Meta has a new plan to navigate the European Union’s tough new ad privacy rules – charge users $14 a month.
The tech giant is considering getting customers in Europe to pay monthly subscription fees to use Instagram and Facebook if they don’t agree to let Meta use their data to serve them ads, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Users who pay the subscription fee will be able to use Meta’s products without ads.
The monthly fee would start at around €10 ($10.50) for a desktop Facebook or Instagram account, but would rise to around $14 for accounts on mobile devices thanks to the commissions charged by Apple and Google’s app stores.
The new subscription tiers, which could roll out in the next few months, are an attempt to comply with the EU’s crackdown on personalized advertising, according to The Journal.
Yeah, it’s an attempt to comply with the EU’s laws rather than a cynical attempt to screw people out of an excessive amount of money for a service that isn’t worth that much. Fourteen bucks a month? We really are trying to make Oolong’s $1-a-year-for-now deal look lightweight, aren’t we, Mark… then again at least he’s not talking about cutting off the service to Europe entirely, unlike Oolong:
In recent weeks Elon Musk has suggested Twitter could stop being accessible in Europe in order to avoid new regulation enacted by the European Commission.
Musk is increasingly frustrated with having to comply with the Digital Services Act, according to a person familiar with the company. The Tesla billionaire, who acquired Twitter, now called X, a year ago for $44 billion, has discussed simply removing the app’s availability in the region, or blocking users in the European Union from accessing it, the person said. This would be similar to the way Meta is currently blocking people in Europe from using its new app Threads.
The DSA took effect in August and requires large online platforms like X to have effective and transparent systems in place for the moderation and removal of false, misleading, and harmful information. With a wave of misinformation regarding the Israel-Hamas war quickly going viral on X, the platform is likely already in violation of the DSA.
EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said last week the Commission is officially “investigating X’s compliance” with the new law and formally requested detailed information from the platform on its actions to mitigate and remove harmful or toxic information.
Cash-strapped X could face a fine if it’s found in violation of the DSA. The Commission can impose “periodic penalty payments,” or fines, up to 6% of a company’s global revenue.
So for having the temerity to tell him to stop his platform being shitty and harmful, Husk apparently thinks he cam “punish” Europe or something by cutting off Twitter there. I mean, sure, THAT’LL work, when you’ve already blown the value of your service by 80% why not just cut off hundreds of millions of potential users, the advertisers will LOVE that… I can see him doing that in Australia too, though, now the government here is also on his back about the amount of CSA material he’s also doing nothing about. The problem is, I can’t see them actually succeeding at getting that from him, even though it’s a pissy sum (about $600,000), because as a billionaire he is clearly above all man-made laws, and for all the talk that he could be fined a further $800,000 per day if he doesn’t pay up… well if he’s not going to pay the original fine, I can’t see him paying the even bigger extra. But I can imagine him just turning the service off altogether here just for considering making him do something to protect kids. And what a loss it’d be if it happened, eh…
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