“Childrens advocates “ have been backing the most egregiously unconstitutional, paternalistic, data broker friendly, moral panic, privacy dystopia bullshit bills around the country. “Childs advocates” are why we have anti pornography pearl clutching panopticon laws that require you to scan a government ID to jerk off. Fuck off with that.
No, this is old as dirt shits upset that kids exist issue. Sorry Grandpa I won't turn the music down. Now go fuck off to Florida and play bingo until you die
But this is none of that. This is informing people that the evidence says that excessive social media use does harm, because most people genuinely don't understand the risks.
Edit: I'm not saying I'm familiar with what the studies say, although some draw a clear link with adverse mental health impacts on kids. Not sure how far that goes. I'm also not saying I agree with the SG or the need for warning labels, but to say this is based on "vibes" is, ironically, speculative at best.
The onus is on the state to justify their control with science. They haven't done that and clearly you haven't done that either. You're literally just posting vibes.
Do I really need to point out that you yourself are "literally just posting vibes" ?
You didn't even bother investigating whether or not they had justified their stance with science. I'm not convinced you made it past the headline, much less read any of the content that article linked to.
The funny thing is I actually did read two of the studies I quickly found and which you too can find. But you seem more interested in adhering to a certain... vibe.
And wouldn't you know, right there are 5 separate papers cited to support 1. that social media is widely used; and 2 it "presents meaningful harm to youth"
So you acknowledge that you don't have the skills necessary to interpret papers so... what, you decide that Nature adequately represents their findings enough to dismiss them? Even though you say there is little evidence of a causative link? Even though the surgeon general says they feel there is and cites that evidence to back it up?
Go to pubmed. Type "social media mental health". Read the studies, or the reviews if you don't have the time.
The average American teenager spends 4.8 hours/day on social media. Increased use of social media is associated with increased rates of depression, eating disorders, body image dissatisfaction, and externalizing problems. These studies don't show causation, but guess what, we literally cannot show causation in most human studies because of ethics.
Social media drastically alters peer interactions, with negative interactions (bullying) associated with increased rates of self harm, suicide, internalizing and externalizing problems.
Mobile phone use alone is associated with sleep disruption and daytime sleepiness.
Looking forward to your peer-reviewed critiques of these studies claiming they are all "just vibes."
Teenage suicide rates were declining for over a decade, especially in males. Now they are increasing in both males and females. You would have to be a complete monster to not want to study, understand, and reverse this trend.
The homicide rate and suicide rate are inversely correlated. One goes up the other goes down. As a whole the country is getting less violent so this is a predictable result. And it doesn't require anyone to invent a communist plot to sap and unpurify our precious bodily fluids or gay frogs.
I agree it's far from ideal. I might suggest that we don't actively work hard to kill the middle class and maybe stop school shootings. But we won't do that when it is easier for us to blame Emmanuel Goldste--- sorry tik Tok.
Pretty disingenuous to say this person is acting like an antivaxxer for reading medical journals, when one comment down you admit to forming your opinion by browsing nature, and not being a field expert yourself.
Your comments display hypocrisy and you should commit one way or another.
If you do the search I suggested you will find relevant reviews immediately. If you add keywords based on my post text you will find the primary sources immediately.
Playing hide and seek with kids when you just want a moments peace, picking up a throw pillow off the couch and looking under that, "gosh I just can't find a single kid and I'm looking so hard"
Typical teen (and often preteen) response to be told to not do anything by adults: Say, "Yeah, right," and go off and do it anyway. Even if you block them outright, they'll find a way around it.
This clown is comparing social media to cars and cigarettes. Cars are literally the leading killer of children. Cigarettes literally cause cancer... Social media? No. It's pathetic but completely normalized when so-called "scientists" promote absolute pseudo-science.
If these fools actually care about kids, reduce and ban cars. They'll never do anything actually productive for kids and humanity because they're profiting from complicity and exploitation. Let's see how long these politicians last if they go up against auto cartels and pretrol tyrants.
