The Digital Markets Act is an anti-monopoly law which defines "gatekeepers" with special more restrictive rules than other companies. It's about shit like interoperability, consumer protection, fair competition, all that kind of unpleasant shit no big tech company actually wants to be burdened with. The worst part is, the fines can potentially have actual teeth, which is illegal obviously. I mean what will become of the world when you can actually deliver justice on companies, it's the end of the world.
Pamasich
joined 2 years ago
they can put out arrest warrants and fines
Of course they can, but they're unenforceable if the instance's operator has no presence nor assets in the UK. That's why I wrote "forced" in bold. They can issue shit, but that's where it stops.
and possibly have the person extradited to the UK
According to Wikipedia, extradition requires that the crime is such in BOTH countries. So no, I don't see that being an option here.
Will Lemmy instances be forced to verify users' ~~ages~~ identities?
If they're located in the UK, sure. But given how small Lemmy instances are, I assume they'll fly under the radar.
Non-UK instances won't be forced to do anything. The UK can't do shit outside their borders, so as long as the instance's operator doesn't set foot into the country, all they can do is block the instance in the UK.
in fact, I follow several Lemmy accounts, and I can directly follow your account as well, right from the web interface.
Is there any point to following Lemmy users though? Like, unlike the rest of the fediverse, Lemmy doesn't send any activities to followers. They just exist, don't actually receive anything. Is there even any point to it then?
Yes, because this isn't just Lemmy.
Lemmy itself is more like a forum or old Reddit. A focus on discussion and link aggregation, not people. I personally still consider it social media, but there are enough people who draw the line there. Like others said, it depends on how YOU define social media.
But this is the fediverse, not just Lemmy. I'm writing this from Mbin, which has a much bigger focus on people (you can follow users here). But you can also talk here from Mastodon. Then there's platforms like Friendica, afaik the Facebook of the fediverse, which theoretically also have access (though I have yet to see a user from there, so idk if they're functionally compatible with Lemmy).
Lemmy itself might or might not fit in isolation, but if an instance is connected to the fediverse, it's definitely indirectly a social network. ActivityPub (the protocol used to connect the fediverse) is explicitly a social networking protocol as per its spec.
I'm a bit confused by comments on this topic. Do sovereign countries not have the right anymore to decide their own laws and issue punishment when they're not followed?
Like, they obviously can't enforce these fines. This article says as much. The fines can't be enforced, but if 4chan ignores them, that opens the door for other measures like delisting the site from search engines or blocking access to it from the UK (these two examples are taken from the article). Which are fair measures imo.
Like, to the people saying UK can't do laws which apply to services which are merely accessible in the UK and have no physical presence there, do you also apply this logic to the GDPR, which works the same way? The US has these laws too, like COPPA iirc. It's not really something the UK came up with, it's a bit of a standard with laws like this as far as I know.
I hope a country like switzerland or something lets companies host servers there for europe without enforcing dumb laws from uk/european union.
Not going to happen with Switzerland and EU laws. Being completely surrounded by the EU, we're really bad with leverage and are already struggling to not have worse and worse deals forced on us. Plus, we have our own Chat Control type law coming up (which is why Proton is leaving). There's no way we'll take a stance against EU law.
Like I said, I love Windows 11. I actually prefer its features in general to what I've seen of Linux, I prefer its design a lot, and there's some stuff, like WSA and autohotkey, which simply doesn't exist on Linux with the same simplicity as far as I know. Can't use classic shell on linux either, and the start menus I have seen either looked ugly or were more launchers than start menus.
I love Windows 11 (the non-copilot+ version) and am positive on AI, but if they pull through with this vision, I WILL switch to Linux once Win11 support ends.
The UK’s Online Safety Act is a licence for censorship – and the rest of the world is following suit
the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest.
You mean like how the french aren't protesting their country's support of Chat Control? At least I can't find any information on them doing so.
Donating costs me money. Donating to every single website I like or rely on requires far more money than I have available or am willing to spend. I don't know your situation, but I'm not rich. I don't have that kind of disposable income to just throw around.
That said, thanks for mentioning that. I did donate to kbin when it was still around, but I've forgotten to set up donations for mbin and kbin.earth since switching over. I'll have to get on with that.
Upvoted you for disclosing the use of AI, while providing new information no one else in the thread has been able to provide without AI. Due to disclosing it, anyone who doesn't want AI can skip the comment, but anyone who'd be glad for the information can still get it. It also makes it clear that this is of questionable reliability, which is good enough in this context, but one shouldn't use this as a source when doing their own medical examinations.