If more people had seen this great ad when it first came out last year, maybe the petition to stop the Internet Censorship Bill (Article 13) had been successful. 

But now, it's going to happen.

Article 13, aka “The EU Copyright Directive” aka "The Meme Ban" aka "The Link Tax" is a controversial new law, that will basically hold online platforms (big and small) responsible for any copyrighted material posted by users on their websites. 

Having total control over what is being published on a site, is of course nearly impossible. And holding the platform responsible rather than the individual who violated the copyright makes no sense.

One commentor likened it to "making a country responsible for one of its citizens committing a crime". 

The potential impact of Article 13

In two years time, though, it will be a law in every European country. In order to protect themselves, publishing platforms will have to implement certain mechanisms and filters.

That has a number of consequences:

• It will put many small websites out of business, because they simply can't afford the costs involved. 
• It will prevent you and me from sharing certain information just because the filter bots deem it "suspicious" even though it's not. Some websites may block European IP addresses all together, as a workaround until they've found a way to deal with this - if ever. This might severely limit our ability to provide value to our followers and market our businesses; and it will affect our livelihood. 
• Our feeds will become more and more narrow, since only "allowed" content will pass through the filters. Our chance to receive an objective view of reality will be diminished more and more (it is already, let's face it, but this will take things way too far).  
• More and more content will only be available to EU viewers through paywalls, meaning increased costs for regular web surfers for something that used to be free. (Of course some of this can be prevented by using VPN's - which also charge fees, though.)

The internet as we know it, will go away

This new law will NOT just put more pressure and fines on the large centralized media platforms like Youtube, Pinterest, Google etc. (granted, they are also not happy about this), but it will make them even more powerful.

Even Edward Snowden commented on this, and wrote a tweet in German after the German party CDU/CSU voted in favor of it. 

On the bright side...

What this will also do, is give more fuel to the desire for decentralisation. I'm sure we will see more and more decentralised, censorship-free (social) media platforms popping up soon. 

You can't control or shut down something that is neither owned by anyone nor based in any jurisdiction.

Many are already in development - Steemit.com and Minds.com are two of the better known ones that already exist, but there are more on the horizon.

Who knows how many will be around in two years once Article 13 will be in effect. Even one will be enough, if it has the potential to "mushroom" around the globe.

The more demand there is for it, the further and faster this space will develop.

Our job is to spread the news about decentralised media platforms to those who will be desperately looking for alternatives. There will be many... 

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Anja Schuetz  is a crypto explorer and mentor for absolute beginners, with specific focus on non-digital natives. She also consults as a Customer Communication & Operations Manager for blockchain start-ups.

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