Except that we're not really at multiple years in prison for copying, because other than in extreme cases of large-scale commercial infringement almost no-one actually gets penalised for copying at all, even if they've benefitted from what should have been thousands of dollars' worth of content without contributing a dime to support it.
I don't think your implication that it's only in the public interest to make behaviour criminal if everyone can be a direct victim really holds up under scrutiny.
The entire premise and justification for copyright is (or at least used to be) that it was in the public interest to incentivise creating and distributing new works. The fact that such an incentive is necessarily beneficial to creators is just a side effect.
Moreover, copyright is not an isolated case. For another example, most people don't run a business, yet we value laws that prevent people exploiting businesses in various ways, because it's in our interests as a society to support those who do run them.
Well, if you just offered a legal alternative of walking into a shop and buying anything you wanted for $1, it's a safe bet that theft of TVs would be reduced...
I agree that the obnoxious extra material on discs is annoying, but that's down to a somewhat different problem: too many jurisdictions allow IP rights to be used to restrict interoperability. If it were not possible to legally restrict competitors from making players that declined to respect the "unskippable" flags so users could go straight to the content they actually wanted to watch, I think we all know what kind of players the market would be buying almost immediately, and I think it's safe to assume that Hollywood wouldn't stop making movies or selling them on discs just because of that. Yay for patents on data formats and anti-circumvention provisions in copyright law?
On the other hand, a threat you don't carry out is no real threat at all.
The problem we have at the moment is that we have this bizarre situation where the law says creators have certain rights as an incentive, and a lot of people do create and share work on that basis, yet actually enforcing your rights is impractical in many circumstances so there's no real deterrent.
This naturally results in a situation where people who are honest and can afford to pay for works do so, but they are effectively subsidising those who rip the works illegally. The honest pay, the artists get some money but not as much as they were legally entitled to given the distribution of their work, and the people exploiting the system are the only ones who actually benefit. Obviously this is backwards.
It also results in a situation where creators will seek to protect their works through technological measures rather than legal ones. This works to some extent, but again, the honest customers lose out because they get all the inconvenience when things go wrong, while those who still manage to pirate the works don't have to put up with such things. Obviously this is also backwards.
I'm generally not a fan of the ever-extending copyrights, nor of scope creep where copyright laws are abused to prevent reasonable actions by exploiting the worst kind of legal technicalities. However, I don't have a problem with the basic idea of copyright, in the absence of any more effective ways to support creators (which I don't think we have found yet, in general).
So lately, I've actually been wondering whether a lack of serious enforcement isn't a big part of the real problem. If stores had to investigate theft of chocolate bars on their own and then sue in court themselves at considerable time and expense with no prospect of recovering more than the original cost of the chocolate bar anyway, I imagine the world would see a lot more theft of chocolate bars, unethical as it would be. If victims of minor assaults had to take civil action to get any sort of justice, and even then the attacker wasn't really punished for their actions and only had to pay some token compensation, we'd probably have a lot more violence on our streets, again despite the unethical nature of such behaviour.
And yet, we have this whole theoretical economic model with copyright that is almost totally unenforced in practice because the costs of doing so are too great. It's hardly surprising in this context that studies show people don't much care about the theoretical level of penalty they might receive. If they think there's no real chance of being caught and penalised anyway, what does the scale or nature of the penalty matter? So instead we get half-broken alternatives like takedown notices and DRM that sorta kinda work in the real world, but that also cause a lot of collateral damage.
So, playing devil's advocate for a moment, maybe copyright infringement should be a crime, treated similar to other financial crimes like fraud, not just a civil matter. Maybe it should be investigated by police and prosecuted by public authorities, like low-value theft or public nuisance offences. Maybe it should carry criminal penalties, not just a civil compensation that in many places can only be actual losses even if the infringer is guilty as sin. Maybe all those people so flagrantly ripping off new works they want but don't want to pay for should get punished for it.
It seems this might have two effects that are both very desirable, after the initial shock wore off. On the one hand, obviously it would force freeloaders to pay their fair share. On the other hand, it would also force price-gouging and other customer-hostile business models into the open since no-one could avoid them any more, perhaps leading to more realistic laws that kept the scope of copyright to what it was always meant to be. It seems that effective enforcement would make little difference to those who are honestly paying for works they enjoy anyway, nor
Those are all very reasonable concerns, and to some extent I think I share them all, though I'm less pessimistic in some respects than you seem to be.
While a lot of the EU regulations affecting online businesses are awful, some of the regulations dealing with physical goods seem more relevant and keeping in compliance with them must be advantageous for businesses in those markets. There's no doubt that this is a loss if a good alternative arrangement can't be found before Brexit.
There is also definitely a danger, particularly with our current almost non-existent opposition, of our own government running for the low ground at its citizens' expense on many issues as soon as they are free of the EU restrictions. I'm less pessimistic about this one, at least for the near future, for two simple reasons.
Firstly, I don't think the current government has the strength to actually do most of those things any time soon. The Snooper's Charter is an odd case, and I'm very curious to know why opposition to it from other parties suddenly seems to have almost disappeared after being so strong previously. However, other than that, I can't see Theresa May's current administration having the votes in Parliament to do things like repealing the HRA, even if the timing of Brexit would technically make it possible, before the next general election. Likewise, when there is already severe disruption in the NHS and the railway network due to ongoing industrial action, trying to significantly weaken employment law seems like a recipe for galvanising the unions and the Labour party (whoever is leading it after the weekend) into much stronger opposition.
