This has been done many times before. The question is: Who wants it? Is it the government that wants it or the users? If the users want it, then it will take off. Otherwise, nobody will use it.
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
-Mark Twain
Worse even, it is typically a case where EU can loose some legal power to the European court of human right. Logically, the ECHR should have primacy over the EUCJ, but technically and legally, it does not yet. Any case as broad as this, if the EUCJ is forced by the parliement to enforce it against human rights, would trigger a shit storm, and the EUCJ would either have to bow to the ECHR, or a new constitution would have to be drafted and voted on, and _that_ would be an even worse shitstorm.
Can you really? I use DoH, could it be stopped? I don't understand networks enough to be sure about anything dns-related tbh,if you tell me you could block DoH outbound, I believe.
But freedom is only a part of human rights, there is also 'equality' in front of the law, and if you admit one exception for non-defense related reasons, you'll get censored by the echr too.
Seems to dovetail with the EU's separate proposal to mandate that browsers trust EU-controlled TLS root certificates [0]. (Note the DNS resolver in OP is not apparently mandatory).
Year 2024, Humanity's in its golden age. Real problems? Extinct. War, crimes, poverty, hunger, even diseases: all banished into history textbooks. The only tear in this utopian tapestry? A handful of folks getting their knickers in a twist over the replication of certain patterns of zeroes and ones.
To be fair, it's vastly more easy to impact such as the DNS servers used or user tracking where you have jurisdiction, than to impact "war, crimes, poverty, hunger, diseases".
You can't "fix" war or famine or disease in a faraway country, really. You can try to impact with stuff like aid, or sanctions, or cooperation, but the actual impact on the ground can vary wildly.
That's exactly the problem people have with the EU. They care (and cost a lot of money) about small things while completely ignoring actual issues. Nobody really wants some digital IDs or censored DNS. Fix the damn war happening right on the border and the resulting energy crisis (I don't mean by buying Russian product). Also, stop making the energy crisis even worse.
I want a digital ID, it would save me a lot of time and would be extremely practical (and it's already technically possible anyway, it would be a waste not to have it).
> Fix the damn war happening right on the border and the resulting energy crisis (I don't mean by buying Russian product)
Oh, just "fix" them, right? Click on the Fix button in the "Diagnose issues" wizard? Why didn't you say that earlier, if only EU leaders knew it was that easy!
The EU is doing a lot to help Ukraine, with funds for the military and humanitarian sides, and donations of lots of equipment. European armies cannot get involved without risking escalation to nuclear war, which nobody wants, so I can hardly see what more you can ask them to do.
A for the energy crisis, guess what, the EU as a whole, and each individual country, has plans already in place and in progress to "fix" it. It just takes decades to deploy enough "green" electricity generation, replace infrastructure, update insulation at people's homes, replace their heating method, etc.
Save time, how? I still have to go renew my ID every ten years even with the digital one. It doesn't save me any time at all. Perhaps your local law had some problems that made online interaction hard, but I personally didn't carry or show my physical ID in the past decade once. Fix your local law instead of having the EU do it for you, we need their attention on difficult international issues.
No buttons. Hard, difficult and long work towards fixing. Instead of separating attention across things that are nice-to-have but don't really change that much.
It's exactly because the EU people know it's not easy they instead work on something else. That needs to stop.
My small country did more to help Ukraine than the largest economies in the bloc. There is much more that could be done. Censoring DNS to be more like Russia is not that.
> Save time, how? I still have to go renew my ID every ten years even with the digital one. It doesn't save me any time at all. Perhaps your local law had some problems that made online interaction hard, but I personally didn't carry or show my physical ID in the past decade once. Fix your local law instead of having the EU do it for you, we need their attention on difficult international issues.
