The All-In Podcast on the European Union’s Digital Services Act Censorship Regime Controlling the Internet:
David Friedberg: The era of the open internet as a decentralized technology platform for the benefit of individuals, and not to be overseen and run by governments, is over.
Chamath Palihapitiya: “Europe has such a checkered past on these things, which is that they somehow try to find this moral high ground, and there is just this overreach and this quasi-central planning that never works.”
David Sacks: This is a censorship regime… The problem is the vagueness of this, which says social media companies have to take down illegal content but does not say what illegal content is. It delegates the power to define it to this group of Eurocrats.
David Friedberg: The Digital Services Act is one of the most overreaching threats to any open, transparent, democratic opportunity on the internet…
It gives this EU government the legal right to go into my computer, pull information out of it, scrutinize it, and make decisions about what I’m doing and whether or not I’m compliant with whatever their commission’s enforcement standards are that day.
This is about as 1984 as you can get. It’s a really serious threat, and I don’t think people are recognizing the second-order and third-order effects of what this is going to do over time to the quality of services and experiences we get on the internet.
Europe has at least a two thousand year long history of censorship. It’s almost in their genes.
America was founded by the children of those former oppressed Europeans who were bullied by Popes and princes who practiced burning books and sometimes people who disagreed with them.
What we are experiencing, what I am experiencing is the corporate/government equivalent of medieval book burning – falsely in the name of the greater good. In their opinion. Like mandatory experimental, untested, warp speed gene therapy operating system injections, for example, for the telling of which I was censored and robbed by a public utility corporation.
Just so readers know I am not simply hypothecating.