Open Consultation Begins On Italy's Internet Bill of Rights 95
Anita Hunt (lissnup) writes: Hot on the heels of Brazil's recent initiative in this area, Italy has produced a draft [PDF] Declaration of Internet Rights, and on Monday opened the bill for consultation on the Civici [Italian] platform, a first in Europe. "[A]s it is now, it consists of a preamble and 14 articles that span several pages. Topics range from the 'fundamental right to Internet access' and Net Neutrality to the notion of 'informational self-determination.' The bill also includes provisions on the right to anonymity and tackles the highly debated idea of granting online citizens a 'right to be forgotten.' Measures are taken against algorithmic discriminations and the opacity of the terms of service devised by 'digital platform operators' who are 'required to behave honestly and fairly' and, most of all, give 'clear and simple information on how the platform operates.'"
'right to be forgotten' (Score:1, Insightful)
That means censorship. Unacceptable.
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Depends,
when the first thing that shows up in a google search about you is a court filing about you driving drunk when in college and 21 and you know HR will google you, you may start to wonder 10 years later how many of those times you got turned down were due to them wanting to "play safe". As a matter of fact, people have become much more controlled in their social media, some may say "self censoring".
You see, internet never forgets, even when throwing out irrelevant information is part of the process of
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What's your view on the enthusiastic hard worker who can't get a job because they only jobs they are capable of doing are already being done by someone in Africa, who can work for a couple of dollars a day?
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So you are saying ther are plenty of jobs? Why does the unemployment rate fluctuate? Surely the number of lazy people is a constant. Are you seriously suggesting that there is nobody who can't get a job?
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And companies will keep doing their usual: "will employ a debt-laden, highly-skilled workhorse for pennies, you're desperate anyway" game.
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I have no idea how to do that
Yes you do. But you have eliminated it as an option because you think it is humanitarian. Besides, there is no reason why people "starve" in first world countries. Between Government and Charity and plain old "will work for food" signs (which are lies for the most part), there is very little chance of someone starving. There is, however, a much higher chance of me inhaling second hand Pot Smoke walking through our downtown park though. It seems, your "starving" people are too stoned to realize they are hung
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Now I'm confused. You're fine with people mooching off the state now?
Well, they're not. They get government handouts. If we're giving handouts to those who don't work and can't work anyway, I see no reason this makes a difference.
Having been unemployed a few times myself, and not spent any money on pot, and not been able to get a job I was overqualified for, I kinda feel that your projudices aren't based on
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You're fine with people mooching off the state now?
Reality doesn't mean I agree or disagree. The reality is, there are PLENTY(perhaps too many) of programs designed to keep people from starving to death. This is the reality. My statement was one of fact, not opinion.
Well, they're not.
Not stoned? Well the ones I was talking about are. And they manage to figure out how to get stoned, but not manage how to hold a job. But then again, that right there might be the problem. They would rather be stoned and sponge off the labor of others than actually hold a job. Yes, they exist, i
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I wonder where does all this animosity against pot come from, you're from NL by any chance?
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I have nothing against people smoking pot. I'm sick of people claiming to be "hungry" and "looking for work" ;) ;) filling our Downtown Park with Pot smoke. Or do you think they should get a pass because they are "homeless"?
Oh, most of the "homeless" are that way because of poor life choices...
http://verkoren.files.wordpres... [wordpress.com]
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They aren't as distinct as they look. Particularly among people with marginal mental health and/or marginal skills, they blend together, and those are most of the problem cases. The rest of the people either can find jobs or there aren't the jobs out there, and that's not too difficult to find out. When I was on unemployment insurance, they required certain levels of job-finding activity, and I exceeded
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Can't work, and wont' work
They aren't as distinct as they look
Can't is an ability. Won't is an attitude.
My wife Can't work (bad back, three blown disks, car accident). She would work if given the ability.
