[strogonoff]

Don’t conflate the concepts of user and customer. “You are a product” as a user is not an exaggeration but ground truth. They run a business, not a charity or government-subsidized public service, and their paying customers are advertisers.

If you have a problem with Big Social banning your free account, you have a problem not with Meta but with this business model being legal. Offering free “service” to collect and retain ad viewer eyeballs distorts the way market is supposed to work, because it’s impossible to compete with free and customers are locked in.

The only way out of this ever-deepening quagmire is to forbid this business model; all users should be paying customers, so the company is accountable to them, they can vote with their wallet, and the market can do its job properly.

[pdonis]

> The only way out of this ever-deepening quagmire is to forbid this business model

I'm not sure this would actually fix the problem. The existing Big Social companies are so committed to this business model that I don't think they are capable of switching. I think some other company (that doesn't exist now) would have to figure out how to run the all-users-are-paying-customers business model at scale for things like search and social media. But who would run such a company? The company that was in the best position to do this, twenty or so years ago, was...Google. They had the tech resources, and they had the "Don't be evil" motto, which back then they were actually making some effort to live up to. And yet nobody there tried to get this done. Who is going to do it now?

[strogonoff]

By “forbid it” I meant “make it illegal” (not as in “big government tell everyone what to do”, but as in “let the market do its job properly”). If it’s illegal, they would have no other choice would they!

[pdonis]

> By “forbid it” I meant “make it illegal”

Yes, I understand that.

> not as in “big government tell everyone what to do”, but as in “let the market do its job properly”

You are missing a crucial point: the current state of Big Social Media is a product of a free market. Users freely choose to take advantage of the opportunity to use these services without paying for them. "Making it illegal" would mean telling all those users that they can no longer make that choice because the government is taking it away, by passing laws that prevent Big Social Media from offering their services for free. And of course Big Social Media will play that for all it's worth in the political debate that would precede the hypothetical passage of any such law. Not to mention that such a law would also be outlawing all the other tech startups that would benefit from a "freemium" business model.

My prediction is that any such law would be taken off the table due to political pressure long before it got anywhere near actually being passed. But in any case, saying that the law is just to "let the market do its job properly" is obviously wrong. "Free market" doesn't mean you get to outlaw freely chosen transactions that you don't like.

> If it’s illegal, they would have no other choice would they!

If we assume the law you propose actually works and isn't gamed (which is already a big if), my prediction is that Big Social Media would either pivot to some new thing that they could charge for (LLM-based "AI", perhaps), or take their cash and effectively go out of business. I don't think they would just say "oh, well" and actually do the hard work it would take to make all their users paying customers.

[strogonoff]

> actually works and isn't gamed

The feeling that law is useless is good for Big Social because it helps uphold the status quo.

In practice, companies don’t like doing things that are obviously illegal, especially criminal.

For example, do phone operators sell your phone records? No, because the penalty is 10 years in prison. One employee with good ethics or bad mood is enough to land top management in jail.

Does “records” mean actual contents of the call? No, it means simply “whom you called and when”.

Does social media contain much more sensitive personal information than phone records? Absolutely.

If the law does not penalize selling that information, it only means the law is inadequate, not that it is useless.

> I don't think they would just say "oh, well" and actually do the hard work it would take to make all their users paying customers.

If they won’t, someone else will. It can even be you or me. This is the beauty of free market where honest competition is possible.

[pdonis]

> If the law does not penalize selling that information

This is a different proposal from what you made before. This proposed law would not require users to be paying customers (so apps could still have a free tier). It would just require that sensitive personal information gained from apps not be sold to third parties for profit, as is now required for phone records. The effect would be similar, since the ad-supported business model largely relies on such selling of information. But it would be a narrower restriction, because there are many apps with free tiers that do not use the ad-supported business model.

That said, the obvious way to game this law is the definition of "sensitive information". This was never an issue for phone operators because their users are already their customers; people pay for phone service. So there is no incentive for phone operators to try to monetize whatever sensitive information they could harvest, so for them "sensitive information" basically means "whatever information you collect from phone calls" and there is no pressure to manipulate that definition. But it would be a huge issue for Big Social Media, and I would expect them to work very hard to gerrymander the definition of "sensitive information" so it doesn't really restrict their operations.

If they failed and a law like this got passed, would they then actually do the hard work to make all their users paying customers? I still doubt it, but perhaps somewhat less than for the broader law I took you to be proposing before.

[strogonoff]

If I didn’t provide the definition for “sensitive information” in my comment that doesn’t mean the law can’t have it.

Same as I did not give you a full definition of what “phone records” means, but the relevant law has it.

> This proposed law would not require users to be paying customers

If it’s made illegal to profit from users through such indirect means, then there would be no choice for companies but to require users to be paying customers.

The core issue is not that users don’t pay, but that they are the product (and that hurts the users and distorts how market works, preventing competition). That’s what legislation could address. Whether users pay or not simply follows from market mechanics.

Companies can still provide subsidized accounts for disadvantaged families and cover the costs by charging premium users more, for example, if they want to.

> But it would be a huge issue for Big Social

Absolutely, it’s probably their worst nightmare ;)

[aurareturn]

I think by now, everyone knows how Meta's business model works. No need to explain it.

The point isn't that I'm a product or a customer. The point is that given the locked in data that can affect real human lives, Meta and Google ought to put more into the process of reversing erroneously banned accounts. I'm not a law expert. Regardless, it's this person who won the case has done a good thing for all Meta users.

[strogonoff]

> The point is that given the locked in data that can affect real human lives, Meta and Google ought to put more into the process of reversing erroneously banned accounts.

There’s many things they could do to affect human lives better, but they have a fiscal responsibility to not spend money on that unless those humans are their paying customers.

Again, this is not a charity. This is a legal business, if you don’t like this you should fight for a change to the definition of “legal”.