Great news from the ‘my idea is SO GOOD that I have to force you to go along with it’ department!
The commission will also force on-demand video providers to ensure, as previously reported, that at least 20 percent of their content is European in origin—of course that includes UK national content, so no one will be forced to watch French films.
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They will also be required to properly tag content that could be harmful to children, such as pornography, or glorified violence. Rules banning hate speech have additionally been extended to video sharing platforms and downloadable content.Source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/eu-digital-single-market-netflix-tax-details/
Quotas are wonderful. I’ve always thought that we should just have a quota for everything. Then… I’ll never have to think anything through, I’ll never have to deal with people disagreeing with me, I can just force people to do what I want without any regard for people’s lives.
Sarcasm aside, this could become a real pain in the butt for companies like Netflix and Amazon… There’s just so many questions…
First off, what counts as European content? Does it have to be financed by a person of that particular country? Can a European production use foreign actors? If so, how many and why only that many?
Second, what happens when Europe’s content creators can no longer keep up with the rest of the world? China and India will increasingly make cultural products that absolutely will find their way onto Netflix and Amazon… how can Europeans ever produce enough content to maintain a 20% quota? And when people realize that a billion Europeans simply cannot create the sheer amount of content coming out of Asia’s 3 billion people do you know what will happen??? I’m guessing that instead of recognizing that quotas are stupid… force will probably again be deployed to take even more money from Amazon and Netflix to fund things people don’t want.
Which brings me to my last point… People may very well not want the content that is being forced onto Amazon and Netflix by the government. The problem with a quota is it not only ignores what people want to watch it ignores what people want to create. The EU says they want 20% European stuff and that’s that…
So, I can very easily see a bunch of crappy European films being made available and NOBODY ever watching them. I bet Netflix and Amazon will have all these statistics sitting in front of them in the future showing that ‘Quota Content’ is 99% less likely to be viewed than non Quota Content… what will happen then?
Quotas are dumb and should be hated.