> "pay or consent" advertising model,
Wait, so the EU has made it illegal to sell a paid service while also offering an alternative where the user pays via seeing ads?
Wait, so the EU has made it illegal to sell a paid service while also offering an alternative where the user pays via seeing ads?
You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.
This is always a bit frustrating to me, in that, if someone doesn't like personal data collection, they likely have enough blocked that the attempts at targeted advertisements are likely to be very ineffective. And even in spaces where there is little personal data available, online advertising still seems to desperately cling to targeting rather than context.
I remember being struck by the contrast between the printed Times Literary Supplement, with advertisements for new book releases, conferences, cultural events, and so on, which all seem quite relevant to the audience, are often enjoyable and informative, and have directly motivated me to buy things, and the automated advertisements that were added to their podcast, for things like... a football-themed advertisement for a car dealership vaguely located near some rough geolocation of my IP address.
This is a lie that has been perpetuated for a very long time.
1. There's no definite proof they are much less effective
2. Even if they are less effective, is it a bad trade-off when weighed against life-long pervasive and invasive tracking?
You're talking benefits to society and/or the consumer; the only thing that matters is (often short-term) profits.
Sadly, this comic lives rent-free in my head all the time
And most social trackers and google analytics, and adsense, and most captcha alternatives or stripe anti fraud scripts.
People have sold their audience to FAANG for 2 decades now.
And let's not think too much about the Android and iOS ecosystems (phone, TV, "assistants" etc.).
Keeo in mind, it is only the largest 7 tech companies in the world that has to comply.
It is incredibly few companies.
There's something I've learnt from some time in the EU. There is not an innovative, risk-taking, freedom-loving bone in the EU culture -- they exported all those folks to the US. Their homegrown risk takers and innovators inevitably leave because of their suffocating culture around innovation, entrepreneurship, and progress. This is one of the reasons for the staggering amount of brain drain in the EU.
Most ironically, they sneer on our concept of entrepreneurship/innovation while they lag development by decades and having total and complete dependence on our technology. It is this weird moral high-horse position that amounts to a tactical foot-gun.
Like the atom bomb, you know - you shouldn't get to drop one in the middle of the city just because you invented it. Not even if it's very profitable.
The number of men dying or getting wounded in war as a percentage of population has gone down dramatically post-nuclear.
Conventional meat-grinder warfare is all but over in nuclear countries, and we can probably thank it for not being sent to war ourselves.
We also got atomic energy out of it which is cool.
> The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles
What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ?
I can agree on some version of "not a neutral law" in that it is "objectively" targeted: the law makes a difference between smaller actors and bigger ones ("gatekeepers") (and it's not clear to me if the criterias (size, audience, revenues, etc...) are set in store, or arbitrary [1]).
It happens that they're all from the US except TikTok's ByteDance and Booking.com. It was probably _designed_ for that.
But I suspect the case here "Meta is offering you to pay, so that they don't have to respect your rights to privacy". I suspect it would be illegal for even the smaller data collectors. But IANAL.
However, the "neutral principles" don't make sense. All laws are principled, except the laws of physics.
In this case, yes, the "principle" is that personal data is something to be treated with care. As often, you can state that something is a "principle" when someone can have the opposite version. So the "opposite" version of this is that personal data is a commodity that can be sold at will.
None of those version is neutrally "true" or "false".
However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter.
The shame is that it never was directly settled in a democratic debate - it's entirely the work of the legislative bodies of the EU, which, though elected and representative, are not exactly well know of famous. Maybe the debate is too technical to be popular.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...
[2] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en#book...
I’ve been asking for years here and nobody has made a solid argument to me how Facebook has a monopoly in anything or how a social networking monopoly even could exist. It’s a competitive market out there. Some of their competitors are on the DMA’s hit list too.
> What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ?
Sure it does. A law against murder is a law applied to everyone. That’s a neutral law, and it’s not targeted, and it’s a fairly neutral principle to state that “murder is intolerable in our society”.
> However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter.
The bad people doing bad things with extensive databases were European governments.
It's a complex thing in practice, don't take the linguistic definition of the word itself as the sole interpretation of the law.
> It's a complex thing in practice, don't take the linguistic definition of the word itself as the sole interpretation of the law.
I am aware; however I am still waiting for the solid argument that Facebook is a monopoly to be made in either an EU legal context (not “gatekeeper”, not “very large online platform”, monopoly) or an American legal context.
So before I start telling EU citizens to sod off for dragging the word “monopoly” into these discussions regarding Facebook’s or any other company’s monopoly status within the EU which by your account doesn’t seem to have the means to even determine that nor a body of law built up around the concept, do any of the member nations have their own anti-monopoly laws? Or have all of their own competition laws up to and including any real or hypothetical antimonopoly laws been preempted by the TFEU?
The EU has competition law (like the USA to be honest). Competition law is a lot broader than simply being against monopoly which is why I don’t understand why you mention monopolies. Monopolies are an extreme form of disfunction in competitive markets. There are a lot of emphasis on market dominance in the EU law which is itself a concept broader than monopolies. A monopoly is necessary a dominant player so would fall under all the provision of article 102, yes.
This seems pretty convincing to me, given that Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp: [1]
> Facebook leads the pack with 3.04 billion users, maintaining its position as the most extensive social networking site globally. > YouTube follows with 2.5 billion users, reinforcing its status as the premier platform for video sharing and consumption. > WhatsApp and Instagram are tied in the third position, each with 2 billion users. WhatsApp is renowned for its messaging services, while Instagram is a favorite for photo and video sharing. > TikTok, with 1.5 billion users, rounds out the top five, showcasing its rapid rise as a leading platform for short-form video content.
