They need to just ban the ad model and make subscriptions (including free with no ads, if the provider wants it) mandatory.
I don't think people understand how the economics of these apps (and websites) work, and it's been so long now that their incorrect assumptions (the feeds are free and the greedy providers shove ads in them) have turned into bedrock beliefs.
You pay for instagram with your personal data, which is used to target you with high value ads. Which covers the cost of your continued usage. If you don't like it, don't use instagram. If you really don't like it, lobby for the law to make it illegal, but get your credit card ready for another monthly subscription.
I think people more or less understand that. Nobody likes ads. Everyone realizes that the ads they're seeing are targeted.
But I think every web designer knows that putting even the slightest barrier between the user and the content drives away vast numbers of people. Making them enter a credit card -- even if you told them it would never be charged -- would send enormous numbers away.
Many won't even create a free account. Tracking tech is so sneaky because just the effort of logging in is too much.
Maybe the world would be a better place if we bit the bullet, nuked the vast majority of web sites, and built a better web on what's left. But it's not going to be an instant, ad-free privacy paradise.
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.
I don't think it's that companies want the ad model, it's that they know they cannot compete with it if they have a subscription model.
Nebula, the "answer" to the shittyness of youtube that creators have been falling over themselves to promote for the last 5 years, still has a conversion rate under 1%.
People hate ads, but they really really hate subscriptions.
A good approach would be that usage means you gotta offer storage or bandwidth in some way. Very very difficult to implement, but say for a PeerTube: wanna watch it? Offer a small percentage of storage for storing chunks. Be a part of the system you use. Of course, the more services you use, the more resources you give up. Or you subscribe.
I can understand if people can't pay for subscriptions. I am not talking from first world citizen and I understand that, this is very real.
If I can be honest, in an ideal world we would have something like patreon and the likes and people sharing their videos on something like peertube and other mechanisms.
I don't want to gatekeep content behind a subscription so that people would be unable to access a community or content when the economy might be out of their hands and they don't want to pay for a subscription but I just wish if more people who do have the means to help and wouldn't be financially impacted much by donating actually do that more often / more as that would be the ideal world but maybe the question is if we can ever reach that or would that always remain an ideal and that we are just stuck with the things in current form.
Nebula just didn’t have enough content I cared about. I happily paid for it, but outside of one or two creators it was “meh.” Half of it felt like content specifically for elementary schoolers. So I, being childless, eventually canceled it. That said, I should probably give it another go, to see if that’s improved at all.
Personally, I really don’t think the problem is subscriptions at this point. I think it’s just having enough content to justify the subscription. Netflix probably costs 4x what Nebula does but certainly has at least that much more content.
I subscribe to Disney/Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube premium. I’ve tried others but there’s not enough content to justify the monthly expense unless I’m actively watching something. And Disney/Hulu is next on the chopping block because the content sort of sucks, there are large periods of time where nothing I want to watch is released, and the whole thing with Kimmel.
My feeling is that this arrangement is massively negative for people and since we ostensibly live in a democracy we should fix it and they can go fuck themselves.
I have edited a bit of the comment and can appreciate it if you read it again but as I have said in some other comments too, there is a social contract between the govt and the citizens and that the citizens should balance / check the govt's rights sometimes and vice versa with judiciary playing a big role too.
another issue which might be is that we are living in a democracy but our options are limited because of the money that flows into these elections.
Is it truly a democracy if its just two options and in my opinion, there is very little that both parties do to fundamentally drastically change the system because of both of them are funded by money donations from large corporations mostly...
They are just different flavours and one might be more preferred than the other for obvious options but even that is not enough and there might be a need for something radical if we truly want to call ourselves democracy and fight against an oligarchy and the sheer influence that big tech has.
I think that we definitely might need to do something as the rights of citizens if we feel like the govt is favouring the big tech or taking decisions that aren't in our interests but that takes real energy but that might be the best way moving forward I am just not sure.
We definitely need some radical change for the economy too and the influence that big tech has. In my opinion we have fought for less and won yet this things seems so hidden that nobody discusses it in real life except here and maybe its hidden because some people might be scared of having all people be educated about this topic as its not in their interests.
To me, I am not sure mate but a lot of the times, to me it seems that people have given hope on radical change, they have accepted things, they have accepted being spied upon so much that they don't even think about it. But as I said in my previous comment that there is definitely a scope of discussion / real change in this I suppose too.
> But I think every web designer knows that putting even the slightest barrier between the user and the content drives away vast numbers of people.
I have a pet theory that these business models paper over the vast worthlessness of many modern technologies. That the value of Facebook is not in it's technologies or network, but rather in the arbitrage of the value of data when combined. We pay for the nearly worthless service of facebook, with our nearly worthless data. Facebook combines that data with other data from other people, and create data that is extremely valuable for advertisers.
The important bit of this theory is that Facebook is presumed nearly worthless. What that means is that outlawing their combining or collection of data from users wouldn't cause their service to transition to a pay-per-user model, but rather would completely dissolve the product, which nobody would miss.
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.
Showing content to users that don't value watching the content is worthless. There's no inherent worth to showing content. My argument is that users consider the content worthless, and therefore any attempt to monetize the the showing of the content directly will end up failing.
The only reason the content works, at all, is because it's completely free and ad driven.
The truth is the content on Facebook is basically worthless and basically nobody wants to watch it. But humans are stupid. If you tell them something is free, they're gonna use it, even if they don't want to use it.
If Facebook cost even 1 dollar a month, I can garuantee those videos views would fall off a cliff.
> Everyone realizes that the ads they're seeing are targeted.
To an extent. I think if everyday users were shown just how much personal data follows them around from site to site I think they’d be horrified. Enough to change their habits? Possibly not. But I don’t think people have full understanding.
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.
A surprising number of my friends even think their phone is constantly listening to their private conversations throughout the day in order to feed the algorithm. And yet they still keep their phone on them at all times, so they are seemingly okay with that much more draconian level of surveillance.
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.
> putting even the slightest barrier between the user and the content drives away vast numbers of people
That's precisely why it should be done statutorily. People are known to be irrational about free things, so it's a fundamentally anti-competitive business model that disadvantages companies that want to actually charge for their services.
Ads can be done without tracking though. The main reason they're not is that Google and meta actively undermine them. They make it really difficult to buy ethical ads.
The reason is of course that tracking is their moat. Nobody else has tracking networks as pervasive as them. But everyone can sell context-based ads
> Everyone realizes that the ads they're seeing are targeted.
Really? It took me until like 2012-2013 to realize Google searches stalked me to other websites.
Then again much critics at that time of big tech was disregarded as lunatic crackpots. And nowadays your are a crackpot if you claim they are not spying on you. I guess that matters.
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.
Yeah, the incident rate of this occurring is pretty high for randomness only.
It's easier to expect that your phone is always listening (because it is) and sending that data to apps for advertising than to force app providers to open source their code and prove they aren't collecting data on what the phone mic picks up.
But maybe you have more insight on a single provider's application that has been thus accused than other people in the thread.
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 don't think people understand how the economics of these apps (and websites) work
That is unfortunate, due to Mark Zuckerberg has redefined the successful business model. META is on track to clear $80 billion per year in net profit. Like it or not, they have a mutually beneficial relationship with advertisers and investors. It's like a Unicorn reproduced with an ATM. It's one of the stocks that seem like neutral ground for institutions, like TSLA. There has to be a high table where those guys talk on phones carried in suitcases.
To put $80 billion per year in perspective, that is approximately the amount of annual federal Medicare matching funds reimbursement for the state of California (Cal-Aid).
*Medicaid, not Medicare. And the actual amount is $85 billion, due to Medicaid is available to nearly anyone, and it is only a coincidence it is the reason for the government shutdown.
I actually think ad based funding models is probably one of the most destructive forces in our society. Do you think politics would be so insane right now if fear based click baiting wasn’t so profitable?
But at same time, Facebook & co need so much ad revenue and tracking because a) they are greedy and want to profit a lot, b) their tracking and ad apparatus is very complex and expensive to run, possibly more expensive than the actual product. People don't need half the shit that facebook offers, which is why people moved to instagram without a problem; then instagram became equally bloated.
So yeah, I understand that Meta wants a lot of money, but I reject the idea that we need to suffer this much to have the social features we need.
Even that's not enough with the shadow profiles they build on people without accounts. It's more like "if you don't like it, don't use instagram and also make sure none of your friends, coworkers, family, associates, or anywhere you go doesn't use it either. Also make sure you, nor the others mentioned, visit any website using Meta's pixel."
We definitely need laws when an individual effectively can't opt out because of network effects.
> You pay for instagram with your personal data, which is used to target you with high value ads.
It's not quite that simple though. The problem is that they are not simply showing you relevant ads, they actively attempt to deliver an outcome the ad is trying to achieve.
On the surface this is relatively benign, Nike wants to sell shoes, they run ads and optimise towards shoe sales, and Meta makes that happen.
But what happens when people run political advertising? What happens when crypto companies promote scams?
I don't disagree about the structure problems with apps and sites that are free with ads.
I do worry that without that free option users just simply wouldn't ever try anything new and just stay where they are new. If everything costs money to move ... I worry nobody moves and everything stagnates. Facebook and similar, now in an even stronger position.
Users, for worse, like it this way and make free with ads the best route because of their choices. Users with their choices incentivize this system too ...
I think another model could help here. Like an automatic/anonymous micropayment when you access a website. This could be a fraction of your internet subscription reserved for micropayments. It should be possible, and cryptocurrencies aren't necessary either (although similar cryptographic constructions may be used, no need for proof of work).
the only solution is not yo consume things that operate on the model. the difficulty there is that the model is generally adopted. so a massive amount of users will go from 1 to another system only to get rug pulled out from under them again and again.
this can be a business model, economic circumstance, mgmt change. a lot can trigger such a shift in services up to then just fine to use.
most companies did not start out on these premises, and its really hard to tell what service will turn next.
i hope maybe ISPs could handle it and offer it as a service. like an ad free internet. but then they will just more deeply embed the ads and it will still get past. changes in designs of the apps will lead to blocking being ineffective.
so really then all that is left is not to use anything that has potential to identify you and your use of it. thats not a lot of things currently. most are frowned upon if you use it in a lot of regions.
a last point would be that another problem is that the apps feed into ad networks. so using 1 is already an issue, mostly the same as using all of them. maybe less data but they can get a lot from little anyway.
This is also a misunderstanding. Not how it works economically.
You do not pay for Instagram with your personal data. The data is elsewhere, not on Instagram. For example with your local retailer or credit card company.
Instagram pays for data about you, which they buy from other people. You do not have a say in this for the most part. Whether or not Instagram buys this data does not affect its collection.
You pay for Instagram with your time spent watching ads. The data they collect about you is mostly not for ads, it's to get you to spend more time on Instagram
To make it clear why this matters:
If you banned advertising on social media, the amount of data collected about you would not decrease
If they're not making money from ads, they don't have incentive to manipulate you into spending as much time as possible watching ads. Maybe if it's some kind of micropayment based model, but if it's subscription the profit motive would be to get you to use the service as little as possible without unsubscribing.
Exactly. The very existence of these apps and websites is based on such “user hostile” behavior. Same with the cat and mouse game between YouTube ads and ad blockers and third party YouTube apps. If the side wanting to completely stop Youtube ads becomes successful, YouTube will cease to exist (as a free app).
I am not arguing for this model, my feed is getting more useless every day, but the only other model is subscription based like you say. And for Facebook, Meta and the like, I don’t think the subscription revenue will be anywhere close due to economies of scale on the free model.
