EU Names 19 Large Tech Platforms That Must Follow Europe's New Internet Rules (arstechnica.com) 75
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The European Commission will require 19 large online platforms and search engines to comply with new online content regulations starting on August 25, European officials said. The EC specified which companies must comply with the rules for the first time, announcing today that it "adopted the first designation decisions under the Digital Services Act." Five of the 19 platforms are run by Google, specifically YouTube, Google Search, the Google Play app and digital media store, Google Maps, and Google Shopping. Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram are on the list, as are Amazon's online store, Apple's App Store, Microsoft's Bing search engine, TikTok, Twitter, and Wikipedia. These platforms were designated because they each reported having over 45 million active users in the EU as of February 17. The other listed platforms are Alibaba AliExpress, Booking.com, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and German online retailer Zalando.
Companies have four months to comply with the full set of new obligations and could face fines of up to 6 percent of a provider's annual revenue. One new rule is a ban on advertisements that target users based on sensitive data such as ethnic origin, political opinions, or sexual orientation. There are new content moderation requirements, transparency rules, and protections for minors. For example, "targeted advertising based on profiling towards children is no longer permitted," the EC said. Companies will have to provide their first annual risk assessment on August 25, and their risk mitigation plans will be subject to independent audits and oversight by the European Commission. "Platforms will have to identify, analyze and mitigate a wide array of systemic risks ranging from how illegal content and disinformation can be amplified on their services, to the impact on the freedom of expression and media freedom," the EC said. "Similarly, specific risks around gender-based violence online and the protection of minors online and their mental health must be assessed and mitigated." The new requirements for the 19 platforms include:
- Users will get clear information on why they are recommended certain information and will have the right to opt-out from recommendation systems based on profiling;
- Users will be able to report illegal content easily and platforms have to process such reports diligently; - Platforms need to label all ads and inform users on who is promoting them;
- Platforms need to provide an easily understandable, plain-language summary of their terms and conditions, in the languages of the Member States where they operate.
Platforms will be required to "analyze their specific risks, and put in place mitigation measures -- for instance, to address the spread of disinformation and inauthentic use of their service," the EC said. They will also "have to redesign their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security, and safety to minors."
Companies have four months to comply with the full set of new obligations and could face fines of up to 6 percent of a provider's annual revenue. One new rule is a ban on advertisements that target users based on sensitive data such as ethnic origin, political opinions, or sexual orientation. There are new content moderation requirements, transparency rules, and protections for minors. For example, "targeted advertising based on profiling towards children is no longer permitted," the EC said. Companies will have to provide their first annual risk assessment on August 25, and their risk mitigation plans will be subject to independent audits and oversight by the European Commission. "Platforms will have to identify, analyze and mitigate a wide array of systemic risks ranging from how illegal content and disinformation can be amplified on their services, to the impact on the freedom of expression and media freedom," the EC said. "Similarly, specific risks around gender-based violence online and the protection of minors online and their mental health must be assessed and mitigated." The new requirements for the 19 platforms include:
- Users will get clear information on why they are recommended certain information and will have the right to opt-out from recommendation systems based on profiling;
- Users will be able to report illegal content easily and platforms have to process such reports diligently; - Platforms need to label all ads and inform users on who is promoting them;
- Platforms need to provide an easily understandable, plain-language summary of their terms and conditions, in the languages of the Member States where they operate.
Platforms will be required to "analyze their specific risks, and put in place mitigation measures -- for instance, to address the spread of disinformation and inauthentic use of their service," the EC said. They will also "have to redesign their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security, and safety to minors."
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Imagine for a second that all of those companies stop supporting EU, in lockstep.
Of those that cared, half would cheer, half would be pissed off.....
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They won't give up on half a billion relatively wealthy consumers.
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All they have to do is simply strip features from the EU version of products and/or services.
Why would they do that? They won't risk their user base over some whining. It's not like search engines or social networks are limited to google and facebook. What they are more likely to do is to open lobby groups in Brussels that push their agenda, although this technique seems to have lost the momentum it once had.
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>> All they have to do is simply strip features from the
>> EU version of products and/or services.
> Why would they do that? They won't risk their user
> base over some whining.
And you think they're going to just give EU users their services, gratis, with nothing in return?
Look... I'm not a big fan of advertising either, especially when it's invasive and poorly-targeted (No, miller; I will never, Ever EVER drink your foul-ass "champagne of beers" no matter how many ads you shove in my face.)
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What *IS* the incentive for internet companies to provide their services, if not monetary?
Mod Parent Insightful!
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What *IS* the incentive for internet companies to provide their services, if not monetary?
That is the wrong question, based on a flawed assumption.
