– says former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton in a Guardian article called “The EU surrendered to Trump over trade tariffs – now it’s in danger of capitulating again”.
It is stirring stuff:
How long are we, citizens of the EU, going to tolerate these threats? Submit to those who want to impose their rules, their laws, their deadlines on us? Surrender to those who now presume to dictate our fundamental democratic and moral principles, our rules for how we live together and even how we protect our own children online? Why and in whose name would we agree to cast aside our twin digital regulations, the DSA and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which were voted into law with clarity, courage and conviction by a landslide in the European parliament?
and
Because regulating the information space is not optional: it is a sine qua non for turning the narrow mercantile logic of a few into a genuine contribution towards human progress and the common good.
Throughout history, humanity has managed to regulate its territorial, maritime and airspace. This is the prerogative of sovereign states. It is the essence of sovereignty itself. To renounce, today, the task of regulating the fourth domain – the digital space – by leaving it to a handful of private actors would be a historic abdication of the public sphere, of political will, of the democratic promise.
Sorry, what promise was this? I’ve heard of “the social contract”. Discussion of that has been around for centuries. I’ve heard of “the military compact”, which in a British context is a phrase used to describe the obligations of the government towards soldiers in exchange for them risking their lives on its behalf. However my self-education in political theory did not include this apparently well-known promise made to its citizens by every democratic state worthy of the name that it would interpose itself between them and the horror of seeing Elon Musk interview Donald Trump on Twitter.
Regular readers will recall that Commissioner Breton was a leading promoter of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which has good reason to be described as “the single greatest threat to free speech in Europe”.
By which he means the perogative of feudal overlords such as himself.
I mean this is really getting into the territory of judge John Mervyn Guthrie Griffith-Jones.
The internet is ours. It is truly democratic. Not elected, appointed, chosen by God or whatever but genuinely of the people. It is also policed by those people and, especially, by those with the wit and capability to create the spaces within it. I have been banned from one website for speaking up for AI (of all things). Fine. Their gaff, their rules. By the same token if folks don’t want their kids to see porn* then that is a responsibility of parenting. Leaving the state in loco parentis is laziness that summons totalitarianism. It’s like employing Pol Pot as a baby-sitter.
What scares our (I assume technophobe “elite”) is over five billion people have access to this technology and essentially the equivalent to Guttenberg’s press in their pocket. What scares them is not controlling the narrative.
I have, BTW, briefly skimmed through “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and it is risible (and not in an amusing way). That is all the censorship D H Lawrence ever deserved. He was a bloody dreadful writer.
*Which is the classic, “Think of the childreeen!!!” excuse.
which were voted into law with clarity, courage and conviction by a landslide in the European parliament?
Unless I am mistaken the European Parliament lacks the right to initiate legislation and merely runner-stamps the diktats of the unelected, unrepresentative and unaccountable European Commission.
Clarity, courage and conviction ROFLMAO, although he would say that wouldn’t he?
John,
I don’t care if they are elected or not. Hitler was elected. So was Keir Starmer.