eykanal

"Set to launch 2030"

Why even bother to announce this now? I only see downsides in mentioning something that far out.

As someone who is on a pretty strict news diet, this is exactly the wrong reaction. As it turns out, it's pretty easy to be informed about important thing without visiting any news websites.

* You can have direct email feeds about the things you find important.

* You can use RSS readers curated to your interests.

* You can listen to podcasts.

* You can—gasp!—talk to people around you who are more knowledgeable than you on these areas.

News websites make money of you visiting and staying on their site, so they give you stuff that will get you to come back. Their interests are almost certainly not aligned with yours.

If you define your own priorities, you can define for yourself what it means to pay attention and be informed, and then seek "news" specifically on those topics.

No one implements compliance goals for fun. If they didn't think they were going to have to comply, they wouldn't do it. If they thought the law would be overturned they wouldn't do it. Same if they thought they would successfully fight the law in court, if they thought consumers would revolt, if they thought that they were a Special Squirrel who would get exemption, or whatever.

Does this put them stupidly behind schedule? Yes, and bummer for them, but I highly doubt that a company as politically savvy, legally savvy, and wealthy as Apple would do this "by mistake".

I assume you're asking this in good faith, so I'll answer in good faith.

Laws vary from country to country, state to state, and they vary tremendously. Laws are also changing all the time. There's literally no way to predict what rules will be in place at any given time.

Also, adding code to meet some government regulation takes time and effort that (form the company's perspective) could be better spent building a product and making money. No one would "choose" to implement some random compliance rule unless they're forced to.

Google eng mgr here. I've worked on a few projects related to compliance with various government policies. This isn't "assign a two-pizza team to it, will be done in a quarter"; these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.

Sure, there's a messaging component to this. However, any company that isn't trying to just skirt the law will aim to do this sort of thing correctly, and it's an enormous effort.

It's kind of fascinating how well Amazon can repeat this. Google has attempted this literally dozens of times with various sub-businesses and failed almost every time. Amazon has a real skill in doing this well that many other large tech companies simply don't have.

<sarcasm> Time to investigate Apple again for monopolistic practices in their ebooks store! </sarcasm>

More seriously, it's somewhat mind-boggling that Amazon is allowed to keep it's "everything store" business, it's logistics business, and it's internet business all under one roof. The P&G discussion here highlights how insane it is that this isn't being investigated and prosecuted.

Alternative take: The fact that twitter / facebook / whatever allow arbitrary, unverified posting enables large-scale misinformation that led to, among other things, Russia's manipulation the US electorate and ultimate impacting the presidential election.

This one-sided view has some good points, but for goodness sake, don't pretend that the alternative has no downsides.

Is there an explainer on this? I'm not familiar with the geopolitics or oil cartels well enough to understand the implications here.

There's a great essay hiding in that page, but oh my goodness that is a frustrating format and layout.