Meme of the day

 

Poland vs Big Tech: New laws to put a stop to Big tech censorship

Only a week ago, it was the EU Commission taking on the big tech companies with its Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. Now Poland is joining the fight against the Big Tech. The offenders who censor their users by removing posts that are not against the law will have to face fines up to 2.2 million euros. Polish courts will be deciding what goes against the law:

Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro emphasized that “a social media user must have the feeling that their rights are protected. There cannot be censorship of expression. Freedom of speech and debate is the essence of democracy.”

An increasing number of posts are being removed by the social media companies and users are being met with bans or even account deletions. Usually, at that point, these users are at the mercy of social media platforms and have limited options.

While freedom of speech and expression are vital in democracies, social media is dominated by companies which can introduce their own guidelines. At the same time, these companies must respect the laws of the countries in which they operate.

Deputy justice Minister Sebastian Kaleta, who is overseeing the work on the laws, declared that the time has come for Poland to have regulations which protect against abuses from giant internet corporations, according to Polish news outlet Benchmark.pl.

He added that the new regulations will allow Poland to punish social media companies for violating the rights of users, which will be backed by the full power of the Polish judiciary. If companies are found to be violating a users' rights and refuse to obey a court's ruling, they could be fined up to €2.2 million.

In the case of a conflict between a social media site and the user, the new law dictates that a Polish court will decide whether a law had actually been broken which would have justified censorship.

Countries such as Germany and France have already enacted laws that impose multi-million dollar penalties on social networks that violate country's laws, and it looks like more and more European countries are willing to follow their example.

EU vs Big Tech: New rules, fines, and measures against tech giants in EU

EU Comission decided to put the foot down, and show Big Tech who runs the show. In a proposal of new rules for digital platforms that are meant to make Europe fit for the Digital Age, the European Commission prposed several Acts whose intended purpose is to better protect consumers and their fundamental rights online, as well as lead to fairer and more open digital market for everyone. In the name of European values. Nobody know what those are, but they do always sound nice.

Concretely, the Digital Markets Act will:

Apply only to major providers of the core platform services most prone to unfair practices, such as search engines, social networks or online intermediation services, which meet the objective legislative criteria to be designated as gatekeepers;

Define quantitative thresholds as a basis to identify presumed gatekeepers. The Commission will also have powers to designate companies as gatekeepers following a market investigation;

Prohibit a number of practices which are clearly unfair, such as blocking users from un-installing any pre-installed software or apps;

Require gatekeepers to proactively put in place certain measures, such as targeted measures allowing the software of third parties to properly function and interoperate with their own services;

Impose sanctions for non-compliance, which could include fines of up to 10% of the gatekeeper's worldwide turnover, to ensure the effectiveness of the new rules. For recurrent infringers, these sanctions may also involve the obligation to take structural measures, potentially extending to divestiture of certain businesses, where no other equally effective alternative measure is available to ensure compliance;

Allow the Commission to carry out targeted market investigations to assess whether new gatekeeper practices and services need to be added to these rules, in order to ensure that the new gatekeeper rules keep up with the fast pace of digital markets.

As Rappler puts it:

A source close to the EU commission said ten firms faced being designated as "gatekeepers" under the competition legislation and subjected to specific regulations to limit their power to dominate markets.

The firms that would be subject to stricter regulation are US titans Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and SnapChat, China's Alibaba and Bytedance, South Korea's Samsung and the Netherlands' Booking.com.

You can read the whole EU draft here.

I found this bit to be of interest:

Platforms that reach more than 10% of the EU's population (45 million users) are considered systemic in nature, and are subject not only to specific obligations to control their own risks, but also to a new oversight structure. This new accountability framework will be comprised of a board of national Digital Services Coordinators, with special powers for the Commission in supervising very large platforms including the ability to sanction them directly.