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Parliament adopts its position on digital copyright rules  

-    Tech giants must pay for work of artists and journalists which they use
-    Small and micro platforms excluded from directive’s scope
-    Hyperlinks, “accompanied by “individual words” can be shared freely  
-    Journalists must get a share of any copyright-related remuneration obtained by their publishing house


Parliament adopted its revised negotiating position on copyright rules on Wednesday, adding safeguards to protect small firms and freedom of expression.

Parliament’s position for talks with member states to hammer out a final deal was approved by 438 votes to 226, with 39 abstentions. It makes some important tweaks to the June committee proposal.

Tech giants to share revenue with artists and journalists

Many of Parliament’s changes to the EU Commission’s original proposal aim to make certain that artists, notably musicians, performers and script authors, as well as news publishers and journalists, are paid for their work when it is used by sharing platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, and news aggregators such as Google News.

After the vote, rapporteur Axel Voss (EPP, DE) said, “I am very glad that despite the very strong lobbying campaign by the internet giants, there is now a majority in the full house backing the need to protect the principle of fair pay for European creatives.

There has been much heated debate around this directive and I believe that Parliament has listened carefully to the concerns raised. Thus, we have addressed concerns raised about innovation by excluding small and micro platforms or aggregators from the scope.

I am convinced that once the dust has settled, the internet will be as free as it is today, creators and journalists will be earning a fairer share of the revenues generated by their works, and we will be wondering what all the fuss was about.”

Fair pay for artists and journalists while encouraging start-ups

Parliament’s position toughens the Commission’s proposed plans to make online platforms and aggregators liable for copyright infringements. This would also apply to snippets, where only a small part of a news publisher’s text is displayed. In practice, this liability requires these parties to pay right holders for copyrighted material that they make available. Parliament’s text also specifically requires that journalists themselves, and not just their publishing houses, benefit from remuneration stemming from this liability requirement.

At the same time, in an attempt to encourage start-ups and innovation, the text now exempts small and micro platforms from the directive.

Protecting freedom of expression

The text includes provisions to ensure that copyright law is observed online without unfairly hampering the freedom of expression that has come to define the internet.

Thus, merely sharing hyperlinks to articles, together with “individual words” to describe them, will be free of copyright constraints.

Any action taken by platforms to check that uploads do not breach copyright rules must be designed in such a way as to avoid catching “non-infringing works”. These platforms will moreover be required to establish rapid redress systems (operated by the platform’s staff, not algorithms) through which complaints can be lodged when an upload is wrongly taken down.

Wikipedia and open source software platforms will not be affected

The text also specifies that uploading to online encyclopaedias in a non-commercial way, such as Wikipedia, or open source software platforms, such as GitHub, will automatically be excluded from the requirement to comply with copyright rules.

Stronger negotiating rights for authors and performers

Parliament’s text also strengthens the negotiating rights of authors and performers, by enabling them to “claim” additional remuneration from the party exploiting their rights when the remuneration originally agreed is “disproportionately” low compared to the benefits derived.

The text adds that these benefits should include “indirect revenues”. It would also empower authors and performers to revoke or terminate the exclusivity of an exploitation licence for their work if the party holding the exploitation rights is deemed not to be exercising this right.

Gargantua wrote:* "Right of panorama": the right to post photos of public places despite the presence of copyrighted works like stock arts in advertisements, public statuary, or t-shirts bearing copyrighted images. Even the facades of buildings need to be cleared with their architects (not with the owners of the buildings).

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/delete-your-account-a-conversation-with-jaron-lanier/

Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier
Harper Simon interviews Jaron Lanier

JARON LANIER IS ONE of the leading philosophers of the digital age, as well as a computer scientist and avant-garde composer. His previous books include Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality, Who Owns the Future?, and the seminal You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. His latest book bears a self-explanatory title: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. We first met while performing on stage together in San Francisco several years ago and developed a friendship. On August 14, he sat down with me to talk about the perils of social media and the promise of better things to come.

...

- Can you describe some of the consequences of what you refer to as “network effects” or “lock-ins,” and how these kinds of design flaws have made it critical for people to quit social media entirely in order to ensure fundamental change?