Secondly, I think there will be a lot of debate about some of these issues in the UK as we try to disentangle our laws from the EU over the next few years. Some of that debate is long overdue, in my opinion, as I think we have become a bit too comfortable trusting that EU rules would do these important jobs for us. I don't think raising awareness of the real implications of reducing employees' rights, privacy, trading standards and other similar protections can be a bad thing in the long term, and at least if we're relying on our national laws to protect all of those things then any government that wants to change them will know it may face consequences for that later. Time will tell whether that is a sufficient safeguard, given our rather undemocratic electoral systems and the corresponding lack of real world accountability for a government.
I think we're talking about different things here. The EU changed the VAT rules last year to do exactly the opposite of what a common market is supposed to do, so instead of being able to trade internationally under the same rules across the whole market, which was basically the situation before, a lot of businesses now have to be aware of all the local rates and rules in every member state.
There is so much overhead involved as a direct result of that change that a lot of microbusinesses had to stop trading with other European nations or even failed altogether, and it's an ongoing burden even for those SMEs that are large enough to carry on. To add insult to injury, the authorities responsible didn't even realise that was going to happen despite years of discussions and planning before making the changes, and while they have now acknowledged that and said the situation needs to be looked at again, it will probably be multiple years before that happens. In the meantime, small EU businesses in fields like digital sales and web services are facing an unnecessary barrier and will continue to struggle.
On your point about London, I don't think it will necessarily be a bad thing in the long term if the UK economy does take a bit of a hit but it's the City financial services sector that is taking it. It will do damage in the short term, as with any drop in economic productivity and corresponding drop in tax revenues, but we have too much reliance on that one specific service sector for my liking, and rebalancing the economy towards manufacturing and other services seems like a healthier plan overall.
Have you somehow concluded that I'm a Brexiter? If so, I'm curious to know what I wrote that gave you that impression. My position is pragmatic realism: the situation is what it is, and regardless of who voted for what or why earlier this year, the important thing now is to make the best of it.
That means trying to mitigate any damage, though obviously that won't be completely possible. It also means trying to maximise the benefits, since obviously there will now be some opportunities that weren't available as part of the EU as well.
I don't think anything is served by trying to understate the damage, and not just economical damage, the UK could take in the short to medium term both from uncertainty in the immediate future and then for a while after Brexit itself. I also don't think anything is served by pretending there aren't aspects of the EU we'll be well rid of when we do go, or that the UK will be in some nightmarish position of not being able to do anything and collapsing into some sort of half-racist, half-economic apocalypse while everyone else in the EU is immune to the same problems.
Technically, the UK can't negotiate much of anything with other international partners until after it's left the EU, but if you believe the interested parties are going to sit around for 2+ years until the official Brexit before starting to talk then I'll sell you that bridge right back.
That is extremely unlikely, almost inconceivable. The EU trades with non-EU partners all the time. What we're really talking about here is tariffs and regulations, not some impermeable barrier that will suddenly stop UK companies from selling the EU customers or vice versa. There could be real trouble with certain areas, notably the passporting arrangements in the financial services sector, but it's not as if we're all going to stop trading with our nearest neighbours altogether whatever happens.
So good luck with getting good deals with big trading zones like the US or China with being alone.
The UK in its own right is one of the largest economies in the world, roughly equivalent to the 14 smallest EU nations combined. It's going to take time, probably a painfully long time, to get deals worked out, but life will go on in the meantime, and there are plenty of good reasons for other powerful nations to work something out with the UK for mutual benefit.
Add to that that Scotland and northern ireland still are undecided on their post Brexit fate.
Polls of the Scots since the referendum result have consistently shown that any second Scottish independence referendum would go the same way as last time, probably by a larger margin. The SNP's wishful thinking notwithstanding, right now it appears that the majority of Scottish voters don't want to leave the UK in order to stay in the EU.
The UK makes up about 1/6th of the EU's trade. The EU makes up about 50% of the UK's trade. One side has leverage in these negotiations, and it's not the UK.
I'm not sure how strong the UK's bargaining position really is, but your conclusion seems to be overstating the one-sidedness of the situation.
Even losing 1/6 of its international trade would be devastating to a modern economy, and in practice some of the biggest and most influential nations within the remaining EU would be among the hardest hit. For perspective, the UK is about as economically significant as half of the other EU member states put together (meaning the ones with the smallest economies, obviously). So even if the EU has a bigger percentage figure to throw around, the UK definitely has significant leverage to negotiate with.
In any case, those two statistics inevitably don't tell the whole story. Notably, they don't consider the effects on the UK in trade with non-EU partners and in its own internal market. Foreign trade with non-EU partners is actually a bit more than half of the UK's total these days, but perhaps more significantly, trade with non-EU partners has already been growing faster than with the EU even without the changes that Brexit will bring. If the UK does remain within the customs union as part of whatever deal is done, there will be significant costs for trade with non-EU partners as well as benefits for trade with the EU, and depending on how strong any deal is, EU regulations could hamper the UK's internal market as well. Likewise if the UK continues to allow completely free movement of labour to and from the EU, but consequently can't do so to and from other partners outside the EU, that isn't necessarily a win from the UK's perspective, even without the political impact.
