I don't think your b follows your a at all.

means in terms of real-world implications. Obviously, you must be following this issue and, it seems, EFF believes all its readers are, but I'm still fighting the net neutrality battle. so admittedly, I am not.

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Upon seeing the other posts, it would appear that I am not alone in this....

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In essence, it's a way for media to charge websites for linking to their content.

"This week, the European Parliament will hold a final vote on the Copyright Directive, which contains two divisive clauses—Articles 11 and 13—that will mandate the imposition of link taxes and copyright filters. These censorious, anti-news clauses have sparked a global outcry, including a petition with more than 5 million signatures, street protests in several countries, and a blackout of several Wikipedia websites, as well as German OpenStreetMap and many more sites. If you live in Europe, call your MEP now! It’s the last chance to fight this terrible proposal."

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The link tax is a profoundly dumb idea. With the internet, some businesses have jumped online and made money while others have failed. Newspapers haven't been particularly successful at figuring out how to profit. Google, of course, has. A big part of their success is the search engine: you type in a topic you're interested in, and Google lists some links that take you to websites dealing with that topic. Google puts ads on their search, and boom! They make money.

One type of link (especially on the Google News search) is a newspaper link. This of course takes you to a newspaper's website, where you can read the article concerning your topic.

Newspapers haven't been nearly as successful as Google at making money, and since Google is linking to those newspaper sites, the publishers have decided that Google should pay them. This is stupid on a multitude of fronts. It's been included in the EU decision because the only chance at making such a dumb idea work is to get the government involved.

Germany was among the first to try it. They let the newspapers "charge" search engines a tax for linking to them. Google said, "No thanks!" and refused to link to any site that opted to charge this tax. As it turned out, the law allowed news sites to opt not to charge the tax, and in the end, just about every site granted this exemption. Because they WANT Google to link to them. (If they didn't, they can put in HTML code that will prevent their site from being indexed by search engines. As it was, these sites were trying to figure out ways to get their results included. They want the traffic.)

Then Spain tried to do it. But they didn't give news sites the option to grant exemptions. Google said, "See ya!" and just refused to link to those sites at all. It hurt the newspapers (although the government and some larger publishers were quite fine with it, since it really hurt smaller publishers, who tended to be tough on politicians).

Now the attempt is to have all of the EU do it, to make it harder for Google to say no.

I thought TheBlackAdder was overexaggerating with the idea of this coming to the US, but then I see this: US Newspapers Now Salivating Over Bringing A Google Snippet Tax Stateside; so, perhaps this virus is spreading.

because so much of what the internet is (or has become) is based upon a more liberal interpretation of copyright law.

Just think of all the sites, blogs, posts, youtube videos, etc - made w/various bits of material, songs, pictures etc - could be stopped and/or severely constrained by harsh copyright laws.