Folks, the reason #Facebook/ #Instagram/ #Meta/ Zuckerberg hasn’t launched #Threads in the #EU isn’t because the EU is determined to protect your privacy, it’s because the EU is determined to protect The Single Market (peace be upon it) from anticompetitive behaviour. It’s because they’re using Instagram to launch Threads and sharing data between them (and not with EU startups that might want to use that data too). It’s #antitrust, not #privacy. It’s markets, not people.
By the way, it’s possible that #Facebook/ #Instagram/ #Meta/ Zuckerberg’s fediverse play for Threads is related to sidestepping the anti-competitiveness/antitrust issues around the EU’s Digital Services Act.
“Hey, look, we’re not a monopoly. We’re not being anticompetitive… we’re federating using an open protocol. Here, let our friend Eugen, CEO of Mastodon, explain to you how it works in very dispassionate words…”
@aral (off topic, but # after / does not work for tags, you need to insert some kind of space, even an invisible one, here it is for you: > /# < copy-pasting this should give slash-hashes that tag properly)
@sivy@aral it could be designed in such a way that hashtag is recognized when the stuff up to the slash is not recognized as a link, although that would reduce consistency
@MariaLiv Of course we can. The problem is that at least the flagship instance has no intention of doing any such thing. (The fact that the fediverse has an architecture that allows for a flagship instance is the problem of course and mastodon.social will lose that position to Threads the moment they federate with them.)
@aral I actually think they know they'll be forced to be interoperable soon and are just getting it done from the beginning tather than having to come back and add activitypub later
@aral I agree with @Gargron on this and I am not in favour of preemptive defederation.
The whole promise of the fediverse is that it can't be taken over, and this is a huge test to see how it works out when a big corporation federates.
Building up walls between us and millions of people makes no sense to me. I don't want to be part of a niche platform where other gatekeepers want all instances to do the same thing.
We'll see how Threads moderates. If it impacts us, we can defederate then
@aral yes I believe that is their play, and we should use it to our advantage. IE was killed despite being in a dominant position because of monopoly concerns. Standards helped there.
@aral I'm beginning to suspect that they might not even implement ActivityPub at all.
Just talking about implementing it at some vague point in the future might be good enough to fool the EU regulators. By the time they realize the real intentions it'll be too late to do anything about it anymore.
@aral Maybe criticise Eugen for doing this if he ever does it (I'm confident he won't) instead of making up a fantasy world for yourself to be angry at
We’re not being anticompetitive… we’re federating using an open protocol.
Or META could go ahead with ‘supporting’ Mastodon (a nonprofit) like Google does Mozilla (a foundation). Has anyone even thought of why ‘Mastodon’ was mentioned? (see PIC).
As for Google supporting Mozilla, Chrome ‘needs a rival’ in Firefox and Google supports Mozilla (the foundation) for a reason.
Don’t tell me to buy Mozilla’s justification of, “we have business relationship with Google so we set Google as the default search engine.”
@aral understand, i see the antitrust is a business or more market respective, regarding fairness and freedom, privacy is more on Human rights side, mostly written in democracy country constitutions..thanks for sharing 🤝
@aral whatever the mechanism, it still serves the people. Antitrust/anti-monopoly legislation helps keep prices down and quality up for consumers. If it happens to help us keep our privacy then great.
I find the privacy/GDPR arguments coming from the likes of Germany odd at times though. The very same country wants anyone with a public website to give a physical (not PO box) street address where they can be found 🤷
@sarajw It serves the Single Market, which may, in this case, coincidentally also serve the people. But framing everything through the lens of the Single Market (instead of, say, human rights) definitely doesn’t serve the people and it’s how we end up with antitrust being the main mechanism by which trillion-dollar corporations are regulated. Better than nothing? Definitely. Best we can do? Not by a long shot.
@sarajw Here’s me making basically that same case at the European Parliament (way before the Digital Services Act, in the context of the Digital Single Market framing):
@aral@lisamelton Of course it does kanka. My business was crushed by Musk. I was running medical retweet bots on Twitter which depended on the access to the old API.
I created a Mastodon server for French speaking healthcare professionals and I set up Mastodon bots to attract the community to Mastodon.
Now that these users finally started migrating, I don't want Meta to take over the Fediverse in the EU. I'm very happy about these antitrust regulations.
@aral Yeah, I heard because you can't uncouple accounts that it was part of it, but I mean also the lack of actual fediverse connection is gonna be part of it too.
@aral
I agree that #EU postures about #privacy are not clear (e.g. discussions about end to end user encryption laws), so I think until the the EU shows us real care about citizens privacy, the "market" argument seems very plausible to me.
On the other hand, I guess that #meta it's just running an "experiment" and they do not want to be expose to possible legal actions from EU.
But I think that if the "experiment" works, it's just a matter of time to see meta and EU arriving to a "nice reasonable agreement" about Threa(t)s 😉
@alternative_be@aral The timing is also interesting - the ruling was made known earlier the same day as Meta announced that Threads wouldn't be making it to Europe. So if GDPR is not the reason, I think Meta at least wants us to believe it is.
The US might be more likely to follow suit in antitrust than in privacy, which could be one potential motivation I guess.
@aral That may be true, but it's still a good thing either way. Relatively fast/aggressive enforcement of anti-competition law is one of the things the EU has got right lately, unlike e.g. the UK, and it makes the difference between something that almost qualifies as capitalism and corporate oligopolies. Equally, regulatory capture is a constant problem in the EU (as everywhere else), but the lobbyists don't always win (surprising given low turnouts in EP elections); Brexit was in part about the freedom to screw the workers and the environment, though it's inevitably been watered down for practical reasons.
@aral And what are the benefits for the #EU people/business?! Imagine, a company from EU can't grow/promote its brand/product/service on #Threads platform, while its competitors can do that. Basically any EU company is in a competitive disadvantage now, because EU legislation deny access to a platform where the EU company could grow and promote its product/service. How is that protecting us?! ALL the ppl around the world can join Threads, only EU people can't. It's a colossal stupidity!!!
Honestly, Meta is getting slammed on both fronts (DPC Decision prohibiting processing in May, Court of Justice Decision on Tuesday covering competition AND data protection). I think it's a perfectly rational calculus by Meta to say "Eh, Europe really doesn't like us right now, let's not give them another thing they can sue us over" -- and not quibble on whether it's privacy, competition, single markets protection, DSA .... There's so much to choose from!
That's an interesting perspective on the subject. You could be right - all political organizations (including #EU) have their agenda that's not necessarily aligned with the #publicInterest.
@aral ufff that's a cynical, but likely accurate, reading. If I understood correctly btw, Meta hasn't been prohibited by the EU to launch Threads, they decided themselves not to for now. But you're probably right that the reasoning behind their hesitation is not "privacy fines" but "antitrust fines"
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