Listen I am all for these big tech companies losing the users but I don't think this was the reason why they wrote this comment or my understanding of it

My understanding of the parent comment and the comment above the parent comment was that the grand comment was frustrated on why things can't be subscription based internet instead of a sneaky ad tech which invades our privacy.

The comment responding to it basically said that it isn't profitable. Users just don't sign up and growth / stock profit matters to the company and so that is the reason why the world is the way it is right now with so privacy invasive ad spyware tech

Now, you want to pass laws to force the bloated companies to lose users, so deep down you are saying that losing users is unprofitable for them and that a subscription based model just wouldn't work for the internet which the grand parent comment wanted / preferred and many people do.

I might not be able to explain it but in just 3 different comments of different people, we might have gotten a justification as to why the internet is the way it is right now

Companies don't want to lose users or money :) which is why they turn to spyware. Now I am not for big tech at all but we need to understand them, we need to realize how this economy of privacy works to fix / liberate ourselves.

And also I think that a lot of these companies just pay fines when they do in fact breach any laws as for them its just a drop of bucket and there is very few amount of times that a company is genuinely punished reasonably and I am not even sure the last time that it happened...

but this is exactly why they spy on us, for profit and how we don't really pay for subscriptions or even let alone the idea of signing up or adding credit card details.

I feel somewhere somehow along the way, we got entitled to everything and we stopped paying for internet services and we started paying with our privacy. There is a point to be made that we live a world where evil adware no matter how much we might comment here is still more profitable sometimes than subscription for a lot of companies and so somehow I do think that its a bit of both on us and taking responsibility ourselves might help us too instead of just dunking them Completely on big tech.

I also think that open source is a good example of this, I just don't understand why people would much rather pay with their ads which might scam them or they might pay for subscription based software and not donate to an open source software.

We as a society complain about open source sometimes not being as good as closed source but why would it if we as a society don't fund it and open source is in a dire state of underfunding, how do we as a society then feel entitled of good quality open source...

The system is a bit broken and it starts from all of us I suppose.

Since the point of these comments on these websites to me seems to be to try to bring change imo otherwhere there is no point in discussing and I want to take it in that direction...

Like, The point I want to really ask is, do people care? Aside from the people here who might be passionate about it, but is there a way that the masses can be taught about such things in a way that they start caring?

Is there a way that we can show people how insane these companies track you all across the internet and how insane big tech is to the general public so that they might care and look at open source or any things like donations / subscriptions as a healthy medium and start taking part in it instead of being into yet another adware software part.

What are some mechanisms to help people share this knowledge I suppose?

Who will share this message of cutting the hand of algorithm when the algorithm is feeding the people the slop and people are eating it. The algorithm wouldn't listen, it wouldn't bother. We might need to think of something else and I just wanted to discuss it here if its alright.

this is just the tech-person habit of assuming that users are less informed than they are. go ask an "everyday user" how much they think instagram tracks them. i think you'll be surprised at what their assumptions are. most people i know (including my extremely non-tech-savvy parents) understand that "the algorithm" knows everything they do on the computer, and that's how both ads and content get targeted to them. they don't necessarily understand that amazon, facebook, and google are different algorithms, or even different companies, but they know that there is an algorithm, and that it's train-able from their usage.

a huge number of people think their ads are targeted based on their phone microphone always listening to them. and they don't change any habits as a result of that assumption.

I also think that people don't have full understanding but I am also not sure how people can get that understanding.

us discussing things here won't reach those people and frankly I am not sure what would.

There is so much actual content about it that I am sure even I don't know 20% about, of all the ways these companies spy but I do know that there are some options to soften the blow by using things like librewolf etc. if you need privacy and ublock origin etc. too

We don't need people to have a full understanding imo, we just somehow need to show them enough and show them the alternatives somehow and hope that things change or try our best but I am not sure.

Even if the data collected by Meta is really worthless (and that is a big if), Meta shows content to a billion(s?) of people everyday.

That alone is definitely not worthless lol

Entertainment is a value. People spend a lot of money on movies and video games, and I don't think we'd call them worthless even though they produce nothing.

When I watch YouTube on an Apple TV the ads seem slightly relevant - when I watch on a mobile device they are completely awful, literally no idea why I'm being shown most of them.

It’s pretty obvious ads are targeted everywhere today, you search for Adidas running shoes and you expect to see running shoes ads in YouTube, Instagram, Amazon and pretty much every single platform with an ad revenue model. It’s not a subtle, subliminal thing buried into text nudging you into buying shoes, but very evident, pretty much your exact search query transformed into highly visual content. I would be shocked if I know someone under 60 that does not know this.

If anything people overestimate the amount of tracking since the average person still thinks their phones are giving them ads based on what they say

Some sites do give you that option. But they're still going to track you everywhere else, so opting out of one doesn't really solve the privacy problem.

There's also an economic problem with the pay-or-ad model. The users who won't pay are the ones with the least money, so your remaining advertisers won't pay as much. They may not even break even with the ads, but persist just to annoy you into subscribing.

I really like the idea of micropayments, especially for news sites, but social media works too. Wish someone could get it to work.