Proving your identity online when you need that is a pain, for government services or other things like banks (opening a new bank account). I vastly prefer having a digital ID that can be used to prove who I am online over relying on varying validation methods with varying levels of actual security - e.g. in France, for the tax office to be able to process your tax returns online, you need to prove your identity which happens by getting snail mail with codes; for banks, there's varying stuff like uploading pictures of your ID, or having to go to a bank branch for them to scan it. Having an uniform digital ID that anyone can attest means the problem goes away and everything is more secure, because nobody needs a scan of your ID card anymore.
> Instead of separating attention across things that are nice-to-have but don't really change that much
Are you under the impression that something as big as the EU can only do one thing at a time?
> It's exactly because the EU people know it's not easy they instead work on something else. That needs to stop.
Or they work on the complicated stuff, but since it takes time, also have the energy and money to work on other stuff at the same time? Shocking, I know.
> My small country did more to help Ukraine than the largest economies in the bloc. There is much more that could be done
Like, what more can be done specifically? Give more money, weapons? Sadly pockets aren't infinite, and especially with the hit due to Covid and Russian gas blackmail, European countries don't have large amounts of money laying around. And yet, they've donated billions of euros and billions of euros worth of equipment, as well as provided training for Ukrainian forces.
All your French problems could be fixed without EU digital ID. In my country I can use my bank account online login to prove my identity to the tax man. The only time I had to go somewhere in person is for my first bank account - same as with digital ID.
I am under the impression that these hard problems require so much resources that not even something as big as EU can split their attention to some small insignificancies, yes.
If they have time for something small and merely nice to have, they're not doing enough about the important things.
Even the smallest countries donated billions, a significant percentage of their GDP. If the biggest economies didn't donate hundreds of billions, there is much more to be done.
Yeah, had to LOL at "War, crimes, poverty, hunger, even diseases: all banished into history textbooks".
That's with several major wars going on, including talks of nuclear escalation, worsening crime stats (in the US, but also elsewhere in the west), poverty on the rise (and thus hunger), and after the COVID pandemic toll (regarding diseases)...
In this case, the sarcasm is intended to confuse, and with some readers it achieves a little more confusion than intended.
kamma could have written something like "the EU should solve <really difficult problems> before concerning itself with <simpler problenm>" but that would have made clear that the really difficult problems are really difficult. The sarcasm is rhetorical device to distract the readers so they won't pay attention to the different levels of difficulty. Handwaving, basically, and the handwaving was a little too strong and distracted some readers too much.
If you've been long enough on internet forums, you'll see every inanity you can think of as "of course it's sarcasm" being presented sincerely.
Also, I've read too many posts/comments of the "the world has never been better" variety (usually citing Hans Rosling or some tech-bro favorite like Pinker), that sincerely push similar ideas of the state of the world in 2024.
You have to choose to draw the line somewhere. You can choose no line (absolute free speech), a conservative line that only limits some speech (where most of the West stands, staggered a bit), or a quite restrictive line that tightly controls public discourse (where China stands, to take your example).
I don’t believe absolute free speech is a sustainable option for societies on the scale of countries. Absolute free speech would invite chaos.
Free speech is not a natural phenomenon. It is an artificial concept created by humans, and thus we have the complete power to define it and choose what it means. Different groups choose differently.
> Samuel Paty died because he believed in free expression, and he would approve of it, no
He probably would, but do note that he caveated his free expression tremendously, doing everything he could do avoid offending brainwashed kids and their retarded parents.
> BTW he didn't die by "words", he died because a bigoted idiot attacked him
Because people called for his death based on a misinterpretation based on a lie from one of the brainwashed students. That was the speech that killed him, not his own. (And for the record, thankfully, all the pieces of shit responsible are being tried - that includes the brainwashed students that spread the initial lies, their parents that spread them online even further, as well as those that called for his death online, and the students that directed the murderer in the direction of the teacher. )
Julius Streicher was executed at Nurenberg for just that, words. Vicious words he published in his newspaper Der Stürmer to demonize Jews and justify their extermination.