This three-way balancing act between EU trade, non-EU trade and the internal market is perhaps the most interesting part of the whole situation, because it means if the EU draws its line too far across the sand, it really could be better for the UK to walk away, fall back on probably some minimal WTO-based arrangement for a while, and focus on building agreements with non-EU partners as soon as possible. That outcome most likely hurts everyone more than a comprehensive UK-EU trade deal negotiated in good faith for mutual benefit, but it might well cost the remaining 27 more in the long term, particularly if the UK is able to score a couple of quick wins with early deals and that sets the tone for future debate and negotiations.
What we most need right now is for the politicians and business leaders to stop posturing and saying silly things, and to let the grown-ups start talking about credible possibilities for a future arrangement so we can get past the big uncertainty phase as quickly as possible. No-one benefits, or probably gains any significant advantage in future negotiations, by keeping the whole community in suspense for any longer than is necessary.
Certainly a lot of damage has been done, and continues to be done with the xenophobic/racist brigade throwing their weight around since the referendum. I am hopeful that much of that damage can be undone again if we can push the far-right back into their obscure corner and repair some relationships with our neighbours that seem to have been needlessly antagonistic in recent weeks.
Unfortunately, some of that antagonism is coming from the remaining EU, not just the UK. I suspect a lot of it comes from underlying sentiment that has been there for a long time, since well before the Brexit referendum. Probably a certain amount since then also comes from jealousy among those who would like their own countries to be less heavily involved with the EU. Some of these bridges will be harder to rebuild than others.
That was all true in the immediate aftermath, but like the market turbulence and most of the other panic reactions in the UK, it appears the sudden emphasis on keeping the remaining 27 together may have been short-lived. I think a lot of people and businesses have woken up to the reality that this is not going to be an overnight change now, and that a lot of what "experts" and politicians of all sides were saying during the referendum campaign and its immediate aftermath has already proved to be unrealistic. Only time will tell what kinds of deals get worked out before the actual Brexit and what the real long-term situation will be.
Meanwhile, the remaining 27 still have pressing issues with both immigration and the European economy to deal with, set against a backdrop of security fears (overstated or otherwise), rising far-right nationalist parties in several states, and weakening political leadership from some of the big players like Angela Merkel who have their own looming elections to face at home. Regardless of what happens with Brexit, the EU is still looking a lot less robust and attractive than it used to.
That is certainly one possibility, though I've also seen an interesting counterpoint recently: given that some other EU member states have a growing movement also wanting to leave, and given that the governments of those states can no longer hide behind the UK when acting in ways that might support doing so, some of them may have to be more open about the possibility now and may want to set a precedent the other way to prove that leaving can work without screwing everyone involved. I don't know whether that would be good or bad for either the potential leavers or the EU in the long term, but it seems a plausible theory.
The one potential upside of that is that our government might finally have to get its act together and fix the problems that employers and non-EU workers face with our current system. Our economy could be seriously damaged if a similar burden is imposed on EU workers once they're all in the same boat, and in any case, a clearer, more efficient, more accurate system than the current mess would be a benefit to everyone involved.
More than that, it will still be possible to sell almost anything to European customers anyway. The worst plausible outcome for trade with the EU is probably that we fall back on general WTO agreements for a while, in which case we're mostly talking about tariffs here. Those are going to be relatively small by the standards of startup culture where you're looking for unicorn-level successes anyway, though they could conceivably be more of an issue for regular businesses in tech sectors if the EU decides to be obstructionist in any future trade deal.
There may be some regulatory hurdles, but in fields like IP and data protection our laws are obviously already aligned with the rest of the EU, so there's unlikely to suddenly be some big compliance burden unless the government shoots itself in the foot by trying to soften protections to appeal more to the US tech sector. YMMV if you work in a field like biotech.
The bright side for UK tech businesses, particularly smaller ones and startups, is getting rid of a lot of silly EU regulations passed in recent years, the things that say you have to put cookie warnings on your site, or if someone buys a digital download from you then by default you mustn't actually supply it for 14 days in case they change their mind, or that you have to apply different VAT rates and rules for customers in every different member state you sell to (which can change at literally a few days' notice, which no-one will actively give you) and file special returns accordingly. These poorly implemented regulations cause significant overheads for small businesses who want to be spending their time building useful things instead, often for no real benefit to anyone or even actively annoying customers, and the sooner we're rid of them the better.
There will certainly be downsides, probably including significant economic harm in the short to medium term, from Brexit. If we're going to do it, let's at least try to take advantage of the upsides as well.
I'm going to stop now. It's clear from your last post that you don't understand very much about how the EU authorities work and how people come to power within them, because you keep proposing things that aren't actually possible to deal with people who shouldn't have that power any more. You might like to read up on how European Commissioners and the President of the European Commission are appointed and then reconsider your position.
As for your comments about freedom and dictatorship, obviously no-one serious is suggesting that the current actions of the EU administration are comparable to the likes of Hitler and Mussolini. The fact remains that the EU administration is full of officials who wield influence yet are practically unaccountable to the common citizen, which immediately fails my standards for having any legitimacy as a government. In many cases, they also have no particular qualification as experts in the field they now administer, which apparently fails your standards as well.
They have a common dependency on experience, so it can be a bit time-consuming to get them all, maybe a few years. Also, depending on your environment, some of them may fail to install.
The good news is that you've got them, it's very quick to set up other useful things like stability, future-proofing, and even progressive-enhancement, with minimal dependencies on other JS packages.