So your argument is that you can't possibly imagine a bad consequence of social media, that the studies by scientists showing the negative aspects are "pseudoscience", that they don't actually care about children, and that these politicians are just pushing this message to make a profit.
Did I get it right?
What will you lose if children are warned about the dangers of social media anyways?
Probably yeah. The modern world is designed to hurt your mental health. Is that the fault of social media or simply the price of being aware? If I learned that many groups of people are being genocided from reading Wikipedia and that makes me depressed would you say Wikipedia causes mental issues?
That is apples and oranges. Clicking through rabbit holes isn't the result of an aggressive algorithm designed to prime you for products being advertised. The motivation for the content being hosted is the major issue and exploitation of younger people in service of that motivation.
Advertising may be your problem, but I know the government's not taking the "we dont allow kids to be served ads", so then what, they're mad it's the Chinese in the lead? The Kids aren't gonna be better off playing COD and watching action movies both of which are lightly disguised military recruitment propaganda aimed at them. You may be mad about it but based on their actions it's not the fact kids are getting exploited that made the Surgeon General speak out, it's that's kids are getting exploited and someone else is benefiting.
The mental health isn't going to get better even if social media didn't exist in general. People would just find a different outlet to develop maladaptive coping strategies with. Treating the symptoms isn't gonna cure the root issue, but the root issue is expensive so we all know they're not going to touch that.
The advertising was an easy and obvious example. I set you up for a straw man but whatever. If you don't understand the harmful effects social media has on mental health and how it's different from other forms of media/content, I'm not going to hold your hand through that. The sophistication of engagement algorithms should be obvious. The purpose of a surgeons general warning would be to raise awareness of those specific mental health issues that can be aggravated by excessive social media use. Raising the awareness of an issue is step in the right direction. Fine to call it a band aid but there's no need to shit on progress of any type.
I don't get why people think this idea is equivalent to stuff like internet access bans or COPPA, it's a warning label, not an "enter your ID" to access page.
They never banned cigarettes, but putting a giant warning on the box did help in vilifying cigarettes as very unhealthy and wrong.
I doubt it'll go anywhere in this age of government, but its exactly the type of thing I would have gone for if I were tasked with solving a societal issue. It's smart because it has no real effect on access, so social media companies would have a harder time fighting it, but it also gives a big bloody warning which does have a substantial psychological impact on users.
iirc someone did something similar with a very simple "are you sure?" app that gave a prompt asking if you were sure you wanted to post something or send a text. Just having a single prompt was enough for many people to reconsider their stupid text or comment.
I call shenanigans. We've had bullying when I was a kid in the 70s. Has anything been done about it? No. Why? Because dominance hierarchy is in among our school districts and administrators, and they like sports team lettermen over science nerds. This hadn't changed in the aughts. It's still the same, today. Even when kids come in with proof of violence (e.g. phone camera video) the question is why did you have a phone in school? not can we identify the dude curb-stomping kids three times smaller than him?
We had hungry kids in the 70s. Have we done anything about it? No. We try to set up school lunches, but then the programs get cancelled because socialism bad! So kids are going hungry thanks to ideology.
Are we yet teaching sexual consent (or how about consent in other places like work and TOS?) No. We're teaching abstinence-only education in 26 states with comprehensive sex ed mandated in three (the west coast). We're teaching girls they're like chewing gum, that is, one-use, and a sexual assault destroys their value. And we're teaching boys their sexuality isn't welcome until they can afford to put a ring on it and have a salary in place, driving them to become alt-right war boys for Immorten Joe. ( WITNESS ME! )
So how about dealing with kids who are homeless? In poverty? In the abusive foster-care system? Dealing with DV at home? Not a god damn thing. Kids need food, shelter, basic needs like clothing, playtime, time to bond with their family, time to socialize, stability at home. Until they have these things, any energy we spend not arranging to providing these things is failure of society to serve basic child welfare for the public.
