So, the EU just passed just about the *dumbest* law ever: a “link tax.” In short, if you post a link to a website in the EU… ya gotta pay for it.

EU approves controversial Copyright Directive, including internet ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

Exactly how these idiotic policies will be administrated will be up to the individual EU nations. But if non-EU websites start getting pestered to pay up for the mere act of linking to an article on the website of, say, a German newspaper… the the obvious solution will be to simply stop linking to EU sources. A likely result of that will be a reduction in reporting on EU news entirely, or reporting without linking or quoting sources. An obvious result of *that* will be that EU news will become a round of telephone; a report on the latest bit of cultural enrichment in, say, Paris with fifty two people killed by a Perfectly Typical Frenchman driving a stolen moving van will in short order wind up being a story about how Godzilla and Cthulhu are currently fighting over the naming rights to the new Brussels Crater.

Easier to just write Europe off. Given that Europe looks likely to pass into a new dark age within a few generations anyway, might as well get an early start on no longer reporting on what’s going on over there.