Over the course of several years, EU legislators introduced a set of extensive regulatory frameworks that seemingly had the goal of censorship and hardcore copyright enforcement. Websites, mostly based in US, freaked and pumped out a mass of bombastic headlines, promising everything from the end of the internet to shutdown of major content aggregators. So, what's going on, what was the motivation for introducing these legislative boundaries and what can you do about it?
Well, the subtitle of this page kind of ruins the reveal but that's pretty much it – US tech giants have (had) unbounded authority in the EU digital market to the point they effectively evaded all copyright enforcement, siphoning off money to California and sharing none of it with users. Worse yet, the tech giants would stubbornly refuse to cooperate and thumbed their noses at EU. Just take a look at Microsoft, which was consecutively punished in the amount of several billion Euros but still didn't want to comply, prompting one EU legislator to decry, "Fines don't seem to be having any effect on Microsoft". Think about how big of a monopoly a US tech giant has to have in order to pay up such huge fines and still keep doing the same thing. Think about the sheer arrogance for a company – any company! – to do the same.
Article 13 effectively states that EU users have the right to demand all profits earned by a company from their content, for example such as by serving ads alongside their content. Before Article 13, tech giants would plop down Terms of Service that served them and shafted the users; Article 13 finally gave a legal foothold for users to fight back, basically serving as an internet Bill of Rights. Before Article 13, Facebook could take your selfie and serve an ad alongside it to 5,000 of your friends and earn, say, a cent from each ad view or $50 in total, of which you'd see zero percent. With Article 13, Facebook users can finally sue the company if it refuses to share profits made off of their content, with the most likely outcome that such users will simply get banned from the platform. This shows the extent of hypocrisy of these tech giants that claim to want to make the world a better place – they earn billions of dollars through their users but never share any of it back, even though content creators are entitled to money earned from their content, can sue for damages and are guaranteed to win. Tech giants will rather spend all that money developing content filters and extensive censorship tools than be generous to users.
Article 11 closes a similar loophole, this time with Google News that would take a link to a news article, such as one from BBC, and show ads next to the link, effectively earning more money from the article than BBC that had to invest money to create it. The problem is that nobody knows how to monetize content online because internet isn't self-sustainable monetarily. Take this website for example: I actually self-fund it from personal sources but that's what allows me to have high quality content without ads or user tracking. I believe other websites should scale down just like I did until they get enough users and then listen to the audience that would buy a subscription, donate or just buy adjunct products rather than pump out random content. In this way, websites could sustainably grow alongisde their niche audiences rather than gambling for an immediate return on investment through infringement of privacy and sanity.
Internet is not meant to be a few monolithic companies, services or products that host billions of users and defy sovereign countries. This opens us all up to hacking attacks and loss of privacy when those companies inevitably stop investing in cyber-security and grow beyond all oversight. It's only through a mass of small content creators and diversified services that we can make internet a safer and more lucrative space for everyone. In my opinion, all websites should be transparent to how they're making their money and you as a user should demand to know how the website, service or product is funded or refuse using it. In this way, only the most transparent content creators would remain and everyone would have to expose their funding influences that often dictate design and content choices.
EU legislators announced they'll be closing more legal loopholes through which US tech giants have been earning ungodly amounts of money. US legislators announced similar laws too, though their earlier attempts to push these through (SOPA and PIPA) failed due to tech giants launching mass hysteria campaigns to block them. The truth is, US tech giants are completely unregulated and do as they please online, creating their own mini-monopolies and using mainstream media outlets to push the propaganda how they're poor fellows who just want to make the world a better place being censored by big, evil legislators.
Facebook doesn't have to be so big as to be untamable but it's intentionally made that way so that the owner can shrug and say: "Security is not a problem that you ever fully solve". That's an actual quote by the way, note the sly neurolinguistic programming phrase "security is not a problem" that's meant to put listeners at ease. No business in the world would be let off the hook with that kind of excuse; why should US tech giants be an exception? It's time for tech giants to start taking some responsibility and grow up, giving power to their users rather than their CEOs.
You don't have to be a slave content creator for tech giants that will make some Californian CEO rich, you can strike your own path and make your own platform. Refuse to participate in this money extraction scheme where you're bound to a platform and don't have any say in how it works. Find an alternative to all tech giant services, as piddling as it might seem. Pump out quality content and keep doing it until you get a following. Build your own reputation, endorse creators you find fitting and just keep going.
Create your own service and legitimately make the world a better place, not through ads or privacy invasion but by offering a simple, clean and straightforward service or product pruned of excessive overhead that's so customary with tech giants. You can actually make a much better product than any tech giant, it's only that you'll have to develop your reputation over the course of years before it starts making a profit. Just have a mustard seed of faith in yourself and keep working on it; you'll eventually be able to move mountains.