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As long as you're working with mentally healthy people, that difference will work pretty well. Get into the more fringe minds out there, and it becomes really questionable. I understand why your wife can't work. How about somebody with mild schizophrenia? Autism? Depression? In some of these cases, it's really hard to tell what's "can't" and what's "won't".
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How about somebody with mild schizophrenia? Autism? Depression? In some of these cases, it's really hard to tell what's "can't" and what's "won't".
Can't is an ability. Won't is an attitude.
Every case you mentioned, as an aspect of "can't" not "won't",
Stephen Hawking is a fantastic example of someone who "can't" but does anyway. Why? Because he has an attitude that allows him to. Making excuse for outliers doesn't do them any good.
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You seem to confuse "discriminatory, exclusive, exploitative system" with "guilty of not bootstrapping an economic empire from nothing but their bare hands"; and you're generalizing BTW.
When you live in a society that kicks you down the bottom of the social ladder and hands you a shovel to dig further down, you can expect some to give up.
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When you live in a society that kicks you down the bottom of the social ladder and hands you a shovel to dig further down, you can expect some to give up.
The only ones I know telling people they can't make it are liberals. "Your too stupid/poor/wrong color we have to help you! "
There are plenty of people proving your assertion wrong. Dr Ben Carson is a great example.
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"Personally, I quite like living in a world where people who can't get a job don't die of starvation. "
Me too. Which is why I advocate a voucher system for as much rice and beans as a person could want, and will throw in multi-vitamins and a rice cooker to boot. and turning closed military bases into homeless shelters where anyone can come to live, so long as they work in the fields to help grow their own food, help cook the meals, help wash dishes, help paint the walls, etc.
No one should starve, but there
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You seem to not understand that the McDonald vouchers are pork for the fast-food corps rather than a sincere effort to help these folks in need.
All the more reason to stop it! (Score:2)
I already said that's I'd eliminate the foodstamp program as it is. A side effect would be to also eliminate the crony-capitalist aspects it may have on top of removing the disincentive to work. Are you saying you support foodstamps at McDonalds?
If the program is indeed sop for the megacorps, I say disallow it. If it is sop for the lazy, I saw disallow it.
Under what circumstances is it a good idea to support anyone's ability to use foodstamps at McDonalds?
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That people "choose to not work" is a neo-con fallacy; the assumption being that markets - therefore labor requirements - have infinite demand and to stay unemployed can only be a voluntary state. That's simply not true.
As for worrying about the lazy bums gaming social security, you should be more careful about the con-artists in wall street that have thrown our entire global economy off the cliff to afford their fix of coke and strippers...
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#2 is where the real meat is. You are quite right that it shouldn't be down to Google. But should the "forgetting" be an automated process? There are various things on the internet that I'm quite proud of or at least happy to keep around. But then, having to explicitly request to be forgotten
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I wonder if you could deal with #3 by only supplying a first name and a unique business-only identifier. It wouldn't be secure against a determined effort to break the law, but casual curiousity would be more difficult, and a company at least wouldn't be able to have a policy of doing this.
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What if the first thing that shows up in a google search about you is a court filing about someone else that shares the same name as you? Any HR department that takes a google search at face value isn't doing its job.
I think the "right to be forgotten" idea has good intentions but the problem is similar to the RIAA's resistance to the internet. A better reaction would be to give an alternative to people treating search engines and random internet sites as authoritative sources of information and instead g
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That's not actually true. The business goal is to hire somebody good, not to make sure to hire the best available, and is definitely not to be fair to applicants. Particularly in cases with lots of reasonable-looking applicants, the business is going to want to narrow those down fast. If a
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That means censorship. Unacceptable.
No. That means commercial companies cannot store certain information about you, for profit, without your consent. As an individual you are still free to remember or speak about a subject, but companies are not people and do not have a right to freedom of speech in the EU.
