Monopolistic practices happened. How does any regime force people to comply? First you have to make people you want to comply criminals by passing certain laws. Then you selectively enforce these laws on a whim of gov officials. Presto, you've now created a system where you may tell the gov to fuck off, but you'll get prosecuted for something that wolill ruin your day tomorrow.
Mind that I'm not making a value judgement that anti monopolistic laws are bad. No, I'm just stating a fact they can be used to coerce monopolies like Google to do whatever regulators want. Incidentally this is why these laws are so selectively enforced.
Also if the roof needs fixing then there's always the prospect of a hundreds of millions of dollars fine. Pop the champagne!
Even playing into the system is pointless, my MP replies 6 months after things are passed lmao
Governments often want to regulate business involving entities physically present in the country. If foreign companies refuse to comply, governments could in principle just block them. But they often don't want to, because they benefit more from continued business on their terms. They would prefer that the foreign companies just comply "voluntarily". For example by realizing that the company could lose access to any financial institution that wants to continue operating in that country. And the companies often comply, because they are amoral profit maximizers without any real principles.
It's not the job of multinational companies to have principles regarding the citizens of a country. And indeed, they can comply with the law, or GTFO. And in case they get out, it won't be because of principles, but rather because users of other countries may leave them in case they install backdoors. It's simple economics, and that's good actually, as people in general don't want to be governed by multinationals.
Protest has been restricted [1], and neither the Conservatives or Labour offer different positions. For example, Labour have pledged to "toughen" the OSB [1].
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56400751 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pl...
Also you’re assuming that users leave platforms because of security issues and that’s obviously untrue for most people. I mean… just look at almost any social media platform
Big tech companies are vulnerable to financial pressure, but a one admin Matrix server or XMPP server hosted in the US has no reason to comply.
I don't want to fly under the radar with an ambiguous sense of my own safety.
There's an important concept in the military wherein you should never give an order you think might not be followed, because it collapses the illusion of authority. Authority is, after all, an illusion. The same is true for governments.
It's why governments that want total surveillance and police states must tippie toe their way there with bills like this, or, do things in total secrecy like the NSA. Try to push the overton window too quickly and you risk noncompliance from a tech company, non compliance from juries, sometimes even (extremely rarely) non compliance from cops, at which point you're facing a governmental crisis of the highest degree.
The Military also expects noncompliance which is why there are military equivalents.
What both need is majority consent and general noncompliance is only a symptom of that being removed. Authoritarian regimes often force compliance even without consent.
I also expect that it would take an awful lot more than regulation like this to get anyone in a western country to rise up enmasse to replace the government. The mess that is this regulation being created just demonstrates how bad the current UK government is at governing.
To a degree, sure, but only because of the fluidity of the US justice system. Tech companies, like anyone, always in the end bow to the whims of congress. Consider how much information Google has or could have on any given member of the government - it could begin blackmailing, but hasn't dared take that step. Consider the actual power over money the banks have - they are one of the primary mechanisms the US government uses to regulate the economy, set interest rates and etc. They twist the law to serve them but no bank has ever outright disavowed a law, despite it being as simple as making the numbers be what the bank wants them to be.
Yes, laws aren't the only pressure mechanism affecting banks, google, etc, but my point is that true noncompliance is representative of a rejection of a given authority. It's more than just breaking a law. The US government remains a competent enough authority to acknowledge, but if congress came out and amended the constitution to remove all term limits, and the supreme court put out a statement that it will interpret these changes as written, and then the three branches went from there to establish an overt authoritarian regime, at that point you'd start seeing true non compliance.
I use the extreme example to show the balance that has to be struck by authority to maintain the illusion of authority. The US government maintains authority so long as it's useful to those others with extraordinary power (banks, tech companies, the People in their entirety, the military-industrial complex, big oil, etc). It can't risk pushing against those interests too far in any direction.
We have a highly coupled world, which means that the Brussels effect, the California effect and now the London effect all combine to produce the lowest common denominator.
Networks aren't all positive.