“In case a gatekeeper does not comply with the obligations laid out in the DMA, the Commission can impose fines up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide turnover, which can go up to 20% in case of repeated infringement.”
Meta’s global revenue last year was $134 billion. It would have to be a historic fine to even make a dent. I’m not hopeful. This will be another “cost of doing business” situation.
They haven’t gotten that fine yet and $13 billion out of $134 billion is absolutely a “cost of doing business” fine. If they still make massive profits at the end of the year, they haven’t been hurt.
Corporations have to be punished and they rarely are.
No, a million is cost of doing business. Once you get into single digit percentage fines, you’re hurting them. Or do you expect shareholders to say, “ah, that’s fine, that’s just the EU, we’re gonna hold Meta stock because we like them”?
Another thing to consider is that it’s also about how many of those fines can the company absorb. Fine them a million? They can take a thousand of those before it even starts making a dent. But how many of the 1% fines can they take? 5? 10? 20?
Why would you want that? Do you seriously want to bankrupt a company for a single mistake? Not sure that’s the world I want to live in. Once this cat’s out of the bag, it’s hard to put back.
I agree, they haven’t got that fine, never mind actually paid it. But it would be about a third of their profits, not exactly negligible, and it could double for repeated offences.
Imagine you making $100K last year doing some shady business. You got caught and convicted in federal court, your punishment is $10K fine, and that’s it. You’re free to change your tactics and make sure you don’t get caught next time.
It’s a little bit stink, but it’s the best you could asked for.
13 billions to Meta may not be a slap on the wrist, but more like 5 spanks and 15 minutes timeout.
Imagine your “shady stuff” is not putting money into the parking meter because you are lazy. You get hit with a 10k fine. You then fix that and start putting money into the parking meter. Because ultimately it cost you less to fix it, than pay the fine. That’s the language corporations understand.
Let’s hope they get fined and it sets a precedent. That crap of" pay or consent" it’s becoming the norm in every site I visit. That’s not a free choice. I’m forced to consent if I don’t want to pay, so it should be a flawed consent.
European law generally isn’t precedent-based, but the commission already put out a statement saying that “pay-or-okay” models are not GDPR compliant. edpb.europa.eu/…/edpb_opinion_202408_consentorpay…
I disagree, no one is by law obligated to provide free services for you. Either pay or have ads is fine by me.
And DMA does not care about your local newspaper site, unless they’re so big that they’re a gatekeeper. Ruling based on DMA does not affect anyone but the gatekeepers.
It’s not about having free services but flawed consent. I can’t give you my consent if it’s either pay or accept tracking tracking. That’s not a free consent, and that’s what’s being ruled here. Give me a paywall, I’m fine with it. But don’t you go saying you’re giving me a free choice when it’s either pay or screw your privacy. That’s not consent, that’s extortion.
That’s a choice, my choice is to back away or use an anonymous window and accept the tracking if I really want to see the content.
It’s just another paywall, it just gives you the option of paying with your data. It’s your choice what’s more valuable.
But I get it, people want choices shoved down their throats, they don’t want to actually choose. That’s why paywall is fine, but paywall with free-with-tracking-option is the big bad. No one forces you to give your consent, give it or don’t, it’s up to you.
You don’t want the choice to consent, you want to be angry at someone about something.
You don’t get it. The problem is that the consent is not free. I can’t give my consent to be tracked if the alternative is to pay a fee. It’s as simple as that. The consent must be given without flaws, I can’t be forced to accept the tracking, because then it’s not a consent. You should stop shilling for corpos.
You’re not forced. And I’m not shilling anyone, for all I care Meta can collapse, I don’t use any of their products because of their tracking. See, I made my choice, you want to push your choice onto others, big difference.
Pay or have ads is fine by the EU’s DMA law too. What isn’t fine is the collection of user data without consent. Facebook can show all the ads they want, but if they collect user data to target those ads they need consent.
Think about radio or TV advertising - those aren’t targeted at specific people, but rather they’re targeted based on what channel, time of day and TV shows that they’re around. Meta can do the same stuff, but they just don’t want to give up that lucrative user data.
I obviously meant ads that track you, didn’t know I have to spell it out. So to clarify, I was talking about the tracking kind of ads which need user consent. My point was that giving consent or paying is fine in my book, because you have a choice and no one is entitled to a free service. And that even if DMA decides it’s not, it doesn’t concern anyone but a few select companies.
To be fair, I’m like 80% sure it was perfectly clear in the original comment as well.
I was making the point that ad-supported services have been financially viable for centuries without needing to invade personal privacy, and that governments have been regulating industries for even longer - and at this point, your personal choice doesn’t really matter. You might be perfectly happy to eat food cooked in an unhygienic kitchen, for example, but enough people have been harmed in the past for food hygiene regulations to be commonplace worldwide.
There are literally two albums that I love that I can’t find on Bandcamp or piracy, but they are literally the only thing keeping my Spotify subscription alive right now.
I think I’m just going to have to stream them into my DAW and do a poor man’s rip, then cancel this shit ass.
No, development is still stalled. You need to pay if you want the really high bit rate flac downloads. I pay and can use Deezer as a backup to Jellyfin in the event there’s a song I don’t have and I’m driving. I was looking at music fab, but it’s expensive, the Spotify downloader has worse quality, and doesn’t grab the cover art, which is probably a deal breaker for me.
They are on the internet, but only streaming on the Big Bads. If you can find me a hookup I will be forever grateful.
The first Album, and the toughest case is an album by a band called Porter from Guadalajara. I have all of their albums except for my very favorite, Las Batallas.
The second album really should be on Bandcamp, and probably will eventually, since the band has a page there. It’s the most recent and self-titled release from an awesome little band called Mo Lowda and The Humble.
