Comment by phtrivier

Please, enlighten me how exactly is the EU not democratic.

I am very sure you have excellent arguments to support this claim.

This is a recurring Russian propaganda point, now amplified by the new US Administration. I am curious about the basis for this.

Could you explain further from your perspective how you came up with this conclusion?

>You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.

This is always a bit frustrating to me, in that, if someone doesn't like personal data collection, they likely have enough blocked that the attempts at targeted advertisements are likely to be very ineffective. And even in spaces where there is little personal data available, online advertising still seems to desperately cling to targeting rather than context.

I remember being struck by the contrast between the printed Times Literary Supplement, with advertisements for new book releases, conferences, cultural events, and so on, which all seem quite relevant to the audience, are often enjoyable and informative, and have directly motivated me to buy things, and the automated advertisements that were added to their podcast, for things like... a football-themed advertisement for a car dealership vaguely located near some rough geolocation of my IP address.

> You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.

This is a lie that has been perpetuated for a very long time.

1. There's no definite proof they are much less effective

2. Even if they are less effective, is it a bad trade-off when weighed against life-long pervasive and invasive tracking?

Extortion is a stretch. Nobody is being forced to use these services.

but only in the context of the DMA (since facebook is a giant). this rule does not apply for smaller sites (like most news outlets)

Except for newspapers

Whack. Let consumers and sellers decide what to do with their own data

Not Meta specifically, although Meta as a monopoly on being apple to infrige this rule. (A long time ago, in a capitalism far, far way, America was against monopolies and cartels. Those days will come back.)

> The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles

What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ?

I can agree on some version of "not a neutral law" in that it is "objectively" targeted: the law makes a difference between smaller actors and bigger ones ("gatekeepers") (and it's not clear to me if the criterias (size, audience, revenues, etc...) are set in store, or arbitrary [1]).

It happens that they're all from the US except TikTok's ByteDance and Booking.com. It was probably _designed_ for that.

But I suspect the case here "Meta is offering you to pay, so that they don't have to respect your rights to privacy". I suspect it would be illegal for even the smaller data collectors. But IANAL.

However, the "neutral principles" don't make sense. All laws are principled, except the laws of physics.

In this case, yes, the "principle" is that personal data is something to be treated with care. As often, you can state that something is a "principle" when someone can have the opposite version. So the "opposite" version of this is that personal data is a commodity that can be sold at will.

None of those version is neutrally "true" or "false".

However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter.

The shame is that it never was directly settled in a democratic debate - it's entirely the work of the legislative bodies of the EU, which, though elected and representative, are not exactly well know of famous. Maybe the debate is too technical to be popular.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...

[2] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en#book...

No. The EU subsidizes electric vehicles. Not the same thing.