Brussels fails to recognise that digital sovereignty isn’t just about who owns or controls your technology. It’s also about having an independent vision for how that technology is designed, developed and deployed.
Well, there are those of us who say that the absence of such a vision is a damn good thing. What the Fuck’s it got to do with government – whether national or EU – how people use a new technology. That’s up to the people, not the rulers.
Men of plan, eh? Always with us and yet we have to shout them down every damn time.
One would have presumed independent vision would have been something independent individuals have, not governments. So by independent they don’t actually mean independent?
UK social media ban just announced. As bad as it could be. Can we have a post, Tim?
Starmer shows increasing delusions: <i>he said the government had learned from the Australian experience.
Tell him please don’t learn from Australia.
From the BBC (with my own edits in bold)
Prime Minister Keir Starmer is expected to ban under-16s from major social media platforms including TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram unless they install Firefox, Opera or get a VPN.
Children will also stop being able to livestream on “safer” sites so will use Pornhub instead, and stop being able to talk to strangers on gaming apps so will have to use dodgy chat sites in the US to do it instead, the prime minister is set to announce.
The thing about gaming is absolutely vile. It assumes any interaction is with a pedo. It’s like don’t let your kids out to go to town, in case a pedo picks them up, rather than warning them about pedos. This is the world that kids live in now. The virtual world is an enabler for education, communications, new friendships. You need to be careful about it but a clampdown has negative effects.
When my kids were about 14/15, they got to know some people on Facebook involved in the Bristol comic con. Quite a small informal group. And “can we go, Dad?”. So, I went with them, made sure it wasn’t some dodgy blokes. It wasn’t. They had a day of it, I found a cafe, met up later.
But I really, sincerely believe, 13+ is where you remove some of the restraints, but observe kids. Physically locking them up because of street pedos, and stopping them using the internet because of online pedos is just going to stunt their growth. Like everyone now realises that Covid was a disaster for kids. Yeah, you prioritised 80 year old grannies that have had their life, who are pottering around watching Countdown over kids that need to grow. I suspect a lot of it is parents who wanted an excuse to lock their kids up. What a fucking awful thing.
Go and watch The Fablemans. Spielberg was making movies from aged 12, and that’s not that uncommon with creative fields. When he was a little older, he had the freedom to earn money to buy film, to learn the value of money. He met John Ford when he was 15. He was hanging around at Universal for a summer on an unofficial apprenticeship when he was 17. Everyone’s obsessed with school, as if you’re going to use that French vocab or knowledge of the Maginot Line again (I mean, you might but).
So, I went with them, made sure it wasn’t some dodgy blokes. It wasn’t. They had a day of it, I found a cafe, met up later.
I think you’re describing “parenting”, WB. It seems to be a dying art.
Just was on the radio news here…
They managed the whopper that “the vast majority of parents is in favour of the measure.”
There’s lies, big lies, and absolute porkers like that….
Honestly though, I think a lot of parents do. A lot of parents want their children infantilised, to live risk free and have far, far more trust in the state than I do.
The whole nonce register means people disengage their brains. Far better to assume everyone might be a nonce and act accordingly. Because in truth, nonces don’t get caught much.
“A Lot” of parents in the “focus groups” and Carefully Worded polls maybe…
But certainly not the “vast majority” of all parents in the UK.
There’s entire groups you can safely assume for they’ll treat such a ban as so much toilet paper.
And we all know this *isn’t* about the dear kiddie’s safety.. It’s about control. At several very unhealthy levels.
Meta and TikTok ( who will most certainly be on the List…) should simply cut off the UK for a week or two…
See how many Parents can actual deal with their Hallowed Offspring… And then we’ll see if they are *still* of the opinion of this type of outright censorship being a Good Idea…
I wish you were right, but you’re not.
Listen to the working classes that switched to Thatcher. Listen very carefully. You will hear far more “Maggie Thatcher got me a council house” than “Maggie Thatcher liberalised the economy”.
People overwhelmingly do not care about the nanny state until it hits them. All the religious people complaining about clampdowns on free speech were the people who loved restrictions on Sunday trade. Lots of gays want to fuck each other, but how dare you call for an end to Pride funding.
And there are no campaigns against forcing children to stay in school, raising the age of smoking, or this of any size.
Even Reform. They want to end this Northern rail project which is great, but what do they want to do? Spend it on a different set of useless choo choos. Some fucking Elizabeth Line for Manchester. They are not saying “and return the money to taxpayers to do as they wish”.
I stood for the Libertarian Party to end lockdowns and got less than 20 votes. That was not a focus group. Not a poll. I leafleted over 2000 homes. I met people in houses that couldn’t connect that paying people to stay home would mean tax rises. And it’s why Rishi got punished. For raising tax. Most voters can’t look beyond their nose.
It’s why I have zero sympathy with the raped women of Berlin after WW2. You voted for Hitler, you wanted to ethnically cleanse the East. Do that and lose and yeah, the Red Army after going to give it back.
