Let me abuse kind 1 here:

Today I went to the meetup associated with the Dutch mini-documentary called ‘Error 404: het internet in crisis’(the internet in crisis), that was released a few days ago.

The episode was about how regulation could keep fight back on the negative practices of social media platforms, following a Greenparty member of the European parliament, the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation and some lawyer trying to fight a legal battle with Meta.

The underlying question was whether something could still be done or if the crisis was complete.

I had a lot of disagreements with what was shown in the documentary, but it is relevant especially that the EU ‘Digital Services Act’ is going into force now. I decided to go to the meetup where a couple of the key players in the documentary would speak and the audience could ask questions.

My main take-away is that there is this sense of desperation, a lack of control on the situation. The idea that these few large corporations just do whatever they want and are geared towards hacking our very human nature. This path of legislation is experienced as their only hope in turning the tide, using the great power structure in the shape of the EU to fight the monolith of a handful of all powerful platforms. This general sentiment is being expressed explicitly from out the EU itself, stating the ambition to be a world superpower by mean of creating legislation; be it AI, cryptocurrencies or social media. Europe can’t seem to create competitive businesses in these fields, so they try to achieve their edge this way, at least so is the thought.

My sense is that these for the most part are very confused people. To illustrate, during the session they expressed their complaints with profiling and targeted advertisements, to subsequently argue a minute later that better targeted adds should help reduce a lot of spammy irrelevant advertisement practices by only getting things that are relevant to you. They did not seem self-aware of this blatant contradiction, and for the most part operate on some ‘if it sounds good it ought to be that way, if it sounds bad it ought not to be that way’ mode of thinking; unaware of the technical reality of things. I guess a concrete expression of this (that was not discussed, but that is besides the point), is the EU now insisting chat applications (whatsapp, signal etc.) become interoperable; it sounds nice, but how on earth is that going to work? Not their problem, for they have an ought in mind and their dictates will make it a reality...somehow.

In the context of the meetup I was only able to ask one question. I decided to ask that given they take issue with the monopoly position of these large platforms, if they did not fear that all these barriers and costs resulting from this legislation would prevent alternatives from coming up, and that it would not just solidify the position of these platforms able to cover theses costs.

The answer boiled down to something like ‘we legislate bad things, and bad things are not the type of innovation we want, so it wont prevent the innovation we do want.’. The host subsequently asked in response to that answer if that did not simply mean that it was them deciding on what was good and what was bad innovation. This followup question caused confusion, they did not seem to comprehend that this could be the case. They did not really have an answer other than that if insights would change over time, new legislation could be made.

From taking a glance at this EU ‘Digital Services Act’ it predominately focuses on ‘Very large online platforms’ (technical term for anything with more than 45 million monthly users), and for the most part is geared towards forcing companies to have adequate processes in place. So the emphasis is more on due diligence than making them directly liable for stuff happening on their platforms.

Still, the devil is in the details with these things, and they shoe-horned a bunch of ‘grey area’ subjects into this like ‘gender-based violence, public health, and mental and physical wellbeing’.

I do sympathize with these people but in the best case they are useless and in the worst case they are counter productive. Unfortunately they do have their hands on levers of power; and I am frankly more concerned about them, than ‘Big Tech’.