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Noting the EU's horrible effort at providing a comment form, Mike Masnick and company have constructed their own page to help you tell EU legislators to not screw up the online world.
The Copia Institute is a new, digital-native think tank from Mike Masnick and the team behind Techdirt.
Europe is considering new regulations that threaten to undermine the internet as we know it.
The European Commission is asking the public critical questions about the future of our online world, but these questions are buried throughout a lengthy consultation survey that will probably make your eyes water. We need you to tackle the survey and make your voice heard. It's not easy, so we're here to help.
Go ahead, take a look at the public consultation. It's got five pages of oblique questions and too much smallprint for anyone's taste. But it's really all asking one thing: WHAT ARE THE ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF SERVICE PROVIDERS IN THE DIGITAL WORLD? Our survey survival guide helps you overcome the bureaucratic barrier and answer that question, because it's at risk of being ignored.
This isn't just for European companies--it impacts everyone online.
[...] Don't let a bad survey bore you into silence.
Thanks to one confusing and poorly-designed survey, the consultation is receiving very little response from the people most affected by this important issue--entrepreneurs, service providers, innovators, and the public. Don't let lawmakers shake the foundations of the internet without your input. The public consultation closes on December 30th.
Okay, are you ready? Take a deep breath, open up our survey survival guide, and make your voice heard.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by greatbigfatcattats on Saturday December 12 2015, @12:08PM
I'm certain that this has been said many times before, but... The fact that this kind of story keeps coming up time and time again indicates, to me at least, that the illustrious "they," whether that is government or the large corporations/ISPs, want the kind of control these things hint at. We can fill out what I assume can only be a purposefully badly-designed survey (not that it's *too* bad, actually, but it could be a lot better) now, sure. And maybe in March next year. August? Well... okay, I guess. November?
cba.
It seems to me like "they" are just waiting for this topic to get boring, buried. I don't want it to, and I suspect nobody else on this site does either. But of course, the normal average denizen of the internet won't care soon, assuming they don't already. They'll still have their youtube and facebook (and their porn, but don't tell anyone.) Instead of countering their d̶e̶m̶a̶n̶d̶s̶ d̶e̶s̶i̶r̶e̶s̶ p̶r̶o̶p̶o̶s̶a̶l̶s̶ surveys, is it time we, and I hesitate to use this word, 'attack' back? Can we set the rules down, and have them answer our questions, take our standards-compliant cross-platform user-friendly surveys?
A compromise needs to be reached. As nice as it would be to return to the digital world within which we each likely emerged from, the Wild West of unfiltered and unmonitored activity, the free (as in speech) transmission of knowledge and data we all know and love, we cannot expect this to continue into the future in the same way it did in ye olde days of l0re. Like a language, the internet and the rules that effectively enable its existence, are defined by the way it's used. Currently, the internet is being abused by a minority, and the rules that govern it are smudgy and blurred at best, non-existent or over-reaching at worst. We don't want to put a band-aid over the itchy lump, we need to cure the cancerous growth.
The internet as an entity has a problem. We can either sit back and let those with the IRL power and no technical know-how sit in a room around a big golden table decide how they're going to eventually gain control over the mysterious digital realm, or we can come together and work something out that solves the issues we face today with the least impact on what we each know are the fundamentals of this digital world in which we inhabit.
I don't have the answers, but I'm sure that together, both we (the residents), the corporations and the governments, can actually work together for once to, primarily, define what actually needs to be solved, and then to actually solve it.