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In A Speech Any Autocrat Would Love, French President Macron Insists The Internet Must Be Regulated
[TechDirt] At best it was the sort of speech that someone completely new to tech policy might have come up with. Someone who, upon finding an imperfect situation, presumes that they are the first to notice the issue. And then takes it upon themselves to heroically step in to address the problem, despite the fact that their proposed "solution" reflects an incomplete understanding of the matter.Control, control, it's all about control. The Eurocrats can always make better decisions than you can do for yourself. There are a number of ways this incomplete understanding infected his speech and undermined the quality of his recommendation. There was, for instance, his erroneous declaration that the Internet today is too much about content distributors not enough about content creators. This declaration alone suggests a very poor understanding of all the myriad ways people all over the world use the Internet to create and then disseminate their expressive works themselves. In and of itself it calls into question whether his overall suggestion is capable of being adequately protective of all this expression. Because it appears not, and not just because of this limited understanding of how the Internet is used. It also ignores the critical countervailing concerns that have long deemed his proposed "fix" to be an unacceptable one. Because the "cure" he proposed ‐ greater regulation of the Internet ‐ is a dangerous one that would destroy all that he purports to want to protect. Posted by: Herb McCoy 2018-11-22 |
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