartial third judge - the opinion of the person allegedly injured is all that is required, in order to impose such correction to any website.
> Conclusion: Today, Internet content in Europe is controlled by three groups of factors: region-wide organizations (the EU), individual countries, and companies (e.g., ISPs, search engines). While governments have been extremely active in promoting filtering technologies for child pornography and surveillance technologies for copyright infringement, they are increasingly finding that they can achieve their aims through indirect means. Rather than passing explicit regulations, governments have pressured companies to voluntarily self-regulate content, be it pornography, hate speech, or content that infringes upon copyrights. Such pressures show a creeping tendency toward the second- and third-generation controls found elsewhere.
Very well said. This, and the EU's encouraging the fascist overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian president has made me strongly opposed to the current form of European 'Union'.
Sigh. Part of the Maidan movement consists of militant fascists, yes. But that doesn't make the whole movement fascist and neither does it make the overthrowing of Yanukowich a fascist coup.
I know a bunch of Ukraininans (ethnic and Ukrainian-speaking), and they are extremely opposed to being any part of the "Russian sphere". Those 80 years of subjugation are not easily forgotten.
Ukraine was at a once-in-a-hundred years decision point and it was very clear that staying away from Russia was not possible with him in power.
Just because you are democratically elected doesn't mean that you can single-handedly decide to do anything you want. Or do you think Yanukowich was elected on a "screw the EU we-ll go Russia"-ticket?
As was pointed out at a UN Security Council meeting regarding the Ukraine crisis, the government wasn't overthrown. Yanukovych just left, first out of Kyiv, then out of the country, and that directly after signing the accord that would have settled all of this. And of course, all of that after actually killing many of the non-violent protestors.
He's probably referring to considerable fascist elements in the Maidan movement. The Right Sector[1] and Freedom[2] (formerly called Social-National Party of Ukraine). The former is "just" fascist, and the latter is neo-nazi.
Why? Single EU countries have widespread censoring infrastructure in place and IP-based bans are common and normal. They are just not at stupid to ban hi-profile sites yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Germany http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_France http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Italy#In... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Denmark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Repu... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Unit...
Please note the common pattern of the justifications: censorship starts often with "terrorism/children abuse/pornography", then covers "counterfeit goods/media", finally "libel/hate speech".