Warning labels on social media will not feed hungry kids, or assure their place to sleep is safe and warm, and we have an outrageous number of kids for whom the latter set are the problem, not dangers of social media. Also warning labels that are not congruent with current scientific consensus only weaken the veracity of tobacco product labels.
ETA: That's not the best link. This search leads to a wider array of stories, and TD is pretty good about including sources within each article.
Edit: Funny how I was replying to a comment with examples of companies that wish they had 70% of the market under their control yet people didn't disagree with OP but bringing up Valve? Oh man, Gaben can do no wrong! 70% of the market under the control of a company owned by a single man? No problemo!
Neither did google. The problem is that this case, from the title stated in another thread, Google are doing anti-competitive shit to make sure they maintain the dominant position. But steam does not practice in anti competitive behaviours (as far as I know anyway). In fact, the competitor can arguably be held to anti competitive behaviour depending on how you spin it.
Steam is currently being sued for anti competitive practices and do we really need to wait until they do bad shit before we start to consider that a single company having a good on 70% of the market isn't a good thing?
Wtf is with people deciding a monopoly is good because the company hasn't started enshittifying it yet. It will happen. It's what monopolies do. Healthy competition is an important part of preventing enshittification.
Steam has no competitors because nobody is competing with them, not because they are forcing nobody to compete with them.
Steam isn't abusing their dominant position to prevent competition. Other companies could make their own storefront and compete with steam. Nobody does in a way that's actually comparable to steam.
Steam has a monopoly, but it's not because steam is actively keeping it that way.
If you have enough control on the market you don't have to actively try and stop competitors, you're just the default solution and people automatically turn to you. Walmart doesn't need to use dirty tactics to compete against mom and pop shops, the day they open people just start going to Walmart instead because they have everything in a single place.
That wasn't always the case, and I don't know if it's currently the case. At least at one point, they would intentionally lose money by dropping their prices below profitability just to get mom and pop shops to shut down, and then raise prices back up to profitability. Or they'd force suppliers to cut costs only for them to the point where the supplier wasn't making a profit, but by then they had stopped selling to competitors.
There's a lot more evidence for Walmart committing anti-trust than Valve.
And that practice is what? Providing value to the consumer? The thing that MAYBE can be used against them is the clause for selling STEAM KEYS outside of steam. But that is it. Take a look at mindustry, the game is free everywhere else but steam. But that did not violate steam ToS since they didn't sell the steam keys for less than what is listed on steam.
It's in front of a judge right now and information is public if you want to know more, and no they're not getting sued for providing value to the consumer (but don't worry, they charge you enough that they can provide value AND make Newell a billionaire... so maybe you should be angry about that if you don't care about the rest.)
Have you read the filings? The complaints are that steam listings for a game have to match the lowest price for the game, that keys can't be sold for less than the steam listing (I'm not really sure how this is a different thing from the low pricing), and that steam takes too big a cut of the proceeds. That last one is particularly hilarious, in that they are bringing this lawsuit to a court that respects USA business laws, which pointedly do not hold that 'being too greedy' is a problem (outside of price-gouging laws, which are not relevant here...)
Other retailers take a smaller cut. But because Steam mandates that the Steam storefront always gets the lowest price, publishers can't take advantage of that lower cut to offer lower prices. They can only lower the price to something that doesn't torpedo them with a 30% cut on Steam.
Sure, but that's not a monopolistic practice. That's just a MAP, which is an incredibly common agreement. Hell, its better than most MAP contracts because they only take a 30% cut of sales thru steam, even if the dev is selling steam keys thru an alternate storefront.
The fuck are you talking about? I already gave an example of mindustry being free anywhere but steam. As long as they don't distribute the steam keys for free somewhere else, they are safe. Steam mandates that you put the lowest/price parity for the steam keys you sold outside of steam. If for example a game is being sold on steam priced at $15 with a 30% cut, the publishers are free to distribute the steam keys on their storefront for the same $15 without any cut. OR they could sell it cheaper BUT they cannot sell the steam keys. Maybe other storefront keys/drm. But the problem is, will the publisher sell it for a lower price knowing that they could sell it for the same price across the board with a higher profit margin?
