Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence
Comments
neonate
KaiserPro
A company that provides a phone service (mobile or other) has to conform to a large amount of regulatory red tape. Why? because either a company before tried to monopolise the entire country, or they killed someone.
Now, large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people (unlike say tobacco, or talc powder, 3M and half of their solvents, weed killer, most car makers, etc etc)
but they have been trying desperately to stop all competition.
They've also been trying to extract as much personal info as possible for profit. Because regulators in the USA are hamstrung, they are used to being able to basically doing stuff that would be illegal if it were in physical stores/pre-existing industries.
pembrook
Nobody is against regulation that disfavors large incumbents to support competition instead.
You'll struggle to find people who are against the Digital Markets Act for this reason. It literally only targets the potential monopolists.
However, virtually every other piece of regulation does the opposite.
Regulation usually gets trotted out after the downside of doing [new innovation] is experienced. This always happens, because doing something new always involves unknown risk. Most people aren't entrepreneurs and hate risk, so they pass regulation, and the market gets locked down so nothing new happens again. Incumbents and their army of lawyers can easily comply or are grandfathered in, and challengers are permanently disadvantaged. That market is officially dead until the next fundamental leap forward in technology.
What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass this incumbent-cementing regulation before we've even had a chance to experience both the upside and downside, so the innovation never happens at all.
Combine this with a rapidly aging demography in Europe, and I only see this trend increasing. If there's one thing old people hate, it's risk and doing new things. Meanwhile, those same old folks are expecting massive payouts (social benefits) via taxation of the same private sector they're currently kneecapping with red tape. While ironic, those two trends converging aren't great for Europe.
no_wizard
Specifically with AI I don’t want to experience the downside of innovation before we regulate because of how wide spread its use already is, and it’s problems have already become apparent.
For example, it’s being used to job screen applicants even though we have proven that AI models still suffer from thing like racial bias. Companies don’t disclose how their models are trained to negate bias or anything like that either and that’s one example I remember off the top of my head
nottorp
> it’s being used to job screen applicants even though we have proven that AI models still suffer from thing like racial bias
I bet they also suffer from other biases that are harder to detect and maybe some biases we can't even imagine and thus control for.
paulddraper
So.....,just like humans?
chfalck
Kind of like humans in that regard
627467
there maybe better examples of why AI biases provide deep systemic problems but: CV screening? are contemporary LLM really worse that previous screening tech and processes?
BobbyJo
I think a worse feature for them to have is consistency. Imagine being someone that has fallen through the cracks of software a significant number of employers are using... Basically soft-locked out of employment with no recourse.
ivan_gammel
You can combat bias in a team of people, but in LLM you may not even know it exists.
justinclift
It's almost guaranteed there are people trying to sell an AI version of Robodebt right now to the Australian government, even though the last (non-AI) version of it was an absolute cluster fuck:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
Other governments around the world have done similar (non-AI) things in the past with similar terrible results. They'll likely try an AI version of things too in the near future, just because "AI" apparently solves all the problems. Ugh.
dudinax
Of course they could be. A company that doesn't want a racial bias won't intentionally filter on names, but might accidentally deploy an LLM that can discern race from name.
no_wizard
You realize this is a huge problem right? Even if that was my only complaint (it’s not!) that is 100% not acceptable. If it’s doing it with CVs it’s doing it with other things in other scenarios.
Another is that a health insurance company was caught using AI to determine if a claim should be denied or not which lead to a scandal as a whistleblower leaked the practice, as it was wrought with errors and ethical concerns
bawolff
> For example, it’s being used to job screen applicants even though we have proven that AI models still suffer from thing like racial bias.
Can't we just say racism is illegal, and if a company uses an AI to be racist, they get fined the same way they would if they were racist the old fashioned way?
graftak
Look up the Dutch tax return scandal where the Dutch tax arm of the government (‘IRS’) used machine learning to identify fraud but it turned out to be very racially biased and it uprooted thousands of families with years of financial struggles and legal battles.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_sca...
ben_w
"Just", no.
Fence at the top of a cliff (make sure the AI is unbiased and can be fixed when it turns out it is) vs. Ambulance at the bottom (letting people sue if they think the machine is wrong).
Silhouette
I would argue that we already have experienced enough of the downsides of "AI" that there is reasonable cause for concern.
The implications of deepfakes and similar frauds alone are potentially devastating to informed political debate in democracies, safe and effective dissemination of public health information in emergencies, and plenty of other realistic and important trust scenarios.
The implications of LLMs are potentially wonderful in terms of providing better access to information for everyone but we already know that they are also capable of making serious mistakes or even generating complete nonsense that a non-expert user might not recognise as such. Again it is not hard to imagine a near future where chat-based systems have essentially displaced search engines and social media as the default ways to find information online but then provide bad advice on legal, financial, or health matters.
There is a second serious concern with LLMs and related technologies, which is that they could very rapidly shift the balance from compensating those who produce useful creative content to compensating those who run the summary service. It's never healthy when your economics don't line up with rewarding the people doing the real work and we've already seen plenty of relevant stories about the AI training data gold rush.
Next we get to computer vision and its applications in fields like self-driving vehicles. Again we've already seen plenty of examples where cars have been tricked into stopping suddenly or otherwise misbehaving when for example someone projected a fake road sign onto the road in front of them.
Again there is a second serious concern with systems like computer vision, audio classification, and natural language processing and that is privacy. It's bad enough that we all carry devices with cameras and microphones around with us almost 24/7 these days and the people whose software runs on those devices seem quite willing to spy on us and upload data to the mothership with little or any warning. That alone has unprecedented implications for privacy and associated risks. With the increased ability to automatically interpret raw video and audio footage - with varying degrees of accuracy and bias of course - that amplifies the potential dangers of these systems greatly.
There is enormous potential in modern AI/ML techniques for everything from helping everyday personal research to saving lives through commoditising sophisticated analysis of medical scans. But that doesn't mean there aren't also risks we already know about at the same kind of scale - even without all the doomsday hypotheticals where suddenly a malicious AGI emerges that takes over the universe.
scarface_74
Let’s stipulate that all you said was true. How is EU regulation suppose to prevent that? Are they going to stop open source models from being used in Europe? Are they going to stop foreign adversaries from using deep fakes?
