What the Russmedia ruling means for ActivityPub and atproto.
So…
Some troll put together a fake ad, put it on a ad-sharing site saying someone was a prostitute, and the site took down the ad about an hour after the someone complained. But in that hour some other trolls copied the ad elsewhere, and so the someone sued saying the ad-sharing site should have stopped the other trolls.
The upset someone sued in file-sharing site in Romania, and rather than getting laughed out of court like a NFT dork complaining about right-clicking they got a favorable ruling, and now both halves of the fediverse are unlawful in the EU.
and now both halves of the fediverse are unlawful in the EU.
The last part is a suspicion the author has, not legal fact. Please do not help create rumors.
So they just killed federated social media? Or am I misreading this whole thing? Sounds to me like they killed it.
They didbt kill it. They issued a court ruling about how two conflicting laws interact whose interpretation could drive federated social media underground if commercial social media don’t lobby for a sane regulation that doesn’t treat the modern Internet like pre-internet print media.
It’s a problem for any kind of social media, not just federated.
There is simply no way to comply with the law under this ruling.
In such a world, the only options are to ignore it, shut down EU operations, or geoblock the EU entirely. I assume most platforms will simply ignore it—and hope that enforcement will be selective enough that they won’t face the full force of this ruling. But that’s a hell of a way to run the internet, where companies just cross their fingers and hope they don’t get picked for an enforcement action that could destroy them.
There’s a reason why the basic simplicity of Section 230 makes sense. It says “the person who creates the content that violates the law is responsible for it.” As soon as you open things up to say the companies that provide the tools for those who create the content can be liable, you’re opening up a can of worms that will create a huge mess in the long run.
That long run has arrived in the EU, and with it, quite the mess
We’re all fucked I guess.
Yup. I remember in the 2000s and early 2010s it was very widely agreed that websites that allow user generated content are a good thing and politics should advance their existence, not try to pass laws making it harder.
Nothing about the facts has changed since then. Politicians’ attitudes meanwhile…
It does sound like that but my eyes glazed over after a while and I couldn’t keep going. I guess we’ll never know.
The author thinks that this ruling could affect Federation:
This is an uhhh, slight bit of a problem, when European legal rulings make it very unclear if federation itself is in compliance with GDPR.
AFAICS that’s as far as their argument goes.
yes this. The current problem right now is that it is very unclear what the status of federation for GDPR compliance is, this ruling strongly suggests that it is not compliant. But this is a single ruling, that technically only right now affects a single Romanian marketplace. So a lot depends on how other courts will respond to this ruling, which parts they pick up on, and if this type of argument will become more broadly used beyond this single Romanian site. But that the german courts specifically paused a major cause about Meta to wait for this ruling, and that they have said that they will read it broadly, and that a prominent German legal scholar predicts that they this ruling will apply straightforwardly to Meta, are not encouraging signs. But yeah, thats future predictions, and that is still highly uncertain.
technically only right now affects a single Romanian marketplace
Not quite. The point of the ECJ is to make sure that European laws are the same all across Europe. When a national court is not quite sure how to interpret EU law, they must ask the ECJ.
What the ECJ says that GDPR means, is what it means all across Europe.
Had to click because of the thumbnail, it looks disgusting and creepy
Looks like a disembowelment.
Concrete worms in mating season
