But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice.

There’s the problem. I was tempted to call this Boomer logic, but that would extremely unfair to Boomers. We are only seeing this now, that the Boomers are on the way out.

I think the Boomers understood better how this works. It’s not like entering a store. It’s like making a phone call to the store, and the store may be on the other side of the world. The Boomers understood borders, long distance calls, international mail.

Now the digital natives are taking over. And they understand nothing beyond tapping and swiping.

Spoilered is a post I wrote earlier. Just so you know what’s coming.

Yes. I had always worried about the copyright industry. That was the big money pushing for censorship. Controlling access and exchange of information is part of their business model and even personal ideology. But I don’t know how much this has actually to do with them, and how much is simply the will to power.

What I did not see coming at all was how the left would completely 180 on these issues. That, at least, I blame on the copyright industry.

Right wing people have screeched about “the intolerant left” forever, but I always ignored the obvious hypocrisy. I took it as a debate on what is permissible in polite society. But now Europe is at a point where there is simply a consensus against free speech. Only the most illiberal forces will be able to use these legal weapons to full effect. That will be the extreme right.

The problem is that meat-space logic is applied to the cyberspace (as it might have been said in the 90ies).

You go into a store and the clerk sees you and knows your age. If it’s borderline, then they ask for ID. They are applying that thinking to internet services. And so are you. You are just trying to figure out a better way to ask for ID.

The UK doesn’t have a system of mandatory national ID. Brits feel that that is totalitarian. So obviously, they do not use the scheme you propose. It’s not their meat-space logic.

Where this falls down is that no ordinary Mastodon instance can comply with the regulations of the close to 200 hundred countries in the world. Of course, just like 4chan, many wouldn’t want to out of principle.

The only way to make this work is to introduce another meat-space thing: Border posts. You need a Great Firewall of the [Local Nation]. At physical border posts, guards check if goods comply with local regulations. We need virtual border posts to check if data is imported and exported in compliance with local regulations.

Such a thing, a virtual Schengen border, was briefly considered in the EU about 15 years ago. It went nowhere at the time. But if you look at EU regulations, you can see that the foundations are already laid, most obviously with the GDPR but also the DSM, DMA, DSA, CRA, …

Eventually, the border will be closed to protect our values; to enforce our laws. We will lock out those American and Chinese Big Tech companies that steal our data. We will only allow their European branches and strictly monitor their communications abroad. We will be taking back control, as the Brexiteers sloganized it. Freedom is just another word for having to ask the government for permission when you enter a country. And increasingly, it is another word for having to ask permission for how you use your own computer.

It won’t be some shady backroom deal. Look here. People in this community love these regulations. Europeans here are happy to tell US companies to “FO if they don’t want to follow our laws”. Well, the Great Firewall of Europe is how you do that.

What gets me is how many people in this very community have the same level of ignorance. And on top of that, they don’t understand that these laws also apply to the very service they are using.

Hast du da eine Quelle dazu? Soweit ich weiß, verlangt Apple, dass alle Apps “notarized” sein müssen. Also das, was Google jetzt auch einführt.

Für Apps im offiziellen Store ist das explizit EU-Vorschrift. Warum sollte die EU was dagegen haben, wenn das freiwillig ausgedehnt wird (falls es freiwillig ist)?

The DSA requires people offering apps (“traders”) to provide certain information. For example: address, email, and phone number must be made public. When Apple introduced that, this also caused some outrage and calls for EU regulation. Despite the fact that this was exactly the regulation called for. Hence, why I mentioned that trusted trader scheme.

Google may be legally required to do this. I’m not sure how the DSA is to be interpreted on this. It’s certainly not a stretch (see Article 31). It’s out of touch to believe the EU will push against this.

You mean when they forced Apple to implement the “trusted trader” scheme.