If Europe's voters are not outraged enough that the politicians who appoint the commission are worried about the risks of not replacing them with more competent people - then they can't be *that* incompetent.
I'm sure that was a lovely explanation of how you'd like things to work, but unfortunately it's totally divorced from reality. There is no effective mechanism through which the people can control or remove a European Commissioner who is incompetent, directly or indirectly. The people are so far removed from the individual Commissioners, there are so many levels of appointed or indirectly elected power in between, that there is no meaningful democratic mandate or oversight at all.
Representative democracy has its flaws at the best of times (so does pure democracy, or any other form of government I know) but what we have in the EU today is very far from representative democracy in any meaningful sense. It might as well be a dictatorship for all the difference that would make to accountability or control by the people the EU administration is supposed to represent.
At some point almost all politics is about economics, even (unfortunately) military actions. But taking your argument to its logical conclusion, that means we should all be ruled by (ideally benevolent) dictators who are economics experts.
There are plenty of flaws in that theory, but the most obvious one is that the people running the show in Europe evidently aren't experts at all. They failed for years to anticipate the worst financial crisis in a generation as it built all around them. Their response when the inevitable finally happened was catastrophically bad, and literally led to rioting in the streets and bringing down governments. To this day, they still haven't figured it out, and nearly a decade after the crash there is still a sword hanging over the head of European economics.
You can argue that that was a one-off situation in extraordinary circumstances, though again, given that it's nearly a decade later and the mess still hasn't been cleaned up, those circumstances are looking a lot like business as usual now. But even then, numerous other economic decisions have been made at EU level that are simply bad policy. Those VAT changes I mentioned were supposed to make things more difficult for large multinationals who were playing games to take advantage of lower rates in some member states, but in reality they shafted almost every small business within the affected markets that trades internationally, and they did so not least because by their own admission many of those supposed experts you support so strongly didn't even realise that many thousands of small businesses like that existed.
When your major policies and infrastructure are leading to rioting in the streets, and your minor policies about harmonisation actually mean that small businesses have to be experts in 28 member states' tax systems instead of just one, I think you've pretty much lost any credible claim to being sufficiently expert to run the show unchallenged. The difference between us seems to be that you're happy to trust the fools running the show to continue with their foolishness anyway even though it's unpopular (and with good reason), while I see no moral or practical reason that sort of dictatorship should be supported or condoned.
In short, as has been said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others we've tried. Appointing experts instead requires that the experts actually be experts and the powers responsible for appointing them actually know that, and I'm not sure that has ever happened consistently in any society in human history.
That might be the theory, but things don't always work that way in practice.
The reality is that most of the real power still lies in the EU infrastructure outside the Parliament. When you see news about a big business being chased for a fortune in taxes or investigated for their behaviour, it's not an MEP announcing it. When yet more expansion of copyright is being introduced or VAT changes that will hurt small businesses across the EU are being made, it's not an MEP driving through these measures. Negotiations on major trade deals are carried out behind closed doors, and even MEPs have had extreme restrictions put on them so they can't scrutinize the process effectively. It wasn't an MEP giving a big speech this week calling for a European military force. It isn't MEPs who are going to be negotiating on the terms of any post-Brexit deal.
I'm not sure which EC you meant in the latter parts of your post, but if it was the Commission then the closest counterpart in the US would be the executive branch of the federal government. The unelected Commission is somewhat like having the President of the United States chosen by part of Congress using some secretive process no-one really understands, having each state's government nominate one person with no democratic accountability to become a cabinet secretary, and then giving Congress an option to object but only by blocking the entire group and starting over.
In the UK's recent referendum, I voted Remain, but held my nose while I did so. I was surprised but not devastated by the result. In the short to medium term, we will undoubtedly suffer economic pain and a fall in living standards. But in the longer term, we do get to step off a conveyor belt towards post-democratic Government.
I wonder how common this view is. I suspect it's a lot more popular than the media and politicians like to acknowledge.
The problem with the way the referendum was organised is that now the government has been told we should leave but there's no good way to know what sort of terms they should seek instead. The process did not collect any information about why people voted the way they did or how strongly they felt on the different issues.
We don't know how many people who voted Leave were racist bigots, and how many simply think we'll be better off outside the EU for reasons we also don't know. Likewise, we don't know how many who voted Remain were strong supporters of the EU, and how many simply think we'll do better in the EU than outside even if it's not perfect, again for reasons we don't know.
My personal suspicion, based on my own anecdotal experiences and what polling data we do have, is that there were a lot more moderates on both sides than the media and politicians have been implying since the result. I also suspect that a lot of people would have preferred a third option of remaining in a substantially reformed EU, but I don't think radical reform was ever genuinely considered by the current EU leadership, and that probably led to a lot of voters with views like yours or choosing to vote whichever way they thought was the lesser of evils.
Unfortunately, in cases like this, that's not entirely true. Commissioners, and by extension Juncker, are still where a lot of the real power in the EU lies, even if the Parliament has more power to get in the way since the Lisbon treaty. If the Commission can drive this sort of measure through via a regulation rather than a directive, it will automatically become binding in all EU member states without the national governments having to do (or ratify) anything. And as I seem to be pointing out a lot lately, the EU authorities are generally very pro-copyright at the moment, so there is no guarantee at all that the Parliament won't essentially wave through whatever the Commission proposes here.
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Except that we're not really at multiple years in prison for copying, because other than in extreme cases of large-scale commercial infringement almost no-one actually gets penalised for copying at all, even if they've benefitted from what should have been thousands of dollars' worth of content without contributing a dime to support it.