You are ignoring that people give away things for free all them time if the cost to them is small enough. But currently those genuinely free options have to compete with ad-funded services for attention and getting that attention requires more effort than just providing the service so this happens less than it otherwise would.
Or to put it another way, most of the content on the internet is already unpaid with the creator not receiving any compensation. What's left is the hosting/distribution and we can find many different ways to (collectively) pay for that besides ads and user subscriptions.
YouTube offers an ad-free subscription called YouTube premium. It's reasonably priced and includes access to YouTube Music.
I like the hybrid approach of being able to be ad-supported or paid with no ads. I would like to see more of it.
What I don't like is a paid service like Amazon Prime that also includes ads. They include ads in their search results and they include tons of ads in their video library.
FWIW: Hulu offers paid access to content with ads but offers an upgrade to get rid of most of the ads, so there seems to be a whole lot of testing what works in this area going on right now, which I see as a good thing, I just hope that once everything settles the predominant model will be fair and respect user privacy.
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.
When Facebook offered me this option: "will you pay with your money or your data?" I was like: "do I really need this?" I just deleted the account since I was already not really using it. Everyone I know went with "yeah just track me" instead.
I suspect it will be politically difficult to outright ban the ad model... might the same effect be achieved however by enforcing strict online advertising requirements & making websites (specifically the owner of the domain name used to access the site?) liable for all ads that they host as well as liable for all data gathering activities that drive those ads? Ideally with a requirement that all ads shown must contain a link to information about all parties involved in producing the ad & any profiling used to determine whether or not to show it to the user viewing it.
So if any ad is shown based on user profiling from data gathered illegally (i.e. without a proper opt-in as per GDPR etc) then the site showing the ad could potentially be sued?
Essentially, make it so onerous to legally advertise without risking a large class action lawsuit that the practice more or less dies out without technically being "banned" per se...
I get what you're saying but by current EU privacy law interpretation this approach is not allowed.
You can of course charge for services but you cannot charge people just to get rid of tracking. This is not to be confused with ads. You can run ads and offer a paid version without ads. It's about the tracking.
Am I weird because I don't consider, in particular, the tracking nature of ads the biggest problem? Sure, I my browser doesn't share data between websites, I delete cookies automatically except whitelisted, and I don't give apps permissions for no good reason. But the problem with ads is their display, not the contents.
Early Google style text box ads were fine. Any ad put on the side of the page with no animated elements is probably fine. But in reality ads are intrusive and those block my mental process when I'm trying to read about of focus on something. Especially ads in videos would just make me focus really, really hard on blocking off the message until I can restore my mental stack and continue with the original video. (I can't watch youtube with ads, for that reason.) Anything that pops up, takes space, or requires me to find an X button to shut them off gets me to C-w the browser tab nearly without exception.
If the ads do behave I don't particularly mind. I even used to peruse ads in print magazines. In fact, untargetted ads are generally complete shit and if the "inter Net cloud thing" has even an inkling of what I might be interested at all, that's all the better I think. I don't ever click on ads though, so I'm probably not part of the prime target audience. But meaningful ads may make me add their products in the comparison set if I'm in the process of buying something similar.
This, exactly. They stop showing the highly visible annoyance. But the more insidious and lucrative datamining to sell ads everywhere else still goes on.
What I can't understand is how the ads are still effective, targeted or otherwise.
I've long thought we are going to reach a point where the return on social advertising isn't worth the investment, these models have a crisis and pivot, but it still seems to be going strong.
Enough people to sustain the model still click. At Meta's scale, you only need a small fraction of clicks and conversions to make it worth it. Meta reaches billions of people, so even a small slice of that is still a huge chunk of people.
There's also a bit of competitive pressure. Even if people get numb to ads, business, especially small businesses, can't afford to not show up if their competitors are still showing up in feeds.
The usual advertising psychology tricks still apply also which is why ads still work. Even if the ad itself doesn't result in a conversion, there's still the exposure effect of someone seeing your brand over and over again in their feed. The more times someone sees it, they'll subconsciously start preferring that brand or see it as more trustworthy. Among other tricks.
Thanks for the thoughts -- the points you make align with my understanding. It still seems so... frail? At least given how much money is circulating in that world.
Attribution, for example, has to be an absolute mess. Especially in the case of the psychology tricks you mention... If I was shown an ad for Subway, and then ate a Subway sandwich a few days later -- it had absolutely nothing to do with the ad. I only eat there when there aren't better options. Yet, I bet some ad conversion counter ticked up somewhere. I see ads for ShopRite all the time, but it's the only grocery store in my area, so of course I shop there. When you repeat this millions of times, it's surprising to me that ads are still provably effective to the point of being a trillion dollar industry.
I wonder if it will become less so as older generations go offline.
There was a time I'd sub to YouTube. however they ditched the sub for that and force YouTube music as well with all of its enshitified user experience I want none of it.
Certainly the company like Facebook, even if you're paying them for data security privacy, how can you trust them? That they will respect it?
These companies are filled to the brim with utter sociopaths, Especially Facebook. Companies that internal metrics with them fully aware of the mental health damage they're doing at a massive scale to young children, and buried it.
Companies that did psychological manipulation AB tests.
The judgement requires Meta to change their platforms within 2 weeks so that the user's choice is persistent. If not implemented in 2 weeks, there is a daily penalty of €100'000, up to a maximum of €5 million.
As an addition, 5 million is a lot for BoF. At the end of 2024 their balance was a little over 1.8 million EUR. Even a single day's worth of coercive fine (100k EUR) would be meaningful to them.
> Now, go away, or I shall taunt you a second time-a!
That is the implication. The point of the first fine isn't to actually hurt Meta. It's to signal that there will be consequences, that the excuse of "but we thought it was legal" is gone now and give them one final chance to get their act together.
It's to pre-emptively clear away any possibility for Meta to appeal to either higher courts or the court of public opinion that they're being treated unfairly. Which they would do if you immediately hit them with a say, €5 billion fine.
The thing about ignoring courts' orders is... well, courts don't exactly look favorably on people who ignore them. Looking forward to court's round 2, then.
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.
It’s an intentional slap on the wrist because they don’t actually want to fine them, they just want them to change their behaviour. The general MO of European courts is to get people to comply, not to punish non compliance. There’s a subtle difference. If Meta change their tact in the next two weeks then they got what they wanted. If they don’t, fine increases and they’ll escalate responses.
Some useful context here is that the Netherlands is holding a general election on 29 October, which is why the deadline of two weeks was imposed. If Meta does not comply with the two weeks deadline and instead pays the (tiny) $5 million fine, that could have serious consequences for the democratic process in the Netherlands. Escalating after two weeks might be too little, too late.
That’s actually really interesting to know. I don’t think it would have serious implications if they chose to pay, but I do think it will be catastrophic if meta refuse to change and NL don’t escalate to the point of forcing compliance.
This is 5 million for this particular court case. Nothing is preventing others from filing their own, very similar cases. If Meta ignores the court's decision, a second lawsuit may end much worse for them.
Though, practically speaking, America has been threatening to make the trade war they started much worse for the EU if it tried to enforce things like DSA and GDPR fines. We'll have to see how enforceable these laws really are.
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.
Ding ding ding! If the EU had even the tiniest of balls, they would've accepted the US tariffs with open arms while applying equivalent ones on services at the same time. Glazing Trump during the announcement about how great of an idea it is to institute these things, how much fairer they make it.
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.
Yes and no. The judge can choose to tack on zeroes to make Meta comply, but they may also find that monetary fines are not sufficient and take other measures. This is not just a money printing machine you can keep coming back to.
If Meta can provide a reasonable time frame for compliance, the judge may also choose to let the existing limit on reparations stand rather than increase it, despite them not complying the day they hit the 5 million euro mark.
It's all up to what the judge deems reasonable to make Meta comply with the court's orders.
> 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.
> 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?
The only sense in which punishment of any kind is reasonable is when it works to disincentivise harmful behavior. If higher risks for shareholders convince them to take a more active role in ensuring that their investment isn't causing harm to the rest of us, then they're at least as reasonable than any other sort of punishment.
If the cheating had gone unnoticed, the shareholders would've been rewarded, so they should bear some risk whether or not they sold after the crime was committed.
As it is, we've got incentives set up to encourage investment in bad behavior so long as you get out before your people get caught.
As for the government abusing the justice system... What rules would create justice is sort of orthogonal to the circumstances under which the rules are broken.
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.
That how you build up a case for transferring control. First its "lol, 5m is a pocket change" and it becomes argument of politicians for tighter control over Meta. Then Zuck says they are trying to make the world a better place but it doesn't stick, people side with the politician who is building a career by sticking it to Meta.
The headline is provocative. The issue is simple: Meta has a recommended feed and another feed which is reverse chronological. The option is hidden and not default, and all the NL judge is asking is for that option to be preserved and not be reset everytime user opens the app/website. Instagram never had this option, this does not say whether they have to implement it too.
I would be curious if the order stands as for curation as well. Someone could have 1000s of friends, and you cant show posts from everyone in a reverse chronological order for a good ux.
As a European, I’m glad that the influence of big, potentially dangerous companies is being kept in check. From the start of October, Meta is completely switching off political ads and now I can look forward to my feed stopping with tabloids, politics and Russian propaganda and going back to technical curiosities and capybaras.
I, as a European, am worried that these rulings, regulations, and the prevailing mindset will lead to companies leaving and result in technological stagnation, due to our inability to compete with global markets.
Of course, there is something to be said about the dangers, effectiveness, and societal impact of social media. But companies should have the right to decide how they conduct their business. They should also have the incentive to innovate and improve- without being threatened by overly strict or poorly designed laws.
The ruling here is about choice of recommendation system ('algorithm'), which ties into social media addiction as well as electoral influence. So there's actually quite a bit at stake.
If we're talking about actual technological innovation, then yes perhaps.
In this case we're talking about social media 'innovation' though. The science and art of getting a population highly addicted to doom scrolling. I'm not sure if that will help said population outcompete the other guys.
Any civilization that calls its citizens making a product choice "conquest" is terminally coddled and isn't going to make it through the century to come.
which choice are you talking about? there is no choice. there are no alternatives to facebook if all your friends are on it. there is no alternative to youtube, and for other products, the alternatives take a lot of effort. (hence despite the existence of linux, there is no choice to windows for example, because it comes preinstalled on every device. same for google infested android)
this is even worse in smaller and in less developed countries. they are most certainly being conquered.
and i don't get what you are trying to say. i am terminally coddled because i view google and facebook as conquerors? what does that even mean?
This seems like a bit of an empty moral panic/slippery slope appeal. As a general rule, it could go either way: civilizations can also collapse from not-enough-regulation, not-enough-rule of law, oligarchic capture, or even just become a megacorporation dystopia without collapsing for a long time, maybe ever. Better to critique the specific case, if you have any objections.
Of course not. I do think that the US might get bored of defending a continent that refuses to lift a finger to defend itself --- or put much effort into anything that isn't regulating, censoring, or fining someone, and then someone else will invade Europe and impose a techno-capitalist oligarchy or worse on it.
There is serious talk in the US now that democracy is a failed system and the country would be better run by a bunch of self-selected billionaires in perpetuity.
The election choices are between some-one is clearly senile, or somebody who clearly has no substance and, well, Trump.
Other recent candidates include sons of previous presidents, or wives of previous presidents.
And you are worried about Europe.
Europe is worried about Europe - but in the context of catching what the US has via dark money flowing through tech platforms driving politics.
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.
Yeah sure, because life in the USA is so much more awesome than in Europe. Naww, they can keep their relevancy in the world stage. We are good over here living in the "stone age".
