thesofafox

@txtx @andypiper @eff not necessarily raging, seems like I misread since I thought you were complaining about not being able to sue people. My bad there 🤷‍♂️

As far as preventing small instances from getting hit though, yes in theory that's easy but good luck having legislators actually write a comprehensive law that hits one and not the other. I have yet to see it in practice when it comes to digital laws.

@txtx @andypiper @eff I think you're wildly missing why the EFF has such a standpoint on these things, especially pertaining to speech.

First of all, lawsuits like that are extremely hard to enforce. They wouldn't do any good. We've already seen how that looks with the UK trying to put such fines on 4Chan and its owners. So unless you expect fucking extraditions for people posting bad words online, which is ridiculous, I don't know what your point in bringing up this inability is.

Secondly, regulating corporate social media almost always also means that the hobbyists and small site owners are hit in the crossfire as well. This would be incredibly difficult to navigate without censoring the internet as a whole even moreso than it is now, again demonstrated by the OSA alongside OS-level age verification laws. At least it shifts the burden away from the user though, right?

And lastly, as far as banning foreign ownership of social media companies, how would this be defined in your hypothetical here? Would my fediverse instance, being entirely U.S. based, get banned in the EU? If not, how are we defining "corporate" social media and what other types would be legally defined? How do we put things into this policy that prevent the misuse of it against small instance owners in the future? I don't see a realistic way to do this without making some serious compromises on the freedom to communicate with others on the internet. Also imagine if the US implemented a similar rule, or other countries for that matter. Everyone would be in their own walled-off silo, which is not what the internet was intended to be nor what it should become.

@anthropy @Gargron I was about to comment this. I'd rather see people use FOSS Firefox forks without AI than switch to a partially proprietary Chromium browser just because it also doesn't have AI.