It’s just like trying to restrict DVD encryption keys from being published or 128 bit encryption from being “exported” in browsers back in the car.
account42
> The implications of LLMs are potentially wonderful in terms of providing better access to information for everyone but we already know that they are also capable of making serious mistakes or even generating complete nonsense that a non-expert user might not recognise as such. Again it is not hard to imagine a near future where chat-based systems have essentially displaced search engines and social media as the default ways to find information online but then provide bad advice on legal, financial, or health matters.
I think a bigger concern is LLMs providing deliberately biased results and stating them as fact.
AnthonyMouse
The issue is, the regulations are tailored to address any of those concerns, some of which may not even be solvable through regulation at all:
> The implications of deepfakes and similar frauds alone are potentially devastating to informed political debate in democracies, safe and effective dissemination of public health information in emergencies, and plenty of other realistic and important trust scenarios.
The horse is out of the barn on this one. You can't stop this by regulating anything because the models necessary to do it have already been released, would continue to be released from other countries, and one of the primary purveyors of this sort of thing will be adversarial nation states, who obviously aren't going to comply with any laws you pass.
> The implications of LLMs are potentially wonderful in terms of providing better access to information for everyone but we already know that they are also capable of making serious mistakes or even generating complete nonsense that a non-expert user might not recognise as such.
Which is why AI summaries are largely a gimmick and people are figuring that out.
> they could very rapidly shift the balance from compensating those who produce useful creative content to compensating those who run the summary service.
This already happened quite some time ago with search engines. People want the answer, not a paywall, so the search engine gives them an unpaywalled site with the answer (and gets an ad impression from it) and the paywalled sites lose to the ad-supported ones. But then the operations that can't survive on ad impressions lose out, and even the ad-supported ones doing original research lose out because you can't copyright facts so anyone paying to do original reporting will see their stories covered by every other outlet that doesn't. Then the most popular news sites become scummy lowest-common-denominator partisan hacks beholden to advertisers with spam-laden websites to match.
Fixing this would require something along the lines of the old model NPR used to use, i.e. "free" yet listener-supported reporting, but they stopped doing that and became a partisan outlet supported by advertising. The closest contemporary thing seems to be the Substacks where most of the stories are free to read but you're encouraged to subscribe and the subscriptions are enough to sustain the content creation.
The AI thing doesn't change this much if at all. A cheap AI summary isn't going to displace original content any more than a cheap rephrasing by a competing outlet does already.
> Next we get to computer vision and its applications in fields like self-driving vehicles. Again we've already seen plenty of examples where cars have been tricked into stopping suddenly or otherwise misbehaving when for example someone projected a fake road sign onto the road in front of them.
But where does the regulation come in here? When it does that it's obviously a bug and the manufacturers already have the incentive to want to fix it because their customers won't like it. And there are already laws specifying what happens when a carmaker sells a car that doesn't behave right.
> Again there is a second serious concern with systems like computer vision, audio classification, and natural language processing and that is privacy.
Which is really almost nothing to do with AI and the main solutions to it are giving people alternatives to the existing systems that invade their privacy. Indeed, the hard problem there is replacing existing "free" systems with something that doesn't put more costs on people, when the existing systems are "free" specifically because of that privacy invasion.
If a government wants to do something about this, fund the development of real free software that replaces the proprietary services hoovering up everyone's data.
paulddraper
How do you know the race?
I've seen some places collect that information which is wild. But you can decline.
apwell23
> it’s being used to job screen applicants
Any idea what software is being used ?
inquirerGeneral
[dead]
DelightOne
Problem is most innovation is in using existing models in new ways. You can't expect these most people to train their own models.
Regulating it the way you say just means "zero innovation!".
swatcoder
> What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass potential market killing regulation
This is entirely because the experts and fundraisers in the field promoted the technology as existentially and societally dangerous before they even got it to do anything commercially viable. "This has so much potential that it could destroy us all!" was the sales pitch!
Of course regulators are going to take that seriously, as there's nobody of influence vested in trying to show them otherwise.
llm_trw
OpenAI was smart enough to build a moat for itself in Europe.
The EU was dumb enough to dig it for them.
monksy
What is the value that OpenAI is bringing to the US right now?
Mostly its being used to generate text that fit a query.
fuzztester
how?
galangalalgol
The experts did that specifically so we would regulate barriers to entry into existence. It isn't a mew trick. Regulatory capture takes many guises, "think of the": Children, Consumers, ... Under booked hotels we could put you in.
harimau777
>> Most people aren't entrepreneurs and hate risk, so they pass regulation, and the market gets locked down so nothing new happens again
I think that the bigger issue is that the people who suffer when the risk goes bad and the people who benefit when the risk goes well usually aren't the same people.
lofaszvanitt
"before we've even had a chance to experience both the upside and downside, so the innovation never happens at all."
----
Let me laugh out loud. Those, who govern these companies know 10 years ahead how and what will happen. Bigdiks higher up has 10-20 year plans. And people talk about "before we had a chance to experience the upsides and the downsides". Get a grip on reality.
pembrook
Yea, so wildly out of touch with reality. The governing elite are wizards of prediction!
Sundar at Google knew LLMs were going to be huge after Google invented them, so that’s why they were first to market and…
Oops. Maybe not?
While it might make risk-averse types feel good to imagine the people in charge are all-knowing (see religion), the truth is the world is a chaotic and reflexive system of unpredictability. Scary, I know!
squigz
I think you're the one who needs to get a grip on reality. There's no cabal of businessmen playing the world like a puppet. They don't have some secret knowledge of the future. They're often just as stupid as the rest of us, and prone to the same biases. If they were as prescient as you think, I assume companies would simply never fail - as others point out, they often miss things or make mistakes.
lofaszvanitt
zzzzzz who said this?
scarface_74
Google didn’t know in 2006 where cell phones were headed. If they did, they wouldn’t have made an Android as a BlackBerry clone.