If you wanted to argue that it is steam's fault for taking the 30% cut in the first place so we get where we are now, then I don't know what to tell you anymore. The problem is not steam but greed. Back to my example mindustry, that is a valid strategy to sell it for free everywhere but steam and is perfectly legal. It's just no one wanted to follow that model (instead of free, offer a cheaper price).
You don't need to have full control of the market to be considered a monopoly, you just need a big enough share that you can make it sway in the direction that you want, which Steam has. Example: Microsoft is considered a monopoly even though there's Apple and Linux that get market shares.
I always find it funny how defensive people get when I bring this up about Steam on Lemmy of all places, suddenly people are perfectly ok with the centralization of power in the hands of a single person.
It's not about market share, it's about actually using that market share to negatively impact competition. Steam doesn't have any sort of exclusivity agreements with anyone, nor do they get paid if a customer buys a key on another platform or on the dev's own website. There's no anti-competitive behavior here at all, people use Steam because they like the experience more.
There's a massive difference between anti-competitive behavior and just being a really good option. You don't get broken up because you're successful, you get broken up because you're abusing your dominant market position. I have yet to see any evidence that Valve does this.
You can't break up steam and improve the market in any particular way. Since they're not really big on exclusivity agreements, there's also very little a court order would do to make the market more competitive.
If consumers were more evenly spread around different platforms there would be actual competition to determine prices and margins for the developers. Right now Epic takes a smaller share of the revenues but the price is the same to try and compensate for the smaller number of buyers. With their dominant position it's pretty much impossible to have someone join the market and truly be competitive against Valve, even if they offered a product with all the same features and more (which would require a ridiculous amount of capital), people have their well established habits and won't move even if the product they're using isn't necessarily the best or they're spending more than they need to.
Epic had all the money in the world and tons of time (and users) to create a viable alternative. They didn't fail because valve squeezed them out, they failed because they refuse to improve their product. In fact, it could be said that Epic wanted to become the monopoly themselves. If they spent half as much effort on their product as they do on lawsuits and exclusivity deals, they would have been a viable competitor. But they didn't. At the end of the day, it sucks to use. Steam does not.
EGS is perfectly usable and in my opinion is better than Steam in some aspects (way less bloat, open the app and your games are right there to launch even if you're on the storefront), your saying they refuse to improve their product just shows you're not using it because it's way better than it was on release.
And yes, Valve has a monopoly, they control enough of the market that it goes where they decide it's going and they're the default solution people turn to when they need the services they offer, they're also working on increasing their reach with streaming on the platform, forums, reviews and so on. If all you need is found on a single platform and it's the platform that a vast majority is using then what do we call that? That's right, a monopoly.
Want a similar example? Microsoft is considered to be in a monopolistic position with Windows, yet they have competitors, same with Office, same with Explorer back in the day. Google is a monopoly even though competitors exist.
Opinions aside, that's still not the legal definition of a monopoly.
Monopoly: Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service.
Valve does not have exclusive control of the PC gaming market. The EGS funded lawsuit even says that in the docket. They are only suing on the grounds of the keys issue. I don't disagree with you that when Newell leaves, things COULD change, but you can't base the present on the possible future. At this time, steam is on "top" because the vast majority of users have voted with their wallet and time. Not because they are engaged in sweeping anti-competitive backdoor dealings. You know, like EGS does.
Any company that makes their owner or investors billionaires while people like you and me have a hard time affording food and a roof is evil. That money comes from somewhere.
You really gotta aim your sights higher if that's the criteria you're using for a "monopoly". Valve is a private company, that sells games and other "wants", not "needs". If people can't afford games, without losing their house or struggling to eat, I don't think that's a company's fault.
