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> Facebook only gets to push some HTML, CSS, and JS to its customers. This is completely false. Facebook is a business. That means they have the legal right t

> Facebook only gets to push some HTML, CSS, and JS to its customers. This is completely false. Facebook is a business. That means they have the legal right to do a lot more than transmit data. This is such a basic, obvious, fact that I find it difficult that so many people seem to not understand it. Facebook is not a data transmission service. They're a business. They have a product that they offer. If you want to use that product, they ask that you agree to a set of rules. This is very, very, normal. It is the foundation of society: The ability to make agreements. Whether or not this software violates the agreement Facebook asks of its users is another question. But, they absolutely DO have the right to do more than "push some HTML, CSS, and JS to its customers."

Dylan16807 13y ago
The agreement applies to the users, not to the person coding the browser. The fact that he happens to have a personal page is unrelated, and facebook would probably threaten legal action even if he didn't have one. On top of that, there is a reason contracts of adhesion are treated specially. An agreement between a billion dollar corporation and someone that wants to post cat photos isn't a true meeting of the minds. It can only make demands that are sufficiently ordinary* Requiring a website to be browsed in a specific way is rather out of the ordinary. * As defined by libraryfulls of precedent.
troymc 13y ago
The fundamental problem is that Facebook's "agreement" seeks to undermine a core aspect of the web, which is that everything --- everything --- sent across the wire is to be interpreted as a suggestion (not a requirement). The recipient is free to enlarge the font if they have poor vision, they're free to pass the content it through a text-to-speech engine if they're blind, they're free to strip out all the Q's and J's, they're free to turn down the volume on videos, etc. Facebook can try to impose their will, but all they'll end up doing is looking like a bunch of empathy-deficient, user-deaf nincompoops.
yason 13y ago
By the same token car makers should have the legal right to dictate which roads you can drive on, hardware makers should have the legal right to dictate what operating system you can run on the hardware you bought yourself, and I think at this point I pretty much should have the legal right to dictate how others must interpret what I write here. Or perhaps not?

Dylan16807 13y ago

The agreement applies to the users, not to the person coding the browser. The fact that he happens to have a personal page is unrelated, and facebook would probably threaten legal action even if he didn't have one. On top of that, there is a reason contracts of adhesion are treated specially. An agreement between a billion dollar corporation and someone that wants to post cat photos isn't a true meeting of the minds. It can only make demands that are sufficiently ordinary* Requiring a website to be browsed in a specific way is rather out of the ordinary. * As defined by libraryfulls of precedent.

troymc 13y ago

The fundamental problem is that Facebook's "agreement" seeks to undermine a core aspect of the web, which is that everything --- everything --- sent across the wire is to be interpreted as a suggestion (not a requirement). The recipient is free to enlarge the font if they have poor vision, they're free to pass the content it through a text-to-speech engine if they're blind, they're free to strip out all the Q's and J's, they're free to turn down the volume on videos, etc. Facebook can try to impose their will, but all they'll end up doing is looking like a bunch of empathy-deficient, user-deaf nincompoops.

yason 13y ago

By the same token car makers should have the legal right to dictate which roads you can drive on, hardware makers should have the legal right to dictate what operating system you can run on the hardware you bought yourself, and I think at this point I pretty much should have the legal right to dictate how others must interpret what I write here. Or perhaps not?