That's completely wrong, and nobody who has ever worked on a subscription business would believe that.

Talk to somebody who works at Netflix or Spotify

The reason is that retention is much, much more important than reducing usage cost for almost every business

YouTube is a good example here, because at least in the EU, you can disable any tracking. You then don't get front-page recommendations, which would normally use that tracking information, but otherwise you can use YouTube just fine.

> It's reasonably priced and includes access to YouTube Music.

The “price” includes giving your data to the data vampires and is thereby incredibly unreasonable.

They are not going to ignore it. They are going to appeal it with a hundred lawyers and a truckload of documents with arguments, and somehow get it watered down. This is what it looks like from my pov anyway.

I think courts are generally swayed by many lawyer-hours and many legal-sounding-documents, because the judges are law professionals too, and naturally they think the profession is admirable, and so is doing so much legal analysis.

Maybe the judges in NL are better than that, what do I know.

Yes, but it buys you some time. Also, Meta could appeal it.

for 5 million?

I am willing to pay 0.01$ out of my pocket to not comply with some regulations in my country. I can even pay annually

The US wouldn't be doing this if these American tech companies weren't lobbying the government hard to kill the DSA & GDPR. It seems like all regulatory enforcement is out of the window with this administration, so if they can kill the European regulations, they're free to do as they like. The scoping of the trade war as the US having a deficit with all countries by not counting services is ridiculous, it's the most important sector of the economy, and the US has a massive surplus in services.

Na, but under the Dutch legal you can go back to the court if they pay the 5 million without changing anything and ask if they can increase it cus it clearly wasn’t enough. They’ll just keep tacking zeroes on.

Doesn't seem like it:

> 5.3. orders Meta Ireland to pay BoE a penalty of €100,000.00 for each day or part thereof that it does not, or does not fully, comply with the orders under 5.1 and/or 5.2, up to a maximum total of €5,000,000.00.

Original:

> 5.3. veroordeelt Meta Ierland om aan BoE een dangsom te betalen van € 100.000.00 oor iedere dag of gedeelte daarvan dat zij niet of niet volledig aan de beelen onder 5.1 en/of 5.2 oldoet. tot een maximum an in totaal € 5.000.000.00 is bereikt.

It seems like usually they start with smaller fines, and if the offense is repeated, they ramp it up. Kind of makes sense.

I believe that is kind of a warning. The major fines based on the global revenue is issued usually by some european institution.

> but generally speaking I'd like to see allocating jailtime across the top shareholders as an option.

Shareholders don’t control day to day operations of a company. Top shareholders rarely have enough shares by themselves to control anything about the company. Remember the VW emissions cheating scandal where people were jailed? It would be completely unreasonable to jail top shareholders because some manager somewhere concocted a scheme to cheat on emissions.

Jailing top shareholders for decisions made by the company would be a weird misdirected use of the justice system. If someone is to be jailed, it should be people responsible for the decision.

That said, I can’t believe anyone would be watching the news about the current U.S. administration threatening companies with spurious and often nonsensical demands and think that we should be normalizing the process of letting the government jail individuals if the company does something the government doesn’t like that would have previously been a small fine. You can’t think of any way this power might be abused by elected officials?

"I'll Believe That Corporations Are People When Texas Executes One"

~Robert Reich

There was a thread recently about sanctions, and how if you break that, executives can actually go to jail.

It is obviously known how to get corporations to comply, and the mechanism is used when governments really want to. In this case and others like it, probably they don't care enough.

"As a European, I much prefer technological stagnation over bundled messenger apps"

Fixed it for you.

Civilizations that think this way get conquered by ones that don't, and afterwards, nobody much cares what they thought.

Europe has this delusion that they can keep living their magically relaxed life, and continue to both fund it and stay relevant on the world stage.

FYI, the big players today are the US and China. Nobody has the heart to call and tell Europeans that they aren't really part of the future, they're still away on their 8th week long holiday of the year.

Not staying economically relevant is far (far) more harmful to society than forgoing social media.

Exactly. I’m not worried about this. If Meta leaves, it just opens the door for European alternatives, which means platforms that are easier to oversee. What concerns me more is the AI industry, but business here isn’t backed by private capital, so the willingness to take risks is much lower than in the US, which is a shame.

When it comes to Meta or any other dopamine-driven platform, European society would only gain from their absence. Anyone would do really.

Facebook Nederland B.V. is just one of the defendants; the other defendants are Meta Platforms Ireland (based in Ireland), and Meta Platforms Inc. (the main company, based in the USA)

The Dutch subsidiary has been acquitted, as it only managed advertisement income, not the app design.

Meta Platforms Inc. has been acquitted, as it itself doesn't directly provide apps or services in Europe (nor the Netherlands) - legally that's managed by Meta Platforms Ireland and so not Inc.'s responsibility.

