European Citizens: You Stopped ACTA, But The New Copyright Directive Is Much, Much Worse: Speak Up

European Citizens: You Stopped ACTA, But The New Copyright Directive Is Much, Much Worse: Speak Up

6 years ago
Anonymous $roN-uuAfLt

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180613/00492240024/european-citizens-you-stopped-acta-new-copyright-directive-is-much-much-worse-speak-up.shtml

It's understandable that people are getting fatigued from all the various attacks on the internet, but as I've noted recently, one of the biggest threats to our open internet is the incredibly bad Copyright Directive that is on the verge of being voted on by the EU Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee. The Directive is horrible on many fronts, and we've been highlighting two key ones. First, the dangerous link tax and, second, the mandatory upload censorship filters. Each of these could have major ramifications for how the internet will function.

Incredibly, both are driven mainly by industry animus towards Google from legacy industries that feel left behind. The link tax is the brainchild of various news publishers, while the upload filters are mainly driven by the recording industry. But, of course, what should be quite obvious at this point is that both of these ideas will only make Google stronger while severely limiting smaller competitors. Google can pay the link tax. Google has already built perhaps the most sophisticated content filtering system (which still sucks). Nearly everyone else cannot. So, these moves don't hurt Google. They hurt all of Google's possible competitors (including many European companies).