The EU isn't stopping these big companies from running ads. It's stopping them from running targeted ads without fully informing the customers.
So the answer to what incentive these companies have to provide their services is "less money than now, more money than nothing". Will these companies be happy about making less money? No. Will they instead opt to not make any money at all? Hello no.
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The USA makes up 4% of the worlds population, feel free to cut yourself off from the other 96% at your own peril.
If that happens, the USA may find its self doing international trade in Euros.
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Is not about denying ad revenue, is about denying revenue from *deceptive* ads.
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this.
other than that the "obligations" are what you would actually expect by default from any honest publisher/ business.
- inform of why you recommend something and allow opt-out
- handle illegal content diligently
- clearly mark ads as such and do not hide who is behind them
- have clear and understandable tos
i usually loathe our institutional eu gutmenschen, bunch of insufferable and corrupt hypocrites most of them, but in this case they're not really asking much. that these 4 items have to be explicitly req
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sorry wrong post
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>"but in this case they're not really asking much. that these 4 items "
For now.
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> expect by default from any honest publisher/
> business.
Except that the EU is not treating these 19 US tech companies like any other business. They're singling them out for attacks they're not making against every other company and leaving EU companies out of it entirely. When the EU goes for equal treatment under the law and gets similarly punitive against its own businesses, let the rest of us know.
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The world will not end without the USA, in fact other countries may take this as an opportunity to make themselves "Great Again"
3rd world countries may even see this as a chance to stop corporations from pillaging their natural resources.
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They threatened to do that with GDPR but nothing significant happened.
Article 27 made products unavailable (Score:2)
One thing that happened after the GDPR took effect was that a bunch of small businesses outside the EU stopped offering to ship to countries in the EU because they couldn't afford the annual fee to designate a representative in the EU pursuant to article 27. This made products without a European distributor unavailable in the EU.
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Routine line of business is not "occasional" (Score:2)
Small businesses? Seems unlikely as Article 27 requires a representative only if the processing of private data is "large scale".
It also requires a representative if the processing of private data is more than "occasional".
It doesn't define it, but occasionally sending out something to someone in another country and keeping data retention to a minimum and, critically, not sharing it with third parties, would strike most reasonable people (the metric a judge would use if a more clarified definition isn't available in law) as small scale.
Sources that I've read claim that a firm's routine line of business does not qualify as "occasional." From "WORKING PARTY 29 POSITION PAPER on the derogations from the obligation to maintain records of processing activities pursuant to Article 30(5) GDPR" [europa.eu]:
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Es an European, I would be glad if they removed all those "features" here, we are talking about features needed and wanted by spammer, scammers, trolls and such, not features wanted by users. Thank you very much, but I can do well without fake news from Russian propaganda.
Re: Can't allow the state to make the rules (Score:2)
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YouTube premium or whatever it's called these days is already more expensive in Europe.
It's up to the companies. They don't have a god given right to profit from profiling us. Either they make less money or they try charging for formerly free services. There will be plenty of others willing to take up their lost business if they don't get it right.
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There will be plenty of others willing to take up their lost business if they don't get it right.
Plenty?! There won't even be one, let alone plenty.
There's a reason the EU has no noticeable tech companies of their own.
This is also why there are over 45 million EU users using American tech companies and not EU tech companies
The EU stealing money from foreign companies that actually create value is exactly why none of the chinese or japanese billionaires have bothered to setup shop and serve EU users.
That won't change if US companies were to leave.
It also won't change the fact EU users aren't willing to choose an EU company over a US one.
Again, it's why US companies have over 45 million EU users and EU companies do not.
The citizens have spoken, we all know what they want, and it's time the EU government stopped interfering with their citizens wishes.
Amen, Brother!
No truer words were ever spoken. . .
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ASML, SAP, STMicroelectronics, etc... There are TONS of tech companies in the EU that the world uses.. the big difference is, most tech companies in the rest of the world are more traditional companies that don't make their money by exploiting users.. (where the USER is the product) hence why they never really dabbled in social media to any significant amount (Oh, there are quite a few.. about 20-30 but most are more regional "villages" with market caps in the 100M mark.
The realit
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> There will be plenty of others willing to take up their
> lost business if they don't get it right.
Oh really? Just what companies EXACTLY are these that will be 100% happy, willing and A-OK to give EU "customers" their services gratis with nothing at all in return?
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They can make money, just with generic ads or ads based on page content.
Isn't that DuckDuckGo's business model?
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My heart bleeds for these $100bn companies that might make less money selling us useless crap.
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indeed.
other than that the "obligations" are what you would actually expect by default from any honest publisher/ business.
