Readit NewsIt certainly does require informed consent in other situations though and the dreaded cookie banners were the industry's attempt to interpret that legal requirement.
The cookie banner requirement is itself a widespread misconception because the actual rule is neither specific to cookies (it would also cover other locally stored data) nor universal (for example it doesn't require specific consent for locally storing necessary data like session/login mechanics or the contents of a shopping basket).
The requirements for consent that do exist originate in the ePrivacy Directive. That directive was supposed to be superseded by a later ePrivacy Regulation that would have been lex specialis to the GDPR - possibly the only actual link between any of the EU law around cookies and the GDPR - but in the end that regulation was never passed and it was formally abandoned earlier this year.
So for now rules about user consent for local data storage in the EU - and largely still in the UK - do exist but they derive from the ePrivacy Directive and they are widely misunderstood. And while there has been a lot of talk about changes to EU law that might improve the situation with the banners so far talk is all it has been.
The unfortunate reality is that we have a duopoly in the mobile device market and having one of those devices are now a practical necessity to live a normal life for most people. Without regulation to force the market to open up there's little to stop organisations that want ever more control over the devices you can use to access their systems. Trying to go outside the two big players just means you're going to get a substandard or completely pointless experience. And even governments are in on it.
Which is going to be interesting when both the huge US corporations that form that duopoly and/or the government of their home nation decide to do something that goes against what the government or laws in other places want to happen.
However the story might be different in a decade as sixth gen aircraft like Tempest are entering service and probably other modern technologies like unmanned/autonomous drones and hypersonic and directed energy weapons are more widely deployed. Connectivity between units in the field is also clearly a huge deal that is going to matter more and more and that is going to require a level of interoperability and trust that won't be kind to "partners" who aren't good team players.
On that kind of timescale I expect "buying American" will be much less attractive to most "allies" of the US than it has been for most of the past century and it will show exactly in decisions like who is making and buying whose planes.
"If country B doesn’t like it, block the mail in question". Saying only the country of origin can regulate activity done in another country creates a legal worm-bucket with vast implications. It's also not how laws work currently in pretty much any other sector than the internet.
IP block should be sufficient to void the laws; That's how other EU laws work. If the UK wants more than than then they should just create a firewall. But saying the internet should be a fully unregulated hellscape is not a sensible position here.
But this is the real issue. To what extent is a company "operating in" a country where it has no staff and no physical presence?
The principle that someone should become subject to the laws of a country they've never visited and where they have no assets just because they communicated with someone else who does live in that country seems questionable. Even if money is sent by the person living in that country to someone based elsewhere it still seems questionable.
Taken to their logical conclusion these kinds of arguments would kill off a lot of the value of the modern Internet (assuming they could be practically enforced). Can you even write a blog post any more if it might be controversial in any country in the world? Do you have to pay if you show ads next to that blog post and someone from the Sovereign Republic Of East Nowhere visits - but the Sovereign Republic Of East Nowhere has a law prohibiting online advertising as a social harm and imposing a fine of 1000% of global revenues generated through ads? What happens when the laws of two different countries are in direct conflict and one requires you to include an official warning of some kind alongside certain information on your blog but the other one prohibits such statements unless you're formally qualified to give advice in the field?
If you want to interfere with international trade or international communications at all then it makes far more sense practically - and arguably both morally and legally as well - to legislate so that your own people in your own country who are subject to your own laws are the ones who must or must not act in a certain way. If there's some kind of regulation on physical goods then make the person importing those goods responsible for compliance. If you want to tax international transactions then make the person in your country who is participating in those transactions responsible for declaring and paying the tax. But realistically this leads to a lot of non-compliance because your citizens don't have to be experts in international tax law so you can collect your $1.53 when they bought a new T-shirt from some online store based in another country and had it shipped.
If you feel you’re entitled to everyone else’s labor - I dunno what to tell you.
On the other hand, if you value your own time so little that the only amount you're willing invest in the quality of what you read is $0 - I also don’t know what to tell you.
Either way, I hope you figure it out.
Medium (at least what it is today) tries to bring down the friction of making valuable content available at a reasonable price.
The alternative solutions the web has been to come up with is to take the valuable content and lock it up in hundreds of silos (Substack, etc), leave residual low value content marketing available, and then cover most everything else with a browser melting level of “adtech”
You're perfectly entitled to keep your content commercial if you want. Just don't put it in the same place as the freely available material that everyone else was working with and then complain when people find you irritating. Some of us are content to share our own work for free on the web and to enjoy work that is offered freely by others. We're all doing it right now on HN and many of us run non-commercial blogs of our own too. And we made the web an interesting and useful place long before sites like Medium came along and tried to centralise and commercialise it.
Hostile? That’s definitely a take. Curious what you’re thinking there.
Probably the second most annoying thing on the web today is when you click a link that looks interesting but the page you land on almost immediately says you have to do or pay something to actually read the thing the referring page implied. I don't even start reading a Medium article now if I can see that pop-up below - it's just an instinctive reaction to close the tab. I wish people wouldn't link to articles in walled gardens and search engines would remove those articles from their index - or if that's not reliable then exclude entire sites. Those walls break the whole cross-linking model that made the web the success it is and they waste people's time on a global scale.
I recognise that my position may be somewhat hypocritical because I'd rank AI slop as #3 and maybe #1 and #2 are making some kind of attempt to avoid supporting AI slop. But then I'd propose a more draconian solution to that problem as well - one involving punitive penalties for AI companies that scrape others' content without permission to train their models and possibly for anyone else using models that are tainted.
In my own cases of responsibility, Caddy would have eliminated them had it been around. Instead I've learned to be paranoid, though having things like this are far better in terms of easing cognitive burden.
Cheers for all of the hard work by you and other maintainers.
I try to avoid engaging in online flame wars but I will say that the developers - including Francis - have been nothing but helpful and courteous to me personally and I've also learned a lot from their numerous positive contributions to Caddy-related forums.
> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
LOL the day that Firefox stops me from running what I want is the day I'll get rid of it.
Today the ability to run proper content blockers is still a selling point for Firefox but obviously wouldn't be if they started to meddle with that as well. (Has there ever been a more obvious case of anticompetitive behaviour than the biggest browser nerfing ad blocking because it's owned by one of the biggest ad companies?)
Other than customisation the only real advantage I see for Firefox today is the privacy angle. But again that would obviously be compromised if they started breaking tools like content blockers that help to provide that protection.