Shut it down.
Twitter too.
From Politico.eu, July 25:
But opponents are already massing against his most ambitious plan — to change Europe’s approach to internet liability.
Emmanuel Macron has set his mind to imposing tougher rules on the world’s biggest tech companies, and he plans to use next year’s European election to move his agenda forward, a minister and top officials told POLITICO.
The French president is the driving force behind controversial plans to impose a revenue tax on companies like Google and Facebook, and he’s an ally of European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager — the woman branded the EU’s “tax lady” by Donald Trump — who last week slapped a €4.3 billion fine on Google over its Android mobile software.
Now Macron wants to press even more far-reaching regulations on Silicon Valley firms. He’s eyeing the European Parliament election next May to establish a broad centrist voting bloc in Brussels that will help him weigh in on the Commission’s agenda for 2019, with digital policy at the heart of his plans.
“We have to go farther than the European Commission has on this subject,” Macron’s secretary of state for digital affairs, Mounir Mahjoubi, said in an interview. “The elections are an opportunity to speed things up. The European Parliament’s first year has to go fast. It’s the digital world … six months is a lot. We can’t take three years.”
One part of the French president’s agenda has to do with regulating online behavior on platforms like Google, Twitter and Facebook. His government, flanked by EU allies, is already succeeding by getting the European Commission to put forward a law that would force platforms to take down terrorist content within a short timeframe, in what would mark a significant shift away from current voluntary schemes.
But Macron wants to go further, by upending the legal framework that currently underpins platforms in Europe and grants them limited liability over hosted content.
In this effort, which involves reopening Europe’s e-Commerce Directive, the 40-year-old is likely to run up against determined opposition from other EU countries, especially in the north and east, which tend take a more liberal view of tech regulation.
“We still haven’t had the right amount of discussion on this at the European level,” Mahjoubi added.
Les copains de Macron
France, which is the only EU country to have a law against fake news on its statute books, had a limited role in writing Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, a sweeping revamp of privacy rules that came online in May, and subjects companies to much tighter rules for how they collect and process data....MUCH MORE