- inform of why you recommend something and allow opt-out
- handle illegal content diligently
- clearly mark ads as such and do not hide who is behind them
- have clear and understandable tos
i usually loathe our institutional eu gutmenschen, bunch of insufferable and corrupt hypocrites most of them, but in this case they're not really asking much. that these 4 items have to be explicitly r
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Far better for the corporations to mine every bit of data they can about people to provide targeted political ads that further wall then into their political world view, while flogging junk to their children with ads that are irresistible to them. That's definitely the world i want to love in.
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I really should post slower... I meant live in of course.
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> The state shall not regulate content, only service, by making it open and transparent
Isn't targeting a 'service' that's going to be regulated?
Leaving all content open to be freely accessed by the public as freely as owners decide.
Change Company Name (Score:2)
And keep business as usual.
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If the newly named company still has over 45 million users in the EU, then it will be automatically subject to same rules. They would have to split their company into several smaller chunks to avoid the rules (which would be great for the market, but unfortunately unlikely to happen).
Federated protocols and tendency to defederate (Score:2)
They would have to split their company into several smaller chunks to avoid the rules
If keeping regulators off companies' backs would encourage companies to stay medium-size and regional and interact at arm's length through federated Internet protocols, I agree that'd be great for the users. We'd see a rise in things like XMPP, Matrix, ActivityPub, feeds (RSS, Atom, and microformats2 h-entry), Webmention comments, and the like. We would, however, end up with netsplits, as XMPP users have seen with defederation due to spam and as ActivityPub users have seen with defederation due to expressio
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No sorry doesn't work like that. The Digital Services Act doesn't actually name any company. All the EU did was confirm to 19 platforms that this law applies to them to make it unambiguously clear they are to follow this law.
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It's about money and access to a valuable market. Google is free to pull out of the EU if it wants to give up on that region's ad revenue.
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Likewise, we don't give a shit about any of your laws. And we laugh at how you pay $100k for basic surgery.
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> It's about money and access to a valuable market.
What about the EU... of any other market... is "valuable" if a business can't make any money in it?
> Google is free to pull out of the EU if it wants to give
> up on that region's ad revenue.
And the EU is trying to take that ad revenue away. So what's your solution? Try to tilt at the paid subscription windmill some more? Or maybe you think that EU (non-)customers should be given all of Google's services free of any charge and with no benefit to
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My solution is to do nothing: everything is going according to plan. Google will bend and accept less revenue instead of zero revenue. The EU will continue to have American internet companies as dominate players in their markets.
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Wake me when the EU matters
WAKEUP! Happy? I mean if you think a rich western marketplace twice the size of the USA doesn't matter then maybe the problem is your ignorance more than anything else.
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That would be great. If Amazon and Aliexpress specially pulled out. That would definitely make me more money.
Google services would not be a big loss, except for android users I guess.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,Snapchat and Tiktok pulling out would be a big overall win for sanity.
The ones that would be annoying are booking.com, Apple's App Store and Wikipedia
Also the freeing of the ad business from the dominance by Google and Facebook would be a great opportunity.
So here is to hoping they do..
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One of those 19 platforms is Wikipedia, I don't see anything in those requirements that would impede Wikipedia to work normally inside EU. On the other end of the spectrum, I can cite countless fake news campaigns run on Facebook by various troll farms.
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We are not terrified of the word "Communism" or "Socialism" like the USA is.
Our countries are MORE democratic than the USA.
The ONLY things the US leads in is prison population, military spending and the cost of healthcare...oh and lets not forget school shootings.
Any other social metric, like democracy , freedom of the press, capitalism, education, social mobility, infant mortality, law and order, corruption, life expectancy, etc etc etc the USA p
Excellent! (Score:2)
Now we need some EU court rulings telling us what constitutes "disinformation" and "inauthentic" content.
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I would say we probably won't see that soon. What is required for now is the definition of a company policy and enforcement mechanisms regarding their own risks, which may or may not include misinformation depending on what these companies do (one of them is a clothing retailer, another one a hotel booking website; probably the parts of the regulation about advertisement are more relevant in their case). Those services which have user-provided contents (facebook etc.) will have to hire something like an eth
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Now we need some EU court rulings telling us what constitutes "disinformation" and "inauthentic" content.
Exactly!
Sexual Orientation (Score:1)
This one seems a little odd to me. Say a new gay bar opens up in a given city in the EU, why should they advertising for that not be allowed? Certainly young gay bar hoppers would like to know about a new gay bar opening, right?
What if you are a haircare product designer that makes ethnic products. How does banning their ability to buy ads targeting would be buyers help anyone? Seems like that would strip away choices for people of a specific ethnic background that could very well want to see an ad for that
Re:Sexual Orientation (Score:4, Informative)
Oh well, I guess the Europeans like being "protected" like this. They voted for it after all.