Sorry, but that is absurd. Propaganda has and will kill people. Look at the legions of dipshits who follow Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh. Sure, all they do is sit at their desks talking absolute horseshit but it'd be deeply unserious to suggest that people haven't been killed as a result.
> This is not about “allowing”, but actively blocking.
What's the difference other than semantics? When a government decides to "not allow" something, it's often achieved through active enforcement, or threats of active enforcement.
Remember, the EU is the ones that enacted the single most consequentially moronic internet-related law, the so-called "ePrivacy Directive", which has infected countless websites with stupid cookie nags. Governments tend to be pretty stupid when it comes to technology policy; my advice is to shut up, quietly work around it, and be thankful that they aren't any smarter.
Curious why? I've never heard court ordered blocking of it.
I remember EU wide sanction mentioning RT in the context of finances and (re-) broadcast, while web traffic was never mentioned.
To answer the spirit of the question: as an American, you could freely subscribe to Soviet newspapers, printed in the USSR, which the US Post Office would deliver right to your doorstep (via international mail). That has been the case since 1965, when the Supreme Court settled the question in Lamont v. Postmaster General.
You could also watch some Soviet movies, but I'd say that is very different to access form large scall media outlets (radio, TV) that don't rely on subscription etc.
How about informing/educating people by promoting instead of undermining real journalism? I aspire to be able to tell apart A from B for myself, and not being told what is what from a nanny state and controlled media.
Can't the "free" and purportedly superior western media debunk whatever BS rt.com peddles?
But then they would probably be inclined to also call-out the psy-ops and other shenaningans staged by our govenments and targeting us. Ooops!
In most cases, you have no way of telling A and B apart unless you are directly involved or an expert.
Debunking has limited effectiveness even in factual situations, beyond factual, not even sure what that would mean.
There is, of course, also a numbers game, flipping the side of a few people is quite sufficient for a some things, so even being really good at countering adversarial propaganda will leave a lot of gaps. Reducing an attack surface might not always be a bad idea.
The US government is constitutionally prohibited from taking down web domains which contain "ideas... actively causing harm".
You're conflating multiple issues into one. The US has jurisdiction to seize domains being used in furtherance of crimes; sure. But ideas aren't crimes in the US. The US isn't able, legally or practically, to use this power to censor opinion or information on the basis of its content: the US courts do not permit it.
~
Your other question ("What do you do...?") is much more interesting to me, but it's too big for me to be able to give it a respectful treatment. This is my shortest answer: we entrust democracy to decide whether to start a war or to a end a war*; whether to build nuclear weapons or abolish them. It's implicit in our method of government that we trust the civic deliberation process with our lives. The fact that our collective deliberation can make mistakes, and kill a million people with its "whoopsies!", is part and parcel of what it means to function as a republic. (To lay the responsibilities elsewhere is to have a different method of government). Most political ideas are capable of causing immense harm in a democracy (except unimportant, frivolous ones)—there aren't many important, but safe, ideas.
*(I think it's remarkable that much of the First Amendment jurisprudence involves censoring opinions about wars, in one direction or another: an acknowledgement that "ideas capable of killing millions" is at the heart of this civic question).
That's a distinction without a difference. Whether "macrosoft.com" is considered an idea or brand impersonation is in the eye of the beholder .
And of course something not being allowed doesn't mean it doesn't happen in plain sight without repercutions. On the practicality of it, getting a take down court order for brand or copyright violation seems straightforward, and civil forfeiture can apply to domains [0] as well, so vaguely sticking a potential associated crime to a domain owner is enough for an agency to take down a domain, whatever it is.
I think that's totally US's choice to have these laws and apply them their way. I also sympathize with the rest of the world planning to get out of that influence and their own tradeoffs.
> It's implicit in our method of government that we trust the civic deliberation process with our lives.
I feel you're looking at from the political lens only. A lot of "ideas" are not political and asking for civil debate everytime one of these gets a wide audience would be an issue.
