Terms like "DAU" or "engagement" is common in our field and the primary objective is how to make users spend more time on our platform. We don't take safety or mental health seriously internally but only externally for PR reasons.
CEOs won't change that because the more time user spends on the platform, the more ad revenue it brings.
Only way is to regulate it.
Great, admission is the first step.
> but the pay is too good to find alternative.
Yet then you immediately undo it!
Try "I'm too greedy". You're the actor with the free will here. The subject of the sentencd shouldn't be "the pay". That is just an amount, a sum, that exists - neither too high nor too low. That is all in the eye of the beholder.
You may want to view action and sphere of influence. Does an individual have international or national influence? Probably not. How about within their community, home, or person? Probably, yes.
I want a good society and I think that’s will be made up of good individuals making individual action. So to me, this all starts at home with the individual’s sphere of influence.
(IMO if the US federal government spent more time caring for it's citizens it would consider doing such things more seriously itself).
It recognise addiction (limited agency vs influence) and monetisation (economic rewards the primary means to influence behaviour) as problematic. It kind made “doing bad for pay” a premise of the system.
Large pay-checks incentivising bad behaviour is exactly another observable outcome of the same systemic issue.
If you had to choose between two identical jobs and salary at a company but at big tobacco vs a hospital, which would you choose? I think most people would pick the hospital. Hence the only reason people work at big tobacco is either because of a genuine interest in their product (rare IMHO) OR because the pay is higher.
This applies to big tech too.
I am very curious if people here agree with my reasoning.
You don't sound psychopathic so I'm genuinely curious what you do with your money to keep your conscious clean.
Bevause I think your salary is practically blood money at this point.
Blood of the additional instagram girls with anorexia.
The additional children with severe myopia.
The additional people murdered by persons radicalized by media that had to polarize news to survive the loss in readership or by the false advertising of quality control on hate speech.
The list goes on and on.
But I don't think people having the skills needed by FAANGS are at risk of starvation, even if not working for a large conglomerate. Do you?
That's why I am genuinely asking OP their reasons.
The amount of paid shills opposing this is a good indicator that it's the right move.
I wonder if we'll get speakeasies where people can get endogenous dopamine kicks from experiencing dark patterns?
I'm not saying social media isn't cancerous and shouldn't be regulated, because it is and it should, I'm saying that in this specific case it's a symptom of a much bigger existing disease and not the root cause of it.
What I'm mostly afraid of now, is that the lesson governments took from this is not that social media should be regulated and defanged of data collection and addictiveness, but instead that governments should keep and seize control of said data collection and addictiveness so they can weaponize it themselves to advance their agendas over the population.
Case in point, the now US-controlled tiktok does more data harvesting than when it was Chinese owned.[1] At least China couldn't send ICE to your house using that data.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-new-terms-of-service-pri...
Actually both can be true.
So blaming of tiktok is a convenient scapegoat for Romania's corrupt establishment to legitimize themselves and deflect their unpopularity as if it's caused by Russian interference and not their own actions. NO, Russian interference just weaponized the massive unpopularity they already had.
So here's a wild idea on how to protect your democracy: how about instead of banning social media, politicians actually get off their kiddie fiddling islands, stop stealing everything not nailed to the ground and do right by their people, so that the voters don't feel compelled to pour gasoline on their country and light it on fire out of spite just to watch the establishment burn with it.
Because when people are educated, healthy, financially well off and taken care of by their government who acts in their best interest, then no amount of foreign social media propaganda can convince people to throw that all away on a dime. But if your people are their wits end and want to see you guillotined, then that negative capital can and will be exploited by foreign adversaries. Like how come you don't see Swiss or Norwegians trying to vote Russian puppets off TikTok to power and it's not because they have more control on social media than Romania.
This isn't a Romanian problem BTW, many western countries see similar political disenfranchisement today, and why you see western leaders rushing to ban or seize control of social media and free speech, instead of actually fixing their countries according to the pains of the voters.
They use a two-round system to elect their President that works like this:
1. If a candidates gets more than 50% in the first round they are the winner, and there is no second round.
2. If there is no clear winner in the first round, the top two from the first round advance to the second round to determine the winner.
In that election there were 14 candidates. 6 from right-wing parties, 4 from left-wing parties, and 4 independents. The most anyone got in the first round was 22.94%, and the second most was 19.18%. Third was 19.15%. Fourth was 13.86%, then 8.79%.
With that many candidates, and with there being quite a lot of overlap in the positions of the candidates closer to the center, you can easily end up with the candidates that are more extreme finishing higher because they have fewer overlap on positions with the others, and so the voters that find those issues most important don't get split.
You can easily end up with two candidates in the runoff that a large majority disagree with on all major issues.
They really need to be using something like ranked choice.
Firstly, there's many forms of elections, each with their own pros and cons, but I don't think the voting method is the core problem here.
Let's assume Norway would have the exact same system and parties like Romania. Do you think Norwegians would have been swayed by a an online ad campaign to vote a Russian puppet off tiktok to the last round?
Maybe the education level, standard of living of the population and being a high trust society, is actually what filters malicious candidates, and not some magic election method.
Secondly, what if that faulty election system, is a actually a feature and not a bug, inserted since the formation of modern Romania after the 1989 revolution, when the people from the (former) commies and securitatea(intelligence services and secret police) now still running the country but under different org names and flags, had to patch up a new constitution virtually overnight, so they made sure to create a new one where they themselves and their parties have an easier time gaming the system in their favor to always end up on top in the new democratic system, but now that backdoor is being exploited by foreign actors.
> Maybe the education level, standard of living of the population and being a high trust society, is actually what filters malicious candidates, and not some magic election method.
My point isn't about filtering malicious candidates. My point is that a "top two advance to runoff if no one wins the first round" system often does a poor job in the face of a plethora of candidates of picking a winner with majority support.
Yes, there are many forms of elections each with their own pros and cons, and that is one of the main cons of that system (and of one round systems where the winner is whoever gets the most votes even if it is not a majority).
Consider an election with 11 candidates and where there is one particular issue X that 80% of the voters go one way on and 20% the other way. The voters will only vote for a candidate that goes their way on X. 9 of the candidates go the same was as 80% of the voters, and the other 2 go the other way. All the candidates differ on many non-X issues but voters don't feel strongly on those. They will pick a candidate that agrees with them on as many of those as they can, but would be OK with a winner that disagrees with them on the non-X issues as long as they agree on X. This results in the vote being pretty evenly split among the candidates that agree on X.
The 9 candidates that agree with the 80% that go one way on X then end up with about 8.9% of the vote each, and the 2 that go the other way end with 10% each. Those two make it to the runoff and wins.
Result: a winner that would lose 80-20 in a head to head matchup against any of the 9 who were eliminated in the first round.
Note I didn't say that the 2 on the 20% side of issue X were malicious. They just held a position on that issue the 80% disagree with.
Such a system is also more vulnerable to manipulation like what happened with TikTok in Romania, because with a large field of candidates with roughly similar positions you might not need to persuade a large number of people to vote for an extreme candidate to get that candidate into the runoff.
Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.
We know plenty of things are quite bad for us, and yet we find them difficult to stop. Somewhat famously difficult to stop.
I think telling people, "just don't..." trivializes how difficult that is.
The amount of people in here right now clamoring for legislation to keep them away from electronics which they themselves purchased is mind-bogglingly insane.
The world is complicated. People's lives are complicated (and often meditated by their phones). People's emotional and social wellbeing is complicated, and simply ghosting all your social groups on a random Tuesday is likely to cause significant problems.
You are in a great place in your life, if your most significant problem is caused by not liking a stupid meme and a breakfast photo your friends posted on a random Tuesday...
Or you’re in a terrible place in your life, and the small endorphin release from liking stupid memes and breakfast photos is how you try and escape from terrible things that haunt you day-to-day.
If basically everyone who takes it for a while gets addicted and dies of course it should be forbidden.
So I would argue that cigaretts should not be allowed but we could discuss cocaine.
Shesh, maybe we should start fining individual developers too if companies aren't able to do it themselves.
Dude, it's 2025.
A few years ago, I accidentally left my phone at home when I went to work, and when I arrived I found that because I no longer had my 2FA device, I couldn't do any work until I went home again and picked it up.
I'm fine without doomscrolling. I've gone from the minimum possible service with internet, to pure PAYG with no internet, and I'm fine with that. But society has moved on, and for a lot of people, phones are no longer an option.
And for a meaningful fraction of people, somehow, I don't get it either, TikTok is the news. Not metaphorically, it's actually where they get news from.
Actually, it's 2026 and has been for six weeks.
> A few years ago, I accidentally left my phone at home when I went to work, and when I arrived I found that because I no longer had my 2FA device, I couldn't do any work until I went home again and picked it up.
Sounds like a personal problem. There are many other 2FA authenticators available. Yubikey, TOTP tokens, smart cards, etc. Using a smartphone (which can lose power at any time) for critical authentication was a silly idea to begin with. I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
D'oh. But fair.
> There are many other 2FA authenticators available.
Specified by job, so no choice in this matter.
> I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
Quite reasonable as a general rule, though my then-employer only required the 2FA app and nothing else, and in this case it would've just meant "get an additional phone".
I suspect the next thing you're going to say is along the lines of "then just switch jobs", though.
I mean even that might not work out. We just switched to MS Teams last year and Microsoft uses a push-based app, not TOTP or other offline keys like we'd used before. And Teams just seems to be getting more popular...
Which of them are available depends on what your company has configured.
If the push version is configured, it's possible it has also installed an MDM profile on your device. Avoid that, or your phone will get wiped when you leave the company in the future.
What a wonderful privileged position you hold. If only everyone could afford to tell their employer to pound sand in the same heroic manner you have undertaken.
So brave.
Laws are not created to be malleable about the population's trivial mental illnesses.
We don't need new laws on the books because some people are incapable of turning their phones off. They have addictive personalities and will fulfill this by other means, while everyone high-fives claiming success.
I'm proud of you that you are as disconnected as you are. I'm the same -- ditched my addictive social media accounts back in like 2011 -- but not everyone is like us.
There will never be anything close to uniformity, so we must decide if we cripple freedom to protect the weak while increasing bureaucracy and authoritarianism, or allow natural selection to take its course while improving treatment of symptoms.
I'm empathetic to the struggle of addiction, which is a real and terrible thing, but I don't think we should create vague nanny laws as a solution. Even if you're an addict, personal responsibility is still a thing.
I have a feeling natural selection will take its course at the level of nations, with nations that do protect their weak surviving and the ones that let profit extractors exploit and abuse theirs dying off.
This is an exaggeration intended to provoke.
>allow natural selection to take its course
This is hideous.
>I'm empathetic to the struggle of addiction
You are very strongly implying that this is untrue.
No, I consider adding laws that ban a simple navigation technique as overreach and a reduction in freedom. To me it feels like banning candy bars because some people eat way too many candy bars. My intention wasn't to provoke, and you shouldn't make statements based off assumptions of someone else's thoughts. My intention is to point out that there's no one-size-fits-all solution, and that there are negatives associated with the top-down legal approach. I want to promote personal and societal responsibility instead of banning every harmful thing.
> This is hideous.
Yes, humans and life in general are filled with terrible things. Doom scrolling was created by us. We allow irresponsible and uncoordinated people to drive cars.
> You are very strongly implying that this is untrue.
So I'm lying because I don't think banning scrolling is the best solution? And you say I'm the one provoking... Have a nice day.
Well, we do want to protect the weak (that's a function of society, after all), and I'm totally okay with removing infinite scrolling from social media apps (or "crippling freedom" as you put it). I don't see any significant benefit it provides to individuals or society. Indeed, it has a negative impact on both. So it sounds like a win/win.
The precedent for "creating a law against an ongoing problem which is bad for societies and individuals and has no redeeming qualities" was set thousands of years ago.
> I want society to be more engaged and responsible for our collective future
Unfortunately, some members of society resist that, like here. Companies have thusfar failed to eliminate the 'infinite scroll' dark pattern out of engagement and responsibility for our collective future. "Plan A" has failed. So now we try "Plan B".
This isn't to say that we shouldn't strive for everybody to be more engaged and responsible for our collective future. Just that the appeal to decency doesn't always work (e.g. here).
Why waste space on the law books about population’s trivial illnesses (addiction).
We have been learning how to induce certain experiences, which correspond to certain substances, for a long time; we're getting more competent at it; this includes social media A/B testing itself to be so sticky that a lot of people find it hard to put down; this is bad, so something* is being done about it.
