More or less the definition of a state is that it upholds the monopoly of violence within its borders. In modern liberal states that monopoly comes with extensive regulations on how, when and by whom violence should be used. This is called the rule of law. The regulations are usually broadly enumerated in the constitution or similar basic law, and in more detail in ordinary legislation. In democratic states these are ideally determined by the population, usually via some representatives.
Sorry if it sounds like I'm stating the obvious, but this is the rationale why many people think that some powers may be granted to the institution with the sole legitimate power to force you to comply at gunpoint.
The government is an institution protecting us from commercial interests. The government also protects against e.g. abject poverty and dying of easily treatable medical conditions. And also upholds e.g. property rights, which you probably hold absolutely necessary.
Society works on balance of power. The government is part of that balance. Ideally the government serves the interests of people, that's the democracy part. In practice that's far from perfect, but it's still not some absolute evil constantly repressing us.
This is not about government reading messages, it's about how large social media companies present content. The European part probably is that these two things are not seen as the same thing. Corporations and individuals don't enjoy the same rights and freedoms in this mindset.
Many, including me, don't see e.g. personal privacy and freedom as the same case as regulating commercial activities. In fact, large business interests are well capable of authoritarian power themselves.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google’s lawyer army could explain to some Google-paid arbitrator how it’s in their interest to find that such behavior violates Google’s database copyright under legislation of Google’s choosing.
The use started to decline when Google started the extreme marketing campaign of Chrome around 2010 or so. All Google services had huge banners and included all sorts of dark patterns to get people to install it.
TBF, Chrome probably also had some better features and performance over FF, but I don't think most people think much about their browser quality.
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
2. The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.
For context, as yearly spending of 285 million €, that compares to building roughly 20 km of motorway, or 0.5% of EU's agriculture subsidies, or half what the German federal government pays Microsoft per year.
Brain's information flow also isn't just through direct neuron-to-neuron connections. Firing also releases neuromodulators into the extracellular space which affects how other neurons operate. Furhermore neuron connection architecture is very different between brain and feedforward ANNs, with the former exhibiting a lot of recurrent connections.
> Almost everyone knows what "healthy food" looks like without needing to know anything about much else.
I highly doubt this. A lot of people think stuff like juice smoothies, granolas or dates are healthy. Or more generally organic or grassfed or "no added sugar" or "high-protein" high-sugar or "unprocessed" stuff.
People are actively misinformed about what's healthy by a constant bombardment of ads, fads and "common sense".
I use LaTeX daily and hate it with a passion. I kinda lost all hope when ArXiv decided to do the HTML support by hacking a LaTeX to HTML conversion.
We already have a very powerful layouting engine: the web browser. The only missing piece is printing/pagination, for which there was some CSS Paged Media progress, but that stalled.
However, why the hell are we even doing paged media? For screen viewing it's strictly worse, and very few people print papers anymore. And even for those HTML pages print passably enough.