Well, those are two slightly different ideas. So let me address them each separately. The network effects and lock-in have to do with what you call natural monopolies that arise in some situations. In the case of Facebook … there’s a very widespread dissatisfaction with Facebook. It’s been criticized almost constantly by everybody. And yet, somehow, people are still on it. And the reason why is twofold in this case. One thing is it’s the network effect, which we were just mentioning. What that means is that, because everybody is already on it, it would require a supernatural degree of coordination for everybody to get off it at the same time. So to get off it means that you’re sort of isolating yourself. And this is typical of a lot of network systems — why it’s hard to have a lot of competing electric companies or competing highway systems. In general, it just gets easier if there’s one of them. And so Facebook is one of these natural monopolies. Sometimes it’s more proper to call these things both monopolies and monopsony.

The key idea here is that it’s just hard to get off it. Mathematically, people are kind of stuck. Then, added to that, in this case, is the addiction factor. People are addicted to it. So if you have both network effect and addiction, then it becomes really hard to leave.

...

You brought up this other question of why is it so important for people to leave, and the thing I want to say is that, because of addiction and because of network effects, I realize that only a small minority of people can do it, and I don’t know how many I have influenced to get off of there. I don’t have a means of measuring that. But here’s what I would say: there have been times before, recently and even in America, when society had to confront mass addiction that had a commercial component.

I’m thinking of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. And I’m thinking of the public smoking of cigarettes. In both of those cases, there were industries that relied on mass addiction, but somehow or other, a rational conversation gradually created a change. In neither case was the substance totally outlawed, but its role in society was vastly changed. And I just want to point out that this process of having a rational conversation about how things can change is only possible when at least somebody isn’t addicted. If the MADD Mothers were themselves alcoholics, it would have been harder for them to organize. A space for conversation where some people aren’t addicted facilitates thinking different thoughts and being able to envision different outcomes. And what I do believe is that we can get at least enough people to quit this stuff to create such a space.

...

- So can we talk a little bit about the social justice or activism aspects of social media? Aside from taking selfies, self-promotion, and communicating with friends, the main justification people have for being on social media is that it enables so much community activism and social justice.

Yeah. A lot of people have felt that using social media is a way to organize for mutual betterment, whether it’s a social justice movement or other things. You’re absolutely correct: in the immediate sense their experience of that is authentic. I think they’re reporting on real events. The problem, however, is that behind the scenes there are these manipulation, behavior modification, and addiction algorithms that are running. And these addiction algorithms are blind. They’re just dumb algorithms. What they want to do is take whatever input people put into the system and find a way to turn it into the most engagement possible. And the most engagement comes from the startle emotions, like fear and anger and jealousy, because they tend to rise the fastest and then subside the slowest in people, and the algorithms are measuring people very rapidly, so they tend to pick up and amplify startle emotions over slower emotions like the building of trust or affection.

And so you tend to have the algorithms trying to take whatever has been put into the system and find some way to get a startle emotion out of it in order to maximize its use for addiction. What we call engagement should be called addiction and then behavior modification. And so you tend to have this phenomenon where there will be, let’s say, a social justice movement of some kind; it’s initially successful, but then the same data is instead optimized to find whoever is irritated by that social justice movement. Those irritated people are introduced to each other and put into this amplifying cycle where they’re more and more agitated until they become horrible. So, you start with the Arab Spring, but then you get ISIS getting even more mileage from the same tools. Or you start with Black Lives Matter and you come up with this resurgent bizarre racist movement that had been dormant for years. And this just keeps on happening.

So the problem is that when people say, “Oh, we use social media for social justice,” they’re typically correct. And yet in the longer story they’re really vulnerable to a far greater backlash than they would have gotten if they used another technique. At the end of the day, it’s hard to say whether they really benefited or not.

...

- It occurs to me that it now requires real bravery to quit your social media accounts, and I imagine that “ influencers” might see it as career self-sabotage. So what would you say to them?