A suicide inducing site could be such. And it doesn't need to be intentional nor straight illegal. If looking at it hundreds of kids took out their lives every single day, you'd shut it down and start asking questions later.
This isn't about "reading/speaking wrong or dangerous ideas". You can stand infront of one of the EU parl today and read whatever manifesto of ideas you think true, in fact some people do, hell you can even do that inside the parliament, in fact some people do.
What you cannot be is a foreign state at war with an ally and freely distribute state propaganda aimed at furthering your war goals. This isn't a hard line to draw.
But you missed the point: the illiberalism isn't the restriction on the foreign government's actions, but the restriction placed on your own citizens—the restriction that they are not allowed to read certain things: that certain books, prints, newspapers, are illegal for their eyes. That's anathema to open society.
This isn't about "foreign governments' rights"; it's about peoples' rights.
"To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker."
I can look at Russian propaganda today and I will not be tried or sent to jail.
I can spread Russian propaganda today and I will not be tried or sent to jail.
Again, the ban of RT isn't because they spread certain ideas that were considered wrong by the EU censors. The ban is because they are owned by an adversary state that currently invading an ally on the EU border.
> That's anathema to open society.
You should maybe read up what the inventor of the very term of the open society had to say about the limits of openness in an open society.
> You can stand infront of one of the EU parl today and read whatever manifesto
And you can do that because it has literally no impact. This vision of free speech was a moment of genius from our institutions.
However, you can’t talk about the crimes of occupants in France in, say, a newspaper, or any broadcast channel, or anything that has an audience. Governments have literally made it a speechcrime to discover the authors who are killing our children at 23x the pace of the others.
> However, you can’t talk about the crimes of occupants in France in, say, a newspaper, or any broadcast channel, or anything that has an audience
If I'm reading your racist dogwhistles correctly, "occupants of France" would be muslims or brown/black people? Don't you worry, plenty of shit-tier "news" in France make it their life goal to cover every single crime committed by someone who cannot trace their lineage to 15th century France. (cf. Valeurs Actuelles) Hell, there are multiple political parties founded around those ideas, that don't forget to chime in any time anything happens.
> Governments have literally made it a speechcrime to discover the authors who are killing our children at 23x the pace of the others.
Who are those killing our children at 23x the pace, and what is the speech crime? Sources, please.
Blocking RT has little to do with the opinions spread by it (though highly correlated for a variety of reasons), other people in Europe are allowed to say and spread the same ideas without any repercussions.
It is about fighting the intelligence operations by a country that is quite literally invading a bordering allied state. RT isn't being blocked because it spread ideas that are contained in some EU law to be illegal and dangerous opinions, they are being blocked because they are owned by the Russian state.
If we're going to argue about the semantics here then so be it. Even within your definition this is not censorship.
I can copy/paste an article from the RT frontpage onto a personal blog of mine and neither me nor my blog will face any legal repercussions. It's not the information that is being banned, it's the state actor spreading it.
You cannot access the rt front page without circumventing the censorship. You may be tech savvy and able to circumvent it. But most people are not. Which is key.
It is literally censored.
Yes it's a worrying trend you see in the laws proposed/created over the past few years.
ISPs in france already comes with censored DNS servers probably due to regulation for a few years now. I guess this is a suggestion to make EU wide not just for some countries.
The real problem is when they will ban and make it illegal to change from a list of censored ones.
I teach a class on basic web technologies to Marketing students, and I always enjoy talking about DNS there. It is a fun concept to explain, that a text file, quite literally, is the backbone (phonebook) to the entire internet as we use it today. Anyone who gets to mess with the phonebook, has power. At the same time, nobody stops you from using your own copy of it. If the government decides to mess with the phonebook (like it does in many countries around the world), you simply use someone else's phonebook, or your own copy (or even just the edits/overwrites - i.e. the hosts file).
The most used third-party options include Google, Cloudflare, OpenDNS and Norton, which are all US-based.This large foreign footprint has the EU worried.
