A possible way to deal with that would be if the government of Canada itself set up a fediverse instance on every upcoming platform and encourage the public to use these new system through them. It would be like the CBC instance that would moderated and maintained by paid professionals and employees for the public at large.
Before anyone jumps down my throat with CBC is bad BS … I have my own complaints about the CBC but I still believe that a publicly backed service is way more important and significant to everyone in general than in privately controlled services, even if they are just as small as one instance with a few thousand users.
I would much rather prefer a publicly funded instance that would have government or institutional oversight rather than in trusting random anonymous individuals on the internet that state that they have the best interests of everyone at heart. I can learn to trust people but people change over time and we never know where they are at or what they are doing or what is affecting them. At instance manager and owner right now might be open, capable and enthusiastic but maybe in a year or two, they would end up no longer caring or changing their politics for whatever reason. Maybe they just get bored, tired, run out of money and just hand it all over to someone with less than rosy ideals who turns the instance into something else.
It would be in the public interest for there to exist a digital town square that was simultaneously: free of hate speech, free of spam, free-to-use, not designed to manipulate you, and not spying on you (beyond what’s required to prevent spam/hatespeech and investigate crimes).
I don’t know how achievable that actually is but it would be interesting to see a proposal.
As usual with these laws, the people writing them are most likely completely removed from, don’t really care about, nor understand the underlying technologies they’re legislating on. Easiest example to illustrate this is looking at countries pushing for (or already adopting) anti-encryption and online age verification. It’s almost always with those half-measure laws that the most dystopian, privacy invading, abusable stuff gets voted through.
Oh, this one has the fingerprints of the age verification people all over it. It’s just that instead of the government mandating it directly (at great political cost because nobody wants it) they’ve set up a commission given the task of studying the question of what should be done to “protect the children” and making regulations as it sees fit. The age verification lobby, anti-porn crusaders, and giant social media companies will battle for control of the new regulator in this new venue made just for them.
The way these rules get enforced against large corps is through restricting their ability to make money from Canadian sources, because they can limit the Canadian bank accounts and/or business licenses that are required to collect money here from advertisers.
For a Lemmy instance that has no financial ties to Canada, there’s no enforcement mechanism. Even the Canadian based instances may not be operating as businesses, and if they have no income, it’s almost impossible to enforce anything. A few donations collected through an individual often can’t be targeted.
I imagine a size of the userbase could be used for this. Perhaps profit status too. E.g. if you’re small you fly under the radar. If you’re large but a nonprofit, possibly too.
I’m curious where the fediverse would fit into this. Or even Nostr where from my understanding taking down information is much harder.
Should be interesting to see how this affects those speaking on the Israel-Gaza conflict. Especially if we as a country continue to support Israel.
A possible way to deal with that would be if the government of Canada itself set up a fediverse instance on every upcoming platform and encourage the public to use these new system through them. It would be like the CBC instance that would moderated and maintained by paid professionals and employees for the public at large.
Before anyone jumps down my throat with CBC is bad BS … I have my own complaints about the CBC but I still believe that a publicly backed service is way more important and significant to everyone in general than in privately controlled services, even if they are just as small as one instance with a few thousand users.
I would much rather prefer a publicly funded instance that would have government or institutional oversight rather than in trusting random anonymous individuals on the internet that state that they have the best interests of everyone at heart. I can learn to trust people but people change over time and we never know where they are at or what they are doing or what is affecting them. At instance manager and owner right now might be open, capable and enthusiastic but maybe in a year or two, they would end up no longer caring or changing their politics for whatever reason. Maybe they just get bored, tired, run out of money and just hand it all over to someone with less than rosy ideals who turns the instance into something else.
It would be in the public interest for there to exist a digital town square that was simultaneously: free of hate speech, free of spam, free-to-use, not designed to manipulate you, and not spying on you (beyond what’s required to prevent spam/hatespeech and investigate crimes).
I don’t know how achievable that actually is but it would be interesting to see a proposal.
For a moment I thought you’re saying CBC is BS and I was about to jump your throat. 🤣 Then reading comprehension settled in.
As usual with these laws, the people writing them are most likely completely removed from, don’t really care about, nor understand the underlying technologies they’re legislating on. Easiest example to illustrate this is looking at countries pushing for (or already adopting) anti-encryption and online age verification. It’s almost always with those half-measure laws that the most dystopian, privacy invading, abusable stuff gets voted through.
Oh, this one has the fingerprints of the age verification people all over it. It’s just that instead of the government mandating it directly (at great political cost because nobody wants it) they’ve set up a commission given the task of studying the question of what should be done to “protect the children” and making regulations as it sees fit. The age verification lobby, anti-porn crusaders, and giant social media companies will battle for control of the new regulator in this new venue made just for them.
The way these rules get enforced against large corps is through restricting their ability to make money from Canadian sources, because they can limit the Canadian bank accounts and/or business licenses that are required to collect money here from advertisers.
For a Lemmy instance that has no financial ties to Canada, there’s no enforcement mechanism. Even the Canadian based instances may not be operating as businesses, and if they have no income, it’s almost impossible to enforce anything. A few donations collected through an individual often can’t be targeted.
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I imagine a size of the userbase could be used for this. Perhaps profit status too. E.g. if you’re small you fly under the radar. If you’re large but a nonprofit, possibly too.