No company can accurately predict where technology is headed a decade from now.
lofaszvanitt
oakay
lolinder
> You'll struggle to find people who are against the Digital Markets Act for this reason. It literally only targets the potential monopolists.
I'm against the way it's being applied to Apple. I don't think that the government should dictate that consumers aren't allowed to choose a platform that's a locked down walled garden if that's what they want.
We have platforms that aren't walled gardens (Android) that many of us happily use (myself included), and Apple shouldn't have to become something that it didn't set out to be just because a few other big tech companies feel stifled by Apple's rules.
ApolloFortyNine
Going out of your way on the internet to defend apples right to take 30% of every sale on the app store is insane to me.
Just how can you not see there's probably 20% of every purchase sitting on the table if competition was ever allowed to occur.
Not to mention the simple freedom of choosing what you want to install yourself, and not just what Apple allows you to...
lolinder
> Not to mention the simple freedom of choosing what you want to install yourself, and not just what Apple allows you to...
I have the freedom to install whatever I want. I get that freedom by using Linux and Android. I choose to have that freedom by selecting platforms that provide it.
Many HN users seem to want all the benefits of Apple's approach with none of the downsides, and it doesn't work that way. Apple is what it is because it has a tight, coherent strategy, and forcing Apple to change that strategy will have knock-on effects that most Apple users won't like.
If you value freedom to install whatever you want, you chose the wrong ecosystem, and hijacking the ecosystem to satisfy your values is unfair to the vast majority of customers whose values already align with the ecosystem's.
tomjen3
The DMA does not allow you to install what you want.
It does not apply to consoles.
It does make it possible for companies to keep some more money, but most importantly it allows them to sidestep the protections for my privacy that I pay a premium to Apple for.
A real DMA would force facebook, twitter, etc to open up for alternative clients. That would bring competition in and benefit the end user.
Not that whatever digital slot machnine company is allowed to keep a higher percentage of the diamonds they sell you in their free to pay game.
kanbara
it’s not 30%— in almost all cases it’s 15%. and by all means, if you think all the services and support for payments and returns and refunds and customer support are doable in 3%, you can have apple not do that too.
scarface_74
[flagged]
standardUser
Apple needs to get out of the infrastructure business if they want to play by their own rules. They aren't selling Gameboys and washing machines, they are storing people's private data and selling primary communication devices. That needs to be regulated and the consumer needs to have the final say, not Apple.
lolinder
> they are storing people's private data and selling primary communication devices.
To be clear, I think privacy laws like GDPR absolutely have a place for consumer protection.
I just don't think the DMA does. Watching how the DMA applies to Apple, it feels far less about consumer protection than it does about businesses, and that's what makes me uncomfortable. The EU is in this case listening to complaints from a bunch of other businesses who do not have consumer interests at heart and ignoring the very real damage that their actions could do to consumer protection.
The Apple App Store protects users from myriad abuses by myriad bad companies. The EU wants Apple to build a blessed, paved off-ramp that companies can strongly encourage prospective customers to use that brings them deeper into the manipulative control of those companies.
theshackleford
> consumer needs to have the final say, not Apple.
And consumers spoke, and now other consumers unhappy with those consumers choices, are demanding the deal be changed.
fl0id
this argument doesn't work, because you could always argue that the consumer chose this product, and thus its features and practices should be allowed. Apple had it coming for a long time already, one way or another. And Microsoft also will again the way they are going.
lolinder
Yeah, sure, you could always argue that about anything, but that's not a refutation of this particular argument in this particular situation. Apple's walled garden produces a lot of real benefits for its customers that are part of what make it successful, and dismantling their walled garden is going to harm consumers.
I would never pick an Apple device for myself. I would also never recommend an Android phone to my mother-in-law. I, myself, know to avoid the many Android security holes that exist because it's a relaxed platform. But for my non-technical loved ones, Apple provides a much better experience in large part because it's a walled garden that makes it very difficult to install garbage.
fallingknife
If Apple was required to provide root access to all customers this would not prevent anyone from choosing to stay inside their walled garden.
merrywhether
You need app Foo on your phone for work (like Slack, maybe). Foo is in the App Store and worked great on your iPhone but decides they want to install via their own store so they can monetize employees’ data (location, whatever) to make more money. The new store launches, the new app version abuses private APIs, and the App Store version stops working. Your company announces that all employees need to download from the new source. Do you really have a choice about staying in the walled garden? Sure, neither your company nor Foo should suck, but we all know plenty of companies that don’t care about employees or users.
Game company Bar decides to launch their own store and pull their game - we’ll call it Nortfite - from the App Store so they can add something shady like crypto features. Nortfite is a massive social game that all your friends play and it’s a huge part of your teenage social life. Your only device capable of playing it is your second-hand iPad. Do you really have a choice about staying in the walled garden? Who needs friends anyway, amirite?
lolinder
The question isn't whether anyone could choose to stay inside if they want to, the question is whether I can trust that {insert older relative here} will stay inside the garden and not get tricked by a sketchy website into installing something through the back doors the EU is mandating.
If the opening up of Apple were as difficult to use as getting root on Android is I wouldn't have a problem. But that's not what's being proposed, and any attempts by Apple to make it less than perfectly smooth for someone to exit the walled garden are most likely going to be shot down.
littlecosmic
I reckon the peaceful existence of macOS is a counterpoint to this argument.
account42
Are you also for workers being able to choose to live in company towns where they have to spend their incomes at the company store? When lock in and network effects come into play then yes the government should make sure that people have real and not only theoretical choices.
arp242
> You'll struggle to find people who are against the Digital Markets Act for this reason. It literally only targets the potential monopolists.
You're commenting on an article doing exactly that. So that was not much of a struggle.
viraptor
> You'll struggle to find people who are against the Digital Markets Act for this reason
You missed most of the discussions about DMA on HN, I guess. There's always someone ready to say how EU will kill all innovation and make Google/Apple exit the market because they dare to question anything.
account42
> Nobody is against regulation that disfavors large incumbents to support competition instead.
