Sounds about right. It's "difficult" to explain the fees in the same way it's "difficult" for one to explain to a significant other that they have been cheating.
"We don't do things for free, so all the unpaid mods should get back to work" is quite the statement.
But why does a government-run website ever have any 3rd party cookies. Those are primarily intended for advertising, right? Session-cookies for logins, sure, but non-commercial sites should be super simple, and entirely self-contained. Aside from hyperlinks to useful off-site resources, I can't think of any reason a government site should be relying on any other servers to function. It's not just a matter of privacy, it's basic security.
Objection: Assumes facts not in evidence.
I'll be a data point in support of this phenomenon, and I have some numbers to back it up. I've been tracking my data usage every day for nearly four years. My averages over that time: 1st-10th of the month: 28GB/day; 11-20th: 30GB/day; 21-30th: 32GB/day. The very last days are the heaviest. As a subset of that last bucket, for the 27th-30th, my household averages over 37GB/day. As the month goes on, and I have data to spare, I make sure to download everything I might want, just in case I don't have room in the 'budget' the next month. I have multiple terabytes of video games downloaded and installed that I've never touched, but they're available if I want them. Without the hard cap, I'd feel much more comfortable installing them as desired instead of queueing them up ahead of time.
The final three paragraphs answer all the questions you're raising.
Sure, but the results are depressing. 17 million cars are sold in the US every year. If even the lowest-interest item above (10%) can get half those people (5%) into paying subscribers at $10/month, that's $102 million/year the auto manufacturers think they're leaving on the table. Of course that's not true in the real world, but all CEOs' glasses are heavily rose-tinted.
If the deputy loses this, expect the department to try to use it in all sorts of cases as precedent that stops can't be recorded/broadcast by citizens. They'll ignore the detail of the PII being the crux of the argument, and try to shut down all sorts of citizen journalism.
the company was required to increase a letter of credit as a security deposit by $10 million.This is the kind of thing that would show up early in any basic due diligence. What kind of business genius wouldn't do that? Oh, nevermind.
something something enshittification
This is Internet 101 stuff. Out of all users, only about 10% interact with content, and 10% of those actually create content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule Maybe Twitter beats those numbers, but I doubt it's significantly different than that. Taking 40 mDAU as a baseline, that's only 400k that are serious daily tweeters that have enough influence that they might pay a subscription long-term. $3.2m/month ($38.4m/year) is a good starting point for any assumptions he wants to make. Adjust up or down from there based on whatever initiatives are in the pipeline, but that's a LOOOOOOONG way from the billions it will take to avoid default.
Even if it's not Apple in this case, it's really only a matter of time before somebody uses the Subway defense ("Footlong is a marketing term") and convinces a court that words like "privacy" and "security" don't mean what they sound like.
It reminds me of the movie Pitch Black. The monsters appear every few decades and consume all the life on the planet, and when nothing is left, they eat each other. Only replace "monsters" with "grifters." Or don't, same thing.
Can you at least combine all the legal notices so that people don't just skip the whole lot?
This website contains stories known to the state of California to cause cancer.
This, but even more. The democratisation of news and information means the old media is no longer a gatekeeper. They have significant incentive to rebuild those walls. Their salary depends on an all-out misinformation campaign against the new media.
After being published in 1989, Rushdie, his publisher, and sellers of the book got death threats, bounties, and even assassination attempts pretty much constantly for 15 years before "social media" was even a term. Clearly this is Twitter's fault.
And with that, I finally ordered the "Math is not a crime" t-shirt.
Define "obscene" in an enforceable way that doesn't rely on any single person's interpretation.
Twitter et al should have an anti-230 party for a few hours every year. Every time somebody tries to post something, they get a landing page/popup: "In the absence of Section 230, we would face the prospect of defending numerous lawsuits. We would win, but it would not be cost-effective to defend them all vigorously. In such a world, we would be compelled to review every post made on this site before it is made available to the wider internet. This is a preview of that world. Your post is number 12,430,659 in the moderation queue. It will be approved or disapproved in approximately 33 days."
I give it 5 years before every physical book includes a prologue that's actually just a 10-page EULA about the reader not being a robot, and agreeing to not discuss the events or descriptions of the story without the express written consent of the publisher.