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That's bullshit. Nobody has any right to tell me what information I can store.The only right you have is to control how it is used as evidence. Are you going to come and take and burn my books because they might contain information you don't want disclosed? Now you want to steal my possessions. Fuck that! Well, regardless, I'm looking for technical means to make censorship impossible through distributed storage and mesh, whatever it takes to stop the tyrants in their tracks, because obviously you can't reas
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Nobody has any right to tell me what information I can store.
You are still thinking about this as an individual, and the right to be forgotten doesn't affect individuals. You can keep all the information you want for personal use. It's only businesses that are required to forget certain things in a commercial capacity.
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That's the whole point... there are different perspectives to this problem and they're not limited to binary: fuck all vs. nazi fahrenheit 451 book-burning thugs. Besides, we humans, as a social species need to adapt and evolve new behavioral patterns to manage this very recent extreme progress in information storage and retrieval.
Takes time...
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Doesn't work that way. Business makes the rules. The individual has given up that power. Regardless, forcing me to burn my books is a crime. Plus you're demanding control of what I can look for and see. The restrictions you are asking for are corrupt by default and will be abused, in fact they already have been. I'll do my own filtering on my own machine.
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Unacceptable to you. There are few absolute rights, and different societies have different values on different rights. The US is one of the most absolute free-speech societies around, but not all speech is permitted. In other countries, there are frequently more limitations.
All sets of rights are compromises. Your freedom to say anything means your freedom to slander me, create false alarms, incite illegal actions, and destroy the flow of information necessary for a free market. Even in the US, thes
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Argument is futile, and the philosophizing is a foolish waste of time. I'm simply looking for a technical solution to censorship now, a way to make the internet indelible, and openly accessible that no authority can hinder in any way.
FYI: Smoking is not speech. The only valid limit one can impose on speech is the decibel level.
ENTITLEMENTS, NOT RIGHTS (Score:4, Insightful)
A list of entitlements, not rights. If somebody has to provide you with a supply of anything in any shape, way or form, then those are entitlements and entitlements destroy right, not provide them. Somebody has to lose his or her right not to supply you with an entitlement, for you to have that entitlement. You don't want people like Italy (or anybody), enforcing their ideas of entitlements. Let them figure out their labour entitlement system, how is that working out therr (Italy, Spain, or anywherr for that matter, where people cannot be fired because of 'rights', and what that does to freedom and eventually business and hiring).
Italy can shove it AFAIC.
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Wrong. Like somebody loses their right not to have to subsidise others with their own lives, loses their right not to have their private property stolen from them so government can buy votes by paying off those, who benefit financially by not having to pay for their own use.
Water is not an entitlement either, there is no entitlement that water has to be cleaned and provided to you by anybody and there should never be anything like that. You have the right to go drink out of a lake or a river, but you dont
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As for water not being an entitlement - if you were literally dying of thirst, would you be tempted to steal some if there was no other way to acquire it?
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Of course not, the same way Ayn Rand never used Public Health Care! *bald eagles*
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A right is a protection against government abuse, nothing else. A 'right to private property' means not being abused by governments, not having your property taken from you. Your property starts with your own body.
Rephrase your comment: "I am not sure why you feel you have the right to your body".
Your private property is merely extension of your time on this planet, extension of your living self. If the society does not accept that people must have the right to own and operate property without government
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No it isn't. That's a ridiculous claim. But really I'm talking about ownership of land. This is what I usually understand by private property.
The government is just administrators of the state. I am part of the state. The state doesn't own people. The state is people. If the government
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No it isn't. That's a ridiculous claim.
- wrong. Do your kidneys belong to you or not? If they do, then whatever time you spend working on things is time that your kidneys had to support as well, you are spending your life, the productive output of your time on those things, you are transferring your time from leisure to work and the productive output of your work is the reward that you are willing to exchange the time of your life for.
