Cory Doctorow at keynote in Pycon this year said pretty much the same thing - now that tariffs had imposed the cost that US always used as a threat to get their own way, what’s to lose now?

I tend to agree but

1. We risk Balkanisation of the internet

2. Enforcing interactivity (sharing posts between instagram and X sounds lovely) but the search and discovery is still the secret sauce - and once you regulate that the only fair way is a time based feed - which will just end looking like a sped up version of the Matrix screen

3. If we do this, we don’t get our own (European) unicorns - what we get is regulated utilities (which let’s face it is the destination of search and posting text or photos).

The power of social media is the power of a phone in every frigging pocket of every adult on the planet.

So we end up with normcore social media, partly because regulation will ramp down the extreme reactions of the algorithm, and partly because LLMs will replace a lot of queries, and they are mostly normcore because they are based on every written word ever, and that is a huge anti-extremism weighting