Actually pretty much all EU regulations and especially enforcement of those regulations gets pundits shouting that the EU is only trying to milk US megacorporations.
> However, virtually every other piece of regulation does the opposite.
Not true but even if so not all regulation concerns itself with monopolies. GDPR in particular is about user rights and should therefore apply to everyone, same for similar kinds of regulations. If corporations cannot survive without violating you in every way possible then they should not be allowed to live. If anything is lacking it's enforcement against incumbents.
> What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass this incumbent-cementing regulation before we've even had a chance to experience both the upside and downside, so the innovation never happens at all.
Good. Not all "innovation" should happen.
> Combine this with a rapidly aging demography in Europe, and I only see this trend increasing. If there's one thing old people hate, it's risk and doing new things.
Again, good. Moving fast and breaking things at societal scale is not a good idea.
Xen9
Makes no economical sense, but arguably the right response to not only AI, but every thing.
monksy
It's not that most people hate risk. It's that individuals whom are harmed by sociopathic individuals that exploit methodologies, techniques, and products to enrich, steal, and harm the population. (When I say that I mean financially, emotionally, socially, physically, etc). To add further insult to injury, defending ones self against these individuals is disproportionately impossible.
Socially: Creating and cultivating a culture that screws up dating.
Emotionally: Filter bubbles, and data analyitics to push proganda and motivate people in directions (cambridge). Additionally subjecting people to material to manipulate.
Stealing: Scooter companies are actively stealing the public space to operate their business (sidewalks), endorsing their users to run over people on the sidewalk (also making it difficult to identify the individual), etc.
Privacy wise: Companies are forcing you to give up your private info to live. (Retail tracking to individuals.. even accross multiple companies [see "The Retail Equation"])
pembrook
I'm not insulting people who hate risk. For the stability and health of society, it's good that most people are that way. We need people who shake their fist at anything new or different to keep us sane (people like you it seems, from your laundry list of frustrations).
But we also need the people who do like risk taking and new stuff, and there's less of them. So innovation is much more of a fragile thing than stasis.
Even if you think society and human life in general can't be improved in any way, to just maintain the way things are now...will require many new innovations and people taking risk on new stuff. Your welfare, lifestyle, and security depends on the risk taking of others. So we should probably be careful about making it too hard for the folks taking risk (it's already hard enough).
Trust me, the risk-averse folks will still be the dominant voice either way. Even this forum--which started as a community of risk-taking entrepreneurial types--is now dominated by the risk-averse majority.
voltaireodactyl
In theory I agree with your argument, but in practice I find it’s very often the AI and other dominant companies — often tech — that are at the root of the risk averse landscape you observe. To put it simply, major tech companies are among the greatest driving forces of that landscape because they would prefer to operate without any competition.
My point being “letting the risk adverse take risks” is not the same thing as “don’t rein in VC backed attempted monopolies”. You can do the latter without doing the former (theoretically of course; in practice doing the latter is impossible without a substantive change in the underlying incentive structure of current global society).
pyrale
> But we also need the people who do like risk taking and new stuff
The issue with that is that risk is usually not borne by the people getting rewards.
account42
> Stealing: Scooter companies are actively stealing the public space to operate their business (sidewalks), endorsing their users to run over people on the sidewalk (also making it difficult to identify the individual), etc.
OMG I cannot wait for these companies to be fined out of existence.
How can you be allowed to have a business model that relies on people leaving your trash wherever they feel like it.
monksy
I have no idea. Chicago had a limited period in which the scooters could operate a few years back. I saw someone that had an experience where the scooter wasn't picked up more than a week past the end. I contacted the alderman to get streets and sanitation to remove the vehcile.
What I got was: The alderman employee tried to get this cleared with the scooter company rather than towed.
I was blown away.. if I parked in front of the Division blue line station my car would be fined, towed, charged with storage fees, potentially vandalized within an hour. Them? Oh the gov employee will do CS for them. I filed a complaint with the city ombudsman and later found out she was removed.
stemlord
>Regulation usually gets trotted out after the downside of doing [new innovation] is experienced. This always happens, because doing something new always involves unknown risk.
I would challenge "unknown"-- it very well seems like the risks have been known every time, they just don't give a shit
>What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass this incumbent-cementing regulation before we've even had a chance to experience ...
Sounds good to me? It's sociopathic and opportunistic to want to risk major socioeconomic issues for the mere chance of a corporate "innovation"
kube-system
The move-fast-and-break-things mentality of many tech companies has absolutely killed people.
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Family/parents-kids-died-after-dr...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/business/instagram-suicid...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/electric-scooter-electric-bike-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/family-sues-airbnb-19-m...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/rohingya-seek-reparat...
https://www.thedrive.com/news/40234/no-one-was-driving-in-te...
"full-self-driving doesn't self drive", "wear a helmet on the bird scooter", and "safety is our first priority at facebook" is the 21st century version of "don't get roundup all over yourself"
edmundsauto
The hard part about reality is the opposite is also true. Cancer patients have gatekept access to cutting edge drugs, etc.
I believe your worldview is correct and also incomplete. It’s really fucking hard to come up with general rules that cannot be gamed.
kube-system
I wasn't attempting to express my entire worldview in a comment. Yes, technology often brings both risk and reward. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize/criticize/discuss those risks.
edmundsauto
My perspective is that framing them as “unrecognized risks” is wrongs. We are mostly engineers - what happened to “tradeoffs”?
xvector
[flagged]
Wurdan
Not all progress is good progress. Adding lead to paint was progress at the time. Same with using asbestos for insulation. We’ve since decided that the costs outweigh the benefits there.
