Post
#CLuxon is doubling down on the #B416 social media ban for kiwis under 16. This is a terrible idea, for many well-documented reasons. But, if tech policy and civil rights activists allow ourselves to be pulled into a narrow, negative campaign against it, there's a risk this will push many people into supporting it on a 'better than nothing' basis.
What we need is a positive campaign for a suite of tech regulations that can actually shift power away from technofascists.
(1/?)
For a start, I think we need to advance the same argument @pluralistic makes in regard to Canada's enforcement of the "anti-circumvention" rules in the US DMCA. Enforcing these deeply unfair rules creates huge costs for kiwis, both as citizens and consumers. The preferential trade we were promised as a quid pro quo for absorbing these costs have never materialised.
It's time to reform our copyright laws, etc, to explicitly allow technological circumventions for otherwise legal purposes.
(2/?)
Cory explains in this article how abandoning US-style anti-circumvention rules law would move power from the handful of giant corporations that make up the US tech cartel to ordinary Canadians, and the same applies to doing it in NZ;
(3/?)
Secondly, we need to lean into the proposals from Better Public Media, amongst others, to levy a tax on all digital advertising. Using the proceeds for arms-length funding of public interest media channels and projects.
Big Content's demand for a link tax targeted at certain US corporations is neither principled nor futureproof. Whereas a comprehensive digital ad tax is like a pollution tax for the net, taxing something we want less of, to fund stuff we need more of.
(4/?)
Another policy we can push as more principled and futureproof than age-gating social media, is a kiwi equivalent of the EU DMA/DSA. By harmonising our anti-monopoly approach to digital services with what the EU is doing, we can simply require that tech companies supply our citizens with the same protections they're already supplying to EU citizens.
(5/?)
More policy ideas welcome, as well as ideas on how to merge it all into a single policy platform and communicate it to the public.
(6/6)
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