If Valve was even close to using anti-competitive methods to maintain market dominance, you'd be correct. However, a company having superior quality products and making good business decisions is not a basis or definition of a monopoly. They just make good decisions and provide quality products that people want and enjoy.
Instead of using strawman and false equivalency fallacies, try taking a look at what really constitutes anti-competitive practices.
You're either a troll, extremely young, naive, and/or uneducated if you think my comment above is in defense of billionaires. I literally have comments in my history to the absolute opposite*. What I'm "defending" is the definition of a monopoly when it comes to business practices; of which Valve has exuded none of the behavior of.
You think any business doing well, providing quality goods and services, not being anti-consumer, and being the most trusted platform for gaming as a result is the definition of a monopoly. Again, you use fallacy to try and argue a point.
Wait... Are you that dickhead from Epic who pays for exclusivity rights, steaks user data from Steam files, or something? I could see that guy being pissed at Steam for seemingly no reason.
* one such comment, if I recall, is about how much I hated Steam when it first came out for killing LAN parties by locking down CD keys.
But that's exactly what you're doing though. You're in front of a company that controls 70% of the market, meaning they can do whatever the fuck they want regarding pricing and you're defending them because you don't see any issue with that.
So yeah, let's wait until they start truly acting like shit before thinking "Hey, maybe we shouldn't have let them get such a hold on the market..."
If they hiked prices above what other stores offered, consumers would leave. If they lowered prices to be untenable for developers, developers would leave, and consumers would follow (they'd probably grumble, but they'd go where the games are). There isn't a lock in for future sales on either side. So do you think they can do whatever they want with prices with no consequences?
If you're big enough and people are dependent on your product then no they won't simply leave.
It's not like owning a DVD deciding your next DVD player won't be a Sony because you don't like them. The products that you "own" are dependent on Steam, of you've got thousands of games on there you can't just leave and bring your library with you to another platform.
That's the same for any digital platform, though. Literally, any gaming store except for GOG won't let you take your library with you. You don't own the game as far as any of them are concerned. You're claiming Steam is some kind of monster because their platform for games you don't own is better than other platforms for games you don't own. Because their platform doesn't sucks, it earns them a lot of business. That's it. That's the magic sauce.
With options, if Stream sucked, people would go elsewhere.
If Steam had anything resembling a monopoly they'd do everything they could to remove platforms offering the same games. The number of platforms has only expanded since they started.
If Stream was a monopoly, they'd not only undercut others, they'd pay for exclusivity rights. Steam let's developers sell their own keys from anywhere the developer wants, while taking no cut when that happens, even though Steam still has to front the bandwidth and storage for the game to be played.
If Steam was a monopoly, they'd buy up smaller firms, buy businesses with similar, but competing services, or take another company's product, reverse engineer it, and make their own undercutting the original. They've done the opposite at every turn.
You really don't understand monopolistic tactics. You're not going to understand it, either, since you've continues to conflate good business decisions that earn trust and adoption with anti-consumer practices. Steam makes good business decisions, listens to their customers and developers about ways to make the service or products better, and has more business because of it. They have a better product without stooping to the air a in lot of current businesses are pulling.
That's it. 70% market dominance doesn't fucking matter. They could have 90% and it still wouldn't be a monopoly with their current strategy. Other businesses need to suck less.
You should review your definition of monopoly because it doesn't imply bad behaviour by the party in a monopolistic position, it just means they have enough control over the market to sway it in the direction that they way, may they do it or not doesn't matter and that's exactly the power that Valve has over the PC gaming market, hence why competitors can't succeed and companies end up just closing their platform and making their games available on Steam instead.
Did you read the articles? The judge acknowledged that Google is widely recognized as the best general purpose search engine but that part of why they are used so often is because of Google paying people to make Google the default search option which many people never change.
