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France Launches Second Salvo Against Facebook (liberation.fr)
Eunuchswear writes: After Mondays decision by the French CNIL (National Center for Computers and Freedom) that Facebook must stop tracking non-users, the DGCCRF (General Direction for Competition, Consumption and Repression of Fraud), has ruled that Facebooks terms of use are abusive and must be changed within 60 days." The linked story is in French, but for those of us who don't speak the language, Google translate works. Here's the DGCCRF's Facebook page.
Of course, America only accepts that one way.
One of the biggest news stories here in South Africa over the past few months was the strong possibility that AGOA would not be renewed. AGOA is a law Obama signed to help African economies grow by giving them tax-free imports into the US. A good idea in principle - but, as always, good ideas get corrupted when US corporations get involved. AGOA is now *also* used to blackmail African countries to change laws that have nothing to do with competitiveness for American exporters. In South Africa's case, the threat is that AGOA would not be renewed unless we agree to no longer require sanitary standards for chicken. Our own chicken farmers have been living with these standards for years and sell chicken quite competitively but US chicken is notoriously low quality and notoriously high risk for disease spreading - risks that are amplified by exporting, and they come nowhere near the (common sense) standards we've had for decades to prevent outbreaks of diseases like Salmonella.
So US sourced chicken has been very rare in our stores since so few US chicken exporters complied with the regulations. This safety law will probably be lost, to secure US companies the ability to export here - because we cannot afford to lose the cheap export markets to the US (that's a pretty significant percentage of our GDP).
Despite most South Africans pragmatically accepting the laxer standards as something we simply have to do - nobody is happy about it, South Africans right now feel extremely bullied by America and feel that our public health is being traded for American profits.
The grand irony: laws or no laws, we have a thriving industrial scale chicken farming industry (which is a nett exporter) - there is almost no way that American companies could compete anyway since local farmers don't have expensive international shipping to pay for. Only a few truly massive factory-farm companies may even bother to enter the market, where they won't sell well because of being more expensive- so American companies are deluded if they think they will actually GET profit from this - but local chicken will also go down in quality if the standards are relaxed.
It's a nett harm for South African consumers - of a meat product that is dietary stable (and often the only proteine source) for the most poor and vulnerable people in our country. And the people who demanded it, will make only a tiny bit of money from it. The only thing that pisses somebody off more than being killed so a billionaire can make another billion - is being killed so a billionaire can make another penny.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
"impose their laws on the rest of the world"?
Facebook is providing services to the French people. So they have to abide by French law.
If you want to talk about countries pushing their laws on others just have a look at the DMCA. This is a US law, yet it seems to be in effect everywhere around the world.