The problem isn't that Europe is living in the stone age, clearly they aren't. The problem is that they are living in the modern age entirely on the back of foreign tech. Chinese hardware running American software. Industry running on American energy, and protection totally reliant on American defense (the US spent more money per capita in Ukraine than the EU did...). This doesn't even factor in generous welfare programs that will need to be funded by a shrinking population(!) that doesn't have cutting edge skills anymore.
Europe decided to vacation for the last 30 years rather than go to work. The fruit of the post-war era was bountiful, and bank accounts were healthy, so why not take time off? Stone age is not a good way to describe Europe today, but over the next 10-20 years it very well may become more appropriate. European leaders are keenly aware of this, but man is it hard to convince the kids that they need to end their vacation, especially when it is all they have ever known.
This is the story American billionaires tell poor Americans every day. Those lazy Europeans may have it good now, but just you wait another 10 years. That affordable healthcare? There won’t be a doctor left! All those parents having a year of paternity leave? Unsustainable!
You guys keep working 80% harder! We will keep 99% of the profits, but don’t worry it will eventually trickle down to you. Hey, maybe one day there will be enough cash left over to fix our healthcare and education systems. Those Europeans are asleep on the wheel. Always protesting and striking and vacationing. Those fools.
Who designed the chip in your phone? Is it more likely to be Intel (US) or is it more likely to be ARM (UK)?
Where does Linux ( which pretty much runs the entire internet from routers to servers ) originate from?
> Industry running on American energy
Eh? While EU imports of US gas are on the rise due to the Ukraine war ( and the blowing up of Russian pipelines which, BTW, the US is implicated in ) - it's a fraction of total energy.
> protection totally reliant on American defense
So the US bases on British islands in the Indian Ocean, or in Japan ( put there after the end of the war with ... Japan ) are purely for the benefit of others and not in anyway part of US global interests?
companies leaving [will] result in technological stagnation, due to our inability to compete with global markets
on the contrary, companies leaving will allow and force us to develop european alternatives that can actually compete in europe. they don't need to compete on the global market.
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.
> But companies should have the right to decide how they conduct their business.
Nope - not if it is to the detriment to society ( as decided by society via democratic means ).
In the UK - when radio and TV came along, society recognized the power of these platforms and the danger of how they could amplify single voices with money in an anti-democratic way. As such political advertising on such platforms very tightly controlled.
In addition there are overall limits on campaign spending.
Then along comes companies like Facebook and money powering political ad campaigns comes in through the back door, and in addition a lack of transparency on the overall spend as it's now much easier to hide.
Moves to curb this is simply society re-asserting it's existing rules, not some new imposition.
> I, as a European, am worried that these rulings, regulations, and the prevailing mindset will lead to companies leaving and result in technological stagnation
If your "technological progress" is dependent on algorithmic feeds and pervasive tracking, good riddance.
> But companies should have the right to decide how they conduct their business.
What Meta does is the equivalent of dumping nuclear waste in the middle of your city. I'm sure you don't think companies have the right to do the latter.
I'm very sceptical of the origin of comments like these. I don't know any actual Europeans who share these concerns because they know that the status quo is that the entire EU market is captured by US tech. And that this has been done through anticompetitive tactics as well as offloading trillions in negative externalities onto societies.
If you're truly a concerned European, you're incredibly naive, and need to read much more about how banally evil Meta is.
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuckerberg: Just ask
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don't know why.
Zuckerberg: They "trust me"
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
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)
There is a level of investment we put in the platforms we use.
This comment is akin to asking farmers cut off from repairing their equipment "why don't you buy tractors from a different company instead of fighting to fix your existing ones?"
The investment in the case of social media is the network you've built. In my country most local events are announced primarily on facebook for example.
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/
Is it possible to use bluesky without a did:plc? Id rather be in control of my own identity than leave it irreversibly in the hands of yet another overlord.
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.
I don't think you understood their point at all. "Don't use it" isn't necessarily a valid choice when it's where all of your friends and/or family are. The "investment" is not monetary; instead, it takes the form of having connections on the platform. You are invested in the platform if your primary connection to someone is hosted there, and it costs a ton of time and effort to transfer that somewhere else.
Hindsight is easy, and perhaps had no-one taken up Facebook in 2004 we'd all be okay. It's also not always obvious what trade-offs you're making, because you cannot see the future.
Ultimately, it was not obvious in 2004 where we'd be today. Reality exists regardless of retrospective blame. The problem we have _today_ is the one we need to deal with.
In the first step, you get everyone to invest into your platform. You provide some valuable services to people, and they sign an implicit contract as a result.
In the second step, you reap what you sow. You switch the platform entirely and change its core nature and functionality. It's hard to stop using Facebook when everyone else is using Facebook, and this fact means you can do things which would normally have people leave your platform in droves.
This ruling limits the extent to which you can run such a bait and switch campaign. It's somewhat remarkable, because it extends some basic consumer rights to tech companies, even if there's no direct product nor a subscription in place. Personally, I think it's long overdue.
I'd say the major switch happened at the point where you lost control over your feed. It's not populated because you opted in to updates from a specific person or organization. It's populated by algorithm. Furthermore, at no point in time were any of these new features opt-in. Instead, they were enabled without your consent. Facebook has a long history of enabling features for people which is not in their interest in the slightest.
I should also say that it's more general than Meta. Google are also notorious for doing stuff like this. About time we start legislating against it.
An important matter in this particular case: It's about elections as well.
You can opt to not use facebook yourself to protect your own data, that is more or less fine. (Though we can talk about Facebook's collection of non-user data another time)
You can't individually opt out of the election influence.
I've switched to email and chat for social connection, works a lot better for me than I think any ranked feed ever will, no matter how many court decisions try to shape it.
1. Subscribe to what you want to see
2. Bookmark the “your subscriptions” page; don’t visit the home page
2a. Although if you disable watch history, youtube tries to punish you by blanking out the “home” page. I consider that a good thing.
3. Use an ad blocker to hide the comments and side bar (recommended videos)
That’s pretty much what I do. Discoverability happens off-site, which might be a hindrance for you, but I don’t necessarily want more stuff to watch for the sake of more stuff to watch.
Blocking elements with ad block works well, but for convenience I use the extension Unhook. It can redirect the home feed to subscriptions, hide end screen cards, end screen feed, live chat, auto generated mixes, notifications, shorts, etc. I also use a tampermonkey script to auto set theater mode and resolution (necessary for incognito mode).
It would be nice if youtube could include some of these handy features in the settings, but it is not something they want to do it seems.
I use an extension called Unhook which has, as one of its many great options, a mode that disables the algorithmic youtube feed and auto-redirects the homepage to your subscriptions page (which is just reverse-chronological)
(it also lets you disable Shorts and suggestions and so on, pretty fantastic actually)
Something I think is worth pointing out: this is happening in the Netherlands, i.e. their jurisdiction. I think most people here aren't from the Netherlands. I think they should be free to try out the legislation they want, and people elsewhere don't need to agree. It's good that different countries can try different things, and if that doesn't work it's a lesson for other places, and if it works that's even better. People on the internet tend to focus too much on uniformity and conformity, as if we lived everyone in the same place.
It's the implementation of an eu wide law. Judges in other countries might rule differently, but this isn't really an example of the netherlands going its own way and experimenting.
I would like them (or actually the EU) to go one step further:
All people should see the same information, in the same order, with the same metadata such as likes and comments.
Example:
I go to Reddit. I see a list of only the subreddits I subscribed to. This is fine. But within this subreddit, I should see the same information as other users do.
Currently, you don’t even see the same comments and same replies, likes, dislikes on topics. This puts people in bubbles, and makes it impossible to enforce fair reporting, illegal content or manipulation.
in my not so humble and often overly verbose opinion, we desperately need to get back to a place where we have more control over what our own inputs.
a handful of people are now in control of the overwhelming majority of what we see. whether that’s the few websites most people visit or the wildly merging media ecosystem which is now also overwhelmingly controlled by a tiny few with even more mergers on the immediate horizon. to the corporate live event space. it’s insane that weve allowed such a tiny few to control nearly everything our people ingest.
anything which counters this stranglehold on our inputs is a good thing, no matter how small.
Please for the love of god make it a legal requirement that messaging must be made available as a separate app without addictive feeds. Or make it such that users can disable the feed in settings. We need to be able to message our friends without seeing a feed without having to convert all of our friends to a new platform.
> We need to be able to message our friends without seeing a feed without having to convert all of our friends to a new platform.
Those people are in the app because of the social features and the feed in the first place. The messaging features were built on top of the platform.
Requiring companies to make and maintain a separate app entirely if their product has messaging features is an unreasonable requirement. If someone has such a strong self-control problem that they can’t message someone without becoming addicted to the feed, they shouldn’t be involved with the platform at all.
Just exchange emails, phone numbers for SMS, or any other type of communication. I seriously doubt that your friends are only able to communicate through exactly one communication channel and it happens to be Instagram.
Requiring companies to make and maintain a separate app entirely if their product has messaging features is an unreasonable requirement
the better alternative is to require interoperability with other messenger apps, so can use the app of my choice. this is a proposal under discussion since years ago.
I seriously doubt that your friends are only able to communicate through exactly one communication channel
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.
> 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.
“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”
I don’t know how old you are or where you live, but I’m in my mid 40s and don’t live in a tech city. A good quarter of everyone I know in my age range uses Facebook Messenger as their primary form of texting. Most of them don’t even use Facebook itself anymore, they just have a lot of momentum on Messenger.
Yeah, this mirrors my experience. I've managed to convince a bunch of tech friends to migrate to Signal, but the vast majority of my non-tech friends/family in the US are exclusively available on Messenger
> Requiring companies to make and maintain a separate app entirely if their product has messaging features is an unreasonable requirement.
I disagree. I think it's more than reasonable. Facebook designs its features with dark UX to cause addiction, it's not about self control, it's about Facebook engaging in anti-human behavior.
It's reasonable to use the State to force a corporation that makes tens of billions of dollars of profit a year to behave in a way that's beneficial to people. The corporation will be fine, it's air conditioned and listening to its favorite music.
> Requiring companies to make and maintain a separate app entirely if their product has messaging features is an unreasonable requirement.
In this case Meta already has such an app (Messenger), and it has at times supported instagram messaging. I'm not sure why they broke that association a little while ago, but it's not unreasonable that they could reconnect it.
> Those people are in the app because of the social features and the feed in the first place.
Well, I suppose that's one take on it.
I would argue that people are in the app because Facebook gave out Facebook Messenger. Then Facebook changed how Facebook Messenger works. You could call it a rugpull, I would call it US business practices.
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?
This judgement is about Instagram, specifically. Messenger pre-dates Instagram (and very significantly pre-dates the Facebook acquisition of Instagram).
> 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.
> Messenger was never the primary draw of Facebook.
I didn't say it was. Remember, my statement was: ... that people are in the app because Facebook gave out Facebook Messenger
Indeed, I remember using Facebook just for messages. So when Facebook Messenger came out, I used that exclusively.
Now, I've long since moved off of Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Some of my family still use it though, and I've seen it. It's not what it used to be. So, I then expanded on that to say: Then Facebook changed how Facebook Messenger works
> they’re factually incorrect or illogical
So, where's the factually incorrect or illogical argument?
The final straw for me to move off of Facebook was Cambridge Analytica. Once I realized how terrible not just Facebook was for not only permitting that kind of shit, but practically inviting it as a feature... that was very telling. And I've since stopped using nearly all social media, present website excluded.
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.