Doesn't matter, there's alternatives therefore it's not a monopoly, that's was the point I was replying to. I'm not the one making the rules or definitions!
it’s pretty much impossible to have someone join the market and truly be competitive against Valve, even if they offered a product with all the same features and more
(1) Many PC gamers simply wait for games to go on sale. Epic buying exclusive agreements isn't as dominating of a strategy as they think it is; even if it's expensive.
(2) Steam is the incumbent. You have to be better in order to be worth it to switch. As you mentioned, Epic is lacking in features
(3) Valve has not treated the desktop market the way Apple as treated the app store. Look at how far Epic has taken Apple to court; compared to their biggest rival, Valve
(4) Valve has put in alot of work in other layers; such as making open hardware and contributing to AMD GPU drivers on Linux. They work on the whole platform, even parts they do not directly make money off. This is called investment.
(5) What exactly would you break Steam into being? One app for reviews, another for buying, and another for launching games? Break the development studio into a different company? Even if Epic is throwing around money made from its game engine and games?
That's the thing though, with their market share an hypothetical competitor could be better and people still wouldn't switch, Steam is where their games are, it's where their friends play, building everything from scratch elsewhere wouldn't be worth the trouble even if the alternative was better.
Store, development, forums, trading platform, launcher, online gaming services, hardware, streaming integrated into the platform, DRM... Valve has their hands all over the place and there's a single person at the top of that. Wanna wait until they start becoming bad before considering that maybe it's not a good thing that they have a hold on 70% of the market? Hell, just the fact that Newell could decide that they're closing their doors tomorrow and no one has access to their games anymore should be fucking worrying to everyone.
At what seams would you break Steam at? In this day and age those are just app store features. Is there anything you listed Sony, Microsoft or Apple don't have?
I do understand having a Steam library would make it harder to switch but most of us have a few GOG games and collect Epic free games as well (though, I haven't even looked at the free Epic games since Christmas).
People even download a launcher like Hero Launcher on the Steamdeck to run games from other stores. We have the freedom to use Steam in tagent with other stores and we do. You can buy a game off GOG and add it to Steam to launch it.
Steam is simply the better product, hands down.
Edit: To prove that I see your point but just don't agree with it: Here is a quote from an ArsTechnica article about a judge viewing Steam as a monopoly.
Despite those changes, Judge Coughenour once again dismissed Wolfire's argument that Valve had engaged in "illegal tying" between the Steam platform (which provides game library management, social networking, achievement tracking, Steam Workshop mods, etc.) and the Steam game store (i.e., the part that sells the games). Those two sides of Steam form a single market, the judge wrote, because "commercial viability for a platform is possible only when it generates revenue from a linked game store." What's more, the suit has not shown there is any sufficient market demand "for fully functional gaming platforms distinct from game stores."
Does this judge expect me to buy a game from Epic which is missing features and then pay Valve a fee to contact the developer through Steam? Will Epic cheapen their price by 30% so I can "enable Steam features." This would be unprecedented. I cannot go to Amazon to return/complain about a product I bought from Walmart.
Steam? Really out of all these, the the one that treats it's customers properly and gives them any and all tools needed to make a proper purchase decision with many big sales consistently. Great call
Just having a high market share isn't the issue. It's abusing that dominant market position that is.
Valve has been smart enough not to do that. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the like haven't. In fact, Valve's competitors have been more anti-competitive than Valve.
ASML, who make EUV machines and other semiconductor tooling, is also in a dominant market position (way more dominant actually). Do you ever see calls to break them up? No. Because they haven't been abusing their power. They know that if they put a toe out of line, they'll be in trouble with regulators.
Google and the like have been able to act with impunity because the US protects them, to the detriment of their smaller companies and their citizens.
Really? Because they're part of the giants that determine game prices, pricing is based on everyone that takes a cut along the way, they take 30%, that's calculated into what games need to sell for, 30% is enough to make them billions in profit, billions in profit is money that came out of our pockets to go in Newell's pockets so he can own six yachts.
I swear if it was a public company people would be flipping out because their numbers would be public and the profit would be going to investors, but they're private and they only have one investor the profit goes to do that's perfectly fine I guess???
