1. Entrenches Google, Facebook, etc. because they are the only people that have enough money to comply with the regulation.

2. Makes the rest of the internet worse (e.g. people show MORE ads because they are less effective because they show me boats and I hate boats)

3. Makes data brokers even more important because companies can't get data anywhere else.

4. Reduces competition because the incumbents will always have more data than startups (Nike knows I wear a size X and the startup can't ever get that data)

Everything is a tradeoff. I, for one, would rather these regulatory agencies go after the 100,000s of data brokers that mine for SSNs, birth certificates, financial info, etc., rather than them going after Facebook, TikTok, etc.

Ads are here to stay, if you don't want ads, then ban ads, and with it most of the internet, but if people keep making terrible regulations like this that try to hurt big companies and get rid of ads and in reality, you just enable and feed these massive companies. Regulation makes them MORE valuable, not less. (see Meta stock price vs. Snap after ATT)

That's an idealistic, but highly unrealistic, thought.

As long as a market exists that can profit from exploiting PII, and is so large that it can support other industries, data will never be radioactive. The only way to make it so is with regulation, either to force companies to adopt fair business models, or by _heavily_ regulating the source of the problem—the advertising industry. Since the advertising industry has its tentacles deeply embedded everywhere, regulating it is much more difficult than regulating companies that depend on it.

So this is a good step by the EU, and even though it's still too conservative IMO, I'm glad that there are governments that still want to protect their citizens from the insane overreach by Big Tech.

Surely they'd do it just for the publicity and ability to shut up Joe Rogan and the other nutjobs that consider that landing fake.

The events of human history on earth have revolved in great part around settling at or controlling strategically advantaged locations, for example any coastline, or a geographic bottleneck for trade and travel (think of Singapore and the Strait of Malacca).

A Lagrange point is the simplest space-based analog to this that I know of, if you want to put something in a fixed location relative to other bodies, the Lagrange points are places where you can do it with the highest fuel economy. Then when operating from that position you will have more energy available to do other things, granting you advantage over competitors who are not at the Lagrange point.

So whether it's science, research, trade, defense etc. there is a compelling reason to locate things at a Lagrange point, and it seems this is already happening as we have science satellites at L1 and L2 and I believe L3 has been talked about. The Lagrange points are not all created equal in terms of distance to their respective bodies, size, energy required to maintain a position etc. All two body systems have them, so for example the Earth and Moon have a set of Lagrange points that are significant to us.

The LPs are what a lot of our space politics and problems may eventually revolve around (quite literally!).