EU agrees deal to tame internet 'Wild West'

Let the users control the data that is stolen from them. Require payment to the users for each use of their data.

If they aren't logged into the platform, then no data can be kept. They deny access, by default.

If they are logged into the platform, then a simple, 1 page, easily automated, allow/deny, control is required. No Javascript. Only plain HTML with POST to update, so others can create even simpler ways to control the options, which will likely include 500 checkboxes for bookface and croogle and whatever-gram and feeter.

It needs to be easy to select the desired options. I'm good if the payment for data is different based on how much tracking the end-user decides to allow. I'm also good if refusing any data tracking effectively blocks all access. I'd love that capability, so my block list didn't need to have 200K entries.

So, do postal services do this to our mail? Opening letters and checking the content for unpopular opinions? Do phone companies listen in to phone calls, banning anyone who expresses a dissenting opinion? No. So why do it for the net?

Wind the clock back and any scientist advocating evolution or the Earth revolving around the Sun would have fallen foul of such laws.

This is Internet censorship Chinese-style from an increasingly fascistic EU. Hopefully distributed technologies will ruin their attempts to create an online STASI.

We are not kids, so don't behave like our parents. We are not criminals, so don't behave like our warders. We elect governments to keep the lights on and fill in the pot holes, not to suppress freedom of speech. Shame on the EU, and on the UK which is implementing similar censorship. These are dark days in our history and suggest worse is to come. Your country is not a democracy anymore, if you can only vote for the person who gets to silence your opinions.

"Today's agreement on DSA is historic," 

Funny how the AFP is trying really hard to make censorship sound like a good thing.