* The risk being "something should be done; this is something, therefore it should be done"
Dude, in case you don't know, you are the anomaly. Most people don't have the amount of free will as you do. They can't "just put down the phone". You can. They can't.
It's as idiotic a statement as saying "Just stop smoking" around the time when big tobacco was lobbying politicians and bribing scientists and doctors to straight up lie about the deleterious effects of tobacco. It's engineered in such a way as to make it basically impossible for a large swathe of the population to "just not use" the apps.
This learned (or lobbied) helplessness of never changing any laws and we are just stuck with this way of life is silly.
They are trying to block a harmless mechanism, that has proven to be addictive, and that companies have willfully exploited for this very reason, proceeding to wreak havoc to various facets of society while concentrating never before seen levels of wealth in the process.
Wealth that in many case makes them more powerful than the government that should regulate them, which in many cases drank the kool-aid of self-policing these companies have gleefully distributed and lobbied for for years. So, enough with this fine principled arguments about slippery slope that don't exist. What is your comment good for, if not for maintaining a status quo that makes these companies even reacher at the expense of everyone?
Also, while I dislike infinite scrolling, why should the EU regulate the design of a website? I don't like this idea as a principle. This clearly comes from overpaid bureaucrats. I am not at all saying the EU should not become stronger, in the face of a very hostile and abusive USA - but the focus by these bureaucrats is wrong. Those micro-regulations will not get rid of US dominance in the software sector.
You’re perpetuating a gross misunderstanding of the cookie law. What it states is different from how the advertisers implement malicious compliance to bias people, like yourself.
Websites that implement basic functional cookies do not need to display any popups. They’re permitted to do so. Any cookies that are essential to the functioning of the website within reason are permitted. In fact at no point a website should serve you a cookie popup unless you seek it out because analytics and advertising cookies are supposed to be opt in.
So many websites do two things, serve you a popup that has everything enabled which is a clear violation; or a popup that has only functional cookies selected but the biggest highlighted button allows all of them.
The law is fine. Malicious compliance is to blame. The EU has been slow to rectify it.
There are laws regulating many things that could be considered "design", for example misleading packaging, mandatory information on some categories of ads, cigarette packaging, container sizes, accessibility requirements, etc.
I would say regulating against addictive design (infinite scrolling is not banned per se, it just makes for a catchy headline) is well within what laws are meant for.
Except, what actually has happened is that the annoying pop-ups became ubiquitous, and then relatively standardized, so that now an extension like Consent-o-Matic (because the browser companies don't want to upset their advertisers) can automate away your actual choices.
If you want to allow websites to track you, tell the extension to make those choices. If you don't, then tell the extension that. It does a great job almost instantly clearing the popups, and you have more control over your digital identity.
Try selling something containing Nicotine and you will find the EU has an opinion on that, too.
Probably not. But the dominance will be regulated.
I think it's this latter camp of people. It triggers them as if you threatened to take away his candy from a child.
It is thoroughly documented that social media and the modern web are designed to be addictive, by psychologists who specialize in this. We regulate access to other addictive things, because addictive things break humans' normal control systems.
> "the farther you get from the influence of bureaucrats, the happier life becomes"
only when things are "normal" and if you're a default power-holder in a community. For everyone else, really no.
Counterexample: just look at the state of EU tech companies compared to Chinese tech companies.
I’m not saying China is an attractive example, but chalking up Europe’s tech issues to a regulation problem fails to address europe’s digital woes.
A huge portion of that market cap exists only because the companies in question are allowed to act unethically. Aside from that, all this wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small minority.
Ultimately the economy exists to serve us, not the other way around. What good all that market cap does for the average American?
This very US lobbyists narrative that Europe regulate while missing out on the economy is used and abused anytime something look like contrary to US interests in MAGA land.
Europe is actually doing quite well at the moment. The European stock markets have over-performed quite decently vs. the US ever since Trump became president, despite the various curveballs thrown at Europe in recent years. Market capitalisation in the US is held up primarily by the Magnificent 7 who are great outliers in the American stock market.
Cumulative returns are around 100% for the american index, vs 60% for the EU one.
The Shiller PE ratio is insanely high. At least the European market isn't completely overinvested in just 7 companies who are spending a lot of their money on the exact same thing, so it has that going for it.
Disclaimer: I anal and this is not legal advice.
Basically, the law created enough fear among the lawyers that software developers are being advised to include the cookie banner in cases where it isn't strictly needed.
You'd have much better retention rates if you don't cover up the content the viewer is trying to view.
How would you like it if I shoved a banner in your face the moment you walked into a store and forced you to punch a hole in it in order to view items on the shelves?
From where I sit that's hard to evaluate since you cannot actually see most data abuses and privacy concerns, and you also don't know how it would have been without it. You also see the effects of various laws and regulations in combination, so the ones related to GDPR are not easy to be singled out. Are you thinking only of the cookie banners? Maybe sites would be plastered with even worse bullshit. Did you consider that GDPR also resulted in privacy policies that (if actually somewhat legal) are fairly easy to read and not just copy pasta but specific to the service(s), have proper contact information, you get some transparency about which data partners the sites work with, sites need to have full data export, right to be forgotten (removal of your data/contributions), and so on. I am certain you benefit from it often, potentially without realizing, and you wouldn't know what the world would be like without them today so it's not so straightforward to reason about.
So uh, don't do that.
You don't need to notify if you use cookies for required functionality like login sessions or remembering a functional setting.
If you're tracking whether they're returning or not your activity is exactly the kind of behaviour the rule is covering because, in legal terms, it's skeezy as fuck.
If your legal team genuinely suggests that, it's likely your company uses the login cookies for some additional purposes.
To put a finer point on some of this, in one instance, I was writing an application that would allow our customers to deploy their own website with content that they had created through the tool that my company had provided. My company wasn't adding any tracking whatsoever to these pages. We were simply taking their content, rendering it properly, and hosting it for them. We ended up enforcing a cookie banner on these pages because the lawyers couldn't guarantee that there wouldn't be tracking content on that page that was added by the customers. But the end result is that every page, the vast majority of which don't have any tracking, still have cookie banners.
In essence, the law created a new legal hazard, and people aren't sure when they're going to run into it, so they end up putting up fences all over the place. Between this and malicious compliance, the end user experience has suffered greatly.
So a generic cookie banner is actually going to make the legal case worse than not having one at all (because you've now demonstrated that you knew you should have explicitly declared usages, partners, and used opt-in consent, but you didn't).
Nobody wants to be the EU test case on precisely how "required functionality" is defined. Regardless of what the plaintext of the law says, it should be self-evident that companies will be more conservative than that, especially when the cost is as low as adding one cooke banner and tracking one preference.
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/no-cookie-for...
Go to that link, these are the cookies it writes (at least for me):
* _ga
* _gcl_au
* octo
* ai_session
* cfz_adobe
* cfz_google-analytics_v4
* GHCC
* kndctr_
*_AdobeOrg_identity
* MicrosoftApplicationsTelemtryDeviceId
* OptanonConsent
* zaraz-consent
This can be for e.g. sales acquisition or marketing engagement, but also includes cookies to simplify login, so not everything is "stupid stuff." A cookie that stores "was here, skip the splash page" may already fall afowl, if you put any session metadata in it.
I think in the past you still needed some info box in the corner with a link to the data policy. But I think that isn't needed anymore (to be clear not a consent dialog, a informational only thing). Also you can without additional consent store a same site/domain cookie remembering you dismissing or clicking on it and not showing it again (btw. same for opting out of being tracked).
But there are some old pre-GDPR laws in some countries (not EU wide AFIK) which do require actual cookie banners (in difference to GDPR consent dialogs or informational things). EU want them removed, but politic moves slow AF so not sure what the sate of this is.
So yes without checking if all the older misguided laws have been dismissed, you probably should have a small banner at the bottom telling people "we don't track you but for ... reasons .. [link] [ok]" even if you don't track people :(. But also if they haven't gotten dismissed they should be dismissed very soon.
Still such a banner is non obnoxious, little annoying (on PC, Tablet, a bit more annoying on Phone). And isn't that harass people to allow you to spy on them nonsense we have everywhere.
Having the EU decide on a technical implementation is more of a last ditch effort, like what happened with more than a decade of the EU telling the industry to get its shit together and unify under a common charging port.
1. GDPR consent dialogs are not cookie popups, most things you see are GDPR consent dialogs
2. GDPR consent dialogs are only required if you share data, i.e. spy on the user
3. GDPR had from the get to go a bunch of exceptions, e.g. you don't need permission to store a same site cookie indicating that you opted out of tracking _iff_ you don't use it for tracking. Same for a lot of other things where the data is needed for operation as long as the data is only used with that thing and not given away. (E.g. DDOS protection, bot detection, etc.)
4. You still had to inform the user but this doesn't need any user interacting, accepting anything nor does it need to be a popup blocking the view. A small information in the corner of the screen with a link to the data policy is good enough. But only if all what you do falls under 3. or non personal information. Furthermore I think they recently have updated it to not even require that, just having a privacy policy in a well know place is good enough but I have to double check. (And to be clear this is for data you don't need permission to collect, but like any data you collect it's strictly use case bound and you still have to list how its used, how long stored etc. even if you don't need permissions). Also to be clear if you accept the base premise of GDPR it's pretty intuitive to judge if it's an exception or not.
5. in some countries, there are highly misguided "cookie popup" laws predating GDPR (they are actually about cookies, not data collection in general). This are national laws and such the EU would prefer to have removed. Work on it is in process but takes way to long. I'm also not fully sure about the sate of that. So in that context, yes they should and want to kill "cookie popups". That just doesn't mean what most people think it does (as it has nothing to do with GDPR).
Oauth, for example.
Legal bases for processing: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/ Everyone knows part A because that's a catch-all. If the user requested something, it's better UX to use Part B. Parts C and F apply sometimes. You still have to follow the rest of the GDPR, like letting them delete it.
Most sites didn't need a banner. Even post-GDPR, many use-cases don't need one.
I like my feed being personalized to who I am. I am unique. I'm not like anyone else.
Is ticktock addictive because of it's design, or is it addictive because it brings thousands of people and experiences and emotions right to you? Probably both, but it's hard to separate one from the other. Apps are not opium, it's not as clear cut.
Instead of micromanaging technology and culture they should make sure that society is kind, that there is slack in the system, that people don't have reason to want to flee their real lives, that those hurt by new technology get support.
Of course truly malicious dark patterns and fraud should be punished. But that feels like a different category.
We have clear answers here. Yes it’s by design
One is arbitrarily banned by unelected bureaucrats. The other is fine.
We blame social companies for failing to raise our children the way we think they should.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueness_doctrine#Unconstitut...
The article reads as if the EC chose one or a few apps that they didn't like, and then wrote a regulation based on that app's key features.
Genuinely curious about the actual data on this.
Does anyone have a link to a reputable, sizable study?
Keep in mind that in Europe, TikTok is still run by the original owners with China connections - unlike the new "American TikTok" after the owner change in the US.
The US legislature only seemed to discover its concern about addictive behavior when foreign actors or pro-palestinian content were involved, but had no problem with YouTube or Facebook doing the same stuff.
I seriously hope it's different in the EU but wouldn't bet on it.
I'm interested to see what measures people will use to get around the increasingly bizarre restrictions. Perhaps an official browser extension for each platform that reimplements bureaucrat-banned features?
They're not alone in this by any means, America has also opened their doors for all forms of gambling like Kalshi which now even sponsors news networks of all things.
The EU has this disconnect with the things they push, which makes sense considering their size and the speed at which it moves. One example that comes to mind is how they're both pushing for more privacy online while also pushing for things such as chat control which is antithetical to privacy.
Does social media need regulating? Yeah. Is infinite scrolling where they should be focusing? Probably not, there's more important aspects that should be tackled and are seemingly ignored.
There were many startups here in Sweden in the early '00s, and I believe they had taken advantage of a legal loophole which has since been plugged. Regulation has tightened. Players have to be 18 y/o, use digital ID and not be registered as a gambling addict. But I still find the industry to be depraved, to be honest.
If you have a gambling addiction, it's basically impossible to avoid the trigger since you have to buy food anyway. Truly an evil dark pattern.
There's also the Court of Justice which is the highest court, but only in EU matters. National courts can refer cases to it, or the commission/member states can bring cases against other member states, if they believe they are not following EU law. This would mean either they are not following a regulation, or that the state has not fully/correctly implemented a directive into their own national laws.
