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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @11:00AM
i'm sure as hell not volunteering the fascists my email address
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @02:44PM
Get a free one
... from somewhere which doesn't need your phone number to "keep your account safe"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @11:19AM
so its the EU, thats trying to wreck the net, eh?
And some faggot, that is somehow related to "a new, digital-native think tank"... wants me to write them?
I had no intention to do that anyway, since this initiative to me looks like PR. Hell, its all PR.
The rich and the clueless have fucked the Net over, they rule offline as well.
Q: WHAT ARE THE ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF SERVICE PROVIDERS IN THE DIGITAL WORLD?
A: same as they were under the Tsar, report anything suspicious to the uniformed werewolves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @11:20AM
What actual threat is there here? Are they trying to censor the Internet, get rid of net neutrality, or something else? It seems like there would be some indication in the summary as to how, specifically, they're trying to screw up the Internet.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @11:57AM
...isn't bad at all, though they might wise up on their use of javascript.
These are some of the questions asked, with simple Yes, No, I don't know answer options:
Do you think that online platforms should ensure, as regards their own activities and those of the traders that use them, more transparency in relation to:
a) information required by consumer law (e.g. the contact details of the supplier, the main characteristics of products, the total price including delivery charges, and consumers' rights, such as the right of withdrawal)?
b) information in response to a search query by the user, in particular if the displayed results are sponsored or not?
c) information on who the actual supplier is, offering products or services on the platform
d) information to discourage misleading marketing by professional suppliers (traders), including fake reviews?
e) is there any additional information that, in your opinion, online platforms should be obliged to display?
(500 chars input field)
Have you experienced that information displayed by the platform (e.g. advertising) has been adapted to the interest or recognisable characteristics of the user?
Do you find the information provided by online platforms on their terms of use sufficient and easy-to-understand?
... and so on -- pretty clear to me.
According to the thinktank [copia.is], sponsored by Google and Andreessen Horowitz among others, the above questions "signal an interest in creating heavy-handed regulatory regimes surrounding such services, interfering with their ability to innovate and serve their users ... The desire to regulate the relationship between online services and the businesses that use them disregards contract litigation and other private dispute resolution mechanisms that are extensively and effectively used by these parties. ... Data portability is a principle that should be supported and encouraged among online services, but strict regulatory requirements will inhibit innovation in this area, not promote it. "
Yadda-yadda-yadda.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @02:25PM
Finally, a digital-native think tank. Brand new, too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @06:47PM
Long Live the Internet! But FUCK the WEB!
No matter what you do information will find a way to be free.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @08:23PM
So let's stipulate that the europeans will wreck the net, for some value of wreckage, and some value of the net.
Can they do it to the whole thing? Enh ... not really. They can wreck their own net.
So what happens next? Everyone sees how stupidly they wrecked it, and makes fun of them. Maybe some podium-banging about how other countries mustn't follow the european mistakes.
Great. We need an example to point at.
So please, euro-friends, wreck that there net. Wreck it good and hard. The rest of the world needs this.
Take one for the team!
(Score: 1) by Caballo Negro on Thursday December 17 2015, @10:54AM
As a European, I finally got around to filling it in (not out, because I'm a European). I suspect I did not give the answers that non-Europeans (and particularly non-European corporations) may have liked me to in every case.
(Strangely, one does not have to have an account on the server in order to submit, but, it you want technical support, you must set up an account.)