I think this really only becomes an issue if the changes you made to your app is in some way affecting democratic elections in that country (and in that case, seems well within the purview of legislation)
> Requiring companies to make and maintain a separate app entirely if their product has messaging features is an unreasonable requirement.
I don't think it's unreasonable and I'll take it further - messaging should be forced to use an open protocol. No more iMessage or Facebook messenger. If you want those, great, then open them.
Now everything works with everything and the world is a utopia and also we cured cancer. Downside: Meta will make slightly less money. I can live with that.
Why not just use SMS messages? No feeds, literally all phones support them, with MMS you also get photos and stuff... you don't need another party involved for the messages to work, and you're already paying for them.
This is something I genuinely don't understand. Whatsapp used to have a reason to exist because the SMS experience on android was pretty bad. That's not the case any more.
Completely. I'm not normally on Instagram but I recently made meet some new friends that use it for messaging. The number of times I've open the app to message someone and gotten distracted by the feed...
That would be the sensible idea in a free market. But that ship sailed LONG ago.
Now there are apps and "markets" that are so important and dominating (Amazon, Facebook, ...) that the only alternatives are basically to split them, control them or regulate them in detail. The problem isn't lack of "innovation".
Anyone can make any social app work the way they want to. But that doesn't mean the same rules and laws applies - or should apply - to one with 1B users as one with 100 users.
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.
Facebook doesn't exist in a free market. It IS a market. And an unfree one ruled by a dictatorship that you can't vote on.
That's what platforms are. They're markets. Its not like making a couch or something.
That's why those other apps are literally worthless.
It doesn't matter if the other apps are super amazing and they walk your dog and suck your dick and make you live forever. Literally does not matter.
The app, itself, does not matter. Which is why Facebook is allowed to be as shit as humanly possible.
What matters is what the app proxies, which is a market. Those other apps will always fail, forever, because they can't compete with facebooks market because they're not even allowed into that market.
> Facebook doesn't exist in a free market. It IS a market.
It is a market that exists in the free market.
> And an unfree one ruled by a dictatorship that you can't vote on.
Ok, so don't use that market. You're not entitled to Facebook, or being able to dictate anything.
> That's what platforms are. They're markets. Its not like making a couch or something.
Bud, I am begging you to close your Facebook account and see it is exactly like a couch you don't have to buy.
> It doesn't matter if the other apps are super amazing and they walk your dog and suck your dick and make you live forever. Literally does not matter.
You heard it here. YC is dead. Close up shop. All these investors just wasting their money because you can't vote Zuck out.
> The app, itself, does not matter. Which is why Facebook is allowed to be as shit as humanly possible.
This is just nonsense. You're trying to sound smart by taking an extreme position. Nuance is smart.
> You heard it here. YC is dead. Close up shop. All these investors just wasting their money because you can't vote Zuck out.
Yes, this is actually true.
You want nuance? Here's the nuance.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, is actually competing with facebook. They're not trying to.
So what is YC funding? What are these companies doing? They're attacking different markets and making different products. When was the last time you saw a startup make a general purpose social media platform? It doesn't happen. Nobody does it. Because they know they'll lose.
If you look at the hot new kids on the block, none of them are actually competing with facebook. TikTok? TikTok is not facebook, it's a completely different product. Twitter? They're incumbent too, but completely different product. Youtube? Disney Plus? Pintrest? Linkedin? Just think about it.
You could, TRIVIALLY, make a better facebook. I, right now, in the course of a few weeks, could make a better facebook. But I'm not. And you're not. And nobody is. And nobody is even trying to.
Search your feelings, and you will know it to be true.
> Why are you on YC if you think free market tech is dead?
I have been visiting this forum for 12 years. It took probably 5 years before I _heard_ about the "other" part of ycombinator - the startup thing. But I never really cared about that bit, it's just an online tech forum that happens to share domain with the startup incubator.
> lol, what? We have different laws depending on how popular you are?
Absolutely. I think that is pretty universal already. For example laws preventing monopolies (government approvals of mergers, for example).
What is and isn’t a monopoly is of course decided on a case by case basis - as it should. There is no law saying that 80% market share is necesssarily a monopoly or that 20% is so low it can’t be blocked.
> Do you think a small mom and pop store in a rural captured market couldn't price fix?
Not sure how it’s relevant but they can of course haves local monopoly - but afaik in the US such local monopolies aren’t subject to regulation.
You can actually pay for Instagram, if you don't want ads. You still have messages tied with the feed.
Now, one must also say that Instagram wasn't the incumbent messaging platform in any place in the world. It's just that newer generations always cannot tolerate to do things like their parents did, so if their parents primarily used Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger (oh, wait, all of them owned by Meta!) to communicate, they ought to find a new platform to get locked in.
Because most products are not only shit, they're designed in such a way to be as shit as possible. Because that legitimately works.
Even if the government agency makes the worse decision possible, which they probably will, that's still an improvement, because we're completely maxed out on shit levels. That's how bad many products are today.
Best positioned as in, make the most money? No, of course not.
Best positioned as in, not completely and totally fuck their users up the ass? Yes!
Look at Meta, Google, OpenAI, you fucking name it. These companies are a cancer onto humanity. They are actively making everyone's lives worse, on purpose, for the pursuit of advertiser revenue and new and innovative addiction mechanisms.
It's sort of like asking, who would you rather make your food? The government, or R.J. Reynolds?
Because things in the State should help people, not exploit them. If the thing, in this case, a corporation, is harming people, why not force it to stop?
Punishes companies for not respecting people's settings. It's as if I chose to keep my chat history private in the settings, but they would ignore that and share all my chats with the world. Same problem. I find it odd you can't see how it's damaging to the consumers if you're offering them a choice that you then completely disregard.
The law requires that they provide a non-profiled choice. Facebook wasn't punished for providing the choice, that was required. They were punished for not respecting that requirement, overriding the user's choice whenever they thought they could get away with it.
Yes, the issue is forced algorithm-based feeds, where Meta is free to profile as deeply as they want and exploit what should be private knowledge about you. A "most recent" feed (of things you already chose to subscribe to/follow) should be a standard option on any social media app, and the app shouldn't switch back to their toxic algorithm automatically anytime you look away. This behavior itself shows how much Meta wants to control what you see and is extra impetus to require a simple chronological feed option that is selectable as default, and that the user's choice is respected.
IIRC, around 2008-2009, "most recent" was the only kind of feed, and within the span of a couple years, they added their "personalized" feed but would let you switch between the two freely (and the setting would persist), and not much later, the setting would no longer persist.
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.
This is government overreach. These are novelty/fun apps. They are not critical infrastructure or needed in any way. This would be like a court ordering a local bar to serve more than just beer and wine, to accomodate people who like sake and soju. You have free choice to use the social platforms that you want to use. Really don't understand this kind of action tbh.
Facebook is a massive part of social media. Billions of users. It is apart of society in its sheer size. A society decided “we want to make this better” and acted appropriately. I think it’s a noble pursuit for a society to attempt to reduce the clearly negative aspects of social media.
There is no real freedom of choice. The network effect cements big players positions. Try telling an 80 year old grandma with a 20 year old laptop to use mastodon. Likely no one she knows is on it.
Finally, individuals make essentially no difference when choosing to not use FB. But when choosing to not go to a local bar, that may be 0.03% loss of their monthly revenue. The only actor that can reasonably bargain with huge organizations is other huge organizations.
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.
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.
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
This is true when there’s plenty of competition that matter. When everybody and every business is in one app, the network effect forces everyone to be there or be invisible. So the “essential infrastructure” label is kinda debatable. I suppose it’s essential for many businesses.
So your analogy should be more like there’s one big shopping mall network in the city that basically everyone has to go because certain stores are only there — and the owners bought any competitor that seemed to start becoming popular in the past so there’s no perspective of competition either.
They need to just ban the ad model and make subscriptions (including free with no ads, if the provider wants it) mandatory.
I don't think people understand how the economics of these apps (and websites) work, and it's been so long now that their incorrect assumptions (the feeds are free and the greedy providers shove ads in them) have turned into bedrock beliefs.
You pay for instagram with your personal data, which is used to target you with high value ads. Which covers the cost of your continued usage. If you don't like it, don't use instagram. If you really don't like it, lobby for the law to make it illegal, but get your credit card ready for another monthly subscription.
I think people more or less understand that. Nobody likes ads. Everyone realizes that the ads they're seeing are targeted.
But I think every web designer knows that putting even the slightest barrier between the user and the content drives away vast numbers of people. Making them enter a credit card -- even if you told them it would never be charged -- would send enormous numbers away.
Many won't even create a free account. Tracking tech is so sneaky because just the effort of logging in is too much.
Maybe the world would be a better place if we bit the bullet, nuked the vast majority of web sites, and built a better web on what's left. But it's not going to be an instant, ad-free privacy paradise.
> putting even the slightest barrier between the user and the content drives away vast numbers of people
Dear god, yes, please, good. Pass laws that force the bloated companies to lose users. Yes. World = better.
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.
I don't think it's that companies want the ad model, it's that they know they cannot compete with it if they have a subscription model.
Nebula, the "answer" to the shittyness of youtube that creators have been falling over themselves to promote for the last 5 years, still has a conversion rate under 1%.
People hate ads, but they really really hate subscriptions.
A good approach would be that usage means you gotta offer storage or bandwidth in some way. Very very difficult to implement, but say for a PeerTube: wanna watch it? Offer a small percentage of storage for storing chunks. Be a part of the system you use. Of course, the more services you use, the more resources you give up. Or you subscribe.
I can understand if people can't pay for subscriptions. I am not talking from first world citizen and I understand that, this is very real.
If I can be honest, in an ideal world we would have something like patreon and the likes and people sharing their videos on something like peertube and other mechanisms.
I don't want to gatekeep content behind a subscription so that people would be unable to access a community or content when the economy might be out of their hands and they don't want to pay for a subscription but I just wish if more people who do have the means to help and wouldn't be financially impacted much by donating actually do that more often / more as that would be the ideal world but maybe the question is if we can ever reach that or would that always remain an ideal and that we are just stuck with the things in current form.
Nebula just didn’t have enough content I cared about. I happily paid for it, but outside of one or two creators it was “meh.” Half of it felt like content specifically for elementary schoolers. So I, being childless, eventually canceled it. That said, I should probably give it another go, to see if that’s improved at all.
Personally, I really don’t think the problem is subscriptions at this point. I think it’s just having enough content to justify the subscription. Netflix probably costs 4x what Nebula does but certainly has at least that much more content.
I subscribe to Disney/Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube premium. I’ve tried others but there’s not enough content to justify the monthly expense unless I’m actively watching something. And Disney/Hulu is next on the chopping block because the content sort of sucks, there are large periods of time where nothing I want to watch is released, and the whole thing with Kimmel.
Oh yes I agree that they don't want to
My feeling is that this arrangement is massively negative for people and since we ostensibly live in a democracy we should fix it and they can go fuck themselves.
I have edited a bit of the comment and can appreciate it if you read it again but as I have said in some other comments too, there is a social contract between the govt and the citizens and that the citizens should balance / check the govt's rights sometimes and vice versa with judiciary playing a big role too.
another issue which might be is that we are living in a democracy but our options are limited because of the money that flows into these elections.
Is it truly a democracy if its just two options and in my opinion, there is very little that both parties do to fundamentally drastically change the system because of both of them are funded by money donations from large corporations mostly...
They are just different flavours and one might be more preferred than the other for obvious options but even that is not enough and there might be a need for something radical if we truly want to call ourselves democracy and fight against an oligarchy and the sheer influence that big tech has.