This is understandable but the integration of government, DNS, and particularly blocking is a controversial intersection of concepts.
Having a state-approved DNS resolver is better than letting ISP and other private entities mess around with DNS. The current situation in many EU countries is that it is up to the ISPs to block unlawful/compromised domains, having an official EU resolver removes that burden from ISP, they now just have to point to that resolver. It will probably make it much easier for wi-fi hotspots, company networks, etc... to be in compliance, and it is better than relying on a third party that may have its own idea of what's acceptable, inject ads, etc...
Of course, it would be better without censorship, and some organizations are fighting for it, and it is a good thing. but the technical solution is not bad IMHO. And censorship will be circumvented anyways, DNS blocking is weak.
In summary:
- It doesn't make the current situation worse regarding censorship (DNS poisoning is already done at ISP level)
- It can keep ISPs in check
- Depending on how well it is run, it can be good for security (it implies good reactivity on the part of the EU, that's why I don't count on it)
Seems both harmless and pointless. There are tons of resolvers that block all sorts of crap, and we just don't use them if we don't want that crap blocked. This proposal doesn't seem to imply that anyone will be forced to use this resolver, and I doubt anyone will use it because it's very unlikely to be better than existing options.
Not hard to anticipate how this might play out. I can see how it first becomes the "official" resolver, which in a later steps is maybe "recommended," then required if you want certain kinds of funding or subsidy, or just serve public contracts, etc. Before you know it it's mandatory.
They can make it “mandatory” but if it sucks then people will just change their DNS to something else. The people who don’t know how to do that probably don’t leave the mainstream internet anyway.
25 years ago I also had a lot of trust in freedom on the internet, because it would just "route around censorship" and all that. I don't have the same confidence anymore.
The internet seems to be doing just fine at routing around censorship. I can still access TPB and Libgen a multitude of different ways despite the efforts of my govt to block them.
DNS is harder to block because it’s not illegal, and it’s a core internet service, which means there’s a lot of interest in preserving access.
You may not use it at home, but it can easily become the default in managed environments.
I just wish that the focus is really on protecting citizens (e.g. block domains known to serve malware) rather than just filtering "illegal content".
The latter would just be a waste of EU money with very little added value for the EU citizens. I'd bet that blocking "illegal content" will be mostly blocking DMCA takedowns. I.e. EU will be spending from their own pockets to have the "privilege" to serve takedowns for US-owned IP from an EU-controlled DNS infrastructure.
This background article covers a lot of the whys and hows: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23738871.2023.2... including mentioning similar projects in the UK and Canada. It says public access to it (as an option, alongside other public DNS services) will be available from 2025.
I have thought "man, I wish my DNS server didn't let me visit this torrent website I want to visit" exactly zero times.
I wonder if this is some misguided "torrent sites are malicious, so users should be able to block them" thing, rather than a "the government needs to ban torrent sites because they're illegal". It's bizarre to make a DNS resolver like this, and then make it opt-in.
The stated purpose of the thing isn't to block torrents. It's to avoid the EU being critically dependent on US infrastructure (and a lot more words), particularly government departments - also the stated reason for the UK version, both of which launched for access from government offices first?
They make it clear on the website that it is optional so that it cannot be used for censorship.
Digital sovereignty might have been the initial reason (and a sensible one). What's actually being delivered seems to be a DNS service for blocking malicious sites with real time threat intelligence feeds, for Telcos to upsell to their customers with antivirus-style security scaremongering.
That difference in focus is pretty troubling. It's taking away focus from the important part of delivering a robust DNS service, making the service more expensive to build out initially, and then also making it far more expensive to operate in perpetuity since they'll be spending the large majority of their time on maintaining the threat intel.
is it blocking anything? It was one of a shopping list of requirements that it be capable of complying with court orders. I expect they don't want to repeat the Quad9 situation, where it just blocked requests from all of Germany. And as others in the thread mention, things that court orders may block aren't just torrents - eg malware.
