Comment by Fiveplus
15 hours ago
Anyone reading this purely as a child safety or campaign finance story might miss the broader architectural war happening here. If you zoom out a little, this is the inevitable, scorched-earth retaliation for Apple's ATT rollout from a few years back.
Apple cost Meta billions by cutting off their data pipeline at the OS level, justifying it with a unilateral privacy moral high ground. Now, Meta is returning the favor. By astroturfing the App Store Accountability Act through digital childhood alliance, Meta is forcing Apple to build, maintain and also bear the legal liability for a wildly complex state-by-state identity verification API.
Gotta give it to Zuck. Standing up a fully-fledged advocacy website 24 hours after domain registration and pushing a bill from a godaddy registration to a signed Utah law in just 77 days is terrifyingly efficient lobbying.
It's the US, all you have to do is drive a truckload of cash into Mar-A-Lago and you'll get whatever you want.
Arabella Advisors is about the farthest thing from MAGA you can imagine.
Sorry, who are they, and what is ATT in this context?
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>Gotta give it to Zuck.
if "it" is the middle finger, for sure. "terrifying" is a great choice of word for it.
I was equally impressed/terrified by Apple's marketing blitz around client-side-scanning. So many people got paid to advocate for that, and the community barely convinced them it was a bad idea. There's not much hope left for any of FAANG deliberately resisting surveillance.
Why would they resist surveillance? They're making massive profits from it.
I would hesitate with reading this and drawing any conclusions at all.
The methodology appears to be LLM driven, and the contextual framing which the conclusions are couched in, drive conclusions to a specific direction.
It does not clarify between two readings
1) Meta is driving Age verification efforts
2) Meta is being opportunistic with age verification efforts to further its own goals
The larger macro picture is that voters globally are tired of Tech firms and want something done about it.
The second macro trend is the inability of governments to handle/control tech, and are looking for reasons to bring tech to heel.
That’s context results in a sufficiently different degree of culpability and eventual path to resisting privacy reducing regulations.
Well, I certainly prefer if big tech fight each other instead of the user as sometimes there might even come something good out of it - like elevated privacy in Apple's ATT case.
Overall, that's the reason anti-trust laws must be applied rigorously, otherwise the normal population has no chance.
Sometimes something good (ATT). Sometimes something bad (this terrible age-verification thing that is a huge barrier to entry for small entrants and comes with massive state surveillance risk).
In the end, all the little people are just collateral damage or occasionally they get some collateral benefits from wherever the munitions land.
Personally I've lived in the world of "small entrants" and can see that but I think the average voter doesn't really understand that "just anybody" could have created an online service. That is, they think you have to have VC money, be based in Silicon Valley, have to have connections at tha pp store, that it's a right for "them" and not for "us".
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Idk the low road is generally the easier one.
Truly disgusting. Wish these corporations would find ways to screw each other over without also screwing over normal people.
That law is perhaps an annoyance for Apple, but it can't cost them billions, can it? I seriously doubt that it would cost Apple more than the several hundred million dollars Meta still needs to funnel in order to get those laws passed in more states.
Plus, Apple gets to be the gatekeeper for Meta and other apps which can't be good for meta, and Apple gets to know the age of its users, which in itself is monetizable.
> That law is perhaps an annoyance for Apple, but it can't cost them billions, can it?
The CEO has 24h in the day, and he/she is asked to be deposed (laws and legal system has that power), it chips away from grand visions. It isnt just money, you cant just stand up a team and be done with it. Everybody will be coming at you.
Expect to see a lot "Y alleges Apple didnt do enough to protect kids" and the burden of proof will be on Apple to make their executives available.
An offensive against Facebook is in order, then. If they're pushing war, then they shouldn't be surprised when they're targeted in turn.