As I understand it, there's no specific regulation or directive aimed at gambling itself. There's things tangentially related (data protection, anti money laundering etc). But since there's no regulation or directive saying "gambling must be allowed", there's nothing stopping a member state banning it completely if they so wish.
The only point in which the EU might step in would be if the law was somehow discriminatory or inconsistent (e.g. we ban all foreign gambling sites, but not our own, we ban lottery tickets but not state run casinos, etc).
So it should be possible to regulate it.
However, national law must reasonably satisfy EU directives, otherwise CJEU could determine that a member state is infringing EU law and fine them until they amend their law.
ISO 12100 (Safety of Machinery): Sets general, fundamental principles for design, risk assessment, and reduction (Type A standard).
ISO 13849-1 (Safety-Related Parts of Control Systems): Defines performance levels and categories for safety-related components (Type B standard).
ISO 13850 Safety of machinery – Emergency stop function – Principles for design
And that's just some of them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_trim_our_hair_in_accor...
If you don't do it this way to apply for everyone, then any good actor products will be crushed by profitmaxxing competitors. Or any good actor executives and workers will be pushed out by profitmaxxing shareholders.
Legislators need to be careful to keep requirements tight and manageable, but it's better to limit negative externalities than outright ban something. Banning infinite scroll or any particular pattern is nonsense, but restricting addictive design (e.g. TikTok) and algorithm weaponization (e.g. TikTok) is very sensible.
This is what I always say, and defended by many economists: The free market needs legislation and enforcement! Especially public companies, which are especially adamant to maximize shareholder profits at any cost.
Fee market only reacts in a positive way by default in matters that are clear to customers, eg pricing. But when the user isn't the customer, and the defects are not immediately sensed, winners will never do the good thing on their accord.
What is next? Sex? Sex is addictive we should put a limit, ban after 33. How about chess? Running? Partying? Gambling?
Making heroes out of social media users was not something expected in my lifetime. Imagine facebook users bragging how they managed to jailbreak their locked down feeds. That's a comical future
Whatever happened to freedom?
IMO it's a feature that's not valuable enough to justify the fact that it contributes to poor quality of life for people who can't put it down.
Because it is a dangerous addiction [1] with recognised adverse effects on human health. Like sugar, tobacco, or drugs.
You reduce sugar intake, not eliminate it.
You eliminate cocaine intake, not just reduce it.
Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.
As it should, because there's a really obvious "slippery slope" argument right there.
But… it can kill people.
There is a certain fraction of the population who, for whatever reason, can be manipulated, to the point of becoming killers or of causing injury to themselves. Social media… actually, worse than that, all A/B testing everywhere, can stumble upon this even when it isn't trying to (I would like to believe that OpenAI's experience with 4o-induced psychosis was unintentional).
When we know which tools can be used for manipulation, it's bad to keep allowing it to run unchecked. Unchecked, they are the tool of propagandists.
But… I see that slippery slope, I know that any government which successfully argues itself the power to regulate this, even for good, is one bad election away from a dictatorship that will abuse the same reasoning and powers to evil ends.
There's also a very good TED talk on this topic from 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI
Not to mention - you have to account for what happens if someone you hate may be in power and could wield any sort of system to stop "stochastic terrorism" against you. This is often dismissed as an abstract what-if, but....given what's been happening with world leaders these days, it should be a central consideration.
Why would you not be willing to include "scrolling" as another form of addiction? Just because it's labeled the same way you yourself are demonstrating that we handle that in different ways.
Social Media is being treated as "sugar" in this instance instead of as "cocaine".
(As I get older, unironically. I want my productive worker bees to be drug free, addiction free, enjoying simple pleasures that do not put me at risk. They pay Social Security. Everything is nice and safe. Freedom? Yeah no thanks, get to work and pay your taxes.)
You think that attacking these horrible companies is bad for our freedoms, we think our freedoms are fine with it.
Freedom from, or freedom to?
‘Freedom does not consist in doing what we want, but in overcoming what we have for an open future; the existence of others defines my situation and is the condition of my freedom. They oppress me if they take me to prison, but they are not oppressing me if they prevent me from taking my neighbour to prison.’ -- Simone de BeauvoirWhy would anyone publicly express any negative opinion about the effects of doomscrolling? I don't think I'm uncharitably paraphrasing, right?
Not because I use these products, but because I have to live in a society with these people, and if they are unhappy and angry, that impacts me directly, through various second-order effects.
Sarcasm now, but maybe what the near future will look like...
More to the point: this is indeed a massive overreach with the Commission being the police, judge, jury, and executioner... what could go wrong? Exactly what we are seeing is taking shape, precedent by precedent.
There’s a finite (albeit vast) amount of content to serve up.
I guess we don’t let people have hard drugs even if sometimes they just need to escape their painful life. And maybe this could fall under that logic. But we do let people drink themselves, which serves the same purpose. And if I had to choose, I think doomscrolling is more at the level of Drinking, and less at the level of Heroin. So I would actually be fine with an age limit for doomscrolling after which, you have a hands off approach.
They avoid to mention the rest of social media platforms, which happen to be US based. It seems they choose a single quick and easy China-based target more like an experiment to decide for the rest. The key point is when: either the current kids will experience it or those that are not yet born.
I'm curious how they plan to pretend to enforce this. Will you need a loisence to implement infinite scroll?
Though if it applies to the YouTube, seems annoying when trying to find a video to watch. I usually trigger a few infinite scrolling loads to look for videos.
And I assume they'd have to specify a maximum number of items per page, or else devs could just load a huge number of items up front which would technically not be infinite scrolling but enough content to keep someone occupied for a long time.
You can have a ranked paginated UI. You can also have an "infinite" (until you run out of items, but this is not different for ranked) chronological UI.
It’s of no value to point out both can technically be implemented independently. That isn’t what happened, and even if it did it would still be user hostile.
The sorting algorithm that they choose isn't what makes a UI infinite scrolling or not, they're completely orthogonal. In MVC architecture terms they're model and view respectively...
Stop getting hung up on whether things are technically possible, and instead think critically about the actual effects of design choices.
The architecturally boundary between view and model (famously difficult to keep cleanly separated, by the way) is what’s orthogonal here. These are business decisions, not software decisions.
Wondering about a technical solution I couldn't find anything besides fold out explanations and links to explain jargon. Neither would really bridge the gap.
One obvious theory was to keep track of what the user knows and hide things they don't need or unhide things they do. This is of course was not acceptable from a privacy perspective.
Today however you could forge a curriculum for countless topics and [artificially] promote a great diversity of entry level videos. If the user is into something they can be made to watch more entry level videos until they are ready for slightly more advanced things. You can reward creators for filling gaps between novice and expert level regardless of view count.
Almost like Khan academy but much slower, more playful and less linear.
Imagine programming videos that assume the reader knows everything about each and every tool involved. The algorithm could seek out the missing parts and feed them directly into your addiction or put bounties on the scope.
Trackers have much more effective techniques than "cookies", kids trivially bypass verification, and designers will make a joke of tell me you have infinite scrolling without telling me you have infinite scrolling. When you are facing trillions of dollars of competition to your law, what do you think is going to happen?
Maybe if there was an independent commission that had the authority to rapidly investigate and punish (i.e. within weeks) big tech for attempting engagement engineering practices it might actually have some effect. But trying to mandate end user interfaces is wasting everyone's time putting lipstick on a pig.
It's not the union's business what adults spend their time on. Porn, for example, is far more addictive than TikTok, are we going to see porn bans next?
Dirty little dictators.
The union had YEARS to invest into renewables, nuclear, modern arms (cheap drones and cruise missiles built inside the union in new, purpose built factories, not bought in pitiful numbers from the US) after Russia invaded Ukraine and what did they do? Fucking nothing. Individual countries dumped the little of their aging stocks they had and that was about it. The EU could be totally independent from russian energy and swarming with hundreds of thousands of drones by now, just by reallocating the existing funds from nonsense into action.
All just to remove navigation clicks no one minded and reduce server loads, in exchange for users suffering laggy lazy loading (or, what a hate-inducing pattern!) inability to preload, print, search or link.
What about video games? We need session limits of 30mins, kids get too addicted to it.
In fact we're going to put a timer in every bedroom so that if you have sex with your wife for too long we'll fine you because it can turn into a real addiction.
> We use cookies and other technologies to store and access personal data on your device
Evidently you don't value privacy.
Feeds should be heavily regulated, effectively they are a (personalized!) broadcast, and maybe the same strictures should apply. Definitely they should be transparent (e.g. chronological from subscribed topics), and things like veering more extreme in order to drive engagement should be outlawed.
This isn’t about addiction, it’s about censorship. If you limit the amount of time someone can spend getting information, and make it inconvenient with UI changes, it’s much harder to have embarrassing information spread to the masses.
Amazingly, the public will generally nod along anyway when they read governmental press releases and say “yes, yes, it’s for my safety.”
>"Social media app TikTok has been accused of purposefully designing its app to be “addictive” by the European Commission, citing its infinite scroll, autoplay, push notification, and recommendation features."
All of these have immediate and easy replacements or workarounds. Nothing will substantially change (for the better; maybe it does for the worse, even).
Moreover, "purposefully designing something to be addictive" (and cheap to make) is the fundamental basis of late stage capitalism.
hopefully AI will wake them up and save us from all this nonsense
You can buy as much freedom as you want there.
Von der Leyen, who illegally deleted her SMS and is being investigated for corruption, conflict of interest and destruction of evidence, must be glad she can count on you to defend spying on every citizen via "Chat Control" and forcing browser developers to accept any state-mandated root certificates via eIDAS.
They talk about how great Europe is, how they like their 1-2 hour coffee/smoke breaks... These kind of moves give me that same vibe.
But why are so many Europeans trying to move to the US? Why isn't the opposite happening?
My hypothesis is that these kind of popular policies are short sighted. They are super popular, they use intuition and feeling. But maybe there is something missing. The unadulterated freedom has led people to enjoy these platforms. Obviously it affects the economy. So much so, even the US military has moved from Europe to Asia.
I don't typically like fiction, but it seems "I, Robot" was spot on about Europe. (Maybe mistaking new Africa for Asia)
Curious where you got your statistics?
If anything it’s probably the opposite, with more Americans wanting to move to Europe than the reverse.
Don't get me wrong; I've spent months in the US and there are things I love about it. The almost naive way in which everyone believes their own bullshit is energizing. The way individuality and risk taking is celebrated allows for the interesting and novel (but also sometimes the worst) to happen. It is invigorating. But soon it all drains you, the grind, the lack of depth in relationships... The lack of social security net, the dystopian levels of inequality, the egotism, the fetichization of violence. It's all crystalized now in the goverment. No, thank you.
Citation needed.
I took some minutes to try and find statistics, and also ChatGPT claims that the EU simply doesn't collect or publish that kind of data, so I'm wondering how you think you know.
All I see in my circle is people refusing to even go on vacation in the US, let alone move there.
I do know people who've gone, only on vacation and they were exactly the sort of unthreatening rich white folks that you'd expect to have least trouble. Oh, and some US citizens who went "home" to see family at Xmas but work here.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-updates-us-travel-advice-after...
"Between January and July 2025, just under 780,000 German tourists flew to the US, around 12% fewer than the same period in the previous year. [...] People are also deterred by plans to require foreign tourists entering the US to share five years of their social media history, as well as reports of Germans suddenly finding themselves in detention or being deported. The number of applications for student exchanges in the US fell significantly last year with some media reports speaking of a 50% decline." https://www.dw.com/en/threat-to-world-peace-how-germans-see-...
Like, a significant fraction of the country level of usage. You don't need to worry about the EU coming and taking away your HN client APK. You do need to be worried about Google doing that, though.
It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling, but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it. The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do.
My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?". Everything I thought of would have some way or workaround that could be found, and equally would have terrible consequences on situations where this is actually quite valuable. IE if you disallow infinite scrolling, what page sizes are allowed? Can I just have a page of 10,000 elements that lazy load?
Regardless of your take around whether this is EU overreach, I'm glad they're not implementing strict laws around what you can/can't do - there are valuable situations for these UI patterns, even if in combination they can create addictive experiences. Still, I do think that overregulation here will lead to services being fractured. I was writing about this earlier this morning (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005367), but the regulated friction of major platforms (ie discord w/ ID laws) is on a collision course with the ease of vibe coding up your own. When that happens, these comissions are going to need to think long and hard around having a few large companies to watch over is better than millions of small micro-niche ones.
Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iterations. Impossible. They'd need to change their top priority from "maximizing engagement by fostering addictive behavior" to "offering a product with enough quality for someone to pay a fee in order to be able to use it".
