Regulate This

The European Commission wants Meta to disable auto-play and infinite scroll. Fine them into compliance. Protect users from addictive design patterns.

I am a software developer. My job, every day I sit down to work, is to make software that people want to use. The EU just proposed making that a liability.

Let me tell you what I actually think about infinite scroll.

It annoys me. Genuinely. I’m chilling with someone I care about and she’s scrolling through it — video after video, algorithm doing what algorithms do — and I’m sitting there. When she wants to show me some video where a huckster is explaining how to make a fortune doing whatever the grift of the week is, I’ve made my peace with it: the answer to making money isn’t in what these people are saying. It’s in reverse engineering what they are doing. The huckster isn’t rich because of the advice. The huckster is rich because they understood how to get you to watch.

I’ve done worse than scroll Instagram. I’ve done considerably worse.

So: do I think social media has taken a turn for the worse? Yes. Do I think changes are needed? Yes. Do I think the EU banning autoplay is the answer?

No.

The Selective Outrage Problem

FanDuel will run a commercial during the game tonight. DraftKings will run one. BetMGM will tell you to scan the QR code and get your first bet matched. All perfectly legal. All deliberately designed to create compulsive behavior in a user base that, unlike someone mindlessly watching their feed, stands to lose actual money.

The EU wants to fine Meta for infinite scroll. Gaming companies spend two billion dollars a year in the US alone on advertising engineered to get people addicted to something that demonstrably destroys finances, relationships, and mental health.

Infinite scroll makes you waste an afternoon. The other thing can take your house.

Where is the Commission on that? Where is the systemic risk finding? Where is the preliminary fine?

That asymmetry is not an oversight. It’s a choice. And it tells you this regulation is not about harm reduction. It’s about which industries have the lobbying infrastructure to make themselves the exception.

What Developers Actually Do

We build software people want to use. That’s not a confession — it’s the job description. You design for engagement because if nobody uses it, you’ve built nothing. You optimize for return visits because a product nobody returns to isn’t a product, it’s a homework assignment.

Infinite scroll, autoplay, notification design — these are tools. You can use them irresponsibly. You can use them in ways that exploit vulnerable people. When that happens, I’m not defending it.

But “optimized for engagement” is not, by itself, an indictment. That’s software engineering. The Commission’s framing — that Meta failed to assess the risks of features it deliberately designed — treats engagement design as inherently suspect. It doesn’t distinguish between making software compelling and making software predatory.

That distinction matters. Collapsing it doesn’t protect users. It just moves product decisions into the hands of people who don’t build products.

What the Covenant Actually Proposes

Here’s the thing about the Covenant model: it is genuinely Libertarian. Not in the hardliner sense of no rules ever. In the market-consequence sense. AIGCSEP doesn’t propose fines. It proposes disclosure, accountability, and exclusion. Publish what your system does, what it optimizes for, what outcomes it produces. Give users and auditors enough information to make informed decisions. If you don’t, you don’t get to participate in the open ecosystem that everyone else built on trust and transparency.

Noncompliance doesn’t get you fined by a commission applying rules that change by jurisdiction. It gets you excluded from the market. The market makes the call.

The EU’s instinct — that companies should be held accountable for the effects of what they build — is right. The tool is wrong. Open standards that anyone can audit, implement, or refuse do what Brussels cannot: they scale, they travel across borders, they don’t require a new directive every time the technology changes.

You don’t need regulators to tell Meta what to do. You need a market that can see what Meta is doing and choose accordingly.

That’s the long-odds play. The house has been pricing that outcome wrong for years.

I’m taking those mispriced long odds on the game tonight and going outside to smoke some weed.

— J.P. Howlett

Related:

• Broadly Distributed Benefits — OpenAI’s founding charter said avoid concentrating power; the government stake says otherwise
• Jekyll Island Redux — on unelected officials making decisions the rest of us live with

Sources

• EU Tells Meta to Disable Autoplay and Infinite Scroll Under DSA — The Verge
• American Gaming Association: State of the States 2026 — American Gaming Association
• Draft AIGCSEP Protocol: draft-howlett-aigcsep-00 — IETF