Regulators should and do weigh both the harm and good of restricting the usage of new technology. The fact that they don’t always get it right isn’t a reason to stop regulation altogether.
kube-system
I don't disagree, in general. Roundup also fed many people. But there are certainly poor choices evident in the above examples that weren't necessary for the progress to be made, but were just disregarded by an organization operating without guardrails. They deserve the pressure to course correct.
baq
> Now, large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people
Teen suicides are a thing. It isn’t lung cancer, sure, but it also isn’t nothing.
xvector
[flagged]
baq
Why would I want to do that? Do you routinely compare apples with oranges?
sdf4j
social networks are not modern technology
93po
modern tech can exist without tiktok algos that push eating disorder propaganda to 12 year olds that leads to suicide and hospitalization
usr1106
> Now, large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people (unlike say tobacco, or talc powder, 3M and half of their solvents, weed killer, most car makers, etc etc)
It's nearly as bad. Social media causes addiction and mental health problems especially for the youth. PISA scores are going down. It can already be seen now, although not many 20 year olds have had a smartphone for more than 10 years. Here in this country every 7 year old has a smartphone and it will get only worse. Physical health is impacted because of kids are tapping on a screen instead of running and playing. It has impact already to language learning and social development of babies because parents interact with their smartphone several hours a day and instead of interacting with their baby.
Of course there is other tech than social media and smartphones. But at least in these areas equally strong regulation as for tobacco and alcohol would be required.
esalman
Large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people in the same way big tobacco haven't killed any people. Nobody smokes a cigarette and immediately die. But one would have to be immensely dense not to see the correlation between smoking habit and lung disease, or Facebook refusing to moderate social media activity in Burma and some of the worst atrocities committed on humans anywhere this century.
edmundsauto
Smoking is causative - did you mean to imply the same for the Burna situation?
cen4
Most importantly all this tech is not reducing cost of living, but is increasing it. Tech is reducing prices of compute and memory and software but everyone's monthly bill increases. This is only possible through parasitic behavior. And we know how to kill parasites. The life and times of a parasite are not as fun as the worthies who come up with these unsustainable business models think.
dirtsoc
Do increases in suicide rates from social media addiction count?
There are emails unearthed from the early days of Facebook where utilizing addiction feedback loops were discussed to retain and maximize young users.
The Anxious Generation provides a lot of evidence correlating the rise of social media and a major increase in depression and anxiety related disorders.
polski-g
When controlled for testosterone levels, how do the suicide rates look?
abdullahkhalids
> large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people
Facebook's and Twitter's recommended feed algorithms and blocking procedures, have to a significant extent determined the outcome of elections, coup attempts, protest movements. These companies have custom tuned their algorithms for particular countries at particular times, during such events. Many people have died, or their lives negatively affected because of the decisions by these companies.
jhickok
Not to mention the effect of platforms like Facebook and Instagram on young boys and girls.
worldsayshi
I have a feeling there's a lot of analogies to be had between parenting, regulation and AI alignment.
All three are about trying to persuade an intelligent organism to adopt acceptable, rich and virtuous behaviour. All three seems to have similar failure modes.
Too much red tape and you'll get over fitting, lack of creative and new behaviour.
Arn_Thor
Except listed companies are sociopathic. They have no empathy. And their only goal is shareholder value. There’s no appealing to their conscience, so carrots and sticks it is
fallingknife
What do they do that would be illegal in physical stores? If I wanted to open a physical store that gave away free stuff but you had to agree to give a bunch of personal info that would be completely legal (but not profitable).
newsclues
Do companies need onerous regulations that increase costs for consumers or do they need the incentive in form of not having their corporate charter cancelled and corporate officers banned from doing business as a threat to maintain a fair market?
mensetmanusman
Large tech companies have killed:
Apple kills migrant workers in China when fires break out or through stress, Samsung kills women working with solvents banned in the US, Exxon kills oil rig workers operating dangerously, etc.
buzzert
> They've also been trying to extract as much personal info as possible for profit. Because regulators in the USA are hamstrung, they are used to being able to basically doing stuff that would be illegal if it were in physical stores/pre-existing industries.
Did you actually read the article? I don't know how you square this kobayashi maru situation, unless you think Meta is outright lying about it:
> Europe recently charged Meta with breaching EU regulations over its “pay or consent” plan. Meta’s business is built around personalized ads, which are worth far more than non-personalized ads. EU regulators required that Meta provide an option that did not involve tracking user data, so Meta created a paid model that would allow users to pay a fee for an ad-free service. This was already a significant concession—personalized ads are so valuable that one analyst estimated paid users would bring in 60 percent less revenue. But EU regulators are now insisting this model also breaches the rules, saying that Meta fails to provide a less personalized but equivalent version of Meta’s social networks. They’re demanding that Meta provide free full services without personalized ads or a monthly fee for users. In a very real sense, the EU has ruled that Meta’s core business model is illegal. Non-personalized ads cannot economically sustain Meta’s services, but it’s the only solution EU regulators want to accept.
Also, what about the CUDA situation? I don't see how any consumer is harmed by this, which is quite different from a social media company doing its thing.
Someone
> They’re demanding that Meta provide free full services without personalized ads or a monthly fee for users
Where are they demanding that? Reading https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_24_..., their complaints seem to be that Facebook
- cannot call the ‘with adverts’ version ‘free’
- makes it too difficult for consumers to find out what exactly they give to facebook in exchange for this ‘free’ service
- is not clear enough about the fact that paying will not remove all ads
- forces existing users to choose between paid and ‘free’ versions before they can use the service again.
Nowhere do they say on that page that Meta "provide free full services without personalized ads or a monthly fee for users”. Am I reading the wrong page?
ADeerAppeared
> Am I reading the wrong page?
Yes. That's a separate investigation; "Today's action focuses specifically on the assessment of Meta's practices under EU consumer law and is distinct from the ongoing ... , and the assessment by the Irish Data Protection Commission under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)."
The illegality of "Pay or Consent" is a GDPR thing. The EDPB ruling on that issue is here: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2024-04/edpb_opinion...
But it's an extremely settled matter. The GDPR says explicitly that consent is not "freely given" if the provision of a service is dependent on said consent. (Where the service does not absolutely require the data processing in question; See Article 7, recital 43)
2muchcoffeeman
>In a very real sense, the EU has ruled that Meta’s core business model is illegal.
Is this actually bad?
lolinder
No, but the EU and the citizens thereof should then accept that Meta or other similar companies in similar situations can't operate within the EU.