I think that we definitely might need to do something as the rights of citizens if we feel like the govt is favouring the big tech or taking decisions that aren't in our interests but that takes real energy but that might be the best way moving forward I am just not sure.
We definitely need some radical change for the economy too and the influence that big tech has. In my opinion we have fought for less and won yet this things seems so hidden that nobody discusses it in real life except here and maybe its hidden because some people might be scared of having all people be educated about this topic as its not in their interests.
To me, I am not sure mate but a lot of the times, to me it seems that people have given hope on radical change, they have accepted things, they have accepted being spied upon so much that they don't even think about it. But as I said in my previous comment that there is definitely a scope of discussion / real change in this I suppose too.
> But I think every web designer knows that putting even the slightest barrier between the user and the content drives away vast numbers of people.
I have a pet theory that these business models paper over the vast worthlessness of many modern technologies. That the value of Facebook is not in it's technologies or network, but rather in the arbitrage of the value of data when combined. We pay for the nearly worthless service of facebook, with our nearly worthless data. Facebook combines that data with other data from other people, and create data that is extremely valuable for advertisers.
The important bit of this theory is that Facebook is presumed nearly worthless. What that means is that outlawing their combining or collection of data from users wouldn't cause their service to transition to a pay-per-user model, but rather would completely dissolve the product, which nobody would miss.
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.
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
Showing content to users that don't value watching the content is worthless. There's no inherent worth to showing content. My argument is that users consider the content worthless, and therefore any attempt to monetize the the showing of the content directly will end up failing.
The only reason the content works, at all, is because it's completely free and ad driven.
The truth is the content on Facebook is basically worthless and basically nobody wants to watch it. But humans are stupid. If you tell them something is free, they're gonna use it, even if they don't want to use it.
If Facebook cost even 1 dollar a month, I can garuantee those videos views would fall off a cliff.
> Everyone realizes that the ads they're seeing are targeted.
To an extent. I think if everyday users were shown just how much personal data follows them around from site to site I think they’d be horrified. Enough to change their habits? Possibly not. But I don’t think people have full understanding.
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.
A surprising number of my friends even think their phone is constantly listening to their private conversations throughout the day in order to feed the algorithm. And yet they still keep their phone on them at all times, so they are seemingly okay with that much more draconian level of surveillance.
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.
> putting even the slightest barrier between the user and the content drives away vast numbers of people
That's precisely why it should be done statutorily. People are known to be irrational about free things, so it's a fundamentally anti-competitive business model that disadvantages companies that want to actually charge for their services.
Ads can be done without tracking though. The main reason they're not is that Google and meta actively undermine them. They make it really difficult to buy ethical ads.
The reason is of course that tracking is their moat. Nobody else has tracking networks as pervasive as them. But everyone can sell context-based ads
> Everyone realizes that the ads they're seeing are targeted.
Really? It took me until like 2012-2013 to realize Google searches stalked me to other websites.
Then again much critics at that time of big tech was disregarded as lunatic crackpots. And nowadays your are a crackpot if you claim they are not spying on you. I guess that matters.
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.
You probably disabled some privacy settings on your mobile (or you are not logged in with your user).
Definitely logged in using the same account.
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
Yeah, the incident rate of this occurring is pretty high for randomness only.
It's easier to expect that your phone is always listening (because it is) and sending that data to apps for advertising than to force app providers to open source their code and prove they aren't collecting data on what the phone mic picks up.
But maybe you have more insight on a single provider's application that has been thus accused than other people in the thread.
What? Just give them an option. Ads or ad free with card.
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 don't think people understand how the economics of these apps (and websites) work
That is unfortunate, due to Mark Zuckerberg has redefined the successful business model. META is on track to clear $80 billion per year in net profit. Like it or not, they have a mutually beneficial relationship with advertisers and investors. It's like a Unicorn reproduced with an ATM. It's one of the stocks that seem like neutral ground for institutions, like TSLA. There has to be a high table where those guys talk on phones carried in suitcases.
To put $80 billion per year in perspective, that is approximately the amount of annual federal Medicare matching funds reimbursement for the state of California (Cal-Aid).
*Medicaid, not Medicare. And the actual amount is $85 billion, due to Medicaid is available to nearly anyone, and it is only a coincidence it is the reason for the government shutdown.
I actually think ad based funding models is probably one of the most destructive forces in our society. Do you think politics would be so insane right now if fear based click baiting wasn’t so profitable?
But at same time, Facebook & co need so much ad revenue and tracking because a) they are greedy and want to profit a lot, b) their tracking and ad apparatus is very complex and expensive to run, possibly more expensive than the actual product. People don't need half the shit that facebook offers, which is why people moved to instagram without a problem; then instagram became equally bloated.
So yeah, I understand that Meta wants a lot of money, but I reject the idea that we need to suffer this much to have the social features we need.
> If you don't like it, don't use instagram.
Even that's not enough with the shadow profiles they build on people without accounts. It's more like "if you don't like it, don't use instagram and also make sure none of your friends, coworkers, family, associates, or anywhere you go doesn't use it either. Also make sure you, nor the others mentioned, visit any website using Meta's pixel."
We definitely need laws when an individual effectively can't opt out because of network effects.
> You pay for instagram with your personal data, which is used to target you with high value ads.
It's not quite that simple though. The problem is that they are not simply showing you relevant ads, they actively attempt to deliver an outcome the ad is trying to achieve.
On the surface this is relatively benign, Nike wants to sell shoes, they run ads and optimise towards shoe sales, and Meta makes that happen.
But what happens when people run political advertising? What happens when crypto companies promote scams?
I don't disagree about the structure problems with apps and sites that are free with ads.
I do worry that without that free option users just simply wouldn't ever try anything new and just stay where they are new. If everything costs money to move ... I worry nobody moves and everything stagnates. Facebook and similar, now in an even stronger position.
Users, for worse, like it this way and make free with ads the best route because of their choices. Users with their choices incentivize this system too ...
I think another model could help here. Like an automatic/anonymous micropayment when you access a website. This could be a fraction of your internet subscription reserved for micropayments. It should be possible, and cryptocurrencies aren't necessary either (although similar cryptographic constructions may be used, no need for proof of work).
I really like the idea of micropayments, especially for news sites, but social media works too. Wish someone could get it to work.
the only solution is not yo consume things that operate on the model. the difficulty there is that the model is generally adopted. so a massive amount of users will go from 1 to another system only to get rug pulled out from under them again and again.
this can be a business model, economic circumstance, mgmt change. a lot can trigger such a shift in services up to then just fine to use.
most companies did not start out on these premises, and its really hard to tell what service will turn next.
i hope maybe ISPs could handle it and offer it as a service. like an ad free internet. but then they will just more deeply embed the ads and it will still get past. changes in designs of the apps will lead to blocking being ineffective.
so really then all that is left is not to use anything that has potential to identify you and your use of it. thats not a lot of things currently. most are frowned upon if you use it in a lot of regions.
a last point would be that another problem is that the apps feed into ad networks. so using 1 is already an issue, mostly the same as using all of them. maybe less data but they can get a lot from little anyway.
This is also a misunderstanding. Not how it works economically.
You do not pay for Instagram with your personal data. The data is elsewhere, not on Instagram. For example with your local retailer or credit card company.
Instagram pays for data about you, which they buy from other people. You do not have a say in this for the most part. Whether or not Instagram buys this data does not affect its collection.
You pay for Instagram with your time spent watching ads. The data they collect about you is mostly not for ads, it's to get you to spend more time on Instagram
To make it clear why this matters: If you banned advertising on social media, the amount of data collected about you would not decrease
If they're not making money from ads, they don't have incentive to manipulate you into spending as much time as possible watching ads. Maybe if it's some kind of micropayment based model, but if it's subscription the profit motive would be to get you to use the service as little as possible without unsubscribing.
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
Exactly. The very existence of these apps and websites is based on such “user hostile” behavior. Same with the cat and mouse game between YouTube ads and ad blockers and third party YouTube apps. If the side wanting to completely stop Youtube ads becomes successful, YouTube will cease to exist (as a free app).
I am not arguing for this model, my feed is getting more useless every day, but the only other model is subscription based like you say. And for Facebook, Meta and the like, I don’t think the subscription revenue will be anywhere close due to economies of scale on the free model.
You are ignoring that people give away things for free all them time if the cost to them is small enough. But currently those genuinely free options have to compete with ad-funded services for attention and getting that attention requires more effort than just providing the service so this happens less than it otherwise would.
Or to put it another way, most of the content on the internet is already unpaid with the creator not receiving any compensation. What's left is the hosting/distribution and we can find many different ways to (collectively) pay for that besides ads and user subscriptions.
YouTube offers an ad-free subscription called YouTube premium. It's reasonably priced and includes access to YouTube Music.
I like the hybrid approach of being able to be ad-supported or paid with no ads. I would like to see more of it.
What I don't like is a paid service like Amazon Prime that also includes ads. They include ads in their search results and they include tons of ads in their video library.
FWIW: Hulu offers paid access to content with ads but offers an upgrade to get rid of most of the ads, so there seems to be a whole lot of testing what works in this area going on right now, which I see as a good thing, I just hope that once everything settles the predominant model will be fair and respect user privacy.
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.
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tbf facebook is the only (mainstream) social media i know that offers a subscription in the first place
actually i forgot about youtube
I'm not entirely against ads. Ads in my print media don't piss me off because they're clearly ads and separate from other content.
Not just that. If you pay Instagram to turn off the ads, they're still tracking you so they can show you targeted ads elsewhere.
For me the tracking is a lot more harmful than the ads. Ads are much more noticeable but tracking is a lot more insidious.
It's really that tracking that I want to see gone
https://about.fb.com/news/2024/11/facebook-and-instagram-to-...
Don't they already offer this? Did it get canceled?
When Facebook offered me this option: "will you pay with your money or your data?" I was like: "do I really need this?" I just deleted the account since I was already not really using it. Everyone I know went with "yeah just track me" instead.
The EU thought the price should be cheap enough that people would pay instead of choosing ads. I think they rejected this plan.
The EU thought the price should be cheap enough that people would pay instead of choosing ads.
people didn't choose to subscribe... kind of a no brainer
basic history one google search away for the top ranking comment on Hacker News
They are not just selling ads, they are also selling 'targeting' services for those ad campaigns.
I suspect it will be politically difficult to outright ban the ad model... might the same effect be achieved however by enforcing strict online advertising requirements & making websites (specifically the owner of the domain name used to access the site?) liable for all ads that they host as well as liable for all data gathering activities that drive those ads? Ideally with a requirement that all ads shown must contain a link to information about all parties involved in producing the ad & any profiling used to determine whether or not to show it to the user viewing it.
So if any ad is shown based on user profiling from data gathered illegally (i.e. without a proper opt-in as per GDPR etc) then the site showing the ad could potentially be sued?
Essentially, make it so onerous to legally advertise without risking a large class action lawsuit that the practice more or less dies out without technically being "banned" per se...
"If you don't like it, don't use instagram."
I get what you're saying but by current EU privacy law interpretation this approach is not allowed.
You can of course charge for services but you cannot charge people just to get rid of tracking. This is not to be confused with ads. You can run ads and offer a paid version without ads. It's about the tracking.
Am I weird because I don't consider, in particular, the tracking nature of ads the biggest problem? Sure, I my browser doesn't share data between websites, I delete cookies automatically except whitelisted, and I don't give apps permissions for no good reason. But the problem with ads is their display, not the contents.
