[astronads]

They don’t have an inherent right to exist or be profitable. If the EU agrees this violates GDPR then they will have to adapt or die.

[ApolloFortyNine]

And EU would have to cave after people complain that YouTube, tiktok, every news site, reddit, the entire internet becomes nothing more than a pay wall to them.

Or maybe more likely, consume content from unfriendly countries who will simply ignore the regulation, and force a continuous game of whack a mole with their domains.

[t0mas88]

Or social media becomes a lot smaller in Europe and society turns out to be better without it... Who knows?

[nurple]

Or, I don't know, consume content that people don't put behind a paywall? I view this all as a manifestation of the network's core feature of routing around damage. Monetization and centralization is a scourge on the system's value in propagating humanity's shared knowledge. As the pendulum swings, I think we'll see a shattering of the stranglehold these soulless money seeking empires have on that effort.

[Nextgrid]

Not necessarily, if the enforcement of these regulations allows domestic competitors (that respect the GDPR) to appear?

If Europe takes this stance, those competitors could also be allowed to mirror the content from foreign, non-GDPR-compliant companies, effectively giving them the best of both worlds?

[Aerroon]

And how would that domestic competitor make money? Can't use ads, can't charge a subscription fee. What else?

Where would this domestic competitor even get the content from? Steal it from YouTube/TikTok?

[Nextgrid]

You can charge a subscription fee. You can even use untargeted ads as an alternative.

But maybe the website can just (in combination with a universal micropayments system) charge a reasonable fee and that people will just pay it?

> Steal it from YouTube/TikTok?

That's another hypothesis. The EU could just rule that it's legal to copy content provided for free and then legally "steal" it from other platforms?

[belltaco]

> You can even use untargeted ads as an alternative.

Why wouldn't those ads be blocked? And they cannot take countermeasures if they were held as illegal in this case. Not sure how that's an alternative.

>That's another hypothesis. The EU could just rule that it's legal to copy content provided for free and then legally "steal" it from other platforms?

Won't that kill EU content creators more than other ones, because non-English EU based content is mostly created and consumed within the EU.

[Aerroon]

But YouTube Premium already exists. It costs €8.5/month here. It gets rid of all of the ads.

[Nextgrid]

The cost should be closer to what current ad impressions cost though, which is a few cents per page load at most.