BTW
20 votes from 2000 leaflets is exactly right statistically speaking.
I think a lot of parents do.
Mothers mainly? Many women can’t/won’t assess risk rationally – particularly when it comes to their children.
In particular, yes.
There is one rational aspect to this with mothers. They have limited time to have children. And since families got smaller and women have them later,, you get more helicopter parents.
If you’re 25 and have 5 kids, one can walk across the railway tracks without looking. You still get 4. Once it’s 1 and you’re mid 30s, different issue.
This is about middle class parents, mothers to be more precise, who probably do want more control.
If they’d put have as much effort in to protecting the children of working class families from rape gangs I might believe this is for the protection of children, but as they haven’t and we all know teenagers will get round all attempts to stop them, it’s obvious this is about rolling the censorship pitch and digital ID.
One conclusion it’s not illogical to reach would be that politicians think this because all of their interactions are with pedos.
You are dealing with a regime that is a byword for evil. Truly there appear to be no depths beyond which it can sink further.
For a moment I thought this was the Iranian discussion, and was thinking “that’s a bit harsh”.
But you mean the EU? Fine, carry on.
Or Mr. Kier Starmer.
Use this one. One of my life’s little agreements is that I don;t use a subject here and at ASI around the same days. As the piece @ASI for tomorrow is on…..
So did I hijack the thread, or, just maybe, was the post put up with that possibility in mind, Tim Machiavelli Worstal?
We never Hijack… we ….”appropriate” and “branch off” and…. 😉
Best of luck putting that toothpaste back in the tube. They really do believe that if something is banned the kids will willingly go “alright Prime Minister, we won’t use Snapchat anymore”.
Just more smoke and mirrors to distract from the vibrant violence on the streets.
And how are they going to monitor kiddies in order to detect when they ignore the ban? And where is the investment in more prison places to chuck them in when they are caught ignoring the ban?
They will go to prison, won’t they? They’ve broken the law, there has to be a punishment.
Doesn’t there?
They won’t and it doesn’t matter.
The goal is not to stop kiddies seeing porn. It’s to win the votes of people who are worried about it.
Same with the war on drugs. Home secretary does a bit of PR at a raid, talks about it. But it doesn’t stop anyone getting gak. Privately they probably know this.
A huge amount of government today is just PR. It’s where the Tories got unstuck with immigration. Lots of spastic schemes that sounded good, but didn’t change the numbers.
Almost unbelievably braindead politics from the stupid party and Kemi Badenoch as well. Not even leaving themselves room to re-rat when it’s all a disaster. Just trying to claim credit, reinforcing the uniparty accusations in the process.
“What the Fuck’s it got to do with government – whether national or EU – how people use a new technology. “
The government has to be in everything, despite its track record.
They have to, Julia. It is nothing more than existential self-preservation. If people realise that government and the civil service were an irrelevance well, that would never do.
Yeah all true, but there are limits.
You dont want to buy a robot hoover that at a flick of a switch becomes the Terminator.
As for the Online Safety Act and this new ban, that is just Labour being Labour : the boot stamping on the face forever. Lamposts and piano wire is the only response.
“You dont want to buy a robot hoover that at a flick of a switch becomes the Terminator.”
Oh No! Guess Ill have to escape by going upstairs.
I’d have to prep first : a few thousand tins of beans and sausages and a microwave oven on the landing.
That may be an option now JuliaM, but these things will learn – “ELEVATE”!!!!!!!
Apologies Addolff, I should have read further before jumping in.
But even the Daleks learned to fly eventually!
That’s daleks, darling. You need a mechanical press or furnace for terminators.
You mean that robot hoover that comes with a sizeable and *very combustible* battery?
Which you can’t extinguish with “allowed for civilian use” extinguishers?
And which…….
Does digital sovereignty enable Brussels to rewrite the rules of arithmetic?
No, it enables them to say that they have rewritten the rules of arithmetic and to track and arrest anyone who disputes this.
What BiS said – if it’s to be centralised to Brussels it’s dependent on member states not doing their own independent thing
Curiously, that ban on social media doesn’t include that wretched hive of scum and villainy Bluesky. You know, where Lefties fantasize about killing Trump? Yeah, that place.
You expected anything else?
Larger firms are easier to co-opt – with lots of lovely barriers to entry.
“What if Washington were to cut off Europe’s access to US advanced chips during a trade dispute, or exploit its control of social media and cloud computing to spy on European governments and influence elections? Given that the EU relies on non-EU countries for more than 80% of its technology and 70% of its cloud computing, as well as the Trump administration’s commitment to “cultivating resistance” in Europe, none of this seems too far-fetched.”
Well, that would be suicide for the US tech industry.
They did this with banning chip exports to China, which is why a ton of Chinese RISC-V chip development is happening. A bit of Chinese government but also companies like Alibaba who need chips for their cloud. The Chinese are also build their own fabrication and working on reverse engineering the ASML photolithography machines. It got everyone in China scared. It’s an upcoming threat to US computing that didn’t have to happen but Biden and Trump built it.
