I would be more worried about police and wannabe police shooting people on the streets, detaining citizens without due process, sending billions to war in Iran while regular people are struggling with day-to-day life. Your universities and primary schools are restricted what they can teach or say either by government or religious movements.
Sure, the chat control is a serious privacy issue but acting like US is some sort of bastion of free speech is not based on anything real. And yes, while hate speech is not allowed in europe like in the US, we at least understand that freedom comes with responsibility.
I was reading an essay by Kant called “what is Enlightenment?” It argues that people should be permitted to say whatever they wanted, provided they obey the laws.
He bases it on the idea that we should not be subject to be “lifelong tuteledge.” At some point we must speak up and contribute.
We can be wrong. Very wrong. We can advise our rulers to do terrible things. The Holocaust hadn’t happened yet, but the Wars of Relgion had - he knew how bad people could be.
Europe doesn’t seem to reject lifelong tuteledge any more. There want opinion and thought to be guided and formed by an elite class, not a noisy crowd of peers.
This is new. It was foreign to Kant, foreign to Locke, Hobbes, Marx, etc.
It’s a bit scary the Europe is leading the way on this. And it does seem they are poking at speech specifically.
Most recently the EU is considering a “ban conversion therapy.” Not medical malpractice legislation - just a very specific type of medical malpractice that has a very specific political constituency.
Meanwhile people who are subject to quacky things like past life regression or Freudian analysis are left with the normal malpractice system.
Really Europe (and other places) are using it as a way to weaken freedom of speech.
Maybe I’m connecting dots where there are none, but there seems to be a big international shift away from free speech, with Europe taking the lead.
In America this manifests itself as “it would be nice if we could restrict speech like normal countries do, but we have to worry about the Republicans, so let’s not do that - yet.”
But it’s pretty clear free speech is going the way of right to bear arms and trial by jury.
What Kant, Locke or Hobbes imagined has only little to do with current societal environment. Our politics and structures are global and the age of internet has mixed it even more. The religions and christianity especially tried to control everything was said under their hemisphere by controlling who could print books or distribute them.
The european (or EU in this context) is truly multinational representative political instance (not a government). While it provides lots of opportunities and lets voices from dozens of different cultures to be heard, it also makes decision making hard. The opposite way to rule is authoritan or totalitarian way where there is just one ruler who has not real opposing forces. In that light you could argue that while EU is large political and economical alliance, it also fails to satisfy every political need of it's elected members.
what US is showing that less there is political variety (powerful parties) less there is moving space for expression, freedoms and change.
As a person who has masters in politics, I appreciate the fact that you brought Kant but more Hobbes and Locke into this. They are excellent reference point for those thinking about origins of societies and liberties. John Locke would have hate everything what current representative democracies are (including US). He would have loved the ideal of ultimate personal freedom but at the same time he would have loathed every control that governments have today over their citizens. There is no separation of state and religion in most of the western nations for example.
We are closer to world what Focault said but he is more recent scholar.
> It argues that people should be permitted to say whatever they wanted, provided they obey the laws.
that's exactly how it works
> Most recently the EU is considering a “ban conversion therapy.”
this has nothing to do with the opinions that are expressed in conversion therapy but with the insane practices - which actually try to enforce people to think like they believe is the "right" way to think about the world, which is far more restrictive than just letting people be themselves
> Really Europe (and other places) are using it as a way to weaken freedom of speech.
this is unfortunately true, too many extreme right wing politicians have been successful recently
> It’s a bit scary the Europe is leading the way on this.
it isn't, the US (though not just the US of course) famously collects data and searches through all of it if they need, and recently ICE had a hand full of incidents where they clearly used databases to profile people (just look at their use of AI cameras at protests)
In the mid-90s the US government proposed that Clipper be used as the universal encryption standard for secure electronic communications in the civilian realm, all other cryptosystems being presumably forbidden. It was based on the idea of key escrow: that all Clipper keys be held in an archive and law enforcement could recover a copy of the encryption key for any given Clipper chip upon providing legitimate authorization to intercept communications. However, the Skipjack protocol used by the chip was buggy and insecure, and consumer CPUs became powerful enough that military-grade encryption was practical in software, rendering Clipper moot. A series of First Amendment rulings protected the proliferation of such software cryptosystems under the rubric that computer program code was protected speech.