The time that your body and mind had to input into productive activity is the time that you subtracted from the
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I don't see how the second follows from the first. The right to something isn't about who spend most time on it. If I am dying of thirst, and you are the only source of water, I have every moral right to acquire through any means short of killing you. I may own just compensation afterwards, but the compensation would be the minimum cost of replacement of a bottle
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I don't see how the second follows from the first. The right to something isn't about who spend most time on it. If I am dying of thirst, and you are the only source of water, I have every moral right to acquire through any means short of killing you.
- why did you stop short of 'killing you'? How does that follow? You just made a very simple case, if you want or need something, you feel entitled to that item regardless of my wants and needs.
If you are in such a pickle that you are dying from thirst, you can ask me for water first and foremost, most people (including myself), will not deny you water because you are dying from thirst. You are not talking about me making a voluntary decision here, you are talking about using violence on the level of gove
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Only if I need it. If I want it then I'm out of luck
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[quote]
How do I produce more land? What do I make it from? Who made it in the first place? How did they make it? Who is the original owner of the land?
[/quote]
Beside, the value of the land is entirely dependent of the surrounding infrastructure and the amount that another individual is willing to pay for it, which is commonly known as "price" and developed by societal consensus.
You do, after all, just own your body and nothing else... everything else is provided by general consensus.
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That's not exactly what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that there's a consensus rather than an inherent right to own property in general, and land in particular. I'm happy to go along with that consensus since that more or less tallies with my view on ownership and property rights, as well as a societal responsibility to contribute to society.
Some people with a more Libertarian mindset don't accept
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You seem to confuse a "civilized and democratic consensus over a certain amount of societal solidarity" with "dictatorial, totalitarian, inhuman regimes"
Note: according to the last employment contract I signed I was basically my company's bitch: do as told, think as told, thoughts belong to them. That's totalitarian in my book...
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In other words, you have no right to not be beaten up by private-sector goons, or to have your possessions stolen by private-sector thieves. Neither of those are government abuses.
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If you paid for any durable good, called it "mine", you believe in private property. Oh, you believe in private property, you are just too stupid to realize it. From the time your sibling (assuming you're not an only child) took your favorite toy, and you cried "mine" to you momma or daddy, you believed in private property.
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Ownership of manufactured goods, I see a rationale for. What about land? I didn't create it. Nor did the person I bought it from. As far as I can see, any land belongs to society as a whole. We give some people exclusive rights to their land for indefinite periods, so in that sense it belongs to them, but we as a society have the right to charge them a reasonable amou
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And you just made the case that government can take any land away for any reason it deems sufficient to confiscate. Old people living in a hovel have no right to live there, because big government and big business just said they would rather have a shopping mall. Once you remove a "right" like you just did, you make government the grantor of rights, and that is a very very dangerous place to be.
Thanks, but no thanks.
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Since you would consider it unfair to turf the old people out of their hovel, and I agree, I think we can speculate that most of society would. Therefore we can't do this without paying them just and fair compensation for the termination of their use of the land. The societal benefit of the shopping mall is fairly minor compared with the societal benefit of the h
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The problem here is you considering the government to be your rulers rather than administrators. We are the state. Not them.
- government is the de facto ruler that buys votes of what you think is of as 'people' by destroying the rule of the law.
There is no need for any government administrators at all if the society is based on the rule of law, there is only need for private competing courts and private security companies, not even need for government cops actually.
There are no private property rights once 'society as a whole' can steal property from the owner. 'Society as a whole' doesn't exist. There are only people and some
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The problem here is you considering the government to be your rulers rather than administrators. We are the state. Not them.
Cute. But I'll refute your delusion with a single word. ObamaCare.
When Government tells me I have to buy a product, or else face fines by the IRS, under threat of guns and penalty of prison for non-compliance, I am no longer being "administrated", but ruled. I am not the state. I am opposed to the state as it exists right now.
