Join Internet Startups In Telling The EU Not To Mess Up The Internet

Join us in telling EU regulators not to wreck the net.
Read & sign our open letter

We mentioned this a few weeks ago, but wanted to remind folks to help us tell the EU not to wreck the internet with a series of bad regulations. There you can see the letter that we put together, which has already been signed by a wide variety of internet companies, including Reddit, DuckDuckGo, Medium, Automattic, Patreon, Shapeways and more. The issue is a big deal right now. European bureaucrats (who couldn't even program a web survey to operate properly) are in the midst of putting together plans to regulate internet companies. This is under the umbrella of what they're referring to as the "Digital Single Market," but which some Commissioners are using as part of a plan to saddle the internet with a variety of new regulations, which have the potential to wipe out important safe harbors that made the internet what it is today.

Just a few months ago, a top EU Commissioner flat out said that the EU should heavily regulate the top internet companies, mainly because they're based in the US. What they don't seem to understand is that the companies they're targeting -- mainly Google and Facebook -- are big enough to deal with almost any of the regulations that come up. They have teams of people who can figure out how to manage them, even if they may grumble about it all. But the companies who cannot deal with such regulations will be basically everyone else. All of the smaller companies and new startups.

In effect, by "regulating" the big internet companies in an attempt to punish them, the EU Commission might actually be entrenching them as the dominant players in the market: the exact opposite of what they think they're doing. Similarly, some of the discussed regulations would again seem to contradict the stated or implicit intentions of those politicians. For example, many in the EU complain about the "privacy" implications of large internet platforms that are monitoring what their users are doing. Yet, a key regulatory proposal being discussed is adding a "duty of care" to internet companies, that will require them to more actively monitor what their users are doing, to make sure that they're not doing anything "bad" that needs to be stopped/taken down/reported on.

Given our concerns that this process appears dangerously misguided, we crafted a letter to send to the EU Commission that is reviewing this issue, and have now opened it up so that you (and/or your companies) can sign it too. Please take a look and consider signing on, and telling the EU not to wreck the internet, in a short-sighted focus on trying to hinder big internet players.

Join us in telling EU regulators not to wreck the net.
Read & sign our open letter

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story