The Meta ruling gives the government an effective stick, First Amendment notwithstanding: if you facilitate communication that the government cannot break into, and someone abuses a child with help from your secure platform, you could be liable for contributing to the abuse of that child. A safe harbor from liability will be provided—by adopting key escrow based encryption (if you support encryption at all). This does not interfere with protected speech about cryptosystems, but it makes using cryptosystems difficult in practice due to the chilling effects.
It’s very hard to control kids internet access. Impossible really. Even if you do it fine at home, once they go to school it’s whatever policies the school has. Most require laptops and provide internet access.
so the school takes on that responsibility, as deputized by the parents.
Kids don't get unfettered access to the streets while at school. They can't take their bikes and ride out at will. What makes the internet and devices any different? The devices provided by the school should be lockdown-able, and kids should not be provided their own device unless there's a parental lock (which is enabled during school hours, and is similarly locked down).
The school does not take responsibility. Schools will tell you what you kid does at home is the parent's responsibility even if it is done on the school device. Parents do not have the ability to configure the content controls on the device itself, so technically sophisticated parents resort to tweaking router settings.
I feel uncomfortable about the idea of controlling children, even my own. Certainly there is a requirement to protect children from others but I feel like putting in guard rails to prevent children from themselves only leads to making things taboo and, as a result, more interesting.
Google is basically its own private internet. It caches content so you can access all sorts of terrible stuff just from Google.com (and its related domains).
But if you cut Google you cut Google Classroom - which is required.
And Google Classroom itself has many workarounds.
This isn’t just a Google problem. The centralization of the Internet around a few mixed content domains really kills conventional filtering.
Paradoxically, there are so many centralized domains that even if you can block one, it’s just a game of whack a mole.
Eventually you just block the whole internet - and then what’s the point? Take away the 20 most popular mixed content platforms, messaging, etc, and you’re effectively blocking the whole internet.
The kids can’t contact their friends, watch educational videos, or any other legitimate use.
As an example of an Eastern country? Well touché, I suppose you're historically correct, but what I had in my mind for this distinction is not the line in the middle of Europe (between the First World and Second World), but that between Europe and Asia. Sorry if I miscommunicated.
> Adam Smith pointed out the first pencil costs thousands of dollars, but the second is mostly free. Same dynamic here, but multipled by a thousand.
The shells are already made by the 10 and 100s of thousands, Shaheds are also not a research project, so either one is in amortized serial production now.
What I meant is that a $10k shell doesn't cost that much. Russians are making the equivalent artillery shells for an _order_ of magnitude less for around $1k. A lot of defense costs are just overinflated simply because they can be. The government is spending taxpayer money, it's not really coming from the politicians' pockets. If the kickbacks are just right, they may in fact flow back into the politicians pockets.
A lot of defense spending revolves around overall manufacturing capacity. Deals contain options that won't be executed unless it's war time. These options increase the cost of the deal as the manufacturer needs to keep capacity.
Before Brexit there was the 1£ Ltd. as a famous contender, which got quite attraction and lead to creation of German UG. Nowadays Estonia is advertising their quick digital registration process.
The problem is that you are still bound to the individual countries legal system and many things there aren't unified. Having to appear at an Estonian court as your books don't comply with Estonian regulation (while at the same time for tax purpose your bookkeeping have to comply to your local legislation) isn't fun.
Also people don't know those names. What is a GmbH, an A.S., an OÜ? Is that a serious business or some shady shell company far off?
Breaking encryption is illegal. Making encryption is difficult to profit from.
Other than that, what’s the value add?
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