this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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The year is 2023, every single major tech companies are racing each other to become Public Enemy No. 1. And the only Hero we have is the EU, will it be able to save the day?
Don't have too much faith in the EU. Corporations are still heavily influencing politics. They will probably come with half assed laws that have loopholes or workarounds.
Like GDPR?
/s
I don’t get the “/s”.
The #GDPR is absolutely a perfect example of ½-assed laws & loopholes. I have filed reports on dozens of GDPR violations; not a single one of them lead to enforcement. The GDPR is just a prop to make people feel comfortable as the EU destroys the offline infrastructure.
I did as well for the Catholic Church. I don't want to have my name associated with a gang of child molesters so I invoked the right to be forgotten. The church told me that baptism is sacred and cannot be undone. The Dutch institution for GDPR claims never did anything about it because they're overloaded with requests.
Oh well, I'm not willing to give it more energy either. It's mildly annoying but doesn't affect my day to day life.
Thinking about it, a lot of these companies created astounding products on a relatively unusual business model of delivering for free (not totally unheard of, tv for example but still not the most traditional way of doing business) and absorbed, cannibalized or destroyed a lot of other services and functions with their ubiquity and unbeatable price.
The way they say it was funded was through advertising, but nonetheless much of the big banner services remained unprofitable for years or even decades. Sometimes the master plan is to get everyone hooked (users and advertisers) and then when they have little choice anymore, start making things cost, a lot more. The trouble with this though is that none of them are the only one's doing it and even with only a handful of big titans controlling it all, there's still the risk of one of your tech bros stealing your lunch when your start trying to cash-in and piss of your users and your customers alike so really I guess all of them doing it at once kind of makes sense. Kind of a "I'll jump when you jump" mentality and at least one has jumped. I somewhat wonder if they all planned to go this route at around the same time together or if they all just concluded that the short term gain in market share by taking advantage of one of them jumping wasn't worth the risks from the intense competition and just decided to instead cash in at the same time.
Or I'm just rambling and have no business sense or idea what I'm talking about. It just seems that might explain why this all seems to be coming to some kind of a crescendo at about the same time.
Forcing this might very well be something EU opposes. While there is a lot of corporate lobbying, Google would be forcing everyone to either use chromium or make compatibility changes into other browser. While not a total monopoly, it still limits the options radically. Therefore there might be hope that EU forbids this type of action. Let's see...
It’s bizarre that you think the EU market it small enough to be dispensable. When GDPR came into force, many US sites had to reject EU traffic. But that was only temporary for the most part. They knew it wasn’t smart for business to exclude the EU so they got their compliance issues sorted.
I would love that actually. But it’s not reality. In reality what happens is the search engines deliver a shit-ton of unusable garbage results that I would rather not see. E.g. sites that block Tor users, CAPTCHAs, giant cookie popups, etc.
If a search engine were to filter out the garbage, it would be a great start to solving the shitty web problem.
Don't worry there are others than Google on the market also. If they want to make space for competition it's actually a good thing.
The EU has a larger population than the US, that's not a market you just leave. Also, Europe is not the same as the European Union.
We already can't due to Google's pushing of irrelevant promoted sites and failing to take meaningful action against SEO in recent years.
Hope you enjoy being laid off when your company eats itself to keep the growth going for just a little longer to please the capitalist parasites known as "shareholders". You can't much money from ads when the economy is utterly, utterly in the shitter like it is right now, not nearly as much as you used to. You really think that the average person has the financial leeway to buy luxury goods or pricier options shown in ads when the budget barely covers food, bills, rent and transport costs, and everything they do buy must be the cheapest thing they can get their hands on? Your company, and all other internet companies supported by ads, made a pact with the devil, and now he has come to collect his due. I will enjoy seeing you all go hard into the red.