For example is my blog talking about Windows considered as Advertising? What about my blog discussing products we make? What about the web site for my local restaurant?
If I add my restaurant location to Google maps, is that advertising? Are review sites?
If I'm an aggregator (like booking.com) and I display the results for a search is that advertising?
I assume though you meant advertising as in 3rd party advertising. So no Google ad words, no YouTube ads etc. Ok, let's explore that...take say YouTube...
Can creators still embed "sponsored by" scenes? Can they do product placement?
Your suggestion is, unfortunately, not implementable. Leaving aside the merit for a moment, there's just no way that any politician can make it happen. Google and Facebook are too big, with too much cash to lobby with. And that's before you tell everyone that the free internet is no more, now you gotta pay subscriptions.
And, here's the kicker, even if you did force users to pay for Facebook and Google, it's still in their interest to maximize engagement...
It’s about the compensation. That makes it advertising.
Regular booking.com is fine. Paying booking.com to allow your results to appear higher is not.
Regular Google Maps to register your restaurant is fine. Paying Google Maps to promote your restaurant is not.
It’s not that hard to implement. Advertising is pretty well defined.
I also assume it means that sites like X could no longer charge for verified accounts.
What's important is agreeing or disagreeing with the spirit of the law, not trying to get a HN comment to give you a bullet-proof wording.
The problem with the direct approach, i.e., “ban advertising”, is that it is hung up on a specific term, not the underlying dynamic/system. It’s fighting a symptom, not the disease/cause.
"let's regulate x"
"but surely we can't regulate x because defining x is complicated"
"plenty of things are complex and are regulated, also here is a definition that covers almost all cases and the rest can be left to judicial nous"
"but people will just evade the law anyway"
Honestly pick a post about the EU at random and you'll be able to find some variety of this chain of conversation. It's so general an argument that it could be made about literally any law that's ever existed, making it entirely null if you believe in any regulation whatsoever
I conceptualize this as something like the Hamming Distance, where you can measure the number of replies the conversation will have before an inevitable pivot to generic American stuff.
So the conversation could start with "Why back in 2013 I had a lovely time fishing in Scotland. The lakes there are remarkable."
"Boy me too that fishing was just great caught such and such fish blah blah blah love those lakes"
"Why that reminds me of the time I went fishing in Kentucky, boy the lakes there let me tell you..."
"Kentucky you say? Why I was just in Kentucky the other day! Boy they sure have < difference in real estate prices | difference in crime rates | differnce in minimum wage... >
and now it's a conversation about Kentucky real estate instead of a conversation about fishing in Scotland.
An example I’m sure you would consider advertising - consider Google advertising Google Fiber in Google search results, or Facebook advertising business services on Facebook, or Apple, Netflix, Cinemark advertising their own shows & products in their own channels. You’ve seen lots of these, I’m sure you would consider them ads, but it’s not the compensation that makes them ads.
Feel free to keep doing "pro-bono" advertising, but shareholders definitely wouldn't.
Why would you not want to keep people engaged and even "addicted" in order to keep them as subscribers and make them upgrade to more expensive subscriptions?
- Gambling while rarely subscription based is usually paid for directly rather than ad funded.
- Newspaper subscriptions are no less addictive for news junkies than purely ad funded newspapers.
- I watch a lot of Youtube, far more than I used to before I started paying for the subscription.
- Netflix and in the olden days TV.
I'm not entirely sure what "insidiously addictive" actually means. I do sometimes scroll through some TikTok vids. I don't find it particularly addictive compared to, say, Hacker News.
An example of a game development pattern that I would consider "merely addictive" would be a game developer trying to make their game as fun as possible. Does maximizing fun inherently make a game more likely to be addictive? Of course, but addiction was not the criteria being optimized for.
An example of an insidiously addictive video game would be one where the developers specifically created features in the hopes that they would create a dependency with the product to drive subscriptions or sales. It's at least partially about the level of cynicism with which the product is being developed.
A more stark example would be a fast food restaurant refining their recipe to make it more delicious versus one adding drugs to the food to make people addicted.
Newspapers and Youtube are both examples of services that are engineered to be ad-based but have a subscription option, so they're most likely still driven by the same attention-seeking incentives.
Whenever the frequency, quantity or intensity of use drives up earnings, you are bound to get the same result: More "addictive" designs are better for earnings than less "addictive" designs. The difference (if any) between addictive because fun and addictive by design is irrelevant for this outcome.
What I will grant you is that the link can be more direct with ad funding. If a newspaper publisher knows that some very loyal subscribers only ever read 5 articles every morning, making that particular group read 30 articles would not drive up earnings.
But I think on average across all readers the link between reading more and higher earnings would still exist and hence the incentive to make the product more "addictive".
I think it's hard to say if that's true. A consumer might be willing to pay more for a service they use a lot rather than a little.
What I do know is that I can see plainly that advertising-driven services are among the worse offenders for creating addictive products and other revenue models generally provide healthier incentives to direct development.
The EU's general approach here is probably better than banning advertising since it diagnoses a clear problem, but leaves it open for regulators and companies to address it.
Of course that will not happen as there are way too many interests involved.
I don’t think you have the incentives correctly summarized. The incentive of businesses like Google, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram are to make money, and the only way they’ve figured out how to do that at scale is advertising. None of those sites had ads when they started.
So basically all full-time Youtubers who do in-video ad reads, including, but not limited to: MKBHD, Linus Tech Tips, Veritasium, Smarter Every Day, minutephysics, Computerphile, Tom Scott, Patrick Boyle, The Plain Bagel, Sailing La Vagabonde, Sailing SV Delos, Gone with the Wynns, etc.
This wouldn't mean this type of content would disappear - for every single business producing such content there's a bunch of people doing the same for free. And then there's patreon et al., and funding for education etc.
For some definition of "same" which may or may not mean "equal" (in the sense of quality, quantity, etc).
It brings to mind some rich people running for public office and putting forward the idea because they're rich they can't be influenced/lobbied or something. Or the general public sometimes complaining about politicians giving themselves raises: well, if you only pay peanuts you're going to get monkeys running things (more than already).
There is more opportunity for different types of people and channels to happen because the money allows people to recompensed for their time/effort. Free only scales so far when you have rent/mortgage, groceries, kids, a partner you may wish to spend time with, etc, to worry about.
> And then there's patreon et al.,
Except for MKBHD and Linus Tech Tips, all (most?) the channels I listed have Patreon, and still find it necessary to in-video ads because it's not enough.
(Genuinely happy to read “like the good old days” as an answer!)
The slop is already there. Even without the slop, which it would be borderline impossible to identify en masse, the hosting costs are still astronomical. I appreciate your idealism, but Youtube without advertising revenue would be a financial black hole, and even if it survived, creators would simply be the ones taking the hit
Unless you're suggesting Youtube would just start again from zero, in which case it would just fail and it might as well be the same as dying
But booking takes a cut of the booking in all scenarios, so they’re already incentivized to prioritize results that result in more profit for them. This all gets very tricky unfortunately.
Scenario A: Booking.com wants to increase their profits so they analyze their results and prioritize the best ones to reach their target. Regardless, Booking takes a cut of everything.
Scenario B: if you pay Booking $10k you can get to the first page even if you are a random 1-star hotel. Booking takes a cut of everything and also profits by getting money in exchange for more visibility of certain results.
> It’s about the compensation. That makes it advertising.
if you rent a billboard or space on Google.com, you’re not paying to promote a product/company; you’re just renting space.
So, if you then, yourself, put your company logo there, you’re saying that’s not advertising, but if you pay your nephew to put it there, it is?
That's a definition, sure. I feel like it leaves loopholes (under this definition spam isn't advertising, and I guess affiliation programs are?)
If I pay someone to print flyers is that advertising? If I pay squarespace for my site, is that advertising?
What if I need a Google maps subscription to place pins? Is placing a pin then advertising? Even if the subscription gives me other abilities?
Under your definition I guess YouTube creators can't be sponsored. And all existing videos with sponsorship need yo be removed? And I guess no online watching of sports (lots of people paid to wear a logo there...)
Presumably no product placement in Netflix shows (not sure what to do with old content?)
Of course I'm not paid to advertise MiraclePill. My channel exists purely thanks to patreon. No, I don't know that my "executive level" patreons are all MiraclePill employees...
No, I don't pay Google for ads, the ads are free when I purchase GoogleCoin which I buy because I expect GoogleCoin to go up in value...
>> Advertising is pretty well defined.
Alas, I fear it isn't...
80/20 rule, it’s defined well enough to encompass 80% of advertisements. Anything beyond that is tolerated or illegal spam.
And if the situation arises that ads are being used unjustly the legal definition will eventually shift.
> If I pay someone to print flyers is that advertising?
What the hell, we're talking about internet... you can't put printed flyers on the internet.
> If I pay squarespace for my site, is that advertising?
No. It's your site, not a third-party site promoting your site!
> What if I need a Google maps subscription to place pins? Is placing a pin then advertising?
If you promote it somehow, yes... if you just say there's a business there, no, since you're not actively promoting it. Information that something exists by itself cannot be included in "promotion".
> And all existing videos with sponsorship need yo be removed?
Yes, or re-uploaded without the sponsor segment.
> And I guess no online watching of sports (lots of people paid to wear a logo there...)
There could be exceptions for ads placed on the real world which are not paid for by the site/creator. There's always cases that must be allowed, no prohibition is absolute.
> Presumably no product placement in Netflix shows (not sure what to do with old content?)
To be honest, I wouldn't mind subtle product placements in shows. That's a lot less hostile than actual ads we see today on the Internet.
> Of course I'm not paid to advertise MiraclePill.
If you lie that you're not paid by someone while you are, like with any law, you can be prosecuted for it.
> Alas, I fear it isn't...
You didn't show what you think you did.
> Yes, or re-uploaded without the sponsor segment
I hope not. For one that would hit retroactively, but also it would cause a huge loss of valuable content from platforms like YouTube as countless videos with sponsor segments are actually interesting and simply too much to reupload, if the uploader is even active still.
If there was a ban on 'internet advertising of anything' then it would basically kill all discussion of any products on the internet.
I'd take adverts over that. :)
- https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/federal_re...
> "Your suggestion is, unfortunately, not implementable."
How about trying it before giving up? Cookie banners were implementable. Laws requiring ID schemes are being implemented. Know-your-customer laws have been implemented. GDPR has been implemented. HIPPA and Sarbanes-Oxley have been implemented. Anti-pornography laws have been implemented despite the gotcha of "but but how will anyone tell what's porn and what isn't?".
"not making a decision" is a decision. Companies are exploiting advertising - trying to avoid doing anything that might be imperfect because it's hard is taking a position, and it's a position in favour of explotative advertising.
I mean are you really asking whether creators embedding "sponsored by" scenes is an ad as if you don't know? C'mon, don't insult your readers with this nonsense.
HN commenters are not legislators, and even if random HN commenters can't draft legislation, that doesn't mean that a minimally-funded team of experts would have any difficulty with the problem.
It might sound nit picking, and it absolutely is, but if we banned Internet advertising (at the exact definition you personally consider advertising to be), you can guarantee the advertising industry would be looking at exactly these loopholes until you reframed your definition.
It's much like how in the UK they banned advertising for tobacco, and years later had to expand it so that supermarkets cannot even show the products visibly because the brand has their own inherent advertising that's visible if you can see it.
So they got rid of 90% of adverts, then adjusted it to get that upto 99%
Meanwhile you're saying "lets use brainwashing to get 8 year olds hooked because we might not get 100% on the first attempt"
I said absolutely nothing of the sort and that hostile style of arguing has no place on this site. I will no longer be engaging with you.
If I receive compensation from company A for a product, and I genuinely like it, is it advertising if I talk about another item on their product line that I bought because of the free item I got?
If I run a retail business, and have a better deal with a provider, am I allowed to prioritise their results?
If I run an AI SAAS, with a bring your own key model, am I allowed to recommend a provider that I think gives the best results, even if my margin is bigger on that model?
I’m not trying to gish gallop you here - the point isn’t to cherry pick any specific example it’s that advertising isn’t just a billboard or a sponsored VPN segment in a YT video.
> HN commenters are not legislators
That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it.
> a minimally funded team of experts would have any difficulty with the problem.
I’m a hugely pro EU person, and support the vast majority of what they do. The Cookie Banner is a disaster and has just resulted in a massive step back for the Internet worldwide. The USB C charger rule missed the forest for the trees. Their stance on technology has been poor, misguided and misunderstood, and often pushes the needle towards US companies winning out.