I don't think your implication that it's only in the public interest to make behaviour criminal if everyone can be a direct victim really holds up under scrutiny.
The entire premise and justification for copyright is (or at least used to be) that it was in the public interest to incentivise creating and distributing new works. The fact that such an incentive is necessarily beneficial to creators is just a side effect.
Moreover, copyright is not an isolated case. For another example, most people don't run a business, yet we value laws that prevent people exploiting businesses in various ways, because it's in our interests as a society to support those who do run them.
Well, if you just offered a legal alternative of walking into a shop and buying anything you wanted for $1, it's a safe bet that theft of TVs would be reduced...
I agree that the obnoxious extra material on discs is annoying, but that's down to a somewhat different problem: too many jurisdictions allow IP rights to be used to restrict interoperability. If it were not possible to legally restrict competitors from making players that declined to respect the "unskippable" flags so users could go straight to the content they actually wanted to watch, I think we all know what kind of players the market would be buying almost immediately, and I think it's safe to assume that Hollywood wouldn't stop making movies or selling them on discs just because of that. Yay for patents on data formats and anti-circumvention provisions in copyright law?
On the other hand, a threat you don't carry out is no real threat at all.
The problem we have at the moment is that we have this bizarre situation where the law says creators have certain rights as an incentive, and a lot of people do create and share work on that basis, yet actually enforcing your rights is impractical in many circumstances so there's no real deterrent.
This naturally results in a situation where people who are honest and can afford to pay for works do so, but they are effectively subsidising those who rip the works illegally. The honest pay, the artists get some money but not as much as they were legally entitled to given the distribution of their work, and the people exploiting the system are the only ones who actually benefit. Obviously this is backwards.
It also results in a situation where creators will seek to protect their works through technological measures rather than legal ones. This works to some extent, but again, the honest customers lose out because they get all the inconvenience when things go wrong, while those who still manage to pirate the works don't have to put up with such things. Obviously this is also backwards.
I'm generally not a fan of the ever-extending copyrights, nor of scope creep where copyright laws are abused to prevent reasonable actions by exploiting the worst kind of legal technicalities. However, I don't have a problem with the basic idea of copyright, in the absence of any more effective ways to support creators (which I don't think we have found yet, in general).
So lately, I've actually been wondering whether a lack of serious enforcement isn't a big part of the real problem. If stores had to investigate theft of chocolate bars on their own and then sue in court themselves at considerable time and expense with no prospect of recovering more than the original cost of the chocolate bar anyway, I imagine the world would see a lot more theft of chocolate bars, unethical as it would be. If victims of minor assaults had to take civil action to get any sort of justice, and even then the attacker wasn't really punished for their actions and only had to pay some token compensation, we'd probably have a lot more violence on our streets, again despite the unethical nature of such behaviour.
And yet, we have this whole theoretical economic model with copyright that is almost totally unenforced in practice because the costs of doing so are too great. It's hardly surprising in this context that studies show people don't much care about the theoretical level of penalty they might receive. If they think there's no real chance of being caught and penalised anyway, what does the scale or nature of the penalty matter? So instead we get half-broken alternatives like takedown notices and DRM that sorta kinda work in the real world, but that also cause a lot of collateral damage.
So, playing devil's advocate for a moment, maybe copyright infringement should be a crime, treated similar to other financial crimes like fraud, not just a civil matter. Maybe it should be investigated by police and prosecuted by public authorities, like low-value theft or public nuisance offences. Maybe it should carry criminal penalties, not just a civil compensation that in many places can only be actual losses even if the infringer is guilty as sin. Maybe all those people so flagrantly ripping off new works they want but don't want to pay for should get punished for it.
It seems this might have two effects that are both very desirable, after the initial shock wore off. On the one hand, obviously it would force freeloaders to pay their fair share. On the other hand, it would also force price-gouging and other customer-hostile business models into the open since no-one could avoid them any more, perhaps leading to more realistic laws that kept the scope of copyright to what it was always meant to be. It seems that effective enforcement would make little difference to those who are honestly paying for works they enjoy anyway, nor
Those are all very reasonable concerns, and to some extent I think I share them all, though I'm less pessimistic in some respects than you seem to be.
While a lot of the EU regulations affecting online businesses are awful, some of the regulations dealing with physical goods seem more relevant and keeping in compliance with them must be advantageous for businesses in those markets. There's no doubt that this is a loss if a good alternative arrangement can't be found before Brexit.
There is also definitely a danger, particularly with our current almost non-existent opposition, of our own government running for the low ground at its citizens' expense on many issues as soon as they are free of the EU restrictions. I'm less pessimistic about this one, at least for the near future, for two simple reasons.
Firstly, I don't think the current government has the strength to actually do most of those things any time soon. The Snooper's Charter is an odd case, and I'm very curious to know why opposition to it from other parties suddenly seems to have almost disappeared after being so strong previously. However, other than that, I can't see Theresa May's current administration having the votes in Parliament to do things like repealing the HRA, even if the timing of Brexit would technically make it possible, before the next general election. Likewise, when there is already severe disruption in the NHS and the railway network due to ongoing industrial action, trying to significantly weaken employment law seems like a recipe for galvanising the unions and the Labour party (whoever is leading it after the weekend) into much stronger opposition.
