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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

These are serious, proportionate fines that meaningfully affect the bottom line. These companies are demonstrably making big changes in order to comply. They have been testing out the boundaries and seeing how close to the wind they can sail, but I think that's coming to an end now that they're seeing the impact of the new approach to enforcement.

The clearest sign for me was Meta's decision to delay the launch of Threads in the EU. Even for a company with the financial might of Meta, two billion euros in fines in the past two years has put the brakes on the "move fast and break stuff" mentality. Of course that creates the possibility of a two-tier internet where EU customers simply don't get access to products that are inherently intrusive, but I think that's a feature rather than a bug - either respect the privacy of our citizens, or take your seedy surveillance business elsewhere.

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> Of course that creates the possibility of a two-tier internet where EU customers simply don't get access to products

this has already happened. google’s bard took it’s time to launch in europe.

the young kid in me that always thought we finally have a piece of tech that is beyond what politicians can control, that transcend borders and nationalities is saddened. but it is what it is, and without some breakthroughs (a system that cannot be controlled, censored etc by design) i don’t think there’s going back.

It's very naive to think that the Internet can transcend in any way law enforcement. You may have distributed protocols and crypto, but the state has a monopoly on violence, it controls all infrastructure, and therefore can control all inputs and outputs.

You can't change the world just with technology, as society is a "social construct". And if people want regulation, that's what they are going to get.

Speaking of EU's data protection regulations, it's funny because many people here claim that it doesn't work, and then are shocked to see that it does.

For what is worth, I think EU's data protections are a good thing. Big Tech acted irresponsibly for too long.

> It's very naive to think that the Internet can transcend in any way law enforcement.

agree, it is naive. but for a while it did feel liberating to a lot of people.

Oh, huh, I actually didn't realise Bard _had_ launched here.

> without some breakthroughs (a system that cannot be controlled, censored etc by design)

This isn't really a technical issue; some small criminal entity could run an AI bot on Tor (or even, realistically, on the open internet) which forwarded all your personal data directly to the North Korean government and the Mafia or whatever, and realistically they'd get away with that. But if there's a large company behind the service, then that company is going to have to _obey the law_, and no amount of technology will change that.

> But if there's a large company behind the service, then that company is going to have to _obey the law_, and no amount of technology will change that.

i agree on the first part. but that second part could probably also be reinvented by new tech, futuristically speaking.

"a system that cannot be controlled, censored"

sounds like the Safe Network! too bad it will never be finished in our lifetimes

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