To steel man, there's a commenting pattern where if someone doesn't like a high-level idea they demand answers to a dozen specifics that, if it were a legitimate proposal going through a legislature, could take hundreds of people months or years of committees, reports & consultations to decide on all the answers to, but if someone can't come up with an answer on the spot in HN then that's taken as proof that the idea is unworkable.
> I’m not trying to gish gallop you here - the point isn’t to cherry pick any specific example it’s that advertising isn’t just a billboard or a sponsored VPN segment in a YT video.
> That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it.
I would even go so far as to say that HN commenters are going to be the ones trying to evade/break/find the loopholes in whatever laws the legislators write.
The thing that changed in the mid-2000s was that we found ways to not only provide these services, but extract billions of dollars while doing it. Good for Mark Zuckerberg, but I doubt the internet would be hurting without that.
That goodwill seems to be in short supply since... hmmm the mid 2000's (rough guess). And goodwill like that seems to be honestly not even understood by the generation(s)* since then.
* Saying "generations" (plural) there because we've had quite a few people go through their formative years during this time and not just a single clearly defined generation.
That's no revisionism. Infrastructure always costed money, but it was relatively inexpensive to develop a social network back then. Instagram had a team of 12 if I'm not mistaken before being bought. So it was easier back then to justify what was pocket change to corporations. The potential payoff was incredible.
But eventually the money printing machine needs to start printing money.
Now fucking everything about the world is a hustle to monetize every possible nook and cranny around content. There isn't even content anymore, it's nearly all AI slop as a substrate to grow ads on.
I am nostalgic for the era when I found "punch the monkey" irritating. People used to make websites as a labor of love.
That seems like an arbitrary penalty. What harm is being prevented by banning advertising, in general?
That directly leads to all these addictive dark patterns.
The harms of addictive design in internet social media.
Regardless, my point was just to answer the question, "is it okay as a business model?" Ostensibly, if advertising online were banned, a business model centered around selling online advertisement attention would not be ok.
Its been 30 years and no one has been able to continue that "etc".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rogers%27s_1969_United_St...
And Trump just cut funding for both PBS and NPR
Nahh that would never happen.
We can argue about public media but Germany is a really bad example.
The same government who threatened to take ABC broadcast license because Kimmel made a joke about a dead podcaster
And then there is that entire “free press” thing in the constitution.
And Disney quickly recanted as soon as people started canceling, even the conservative owned local affiliates had to back down.
The potential failure of the system because of the effect of the wrong choice in this matter is evidence in favor of my argument, not against it.
They also can’t stop me because I don’t “look like I belong” in my neighborhood (true story). I’d rather not give the government any more power.
Have you every thought about the fact that power doesn't just disappear? Someone is going to have control over the jackbooted thugs. Claiming democratic norms and public control over them is bad just ensures that they become the tools of a few people without any way to constrain them.
I'm sorry you had a bad experience and that we are currently having one as a country, but the solution is to push for more democracy, not more privatization.
And to pretend like the US is a democracy where the popular vote matters completely ignores reality. Every state gets two Senators so South Dakota has the same voting power in the Senate as California. The house districts are so gerrymandered that the sum total of Democratic votes will always be less than their share of the house since it is so easy to dilute Democrats voting power since they live in major cities.
So if you want to push for a more (small d) democratic government, you’re going to first have to overall the entire constitution so the largest states population’s aren’t diluted.
And I posted a link earlier that the government has literally been trying to defund PBS since the 1960a and Mr. Rogers himself had to beg Congress not to defund it.
Right now today the federal government is erasing any signs of anything in museums and national parks that doesn’t make the US look good or admit that gay people exist. This is the government you want controlling the press?
But I also agree it's when <1% of people where online, and it's never going back to that.
In practice, this cuts of 80% of the worlds population.
Catering to the lowest common denominator is how we got the Burger King guy on spirit airlines.
I have and do pay for website access. That doesn't mean much if the current model flocks to no paid services.
My comment about not having a right to business models is in some ways more general. Regardless of whether this business model is protected for some other reason, business models in general aren't, and it's a common flawed argument that they are.
Note, neither one of us is a corporation, so "we" doesn't refer to corporations.
Say a a kid started throwing tantrums at school. By not punishing/ removing him you restrict the freedom of everyone else.
Regulations can protect freedoms, but they don’t create them. Freedom is inherent. Regulations protect.
Advertising sucks in this thread too.
By that I mean, people are not speaking plainly, and it is almost ingrained into our societies now. We "sell" our position in a discussion, a debate.
For example, regulation does curtail freedom. Completely.
However, lack of regulation can harm people. Significantly.
Thus, regulation does not give people more freedom, it can however reduce harm.
In democratic nations, often judges will weigh these two things, when determining if a regulation passes the muster. In my country, we have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and often judges will determine if a challenged regulation is of sufficient, required public good, whilst not overtly reducing freedom of the individual.
This is a mature conversation.
Advertising is not.
A primary example I've seen in the US, is people calling immigrants "undocumented" on one side, and "criminals" on the other. This is, of course, a reduction in nuance, and designed to advertise a position merely with the words used. And it is a societal sickness.
An illegal alien is just that, and using that term confers no judgement, for it is simply fact.
There was a time when politics were not first and fore in terms of the use of language. The current trend to be "touchy feely" over use of language, and find great offense at the use of language, does nothing other than stop debate. Reduce discussion. Cause schism instead of collaboration.
And there are those around us, which prefer that.
Don't feed them.
If there were no regulation against someone picking you up off the street and chaining you up in their basement, they would be more free in this scenario and you would be less free. You might be able to say regulation can curtail freedom and at the same time increase freedom.
>An illegal alien is just that, and using that term confers no judgement, for it is simply fact.
Well, it also has a connotation just like the other words. "Illegal" and "alien" both evoke meaning that goes beyond the specific condition, and that phrase was generally the predecessor of "criminals" in this example. Those who use different terms are also incentivized to convince others that their chosen word is the one that is most "simply fact" and not "touchy feely" language.
> Thus, regulation does not give people more freedom, it can however reduce harm.
When I say regulation is freedom, I'm borrowing from dialectics. The only way we figured out how to move forward is to leave something behind.
So when you see regulation, the absence of a given right, let's say to carry a deadly weapon in public, you have to see this is the tailend of the synthesis of a long debate, where we agreed that the risks of arming the population outweighs the benefits of self protection.
So regulation is freedom because freedom is choice, and to choose is to leave something behind. Regulation is just the manifestation of the consequences of that choice.
This depends on what definition of freedom you are using.
Take this definition.
> the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do
Being able to walk down a street because there is a regulation restricting cars would enhance my freedom.
It amuses me how the "land of the free" makes it a crime for people to cross the street without doing it at regulated locations.
But the thing is that statistically the likelihood they were discussing in good faith about this is near none, instead their way of speaking are telltales of a libertarian, where they have a almost religious believe that regulation is their biggest enemy and will never admit that the lack of it could harm or even kill them, I have wasted many many hours talking with such kind of people and don't aim to waste more arguing in good faith giving nuanced responses.
Fuck ads. What's absurd is tolerating them and the damage they do to media, consumers, kids, lesser and/or more honest businesses, culture, products, and so on all the way to the Windows and macOS system UIs.
At the same time, this has the same energy of "if we release all the files, the system will collapse". Maybe we need the billionaires to feel some pain sometimes (even if yes, we'll feel more overall).
Ads are speech.
No, they are not.
People have been brainwashed and legal systems have been paid and bought for to consider them as such, just like corporations have been whitewashed to be treated as "persons".
In any case, we regulate all other kinds of speech as well: explicit content, libel, classified information, cigarette ads, and so on.
If only individuals are allowed freedom of speech NYT, CNN, and other news organizations do not have first amendment rights.
Are you sure you've thought this through?
I don’t think you need to count companies being able to put any message out there as free speech.
If I get paid to say something I would have said anyway, is that not free speech?
>preselected
If I go to a protest with a sign that my friend made because I can't, that is not free speech?
And this is about Europe, which has never had an absolutist view of rights to begin with. In Europe, rights are seen as intended to be balanced against each other instead of maximizing an arbitrary set of them to 100%. You have the right to free expression (except in... most countries, so let's call it a theoretical right) as well as the right to not be preyed upon. Although it's legal to distribute chemicals, some of them are highly addictive so they're restricted. Same with social media.
Granted, that's proven to be a horrible concept. So let's repeal that.
Five dollars a month to subscribe or whatever. If people get the value out of it, you can get them to pay it.
If that's not viable enough, so be it.
But in reality is going to crap too as how you select the “right” company? If the company is owned by Gov then it will probably be worst than now.
Then it will be back to communism
I think one thing to understand about advertising is that it fundamentally breaks the way capitalists say capitalism works. If you really want capitalism to be about competition to create the best quality at the lowest cost, then you can't have advertising. Advertising inherently drives up cost because it costs, and it allows lower-quality, higher-ost products to outcompete higher-quality, lower-cost products if they are better advertised.
And before some advertiser comes along and says, "But how will we find out about goods and services!?" Search engines. Independent reviewers. Word out mouth. Experts. These are solved problems.
And more to the point, advertising is literally the worst way to find out about goods and services. Mostly, advertising is simply lies, and when it's telling the truth it's not telling you the whole truth. If you're concerned about people being able to find out about goods and services with any accuracy, then you should be against advertising. Ads aren't information, they're misinformation which prevents consumers from making accurately informed decisions.
Maybe it could be good again, but not on the path it's on.
(1) You do not have any reason to think I've "arrested emotional development" or an "ideological blind spot"; (2) my "defense of harmful technologies" was not even presented, (3) let alone does it have anything to do with old men shaking their fists at clouds; and (4) you do not have any reason to say I've not been open-minded.
The only thing I said is that there have been some happenings to be entertained by, that is not exclusive to other feelings about them. I can think whoever set up MJ Rathbun has been irresponsible while also laughing at the dumb thing their irresponsible decisions caused.
These feelings are not mutually exclusive and hostility towards the ones I expressed because you made assumptions about other feelings I must have is an indication of arrested emotional development and certainly doesn't herald open-mindedness. Obviously (this is from my perspective, let's remember our emotional development and open-mindedness), you must fear these things in some manner and you are projecting said fears onto my statements in these comments.
[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
The primordial domino tile is human nature, which you're not going to knock over. The solution is probably closer to what China does - punish companies that don't prioritize/train algos to prioritize the values we hold dear. Basically, just keep beating meta and bytedance until they decide to get their timelines out of the politics game and into the education game, for example, or the democracy game, or whatever your country's main issues are.
I think there's definitely room to regulate "divisiveness" though, and that's a little clearer than "addictive design".
Hosting millions of users is very cheap (less than 200$ per month).
Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely. You are literally arguing against something that has already happened.
At its peak (late 1990s to early 2000s), IRC was estimated to have about 3–4 million concurrent users worldwide at any given moment, with tens of millions of total users over time.
Pales in comparison with the scale that’s needed today, given the number of people, variety of media, and bandwidth required.
The scale issue is enabling billions of consumers. It takes time and effort and skill.
It turns out that there are relatively skilled people who are willing to give their time and resources freely relative to billions of consumers in the market.
1. Reform occurs, now ad-networks serve ads based on the content it appears near, rather than analyzing the viewer.
2. Ad-network says "You know, I'd pay more if you had a version of this content that drew people who were X, Y, Z..."
3. The sites start duplicating their content into hundreds of inconsequentially-different sub-versions, profiling visitors to guide them to "what fits your interests", but it's actually a secret signal to the ad-networks.
4. Ad-network, super-coincidentally, releases tools that can "help" sites do it.
OTOH I gladly pay for YouTube Premium.
If you try to regulate this, everything will be an ad in disguise.
In my opinion, that's the direction we are heading towards with AI anyway.
I'm surprised we haven't seen an instance of 'pay to increase bias towards my product in training' yet.
Require that every user must be shown the exact same ads (probabilistically). Don't allow any kind of interest or demographic based targeting for paid content.
Advertisers would still be able to place Ads on pages they know there target audience goes, but wouldn't be able to make those same Ads follow that target audience around the internet.
Browsers typically send Accept-Language headers so you could easily return ads in languages matching that header, without having to analyze your posts.
It’s like switching on to a Spanish TV channel and getting Spanish speaking ads. It’s not targeted because you are signalling you probably understand Spanish.
But not guess a language based on the content of posts.
Again, why are foreign sites relevant, and why does this idea seem hard to grasp?