The EU regulators and select HN users might be okay with that, but EU citizens on average probably won't be.
echelon
You're free to not be a user, but millions of other people want it.
Zpalmtree
yes, arbitrarily killing business people like is bad
probably_wrong
For what is worth, I think Meta is lying about it, or at least playing the victim card too strongly.
> They’re demanding that Meta provide free full services without personalized ads or a monthly fee for users.
Meta is being sued because their paid plan is not honest - they are currently asking for 10€/month which is disproportionate - for comparison, a Business Standard Google Workspace account with 2Tb and Gemini costs 11€. From [1], "EU law requires that consent is the genuine free will of the user. Contrary to this law, Meta charges a 'privacy fee' of up to €250 per year if anyone dares to exercise their fundamental right to data protection".
[1] https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-files-gdpr-complaint-against-meta-ov...
t1hrowaway
The price looks reasonable to me after looking at the average revenue per user. https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average...
fallingknife
That is perfectly honest. If it were 10x that it would still be honest. Pay the price or don't use the service. Nobody owes you anything.
sensanaty
I don't believe a single word anyone from Meta says, yes. That company is full of amoral scum, you think lying is beneath them if it helps them out?
skywhopper
lol. You don’t think Meta would outright lie about this stuff? They have been for years and years. Why is this different?
onlyrealcuzzo
> but they have been trying desperately to stop all competition.
Every large company in every industry wants to do this.
> They've also been trying to extract as much personal info as possible for profit.
Why would you expect a company not to pursue profits?
NegativeK
> Why would you expect a company not to pursue profits?
People keep talking about the obligation to shareholders for a company to maximize profits, but there's a wide list of possibilities between not doing that and seeking to actively, wholesale ruin privacy.
I expect the people in companies to take responsibility for their actions instead of pretending that they're beholden to the company's wants.
loa_in_
"We share the risk but the profit is mine" company mindset is no better than medieval thuggery
ktosobcy
> Every large company in every industry wants to do this.
And the point of regulation is to stop it and bring balance. Or are you happy with mono-/oligopolies?
onlyrealcuzzo
I'm fine with regulation to prevent monopolies / duopolies.
In practice, regulation almost never actually does that.
Every major industry is a monopoly or duopoly if you're even a bit generous with the term.
I'm just pointing out there is nothing unique here with tech or data.
And the politics are mostly theater that often makes things more monopolistic, not less.
johnchristopher
> > They've also been trying to extract as much personal info as possible for profit.
> Why would you expect a company not to pursue profits?
And that's how you justify children in cobalt mines I suppose ?
account42
Why do you expect countries to not restrict how companies can pursue profits to protect their citizens?
kragen
> A company that provides a phone service (mobile or other) has to conform to a large amount of regulatory red tape. Why? because either a company before tried to monopolise the entire country, or they killed someone.
you sweet summer child
no, that's not how the red tape got put in place. the government put the red tape in place to protect the established companies in the space from upstart competitors
autoexec
The EU is free to pass laws preventing gatekeepers and insisting on interoperability requirements and Apple is free to refuse to do that and not offer their non-competitive gatekeeping products in the EU.
There's zero reason to think that this will mean the EU won't have a tech market. It just won't have one that includes Apple products which refuse to follow the law. Seems like a massive win for the EU, and because Apple is the one deciding to pull their products rather than follow the law they can't really complain either, so win/win I guess.
cheptsov
Except EU doesn’t have big tech.
dijit
Anything that gets close gets bought or killed by non-european giants.
Tencent buys basically all game companies, microsoft buys basically all communication companies (skype, nokia come to mind), google buys basically everything. Even ARM is owned by Softbank after starting out in the UK.
The Automotive industry and ASML are just about the only things resistant to this because they're so large already; Automotive acts a lot like big tech. (a clear similarity I saw after being in BMW R&D and Googles Zurich and SF campuses)
roenxi
There is an issue with that perspective though. The Europeans sell out. Ok. Maybe they are bad at valuation and don't realise that their companies are worth more than they are being paid for. Or maybe an EU company can't capture as much value as a US/Chinese company. And those are really the only two options - either the decision is rational or irrational. If it is an irrational decision then there isn't much to talk about. But it is probably the second case - selling out to someone on a different continent generates value. And there is a good chance that is because it helps avoid EU regulators.
For example, you mentioned Nokia. Nokia was blown out of the market by superior Chinese manufacturing and US design [0]. It wasn't a close battle, the EU contender was crushed. Apple's motivation for entering the market was that among other things that companies like Nokia were so bad at making phones that Apple reckoned it could break in to a new vertical. That is a very EU-led-industry problem to have. The reason they sold out was because the EU turned out to be incapable of incubating a modern, successful phone manufacturer in the 21st century even with an incredible lead and Nokia was being outmanoeuvred everywhere.
[0] Both looked like regulatory issues to me, we've seen how the EU responds to things like micromanaging the iPhone charging port.
carlosjobim
They can't buy anything unless Europeans are willing to sell.
ahartmetz
SAP, too.
okanat
EU didn't go into an uncontrolled spree investing every company that had .com in its name and ruined thousands of lives and wasted billions of dollars.
EU usually doesn't let companies to grow uncontrollable sizes that the government is completely controlled by them not the citizens.
The existence of Big Tech means that the government did a very poor job in protecting the consumers and the free and fair market
machiaweliczny
The only difference is that US has lower cost of debt and that’s why they can buyout EU companies
ADeerAppeared
> EU didn't go into an uncontrolled spree investing every company that had .com in its name and ruined thousands of lives and wasted billions of dollars.
This is the thing that so many Americans in tech don't seem to understand. VC Twitter is full of smugposting about how the US has "$5 trillion market-cap of startups" and the EU doesn't.
And what they miss is that the EU doesn't want Silicon Valley. It doesn't want the "trillions in startups". Because essentially none of them turn any profit. Why on earth would anyone want $5 trillion dollars in companies that do not make financial sense yet have awful externalities.
