So I could bring down eBay by opening a store; selling something that I know (but eBay doesn't) is dangerous / broken / false. If that sale goes through, should eBay be taken down since they operate a marketplace where unsafe products are being sold ? eBay cannot reasonably test every single item that is sold through their platform. Same goes for every second hand marketplace in the world. They need to take some measure to address this, but cannot reduce the risk to 0.
As far as I know, SilkRoad had a whole reputation system in place to allow users to flag untrustworthy sellers; that system was inline or even ahead of what many "legal" marketplace had put in place. A part of why SilkRoad was so successful is precisely because overall that reputation system allowed users to identify trustworthy sellers.
This theory was actually tested last year and...eBay won.
The DOJ filed a lawsuit on behalf of the EPA against eBay in 2023, seeking to hold them liable for prohibited pesticides and chemicals as well as illegal emissions control cheat devices sold through the platform that violate multiple federal laws and environmental regulations.
There wasn't even really an argument about whether or not the items were actually illegal to sell - all parties including eBay basically stipulated to that and the judge even explicitly acknowledged it in her ruling - the entire case came down to whether or not eBay could be held liable for the actions of third party sellers on their platform who they failed to proactively prevent from selling illegal items.
In September 2024, U.S. District Judge Orelia Merchant granted eBay's motion to dismiss the case, ruling that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 provides eBay immunity for the actions of those third party sellers.
DOJ filed an appeal on December 1st so we'll see where that goes but as it stands now - no, you couldn't take eBay down even by listing stuff eBay does know to be illegal, based on current precedent.
Why the courts applied Sec230 that way in one instance and not another is the real question and the more cynically minded might also wonder how eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's various philanthropic and political endeavors (including but not limited to being the $ behind Lina Khan's whole "hipster antitrust" movement) could be a factor too. He's no longer an active board member but still a major shareholder whose existing shares would likely be worth a lot less if a case with a potential ~$2 Billion in fines had been allowed to proceed.
Ebay tries to prevent you from selling illegal stuff though. Silk Road didn't. The reputation system was to prevent scams and bad quality products, not to prevent illegal transactions, right?
A large minority of the population (and in some cases, like weed, an overt majority) of the population don't think those transactions should be illegal. "The law is wrong" is sort of the whole point, and why Ulbricht is a quasi-folk hero.
It’s also a biased view. The author admit that the feature he was involved in took longer to ship initially. Depending on the environment this can be an anti-pattern; don’t we say “release early, release often”.
In the same vein; the author says that the other feature took several releases to be stable. Were the other release purely bug fixes or did that give the engineer a chance to get early feedback and incorporate that into the feature ?
It’s clear that the author prefers a slow and careful approach, and he judges “success” and “failure” by that metric. It sometimes is the right approach. It sometimes isn’t.
AI does not commit code; people do. The origin of the code does not matter, processes remain the same. So:
1. We never catch AI trying to make breaking changes, but we catch developers who do. Since using AI tools we haven’t seen a huge change in those patterns.
2. Prior to opening a PR; developers are now spending more time reviewing code instead of writing it. During the code review process, we use AI to highlight potential issues faster.
> No we don't need to change the system on the basis that it leads to outcomes you want.
I definitely agree with that view. But maybe we could/should change the system on the basis that "the majority does not agree that the system is working".
While measuring that is hard since you would always tend to find that the system is working if it favours the candidate you like; there still is a significant number of people both left and right leaning that agree that the bi partisan winner-takes all voting system is fundamentally broken.
If only for the fact that a president can ben elected by winning less voices than his opponent, thereby showing that some votes are worth more than others.
> After all, the primary purpose of the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation was to try to capture enough Israelis to force a prisoner exchange and get their own people back
You can't possibly believe this when there are numerous confirmed reports of entire families being massacred with 0 hostages taken. If your purpose was really to take hostages; those could have been easy bargain chips; instead they raped them, murdered them and paraded their bodies in front of cheerful crowds.
If the central point of the operation was to grab hostages; their whereabouts and well being (or at least survival) would have been central to the whole ordeal; instead the were disseminated with little to no proof of life. It doesn't even appear that the Hamas leadership knew what to do with them, or even had them accounted for and located.
The goal of the attacks was to inflict a major blow to the Israeli government by forcing a strong military response that would delay the normalisation of the relations between Israel and other arab states. To do so Hamas was wiling to sacrifice civilian blood which is exactly what is happening now. They placed their hideouts in schools hospitals, and NGO headquarters to maximise the political cost of any military operation. Hostages were "nice to have" as they were supposed to further increase the pressure on the Israeli government by people who would be pushing for their return.
They did not anticipate how far BiBi was willing to go and they are definitely paying for it in blood now.
> It would've been trivial to designate X as a gatekeeper to make some cash
The whole point of the article is that the sole reason why X is not "feeling the full force of the EU regulation" is that.... there is not enough cash to make so the EU does not bother. The very definition of an extortion market.
I'd argue that X is far worse than other tech giants in promoting hate crime etc. But since the EU can't really grab a lot of money from it (turnover too low) they care less. As a European, I read the law as; it does not matter how much of a threat to democracy you are: the amount of money you make (and thus we amount we can fine) are the main factor that will determine if we go after you or not. Great.
"The DMA aims at ensuring a higher degree of competition in European digital markets by preventing large companies from abusing their market power and by allowing new players to enter the market"
Those are all very nice intentions. But let's look at the facts: you can have massive impact, and still fly under the radar because the way the law is written "large companies" is all about money.
