European Internet

       

                                                   

It's hard to get a concrete feel on this but, from reporter Casey Newton for The Verge, here's the gist:

       "The internet has previously been divided in two: the open web, which most of the world could access; and the authoritarian web of countries like China, which is parceled out stingily and heavily monitored."

       But, Newton says, a new European Union law (the General Data Protection Regulation) adds a third divide. Essentially, the GDPR prevents large information disseminators  such as Google, other search engines and news aggregators from using snippets of new stories without paying the original publishers. This will have the effect of killing free news. Good for publishers, bad for news consumers.

       (There is the argument that without revenue, there will be no news publishers.) But the bottom line is, people without means will more and more be people without reliable information about events of the day. Bloggers, Twitter and Facebook, among others, will have to step up. As laughable as the ideas of fairness, impartiality and facts have become, things sound about to get worse.