Regardless of the intentions behind this, this is very, very illegal(if you are in the US) and could open the company up to some serious liability down the line.
It seems like the previous browser antitrust ruling in Europe was 2010, with the browser ballot screen being required until 2014.
Given the scale of the fine Microsoft received after breaking their agreement by breaking the ballot system and not showing it to users (over 500m EUR I believe), it seems strange to me that Microsoft is really so willing to get back into this area of making it harder to switch browser, given the ample past precedent.
Is user data gathered from the web browser under default settings really valuable enough to justify the risk?
Obviously €500m wasn't enough of a deterrent, and anti-trust authorities need to be able to issue exponentially increasing fines to produce either compliance from or the dissolution of the repeat offender.
The only question up for debate is what the base of the exponential function should be.
Honestly, I don't expect antitrust to trigger here. With Apple's treatment of browsers on their phones being considered perfectly acceptable somehow (and the same can be said about pretty much every type of app store category, to be honest), I don't think there are any government bodies that even care about this type of antitrust anymore.
The fight for free access to app stores has replaced the fight for browser bundling.
Yes, it will be a definite red flag if there is no clear CEO in the company.
However, nothing says these titles have to map in any way to actual responsibilities inside the company. Just make someone CEO on paper, at random if you need to, and disregard the title internally.
I fully agree with you. I'm absolute skeptic about anything Facebook and Twitter and other multi-billion dollar tech companies support. Especially because, the whole project of a decentralized social network, if this succeeded, and really became mainstream, these same companies would loose A LOT of power.
It would be easier to compete with them, they would lose their role as being the gate keeper of acceptable debate on a huge part of the internet, so there's a huge down scepticism from my part, thinking "they will find some way to taint and contaminate this whole project... somehow". Twitter would never actually embrace this idea, certainly voluntarily.
It looks like the language is really maturing. The changes are all fairly minor optimizations and improvements to the stdlib.
Impressed with the Go team’s discipline for simplicity and stability.
Between the 1 release in 2012 and the 1.13 release in 2019, this has been the development model of the language. So it's nothing new in Go's evolution.
This is very common in the US, especially for banks and financial institutions.
They settle without admitting any wrongdoing, and agree to pay a fine and promise to change their procedures to avoid doing this in the future.
It is exceedingly rare for financial executives to go to jail for crimes committed by a corporation.
There’s a weird game-theoretic angle to it too. US regulators tend to mostly hammer down when they are confident they can win, they don’t like fighting and losing. So in a way, being told to pay a fine is seen as “pay the fine or else we’re going to court and winning”. It saves the regulators the hassle of actually proving they are right.
But of course there is then a second-order effect. If you are defending yourself against the regulators, right or wrong it is assumed the case is very strong, by all parties.
Ultimately it’s an agency problem too: regulators want (are incentivised to maintain) “clean” markets, not to send people to jail. In the short term, if their civil fine achieves it, their job is done and there is no need to drag themselves through the courts.
From a societal perspective if the threat of investigation and fines is enough to scare most people into following the law most of the time then it's a fairly cheap return on investment. It sucks that some people "get away with it" but over-zealous prosecution can have its own negative side-effects.
FWIW I do wish we'd see more prosecutions of the big cases like the financial crash or the many instances of criminal fraud in the crypto space. Like Madoff you need to catch some big fish to remind everyone that your threats are not entirely empty.
For anyone thinking to do this, it’s a terrible idea. Bitcoin has a public ledger that is around forever. It is much easier to trace than cash or offshore bank accounts.
Start by taking to your CTO to understand the basic architecture of your product and tech stack, so you know what tech you are using for frontend, backend, db, etc.
Then pick one and take a look at some beginner tutorials for that technology. See what it would take to build a “Hello, world” type product.
But yes, for now the central bank and legislative actions far outweigh my uber drivers and unemployed dates talking about daytrading, as more money is going to hit the market. US Congress is going to create/distribute $2 trillion more dollars and the US Federal Reserve is still purchasing corporate bonds, creating new money in every transaction. Babies better be daytrading on abacuses.
