It's easy for people to read the law — or worse, opinions about the law — and mistake this for knowledge. One of the benefits to me for ChatGPT is that it gives me a stick to measure against: I know it's flawed because of how it writes code, and I know it will be that level of wrong about law too, and I also know that it's wildly better about law than I am. This makes the degree of my own ignorance much more intuitive, and reminds me that I can't just look at the text of the law and go "ah-ha!"
While I suspect you're right that Facebook will attempt this, I suspect they are much like Apple when it comes to not really believing that the EU is serious, and it will explode in their faces — a few years back, Apple put in rules for advertising privacy ID, which (while acknowledging my ignorance above) didn't seem too different from what the law required, yet Facebook was very unhappy about this.
We know:
https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/07/04/apple-bows-to-kr...
https://9to5mac.com/2021/06/15/app-store-lgbtq-censorship-co...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/tech/china-apple-whatspp-thre...
Anyone speaking with certainty against these examples should be distrusted. This is our reality. You cannot deny what Apple does.
Anybody speaking with certainty on these questions should be distrusted.
We don’t know. We now have a natural experiment between the EU and U.S. My suspicion is we’ll see Orwellian corporate surveillance through mandated alternative marketplaces, e.g. Facebook requiring an Eye of Sauron marketplace to get around Apple’s rules, but that’s just a hunch. We may instead see a Cambrian explosion of creativity in the EU.
The question is how long we wait to measure. I think the answer is about one VC fund cycle, or 3 to 7 years. I don’t know when to start the clock—my hunch is when the first alt app store actually launches.