“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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
…ok we figured it out, now guys you’ll have to build a few things. First thing, you’ll have to go into the garbage disposal and using plastic bags please collect small bundles of poop. Mix the poop with hydrochloric acid and make them into hexagonal shapes 6” tall by 2" thick. Now we’ll need one of you to get the flu… Go find a vial left by the ruzzians. Don’t worry, we got the antidote down here. Okay next collect all the snot and mix it up with 10% gelatin. Finally, you’ll have to go outside and patch the heat shield using the gelatine as glue…
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
engadget.com
Hot