Secondly, I think there will be a lot of debate about some of these issues in the UK as we try to disentangle our laws from the EU over the next few years. Some of that debate is long overdue, in my opinion, as I think we have become a bit too comfortable trusting that EU rules would do these important jobs for us. I don't think raising awareness of the real implications of reducing employees' rights, privacy, trading standards and other similar protections can be a bad thing in the long term, and at least if we're relying on our national laws to protect all of those things then any government that wants to change them will know it may face consequences for that later. Time will tell whether that is a sufficient safeguard, given our rather undemocratic electoral systems and the corresponding lack of real world accountability for a government.
I think we're talking about different things here. The EU changed the VAT rules last year to do exactly the opposite of what a common market is supposed to do, so instead of being able to trade internationally under the same rules across the whole market, which was basically the situation before, a lot of businesses now have to be aware of all the local rates and rules in every member state.
There is so much overhead involved as a direct result of that change that a lot of microbusinesses had to stop trading with other European nations or even failed altogether, and it's an ongoing burden even for those SMEs that are large enough to carry on. To add insult to injury, the authorities responsible didn't even realise that was going to happen despite years of discussions and planning before making the changes, and while they have now acknowledged that and said the situation needs to be looked at again, it will probably be multiple years before that happens. In the meantime, small EU businesses in fields like digital sales and web services are facing an unnecessary barrier and will continue to struggle.
On your point about London, I don't think it will necessarily be a bad thing in the long term if the UK economy does take a bit of a hit but it's the City financial services sector that is taking it. It will do damage in the short term, as with any drop in economic productivity and corresponding drop in tax revenues, but we have too much reliance on that one specific service sector for my liking, and rebalancing the economy towards manufacturing and other services seems like a healthier plan overall.
Have you somehow concluded that I'm a Brexiter? If so, I'm curious to know what I wrote that gave you that impression. My position is pragmatic realism: the situation is what it is, and regardless of who voted for what or why earlier this year, the important thing now is to make the best of it.
That means trying to mitigate any damage, though obviously that won't be completely possible. It also means trying to maximise the benefits, since obviously there will now be some opportunities that weren't available as part of the EU as well.
I don't think anything is served by trying to understate the damage, and not just economical damage, the UK could take in the short to medium term both from uncertainty in the immediate future and then for a while after Brexit itself. I also don't think anything is served by pretending there aren't aspects of the EU we'll be well rid of when we do go, or that the UK will be in some nightmarish position of not being able to do anything and collapsing into some sort of half-racist, half-economic apocalypse while everyone else in the EU is immune to the same problems.
You're kidding, surely? China is a major source of investment in the UK, and the UK imports lots of Chinese-made goods.
Technically, the UK can't negotiate much of anything with other international partners until after it's left the EU, but if you believe the interested parties are going to sit around for 2+ years until the official Brexit before starting to talk then I'll sell you that bridge right back.
The UK will lose the access to the EU market
That is extremely unlikely, almost inconceivable. The EU trades with non-EU partners all the time. What we're really talking about here is tariffs and regulations, not some impermeable barrier that will suddenly stop UK companies from selling the EU customers or vice versa. There could be real trouble with certain areas, notably the passporting arrangements in the financial services sector, but it's not as if we're all going to stop trading with our nearest neighbours altogether whatever happens.
So good luck with getting good deals with big trading zones like the US or China with being alone.
The UK in its own right is one of the largest economies in the world, roughly equivalent to the 14 smallest EU nations combined. It's going to take time, probably a painfully long time, to get deals worked out, but life will go on in the meantime, and there are plenty of good reasons for other powerful nations to work something out with the UK for mutual benefit.
Add to that that Scotland and northern ireland still are undecided on their post Brexit fate.
Polls of the Scots since the referendum result have consistently shown that any second Scottish independence referendum would go the same way as last time, probably by a larger margin. The SNP's wishful thinking notwithstanding, right now it appears that the majority of Scottish voters don't want to leave the UK in order to stay in the EU.
The UK makes up about 1/6th of the EU's trade. The EU makes up about 50% of the UK's trade. One side has leverage in these negotiations, and it's not the UK.
I'm not sure how strong the UK's bargaining position really is, but your conclusion seems to be overstating the one-sidedness of the situation.
Even losing 1/6 of its international trade would be devastating to a modern economy, and in practice some of the biggest and most influential nations within the remaining EU would be among the hardest hit. For perspective, the UK is about as economically significant as half of the other EU member states put together (meaning the ones with the smallest economies, obviously). So even if the EU has a bigger percentage figure to throw around, the UK definitely has significant leverage to negotiate with.
In any case, those two statistics inevitably don't tell the whole story. Notably, they don't consider the effects on the UK in trade with non-EU partners and in its own internal market. Foreign trade with non-EU partners is actually a bit more than half of the UK's total these days, but perhaps more significantly, trade with non-EU partners has already been growing faster than with the EU even without the changes that Brexit will bring. If the UK does remain within the customs union as part of whatever deal is done, there will be significant costs for trade with non-EU partners as well as benefits for trade with the EU, and depending on how strong any deal is, EU regulations could hamper the UK's internal market as well. Likewise if the UK continues to allow completely free movement of labour to and from the EU, but consequently can't do so to and from other partners outside the EU, that isn't necessarily a win from the UK's perspective, even without the political impact.