Well, one other thing I emphasize, to the point of being annoyingly repetitive in the book, is that each life is different. And I don’t want people to self-sabotage. I want people to be successful. My personal opinion is that even if social media as it exists is bad for the world, if it helps you for now, it might be a really legitimate decision for you to stay on it. I’m not going to judge you for it. And I don’t think there are any easy, one-size-fits-all answers. Having said this, I do want to point out that, as far as I can tell, I have a pretty successful writing career. I have a pretty successful speaking career. I have a pretty successful career as a public intellectual. And I’ve never had one of these accounts. And whenever I point that out, people say, “Well, but you’re an exception.” And, you know, maybe — but I can’t be that exceptional. I don’t think I’m that unusual. I think there might be a degree to which people are afraid that if they did anything different, their life would be completely destroyed, but they may not be correct. It might actually be fine.

- I think that’s absolutely right. And I do wonder how much pressure studios or record labels or other powerful companies put on talent to use social media.

Yes, I know, there is a bizarre conformity thing; sometimes, if you’re not on social media and you did something with someone, they feel let down that you’re not there to promote them. But ultimately, the whole thing is just a fake, you know — again, I’m not on it and I seem to be doing fine. I mean, maybe if I was on social media I’d have some spectacularly bigger career or something, but it seems to me like I’m doing pretty well, really.

Seems like a good moment to coin an acronym so I don’t have to repeat, over and over, the same account of the pieces that make up the problem. How about “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent”? BUMMER.

BUMMER is a machine, a statistical machine that lives in the computing clouds. To review, phenomena that are statistical and fuzzy are nevertheless real. Even at their best, BUMMER algorithms can only calculate the chances that a person will act in a particular way. But what might be only a chance for each person approaches being a certainty on the average for large numbers of people. The overall population can be affected with greater predictability than can any single person.

Since BUMMER’s influence is statistical, the menace is a little like climate change. You can’t say climate change is responsible for a particular storm, flood, or drought, but you can say it changes the odds that they’ll happen. In the longer term, the most horrible stuff like sea level rise and the need to relocate most people and find new sources of food would be attributable to climate change, but by then the argument would have been lost.

Similarly, I can’t prove that any particular asshole has been made more asshole-y by BUMMER, nor can I prove that any particular degradation of our society would not have happened anyway. There’s no certain way to know if BUMMER has changed your behavior, though later on I’ll offer some ways to find clues. If you use BUMMER platforms, you’ve probably been changed at least a little.

While we can’t know what details in our world would be different without BUMMER, we can know about the big picture. Like climate change, BUMMER will lead us into hell if we don’t self-correct.


THE PARTS THAT MAKE UP THE BUMMER MACHINE

BUMMER is a machine with six moving parts.
Here’s a mnemonic for the six components of the BUMMER machine, in case you ever have to remember them for a test:
A is for Attention Acquisition leading to Asshole supremacy
B is for Butting into everyone’s lives
C is for Cramming content down people’s throats
D is for Directing people’s behaviors in the sneakiest way possible
E is for Earning money from letting the worst assholes secretly screw with everyone else
F is for Fake mobs and Faker society

...


THE PROBLEM IS LIMITED, SO WE CAN CONTAIN IT

The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes. Here I have put forward a hypothesis that our problem is not the internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms. Instead, the problem that has made the world so dark and crazy lately is the BUMMER machine, and the core of the BUMMER machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people.

It’s not even a widely used business plan. Outside of China, the only tech giants that fully depend on BUMMER are Facebook and Google. The other three of the big five tech companies indulge in BUMMER occasionally, because it is normalized these days, but they don’t depend on it. A few smaller BUMMER companies are also influential, like Twitter, though they often struggle. One of the reasons I’m optimistic is that BUMMER isn’t great as a long-term business strategy. I’ll explain that observation more in the argument about economics.

Which companies are BUMMER? This can be debated! A good way to tell is that first-rank BUMMER companies are the ones that attract efforts or spending from bad actors like Russian state intelligence warfare units. This test reveals that there are pseudo-BUMMER services that contain only subsets of the components, like Reddit and 4chan, but still play significant roles in the BUMMER ecosystem.

Next-order services that might become BUMMER but haven’t achieved scale are operated by the other tech giants, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, as well as by smaller companies like Snap.

But this second argument is not about corporations, it’s about you. Because we can draw a line around the BUMMER machine, we can draw a line around what to avoid.

The problem with BUMMER is not that it includes any particular technology, but that it’s someone else’s power trip.

