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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

It’s more like “Meta is restricting European access to models even though they don’t have to, because they believe it’s an effective lobbying technique as they try to get EU regulations written to their preference.”

The same thing happened with the Threads app which was withheld from European users last year for no actual technical reason. Now it’s been released and nothing changed in between.

These free models and apps are bargaining chips for Meta against the EU. Once the regulatory situation settles, they’ll do what they always do and adapt to reach the largest possible global audience.

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> Meta is restricting European access to models even though they don’t have to

This video segmentation model could be used by self-driving cars to detect pedestrians, or in road traffic management systems to detect vehicles, either of which would make it a Chapter III High-Risk AI System.

And if we instead say it's not specific to those high-risk applications, it is instead a general purpose model - wouldn't that make it a Chapter V General Purpose AI Model?

Obviously you and I know the "general purpose AI models" chapter was drafted with LLMs (and their successors) in mind, rather than image segmentation models - but it's the letter of the law, not the intent, that counts.

> The same thing happened with the Threads app which was withheld from European users last year for no actual technical reason. Now it’s been released and nothing changed in between.

No technical reason, but legal reasons. IIRC it was about cross-account data sharing from Instagram to Threads, which is a lot more dicey legally in the EU than in NA.

It’s not like Meta doesn’t know how it works. They ship many apps that share accounts like FB + Messenger most prominently.

They’ve also had separate apps in the past that shared an Instagram account, like IGTV (2018 - 2022).

The Threads delay was primarily a lobbying ploy.

No, it really was a legal privacy thing. I worked in privacy at Meta at that time. Everybody was eager to ship it everywhere, but it wasn't worth the wrath of the EU to launch without a clear data separation between IG and threads.

Not saying you're wrong, but in this instance it might be a regulation specific to Germany since the site works just fine from the Netherlands.

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