The more the EU’s impotence on the global stage is revealed, the more totalitarian it gets at home. From Nick Corbishley at nakedcapitalism.com:
The “Chat Control” law threatens to transform the Internet into an even more centrally controlled, surveilled environment. And it could be a legal reality by October.
Regular readers are by now familiar with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which we have covered on several occasions since July 2023. For those who aren’t, a quick primer: the DSA imposes a legal requirement on very large online platforms (VLOPs), and very large online search engines (VLOSEs) to take prompt action against illegal content hosted on their platforms, either by removing it, blocking it, or providing certain information to the authorities concerned.
VLOPs and VLOSEs are also required to take action against risks that extend beyond illegal content, including vague threats to “civic discourse”, “electoral processes” and “public health”. It is down to the Commission or national authorities to define what those threats might entail. This is where the EU’s mass censorship regime began to take form.
The overarching goal of the DSA is to combat — i.e., suppress — mis- and disinformation online, not just in Europe but potentially across the world. It is part of a broader trend of Western governments and UN institutions pushing to censor information on the Internet as they gradually lose control over key narrative threads.
Platforms that fall foul of the Act face potentially ruinous fines of up to 6% of their global annual turnover. As such, it’s probably safe to assume that they err on the side of caution, deleting content that could be considered harmful, even when it is entirely lawful. So begins the slippery slope of systemic online censorship.
As retired German judge Manfred Kölsch warned in an op-ed in Berliner Zeitung, the DSA not only poses an existential threat to the freedom of speech in Europe, it contravenes many of the EU’s own laws on freedom of expression and information:
A careful look behind the facade of the rule of law reveals that the DSA knowingly undermines the right to freedom of expression and information guaranteed by Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 5 of the Basic Law (Germany’s written constitution, agreed by the allies back in 1949 when the first post-war government was established in West Germany).
At least they’ll be busy monitoring for wrongthink.
Not much else is going on in the backwater.
As they say in Europe, Allahu Ackbar.