I remember a long time ago on Reddit I saw a post saying (paraphrasing) "AMA: PayPal locked up $600,000 of my money because my video game is selling so quickly they think it is a scam." Turns out this was Notch selling early alpha versions of Minecraft off his personal website, which totally did look like a scam at the time.
> The plaintiff is a 20-year-old California woman identified as K.G.M. because she was a minor at the time of her alleged personal injury.
I didn't realize this was literally a single person claiming they were personally injured by literally every major social media company. How does that even work? What laws are purported to have been broken here? I wholeheartedly support some sort of regulatory framework around social media, but this specific case seems like a cash grab. It was already successful too, since Snap and TikTok have settled.
"K.G.M.’s lawsuit was selected as a so-called bellwether case and is proceeding first among more than a thousand personal-injury complaints under a coordinated, court-managed process meant to eliminate the risk of inconsistent rulings at subsequent trials."
Corporation's lobbyists, or some other circumstances, prevent the establishment of any meaningful regulatory framework that would effectively produce a desired change in the corporation's behaviour
However the threat of thousands of "cash grabs" through private litigation causes the desired change in the corporation's behaviour even in the absence of a regulatory framework
What are the pros and cons
For example, one could argue that the "cash grabs" pose a greater problem than the corporate behaviour that would occur in their absence, or vice versa
Not true at all. In fact settlements mostly happen because it would cost significantly more for a company to go through discovery and argue their case in court regardless of the eventual result. And court systems strongly encourage settlements to save their own time. There an entire industry of patent trolls and sleazy personal injury lawyers in business because of this.
I was sued. I was 19 years old working as a painter for a dishonest contractor that paid crap wages. I nosed out of a parking lot after work one day to see around a line of cars turning in and a big sedan ploughed into my little econobox. Several years later, as the statute of limitations was about to run out, the driver of the sedan sued me. My insurance companies first move, before doing any discovery, was to offer her $50k. She said no, so discovery began. It turned out she'd been mis-prescribed an anti-psychotic to create the symptoms she was suing me for having caused. The case was thrown out. The insurance company's legal bills ended up being much less than $50k, but the way it worked was they took a guess at the break even point, offered a bit less than that, and made an offer.
That's not to say this is how it works when Meta is on trial. I just thought it was useful perspective on the nature of settlements.
In legal terms they often call this a "nuisance fee", although it's normally much smaller when the defendant thinks there is a 100% chance they will win but just wants to avoid all the costs.
Not sure about that, don't defendants sometimes settle because they don't want the publicity of a trial or don't want their dirty laundry being aired in discovery?
She's not wrong. The discovery process has shown that such decisions were made by Meta and Zuck himself, knowingly, in the face of research that opposed their goals.
> You might fear that people will start arriving at 1:07pm, but I have seen the opposite. They respect the new time. They arrive by 1:05pm, ready to work.
We do the :05 thing and this is exactly what happens every meeting: all of them end up starting between :07 and :10 since people leave their desk to find the room at :05.
Maybe this is a lever that they now have to finally break free of their total dependence on Google. Get someone like Meta to pay them to be the default AI model / interface.
Wow, to be honest I hadn't thought of it that way but that might be exactly what's on the horizon. Hard to survive on a search licensing deal in a world where LLMs threaten to eclipse search, but it may mean that LLMs want to compete to be in the browser space.
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