cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/12896912
As the EU’s new flagship tech laws, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, are coming into full application, Big Tech is working hard to shoot them down. As of today, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) becomes fully applicable, following its counterpart the Digital Services Act (DSA) on 17 February.
However, as the EU’s new tech laws are coming into full application, tech corporations like Apple, Amazon, Meta and TikTok are already undermining them at every turn. To subvert these new regulations, tech corporations have filed a number of lawsuits against the European Commission and attempted to weaken the rules with malicious compliance that protects their profits at the expense of their users.
And pray that the candidates elected on those platforms don’t backtrack for the lobby of big-whatever.
There’s only so much you can do in a representative democracy. A liquid/delegative democracy could be better, but until then, we use the tools we are given.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
How about demanding better tools?
Can a democracy that doesn’t reflect and can’t act systematically for the needs of the people really be called a democracy?
What good are demands if there’s no power behind the demands. I can demand you stop using the internet, but I have no way to enforce it.
We do need better tools, but we need to agree upon what those tools are.
Of course it can. Just because you don’t like the way a system is run doesn’t mean it isn’t what it is. There many forms of democracy (delegative, representative, direct, and all their subforms constitutional monarchy, parliamentary, …).
Which democracy is the best for the people is of course very debatable. A direct democracy wouldn’t make sense in a country with a small elite and large uneducated population for example. The elite could easily influence the rest of the population in many ways: political messages, paid mercenaries, bad worker laws that make it impossible to have time to vote, flooding the system with calls for votes, proposing changes that are bad for the population but incomprehensible to them, …
It’s not easy.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0