Comment by SllX
5 days ago
No. They just made it illegal for Meta specifically to do it, and they’re reserving judgment for anyone else on their hit list covered by the DMA. The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles despite the PR and the extra layers of indirection, it targets American and Chinese companies specifically because that’s what it was designed to do.
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...
> 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.)
I’ve been asking for years here and nobody has made a solid argument to me how Facebook has a monopoly in anything or how a social networking monopoly even could exist. It’s a competitive market out there. Some of their competitors are on the DMA’s hit list too.
> What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ?
Sure it does. A law against murder is a law applied to everyone. That’s a neutral law, and it’s not targeted, and it’s a fairly neutral principle to state that “murder is intolerable in our society”.
> 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 bad people doing bad things with extensive databases were European governments.
Antitrust doesn't mean monopoly, but monopoly is a part of antitrust. Monopoly also doesn't mean you're the only one, but you're the one capable of fixing prices, or doing something else anti competitive.
It's a complex thing in practice, don't take the linguistic definition of the word itself as the sole interpretation of the law.
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> I’ve been asking for years here and nobody has made a solid argument to me how Facebook has a monopoly in anything or how a social networking monopoly even could exist. It’s a competitive market out there. Some of their competitors are on the DMA’s hit list too.
This seems pretty convincing to me, given that Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp: [1]
> Facebook leads the pack with 3.04 billion users, maintaining its position as the most extensive social networking site globally. > YouTube follows with 2.5 billion users, reinforcing its status as the premier platform for video sharing and consumption. > WhatsApp and Instagram are tied in the third position, each with 2 billion users. WhatsApp is renowned for its messaging services, while Instagram is a favorite for photo and video sharing. > TikTok, with 1.5 billion users, rounds out the top five, showcasing its rapid rise as a leading platform for short-form video content.
In terms of social media, the only "competitor" at the same scale as facebook is tiktok and snap.
We might leave in the bubble that uses twitter, bluesky, reddit, etc... but their small relative to the blue site, for better or for worse.
Break up Meta into differents, apps, and suddenly the monopoly becomes much less obvious.
> and it’s a fairly neutral principle to state that “murder is intolerable in our society”.
Do you mean it's "neutral" because there is no "arbitrage" in deciding if someone is a murderer ?
Or that the principle behind it is universal ?
In this case, is it still "neutral" once your start talking about, say, self defense ? death penalty ? assisted suicide ? war times ? (or, if you're going to stretch it a lot, abortion ?) I'm not bringing it to say there is an equivalence, I'm saying you _will_ have people making the equivalence, and different people will disagree. It's called principles - no law say they have to be universal, and they're usually not.
[1] https://prioridata.com/data/social-media-usage/#Social_Media...
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> It happens that they're all from the US except TikTok's ByteDance and Booking.com. It was probably _designed_ for that.
Booking.com is owned by an American company.
> In the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases
Lack of databases didn't stop "people" from doing bad things. They built the databases, rather quickly, while they were doing bad things.
I find it bizarre that the response to trying to prevent the rise of another fascist European government was to avoid collecting data as if a populist fourth Reich wouldn't ignore the law and use neighbors to rat out neighbors again. Not that I believe for a second any European country doesn't keep far more extensive records on citizens than the Nazis did when they came to power.