BlueCooled
> The existence of Big Tech means that the government did a very poor job in protecting the consumers and the free and fair market
I'm sure they are quite proud of that achievement
autoexec
Not on Apple's scale, but with apple pulling products from the market, this opens the door for someone else to step up and fill that highly profitable gap in the market apple abandoned. I really hope that they do. The more players there are in the game from other countries the better off we'll all be.
ilrwbwrkhv
But Apple also fumbled with the Vision Pro. They won't remain on the top for much longer I think.
bamboozled
How important “big tech” though? Honestly ? It’s even an insidious sounding name.
refurb
How important is technological industry? Pretty damn important I'd say if you're interested in economic growth and hence supporting your social safety net.
machiaweliczny
Will have, if Russia can have their own search engine or Czechia (8M people). It’s matter of nit having US competition that undercuts on ads monopoly
RamblingCTO
Ever heard of Spotify or SAP maybe?
rsanek
those are tech companies, but aren't really considered big tech. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech
onel
How is that a bad thing?
bamboozled
How important “big tech” though? Honestly ? It’s even an insidious sounding name.
Big tech has caused a lot of problems for society. Echo chambers on social media, monopolistic behaviour, teen depression and addiction.
We want the tech, without the grifting.
shermantanktop
Are they separable? Teens in particular appear to be bad for each other's mental health. Connectivity increases that effect, anonymity makes it worse, likes and other status features makes it worse still. Not sure where you draw a line between not quite bad enough and too bad.
ffhhj
This could be the beginning of big tech for them, another winning situation.
AceJohnny2
> The EU is free to pass laws preventing gatekeepers
I'm intentionally taking this out of context to point out that laws can act as gatekeepers and help preserve incumbent's positions.
Stuff like "minimum service requirement" which require new entrants to front a massive initial investment, preventing them from getting a foothold (see: France telecom landscape in the 90s-'10s). GDPR was crafted by the likes of Google & Meta that were strong enough to weather the transition, but kill off smaller competition.
There are always tradeoffs, but those aren't talked about as much.
autoexec
It's absolutely true that regulations can be written by corporations to keep out competitors. Regulations are just tools. They can be used to protect and benefit the majority or to further enrich a small number of wealthy and powerful individuals. I haven't seen anything to convince me that the Digital Markets Act was written to hurt competition at the expense of the public.
amelius
Yeah if people complain about government regulation then they've never seen a company regulate a market.
mullingitover
> Apple is free to refuse to do that and not offer their non-competitive gatekeeping products in the EU.
Currently Apple has been complying with the letter of EU law (opening their devices to alternative app stores, etc) but not the spirit of the law (leaving the EU market).
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> The EU is free to pass laws preventing gatekeepers and insisting on interoperability requirements and Apple is free to refuse to do that and not offer their non-competitive gatekeeping products in the EU.
Apple is also free to lobby the US government and people to take action against the EU. Especially if Trump gets elected, Apple complaining about Europe taking advantage of American companies would resonate with a lot of the officials likely to staff such an administration.
Given Russia, it is likely that the US has far more leverage on the EU than the EU has on the US.
autoexec
Why should the US government care if Apple chooses not to sell some of their products in the EU because they don't want to abide by the EU's laws? The EU isn't taking advantage of US companies, or looking to pressure the US. The EU has every right to set their own laws and businesses can decide for themselves if they want to sell their products there. The fact that Russia exists doesn't change that.
Nasrudith
Because even without public ownership of Apple stock China style or even any lobbing from Apple, the US government are effectively "invested" in their gains via taxation. Apple's interests are the US's interests to some small extent (technically so is that small coffee shop down the block). Geopolitical interest implies they'd care enough to at least nudge the EU a little.
Moldoteck
Eu has lots of leverage too against US. Lobbying for actions against eu may have absolutely bad consequences and it's totally bonkers to think/prise that an us company has this much power proving once again that maybe it's a good think eu doesn't have such big corpos
sonotathrowaway
The EU just has to hint that they’d move closer to china, and all this supposed leverage would evaporate.
sonotathrowaway
This clever geopolitical analysis notably ignores China, and the fact that Trump pushing the EU to China would be the greatest geopolitical victory for China in history.
Destiner
how it’s a win if i can’t use apple products?
bitcharmer
It's funny how you already answered your own question
draw_down
[dead]
1vuio0pswjnm7
"Europeans could end up living in an online backwater with out-of-date phones, cut off from the rest of the world's search engines and social media sites, unable to even access high-performance computer chips."
Sounds like a paradise. More healthy lifestyle. For most people much of this stuff is unnecessary. If one wants to live life "online", glued a screen digesting garbage and propaganda 24/7, then one can relocate to some country where that's what people do. Chances are, tourists from such countries will want to visit Europe even more.
We are all living in an "online backwater" in case the author hasn't noticed. The web is a sewer of surveillance, marketing and ads. Despite the information access possibilities the internet presents, the distribution of factual information seems to be at an all-time low, at least in the lifetime I am living. I have never seen people who were so detached from commonly shared reality as a result of "search engines and social media sites". To access facual information, cf. marketing and propaganda, worthless opinions, and "AI" generated garbage, one did not and does not need the latest "phone" or "high-performance computer chips". This stuff is not making people smarter. Is it is not making society better.
I would be willing to bet the countries that have the populations that are most reliant on "search engines and social media sites" and "high performance computer chips" are going to have the highest rates of mental illness and other complications that arise from too much screen time, and the lowest test scores. These will be dumbed down, whacked out societies. They will have the worst quality of life.
I was listening to an interview with Jonathan Kanter recently and the interviewer tried to get him to comment on Europe's approach to regulation of "Big Tech". He was hesitant to accept any comparison. But I am confident there are plenty of folks, generally _not people who comment on HN_, who are envious of the direction Europe is taking.
The idea that regulating Apple and Meta, companies that exploit people commercially as they use computers, e.g., as data collection sources and ad targets, is going to contribute to cause "poverty" or deprive Europe of useful networking and computer technology, e.g., the type used for national defense, is absurd.
runday198
What an interesting point of view. Very European. I wonder what will those Europeans do that do need the high-performance computer chips to create something new, to innovate.