Do we tell US companies they can’t buy advertising on foreign sites and that those foreign sites can’t be accesed from the US?
We have an existence proof of what happens when a government tries to restrict what people can see on the internet. I live in one of the states that require porn sites to validate ID. If you add all of the sites that ignored the law completely and all of the sites that you can access via a VPN, the number you get is 100%
So what if I have a website based out of the counter and accept advertisements? Are you going to tell ISPs to block those foreign websites?
Let me tell you a little story. The state I live in just passed a law requiring all porn sites to verify age. Guess how many porn sites not based in the US ignored the law entirely? Guess how many who did folks the law can be viewed over a VPN? If you guessed “lesser than 100% between both, you would be wrong.
You really like where this is going?
Interestingly, there are autocratic governments who do try to ban vague things. The goal there is selective enforcement, not good public policy.
You don’t need to go too far down the rabbit hole. You need to introduce friction to ads.
Subscription revenues are tiny when compared ad revenue, so I expect people will resist this idea ferociously.
I.e displaying an ads about Sentry on a ads technica page, find . Displaying an ads about hiking equipment on ars techbica because i made a google search abd it is estimated I like that -> not fine. It would kill all the incentive to overtrack the ROI will no more justify the cost.
It'd be like streaming today. Fragmented, expensive, and useless. And no one would like it.
Beyond that, websites would still need people to be addicted to justify the sub.
And furthermore, "sponsorships" will still occur behind the sub wall.
Addiction is a precursor to poverty. If we accept the domino theory of "online advertising -> addictive design" then the fundamental evil becomes clear. Holding people in poverty in order to profit from their time and attention.
We also live in an area where outdoor ads are banned (which tends to be the case in wealthy areas IME), and I block ads on our computers, so we rarely encounter them. Consumerism is gauche.
Is another area needing new legislation. Changes to copyright, interoperability requirements and such, we can change more than one parameter
Lets say I'm reading a laptop review. Show me adds from the laptop manufacturer or of websites that sell said laptop. People reading the review are likely in the market for a laptop so it makes sense to show it. At most you could probably narrow it down to the country so a German doesn't get shown a Best Buy ad but thats as far as I would go.
I think it's fundamentally anti-competitive.
The product is the same as the speech, whereas in advertising the speech is in sycophantic service of another product.
If you remove the ability for these people to advertise there goes their livelihood. I understand the desire to want to punish big evil corporations but all this will do is strengthen them because they're the ones who have enough capital to survive something like this and scoop up the marketshare left behind by the millions of small businesses that will fail when this is implemented.
We can have word of mouth, genuine, in forums and social media.
We can have reviews, genuine, in websites.
We can have websites which present new products and business, not as paid sponsorships.
We can search on our own initiative and go to their website.
We can have online catalogs.
And tons of other ways.
Making global business harder and forcing things more local actually sounds like a great benefit.
We could use less 1T companies and more a few billion or 100s of millions level companies too. I miss the "focused on Mac and iPod" era Apple.
The idea that we should eliminate that because a higher-income bracket of consumers is inconvenienced by ads just comes across oddly haughty and privelaged to me.
Heck, I wouldn't have my successful career today if it wasn't for the ad-supported ISP NetZero CD I came stumbled upon in 1999.
The follow industry conventions, visit registries of industry websites, have professional lists where companies submit their announcements (and not to the general public) and so on.
>Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.
If advertising is banned, it will work just as good as for any competitor.
Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?
The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs. When people learn that their neighbors are paying less they will be naturally incentivized to investigate why. Equivalent problems can be solved with the same general technique.
Now all of the "brought to you by America's <industry group>" ads are back in. So is every pharma ad and every other patented product because they don't have to tell you a brand when there is only one producer.
> The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs.
Publication where? In the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"? Also, who decides to publish it, decides what it will say or pays the costs of writing and distributing it?
No, but they can convince a disinterested party that people aren't aware of <fact about industry that industry wants people to know> because that's actually true.
> Minimum competition requirements can be imposed.
But that brings back the original problem. Company invents new patented invention, how does anybody find out about it?
> a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed.
This is the legislator's fallacy. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this.
If a proposal is full of problems and holes, the alternative isn't necessarily to do nothing, but rather to find a different approach to the problem.
Proposals that are full of holes are often worse than nothing, because the costs are evaluated in comparison to the ostensible benefit, but then in practice you get only a fraction of the benefit because of the holes. And then people say "well a little is better than nothing" while not accounting for the fact that weighing all of the costs against only a fraction of the benefit has left you underwater.
But I acknowledge that there may be edge cases. My point is that the existence of edge cases does not mean we should permit the harm to continue. Those specific edge cases can be identified and patched. My suggestion is a hypothetical example of a potential such patch, one that might possibly be a net benefit. Maybe it would actually be a net harm, and the restriction should be absolute. The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched.
Your objections to this hypothetical example are nit-picking the edge cases of an edge case. They're so insignificant in comparison to the potential harm reduction of preventing advertising that they can be safely ignored.
> The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched.
Only it turned out to be an example to illustrate how patching the edge cases might be a quagmire.
The same legit things that can cause them to realize it today. Word of mouth, a product review, a personal search that landed them on a new company website, a curated catalog (as long as those things are not selling their placements).
An ad is the worse thing to find such things out - the huge majority ranges from misleading to criminally misleading to bullshit.
Many don't think businesses should exist in the first place.
That won't convince anyone.
but you can help this by banning all forms of active tracking.
Static ads only, no click tracking, and complete ban on profiling clients and especially on adjusting prices based on client/possible client behavior patterns.
Websites can too.
If you know the kind of articles your readers like, you can find ads that your readers will like.
Pervasive surveillance to make a system that's practically worse than the alternative that doesn't require mass surveillance, and is much simpler and cheaper. Did I say amusing before? Depressing is probably a better fit.
To become a member of the EU, you have to first join the Council of Europe and its European Convention on Human Rights – article 10 of which guarantees the right to free expression. The EU also has its own Charter of Fundamental Rights which says the same thing. And the plan is for the EU to become a party to the Convention in its own right, although that's got bogged down in technical legal disputes and still hasn't happened, despite the 2009 Lisbon Treaty mandating it.
The US First Amendment has no exceptions as worded, but the US Supreme Court has read some into it. The Convention has exceptions listed in the text, although they are vaguely defined – but like the US, the European Court of Human Rights has developed extensive case law on the scope of those exceptions.
The big difference in practice is the US exceptions end up being significantly more narrow than those in Europe. However, given in both, the details of the exceptions are in case law – courts can and do change their mind, so this difference could potentially change (either by narrowing or broadening) in the decades to come.
> "Article 10 of the Human Rights Act: Freedom of expression
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
In the 2015 case Perinçek v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights applied Article 10 to find against a Swiss law making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. Can you imagine a Soviet court ever striking down a genocide denial law?
The decision is controversial because it introduces a double standard into the Court's case law – it had previously upheld laws criminalising Holocaust denial, now it sought to distinguish the Holocaust from the Armenian genocide in a way many find arbitrary and distasteful – the consistent thing would be to either allow denying both or disallow denying both.
But still, it just shows how mistaken your Soviet comparison is.
Conflating advertising with free speech is like conflating sex work with reproductive rights.
The most plausible way would be if the one you're paying to distribute it has some kind of exclusive control or market power over the distribution channel so that you're paying them a premium over competing distributors. But then wouldn't the best way to prevent them from extracting that premium to be to make it so nobody has exclusive control over distribution channels, e.g. by breaking up concentrated markets or requiring federated protocols?
That's a different model than paying a technical writer to do technical writing.
But now how are you distributing either of them?
Advertising is not distribution. Publishing is distribution, and advertising sometimes comes along for the ride.
> The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it.
Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product.
And then the question is, how do they get it? There are many ways to distribute. They could pay to print it out on paper and put it in the lobby in their corporate offices, but then customers would have to come to their corporate headquarters to get it, which most won't do, so obviously some methods of distribution have a higher likelihood of being seen. Then companies will prefer the ones that allow them to be seen more.
But they're paying someone for any of them, so "is paying for it" isn't a useful way to distinguish them.
And then we're back to, suppose you pay Facebook to host your documents on your company's Facebook page. Furthermore suppose that they, like most hosting companies, charge you more money if you get more traffic. Meanwhile their "hosting customers" on the "free tier" (i.e. ordinary Facebook users) have a very small quota which is really only enough for their posts to be seen by their own friends. So paying them for distribution -- like paying for any other form of distribution -- causes your documents to have better visibility. Now you can show up in the feed of more people before you run out of quota, just like paying more for hosting means more people could visit your website before you exceed your transfer allowance.
How do you tell if someone is paying for computing resources or eyeballs when the same company provides both? Notice that "don't let them do both" is a bit of a problem if you also don't let them sell advertising, because if they can't sell ads or charge for using the service then what are they doing for revenue?
> Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product.
I agree with this statement, but it is irrelevant. The primary purpose of documentation is what I said: for understanding how to operate the product. The only purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Advertising has no secondary purpose. These are not the same thing.
The test is quite simple: Is the sole purpose of the payment to make a sale? If so, it is advertising.
We don't really need to discuss documents any longer. Documentation is not an advertisement.
Yes. You self host it as a company, and it can only be reproduced (if they wish) in outlets (say review sites) when there's no payment or compensation of any kind involved for that.
You have your own website and your copy on it. Don't start that "but if you pay some hosting provider to host that website that would be advertising", or the
"And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that."
that borders on being obtuse on purpose.
Yes. You're still allowed to pay someone - for YOUR OWN corporate website. Still your copy is not on my fucking social media, news websites, forums, tv programming, and so on.
>and now you have the caravan of trucks going through the loophole because Facebook et al get into the hosting business and then their "spam filter" trusts the things on their own hosting service so using it becomes the way to get seen.
They can go into the hosting business all they want. If they show what they host (i.e. ads) on my social media feed, or links to it there, they're breaking the law. What they host should only be accessible when somebody consciously navigates to it in some hierarchical scheme or directly enters the address/handle.
They're already hosting everything in your feed, and if there were actually no ads then everyone on the site would be paying them to do it, at which point what do you expect to be in your feed?
In any case it's trivial to come up with such a definition that covers most cases. Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it. Laws can be supplemented and ammended.
We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it.
> We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?
Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective. I'd take a relative improvement even if it's not 100% over free reign.
>You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?
I don't consider it a "hopeless disaster" (except in it's effects on society). As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations. The existence of dark illegal versions of it, or exploitation in the industry, doesn't negate this.
For the most part they're trash. There is a narrow range of effectiveness where the cost of compliance is low and thereby can be exceeded by the expected cost of reasonable penalties imposed at something significantly less than 100% effective enforcement, e.g. essentially all gas stations stopped selling leaded gasoline because unleaded gasoline isn't that much more expensive.
The cost of complying with a ban on advertising is high, so the amount of effort that will be put into bypassing it will be high, which is the situation where that doesn't work.
> As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations.
It essentially bifurcated content creation and distribution into "this is 100% porn" and "this company will not produce or carry anything that would cause it to have to comply with those rules" which inhibits quality for anything that has to go in the "porn" box and pressures anything in the "not porn" box to be sufficiently nerfed that they don't have to hire more lawyers.
The combination of "most human communication now happens via social media" and "expressing your own sexuality is effectively banned on most major social media platforms" is probably a significant contributor to the fact that people are having less sex now and the fertility rate is continuing to decline. "All the boobs you could ever possibly look at but only on the sites where there is no one you will ever marry" is not a super great way to split up the internet.
The ambiguity in the definition frequently causes people to be harassed or subject to legal risk when doing sex education, anatomy, etc. when they're trying to operate openly with a physical presence in a relevant jurisdiction. Conversely, it's the internet and it's global so every terrible thing you'd want to protect anyone from is all still out there and most of the rules are imposing useless costs for no benefits, or worse, causing things to end up in places where there are no rules, not even the ones that have nothing to do with sex.
It's now being used as an guise to extract ID from everyone for surveillance purposes.
It's a solid example of bad regulations setting fire to the omnishambles.
If what you put up on that billboard is an ad, then it's advertising and would be covered. If not, it wouldn't. So you could rent a spot on the website, but you couldn't put promotions on it.
This would be distinct from ordinary web hosting because you're not just renting a space on a site, you're also renting exposure (a spot on some other website).
Sure, you could probably find edge cases - "what if I put a table of contents on my page with every page URL on every site on my web host on it" - but the distinction would be clear most of the time.
