Thursday, November 16, 2017

Os perigos dos sistemas para bloquear websites

New EU law prescribes website blocking in the name of “consumer protection”, por Julia Reda (deputada ao Parlamento Europeu pelo Partido Pirata alemão):

Today, the European Parliament passed the Consumer Protection Cooperation regulation. Unfortunately, it contains an overreachinggeneral website blocking provision. Additionally, consumer protection improvements were watered down or removed completely in last-minute trilogue negotiations with the Council.

According to the new rules, national consumer protection authorities can order any unspecified third party to block access to websites without requiring judicial authorisation.

This forces internet access providers to create a website blocking infrastructure, which risks being abused later on for any number of other purposes, including censorship. To give a recent example,independence-related websites were blocked in Catalunya just weeks ago. These actions could only be taken so quickly because website blocking infrastructure had previously been put in place for other purposes, such as barring access to sites involving copyright infringement.

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