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This is really a power that should be the responsibility of the states, not the federal government. But whoever does it, trying to apply it as a patch for the existing fully private system, when that system is completely dysfunctional is terrible. A sensible process would be to wind do
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proper public health system.
A couple quick points. HealthCare is a privilege of wealth, not a right. If you want to assert that is a privilege of citizenship, that is fine, but make sure it is clearly defined as such. FYI, Privileges can be revoked by social contract, rights exist apart from social contracts.
The problem is insurance, but not in the way that you think. Middlemen increase prices, every time. Every proceedure that is not covered by insurance, is always much more affordable, and much more available when compared to proced
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In Britain we have the option to go for private health care. Private insurance costs a lot less than American health insurance. A huge 3% of the population take that offer.
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"private property stolen from them"... "government shouldn't be in any business"... "stealing property and destroying individual rights"
I smell a little Aynrand fundamentalist here...
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No one is entitled to drinkable tap water. When that ressource comes short, everyone gets rationed. And if you won't pay the bills the tap gets cut off. In fact it's ubiquitous in our countries because it's both cheap and vital to so many. But getting there was, actually, a capitalist initiative: the work of persistent entrepreneurs [wikipedia.org]. So yeah, choosing this example undermines
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You have an odd view of society, at least from a European point of view.
In Europe certain things are considered human rights, such as the right to life and to shelter and to water. Therefore the water company can't turn your water off, ever. They can take legal action to make you pay, take away all your stuff if you refuse, but they can't try to simply starve you out like they do in the US. Similarly, the gas and electricity companies can't turn your supply off in the hope that the freezing weather and the
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You have an odd view of society, at least from a European point of view.
- not all of Europe. I rather like Switzerland and its take on things.
In Europe certain things are considered human rights, such as the right to life and to shelter and to water.
- please, define what you mean by 'human rights'?
If the human right in this case means that government cannot prevent an individual from attempting to build himself a better life, attempting to survive by building/acquiring shelter/water, that is one thing.
If by 'human right' you mean government using force and violence to take resources from some people in order to provide entitlements to items, that you think are 'rights' (food/shelt
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If the human right in this case means that government cannot prevent an individual from attempting to build himself a better life, attempting to survive by building/acquiring shelter/water, that is one thing.
If by 'human right' you mean government using force and violence to take resources from some people in order to provide entitlements to items, that you think are 'rights' (food/shelter/water), then it's something else entirely.
Neither. In Europe human rights include a requirement for the government to ensure that everyone has access to certain basic resources. Resources are divided up by various means, most obviously what people can afford to pay for them. However, certain resources are not freely exploitable, so for example you may own a lake but you can't just drain it for your own benefit because of the impact on others. In other words, in exchange for the right to own a lake you also take on certain responsibilities like not
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Neither. In Europe human rights include a requirement for the government to ensure that everyone has access to certain basic resources.
- not neither, the option 2 that I listed. Governments have no resources but what they steal from private individuals, so you are talking about theft and redistribution of stolen resources, let's name things what they are, don't pretend you don't understand such simple concepts.
Resources are divided up by various means, most obviously what people can afford to pay for them.
- free market based price discovery mechanism is the only way to provide access to resources in a way that maximises economic activity and profitability, which is the most moral way the humans devised how to run an economy. Once y
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Governments have no resources but what they steal from private individuals
I'm trying to understand how you think property works. If society decides people can own certain things, they can be your property. Government enforces property rights on behalf of society. The only other option is that you defend those rights yourself, against the rest of society which has decided on different rules.
So... Do you really think property is a question of what the individual can defend with their own resources? Or did you want government to "steal" your resources and use some of them to defend
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Property is exactly what you can protect. Having a rule of law based society, meaning society that does not discriminate, does not have multiple sets of laws for different people (no special case scenarios regardless of your wealth, race, gender, colour, whatever) is what allows us to have an actual working system, where the government is not there to own you but instead it's there only to enforce very specific rules in the same exact way to everybody. This of-course means you can't have income taxes and
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I somehow doubt capitation taxes and import duties would be enough to cover a working legal system, at least not without crippling the economy. Beside which, if the only protection it offers is protection of private property that opens all up kinds of abuse that would be uncontrolled and ruin your life, like pollution.