Methodical behaviorism, described in the first argument, isn’t in itself a problem, for instance. You might choose to be treated by a cognitive behavioral therapist, and benefit from it. Hopefully that therapist will have sworn an oath to uphold professional standards and will earn your trust. If, however, your therapist is beholden to a giant, remote corporation and is being paid to get you to make certain decisions that aren’t necessarily in your own interests, then that would be a BUMMER.

Similarly, hypnotism isn’t in itself a BUMMER. But if your hypnotist is replaced by someone you don’t know who is working for someone else you don’t know, and you have no way of knowing what you’re being hypnotized to do, then that would be a BUMMER.

The problem isn’t any particular technology, but the use of technology to manipulate people, to concentrate power in a way that is so nuts and creepy that it becomes a threat to the survival of civilization.

If you want to help make the world sane, you don’t need to give up your smartphone, using computer cloud services, or visiting websites. You don’t need to fear math, the social sciences, or psychology.

BUMMER is the stuff to avoid. Delete your BUMMER accounts!

Blacklists and monitoring systems are nowhere close to Black Mirror fantasies.
BY JAMIE HORSLEY | NOVEMBER 16, 2018, 6:46 AM

hina’s sweeping, data-driven “social credit” initiative is sounding alarms. In a speech on Oct. 4, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence described it as “an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life.” But there’s a small problem. The system doesn’t actually exist—at least as it’s generally portrayed.

It’s not surprising that myths about the system are spreading, given the shrinking space in China for civil society, rights lawyering, speech, investigative journalism, and religious belief; its increasingly ubiquitous, invasive surveillance capability; and the Chinese Communist Party’s push to apply big data and artificial intelligence in governance. China’s party-state is collecting a vast amount of information on its citizens, and its social credit system and other developments internally and overseas raise many serious concerns. But contrary to the mainstream media narrative on this, Chinese authorities are not assigning a single score that will determine every aspect of every citizen’s life—at least not yet.

It’s true that, building on earlier initiatives, China’s State Council published a road map in 2014 to establish a far-reaching “social credit” system by 2020. The concept of social credit (shehui xinyong) is not defined in the increasing array of national documents governing the system, but its essence is compliance with legally prescribed social and economic obligations and performing contractual commitments. Composed of a patchwork of diverse information collection and publicity systems established by various state authorities at different levels of government, the system’s main goal is to improve governance and market order in a country still beset by rampant fraud and counterfeiting.

Under the system, government agencies compile and share across departments, regions, and sectors, and with the public, data on compliance with specified industry or sectoral laws, regulations, and agreements by individuals, companies, social organizations, government departments, and the judiciary. Serious offenders may be placed on blacklists published on an integrated national platform called Credit China and subjected to a range of government-imposed inconveniences and exclusions. These are often enforced by multiple agencies pursuant to joint punishment agreements covering such sectors as taxation, the environment, transportation, e-commerce, food safety, and foreign economic cooperation, as well as failing to carry out court judgments.

These punishments are intended to incentivize legal and regulatory compliance under the often-repeated slogan of “whoever violates the rules somewhere shall be restricted everywhere.” Conversely, “red lists” of the trustworthy are also published and accessed nationally through Credit China.

The scope, scale, diversity, and language of the evolving system have caused a lot of confusion, particularly with respect to the existence of a single social credit score. There is no such thing as a national “social credit score.”There is no such thing as a national “social credit score.” A few dozen towns and cities in China, as well as private companies running loyalty-type programs for their customers, do currently compute scores, primarily to determine rewards or access to various programs. That was the source of at least some of the confusion. Alibaba’s Sesame Credit program, for instance, which gives rewards on Alibaba’s platforms and easier access to credit through a linked company, was often cited as a precursor of a planned government program, despite being a private enterprise.
The government does assign universal social credit codes to companies and organizations, which they use as an ID number for registration, tax payments, and other activities, while all individuals have a national ID number. The existing social credit blacklists use these numbers, as do almost all activities in China. But these codes are not scores or rankings. Enterprises and professionals in various sectors may be graded or ranked, sometimes by industry associations, for specific regulatory purposes like restaurant sanitation. However, the social credit system does not itself produce scores, grades, or assessments of “good” or “bad” social credit. Instead, individuals or companies are blacklisted for specific, relatively serious offenses like fraud and excessive pollution that would generally be offenses anywhere. To be sure, China does regulate speech, association, and other civil rights in ways that many disagree with, and the use of the social credit system to further curtail such rights deserves monitoring.