Early Google style text box ads were fine. Any ad put on the side of the page with no animated elements is probably fine. But in reality ads are intrusive and those block my mental process when I'm trying to read about of focus on something. Especially ads in videos would just make me focus really, really hard on blocking off the message until I can restore my mental stack and continue with the original video. (I can't watch youtube with ads, for that reason.) Anything that pops up, takes space, or requires me to find an X button to shut them off gets me to C-w the browser tab nearly without exception.
If the ads do behave I don't particularly mind. I even used to peruse ads in print magazines. In fact, untargetted ads are generally complete shit and if the "inter Net cloud thing" has even an inkling of what I might be interested at all, that's all the better I think. I don't ever click on ads though, so I'm probably not part of the prime target audience. But meaningful ads may make me add their products in the comparison set if I'm in the process of buying something similar.
I'm totally convinced that even if you'd pay for Meta based social media account, they'd still harvest as much data on you as possible.
The data is extraordinarily valuable and the morals of Meta is so utterly low.
This, exactly. They stop showing the highly visible annoyance. But the more insidious and lucrative datamining to sell ads everywhere else still goes on.
So pay ~$30 a month (the LTV of a user on facebook). No way.
What I can't understand is how the ads are still effective, targeted or otherwise.
I've long thought we are going to reach a point where the return on social advertising isn't worth the investment, these models have a crisis and pivot, but it still seems to be going strong.
Enough people to sustain the model still click. At Meta's scale, you only need a small fraction of clicks and conversions to make it worth it. Meta reaches billions of people, so even a small slice of that is still a huge chunk of people.
There's also a bit of competitive pressure. Even if people get numb to ads, business, especially small businesses, can't afford to not show up if their competitors are still showing up in feeds.
The usual advertising psychology tricks still apply also which is why ads still work. Even if the ad itself doesn't result in a conversion, there's still the exposure effect of someone seeing your brand over and over again in their feed. The more times someone sees it, they'll subconsciously start preferring that brand or see it as more trustworthy. Among other tricks.
Thanks for the thoughts -- the points you make align with my understanding. It still seems so... frail? At least given how much money is circulating in that world.
Attribution, for example, has to be an absolute mess. Especially in the case of the psychology tricks you mention... If I was shown an ad for Subway, and then ate a Subway sandwich a few days later -- it had absolutely nothing to do with the ad. I only eat there when there aren't better options. Yet, I bet some ad conversion counter ticked up somewhere. I see ads for ShopRite all the time, but it's the only grocery store in my area, so of course I shop there. When you repeat this millions of times, it's surprising to me that ads are still provably effective to the point of being a trillion dollar industry.
I wonder if it will become less so as older generations go offline.
There was a time I'd sub to YouTube. however they ditched the sub for that and force YouTube music as well with all of its enshitified user experience I want none of it.
Certainly the company like Facebook, even if you're paying them for data security privacy, how can you trust them? That they will respect it?
These companies are filled to the brim with utter sociopaths, Especially Facebook. Companies that internal metrics with them fully aware of the mental health damage they're doing at a massive scale to young children, and buried it.
Companies that did psychological manipulation AB tests.
Judgement (dutch): https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2025...
The judgement requires Meta to change their platforms within 2 weeks so that the user's choice is persistent. If not implemented in 2 weeks, there is a daily penalty of €100'000, up to a maximum of €5 million.
Note that the penalty for non-compliance will be forfeited to Bits of Freedom. It's not like a traffic fine that has to be paid to the government.
In Dutch this is called a "last onder dwangsom": an injuctive order enforced by a conditional fine.
As an addition, 5 million is a lot for BoF. At the end of 2024 their balance was a little over 1.8 million EUR. Even a single day's worth of coercive fine (100k EUR) would be meaningful to them.
Their annual report is online at https://2024.bitsoffreedom.nl/en/ for people who want to learn more.
Fines up to 5 million Euros against meta
Now, go away, or I shall taunt you a second time-a!
> Now, go away, or I shall taunt you a second time-a!
That is the implication. The point of the first fine isn't to actually hurt Meta. It's to signal that there will be consequences, that the excuse of "but we thought it was legal" is gone now and give them one final chance to get their act together.
It's to pre-emptively clear away any possibility for Meta to appeal to either higher courts or the court of public opinion that they're being treated unfairly. Which they would do if you immediately hit them with a say, €5 billion fine.
I’m almost hoping Facebook is going to refuse to change, a couple million to BoF would a very nice gift to them.
One less principal engineer signing bonus ...:-)
I doubt they will meet the deadline or care over 5mill. It just is pennies to them.
The thing about ignoring courts' orders is... well, courts don't exactly look favorably on people who ignore them. Looking forward to court's round 2, then.
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.
The judge: five .... MEEEIIILLIONNNN ... euros!
Meta: lol
Lol 5 million is pocket change for meta, wtf are these courts doing?
The goal isn’t to penalize, it’s to get them to comply.
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
Yes, for 5 million.
It’s an intentional slap on the wrist because they don’t actually want to fine them, they just want them to change their behaviour. The general MO of European courts is to get people to comply, not to punish non compliance. There’s a subtle difference. If Meta change their tact in the next two weeks then they got what they wanted. If they don’t, fine increases and they’ll escalate responses.
Some useful context here is that the Netherlands is holding a general election on 29 October, which is why the deadline of two weeks was imposed. If Meta does not comply with the two weeks deadline and instead pays the (tiny) $5 million fine, that could have serious consequences for the democratic process in the Netherlands. Escalating after two weeks might be too little, too late.
That’s actually really interesting to know. I don’t think it would have serious implications if they chose to pay, but I do think it will be catastrophic if meta refuse to change and NL don’t escalate to the point of forcing compliance.
Failure to comply will also increasingly prejudice later legal cases and judgments down the road.
This is 5 million for this particular court case. Nothing is preventing others from filing their own, very similar cases. If Meta ignores the court's decision, a second lawsuit may end much worse for them.
Though, practically speaking, America has been threatening to make the trade war they started much worse for the EU if it tried to enforce things like DSA and GDPR fines. We'll have to see how enforceable these laws really are.
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.
Ding ding ding! If the EU had even the tiniest of balls, they would've accepted the US tariffs with open arms while applying equivalent ones on services at the same time. Glazing Trump during the announcement about how great of an idea it is to institute these things, how much fairer they make it.
It also means that after 50 days there's basically no incentive to comply.
Maybe it's per user?
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.
Yes and no. The judge can choose to tack on zeroes to make Meta comply, but they may also find that monetary fines are not sufficient and take other measures. This is not just a money printing machine you can keep coming back to.
If Meta can provide a reasonable time frame for compliance, the judge may also choose to let the existing limit on reparations stand rather than increase it, despite them not complying the day they hit the 5 million euro mark.
It's all up to what the judge deems reasonable to make Meta comply with the court's orders.
Exactly, they can’t just pay the 5 million and call it a day.
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.
Fines in general aren't effective.
Perhaps this case doesn't warrant it, but generally speaking I'd like to see allocating jailtime across the top shareholders as an option.
If my dog bites somebody, I'm on the hook, it should be no different with a company.
> 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?
The only sense in which punishment of any kind is reasonable is when it works to disincentivise harmful behavior. If higher risks for shareholders convince them to take a more active role in ensuring that their investment isn't causing harm to the rest of us, then they're at least as reasonable than any other sort of punishment.
If the cheating had gone unnoticed, the shareholders would've been rewarded, so they should bear some risk whether or not they sold after the crime was committed.
As it is, we've got incentives set up to encourage investment in bad behavior so long as you get out before your people get caught.
As for the government abusing the justice system... What rules would create justice is sort of orthogonal to the circumstances under which the rules are broken.
"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.
That how you build up a case for transferring control. First its "lol, 5m is a pocket change" and it becomes argument of politicians for tighter control over Meta. Then Zuck says they are trying to make the world a better place but it doesn't stick, people side with the politician who is building a career by sticking it to Meta.
So not entirely useless.
I'm not sure if you're arguing for more or less control being transferred from Meta towards the state, but I agree with your observation.
The headline is provocative. The issue is simple: Meta has a recommended feed and another feed which is reverse chronological. The option is hidden and not default, and all the NL judge is asking is for that option to be preserved and not be reset everytime user opens the app/website. Instagram never had this option, this does not say whether they have to implement it too.
I would be curious if the order stands as for curation as well. Someone could have 1000s of friends, and you cant show posts from everyone in a reverse chronological order for a good ux.
on the Instagram mobile app: long press their logo to switch from the recommended feed to your following feed, in reverse chronological order
As a European, I’m glad that the influence of big, potentially dangerous companies is being kept in check. From the start of October, Meta is completely switching off political ads and now I can look forward to my feed stopping with tabloids, politics and Russian propaganda and going back to technical curiosities and capybaras.
I, as a European, am worried that these rulings, regulations, and the prevailing mindset will lead to companies leaving and result in technological stagnation, due to our inability to compete with global markets.
Of course, there is something to be said about the dangers, effectiveness, and societal impact of social media. But companies should have the right to decide how they conduct their business. They should also have the incentive to innovate and improve- without being threatened by overly strict or poorly designed laws.
As a European, I much prefer technological stagnation over technological progress that is harmful to society.
"As a European, I much prefer technological stagnation over bundled messenger apps"
Fixed it for you.
The ruling here is about choice of recommendation system ('algorithm'), which ties into social media addiction as well as electoral influence. So there's actually quite a bit at stake.
Civilizations that think this way get conquered by ones that don't, and afterwards, nobody much cares what they thought.
If we're talking about actual technological innovation, then yes perhaps.
In this case we're talking about social media 'innovation' though. The science and art of getting a population highly addicted to doom scrolling. I'm not sure if that will help said population outcompete the other guys.
we are being conquered by google and facebook already. them leaving would be the exact opposite.
Any civilization that calls its citizens making a product choice "conquest" is terminally coddled and isn't going to make it through the century to come.
which choice are you talking about? there is no choice. there are no alternatives to facebook if all your friends are on it. there is no alternative to youtube, and for other products, the alternatives take a lot of effort. (hence despite the existence of linux, there is no choice to windows for example, because it comes preinstalled on every device. same for google infested android)
this is even worse in smaller and in less developed countries. they are most certainly being conquered.
and i don't get what you are trying to say. i am terminally coddled because i view google and facebook as conquerors? what does that even mean?
fr
This seems like a bit of an empty moral panic/slippery slope appeal. As a general rule, it could go either way: civilizations can also collapse from not-enough-regulation, not-enough-rule of law, oligarchic capture, or even just become a megacorporation dystopia without collapsing for a long time, maybe ever. Better to critique the specific case, if you have any objections.
You think the US is going to invade Europe and enforce a techno-capitalist oligarchy on it?
Of course not. I do think that the US might get bored of defending a continent that refuses to lift a finger to defend itself --- or put much effort into anything that isn't regulating, censoring, or fining someone, and then someone else will invade Europe and impose a techno-capitalist oligarchy or worse on it.
There is serious talk in the US now that democracy is a failed system and the country would be better run by a bunch of self-selected billionaires in perpetuity.
The election choices are between some-one is clearly senile, or somebody who clearly has no substance and, well, Trump.
Other recent candidates include sons of previous presidents, or wives of previous presidents.
And you are worried about Europe.
Europe is worried about Europe - but in the context of catching what the US has via dark money flowing through tech platforms driving politics.
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.
Yeah sure, because life in the USA is so much more awesome than in Europe. Naww, they can keep their relevancy in the world stage. We are good over here living in the "stone age".
The problem isn't that Europe is living in the stone age, clearly they aren't. The problem is that they are living in the modern age entirely on the back of foreign tech. Chinese hardware running American software. Industry running on American energy, and protection totally reliant on American defense (the US spent more money per capita in Ukraine than the EU did...). This doesn't even factor in generous welfare programs that will need to be funded by a shrinking population(!) that doesn't have cutting edge skills anymore.