Your ideal society sounds awful.
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private property and contract law... ha, I knew it! Typical libertarian, anarco-capitalist...
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Roman, you should put that Ayn Rand pulp where it belongs... the trashcan.
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Let them figure out their labour entitlement system, how is that working out therr (Italy, Spain, or anywherr for that matter, where people cannot be fired because of 'rights', and what that does to freedom and eventually business and hiring)
I worked in Italy for a few years before emigrating to the US, so I can give an actual experience-based answer (i.e. anecdote rather than speculation) about what it's like in practice. I went from a $12k/year job in Italy to a $120k/job year in America. The food in Italy was far better, it was easier to travel within the country and outside it, the work-life balance was uniformly better, people seemed generally happier, they dressed better, and all of this was affordable. The houses and apartments were smal
The problem (Score:1)
The problem is that the internet is a global entity and owned by the USA, or so they claim. As long as the internet 5 (AU, CA, NZ, UK, US) ignore the rights of digital citizens, the protection offered by another country, is not enforceable. Half of the tiger 5 (BRA, RUS, IND, CHN, ZAF) also ignore the rights of digital citizens. Meaning, growth of IT services in these countries will not create protections for digital citizens.
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It is worse than what you claim. They are taking powers of the people and accumulating them as far away from "the people" as they can, to solve problems that the people's own creation. At some point, we have to say to people, "you made your bed, now lie in it". But that sounds harsh to the idiots who make unwise choices.
Blabbering (Score:2)
Sounds like philosophy. Which we don't really need without a clear plan for actual actions.
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Any person shall have the same right to access the Internet on equal terms, using appropriate and up-to-date technologies that remove all economic and social barriers.
The fundamental right to Internet access must be ensured with respect to its substantive pre-conditions, not only as the mere possibility of connecting to the Internet.
Access shall include freedom of choice with regard to operating systems, software, and applications.
The effective protection of the right to Internet access requires appropriate public intervention to overcome all forms of digital divide - based on cultural, infrastructural or economic factors particularly as regards accessibility by persons with disabilities.
It's just blabbering without explicitly adding something like:
All authorization to operate will be withdrawn by the Italian Parliament, by means of the AGCOM (Agency for the Communication Warranties [but not freedoms]) from whoever will act against these rights and will prosecute it with criminal files.
Because of a typo in a database I had to wait two years before getting my ADSL.
My rights were thrashed and there has been no way for me to defend them.
The incombent telco simply ignored any communication of mine and never paid for that.
No law, no right!
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No law, no right!
Rights exist apart from law. Laws are simply a convention of social contracts, designed to protect rights (they already exist). If your government is not creating laws that protect your rights, then your government should change, and you should champion that change. But beware, plenty of people talk about rights as entitlements, and entitlements as rights, as you have just done. A Telco has no obligation to you, without a contract. You had no contract, therefore you had no rights with regard to the telco.
Cr
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A Telco has an agreement with the government to run wires or fiber all over the place, through public and private property, or it has an agreement to give it exclusive rights to part of the electromagnetic spectrum. It's reasonable for the government to impose obligations on a Telco in exchange.
I don't have to have a telephone. If I want one, the local phone company is obligated, as part of its agreement with the government, to supply the service for a reasonable fee. I have the legal right to enter i
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Rights exist apart from law.
Maybe that's true in your country. In mine, law is to enforce rights (and duties).
Better than nothing (Score:2)
In the meantime, Italians and other European citizen are stripped from basic democratic rights, with austerity policies being enforced without the will of the Peoples, and with no way to cast a vote to stop them.
But they will have Internet freedom. This is better than nothing.