A number of companies, including Meta, have self-designated themselves as “gatekeepers” under the DMA rules, which will potentially make them subject to stricter regulations around data sharing and giving preference to their own products.
Gatekeepers are banned from combining users’ personal data across different platforms under the DMA.
Threads is designed to let users follow the same accounts they’ve connected with on Instagram and keep their Instagram usernames, helping the social media giant leverage its billions of users to quickly gain scale.
I think the term gatekeeper makes more sense if applied to companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft & Co, with their search engines, maps, app stores, operating systems, browsers ... all these are gateways to "the digital market". Twitter might be to small and comparatively niche to be classified as a gatekeeper. There does not seem to be an exact definition that I could find. But social networks as a category and companies like Meta/Facebook are listed as gatekeepers.
The European Union Digital Markets Act, coming into effect in May 2023, explicitly forbids such behavior. (If twitter is classified as a "gatekeeper".)
Example of the “don'ts” - Gatekeeper platforms may no longer:
- treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
- prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms
And I am totally for these "million other lefty-green things". Solar and wind is comparatively cheap to install and comparatively low effect on nature. The resulting energy is also cheap (if used locally). We have many (poor) villages here in Germany owning their own wind turbines and benefiting from selling this energy, greatly improving the financial situation for the local population. It's like farming but with wind turbines.
In the long run Germany will be better of. We just have to get through this painful transition.
I don't find the argument "richer countries can emit more CO2" to be helpful. The richer the country the more money is available to act responsible.
Even in your GDP adjusted data France is 37% lower than Germany (0.14/0.09). In a global comparison both countries are doing fine, but not good enough: https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/ .
A German court can not, in fact, serve a court order to Volkswagen America. (Technically it can, but the order is not enforceable.) A German court is also forbidden to force Volkswagen AG to reach into Volkswagen America because these are separate legal entities.
A German court would use judicial assistance and ask US law enforcement to help. US law enforcement would then adhere to local laws and protect the rights of US citizens while trying to help.
Searching for "12.1 Regions. Customer can specify the location(s) where Customer Data will be processed within the" (as mentioned in the verdict) yields AWS as the problematic sub-processor for company A: https://d1.awsstatic.com/legal/aws-gdpr/AWS_GDPR_DPA.pdf
No, opening a connection and exchanging IPs falls under "technically necessary" processing of personal data.
But from a legal point of view we, as a European company, are forbidden to use any US infrastructure provider. We can't ask for consent to transfer data to an US based entity if our consent form itself is already hosted by an US based entity. And even if we did find a solution, like hosting the main infrastructure with a European company and asking for consent for some later data transfer, we are most likely forbidden to transfer data to US based entities at all.
This will change soon. From what I heard work is underway to let national data protection offices handle cases without the Irish DPC or force the Irish CPC to work.
"(1) Personal data shall be: (f) processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data, including protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage, using appropriate technical or organisational measures (‘integrity and confidentiality’)."
"(1) Processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that at least one of the following applies: (b) processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party or in order to take steps at the request of the data subject prior to entering into a contract;"
"(1) Personal data shall be: (f) processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data, including protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage, using appropriate technical or organisational measures (‘integrity and confidentiality’)."
That is not true. IP addresses are explicitly stated as personal data. That they are a technical requirement for a connection only has repercussions on how you are allowed to store and process this data and the consent you need to get from the user for your data processing.
You are not allowed to send IP addresses (even if they are a technical requirement for connection set up) to companies under US government control before you get full consent from the EU user.
The "technical requirement" exception (to process data without consent) only applies to GDPR complaint data processors which US companies can't be because of the Cloud Act.
Yes, that might be a real difference. (But I, personally, find sugar very addictive. YMMV) But what happens if we compare the health implications? Obesity, and sugar as one of many parts of this problem, might be more deadly than nicotine. The thing is... I don't know! But it is startling how different the discussion in the UK is compared to the US. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/e-cigarettes-an-e...
There is so much politics and misinformation in this discussion. That's not good.
ps: For me the upside of nicotine is fun. The same with alcohol. (I say this as someone who is vaping once a month and uses nicotine as a drug but does not want the downsides of cigarettes.)
So does sugar. So what's exactly the argument? If we forbid everything that might be dangerous the world would look very different. Half our food would vanish. Cars get banned...
To have a fair discussion I think we should compare to other substances we legally consume.
15 years ago when I worked in the music streaming space we also had to push users to playlists instead of albums. The reason, in Germany at least, was that a playlist only payed 1/10 the royalties to the GEMA [1] than an album playthrough. Playlists were classified as ¨radio¨ and thus a performance of the radio station but an album was the performance of the original artist.
Our interface was optimized for low royalties, not the end user. Maybe it is the same situation now.
To quote https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-05/meta-won-... :
A number of companies, including Meta, have self-designated themselves as “gatekeepers” under the DMA rules, which will potentially make them subject to stricter regulations around data sharing and giving preference to their own products.
Gatekeepers are banned from combining users’ personal data across different platforms under the DMA.
Threads is designed to let users follow the same accounts they’ve connected with on Instagram and keep their Instagram usernames, helping the social media giant leverage its billions of users to quickly gain scale.