If they just banned infinite scrolling someone would come up with something equivalent that works slightly differently. Now they need a whole new law. It’s just constant whack-a-mole.
So instead they seem to ban goals. Your thing accomplishes that goal? It’s banned.
It’s a pretty different way than how we seem to do things in the US. But I can see upsides.
You don't, but the EU doesn't need to care about American ideas of free speech. This is actually in some sense the biggest hurdle to all of this, the psychologically defensive posture that somehow assumes that on European territory this should even be a concern. Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. This unfettered, deregulated commercial environment is even in the US a creature of the last ~40-50 years, and those unchained companies, not unironically, then went on to convince everyone to defend that state of affairs given each opportunity.
At the core of the first amendment is the idea that people should not be punished for criticizing their government. I think that idea is worth preserving. But the idea that people are free to say anything they choose, in any context, regardless of its factual status, and also that their permission to do so is limited only by the resources they can muster to promulgate their speech, is an unwarranted extension of that concept.
The cold hard reality is that no matter how much you trust the people in the government today, eventually they will be replaced by people you consider to be the scum of the earth. And when that day comes, you will curse the day you allowed the government to punish speech, because you'll see speech you consider perfectly justified become illegal.
There is no way of listing rights on paper that can protect you if truly evil people get into power. But there are ways of listing rights on paper that can allow good people who believe in those rights to defend them in ways that involve preventing evil people from getting into power. Free speech is not a magic bullet in either direction.
Those of us who dislike these practices already have a choice. We can simply not use the service. So why remove that choice from others who don't mind ads and are willing to use the free version?
Also, forcing a paid only model raises the barrier to entry. Most of the world lives on less than $10 a day, so a subscription would effectively limit access to relatively wealthy people by global standards.
Are you going to put up a “Great Firewall of America” to keep non US sites advertising sites from being seen by US citizens? Are you going to stop podcasts from advertising?
Using an ad-blocker gets rid of most visible ads online, but there's still paid content in various forms which may be more effective than straight adverts anyway.
Today, on June 1st 2030, I'd like to announce the launch of the fediverse cooperative, the first cooperative social media platform.
We pay out all our membership fees (minus hosting costs) to our entire cooperative.
To use our servers, you'll obviously have to become member of our cooperative, paying $100 a month in membership fees, and earning $99.50 a month in dividends.
"It's the primordial domino tile."
FWIW, I believe this is correct
However when using the term "banning" this needs to be placed in context; advertising might be "banned" only in certain circumstances.. Mind you, advertising has been banned whole cloth from computer networks in the past. It is still banned on many computer networks.^1 Before the internet (an interconnected network of computer networks) opened to the public there was a rule, i.e., policy, against advertising
A better term than "banning" might be simply "regulating". Online advertising is not regulated in the same way that advertising is regulated on billboards, in print publications, radio or television. For example, regulating the time (electoral campaigns), place (billboards), subject matter (cigarettes)
Whenever this topic comes up on HN, it draws inane replies about people being unable to distinguish advertising from anything else
But there is zero evidence to support this theory in practice. Everyone knows what advertising is, and how to identify it. That's why and how people are capable of complaining about it
Even this forum, Hacker News, places limits on advertising. YC may promote its participating companies but others are generally not permitted to advertise. Submissions that are deemed to be ads are killed. If advertising was undefinable, then how is HN able to define it
If advertising was impossible to define then how could anyone design a so-called "ad blocker"
1. If advertising were undefinable then why would any computer network have a "Network Use Policy" that prohibited using the network for disseminting advertising
The suggestion that advertising is undefinable, that either everything is advertising or nothing is advertising, is pure nonsense
It's only when the subject of tampering with the sole "business model" of the so-called "tech" company having nothing else to sell, or the means of substinence for the low quality website operator republishing public information in pages crammed full of ads and tracking, that HN commenters try to argue that advertising is beyond definition
A large percentage of internet users, perhaps a majority, have never experienced the internet without ads. Hence it may be difficult for these people to understand the place of advertising on a computer network. Let's be clear, originally, there was _no place for it_
Some people alive today did experience the internet without ads. Sadly, many of them are now engaged in providing internet advertising services for financial gain. Others are not. I'm in the later category
Some of the loudest voices defending internet advertising will be people in the former category. They have cashed in at every internet user's expense
In a sense, I'm just agreeing with a fellow comment in the vicinity of this thread that said GDPR is already the EU's shot at banning (targeted) ads---it's just implemented piss-poorly. Personally formulated, my sentiment is that GDPR as it stands today is a step in the right direction towards scaling back advertisement overreach but we have a long way to go still.
Ofc it's impossible to blanket ban targeted ads because at best you end up in a philosophical argument about what counts as "targeting", at worse you either (a) indiscriminately kill a whole industry with a lot of collateral casualties or (b) just make internet advertising even worse for all of us.
My position here is that ads can be fine if they
1. are even somewhat relevant to me.
2. didn't harvest user data to target me.
3. are not annoyingly placed.
4. are not malware vectors/do not hijack your experience with dark patterns when you do click them.
To be super clear on the kind of guy talking from his soapbox here: I only browse YT on a browser with ad blockers but I don't mind sponsor segments in the videos I watch. They're a small annoyance but IMO trying to skip them is already a bigger annoyance hence why I don't even bother at all. That said, I've never converted from eyeball to even customer from sponsor segments.
I'd call this the "pre-algorithmic" advertising approach. It's how your eyeballs crossed ads in the 90s and IMO if we can impose this approach/model in the internet, then we can strike a good balance of having corporations make money off the internet and keeping the internet healthy.
I want to be able to browse the internet for free, where the sites have a sustainable business model and can therefore make high-quality content, but I don't want to have to sign up to a subscription for everything.
I want to be able to host websites that get lots of views, but I don't want that popularity to cost me.
Can someone please come up with something that solves all of these dilemmas for me?
Let's be clear what we mean by "evil". My time is valuable. I have a finite number of heartbeats before I die. If I have to spend 30 seconds watching a damn soap commercial before I get to watch a Twitch stream, that's 36 heartbeats I will never get back. Sure, I could press mute and do something else for 30 seconds that seems more valuable, but that doesn't fit my schedule. Stealing heartbeats is evil.
I have so far optimized against wasting my heartbeats by paying subscriptions to remove ads. Spotify, Twitch, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, and a bunch of others I'm forgetting. Because it's worth $150/month or whatever to not waste my time with the most boring, uninteresting, irrelevant, nauseating crap that advertisers come up with.
And thank science for SponsorBlock, because sponsored segments in videos are the devil. Sponsored segments use the old non-tracking advertisement model. They pay publishers practically nothing because they aren't paying for conversions, but for an estimate based on impressions and track record woo. Bad for publishers, bad for advertisers, and bad for content consumers. Everybody loses. I'm well over my lifetime quota of BS from VPNs, MOBAs, and plots of land scams. So many heartbeats lost.
I’m totally fine with outlining targeted advertising. But even classic broadcast stuff poses the dilemma for me.
I have absolutely noticed I miss out some. As an easy example I don’t tend to know about new TV shows or movies that I might like the way I used to. There’s never that serendipity where you were watching the show and all of a sudden a trailer from a movie comes on and you say “What is THAT? I’ve got to see that.”
Maybe some restaurant I like is moving into the area. Maybe some product I used to like is now back on the market. It really can be useful.
Sure the information is still out there and I could seek it out, but I don’t.
On the other hand I do not miss being assaulted with pharmaceutical ads, scam products, junk food ads, whatever the latest McDonald’s toy is, my local car dealerships yelling at me, and so much other trash.
I’ve never figured out how someone could draw a line to allow the useful parts of advertising without the bad parts.
“You’re only allowed to show a picture of your product, say its name, and a five word description of what it’s for”.
Nothing like that is gonna be workable.
Such a hard problem.
But we can build a culture that knows how to avoid ads and the technology to enable it.
You know, we used to have Flash games that were free to play and ad supported.
With the iPhone, those died, and now we have mobile games that support themselves with microtransactions.
The method of collecting fees on the games was to lower their quality, not to raise it.
People would also be better of without 90% of the ad-driven internet.
This. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
I don’t know how we’d ban advertising without impinging on free speech laws in the USA, where a lot of huge companies reside.
How would you do it?
Make a lot of noise about privacy, force massive spend in the general direction of the EU, fund a new layer of bureaucracy, and actually do nothing to harm the toxic business models that were nominally the impetus for all this. Because someone’s gotta pay for all this new “privacy” infrastructure…
European companies know this pattern, and tend to get the hint. US companies tend to try and maximize what they can get while claiming there is no law against it, then go very pikachu-faced when the consequences hit them.
Is there a law against it?
There's a strong hint that something's wrong, and that good corporate citizens would change course and try to become positive forces for the world.
Or else.
This is not such an unusual thing in law, as much as us stem-brained people want legal systems to work like code. The most famous example is determining art vs pornography - "I know it when I see it" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it)
> as much as us stem-brained people want legal systems to work like code
I see this a lot on HN, and it makes sense to think like this if you're a programmer. It's also a sign these programmers should open up their world view a bit more.
Not, at least, until our machine overlords arrive.
The issue is: If you do a precise wording of what you don't want a lawyer will go through it wird by word and the company finds a way to build something which violated the spirit, but not the exact wording. By being more generic in the wording they can reach such cases and future development with very little oversight for later corrections and courts can interpret the intention and current state of art.
There are areas where law has to be precise (calculation of tax, criteria for criminal offenses, permissions for authorities, ...), but in many cases good laws are just as precise as needed and as flexible as possible.
Most European countries, and the EU as a legislative body, work with the premise of the spirit of the law. It is less precise and requires real world judgment to determine its boundaries but it can be much harder to side-step with technicalities and "gotchas" using loopholes in the letter of the law.
It's just a different system, in my opinion it's less exploitable even though it's riskier. I prefer the spirit of the law to be defended instead of a whole system of gaming technicalities, really don't like the whole vibe of playing Munchkin the USA has in its legal system. Makes some good legal drama though.
But yet again we can’t do anything about it because it would interfere with the freedoms of corporations, effectively. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46870147
When rules are vague enough you can pretty much always find a rule someone is 'breaking' depending on how you argue it.
It's why countries don't just have a single law that says "don't be evil".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent>
The equivalent doctrine under a civil legal system (most of mainland Europe) is jurisprudence constante, in which "if a court has adjudicated a consistent line of cases that arrive at the same holdings using sound reasoning, then the previous decisions are highly persuasive but not controlling on issues of law" (from above Wikipedia link). See:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisprudence_constante>
Interestingly, neither the principle of Judicial Review (in which laws may be voided by US courts) or stare decisis are grounded in either the US Constitution or specific legislation. The first emerged from Marbury v. Madison (1803), heard by the US Supreme Court (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison>), and the second is simply grounded in legal tradition, though dating to the British legal system. Both could be voided, possibly through legislation, definitely by Constitutional amendment. Or through further legal decisions by the courts themselves.
Also it breaks the trias politica in my opinion. Case in point: the way the Supreme Court plays politics in the US. It shouldn't really matter what judge you pick, their job is to apply the law. But it matters one hell of a lot in the US and they've basically become legislators.
This is different, it is intentionally ambiguous precisely so bureaucrats get to choose winners and losers instead of consumers.
I'm not saying legislation is a good solution but you seem to be making a poetic plea that benefits the abusers.
Only if you believe everyone else has no agency of their own. I think most people outgrow these things once they have something more interesting in their lives. Or once they're just bored.
Back when this thing was new, everyone was posting pictures of every food item they try, every place they've been to etc.. that seems to slowly change to now where there are a lot more passive consumers compared to a few polished producers.
If you're calling people delivering the content "abusers", what would you call people creating the content for the same machine?
But I do believe we overestimate our own agency. Or more importantly society is often structured on the assumption that we have more agency then we actually do.
Setting up the argument between agency/no agency misses the point IMO.
And companies should not be allowed to predate on the vulnerable.
The food industry has pretty much invented the whole process of making "addictive" products and then "test[ing] out recipes on the public to make it even more addictive". Of course, we usually call it making products that taste good, and running taste panels with the public for product development (making a new tasty thing), quality control (ensuring the tasty thing stays tasty), and market research (discovering even tastier things to make in the future). Each part of it employs all kinds of specialists (and yes, those too - nutrition psychology is a thing).
The process is the same. The difference between "optimized for taste" and "addictive" isn't exactly clear-cut, at least not until someone starts adding heroin to the product (and of the two, it's not the software industry that's been routinely accused of it just for being too good at this job).
