[whimsicalism]

No, it makes it a legal method of payment as long as you permit free riders or alternatively you can pull up the drawbridge and charge all users for it, preventing poorer people from using the largest public squares in the world.

Free access to global communication is not a bad thing.

But this is besides the point: the guidance is absolutely not clear and if local regulators cannot even get their story straight I am not sure how you expect foreign companies to figure it out. And collecting information about how users use your property is not stalking.

[Nextgrid]

> preventing poorer people from using the largest public squares in the world.

Advertisers aren't charities and the purpose of advertising is ultimately to drive profit. Subsidizing poor people is not in their interest.

The fact that poor people can currently access things for free is a result of imprecise targeting. If there was a way for advertisers to reliably tell apart poor people from the rich ones they'll happily block the poor ones.

Without laws like the GDPR in place to curtail data collection and profiling, it's only a matter of time before more and more data is collected to enable this kind of targeting and lock out poor people too.

> Free access to global communication is not a bad thing.

Global communication being subsidized (and thus controlled) by a handful of commercial interests is very dangerous.

> And collecting information about how users use your property is not stalking.

I'm not talking about basic self-hosted (very important difference!) web analytics or server logs here, I'm talking about large-scale stalking such as what Google/Facebook or any major ad provider does. The information they collect go way beyond what the user does on their platforms.

[whimsicalism]

> The fact that poor people can currently access things for free is a result of imprecise targeting. If there was a way for advertisers to reliably tell apart poor people from the rich ones they'll happily block the poor ones.

You are absolutely wrong about that and you do not understand the business model. I am not saying it has anything to do with the goodness of their heart but this is absolutely not something that would be in their interest. They benefit from the networks effects just like the users do.

> Advertisers aren't charities and the purpose of advertising is ultimately to drive profit. Subsidizing poor people is not in their interest.

It is possible for self-interested action to have knockoff positive effects. In fact, it is actually quite common: most exchanges are mutually beneficial.

> I'm not talking about basic self-hosted (very important difference!) web analytics or server logs here, I'm talking about large-scale stalking such as what Google/Facebook or any major ad provider does. The information they collect go way beyond what the user does on their platforms.

If you read my original comment, you would see that I am in favor of banning cross-site stalking but that is both not what Meta is being fined for here and not the only thing the GDPR/DMA prohibits.

Targeting based on only your own platform is a good middle ground.

[Nextgrid]

> Targeting based on only your own platform is a good middle ground.

I think it's still a problem because it's a grey area as to what "own platform" means exactly. Malicious actors will stretch that definition beyond what's reasonable.

Publicly-available data posted by the user seems fair, but things like scroll position, or the time you read a particular item, or forms typed but not submitted (all things I'm sure Facebook is absolutely collecting via client-side JS) should not be considered fair.

Either way, I'm personally in favour of ad-based business models getting shut down/being made unprofitable as it will ultimately realign the incentives, surface the true price of platforms and mean that we can finally have communication/entertainment tools that are designed with those primary purposes in mind as opposed to spam machines with the bare minimum amount of functionality sprinkled in. I want our online public squares to be accountable to their end-users rather than advertisers, and facilitate communication rather than outrage (what they call "engagement").