Antitrust is not about preventing big companies making money. It's about preventing specific practices by monopolies to restrict the free market and to abuse their users. Don't get me wrong, there's a ton I find morally objectionable with companies as big as Valve and people as rich as Gabe. We might agree on those issues. But this particular Google thing is about something else. And Valve is indeed different to most tech companies in that regard.
If you don't consider that a company taking billions out of our pockets and putting it in the pockets of a single person abuse then I don't know what to say.
ASML is basically a strategic asset. Breaking them up to have a more level playing field inherently threatens the West's economic-political position. If ASML abused their position, it wouldn't be the regulators so much as the CIA that showed up to tell them to reconsider.
What's a better alternative? Have tried all major ones except paid ones and I always return to Google. Maybe for basic stuff Duck Duck Go / Bing is fine, but once you start searching for local / non-English stuff, results were underwhelming.
Where companies with monopolies are found to gain that title by ousting competitors and brutal buyouts and tactics literally every time, Valve exists. Literally. They just exist. Big difference between a monopoly and the best.
Other companies also exist. In fact there are several launchers and two other digital distributors, and several websites, where one can purchase games. There are some things Steam is shit on. The still feels old interface as a broad example. Competitors could push in, like Epic. Instead, they manage to create the next step up from a gold-tainted dung pile, shit on their own launcher or store stability and performance, and create an experience so bad that Steam is able, through the fuckups of their rivals, maintain a market majority.
I still don't understand how the Californian government bailed them out when they were bankrupt, yet they were allowed to remain an independent company? Why didn't the government take full control?
Electricity in cities in the Bay Area that have their own municipal power company (like Palo Alto and Santa Clara) is literally 1/3 the cost of PG&E.
They are. The FTC have already brought antitrust suits against three of the companies you just listed, and you can bet your ass they're eyeing the rest.
Decades of neoliberalism doesn't get undone in a single day. This is good news, and if America keeps putting competent people in power we'll see more of it.
This is a big deal, but just a reminder that this is the District (trial) court, so the next step would be the Circuit Court of Appeals, followed by an appeal to the Supreme Court. There may be some intriguing injunctions that come out of this, but we're years away from a final disposition.
For the curious, this one came out of the DC Circuit, informally known to be the most technically and administratively savvy circuit, as it deals with a LOT of nitty gritty stuff coming out of Federal agencies.
Its seriously absurd. I hate ads, but there's realistically not a better option to profit when providing free software and services like Mozilla is doing. Investing into ads that don't violate your privacy is a great decision. I don't know what the hell people want from them.
They should do it like Signal: accept donations. Signal is doing just fine. But Mozilla cannot legally do that as they are a for-profit company. And Mozilla Foundation won't do that either because they are funded by Mozilla and under their command.
People don't seem to realise that developing a browser (a real one, not Chrome with a different paint job), web rendering engine, having the top-notch security expertise that building a modern web engine requires, plus being on the board that decides web standards is expensive.
It's honestly at a similar scale and complexity to OS development.
We're talking hundreds of millions a year to do the work that Mozilla needs to do. People who say "oh I'd chip in a dollar or two, but only if they get rid of all other funding" as if it's feasible kind of get on my nerves because they clearly don't see the big picture.
Any time Mozilla tries to diversify their income while still being broadly privacy-respecting they're branded as evil or too corporate. Any time they ask for donations they're being greedy beggars. When they take Google's money they're shills for big tech. They can't win. People want Mozilla to work for free.
In a healthy market new browsers need to be able to enter.. but browsers are so complex from the reckless, endless feature creep that creating a new browser securely (or at all) is unreasonable. (Luckily they are open source and can be forked but the changes are minor compared to the base. A Chromium fork is still Chromium at the end of the day).
Supporting the ad-driven internet is contrary to what is wanted by many users of Firefox/flavors and there is no alternative. It was said that they would destroy the Sith, not join them.
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