Not defending social media here in any way. Cause and effect is known these days, and in digital everything is faster and more pronounced. And ironically, I don't even agree with GP either! I think that individuals have much less agency than GP would like it, and at the same time, that social media is not some uniquely evil and uniquely strong way to abuse people, but closer to new superstimulus we're only starting to develop social immunity to.
So what we have is a machine designed to optimise for something adjacent to addictiveness, and then some rules saying "you can't design for addictiveness"...
What happens when an underspecified vibe rule clashes with a billion dollar optimisation machine? Surely the machine wins every time? The machine is already defeating every ruleset that it's ever come up against.
Feels like the only way regulation could achieve anything is if it said "you can't build a billion dollar optimisation machine at all".
If this law passes and they "blacklist" some of these design-for-addiction (sorry, "engagement") platforms, I believe it should send a strong signal for adults as well. Most adults are pretty much aware that these platforms are bad for everyone; according to some polls, the public opinion is unambiguously in favor of these laws.
There is obviously a lot of detail to work out here-- which specific question do you ask users, who administers the survey, what function do you use scale the fines, etc. But this would force the companies to pay for the addiction externality without prescribing any specific feature changes they'd need to make.
Specifying the requirement in terms of measured impact is a good strategy because it motivates the app companies to do the research and find effective ways to address addiction, not just replace specific addictive UI patterns with different addictive UI patterns.
Building measurement into the law also produces a metric for how well the law is working and helps inform improvements to the law.
You can't. You don't need to specify how to comply with the law, just that generally a goal must be met. That's good lawmaking there, since it's flexible enough to catch all future potential creatives way to break it. I remember someone comment about how working at MSFT as a compliance officer, dude was going around saying that it's not the letter of the law that must be followed, but the spirit of thereof. They rolled over him and released the product nonetheless. Almost immediately came the EU investigation and that crap had to be reversed an put in accordance to what the stated goal of the law is.
I'm recovering from a surgery and can't do much besides existing. So I'd like to scroll to keep me occupied and numb the pain in my face. But instagram tries to shove content down my throat that I don't want to see. It's always only a matter of time until I see THOT/incel content. No matter how often I click "not interested", they try again and again. If it's not playing genders out against each other, it's politics. It's brain rot. I don't wanna see that. I have interests and they know what they are. But no, they show me this garbage. The algorithms need to be the second thing we need to regulate imho
They haven't nailed it every time, but on the whole it's a good approach. It's hard on companies, but rightly so.
This doesn't solve the problem though - the enforcers still have to come up with a standard that they will enforce. A line has to be drawn, letting people move the line around based on how they feel today doesn't help. Making the standard uncertain just creates opportunities for corruption and unfairness. I haven't read the actual EU stance on the matter but what you are describing is a reliable way to end up in a soup of bad policy. There needs to be specific rulings on what people can and can't do.
If you can't identify the problem, then you aren't in a position to solve it. Applies to most things. Regulation by vibe-checks is a great way to kill off growth and change - which the EU might think is clever, but the experience over the last few centuries has been that growth and change generally make things better.
And what they actually seem to be doing here is demanding that sites spy on their users and understand their browsing habits which does seem like a terrible approach. I don't see how their demands in that statement align with the idea of the EU promoting digital privacy.
A very common tension in law everywhere.
In the US you now have a 'major questions doctrine'. What the hell is a major question?
An example of this is contract law. There is no clear definition of what a legal contract must look like. Instead, a contract's validity can depend on whether an average, prudent person would have entered into it in similar circumstances.
The EU, in general, phrases laws and regulations more in terms of what they want to accomplish with them than in terms of what you can’t do.
In contrast, common law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law), over time, more or less collects a list of all things you may not do.
These findings are very much in line with that, they bring up a feature, a checkbox, a specific thing TikTok did to pay lip-service to protect minors, and then they're simply saying that it doesn't appear to work. So it doesn't matter that TikTok checked the box and crossed the t.
[1] Eg: printables.com (for open source, 3D print files)
Although there is a special place in hell for those who put a website options for customer care at the bottom of an infinite scrolling page...
That's exactly why you don't write legislation to ban infinite scroll but 'addictive' design. Then it's ultimately up to the courts to decide, and they have the necessary leeway to judge that journalctl -f isn't addictive but TikTok is, even if they both use a version of infinite scroll.
i do get the idea though. abusive infinate scroll games/exploits, the compulsion to "finish" the feed.
If a company chooses a design and it can be proved through a subpoena of their communications that the design was intended and chosen for its addictive traits, even if there has been no evidence collected for the addictiveness, then the company (or person) can be deemed to have created a design in bad faith to society and penalized for it.
(Well that's my attempt. I tried to apply "innocent until proven guilty" here.)
“You know it when you see it.”
No more for profit nets. Time for civil digital infrastructure.
Only allowing algorithmic feeds/recommendations on dedicated subpages to which the user has to navigate, and which are not allowed to integrate viewing the content would be an excellent start IMO.
That actually makes me think that any page containing addictive design elements should, similar to cigarette warning, carry a blinking, geocities style, header or footer with "WARNING: Ophthalmologist General and Narcologist General warn about dangers of addictive elements on this page".
3 hrs a day on your phone is equivalent to 15 years of your life (accounting for a 16 hour waking day). I know people that do a solid 6... That's 30 years of their life scrolling, getting their brains completely fried by social media, and soon the infinite jest machine that is generative AI.
Sorry, we don't let people fry their brains with drugs, well we at least try to introduce some societal friction in between users and the act of obtaining said drug.
Point being, the internet is the clutchable pearl de jour for easy political points. There's far more proven addictions and harm elsewhere, but those problems are boring and trodden and don't give a dopamine hit to regulate quite like the rancor that proposals like this drum up. Hey, aren't dopamine hits what they're trying to mediate in the first place?
Not necessarily. The consequences of a few bad micro-niche ones would be, well, micro.
If the EU passes a law that seems general but start giving out specific examples ahead of time, they’re outlawing those specific examples. That’s how they work, even if you read the law closely and comply with the letter of the law. And they’ll take a percentage of your global revenue while people shout “malicious compliance” in the virtual streets if they don’t get their way.
Expand the GDPR "Right to data portability" to publicly published content for third parties, i.e. open up the protocols so you can have third party clients that themselves can decide how they want to present the data. And add a realtime requirement, since at the moment companies still circumvent the original rule with a "only once every 30 days" limit.
Also add an <advertisment> HTML tag and HTTP header and force companies to declare all their ads in a proper machine readable way.
The core problem with addictive design isn't the addictive design itself, but that it's often the only way to even access the data. And when it comes to communication services that benefit from network effects, that should simply not be allowed.
That's not really accurate. The EU actually legislated in a way which is very typical of how countries regulate things which are now to carry hard to characterized and varied risks.
Companies have to carry out a risk assessment and take appropriate preventive actions when they find something. The EU audits the assessment. That's how finance has been regulated for ages.
It's all fairly standard I fear.
I'd make the algorithms transparent, then attack clearly unethical methods on a case by case basis. The big thing about facebook in the 2010's was how we weren't aware of how deep its tracking was. When revealed and delved into, it lead to GDRP.
I feel that's the only precision method of keeping thins ethical.
I still don't like that explanation at all. They imply that infinite scrolling is a sign of addictive design. How do they reach this conclusion? I can think of other ways that don't necessitate an addictive design. Some art form for instance. It may not be your cup of tea but that is art in general. I just don't see the logical connection.
Not that I am against taxing these greedy and evil US corporations. But that argument by the EU is simply not sound.
> Regardless of your take around whether this is EU overreach, I'm glad they're not implementing strict laws around what you can/can't do - there are valuable situations for these UI patterns, even if in combination they can create addictive experiences.
But why would you be in favour then? Does this make sense?
> but the regulated friction of major platforms (ie discord w/ ID laws) is on a collision course
This will happen anyway. Trump and his TechBros leverage the US corporations for their wars. You only need to listen to Vance, or Rubio doing his latest dance. Sadly the european politicians are also too weak to do anything other than talk big.
These laws are harsh... but, as much as I hate to say it, the impact social media has had on the world has been worse.
Laws are supposed to be just that — predictable, enforceable, and obeyable rules, like the laws of physics or biology.
Bad laws are vague and subjective. It may be impossible to remove all ambiguity, but lawmakers should strive to create clear and consistent laws for their citizens.
Else it is not a nation of laws, but a domain of dictators.
No you don't have to have a cookie banner. The law means you need to ask for informed consent for each purpose where you collect and or transfer personal data from your users. So (1) if you don't collect the data, you don't have to ask for consent at all and (2) it doesn't matter too much if cookies are involved (or you use some other client side storage for tracking) and (3) you need to have their informed consent, meaning just having them click OK somewhere is absolutely useless unless you explained which data you collect for what purpose. Good luck doing that for your 300+ "partners".
The ad industry and self-declared SEO experts have displayed an astounding inability to read the text of the law and follow its spirit. One could argue, probably on purpose. The same will happen here. This is clearly about giving users an way to sue against addictive designs and giving the EU a lever to protrct consumers from particularily bad actors. Now anybody who still profits from using these dark patterns will try to make it about one thing "infinite scroll verboten" and then proceed to violate the spirit of the law.
Like most famous EU laws, this is not a law for people. Like the Banking regulations, the DMA, the GPDR, the AI act, this law cannot be used by individuals to achieve their rights against companies and certainly not against EU states, who have repeatedly shown willingness to use AI against individuals, including face recognition (which gets a lot of negative attention and strict rules in the AI act, and EU member states get to ignore both directly, and they get to allow companies to ignore the rules), violate GPDR against their own citizens (e.g. use medical data in divorce cases, or even tax debt collection, and they let private companies ignore the rules for government purposes (e.g. hospitals can be forced report if you paid for treatment rather than pay alimony, rather than pay your back taxes)). The first application of the GPDR was to remove links about Barrosso's personal history from Google.
These laws can only be used by the EU commission against specific companies. Here's how the process works: someone "files a complaint", which is an email to the EU commission (not a complaint in the legal sense, no involvement of prosecutors, or judges, or any part of the justice system of any member state at all). Then an EU commissioner starts a negotiation process and rules on the case, usually imposing billions of euros in fines or providing publicly-backed loans (in the case of banks). The vast, vast, vast majority of these complaints are ignored or "settled in love" (French legal term: the idea is that some commission bureaucrat contacts the company and "arranges things", never involving any kind of enforcement mechanism). Then they become chairman of Goldman Sachs (oops, that just happened once, giving Goldman Sachs it's first communist chairman, yes really. In case you're wondering: Barrosso), or join Uber's and Salesforce's executive teams, paid through Panama paper companies.
In other words: these laws are not at all about addictive design, and saving you from it, they're about going after specific companies for political means. Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, ...
Ironically the EU is doing exactly what Trump did with tariffs. It's just that Trump is using a sawed-off shotgun where the EU commission is using a scalpel.
Addictive designs and social media have changed a lot in the last 10 years, for one. But more importantly, there's no statute of limitation on making laws.
The US doesn't have any soft power any more.
Of course the GDPR gives individuals rights, counter example:
> The first application of the GPDR was to remove links about Barrosso's personal history from Google.
The fact that all of these companies aren't European certainly doesn't help, but if you think this and GDPR, DMA etc. are purely schemes to milk foreign companies then you've been drinking way too much cynicism juice.
In the UK at least, the GDPR was incorporated into UK law (where it remains, essentially unmodified, even after Brexit). So it is certainly not necessary to get the EU commission involved to enforce the law. In the UK, the ICO is the relevant regulator. There are other national regulators that enforce the GDPR, such as the French CNIL.
I think you are projecting values on entities that don't share those values. I don't think they'd have any problem destroying a pile of companies and not enabling replacements; they are not pro-business, and they have not shown a history of regulating in a fashion that's particularly designed to enable home-grown EU businesses. Predictability and consistency of enforcement are not their values, either. They don't seem to have any problem saying "act in what we think the spirit of the law is, and if you think you can just understand and follow the letter of it we'll hurt you until you stop".
The EU realized they can extort the US big tech. The EU will now just focus on laws and taxing (the war in Ukraine isn't their problem). And frankly, we should just ignore EU laws in the US.
Companies that try to do business in the EU have to follow EU laws because the EU has something that can be used as leverage to make them comply. But if a US company doesn't have any EU presence, there's no need to obey EU laws.
Or abide by the laws, which truly isn't that difficult.
The fact that no one at Meta lets their own children use their platforms on its own justifies these laws a hundred times over.