I would say it’s actually now the “modern” approach.
The old way was to move fast and break things.
The new way is extreme risk aversion and lawyers. We’ve swung in the complete opposite direction because in the eyes of the current zeitgeist, all tech companies are default evil until proven otherwise.
Governments like the EU have made it clear they do not like their citizens interacting with experimental technology products that might be rough around the edges. Gotta protect everyone from these awful scary new fangled chat websites.
> all tech companies are default evil until proven otherwise
To be fair, that is a relatively reliable assumption. The market incentives are set up that way, so either they are or they are pushed out by those that are.
The market incentives are absolutely not set up that way.
While you can make money in the short term by scamming people, in the long term, you always get found out.
Markets are not perfectly efficient, but in aggregate they trend toward efficiency over time. Fundamentally, all products that continue to exist over time do so because they deliver value for people.
You may not agree with what other people value, but then your problem is with those people, and we have to ask the question--why are the things you value so much better and why should we make you King and allow you to dictate the needs and wants of everyone else?
Or rather, “fining the hell out of companies for offering services to your citizens that your citizens want and the rest of the world is fine with” is such a Stone Age approach
counter point: asking companies to do the bare minimum to guarantee that companies don't steal customer's data, infringe copyright and generally piss on people's rights for their own profit, seems like a reasonably good thing.