Also, given that it's mainly aimed (so far) at government departments and telcos, it's not clear that that would reduce adoption at all.
> is it blocking anything? It was one of a shopping list of requirements that it be capable of complying with court orders.
Presumably the court orders would be to block things, right?
> I expect they don't want to repeat the Quad9 situation, where it just blocked requests from all of Germany.
Best way to resolve this is to not have laws requiring DNS servers to censor things, and make those laws as inconvenient to enforce as possible to encourage that outcome.
> And as others in the thread mention, things that court orders may block aren't just torrents - eg malware.
But as soon as they start blocking torrents then people stop using it and it can no longer block malware.
> Also, given that it's mainly aimed (so far) at government departments and telcos, it's not clear that that would reduce adoption at all.
Users can choose not to use their telco's DNS if it starts blocking things they don't want it to, which in turn limits use of the service by end users. It may even limit use of the service by telcos if they get customer complaints or notice that customers are switching from their DNS, which they don't want if they're redirecting NXDOMAIN to ad spam or using/selling DNS query data etc.
It's not only bizarre but counterproductive. In theory you could create a DNS resolver that only blocks unambiguous threats, like actual malware domains, and then people would have a reason to opt in. But as soon as you start adding things to the list that give the users a reason to stop using it, they stop using it.
Turkey has a similar thing since about 10 years and the way it works is that if you don't agree with the government censorship you simply use some other DNS. Some service providers go the extra mile and block the ip but it seems pretty random. Even when blocked, you can use VPN.
However, being able to access if you try hard enough is not O.K. Especially commercial operations are not viable if the Government doesn't like you because you instantly lose the non-techies.
Dangerous stuff, even if you completely agree with everything the current government does don't forget that governments change.
During the early career of Ursula von der Leyen (current EU president) in Germany she was championing a law just like that. It was something like "stop signs" for the internet and was based on DNS based blocks. The law was passed and was quickly overturned once her party won the election. During the campaign she and her party were denouncing everybody opposing the law as being friendly to csam. This feels like a bad re-run of the same script to me.
Doesn't matter. Most people have been manually changing their DNS server to Google or Cloudflare DNS. More tech-savvy ones run their own DNS: unbound, pi-hole, etc.
No, they can't "just" do it in one fell swoop, that'd be too much and meet way too strong backlash. Even in autocratic regimes the "tightening of the bolts" has to be done gradually and step by step, nevermind the (still mostly) democratic ones.
It's so weird to me that the EU seems to simultaneously hold the position that a user's privacy is a fundamental right that must be respected, and enacts a lot of good legislation to that effect, but also that we must snoop on everyone so that we can think of the children.
You may wonder how's that going to work now that DoH is used by default by browsers? For it won't be enough to use the great firewall of communist Europe to filter port 53: they'll have to force browsers to send encrypted DNS traffic to EU-approved resolvers...
Well, the call for proposal linked in TFA mention DoH and explains that they'll need to "engage with the community" (browsers, ISPs, ...).
I know the word "neoliberal" is overused, but The EU really is a neoliberal economic bloc, in the correct sense of the term.
The most fundamental goal of the EU is to enable free flow of goods, services and labor within the bloc. The EU tries to prevent member states from enacting subsidies or regulations that benefit their own companies at the expense of other EU companies.
The one area in which EU market policy isn't neoliberal is agriculture. EU subsidies there are meant to keep farmers happy and to prevent any food crisis from ever occurring. I think food security is an exception that even the most strident free-marketeer understands.
So when people call the EU communist, I just have to chuckle.
3) add laws that forbid individuals and association to maintain an uncensored DNS
4) Force browser vendors to point to DNS over HTTPS server whose source is EU DNS
Not sure how they could limit people from using DNS over HTTPS with forked/reconfigured browsers but I guess that would at least limit the majority of non tech savy users.
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." -Mark Twain