Europe decided to vacation for the last 30 years rather than go to work. The fruit of the post-war era was bountiful, and bank accounts were healthy, so why not take time off? Stone age is not a good way to describe Europe today, but over the next 10-20 years it very well may become more appropriate. European leaders are keenly aware of this, but man is it hard to convince the kids that they need to end their vacation, especially when it is all they have ever known.
This is the story American billionaires tell poor Americans every day. Those lazy Europeans may have it good now, but just you wait another 10 years. That affordable healthcare? There won’t be a doctor left! All those parents having a year of paternity leave? Unsustainable!
You guys keep working 80% harder! We will keep 99% of the profits, but don’t worry it will eventually trickle down to you. Hey, maybe one day there will be enough cash left over to fix our healthcare and education systems. Those Europeans are asleep on the wheel. Always protesting and striking and vacationing. Those fools.
> Chinese hardware running American software
Who designed the chip in your phone? Is it more likely to be Intel (US) or is it more likely to be ARM (UK)?
Where does Linux ( which pretty much runs the entire internet from routers to servers ) originate from?
> Industry running on American energy
Eh? While EU imports of US gas are on the rise due to the Ukraine war ( and the blowing up of Russian pipelines which, BTW, the US is implicated in ) - it's a fraction of total energy.
> protection totally reliant on American defense
So the US bases on British islands in the Indian Ocean, or in Japan ( put there after the end of the war with ... Japan ) are purely for the benefit of others and not in anyway part of US global interests?
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companies leaving [will] result in technological stagnation, due to our inability to compete with global markets
on the contrary, companies leaving will allow and force us to develop european alternatives that can actually compete in europe. they don't need to compete on the global market.
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.
> But companies should have the right to decide how they conduct their business.
Nope - not if it is to the detriment to society ( as decided by society via democratic means ).
In the UK - when radio and TV came along, society recognized the power of these platforms and the danger of how they could amplify single voices with money in an anti-democratic way. As such political advertising on such platforms very tightly controlled.
In addition there are overall limits on campaign spending.
Then along comes companies like Facebook and money powering political ad campaigns comes in through the back door, and in addition a lack of transparency on the overall spend as it's now much easier to hide.
Moves to curb this is simply society re-asserting it's existing rules, not some new imposition.
> I, as a European, am worried that these rulings, regulations, and the prevailing mindset will lead to companies leaving and result in technological stagnation
If your "technological progress" is dependent on algorithmic feeds and pervasive tracking, good riddance.
> But companies should have the right to decide how they conduct their business.
What Meta does is the equivalent of dumping nuclear waste in the middle of your city. I'm sure you don't think companies have the right to do the latter.
I'm very sceptical of the origin of comments like these. I don't know any actual Europeans who share these concerns because they know that the status quo is that the entire EU market is captured by US tech. And that this has been done through anticompetitive tactics as well as offloading trillions in negative externalities onto societies.
If you're truly a concerned European, you're incredibly naive, and need to read much more about how banally evil Meta is.
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuckerberg: Just ask Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuckerberg: People just submitted it. Zuckerberg: I don't know why. Zuckerberg: They "trust me" Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
The defendant in the verdict is called "Facebook Netherlands B.V."
I guess they're writing the paperwork to cut off that particular subdivision as we speak.
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)
Thank you for clearing that up
Why don't you just stop using Facebook, if you don't like it?
There is a level of investment we put in the platforms we use.
This comment is akin to asking farmers cut off from repairing their equipment "why don't you buy tractors from a different company instead of fighting to fix your existing ones?"
The investment in the case of social media is the network you've built. In my country most local events are announced primarily on facebook for example.
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/
Is it possible to use bluesky without a did:plc? Id rather be in control of my own identity than leave it irreversibly in the hands of yet another overlord.
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.
I don't think you understood their point at all. "Don't use it" isn't necessarily a valid choice when it's where all of your friends and/or family are. The "investment" is not monetary; instead, it takes the form of having connections on the platform. You are invested in the platform if your primary connection to someone is hosted there, and it costs a ton of time and effort to transfer that somewhere else.
Unless you depend on Facebook for your livelihood, then this is a false equivalence.
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Sorry the factory you bought from changed their T&C last month. You agreed to it when you turned your tractor on that morning.
Get a longer lasting contract next time.
Hindsight is easy, and perhaps had no-one taken up Facebook in 2004 we'd all be okay. It's also not always obvious what trade-offs you're making, because you cannot see the future.
Ultimately, it was not obvious in 2004 where we'd be today. Reality exists regardless of retrospective blame. The problem we have _today_ is the one we need to deal with.
You have completely missed the point of what they are saying to you, or are being willfully obtuse.
Facebook is one major bait and switch strategy.
In the first step, you get everyone to invest into your platform. You provide some valuable services to people, and they sign an implicit contract as a result.
In the second step, you reap what you sow. You switch the platform entirely and change its core nature and functionality. It's hard to stop using Facebook when everyone else is using Facebook, and this fact means you can do things which would normally have people leave your platform in droves.
This ruling limits the extent to which you can run such a bait and switch campaign. It's somewhat remarkable, because it extends some basic consumer rights to tech companies, even if there's no direct product nor a subscription in place. Personally, I think it's long overdue.
How has Facebook changed its core nature?
I'd say the major switch happened at the point where you lost control over your feed. It's not populated because you opted in to updates from a specific person or organization. It's populated by algorithm. Furthermore, at no point in time were any of these new features opt-in. Instead, they were enabled without your consent. Facebook has a long history of enabling features for people which is not in their interest in the slightest.
I should also say that it's more general than Meta. Google are also notorious for doing stuff like this. About time we start legislating against it.
An important matter in this particular case: It's about elections as well.
You can opt to not use facebook yourself to protect your own data, that is more or less fine. (Though we can talk about Facebook's collection of non-user data another time)
You can't individually opt out of the election influence.
Facebook's election influence is pretty minor.
It's about making the right choices for society as a whole
Not using Facebook might be the right choice.
It probably is the right choice. But that hardly means that we can't also regulate Facebook.
Because the alternatives are not going to try exploit us when they grow big enough?
Not if there’s enough of them.
The network effect is real.
Why dont we make all laws voluntary and let people do whatever they want?
Using Facebook is voluntary.
Living in a society that gets fucked up by Facebook is not voluntary.
In the same sense that having a job that requires you to use facebook is voluntary. Unless of course eating is also voluntary.
I've switched to email and chat for social connection, works a lot better for me than I think any ranked feed ever will, no matter how many court decisions try to shape it.
I wish I could make youtube default to the subscriber behaviour.
1. Subscribe to what you want to see 2. Bookmark the “your subscriptions” page; don’t visit the home page 2a. Although if you disable watch history, youtube tries to punish you by blanking out the “home” page. I consider that a good thing. 3. Use an ad blocker to hide the comments and side bar (recommended videos)
That’s pretty much what I do. Discoverability happens off-site, which might be a hindrance for you, but I don’t necessarily want more stuff to watch for the sake of more stuff to watch.
Blocking elements with ad block works well, but for convenience I use the extension Unhook. It can redirect the home feed to subscriptions, hide end screen cards, end screen feed, live chat, auto generated mixes, notifications, shorts, etc. I also use a tampermonkey script to auto set theater mode and resolution (necessary for incognito mode).
It would be nice if youtube could include some of these handy features in the settings, but it is not something they want to do it seems.
I use an extension called Unhook which has, as one of its many great options, a mode that disables the algorithmic youtube feed and auto-redirects the homepage to your subscriptions page (which is just reverse-chronological)
(it also lets you disable Shorts and suggestions and so on, pretty fantastic actually)
Subscribe?
Something I think is worth pointing out: this is happening in the Netherlands, i.e. their jurisdiction. I think most people here aren't from the Netherlands. I think they should be free to try out the legislation they want, and people elsewhere don't need to agree. It's good that different countries can try different things, and if that doesn't work it's a lesson for other places, and if it works that's even better. People on the internet tend to focus too much on uniformity and conformity, as if we lived everyone in the same place.
It's the implementation of an eu wide law. Judges in other countries might rule differently, but this isn't really an example of the netherlands going its own way and experimenting.
I would like them (or actually the EU) to go one step further:
All people should see the same information, in the same order, with the same metadata such as likes and comments.
Example:
I go to Reddit. I see a list of only the subreddits I subscribed to. This is fine. But within this subreddit, I should see the same information as other users do.
Currently, you don’t even see the same comments and same replies, likes, dislikes on topics. This puts people in bubbles, and makes it impossible to enforce fair reporting, illegal content or manipulation.
/me claps.
in my not so humble and often overly verbose opinion, we desperately need to get back to a place where we have more control over what our own inputs.
a handful of people are now in control of the overwhelming majority of what we see. whether that’s the few websites most people visit or the wildly merging media ecosystem which is now also overwhelmingly controlled by a tiny few with even more mergers on the immediate horizon. to the corporate live event space. it’s insane that weve allowed such a tiny few to control nearly everything our people ingest.
anything which counters this stranglehold on our inputs is a good thing, no matter how small.
English
https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/2025/10/02/judge-in-the-bits-of...
Lekker bezig.
For non-Dutchies: Lekker busy.
Please for the love of god make it a legal requirement that messaging must be made available as a separate app without addictive feeds. Or make it such that users can disable the feed in settings. We need to be able to message our friends without seeing a feed without having to convert all of our friends to a new platform.
> We need to be able to message our friends without seeing a feed without having to convert all of our friends to a new platform.
Those people are in the app because of the social features and the feed in the first place. The messaging features were built on top of the platform.
Requiring companies to make and maintain a separate app entirely if their product has messaging features is an unreasonable requirement. If someone has such a strong self-control problem that they can’t message someone without becoming addicted to the feed, they shouldn’t be involved with the platform at all.
Just exchange emails, phone numbers for SMS, or any other type of communication. I seriously doubt that your friends are only able to communicate through exactly one communication channel and it happens to be Instagram.
Requiring companies to make and maintain a separate app entirely if their product has messaging features is an unreasonable requirement
the better alternative is to require interoperability with other messenger apps, so can use the app of my choice. this is a proposal under discussion since years ago.
I seriously doubt that your friends are only able to communicate through exactly one communication channel
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.
> 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.
“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”
I don’t know how old you are or where you live, but I’m in my mid 40s and don’t live in a tech city. A good quarter of everyone I know in my age range uses Facebook Messenger as their primary form of texting. Most of them don’t even use Facebook itself anymore, they just have a lot of momentum on Messenger.
Yeah, this mirrors my experience. I've managed to convince a bunch of tech friends to migrate to Signal, but the vast majority of my non-tech friends/family in the US are exclusively available on Messenger
interoperability is about more than just solving some edge cases:
https://umatechnology.org/eu-could-force-whatsapp-messenger-...
> Requiring companies to make and maintain a separate app entirely if their product has messaging features is an unreasonable requirement.
I disagree. I think it's more than reasonable. Facebook designs its features with dark UX to cause addiction, it's not about self control, it's about Facebook engaging in anti-human behavior.
It's reasonable to use the State to force a corporation that makes tens of billions of dollars of profit a year to behave in a way that's beneficial to people. The corporation will be fine, it's air conditioned and listening to its favorite music.
> Requiring companies to make and maintain a separate app entirely if their product has messaging features is an unreasonable requirement.
In this case Meta already has such an app (Messenger), and it has at times supported instagram messaging. I'm not sure why they broke that association a little while ago, but it's not unreasonable that they could reconnect it.
