Technology

People, including many Europeans, make a lot of assumptions about Europe.

Americans in particular seem to assume that issues fall along the same political Dem/Rep divide as in the US. That gives them bad ideas. European countries have more solid social safety nets, more accessible and cheaper health care and education, more developed and usable public transport systems, ...

On other issues like immigration or racism, they are on a MAGA-level. There is no big controversy because it is widely taken for granted that European nations are ethno-states. This is less so in the former colonial powers Britain and France. But they have their own baggage that gnaws at them from within, just like the history of racial segregation undermines the USA.

Another area where Europe is just different from the US is freedom of information. It's just not respected in the same way. Intellectual property, on the other hand, is held in much higher regard. That's how it has been for a long time.

Now that the copyright industry is waging an all-out lobby battle against citizens, you can expect much more like this.

Why?

That does it, I'm not having waffles anymore

I don't think anyone has ever thought Belgium was cool. Been to Brussels plenty of times and I think it might be the least cool city in all of Europe. Except for FOSDEM of course. That is pretty damn cool.

That be the country where the king records a "happy psychopath"-style videos where he talks with his subjects over video calls on a smartphone. Everything clean, bright smiles, the subjects' selection is properly racially diverse. And you can just feel how with everything so perfect something is wrong, like - why that session of short video calls of the monarch with random (but very proportionally selected and similarly clothed in style) people even happens? What is it intended to show, that the king has empathy for every person? Were I a citizen of Belgium, I'd prefer the king to not care and tend to his garden instead. This feels so glowing and fake that one can't help thoughts like "what if the king actually eats children for breakfast".

I'd say that European nations have a different understanding of press freedom. Mind that the individual nations have different attitudes toward this.

In Germany, press means mainly newspapers. The publishers owning these papers are very keen on copyright enforcement. Copyright does conflict with freedom of information but, I think, most would not see a conflict with press freedom.

The EU is determined to regulate who is allowed to use data for what purpose and to create the legal tools to enforce that. That's not limited to copyright. I'm very worried about that trend on many levels.

But I don't think Yuri creators will face problems in most EU countries in the foreseeable future.

In France, you have the choice between public press (depending a lot on the president in place thanks to his tax cut), you have capitalist propaganda, more or less obviously fascist, and that's it for the TV. On the web you have Blast, le Média, Frustration Magasine, or Humanity in paper if you want leftist media.