from Hacker News

New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of consumer protection

by cameronhowe on 11/15/17, 9:40 PM with 117 comments

• by sassenach on 11/15/17, 10:29 PM

  I think this is the relevant paragraph in the document (page 27 in http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/commissions/imco/inag/...) linked from the article:

  "3. Competent authorities shall have at least the following enforcement powers:

  (e) where no other effective means are available to bring about the cessation or the prohibition of the infringement including by requesting a third party or other public authority to implement such measures, in order to prevent the risk of serious harm to the collective interests of consumers:

  - to remove content or restrict access to an online interface or to order the explicit display of a warning to consumers when accessing the online interface;

  - to order a hosting service provider to remove, disable or restrict the access to an online interface; or

  - where appropriate, order domain registries or registrars to delete a fully qualified domain name and allow the competent authority concerned to register it;"

  Seems similar to already existing measures against infringement of copyrights, except that thing about circumventing the courts, as Reda writes. Could this possibly mean websites such as Facebook could be blocked on the grounds of protecting consumers? The document defines 'widespread infringement' as

  "(1) any act or omission contrary to Union laws that protect consumers' interests that harmed, harms, or is likely to harm the collective interests of consumers"

• by dalbasal on 11/15/17, 10:32 PM

  This feels like a fight we're going to lose eventually.

  Proposals come up.. most fail. I admire those responsible for putting up resistance. But.. some succeed. Others partially succeed. Limited to stopping pedophilia, piracy, nazis... Those are bridgeheads.

  The direction is monodirectional. Eighty six proposals can fail, but if the eighty seventh succeeds that's just as good. There is no going back. Win, good. Lose, try again. That kind of dynamic guarantees a certain result.

• by seomint on 11/15/17, 11:41 PM

  Whenever I see news like this I think of John Gilmore's quote, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Perhaps decisions like this will hasten a move toward a decentralized and an encrypted Net where politicians and their corporate sponsors have far less influence.

• by Kequc on 11/16/17, 2:02 AM

  This has been going on for a while but all the way down to the web host it seems like companies are on board with this stuff. I've found that terms of service for web hosting companies generally includes a clause that specifies one of your users harassing another one of your users.

  As if you can prevent that as a website owner. Especially since such a thing would be totally subjective to judge. What it means is they are purposefully giving themselves any reason at all to shut off your site.

  I asked one of them about it, I got directed to their legal department. I asked the legal department about the clause and they told me to look for hosting elsewhere given what they assumed was the way in which I conduct myself on the internet.

  There is no legal reason. They just want to control information.

• by zyztem on 11/15/17, 11:43 PM

  You people definetly should fight this.

  We had something like this under "ban pedo" umbrella, now this thing filter anything that is against the party rule

• by amelius on 11/15/17, 10:41 PM

  I'm against this ... unless they block Facebook :)

• by gioele on 11/16/17, 7:49 AM

  The sad truth (and missing detail) is that most EU countries already have national laws that allow extra-judicial bodies request ISPs to block websites at the DNS/IP level with minimal oversight.

  A DB of such requests, limited to Italy: https://censura.bofh.it/

• by dingo_bat on 11/16/17, 12:51 AM

  We must realise that there is nothing like "rights". There is only what we can secure for ourself, by way of voting or by way of revolution. You must fight for your rights, always. The moment people start thinking that their rights are inalienable, government starts eroding them.

• by choward on 11/16/17, 1:09 AM

  Man am I naive. I read the title as the EU wanting to provide a way to block web sites that do things like track consumers.

• by maxsavin on 11/15/17, 10:19 PM

  This is horrible

• by yason on 11/16/17, 8:16 AM

  I tend to agree: "There is something bigger brewing here. Something much bigger. This is one to keep on the radar."

  https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2017/11/european-...

• by hw on 11/16/17, 5:47 AM

  This is great. Companies will now have to deal with this, along with the General Data Protection Regulation (which is a huge fine if in non-compliance)

  It's a lot of friction and hoops to go through, especially for smaller companies, to do business that reaches into the EU (directly or indirectly) with these regulations.

• by emptyfile on 11/16/17, 12:22 AM

  Consumer protection is a bad thing?

• by Feniks on 11/16/17, 12:55 PM

  "website blocking infrastructure"

  Uhm we've had that for a long time, it is how sites with CP and other illegal things are dealt with.

• by pimmen on 11/16/17, 10:57 AM

  So this is how democracy dies.

• by golemotron on 11/15/17, 10:11 PM

  I read "prescribes" in the title as "proscribes." There's an argument for that too.

• by porfirium on 11/15/17, 10:21 PM

  >To give a recent example, independence-related websites were blocked in Catalunya just weeks ago.

  That required judicial authorisation. Good way of beginning a post, with a lie.

• by maxsavin on 11/16/17, 1:22 AM

  This can be used to shut down services like Bitcoin, can't it?

• by ucarion on 11/16/17, 12:19 AM

  I don't see the relevance of Ms Reda's example of Catalonian domains being taken down. Using such an example seems more like a scare tactic than anything else.

  The EU law she discusses seems clearly focused on (e-)commerce, and it instructs the government to have websites taken down only when that's the only way to protect consumers from being harmed (e.g. defrauded) by those websites.

  News websites, even those encouraging people to show up to illegal referenda, don't appear to be affected by this law?