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Meta calls €200M pay-or-consent fine 'unlawful' (www.theregister.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Meta has come out swinging following the European Commission's decision that its pay-or-consent model falls foul of the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

In a post, the company stated: "This decision is both incorrect and unlawful, and we are appealing it." It then cites previous judgments to support its argument that it should be permitted to display personalized ads to users who don't want a paid subscription.

"Meta," it said, "is the only company in Europe unable to offer both a subscription-based and a free ad-supported service. Instead, Meta is required to offer a free, reduced-ad service – less personalized ads – that leads to poorer outcomes for users, advertisers, and platforms."

According to Meta, national courts and data protection authorities, including in France, Denmark, and Germany, have given "consistent support" for "business models that provide a paid subscription alternative to consent for personal data use for personalized ads."

But not the European Commission, which handed down a €200 million ($228 million) fine for the Meta's "consent or pay" ad model in April.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (4 children)

Or just, you know. Ban every meta product in the EU. That would be so wonderful. It would force people to stop using that shit and the world would be a better place. I see this as an absolute win.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

That's an option but doesn't seem realistic. If a service is freely available on the Internet, it's hard to ban it in a specific country. China and Russia are doing it and that require massive Internet censorship apparatus, strict measures against VPN, Tor, and online privacy tools.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It's not unrealistic if you don't expect it to be watertight. They've already banned piracy and gambling sites here. It's a simple DNS block and so only for people using their ISP's DNS. It still works, way fewer people use the sites that are blocked.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Blocking of piracy websites are a good example of a decision to block escalating to rediculous levels, and becoming increasingly problematic.

Companies from the from music/cultural industry convinced a court to order ISP to block some websites, and they did by meddling with their own DNS servers.

Then those companies came back to request blocking by alternative DNS providers such as Google and OpenDNS, since people used them to workaround blocks.

And next of course these companies attacked VPN providers, asking for more blocking, again because those allow working around previous blocks.

These ISP, DNS and VPN providers are third parties with no involvment in piracy, but they're being forcully involed into that fight anyway. This is completely disproportionate. If they want to fight piracy those companies should only be allowed to attack those actually involved.

If they have their way, we'll end up the having the equivalent of the great firewall of china dedicated to tracking and blocking anything remotely looking like piracy or p2p.

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