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by teekert 1547 days ago
Wow, "just force everyone". This is not freedom. I mean it doesn't feel that wrong because we ware talking about a big corporation, and sure I hate that WhatsApp replaced SMS here here claiming "privacy first, never any ads" but then gets bought by a big anti-privacy, ads-everywhere company. But still, imagine WhatsApp was written and maintained by an individual? Would we be so keen to use terms like "force"? This is all negative in the freedom dimension.

If you want a free, private, modern communication network, build it, don't steal it. In this case we are already very close to having a very nice solution in the form of Matrix. Throw some money and devs for things at Matrix/Element for issues we want to solve there. Push it as a government sanctioned solution. Offer services over Matrix, avoid WhatsApp.
4 comments
username190 1547 days ago
> imagine WhatsApp was written and maintained by an individual? Would we be so keen to use terms like "force"? This is all negative in the freedom dimension.

These rules only apply to platforms with a market cap of over €75 billion or European Economic Area turnover of over €7.5 billion.[0] No one is proposing that we require single developers work with Apple and Facebook to make their apps interoperable.

[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/eus-digital-markets-act-adop...

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wintermutestwin 1547 days ago
The more freedom monopolistic entities have the less freedom the rest of the world has because these overpowered companies have turned freedom into a zero sum game.
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tluyben2 1547 days ago
You are right, I fixed my words to say what I actually meant with 'everyone'; I meant (more or less - it could be a applied to a bit smaller imho; a few billion Euros seems enough to ask for some type of openness, but yeah it should not apply to small companies anyway) what the EU is planning, not actually 'everyone'.
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antris 1547 days ago
Limiting freedoms of megacorporations is a good thing.
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teekert 1547 days ago
They should be limited (blocked entirely) in their attempts to influence politics, I agree (sadly that is not the case). They should be limited in their attempts to create addictive products. Instead, we are now proposing to limit them in creating solutions according to viable business models that do no real harm.

There is no forcing necessary in other, imo preferred, scenarios. Like pushing Matrix. The solution, which uses the law to force a company will just block new attempts at creating similar but better products.

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