You have millions of users, be cited 1000x/hour on public/private media, be the place where Europe commissioner announce their resignations, and be the origin of countless lawsuits entered around censorship and freedom of speech; if you are owned by a billionaire who is able to squeeze costs and is not in need to make money, you will never be considered to be worth of investigation by the DMA. Just because you don't generate enough money to be worth the EU time.
The way the law is written is all about money; the amount of revenue you make (and thus the amount they can grab) is quite literally the main criteria when deciding if you are subject to it or not. They just sugar coated it with the usual layer of "EU citizen protection" and "protection from abuse of power".
Well, I guess I have a less cynical attitude than you. Sure, goverments and supranatinal organizations are not perfect and they deserve to be criticized. But, I also believe that many people who work there do care about these issues for the sake of humanity.
When you design a regulation like the DMA, how much revenue a company makes is a good proxy of their potential impact on citizens. It's not the only proxy, but it's also not the only criteria in the DMA.
I hate Musk just as much as next person, but it seems obvious that they don't fall under the criteria defined by DMA. I agree that the criteria should be adapted. So, we could discuss about adapting the DMA to include more companies as gatekeepers. And maybe this will happen, the DMA is a brand new regulation, and I'm sure there will be many amendments to it in the years to come.
But just retorting to calling the DMA as a money grab by the EU is not a constructive way forward.
> When you design a regulation like the DMA, how much revenue a company makes is a good proxy of their potential impact on citizens
Absolutely not; it's just a proxy for how much money you can get from them, especially when the way you define the fines is proportional to that number (a coincidence I am sure).
The origin of the problem is that the EU has been unable to properly tax big tech companies for a long time. Due to how accounting works, Meta, Apple, Alphabet etc have been reporting very little revenue in Europe despite Europe being a major market.
They do so because the EU tax rate is much higher than the US so they have a lot of incentive to move all the revenue away through "clever" accounting.
Because there is "no revenue" there is "no profit tax". And that drives the EU crazy to see so much $$$ being done here and no contribution to the states members budget, which are in dire need of cash. Because the international convention prevent you from taxing international revenue, you invent some kind of weird law to fine it instead. Different name, but same result. I am sure you noticed that the fine are proportional to the worldwide revenues of those companies. From a "EU citizen protection" perspective, there is no logic behind taxing money made in Thailand because you breached a law related to users in Belgium. From a "let's grab what we are owed because we have trouble taxing it the normal way" perspective it makes total sense. Fining based on world wide revenue is the one key reason why this law exists.
Because you actually don't want to impact European companies (which are already paying what the EU feels like the "right" amount) you carve some rules and boundaries that are specifically designed to only target the companies you are after. These kind of artificial threshold age poorly as we see.
An excellent counter example to this is Live Nation. They have huge revenue, massive user base and undeniably act as a Gatekeeper in the live music sector (when is the last time you did not use Ticketmaster to buy a ticket ?). Even the US is after them. Will the EU move a finger against them ? Absolutely not; because of the nature of the live music sector it's quite hard to "hide" revenues made in Europe. So Live Nation pays the right amount of tax, and thus will not be investigated. They check all the mark, but they also have already paid their due, so no one is going after them.
In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes — Ben Franklin
There are other reasons to fine companies based on % of their revenue: If it were a fixed amount, large companies would not care about the fine, whereas smaller companies would go bankrupt.
What about humble ones ? You come with a strong « I know best than anyone else » yet your project hasn’t even had 1 day of experience in the « real world ».
> But, tell me what you want tested and add that to my list.
Big numbers, small numbers, positive numbers, negative numbers, positive 0, negative 0, positive infinity, negative infinity, fractional numbers, irrational numbers, latin characters, non latin characters, invalid characters, emojis, dates in the past, dates in the future, dates that don’t exist, the list goes on; really
The point here is that the antitrust concerns are a natural consequences of them doing their job properly; with Apple becoming a bigger company - which is what is expected of them - it is quite natural that Apple will attract more scrutiny regarding their practices as a dominant player.
Their high level decisions and strategy created a desirable situation: Apple is bigger than ever. That situation has undesirable side effects, but overall the tradeoff is worth it.
It's what we call "rich people problem"; those are real problems - that need to be handled - but they are problems that "you wish to have" because it also means you solved a ton of other - more pressing - issues. And people don't usually look for "blame" in these situations.
There's an argument that Microsoft missed the whole mobile trend because of the antitrust trial and it's outcome, making them second guess potential moves.
IBM got rid of it's computer division as one of the many results of the antitrust case and it's now basically a consulting company with researchers as a side gig.
For any of these companies there was a path to keep making tremendous revenue without getting regulators on one's back, though it requires keeping producing competitive products.
As an example, LVMH is an ultra profitable group with a tentacular hold on its markets, but you don't see governments constantly suing them.
I'm not sure why you see getting struck down by whole governments to be some desirable "rich people problem".
The entire article considers engineer to be fundamentally different than « normal people ».
Here is the trick: we aren’t. People like concrete arguments as much as we do. People buy product they like as much as we do. People like to play with stuff before buying as much as we do.
I think I can elucidate what the author was going after, in the context of advertising.
Most people want shiny things in nice boxes. The aesthetic and aesthetic experience is extremely important.
In engineering it is the functional characteristics which we are ooing and enamored by.
In my line of work (power engineering) there is -zero- thought put into aesthetics and experience. In my girlfriends line of work (cosmetics development) there is a whole team larger than the technical team that puts an enormous effort into things like bottle design and "vibe".
Perhaps at a base level the same brain chemicals get stirred up, but what the author is saying is that the paths there are different.
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