I wonder if American citizens from states which requires age verification to access porn (25 US states today) will be fine with it or these states will start demanding ID to access freedom.gov. It would be delicious irony.
There is a lot more blocked than porn and neo-nazis. This will also allow access to sites that block access because of laws: Imgur is not accessible from the uk, nor are a lot of smaller US news sites. Ofcom are after 4 chan too.
First off, the UK isn't in the EU, and 2nd, not a single website is blocked for me here in the Netherlands, quite literally none. I can access Discord without an ID, I can watch all the porn I want, I can pirate anything I want from anywhere etc.
How many states require IDs to go to porn sites, again? How many journos is it now that Trump blacklisted from the White House? Yeah, lotta freedoms over there...
> At the very least I know you have censored search results as that is an EU wide requirement of the right to be forgotten.
How is the right to be forgotten a bad thing exactly? You can't request a news article be deleted if you're a prominent public figure for obvious reasons, but if you're a random Joe Schmoe then being able to force companies to take down things they've collected about you is a good thing.
And are you implying search engines in the US don't have things "censored" all the time anyway? If you look up basically any form of media on Google, at the bottom will be a large list of links removed due to DMCA takedowns. Hell, Youtube literally steals all ad revenue from creators hit with DMCA takedowns, even falsified ones, where's your complaint about Google censoring its own creators?
> Multiple EU countries are blocking pirate sites
And that's idiotic, but definitionally not the case in "The EU" as can be seen by my country which is part of The EU, the Netherlands, not blocking access to any pirate sites. I would know, I pirate media quite literally every single day of my life, both private and public trackers without even having a VPN or anything of the sort. I'm sure it's not the only EU country to not block anything, even though corrupt idiots in Spain and Italy also exist.
> There are definitely American sites that block EU visitors because of the cost/risk of GDPR compliance.
I mean, good? If business are so incompetent/malicious that they can't even comply with the GDPR, which just states that users have to be informed and have to give explicit consent to companies harvesting their data, then they can fuck off. If your company goes bankrupt because the GDPR makes it impossible to earn money, good riddance to that parasitic business model I say, maybe get a real revenue stream that doesn't rely on fucking over every single one of your users instead? The people who are against GDPR are really telling on themselves and how little they respect their own users.
But anyways wtf does the GDPR have to do with "censorship" or hate speech? If anything this sounds like you're arguing that the US companies are the ones doing the censorship, considering they're the ones blocking it for EU users (apparently, I've literally never come across a blocked page due to GDPR, and it's not like California doesn't have similarly stringent regulations either like the CCPA).
Next you're going to tell me HIPAA is censorship as well.
> How is the right to be forgotten a bad thing exactly? You can't request a news article be deleted if you're a prominent public figure for obvious reasons,
Criminals and politicians have used it to get removed from search results. The news article might be there, but no one will find it.
> I'm sure it's not the only EU country to not block anything, even though corrupt idiots in Spain and Italy also exist.
Exactly my point. You cannot generalise about the EU and say "it does not happen in the EU"
> And are you implying search engines in the US don't have things "censored" all the time anyway?
I never said that!
> I mean, good? If business are so incompetent/malicious that they can't even comply with the GDPR
So, to be clear, you think its good that people in the EU cannot read some news sources?
> I've literally never come across a blocked page due to GDPR
Maybe your interests are too mainstream. I often find news stories I would like to read that are blocked for people from the UK and EU.
> Criminals and politicians have used it to get removed from search results. The news article might be there, but no one will find it.
Sure, there have doubtlessly been some cases of people abusing it, but that's an argument for refining how the law works, not scrapping the right entirely. The alternative is just "companies can collect and display whatever they want about anyone forever with zero recourse," which is obviously worse. If anything the fix is clearer rules about who qualifies, not throwing the whole thing out.
> Exactly my point. You cannot generalise about the EU and say "it does not happen in the EU"
Fair enough, and I'll concede that. But the same goes the other way, you can't make a blanket statement like "websites in the EU are censored/blocked" when that's simply not true in every EU country. Most people on HN talk about "The EU" like it's a singular borg entity with identical laws across the board, which it isn't.
> So, to be clear, you think its good that people in the EU cannot read some news sources?
The sites choosing not to serve EU users is on them, not the EU. The GDPR doesn't say "block European visitors," it says "if you collect their data, follow these rules." The sites are making a business decision that compliance isn't worth it, which again just tells you everything about how central harvesting user data is to their whole operation. If a news site is literally non-functional without hoovering up your personal data without consent, that's not the EU's fault, and frankly no one should be giving these privacy ruining entities anything anyways if that's the case.
You can't dump chemicals into the water table just because proper disposal is inconvenient and expensive, why do we suddenly clutch our pearls when the same logic is applied to people's privacy?
> Maybe your interests are too mainstream. I often find news stories I would like to read that are blocked for people from the UK and EU.
I read pretty niche stuff and have never once hit a wall here in NL. What specifically are you being blocked from? It's not something I've ever run into.
Previous propaganda channels from the government couldn't legally be broadcast within the US itself, so it's possible they'll try to pull the same thing here.
Government mandated uncensored free porn access. I wonder if this will this also apply in US states requiring age verification to legally access such content?
