[zaarn]

It's not entirely meaningless.

If the law applies that means a corporation could get into hot water if customers or vendors in the EU don't want or can't trade with them anymore.

The law applies to them in the sense that if they don't follow it, they face negative repercussions. It is not enforceable by the EU directly since they aren't in their jurisdiction.

Application and Enforcement of Law are, atleast IMO, separate things. It's an implication relationship of Enforcement->Application. Application alone does not mean it is enforced but enforcement means it's applied.

Difference being that if the law applies then the EU might want to enforce but lacks the teeth to. They would if they could.

[jakeogh]

True. It's a nice demonstration of why capitalistic markets and sovereign countries are good things.

If a company I do business with is subverting my rights (in this case the ability to even remember something), I'll gleefully stop using them.

Astroturf corps are salivating at the possibilities.

[zaarn]

The problem usually starts to occur when the company that starts subverting your rights is too monopolistic on a market with either a high barrier to entry or a strong networking effect (CPU/GPU vendors and social networks).

In this case choosing another vendor may not be easy (find a GPU that isn't AMD/NVidia/Matrox and that works with most games or find a social network that allows the same reach as facebook or find a video sharing site with the same ad revenue and reach as youtube)

[jakeogh]

I'm with you there. Antitrust law has been applied effectively (although in the FB case, I find it hard to come up with a technical argument as to why, it's just MySpace 2.0 and we will laugh about it years from now). I tend to jump into these conversations because it's often related to a push for more law.