Lots of comments in this thread that are splitting the details. Which , fine. The underlying issue that is being broadly gestured to is consumer protection vs. corporate protections - or even more broadly just the double standards of rights for organizations vs. people ; look at the LLM piracy that occurred vs. individuals that get caught pirating. Look at the harm against children fee that meta is paying vs what happens to individuals that harm children. With consolidation of power/money consumer choice goes down and with consolidation of wealth corruption goes up leading to less choice w/less protections.

I certainly agree that more options will help - but, I would love to see a more federate / user powered, owned option take YouTube’s place not just Youtube #2. it feels like a centralized option will just corrupt over time no matter the intentions and we will just be repeating the same mistakes but perhaps the economics of Video hosting / streaming at scale require something like this … I am not sure how the economics of something like peer tube scale but I would love to see us all learn from our mistake and not just make it again. But … maybe I am just idealistic and not grounded in reality.

Yeah , I love a good ad blocker / sponsor block / privacy frontend but they all feel like duck tape on a sinking boat. At some point we have to move away from these centralized platforms but the enshitification hasn’t outweighed the lion’s share of content / creators on these platforms to a tipping point for the majority. Ad blocks let you mitigate the enshitification so you can stay on these platforms longer - in many cases this is required so not knocking it, I do it as well. My hope is that as these companies continue to go after ad blocks users will finally jump ship in mass as they are forced to confront the lovecraftian nightmare that is any of these platforms without an ad block.

Glad to hear it. But fines like this are just a cost of business for them and for every big company. A fine only hurts if it turns the profit negative. It has to bite enough that breaking the law costs more than not getting caught. Or someone goes to jail. They made more than $942 million by gambling with kids’ safety. The leaders likely read the ruling and did the math and would make the same decisions again and just try harder to get away with it. Getting caught harming children ( not just children ) at scale should result in a company no longer existing. It doesn’t.

My one hope with all this nonsense is that it will drive people away from centeralized products and toward more open , democratized options ( and that those options will remain excluded from these laws. )… but the world doesn’t normally go the way that I want.

Cool!! i was literally just thinking about this as part of my effort to be more analogue. I will follow this hungrily.

Maybe these type of things will finally push people away from these platforms and toward more open / non-centeralized platforms.