> Those people are in the app because of the social features and the feed in the first place.
Well, I suppose that's one take on it.
I would argue that people are in the app because Facebook gave out Facebook Messenger. Then Facebook changed how Facebook Messenger works. You could call it a rugpull, I would call it US business practices.
> 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?
This judgement is about Instagram, specifically. Messenger pre-dates Instagram (and very significantly pre-dates the Facebook acquisition of Instagram).
> 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.
> Messenger was never the primary draw of Facebook.
I didn't say it was. Remember, my statement was: ... that people are in the app because Facebook gave out Facebook Messenger
Indeed, I remember using Facebook just for messages. So when Facebook Messenger came out, I used that exclusively.
Now, I've long since moved off of Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Some of my family still use it though, and I've seen it. It's not what it used to be. So, I then expanded on that to say: Then Facebook changed how Facebook Messenger works
> they’re factually incorrect or illogical
So, where's the factually incorrect or illogical argument?
The final straw for me to move off of Facebook was Cambridge Analytica. Once I realized how terrible not just Facebook was for not only permitting that kind of shit, but practically inviting it as a feature... that was very telling. And I've since stopped using nearly all social media, present website excluded.
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.
I think this really only becomes an issue if the changes you made to your app is in some way affecting democratic elections in that country (and in that case, seems well within the purview of legislation)
> Requiring companies to make and maintain a separate app entirely if their product has messaging features is an unreasonable requirement.
I don't think it's unreasonable and I'll take it further - messaging should be forced to use an open protocol. No more iMessage or Facebook messenger. If you want those, great, then open them.
Now everything works with everything and the world is a utopia and also we cured cancer. Downside: Meta will make slightly less money. I can live with that.
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Why not just use SMS messages? No feeds, literally all phones support them, with MMS you also get photos and stuff... you don't need another party involved for the messages to work, and you're already paying for them.
This is something I genuinely don't understand. Whatsapp used to have a reason to exist because the SMS experience on android was pretty bad. That's not the case any more.
WhatsApp took off simply because SMS used to cost money, at least in the areas of Europe I'm familiar with.
1. You do need a third party.
2. SMS is probably the most insecure protocol created for anything, ever.
3. The experience is as close to as shit as it can get.
4. Most modern messaging features aren't supported.
5. Most devices don't support SMS.
6. You can't sync SMS across devices.
Completely. I'm not normally on Instagram but I recently made meet some new friends that use it for messaging. The number of times I've open the app to message someone and gotten distracted by the feed...
> Please for the love of god make it a legal requirement that messaging must be made available as a separate app
Please for the love of god do not make legal requirements about how to build an app and what features can be included.
> We need to be able to message our friends without seeing a feed without having to convert all of our friends to a new platform.
lol, you have no legal right to how a chat dialog must be presented.
Why don't you try innovating instead of suing?
That would be the sensible idea in a free market. But that ship sailed LONG ago. Now there are apps and "markets" that are so important and dominating (Amazon, Facebook, ...) that the only alternatives are basically to split them, control them or regulate them in detail. The problem isn't lack of "innovation".
Anyone can make any social app work the way they want to. But that doesn't mean the same rules and laws applies - or should apply - to one with 1B users as one with 100 users.
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.
Facebook doesn't exist in a free market. It IS a market. And an unfree one ruled by a dictatorship that you can't vote on.
That's what platforms are. They're markets. Its not like making a couch or something.
That's why those other apps are literally worthless.
It doesn't matter if the other apps are super amazing and they walk your dog and suck your dick and make you live forever. Literally does not matter.
The app, itself, does not matter. Which is why Facebook is allowed to be as shit as humanly possible.
What matters is what the app proxies, which is a market. Those other apps will always fail, forever, because they can't compete with facebooks market because they're not even allowed into that market.
> Facebook doesn't exist in a free market. It IS a market.
It is a market that exists in the free market.
> And an unfree one ruled by a dictatorship that you can't vote on.
Ok, so don't use that market. You're not entitled to Facebook, or being able to dictate anything.
> That's what platforms are. They're markets. Its not like making a couch or something.
Bud, I am begging you to close your Facebook account and see it is exactly like a couch you don't have to buy.
> It doesn't matter if the other apps are super amazing and they walk your dog and suck your dick and make you live forever. Literally does not matter.
You heard it here. YC is dead. Close up shop. All these investors just wasting their money because you can't vote Zuck out.
> The app, itself, does not matter. Which is why Facebook is allowed to be as shit as humanly possible.
This is just nonsense. You're trying to sound smart by taking an extreme position. Nuance is smart.
> You heard it here. YC is dead. Close up shop. All these investors just wasting their money because you can't vote Zuck out.
Yes, this is actually true.
You want nuance? Here's the nuance.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, is actually competing with facebook. They're not trying to.
So what is YC funding? What are these companies doing? They're attacking different markets and making different products. When was the last time you saw a startup make a general purpose social media platform? It doesn't happen. Nobody does it. Because they know they'll lose.
If you look at the hot new kids on the block, none of them are actually competing with facebook. TikTok? TikTok is not facebook, it's a completely different product. Twitter? They're incumbent too, but completely different product. Youtube? Disney Plus? Pintrest? Linkedin? Just think about it.
You could, TRIVIALLY, make a better facebook. I, right now, in the course of a few weeks, could make a better facebook. But I'm not. And you're not. And nobody is. And nobody is even trying to.
Search your feelings, and you will know it to be true.
> Why are you on YC if you think free market tech is dead?
I have been visiting this forum for 12 years. It took probably 5 years before I _heard_ about the "other" part of ycombinator - the startup thing. But I never really cared about that bit, it's just an online tech forum that happens to share domain with the startup incubator.
> lol, what? We have different laws depending on how popular you are?
Absolutely. I think that is pretty universal already. For example laws preventing monopolies (government approvals of mergers, for example).
> For example laws preventing monopolies (government approvals of mergers, for example).
Can you show me the federal code that includes number of customers?
Do you think monopoly rules are about size or behavior? Do you think a small mom and pop store couldn't act in monopolistic practices?
Do you think a small mom and pop store in a rural captured market couldn't price fix?
Hint: It's not size :)
> Can you show me the federal code that includes number of customers?
I never mentioned ”number of customers”. The relevant law surrounding monopolies is the Clayton antitrust act of 1914
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/18
What is and isn’t a monopoly is of course decided on a case by case basis - as it should. There is no law saying that 80% market share is necesssarily a monopoly or that 20% is so low it can’t be blocked.
> Do you think a small mom and pop store in a rural captured market couldn't price fix?
Not sure how it’s relevant but they can of course haves local monopoly - but afaik in the US such local monopolies aren’t subject to regulation.
Messenger is already a separate app.
Instagram Messenger is not
Isn't it free? You're asking a lot for something that is "free".
You can actually pay for Instagram, if you don't want ads. You still have messages tied with the feed.
Now, one must also say that Instagram wasn't the incumbent messaging platform in any place in the world. It's just that newer generations always cannot tolerate to do things like their parents did, so if their parents primarily used Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger (oh, wait, all of them owned by Meta!) to communicate, they ought to find a new platform to get locked in.
I don't know why you want a government agency to dictate product strategy.
Because most products are not only shit, they're designed in such a way to be as shit as possible. Because that legitimately works.
Even if the government agency makes the worse decision possible, which they probably will, that's still an improvement, because we're completely maxed out on shit levels. That's how bad many products are today.
Really? You think government officials are best positioned to come up with next ChatGPT feature, or what how to implement authentication in a webapp?
Define best positioned?
Best positioned as in, make the most money? No, of course not.
Best positioned as in, not completely and totally fuck their users up the ass? Yes!
Look at Meta, Google, OpenAI, you fucking name it. These companies are a cancer onto humanity. They are actively making everyone's lives worse, on purpose, for the pursuit of advertiser revenue and new and innovative addiction mechanisms.
It's sort of like asking, who would you rather make your food? The government, or R.J. Reynolds?
Shockingly, the answer is the government!
From a government point of view, it makes sense to jump in when the product is a psy-ops at societal level, doesn’t it?
Because things in the State should help people, not exploit them. If the thing, in this case, a corporation, is harming people, why not force it to stop?
> 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.
No, the feed is harming people. Social media and the dark patterns they use to maximize engagement are harming people.
I suppose that’s because people already lost faith in the current system and where things are going as it is.
It's the European way
This is over the "most recent" mode? Absolutely moronic decision. It punishes companies for giving users any choice at all.
Punishes companies for not respecting people's settings. It's as if I chose to keep my chat history private in the settings, but they would ignore that and share all my chats with the world. Same problem. I find it odd you can't see how it's damaging to the consumers if you're offering them a choice that you then completely disregard.
The law requires that they provide a non-profiled choice. Facebook wasn't punished for providing the choice, that was required. They were punished for not respecting that requirement, overriding the user's choice whenever they thought they could get away with it.
Yes, the issue is forced algorithm-based feeds, where Meta is free to profile as deeply as they want and exploit what should be private knowledge about you. A "most recent" feed (of things you already chose to subscribe to/follow) should be a standard option on any social media app, and the app shouldn't switch back to their toxic algorithm automatically anytime you look away. This behavior itself shows how much Meta wants to control what you see and is extra impetus to require a simple chronological feed option that is selectable as default, and that the user's choice is respected.
IIRC, around 2008-2009, "most recent" was the only kind of feed, and within the span of a couple years, they added their "personalized" feed but would let you switch between the two freely (and the setting would persist), and not much later, the setting would no longer persist.
There are probably people on this thread who were born after algorithmic feeds became ubiquitous and they seem to have turned out fine.
The moral panic over feed ranking models will seem to history as quaint as the moral panic over the telegraph and the train.
If your new technology isn't attracting a swarm of moral gnats buzzing about it corrupting the youth, are you even making something impactful?
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.
Should be a fixed % tax that is permanent and on all prior and future revenue.
This is government overreach. These are novelty/fun apps. They are not critical infrastructure or needed in any way. This would be like a court ordering a local bar to serve more than just beer and wine, to accomodate people who like sake and soju. You have free choice to use the social platforms that you want to use. Really don't understand this kind of action tbh.
Let me offer a different opinion.
Facebook is a massive part of social media. Billions of users. It is apart of society in its sheer size. A society decided “we want to make this better” and acted appropriately. I think it’s a noble pursuit for a society to attempt to reduce the clearly negative aspects of social media.
There is no real freedom of choice. The network effect cements big players positions. Try telling an 80 year old grandma with a 20 year old laptop to use mastodon. Likely no one she knows is on it.
Finally, individuals make essentially no difference when choosing to not use FB. But when choosing to not go to a local bar, that may be 0.03% loss of their monthly revenue. The only actor that can reasonably bargain with huge organizations is other huge organizations.
> There is no real freedom of choice
but there is? simply choose to not use facebook.
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.
Bars are heavily, heavily regulated actually. You could have chosen a better example.
They're heavily regulated but not regarding what liqueur and beer they have to offer...which is exactly what OP was comparing it to.
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.
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.
> moonshine you brewed under the counter
That sounds like as good a metaphor for addictive and unhealthy social media feeds as any! :-)
This is true when there’s plenty of competition that matter. When everybody and every business is in one app, the network effect forces everyone to be there or be invisible. So the “essential infrastructure” label is kinda debatable. I suppose it’s essential for many businesses.
So your analogy should be more like there’s one big shopping mall network in the city that basically everyone has to go because certain stores are only there — and the owners bought any competitor that seemed to start becoming popular in the past so there’s no perspective of competition either.