The European Union’s Digital Markets Act is the gift that keeps on giving. This time, it’s Facebook’s turn to be slapped on the fingers with a ruler – a metric ruler, of course – because of its malicious compliance with the DMA.
Today, the Commission has informed Meta of its preliminary findings that its “pay or consent” advertising model fails to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). In the Commission’s preliminary view, this binary choice forces users to consent to the combination of their personal data and fails to provide them a less personalised but equivalent version of Meta’s social networks.
↫ European Commission press release
The European Commission’s preliminary conclusion takes issue with Facebook’s binary choice between “pay for zero ads” and “full-on tracking and all the ads”. According to the DMA, Facebook must offer users the option of an equivalent experience with less tracking, and the company doesn’t offer such an option to users. In addition, Facebook’s proposal does not allow users to “exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data”.
It’s important to note that this is not some sort of definitive ruling of finding; it’s preliminary, and Facebook now has the opportunity to state its case and formulate its arguments. If the eventual ruling is that Facebook does not comply, the company is liable for fines up to 10% of its yearly worldwide turnover, which can rise up to 20% for repeated infractions.
@Thom:
Did the Ladybird-article get lost?
It got deleted:
https://exquisite.social/@thomholwerda/112718003173758014
I still dont entirely understand it tbh.
While I understand the interpretation, there are better ways to make a commit/PR to something that was added 3 years ago than calling them a white supremacist which the bot auto-rejected.
Thanks, but what happened?
All I see in Thoms feed is a incoherent mess of posts.
there is this comment in the CONTRIBUTING.md
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/commit/6b32b775bfab60f4286ba49f96c3e7419d42062e
that is seen as a bit of a dog-whistle phrasing (I have no more information if its intentionally so or was intended as it says on the tin)
This commit to remove it was rejected with the commit comment of “Removed white supremacist language.” (by the bot) and marked as spam
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/pull/366/commits/101b5acb26a9b70d04238c4907b93d442a07d300
Thanks for the summary.
Looking at the “emilyCringe” account on github, she didn’t even bother to remove this offensive dog-whistle from her own fork of ladybird:
https://github.com/emilyCringe/ladybird/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
I don´t get any of this. The world is getting stranger with every day. Why is it a bad thing to keep politics and religion out of your open source software project? And even if Thom disagrees, why delete the article, he could have just added an edit or wrote an extra article stating his position.
@DigitalHippie I’ve worked places where you litterly Can’t talk politics. It was remarkably refreshing tbh. Especially when working across countries and continents and Especially during elections/referendum.
In this instance, I also understand that the wording can be seen as divisive. I’d actually quite like to see Thom explore this as a topic of open source that doesn’t get much limelight rather than remove it completely. (as might happen with this thread ofc!)
Sigh.
I agree that the Kling mishandled the [very minor] language change a contributor made…three years ago…. And I understand why some consider the prohibition on “ideologically motivated” changes misguided or insincere or whatever, since that policy itself is ideological.
But we’re going to write-off a promising project to do a good thing, and add it to the “popular projects @osnews refuses to report on” list (as Thom put it), because we don’t like how the project leader thinks about political and social issues? Or how he applies those thoughts to his project?
It’s not like he’s refusing to accept contributions from people he [might] have some prejudice against, as far as we know anyway. He just doesn’t want to accept changes that he interprets (rightly or wrongly) as being solely ideological. Sure, maybe that’s wrong. Maybe that’s an a**hole move. Maybe we disagree with his reasoning. But what a silly reason to write off the whole project, which may be co-led by Kling but is about a lot more than Kling.
Of course we’re all free to participate or not. And Thom is free to cover it or not. But we’re getting into a weird place as a society and community if we’re only going to pay attention to people we like and agree with…especially when we’re talking about cool tech projects, which can still be cool on their own merits even when we think the people who create and maintain them are deeply flawed.
In this particular case though…I mean, he used a generic masculine pronoun in some documentation. Sure, that’s “wrong” now, but was generally considered “right” not very ago. Now “they” is widely accepted as a gender neutral singular pronoun, but even now some linguistic pedants hate it (for simple grammatical reasons, not political or ideological ones). And, sure, he refused to change it…and for pretty dumb reasons. We can (and should) criticize all that. But **this** is the level of offense that justifies completely writing the guy off, along with his whole project? Maybe I’m in the minority here…but that seems like insane overkill to me, even if I accept the most negative possible interpretation of Kling’s behavior.
And I do wonder what else is on the “popular projects @osnews refuses to report on” list that Thom mentioned. How much cool stuff are we missing out on for reasons along these lines? I understand…he runs the joint and it’s up to him. But **I** would rather hear about it all and make my own decisions…put a “disclaimer” explaining your objections and I’ll read and consider them too. Just my “two cents” as a long-time reader.
Especially since we live in a world that desperately needs an emergence of a new “Phoenix Browser”.
Never meet your heroes.
Very well written comment, completely agree.
I’m all for gender equality and using language that reflects it. But we have to consider this is a relatively new thing and we are not all equally up to speed with it. I am certainly not, although I try.
It would have been much better to get in contact with Andreas (or the project in general) and politely point this out instead of resorting to all kinds of hysteria (not here but on Thom’s Mastodon channel) and effectively banning the project from OSNews. (not explicitely stated but it seems like this) without at least making a statement to the OSNews.
readers. (missed typing the word at the end, why can´t we edit comments here?
“An open source project that contains rules
that effectively mean only LGBTQ+ people are allowed to contribute.
Let’s see how quick that’s going to get banned by GitHub, while trash like Ladybug is allowed to stay up.”
https://exquisite.social/@thomholwerda/112723781988098740
Thom, you really need to cool down and get out of your bubble.
I just don’t get why countries won’t call the Meta bluff, let Meta act on it’s threat to pull services out of regions and business will boom for independent developers restoring the public’s choice. Supporting monolithic entities like FB just shoots independent developers in the foot.
Meta won’t do that anyway, it’s not stupid, it won’t remove it’s own foundation.
Probably because most political parties in Europe rely on Facebook (to a lesser or greater extent) to reach their electorate. Without Facebook, how can they reach thousands with a targeted election ad?
cpcf,
The problem is, in this particular case it might not be a bluff.
They might not entirely take their services out, but if they have to remove one of the “cash” or “data” payment options, there is no guarantee they will keep “data”. It might very well turn out that they might make Facebook entirely subscription based for EU customers.
As you said, they won’t remove their own foundation (which is making money).