[DJHenk]

> I think this should be of particular importance to the US which has fudamental rights protecting freedom of expression.

It is important for everyone in the world and most nations have already wrestled with this problem. The US is not special. The only reason the US is starting to wonder about the influence of other states on such a critical piece of infrastructure is because they are not dominating it anymore and only now are beginning to find out that there are other nations present that have different cultural norms.

Laws like the DSA are exactly created to address this problem. If you want to operate in the EU, you have to adhere to European laws and values.

> I'm very worried about co-ordinated lawfare against Musk-operated companies being used as a tool to force his compliance with systems that exist to get around laws against the US government's direct involvement in censorship. I'm also worried about the EU's lurch towards Chinese-style censorship of social media. And, I think we should be able to talk about it now while we still can.

Well, other people are very worried about companies exploiting exploiting every technique they can think of to fuck their users and make more money. Trying to prevent that is not even remotely close to Chinese-style censorship.

[nvm0n2]

> If you want to operate in the EU, you have to adhere to European laws and values.

The EU institutions don't represent European values. The Commission doesn't run elections to find out what they are, can't even define what it thinks they are and routinely claims that the results of actual democratic elections in Europe are somehow contrary to those same European values.

> The US is not special

It is in fact special, in that it has systematically kicked the ass of the European economy for decades in everything tech related. The EU doesn't even have second place also-ran companies that compete with Twitter, Instagram, Threads, TikTok etc. It has nothing.

So, fundamentally, Musk can and maybe should tell the Commission that in fact they don't operate in Europe and do not recognize EU laws or what they think European "values" are. I wonder how long the current state can hold for. If US tech firms just state that they will ignore EU regulation whilst continuing to serve requests from EU IP ranges, then what? The Commission would have to impose trade sanctions on the USA (i.e. ban European companies from purchasing services from them), which would invite retaliatory sanctions from Washington.

[gettodachoppa]

> If US tech firms just state that they will ignore EU regulation whilst continuing to serve requests from EU IP ranges, then what?

Then they are unable to take money from EU businesses to show ads to EU users.

Social media companies don't develop their products out of altruism. Their goal is to make money. (and increasingly the ability to manipulate public opinion/ban wrongthink) What's the point of letting millions of EU users hammer your servers if you can't make money from them?

[nvm0n2]

That would only be the case if the EU imposed financial sanctions on the USA (forbidden transactions with US banks), which the US would retaliate against.

Additionally, even if enforced, it just means European visitors would see ads for American products (which they can still import) instead of local products. An own goal for sure.