Yes indeed. The examples you cite are prohibited in France since 1978 (for the computer part), and some of them since 1945. It comes from the prohibition of keeping files of the population listing their political, sexual, ethnic characteristics, ever since the end of WW2. (Of course as a gay bar, church, political party, you can keep files of your registered members, but as an advertiser you cannot make a files of "people I suspect are gay".)
Re:Sexual Orientation (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sexual Orientation (Score:4, Informative)
We have roughly the same constitutional free speech laws as you, just fewer people saying the N-word.
I imagine that the advertising bans are to reduce the incentive to collect information that Nazis might use against you. We're trying to legalise punching Nazis in the face.
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>"We have roughly the same constitutional free speech laws as you"
No, you don't
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You can read about it here. This is just the basics that every EU country has to obey. Each EU country can layer extra rights on top.
We also get proper privacy rights on top. There's no free speech without privacy. Your slave-owning founding fathers forgot about that.
https://www.echr.coe.int/docum... [coe.int]
It's so cute that you forgot we invented your rights.
And we don't have to put up with Nazis either, never mind elect one.
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We also get proper privacy rights on top. There's no free speech without privacy.
Free speech and privacy have nothing in common. It's freedom generally that depends on privacy but you wouldn't understand that.
Your slave-owning founding fathers forgot about that.
Europeans have owned slaves for thousands of years.
It's so cute that you forgot we invented your rights.
Is that why the UK left because they couldn't handle all your freedoms?
And we don't have to put up with Nazis either
That's right you don't have to put up with anyone you disagree with.
LOL.
Enjoy your freedom of speech...
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>"You can read about it here. This is just the basics that every EU country has to obey."
EU countries are jailing people for "offending" each other. That is not freedom of speech.
>"Each EU country can layer extra rights on top."
Right, more "offenses" that restrict freedom of speech.
>"We also get proper privacy rights on top. There's no free speech without privacy."
That is not true AT ALL. Privacy is important, but freedom of speech is not about privacy.
>"Your slave-owning founding fathers forg
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I'm so shocked the Nazi outed himself like I planned LOL
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I'm so shocked the Nazi outed himself like I planned LOL
The whole point of free speech is tolerating thoughts and ideas you don't agree with. Unsurprising this concept would go over your head.
That you would conflate support for allowing people to convey unpopular thoughts and ideas with support for those ideas demonstrates an impressive lack of awareness of what free speech even means.
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I'm so shocked the Nazi outed himself like I planned LOL
The whole point of free speech is tolerating thoughts and ideas you don't agree with.Unsurprising this concept would go over your head.
That you would conflate support for allowing people to convey unpopular thoughts and ideas with support for those ideas demonstrates an impressive lack of awareness of what free speech even means.
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Say a new gay bar opens up in a given city in the EU, why should they advertising for that not be allowed?
You misunderstand. Advertising is certainly now allowed. What isn't allowed is the likes of Facebook classifying users according to *their* sexual orientation and then presenting them unique content based on this very much legally protected private data.
You can advertise what you want. But here let me put it in terms Americans will instantly understand: imagine if Facebook compiled a list of who everyone specifically voted for in the last election. Are you up for them allowing advertisers to target you spec
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Also, not allowed would be a pro or anti gay campaign run by IRA (the Russian troll farm) disguised as a kitten lover group (real life example)
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Are you up for them allowing advertisers to target you specifically because they know you voted for e.g. Biden? No. In America this is protected information. They can still target you based on more generic terms, but your actual political preference is very much private.
This is not protected information. It's secret information. A secret you can choose to keep or blab away.
Whether or not you choose to reveal your secret or leak proxy data that undermines your secret is not at all protected information. There is no duty for anyone to respect these things or refrain from using comments and behaviors to give insights into voting history in order to target you based on how you were likely to vote.
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This is not protected information. It's secret information.
Please tell us you don't have a clue without telling us you don't have a clue. Hint: The word "secret" does not appear anywhere in the GDPR legislation.
Data covered under provisions falls into two categories, personal data, and sensitive personal data, the latter of which is protected with additional special provisions.
Whether or not you choose to reveal your secret
Is completely irrelevant. That's all you needed to say. The rest of your post was nonsense.
The law does not name companies (Score:2)
Just to be clear the Digital Services Act doesn't name any companies. It names specific classes of services, and conditions for which that specific service needs to meet for it to apply.
All the EU did here was tell 19 platforms unambiguously: "Hey, this law applies to you, so don't go bullshitting us later pretending you didn't know."