Meta Platforms Ireland has been ordered to implement these changes, enforced by the up to 5 million euro fine (see pages 20 and 21 in the verdict)

This article about the AT protocol (which Bluesky uses) provides a good argument for why alternative social media sites like will help prevent this feeling of lock-in in the future and is worth a read: https://overreacted.io/open-social/

That isn't a good comparison at all. "Don't use it" is a valid choice. I use it. None of my kids do. It's also "free" for you to use. So maybe stop trying to force them to do things while providing you a "free" service.

Unless you depend on Facebook for your livelihood, then this is a false equivalence.

[flagged]

How has Facebook changed its core nature?

Facebook's election influence is pretty minor.

Not using Facebook might be the right choice.

Using Facebook is voluntary.

> some people do exactly that. they refuse to communicate on anything but their messenger of choice. and sometimes keeping in touch with that person is more important than my preferences. oh, and for many people i do not want to share my phone number, which limits the available messaging platforms we can still use. we'll be lucky if there is one.

I’m sure there are some number of people out there who only use Facebook Messenger, do not check their email, refuse to use any other messenger, for whom you do not want to share your phone number with for SMS texting, and for whom one of their friends cannot self-control enough to scroll a Facebook feed when they use the Facebook Messenger app. I agree this scenario is plausible for some very small percentage of users with eccentric habits and specific demands who are unwilling to compromise.

I do not agree that we need to start using the force of government to regulate that companies cater to this exact edge case situation where both parties refuse to bend their messaging habits or exchange SMS contact information but want companies to create an entirely separate app for them to communicate on their platform.

> Well, I suppose that's one take on it.

It's the correct take. Facebook had 800M users on the day Messenger was released.

> I would argue that people are in the app because Facebook gave out Facebook Messenger

Why would you argue a nonsense point? Literally all you have to do is Google "when was messenger released" and "number of facebook users in August 2011"

Unless you think those 800M users were just waiting for a shitty messenger?

> I would argue that people are in the app because Facebook gave out Facebook Messenger.

Messenger was never the primary draw of Facebook. It came long after Facebook was popular.

I should have known better than to step into a conversation about Facebook on HN. Doing anything other than blindly agreeing with anti-Facebook comments, even if they’re factually incorrect or illogical, attracts downvotes and more illogical arguments.

This idea that if you change your app in a way that some people don’t like, then the government legislate your features for you, is just mind boggling to me.

Case in point: the only other big "apps" that appeared, survived and are actually making a dent in the existing monopolies are from China, backed by a "hostile" government and impossible to buy for the incumbents.

> That would be the sensible idea in a free market.

Absolutely nothing stopping you from starting a social network

> But that ship sailed LONG ago.

I'm pretty sure there are hundreds? thousands? of startups ready to launch that all do some variant of FB.

Why are you on YC if you think free market tech is dead?

> But that doesn't mean the same rules and laws applies - or should apply - to one with 1B users as one with 100 users.

lol, what? We have different laws depending on how popular you are? What are the thresholds for when new laws apply? Is it strictly user count? Engagement time? Revenue?

Innovation may be dead in Europe but don't try to bring this nonsense elsewhere.

Really? You think government officials are best positioned to come up with next ChatGPT feature, or what how to implement authentication in a webapp?

> If the thing, in this case, a corporation, is harming people

Having messaging feature inside an app is harming people? Have we lost all perspective?

Why stop at this? Why dont we have a dedicated device just for messaging because if you really think about it, iPhones are actively harming people.

> If the thing, in this case, a corporation, is harming people, why not force it to stop?

Lack of a messaging app is harming people? Let's be serious here.

WhatsApp took off simply because SMS used to cost money, at least in the areas of Europe I'm familiar with.

Isn't it free? You're asking a lot for something that is "free".

Okay, but that doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and say "guess chronological sorting is too much to ask for." I flip between the homepage of HN, the /newest section, and the /active section, and frequently find interesting content at the top of each that is missing from (or buried in) the other views. Similar with facebook. The default feed to find bigger posts that might be a few days or a week old, and the recent feed for what's happening right now.

How does it hurt you by requiring social media to offer a working chronological sort?

I think even casual users understand the appeal of having both options and wouldn't want to lose it, assuming they discover it.

I agree with the judge. We are not obligated to suffer the degeneracy of the hyper-optimized algorithm with no alternative.

Just because you have never experienced the utility of working chronological sort doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I guess so, and that definitely is the healthier option! That’s what I’ve been doing for close to 15 years.

The only way you can exist on the modern world is to accept the TOS and crap that a small number of companies are in control over. Saying “just don’t use major tech services” makes people revert back to older methods like snail mail, which is just silly, not a real choice.

The consequences of “simply choosing no” matters. If that means you can’t interact in modern society, that means that service is essential, and should be tested as such.

Many jurisdictions do in fact include what drinks are available as license conditions. E.g. A license for beer and wine can be easier to get than a license for liquor. Or brewery (beer only) get a special category with less restrictions (e.g. they aren't required to provide food) etc etc

> but not regarding what liqueur and beer they have to offer

Try selling moonshine you brewed under the counter, and you'll quickly learn how much regulation there is.

Actually, in many places there are regulations on these things. For example, in France, they are legally obligated to serve several non-alcoholic drinks if they serve beer and wine.