China’s credit reporting system, whose financial reports comprise a core component of what is considered “social credit,” may also have contributed to the myth. The Chinese term for credit reporting (xinyong zhengxin) is often translated as “credit scoring.” However, the primary financial credit reporting system for companies and individuals overseen by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), China’s central bank, does not provide credit scores or assessments with its standard reports and does not mention “scoring” in its definition of credit reporting. The PBOC’s Credit Reference Center, like licensed private credit reporting agencies, does offer financial credit scores (xinyong pingfen).

Widely reported private credit scoring programs launched not by credit reporting agencies but by some payment platforms such as Alibaba’s, which consider e-commerce and social media interactions as well as financial histories to determine customer scores, likely also contributed to the misconception of a social credit score. The PBOC, looking to expand its consumer credit coverage by sourcing data from online lenders and other nontraditional sources, in 2015 authorized eight companies—some of which, including Sesame Credit, ran customer scoring programs—to seek credit reporting agency licenses. None of those companies qualified.

However, this year the PBOC did license a national agency called Baihang Credit (Baihang Zhengxin), with those eight companies as shareholders, to provide credit reporting services to clients and contribute data from online microlenders and peer-to-peer lending platforms to the PBOC for compiling more accurate consumer credit histories. Baihang may offer credit scoring products, but those scores, as opposed to the data on which they are based, are not part of the official social credit system yet.

A second misapprehension is that the social credit system collects data on every citizen. The government does collect regulatory information on all companies and social organizations, and different departments maintain their own dossiers on individuals. Some of this information is made public, and the social credit system is intended to create a culture of greater trust and creditworthiness in society as a whole. However, at present the system prioritizes compiling and sharing public record-type data such as licensing, other regulatory information, and adverse court decisions on adults in key areas. Unless people are sole proprietors or company representatives, have taken a loan or credit card, violated the law, or defaulted on a court judgment, they’re unlikely to be in the social credit database.

A third common error is the belief that social behavior, consumption habits, and political loyalty impact one’s social credit and constitute a basis for imposing punishments. Again, that misconception typically arises from conflating private commercial rewards programs, which do consider shopping and social behaviors in assigning their own credit scores to customers who opt in to the program, with the government-sponsored social credit system. The core government documents, sectoral and local government regulations, and numerous multiagency joint punishment systems thus far rely on published standards of compliance with laws, regulations, and contractual obligations, rather than on loose concepts of appropriate behavior or one’s random digital activity, to enforce the social credit system.

There are plenty of legitimate concerns. The massive amounts of data being compiled and shared heighten the dangers of hacking and leaking personal and other confidential information. Information security is a huge problem in China. In a recent survey, 85 percent of respondents reported they had suffered data leaks ranging from phone numbers to bank account details. National and local social credit and other documents do call for enhanced information security and privacy protections. However, China does not yet have an overarching privacy law or the ability to enforce these protections.

The social credit system’s use of public blacklists and shaming—what one scholar calls “reputation mechanisms”—as well as the joint punishment mechanism that essentially imposes yet another layer of penalty enforcement for legal offenses are controversial and problematic. The standards for getting put on blacklists, managed by different departments at multiple levels to enforce rules within their jurisdiction, are not always clear. The targets are not always notified and given a chance to contest the listing

Some blacklisted individuals have continued to face restrictions after their debt was repaid or the time period for the penalty expired, creating situations such as the man who discovered through denial of his credit card application that his bank was not informed of his removal from the blacklist, and the admitted student who was erroneously denied his place at a university due to his father’s failure to pay back a bank loan. The technical challenges of running such a sprawling, complex system efficiently and minimizing mistakes are mind-boggling.

The danger that the Chinese party-state may attempt to develop a global citizen score and start using opaque algorithms to determine one’s creditability for a variety of political as well as financial and regulatory purposes cannot be ruled out. China outlaws conduct such as reporting on protests, spreading online rumors, and growing “abnormal beards” in Xinjiang, and such offenses could certainly be used as a basis for imposing punishments under the social credit system. However, the Chinese party-state has many other tools to address public and political security issues. Moreover, given the diverse standards for assessing legal noncompliance and landing on any particular social credit blacklist, it would be challenging to devise a global score that would have a meaningful regulatory impact.