All else aside, I highly recommend these bands to anyone who likes good rock music. Both albums are no-skip for me but two standout tracks for each: for Las Batallas you have got to check out “Himno Eterno” and “Hombre Maquina”. For Mo Lowda, “O.O.Y.O” and “Dog At The Pound”
The irony of these being the two I haven’t been able to add to my Plex library is that these are probably the two most prominently featured albums on Spotify Wrapped last year.
Amazing! Thank you so much. I said F you to Spotify earlier this afternoon with the help of you and another Lemmy user. I hope I can help someone else as much as you’ve helped me.
Going overseas makes so many albums disappear due to “muh licensing” and “technology and convience stinks” (cough japan)
So many musics are not available beyond catching limited sales and/or physical only.
Newer stuff isnt as bad but the <2010s are often pretty hard to find.
No kidding. Consider the possibility that this was the first avenue I pursued and was nevertheless stymied in my efforts.
One of the bands only sells vinyl outside of Spotify (I have the record on Vinyl, but the process of digitizing it is similar to recording straight from Spotify but harder), and the other band is based in Mexico and doesn’t have a digital marketplace. In both cases I’ve literally emailed the bands offering to overpay for raw digital files but haven’t heard back yet. I am seriously considering flying to Guadalajara to catch them live and pick up a CD there. They don’t really tour in the US north of Texas.
That does seem like a pickle. There is a band that is (well, WAS) LOCAL to me and I still couldn’t get digital files. I was bitching about on reddit a while back, and I got a DM from someone who sent me an email with the files. They’re in 320mp3, but better than what I had before.
Good luck with that, and have fun in Guadalajara if you go!
Well you just hooked me up with the album I’d all but given up on, so thank you tremendously. Since I at least have the other album on Vinyl, I think I am going to pull the trigger and cancel my Spotify now. Now I don’t exactly need to go to Guadalajara, though I hope to see Porter live one day.
I know I will eventually. I also just really want to support them, and will buy a copy of all of their albums whenever I am able to. I don’t even speak spanish but their music just lights me up.
Thanks! I wrote off Tidal as an also-ran like a decade ago and haven’t heard of the others so these were not on my radar at all. I will check them out. I didn’t even know Tidal was still a thing!
They’re not stranded because the part of the capsule that isn’t working has multiple redundancy and is intended to burn up on reentry anyway.
Starliner is perfectly capable of leaving the ISS whenever they want, but they would be unable to continue collecting data on the thruster shutoff (again, because it would burn up in the atmosphere).
Except the “emergency capsule” is all of them, including Starliner. Because Starliner is perfectly capable of returning to earth safely.
Because every thruster that has shut down has hot fired okay, and the known helium leaks still leave enough margin to cover several multiples of the 5 hours or so of RCS operation that you need to get to landing.
Completely untrue. There are currently only 3 human-rated spacecraft docked to the ISS and none of them are set aside as some sort of emergency capsule. There’s no trickery here. The number of astronauts on board is equal to the number of seats available for them to ride back home in. The only reason they aren’t stranded is because Starliner is still fully capable of undocking and taking them home whenever necessary. If it wasn’t, then they would actually be stranded with no alternative way back beyond straping them to the floor of Dragon.
I mean, Boeing hasn’t killed them in a fireball of death, hurtling at 18 thousand kph to the earth. The media has this totally wrong, for now. Everything is totally fine, at this time.
The people in every one of these Starliner threads seemingly hoping for the worst case scenario to occur just so they can dunk on Boeing for it are disturbing
It’s a weird moral grey zone. Everyone has forgotten the hundreds of people Boeing murdered as a result of their desire to skirt modern safety regulations. I just flew my family across the country yesterday on one of these end-stage-capitalism products for lack of any other option.
Were I to be ash this morning, I would be forgotten too.
But if astronauts were killed, maybe the outrage would finally be enough for all the greased palms to be sheepishly shoved in pockets just long enough to get justice, ground all those affronts to safety, and jail enough executives to maybe make Boeing stop being a global safety risk and a national security concern.
Lol. People want Boeing to fail, because they’re corrupt, lying, poorly engineered pieces of shit riding on bribed politicians. They’ve already deliberately caused the deaths of hundreds of people due to willful and deliberate negligence to save a buck.
Nobody’s wanting the astronauts to die. And they won’t, they’re safe on the space station, and there are multiple options to get them home safe even if they have to abandon the POS Starliner to do it.
I’m not talking about people who just want Boeing to fail, I’m talking about the ones who think the best path to changing things is if they publicly kill two astronauts. eg. See the “morally gray” comment below
They functionally do, at almost all points in time there are enough capsules docked to the station for all astronauts to be able to return to Earth. The starliner capsule is currently able to return if needed, they are having it stay up there a bit longer to check things out to better understand why the one thruster is bad.
It’s insane that false arrests had to be made before the law was changed considering that experts have been very clear about the potential dangers of relying on facial recognition alone.
The thing is, police and politicians don’t care about getting correct results, they only care about results. An innocent person convicted is still “case closed” and “another criminal punished.”
Politicians can be made to care by threatening their jobs, but the police still don’t give a shit about catching the right person as long as they can put somebody behind bars by any means possible.
I’m their view, the experts are part of the problem and should be ignored.
They’re not. The ship has 1 bad thruster, but need like a dozen to fail to make re-entry impossible. They could leave right now and everything would be just fine.
The thing is the module that’s malfunctioning doesn’t survive re-entry, so the only time to investigate the problem is before they head back.
There are 16 thrusters on the service module and they only need like 4. One is malfunctioning. They’re trying to diagnose the problem to fix it for next time since the service module burns up on reentry.
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