We use Intel, Facebook, Microsoft, AWS etc because it works, so why re-invent the wheel? There is some demand for EU sovereignty, so there’s Schwarz Digits, which is a cloud company spun off from Lidl that meets that. And I think it’s more of a value-added service, maybe more support so Germans can speak to Germans? I’ll take the risk with my goofy little things on AWS or Azure. Trump bans my wine API, I’ll have to move it to Europe.
And the US tech industry is mostly around Palo Alto, like F1 is mostly around West Northamptonshire, Italian sports cars are around Modena, the perfume industry is in Grasse in Provence. You get the networks, and in the case of Palo Alto, where the venture capitalists are. Andressen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital are in Menlo Park. Larry and Sergei could have biked over from their garage. Facebook is 20 minutes away by car. There are particular skills these companies need (massive scaling, in particular) so you get that clustering, network effect. It’s weakening. Tech growing in Texas and Salt Lake City
I’m reminded of Alta Vista, Myspace and Netscape. No time at all between being essential tools and being gone. New things will arise, and in most cases the penalty for pointing your browser at them will be zero, if the crowd moves too. And if the crowd is 15-year-old kids looking to communicate, and a new tool comes along, they’ll be on it like a rash. Government won’t be able to ban their way out of it.
“which is why a ton of Chinese RISC-V chip development is happening”
You mean the Chinese have stepped up their stealing of technology from the US and Taiwan to flank speed.
RISC-V is an open source chip, royalty-free instruction set. China might be doing some other dodgy shit but that isn’t one of them.
Well, that would be suicide for the US tech industry.
You see Europe building fabs & doing tech? In which century?
The EUV* photolithography machines used in advanced chip making are effectively exclusively from the Dutch ASML corp. Trumpy wants them as much as the Chinese do.
*merely a fun coincidence
If the cost of getting chips is too high, yes. Of course. We have the ability to make chip fabs. it just isn’t worth it. Your laptop, phone are made in China. Why would you make chips in Germany to be shipped there instead of Taiwan or China?
And Europe does tons of tech. It doesn’t do much well-known consumer tech. That’s a Palo Alto thing. And people think we don’t do tech because their perspective is the apps on their phone. But that’s a tiny part of tech. There are companies like SAP that do internal stuff in businesses, Dassault Systems that do 3D design, Amadeus that do flight and hotel booking software. That’s $240bn in market cap for just those 3. My mate works on software for the drug testing industry. I’ve done software for parking meters, banks, training companies, vehicle tracking, ladies underwear. Someone wanted a particular thing that the e-commerce software couldn’t do, so I did a little work on it.
Cambridge is full of amazing people, like the ones at ARM that design the core of everyone’s phone. Or the people at Hitachi there that work on making storage smaller. Swindon does a lot of chip design for the motor industry. There’s teams of blokes in sheds in Oxfordshire doing things for analysing F1 cars.
Asking for a friend, but what role does software in the manufacture of ladies’ undergarments?
Cutting the cloth to ensure a suitable fit (tight or loose as the case may be)
Actually, he didn’t say it was for the manufacturing…
Just coincidence it’s listed after vehicle tracking?
Curiouser and curiouser…
Just the selling bit. They wanted a few website changes.
So there’s an app for one to let one’s wife’s knickers down?
No, that’s an electro magnet on the face of your watch.
Assuming your wife’s knickers have a zip rather than a padlock.
You regard software as tech, do you? Oh well…
Recruitment agencies regard software as “IT”, and anything within a couple of yards of a power socket.
Why do you think we build chips?
You build the chips to get things done. What’s important is getting things done, not how it’s done.
Just a guess, but whoever wrote ‘Brussels fails . . . ,’ seems not to actually understand technology.
Look for a presentation by Mike Blanche on Digital Networks Act. Mirroring that will destroy the UK internet industry in the way it’s about to do with the EU’s 🙁
It’s also about having an independent vision for how that technology is designed, developed and deployed.
Minitel was actually pretty good. It worked, did the job it was designed for. The hardware was more or less handed out as I understand it. But it worked.
Then the Internet came along and ate its lunch. This is what happens when you have a central body doing design, development, and deployment.
The web is very loosely coupled with almost no central control.
But there was a thing about this, which is that for its time, Minitel was probably about the best solution. Running a TCP/IP stack, a webstack on a 14mhz CPU with tiny memory just isn’t going to fly. They ran across an X.25 network which was a lot simpler.
The rise of the web was a lot about hardware capability.
All the real “grooming” of children happened without the use of the interweb.
Once the imported diversity learn to use their (our) government provided web phones, tablets and AI , and dial-a- no-win-no-fee Starmer-Bot help line, together with our ununbiased Police heid bummer Polis ……. well, what can one say?
I smell another Minitel on the way!