Oh boy, this reminded me of university days. I wrote a little servlet which would pop out the CD drive on my friends computer in the lab, and I would trigger it at tense moments in Starcraft games. Good times.
Well that's a depressing progress report if I've ever seen one. Honestly I'm boggled at how many people seem indifferent to what could be an existential threat for many of us - obviously many of us care deeply but there's nothing resembling a code red happening in the public consciousness.
insightful comment. I'd like to think that Google will integrate AI in an at least mostly useful way, but it's clear that large scale reorgs like this around chasing a competitor can and do end badly.
This is one of those proposals that seriously made me wonder if the conspiracy theorists were right that he's intentionally running it into the ground. I don't believe that but... charging new users? that's an ostentatiously dumb idea.
Doesn't the EU law have a size requirement for the userbase before it ratchets up? that seems like a reasonable way to apply this law without unduly burdening small companies.
The problem is that it penalizes success and keeps companies small. If your company grows from small to large using personalized ads, you'll suddenly find it subject to this law, and then it has to change its business model. That's incredibly disruptive and discourages growth.
There is no company size threshold here. This is GDPR related. You and Gruber are both mixing up GDPR with the EU's Digital Markets Act. Digital Markets is the one which has a "gatekeeper" concept tied to company size and market power.
Nobody is confused here. The point is, there's not a single European company that is impacted by the "pay or OK" demand, and it's a fair question as to whether there ever will be.
I'm pretty sure that for Google a "multi-million" sized venture is considered a complete waste of time; they probably don't consider it worth pursuing until it hits the hundreds of millions. The scale they operate at financially is beyond comprehensible.
I imagine its frustrating to be working on these projects which would mean untold riches to any individual or small group but having it get shut down because it's not making a half billion or so.