This three-way balancing act between EU trade, non-EU trade and the internal market is perhaps the most interesting part of the whole situation, because it means if the EU draws its line too far across the sand, it really could be better for the UK to walk away, fall back on probably some minimal WTO-based arrangement for a while, and focus on building agreements with non-EU partners as soon as possible. That outcome most likely hurts everyone more than a comprehensive UK-EU trade deal negotiated in good faith for mutual benefit, but it might well cost the remaining 27 more in the long term, particularly if the UK is able to score a couple of quick wins with early deals and that sets the tone for future debate and negotiations.
What we most need right now is for the politicians and business leaders to stop posturing and saying silly things, and to let the grown-ups start talking about credible possibilities for a future arrangement so we can get past the big uncertainty phase as quickly as possible. No-one benefits, or probably gains any significant advantage in future negotiations, by keeping the whole community in suspense for any longer than is necessary.
Certainly a lot of damage has been done, and continues to be done with the xenophobic/racist brigade throwing their weight around since the referendum. I am hopeful that much of that damage can be undone again if we can push the far-right back into their obscure corner and repair some relationships with our neighbours that seem to have been needlessly antagonistic in recent weeks.
Unfortunately, some of that antagonism is coming from the remaining EU, not just the UK. I suspect a lot of it comes from underlying sentiment that has been there for a long time, since well before the Brexit referendum. Probably a certain amount since then also comes from jealousy among those who would like their own countries to be less heavily involved with the EU. Some of these bridges will be harder to rebuild than others.
That was all true in the immediate aftermath, but like the market turbulence and most of the other panic reactions in the UK, it appears the sudden emphasis on keeping the remaining 27 together may have been short-lived. I think a lot of people and businesses have woken up to the reality that this is not going to be an overnight change now, and that a lot of what "experts" and politicians of all sides were saying during the referendum campaign and its immediate aftermath has already proved to be unrealistic. Only time will tell what kinds of deals get worked out before the actual Brexit and what the real long-term situation will be.
Meanwhile, the remaining 27 still have pressing issues with both immigration and the European economy to deal with, set against a backdrop of security fears (overstated or otherwise), rising far-right nationalist parties in several states, and weakening political leadership from some of the big players like Angela Merkel who have their own looming elections to face at home. Regardless of what happens with Brexit, the EU is still looking a lot less robust and attractive than it used to.
The UK isn't within the Schengen Area anyway.
That is certainly one possibility, though I've also seen an interesting counterpoint recently: given that some other EU member states have a growing movement also wanting to leave, and given that the governments of those states can no longer hide behind the UK when acting in ways that might support doing so, some of them may have to be more open about the possibility now and may want to set a precedent the other way to prove that leaving can work without screwing everyone involved. I don't know whether that would be good or bad for either the potential leavers or the EU in the long term, but it seems a plausible theory.
The one potential upside of that is that our government might finally have to get its act together and fix the problems that employers and non-EU workers face with our current system. Our economy could be seriously damaged if a similar burden is imposed on EU workers once they're all in the same boat, and in any case, a clearer, more efficient, more accurate system than the current mess would be a benefit to everyone involved.
More than that, it will still be possible to sell almost anything to European customers anyway. The worst plausible outcome for trade with the EU is probably that we fall back on general WTO agreements for a while, in which case we're mostly talking about tariffs here. Those are going to be relatively small by the standards of startup culture where you're looking for unicorn-level successes anyway, though they could conceivably be more of an issue for regular businesses in tech sectors if the EU decides to be obstructionist in any future trade deal.
There may be some regulatory hurdles, but in fields like IP and data protection our laws are obviously already aligned with the rest of the EU, so there's unlikely to suddenly be some big compliance burden unless the government shoots itself in the foot by trying to soften protections to appeal more to the US tech sector. YMMV if you work in a field like biotech.
The bright side for UK tech businesses, particularly smaller ones and startups, is getting rid of a lot of silly EU regulations passed in recent years, the things that say you have to put cookie warnings on your site, or if someone buys a digital download from you then by default you mustn't actually supply it for 14 days in case they change their mind, or that you have to apply different VAT rates and rules for customers in every different member state you sell to (which can change at literally a few days' notice, which no-one will actively give you) and file special returns accordingly. These poorly implemented regulations cause significant overheads for small businesses who want to be spending their time building useful things instead, often for no real benefit to anyone or even actively annoying customers, and the sooner we're rid of them the better.
There will certainly be downsides, probably including significant economic harm in the short to medium term, from Brexit. If we're going to do it, let's at least try to take advantage of the upsides as well.
I'm going to stop now. It's clear from your last post that you don't understand very much about how the EU authorities work and how people come to power within them, because you keep proposing things that aren't actually possible to deal with people who shouldn't have that power any more. You might like to read up on how European Commissioners and the President of the European Commission are appointed and then reconsider your position.
As for your comments about freedom and dictatorship, obviously no-one serious is suggesting that the current actions of the EU administration are comparable to the likes of Hitler and Mussolini. The fact remains that the EU administration is full of officials who wield influence yet are practically unaccountable to the common citizen, which immediately fails my standards for having any legitimacy as a government. In many cases, they also have no particular qualification as experts in the field they now administer, which apparently fails your standards as well.
I think you have to start by running
npm install knowledge skill wisdom
They have a common dependency on experience, so it can be a bit time-consuming to get them all, maybe a few years. Also, depending on your environment, some of them may fail to install.
The good news is that you've got them, it's very quick to set up other useful things like stability, future-proofing, and even progressive-enhancement, with minimal dependencies on other JS packages.