For now, while there are many things to be worried about in China, a single and all-pervasive ranking system isn’t one of them—yet.

• More than a dozen former Facebook employees detailed how the company's leadership and its performance review system has created a culture where any dissent is discouraged.
  
  
• Employees say Facebook's stack ranking performance review system drives employees to push out products and features that drive user engagement without fully considering potential long-term negative impacts on user experience or privacy.
  
  
• Reliance on peer reviews creates an underlying pressure for Facebook employees to forge friendships with colleagues for the sake of career advancement
  

Despite year-old promises to fix its “Up Next” content recommendation system, YouTube is still suggesting conspiracy videos, hyperpartisan and misogynist videos, pirated videos, and content from hate groups following common news-related searches.

On its 15th anniversary, a look at how the site has changed social life by keeping weak connections on life support forever

bela maca wrote:nema veze fejsbuk s tim, kada je prijateljstvo stvarno gotovo lako se anfrenduje bilo ko.

Equifax's data breach on Sept. 7, 2017, stunned markets and American consumers, but where the data of those 143 million people disappeared to has remained a mystery.

CNBC talked to experts, intelligence officials, dark web data "hunters" and Equifax to discover where they expect the data has gone, and what it is being used for.

The prevailing theory today is that the data was stolen by a nation-state for spying purposes, not by criminals looking to cash in on stolen identities.

Facebook removed several ads placed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign that called for the breakup of Facebook and other tech giants.

But the social network later reversed course after POLITICO reported on the takedown, with the company saying it wanted to allow for "robust debate."

The ads, which had identical images and text, touted Warren's recently announced plan to unwind "anti-competitive" tech mergers, including Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram.

“Three companies have vast power over our economy and our democracy. Facebook, Amazon, and Google," read the ads, which Warren's campaign had placed Friday. "We all use them. But in their rise to power, they’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field in their favor.”

A message on the three ads said: “This ad was taken down because it goes against Facebook's advertising policies.”

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the ads had been taken down but said the company is in the process of restoring them.

“We removed the ads because they violated our policies against use of our corporate logo," the spokesperson said. "In the interest of allowing robust debate, we are restoring the ads.”

Warren swiped at Facebook over the removal, citing it as evidence the company has grown too powerful.

"Curious why I think FB has too much power? Let's start with their ability to shut down a debate over whether FB has too much power," she tweeted. "Thanks for restoring my posts. But I want a social media marketplace that isn't dominated by a single censor."

More than a dozen other Facebook ads from Warren about her tech proposal were not affected.

Gargantua wrote:

možda je vreme da prestane da se idealizuje stanje ("mreža", "platforma", "odgovornost" itd) i da se fb (i dr) počnu tretirati kao bilo koje druge privatne kompanije, podložne kapricu vlasnika, pritiscima vlasti itd itd.

Well, it was a nice run while it lasted, but the EU Parliament has just put an end to the open internet. By the incredibly thin margin of just five votes, the Parliament voted to approve the EU Copyright Directive, including the terrible versions of both Article 11 and 13. This is an inauspicious day and one that the EU will almost certainly come to regret. While we now need to see how each of the member states will implement the actual laws put forth in the Directive (meaning the damage in some states may be more mitigatable than in others), on the whole the EU Copyright Directive requires laws that effectively end the open internet as an open communications medium. Sites that previously allowed content creators to freely publish content will now be forced to make impossible choices: license all content (which is literally impossible), filter all content (expensive and failure-prone), or shut down. Sites that used to send traffic to news sources may now need to reconsider, as doing so will inexplicably require payment.
At best, the EU--for all its complaints about Google and Facebook--has just locked both companies into a dominant position. They can afford this. Others cannot. And, the legacy gatekeepers in the media and entertainment business will quickly pivot to seeking to export this model elsewhere.
The MEPs who voted for this are up for election in two months, and hopefully the EU shows them the door, but in the meantime, today is a sad day for the open internet. I am sure that some will be celebrating on the false belief that this will magically "help artists." It will not. You just handed more power to giant companies, and took it away from creators. In time, one hopes, those who mocked the protesters and activists and actual experts will come to realize just how much they destroyed today.