Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for November 9, 2019

For side:

• EU regulations go beyond ensuring fair competition. They're motivated by a desire to bring the tech sector to heel.
• The first pass of the GDPR drove more than 1,000 tech companies out of Europe, which led EU bureaucrats to immediately ratchet up pressure on the companies that remained.
• The EU is terrified of countries leaving, including BREXIT and other nations. Insofar as tech companies allow activists to organize, the EU views them as an existential threat.
• EU regulations make Europe into a terrible place to build a business, they're even driving Europe's best and brightest to the United States, which places more value on openness, learning, and experimentation.
• Under the GDPR, the EU has ramped up monitoring, down to the detail level of letters to the editor in local papers.
• The EU is ratcheting up copyright restrictions in a framework that it explicitly defined in terms of a trade war. Big companies can adapt, but small companies will continue to be forced out. Examples are given of a genealogy company, which was a small German hobbyist site, until the GDPR forced it to shut down. Also, churches have been forced to stop emailing their weekly bulletins to church members.
• The European Court of Justice has been empowered to shut off connectivity to the United States at a moment's notice
• The war by European policy-makers against the tech companies is just a part of their wider war for control of society, and against openness
• What's going on is a sort of regulatory capture, where big tech companies have weaponized EU policies in a way that threatens their smaller competitors.

Against side:

• Tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Brad Smith have all called for regulation.
• EU regulations support liberty for business interests, consumers, and free market of ideas.
• The Internet evolved as a public good, and tech companies should be expected to act as good stewards of a public good, even while profiting from it.
• AI systems inherit racial and gender bias from society, and the EU is forcing AI systems, and tech companies at large, to be their better selves.
• EU regulations support people, engaging with one another.
• Wars have blood. Europe and America live in physical peace and safety. Don't use the word, "war" frivolously.
• Regulation is not "against" anyone or anything. It's "for" consumers and citizens.
• Even in the United States, the call for regulation is growing.
• EU regulations are basically a sort of common sense balance between digital rights and digital innovation. It is "pro-innovation. It's consistent with tech branding, right -- big tech branding, at least -- in a way that balances things, that is good for consumers, good for small businesses, good for big tech companies."

As with all intelligence² debates, the debate is structured in a series of phases. First, the audience votes to reflect their opinions going into the debate, then the panelists make their opening statements. Next, the panelists ask each other questions, the audience asks the panelists questions, and the panelists end the debate with their closing statements. Finally, the audience votes again, and the winner is chosen by the change in audience voting based on the polls at the beginning and the end of the debate. For this debate, with a big swing in voters from "Undecided", the audience selected the "Against" side as the winners.