In terms of social media, the only "competitor" at the same scale as facebook is tiktok and snap.
We might leave in the bubble that uses twitter, bluesky, reddit, etc... but their small relative to the blue site, for better or for worse.
Break up Meta into differents, apps, and suddenly the monopoly becomes much less obvious.
> and it’s a fairly neutral principle to state that “murder is intolerable in our society”.
Do you mean it's "neutral" because there is no "arbitrage" in deciding if someone is a murderer ?
Or that the principle behind it is universal ?
In this case, is it still "neutral" once your start talking about, say, self defense ? death penalty ? assisted suicide ? war times ? (or, if you're going to stretch it a lot, abortion ?) I'm not bringing it to say there is an equivalence, I'm saying you _will_ have people making the equivalence, and different people will disagree. It's called principles - no law say they have to be universal, and they're usually not.
[1] https://prioridata.com/data/social-media-usage/#Social_Media...
>> Facebook leads the pack with 3.04 billion users, maintaining its position as the most extensive social networking site globally. > YouTube follows with 2.5 billion users, reinforcing its status as the premier platform for video sharing and consumption. > WhatsApp and Instagram are tied in the third position, each with 2 billion users. WhatsApp is renowned for its messaging services, while Instagram is a favorite for photo and video sharing. > TikTok, with 1.5 billion users, rounds out the top five, showcasing its rapid rise as a leading platform for short-form video content.
This tells only part of the story, believe it or not. You know the old phrase, lies, damned lies, and statistics? This is why statistics is on the list: statistics are a very easy way to mislead and even straight up lie to people.
So let’s start with your conception of the DMA: the DMA is not an anti-monopoly law. It is addendum to the EU’s competition policy, which defines a new entity type called a gatekeeper. Similarly, with the DSA (“Digital Services Act”) they defined another entity type: very large online platforms or VLOPs.
The reason why they were put in the position in the first place of writing new laws defining new entity types is because no matter how they tried to slice it, not even the EU could justifiably punish their targets, large mostly American tech giants, under anti-monopoly law, not even if they were to really stretch it by legally redefining what a monopoly even is.
Do you want to know what a monopoly looks like? It looks like AT&T in the 90s with long distance phone calls, where the only way to talk to someone across a long distance and hear their voice was to go through AT&T’s telephone lines that had long ago been laid coast-to-coast across the USA. It looks like railroads colluding because they’re all laying tracks across Kansas and they don’t want to do that anymore. That’s a monopoly.
Apple, Meta, et al. have not been charged as monopolies under the DMA or DSA. They have been defined, literally put on a list by the EC under a law it had written itself with specific targets in mind, as Gatekeepers and/or VLOPs and simply being on that list is enough to give the EC extra special authority over them, again, under the law it has written with them in mind.
So let’s go back to social networks and discuss whether Facebook is a monopoly. I’m going to assert no and here is why: Facebook does not control the free flow of information across society, provide a chokehold for communication, is not essential for communication, and is not essential in its form or function. The Blue App itself is actually a very old type of social network grounded in the early to mid-aughts with sites like MySpace and 1up.com as its peers. Some of the kids today that never grew up with that, but really only heard about it have found their home in this retro social network called SpaceHey, but you don’t really see more Facebook’s because nobody really wants that. There’s already Facebook.
What about Facebook’s suite? The Blue App, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Again, all very large social networks in their own right. There’s also Threads tied into Instagram. They only seem dominant if you ignore an incredibly important piece of information: people don’t use just one social network. They use several, and for different purposes and niches. Twitter/X, Reddit, WeChat, LINE, KakaoTalk, Blue Sky, WhatsApp, VSCO, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Mixi, iMessage, Badoo, Mastodon, TikTok & Douyin, Whisper, Yik Yak, VK, Xiaohongshu, Letterboxd, Truth Social and Bumble are all playing in the same space. I would even throw Hacker News in the mix. What differentiates them are things like niche, geography, audience or interest focus, and medium but there are only so many hours in the day and Facebook is competing against all of that, and Netflix and YouTube, and the time you spend IRL just chatting with your friends at the pub or whatever.
People are on Facebook at this point largely because they want to be, and the fact that they have 3 billion users or whatever is fucking irrelevant to a competition authority because there’s no country or bloc on Earth with that population. The United States Department of Justice is chiefly concerned with competition law inside its own borders, and the same for the relevant EU authorities, and the same for each other country on Earth.
> In this case, is it still "neutral" once your start talking about, say, self defense ? death penalty ? assisted suicide ? war times
Murder has a definition, and it’s not just a synonym for the killing of someone. It’s the unlawful and intentional act of killing someone without justification nor a valid excuse. Different legal systems may vary in the specifics, but most do tend to distinguish murder from other forms of killing. Either way, the applicability of the charge of murder, or the charge of being a monopoly to bring this discussion back a bit from the morbid, is founded in the rule of law.
Booking.com is owned by an American company.
> In the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases
Lack of databases didn't stop "people" from doing bad things. They built the databases, rather quickly, while they were doing bad things.
I find it bizarre that the response to trying to prevent the rise of another fascist European government was to avoid collecting data as if a populist fourth Reich wouldn't ignore the law and use neighbors to rat out neighbors again. Not that I believe for a second any European country doesn't keep far more extensive records on citizens than the Nazis did when they came to power.