If Europe's voters are not outraged enough that the politicians who appoint the commission are worried about the risks of not replacing them with more competent people - then they can't be *that* incompetent.
I'm sure that was a lovely explanation of how you'd like things to work, but unfortunately it's totally divorced from reality. There is no effective mechanism through which the people can control or remove a European Commissioner who is incompetent, directly or indirectly. The people are so far removed from the individual Commissioners, there are so many levels of appointed or indirectly elected power in between, that there is no meaningful democratic mandate or oversight at all.
Representative democracy has its flaws at the best of times (so does pure democracy, or any other form of government I know) but what we have in the EU today is very far from representative democracy in any meaningful sense. It might as well be a dictatorship for all the difference that would make to accountability or control by the people the EU administration is supposed to represent.
At some point almost all politics is about economics, even (unfortunately) military actions. But taking your argument to its logical conclusion, that means we should all be ruled by (ideally benevolent) dictators who are economics experts.
There are plenty of flaws in that theory, but the most obvious one is that the people running the show in Europe evidently aren't experts at all. They failed for years to anticipate the worst financial crisis in a generation as it built all around them. Their response when the inevitable finally happened was catastrophically bad, and literally led to rioting in the streets and bringing down governments. To this day, they still haven't figured it out, and nearly a decade after the crash there is still a sword hanging over the head of European economics.
You can argue that that was a one-off situation in extraordinary circumstances, though again, given that it's nearly a decade later and the mess still hasn't been cleaned up, those circumstances are looking a lot like business as usual now. But even then, numerous other economic decisions have been made at EU level that are simply bad policy. Those VAT changes I mentioned were supposed to make things more difficult for large multinationals who were playing games to take advantage of lower rates in some member states, but in reality they shafted almost every small business within the affected markets that trades internationally, and they did so not least because by their own admission many of those supposed experts you support so strongly didn't even realise that many thousands of small businesses like that existed.
When your major policies and infrastructure are leading to rioting in the streets, and your minor policies about harmonisation actually mean that small businesses have to be experts in 28 member states' tax systems instead of just one, I think you've pretty much lost any credible claim to being sufficiently expert to run the show unchallenged. The difference between us seems to be that you're happy to trust the fools running the show to continue with their foolishness anyway even though it's unpopular (and with good reason), while I see no moral or practical reason that sort of dictatorship should be supported or condoned.
In short, as has been said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others we've tried. Appointing experts instead requires that the experts actually be experts and the powers responsible for appointing them actually know that, and I'm not sure that has ever happened consistently in any society in human history.
That might be the theory, but things don't always work that way in practice.
The reality is that most of the real power still lies in the EU infrastructure outside the Parliament. When you see news about a big business being chased for a fortune in taxes or investigated for their behaviour, it's not an MEP announcing it. When yet more expansion of copyright is being introduced or VAT changes that will hurt small businesses across the EU are being made, it's not an MEP driving through these measures. Negotiations on major trade deals are carried out behind closed doors, and even MEPs have had extreme restrictions put on them so they can't scrutinize the process effectively. It wasn't an MEP giving a big speech this week calling for a European military force. It isn't MEPs who are going to be negotiating on the terms of any post-Brexit deal.
I'm not sure which EC you meant in the latter parts of your post, but if it was the Commission then the closest counterpart in the US would be the executive branch of the federal government. The unelected Commission is somewhat like having the President of the United States chosen by part of Congress using some secretive process no-one really understands, having each state's government nominate one person with no democratic accountability to become a cabinet secretary, and then giving Congress an option to object but only by blocking the entire group and starting over.
In the UK's recent referendum, I voted Remain, but held my nose while I did so. I was surprised but not devastated by the result. In the short to medium term, we will undoubtedly suffer economic pain and a fall in living standards. But in the longer term, we do get to step off a conveyor belt towards post-democratic Government.
I wonder how common this view is. I suspect it's a lot more popular than the media and politicians like to acknowledge.
The problem with the way the referendum was organised is that now the government has been told we should leave but there's no good way to know what sort of terms they should seek instead. The process did not collect any information about why people voted the way they did or how strongly they felt on the different issues.
We don't know how many people who voted Leave were racist bigots, and how many simply think we'll be better off outside the EU for reasons we also don't know. Likewise, we don't know how many who voted Remain were strong supporters of the EU, and how many simply think we'll do better in the EU than outside even if it's not perfect, again for reasons we don't know.
My personal suspicion, based on my own anecdotal experiences and what polling data we do have, is that there were a lot more moderates on both sides than the media and politicians have been implying since the result. I also suspect that a lot of people would have preferred a third option of remaining in a substantially reformed EU, but I don't think radical reform was ever genuinely considered by the current EU leadership, and that probably led to a lot of voters with views like yours or choosing to vote whichever way they thought was the lesser of evils.
He has very little power.
Unfortunately, in cases like this, that's not entirely true. Commissioners, and by extension Juncker, are still where a lot of the real power in the EU lies, even if the Parliament has more power to get in the way since the Lisbon treaty. If the Commission can drive this sort of measure through via a regulation rather than a directive, it will automatically become binding in all EU member states without the national governments having to do (or ratify) anything. And as I seem to be pointing out a lot lately, the EU authorities are generally very pro-copyright at the moment, so there is no guarantee at all that the Parliament won't essentially wave through whatever the Commission proposes here.