Meta unlawfully ignores the users' right to easily withdraw consent: complaint

I don’t assume that people who don’t know how to use weary correctly are that clever, but perhaps you’re just more grammatically optimistic than I am.

I ran one of many commercial ISPs in 1995 and we founded ours out of frustration with the available commercial ISPs before us.

AFAIK the first commercial ISP dates to around '89.

But I don't think the fact the internet once had restrictions on commercial activity really makes much difference to the argument above other than in the details, given the argument was broader than about the net.

Which specific ruling? The DPAs of a couple of EU member countries, on "pay or okay"?

Are you talking about what online newspapers do in EU, US or where?

I know this is a startup incubator (whatever that is) forum, but I’m tired of this Market Strategy-first framing.[1] Companies like Meta clearly gave away access to their platform in order to build an effective monopoly in some niche.[2] And companies will do whatever within the Law to increase profits. I’m sure all the CEOs here will agree. Anything less is leaving money on the table.

This worship of the Market Strategy was bad enough before when there wasn’t much talk of actual laws defining how much of a “product” they can make their users. But now there are! And this submission is about unlawful practices. And we’re still going to frame this as Meta just being effectively forced by the horrible consumers who refuse to “pay for services”? Ridiculous.

And I haven’t even really gotten into how much of a fallacy the specific belief is that if you just “pay for services” then you won’t become a “product”. But thankfully there are a lot of other reasonable posters on this forum about tech company profit-maximization.

[1] The Company’s perspective is the prime one. The Company doing shady stuff is merely because the consumer’s are stingy or difficult in some way. If the consumers are inconvenienced by the Company then that is just because the Company had to adopt a market strategy which is not as wholesome as the one they could have used if the consumers were better in some way.

[2] And do we have to retread the hopelessness of making a social network where you have to pay to use it when no one else is using it (at the start)? That’s a complete dead-end.

Schrems is so much more than a teenager activist.

Anyway, if this thread leaves you frustrated then maybe just don't participate in it?

The EU has 100's of millions of people, not all of them are in a position to bring this kind of effort because it requires bringing suit (which children may be able to do but don't generally do) and a very large chunk of a lifetime's worth of dedication. So in an attempt to roughly indicate the order of magnitude of difference between the number of people that could have taken action but didn't I used the 300 million figure. I haven't checked it for accuracy and Greta Thunberg notwithstanding the fact that you bring her up as an example is exactly because such individuals are so rare which is exactly the point that I was making.

Without Schrems for privacy and without Thunberg for climate change these subjects would get less attention than they do, and both of them have been instrumental in making meaningful change when in fact both of these subjects should concern the vast majority of that 300 million, give or take.