> Now, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands must determine whether the geo-blocking used by the website was state of the art and effective in practice. If so, the intended audience would not have included Dutch users, and no communication would have been made to the public in the Netherlands.
This seems extremely problematic, depending on what "state of the art and effective" means. It seems like blocking VPN users is unfortunately still on the table, as are other invasive enforcement methods.
One of the core functions of Court of Justice of the European Union (CEJU) is to perform judicial review, which means they can strike down laws. So it would not be legal to pass legislation attempting to make legal what they struck down.
A mandatory client side scanning system with an opaque database filled with unverifiable entries would render many of the protections provided by ADP meaningless. Its was insane that Apple was even considering such an idea in the first place.
Circumventing encryption with client side scanning is on par with requiring encryption backdoors, and goes against the purpose of having end to end encryption.
The judge's comments are extremely disturbing, as she seems to want legislation passed that requires companies to violate user privacy.
And client side scanning is just as bad as encryption backdoors. There's a good reason Apple was attacked for even considering it: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.07450
The controversial part is having the system enabled by default with age verification required to turn it off, and having the system impact non-Apple/Google apps. The UK for example wants Apple and Google to forcibly enable nudity blocking on all devices in the UK, and they want the system to bypass app/DRM security to scan all content visible on a device.
The problem is that Paxton is attempting to do the same thing to every site that doesn't forcibly violate user privacy with mandatory age verification. Its part of Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundations goals, and its incompatible with privacy rights.
So he managed to block the site globally for not forcibly violating the privacy of its users with mandatory age verification.
The US court system really needs to do something about this, and overturn Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton in favour of Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union.
There's no such thing as "reasonable age verification measures". Its lie spread by fascists like Ken Paxton, the Heritage Foundation, and ton of other evil people.
> Super awesome as long as your kids never go anywhere they could access a non-locked-down device.
We could lock every kid and adult in a padded cell to prevent kids from being harmed, so why don't we pass a law requiring that? Because its not a proportional response, just like demanding mandatory age verification for every adult is not proportional either.
Jonathan Haidt's book isn't taken seriously in academia. He also believes that social media turns kids transgender, and that may be part the reason that he's aggressively lobbying for bans enforced with mandatory age verification.
For those who do not know, bill C-22 is the Canadian government's attempt to force encryption backdoors and mandatory metadata retention on all online services in Canada.
If you know anyone who uses WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, and other encrypted apps, those apps will be blocking Canadians. The blocking will either happen imminently, or suddenly at point in the future without warning (because organizations are not allowed to publicly reveal that they have been told to weaken encryption or illegally retain metadata).
Unfortunately even if this blocking is only temporary, a precedent has been set.
The government will likely be more willing to target open source models in the future that they deem to be too powerful. A lot of open source AI infrastructure exists within reach of the US government.