While I truly hope something is done on the US side, I am much more hopeful that the EU will be able to arrive to such a solution in a reasonable time.
They would definitely be the most likely to lead the way.
Unfortunately for us, unlike with hardware requirements like USB-C, software restrictions likely wouldn’t cross the pond.
They still break new ground globally. The DMA/DSA has Japan follow the EU’s lead for example, and the more countries adopt better regulations, the more the US gets pressured to follow.
Wow - while I sympathize with their goals, this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet works. They need to restrict and govern corporate entities, not the Internet itself.
I haven’t read the book but as far as I gather they aren’t proposing to restrict the internet as it is, but rather make digital rights for consumers to be able to control and own the data that is given to third parties.
So Google for instance can’t say like “we’ll give you this for free but you have to give us your data”. Instead, you’d probably need to pay directly for Gmail for instance or Google would have to pay you for access to your data. Either option might be better than what we have today.
If you pay $1 for Gmail, and Google pays you $1 for your data, isn’t that equivalent to where we are today?
If you pay $1 for Gmail, and Google pays you $1 for your data, isn’t that equivalent to where we are today?
There’s the issue of consent
It’s either or, not both at the same time.
Wow, cool, even NBC is catching on to the Fediverse now?
… nope, it’s just another blockchain fueled social media system, the main use of which so far seems to be as a haven for QAnon types (according to Wikipedia,) rapidly burning up venture capital. Good luck to them, I guess.
I’m pretty skeptical about how much fundamental change is possible on this issue. So long as we give consumers a choice, the overwhelming evidence is that most people dgaf about their data, and are willing to trade it away.
This is a totally free exchange. Even when you plant the choice in front of users as an obnoxious and intrusive accept-cookies prompt, they’ll happily click Accept All even for sketchy websites (let alone something like Gmail). So you end up wasting everyone’s time for little benefit.
A common response to this is to mull heavy-handed centralized government controls, like how China regulates its internet giants. But this would be a decisive move away from the entire idea of a decentralized internet. People pushing such legislation often retort that it’s possible to pick off the internet giants while leaving smaller operators alone, but this seems like a forlorn hope. Google and Meta already signalled that they are not concerned about EU data laws, because they have so much internal data, and the regulations could even entrench their dominance by preventing other players from catching up.