They will probably move to those whacked out societies.
tivert
> What an interesting point of view. Very European. I wonder what will those Europeans do that do need the high-performance computer chips to create something new, to innovate.
You mean the ones fabricated with European photolithography machines?
I think you missed the GP's point: a lot of so-called "innovation" is crap, providing as much true value as a parasite (maybe one of those lovely ones that will kill you if you try to kill it).
rangestransform
A lot of “crap” is innovation too. In the past some considered video games to be crap, rotting children’s brains, promoting violence, etc. Look what happened when we figured out that add on cards for projective rendering could also multiply matrices really quickly.
Whether or not an innovation is crap can only be judged in hindsight.
runday198
And I think you missed mine.
I agree with you. A lot of innovation is indeed crap. But there are times when they are not crap, but brilliant instead.
So these crappy and brilliant innovators are going to move to the whacky societies. It's for Europeans to judge if that is a net loss or a net gain.
generalizations
> You mean the ones fabricated with European photolithography machines?
Interesting discussion recently, I forget if it was on here. Those lithography machines are built with the worst spaghetti code imaginable and the engineering is so close to black magic that development is painfully slow. In other words, that space is ripe for disruption and there might be some attempts at that in the near future.
koonsolo
If we (EU) are not allowed to have high end AI chips strapped on quadcopters and Russia is, well, good luck to EU.
arp242
A (very hypothetical) war is not going to be won by AI chips and quadcopters.
Furthermore all of this applies to consumer tech, not military tech. Consumers are not allowed to have military drones, attack fighters, and tanks either.
koonsolo
You don't seem to know what is currently being used in Ukraine right now.
callalex
Well, that stupid government isn’t “allowed” to import chips either. How has that materially changed anything? (Please use specific examples.)
koonsolo
Putting limitations on technology is really stupid from a defense point of view.
dyauspitr
It’s a short term paradise. You’re not going to be able to keep it that way when the rest of the world is more technologically advanced and you slip into poverty.
tivert
> It’s a short term paradise. You’re not going to be able to keep it that way when the rest of the world is more technologically advanced and you slip into poverty.
I think you're failing to make important distinctions. Being "less advanced" in algorithmic addiction machines, ad targeting, personal privacy invasion, or monopoly is not going to cause any of those things.
As an American, a good chunk of American consumer technology is more akin to a parasitic burden than any advantage.
arp242
Things like Facebook, Meta, Uber and whatnot are not really innovative technology. Almost none of the tech the DMA regulates is innovative as such, other than some "innovation" to deal with the scaling, and the only reason they need to scale is due to the dubious business activities that allowed them to grow to this size.
The DMA is really about regulating basic common sense free market rules, not regulating technology as such.
ripped_britches
Exactly my thought here. Such a privileged view of the world to not appreciate the luxuries that internet technologies have bestowed us.
hughesjj
It's also naive in that they somehow think they wouldn't get invaded the second some dictator decides they want some lebensraum. You can't have an entire continent (save Poland, Finland, Britain, France, and a handful of others) more or less ignore defense (via technological advancement) and hope to keep pax liberalism
1vuio0pswjnm7
There is no equivalence between (a) "internet" or "high end computer chips" (much less "technology" or "innovation") and (b) "search engines" or "social media sites". Except if one is Silicon Valley VC, Big Tech employee, "tech" journalist, payola recipient or other supporter of "Big Tech". This is false quivalence, a flawed premise. Arguments relying on a flawed premise are, of course, inherently flawed.
kelnos
I don't live in Europe, but wish we had these sorts of regulations in the US.
If tech companies cannot provide us a means to control our personal information, and require us to be locked into their gatekeep-y, nanny-state, walled gardens and submit to using locked-down devices that don't actually obey what we want them to do, then those tech companies should not exist.
I've gotten a little bit of a taste of some of this stuff in the form of the CCPA/CPRA, and it's delightful. Getting to tell companies they're not allowed to sell any of my information to third parties is wonderful. I just wish that was the default and I didn't have to opt out.
Big tech is far, far under-regulated, even in Europe, too, and that needs to change.
ricardo81
IMHO the problem has been that FAANG has not been regulated enough. The sheer size of these companies and their market share means there's little chance of competition from anywhere.
Though TBF when it comes to poorly thought out regulation, the amount of human time lost to clicking cookie consent/reject screens surely has to be a net loss to society.
paulryanrogers
The regulations don't require a banner. Just don't gather or share unnecessarily. No banner or notice required. Companies would rather hound users than stop selling them down the river, even their directly paying customers.
And if people are better informed of how far and wide their data will be prostituted, then I'd call it a win.
ricardo81
Fair points.
I guess browsing life would be much easier if something was implemented at the browser level and cookie pop ups become the exception.
thrance
I wish targeted advertising was made completely illegal here, I am sure our society would greatly benefit from that.
georgeburdell
Do you actually get relevant online ads? I usually get ads about the thing I just bought
fooker
Statistically this works out pretty well.
If you spent real money on something, you're far more likely to buy it again or buy it for someone or send that link to someone than a completely new product.
stemlord
Do you really need an ad to get you to do that?
Too
Even worse. It doesn’t work. Yet, it either way requires large scale harvesting of everyone’s personal information.
If it wasn’t allowed, the value of all this personal information wouldn’t be as high.
baq
I thought it’s idiotic until the first time I sent something back for a refund.
fruit2020
And how many times did you do that :))
tzs
What exactly do you mean by "targeted advertising"? I'm guessing you probably mean "behavioral advertising", which is a subset of "targeted advertising".
Targeted advertising includes contextual advertising (e.g., a company putting an ad for their bird watching binoculars on a bird watching blog) and I'm having trouble thinking of any reason to ban that.
tcfhgj
I'd even go to banning all commercial ads, like several cities have done offline.
Reasons?
Click bait, boosts consumerism, ads imply essentially a tax for everyone (remember that ads have to be paid by the consumers), CEO spam, annoying, environmental costs
ripped_britches
You should ask an economist to model this scenario for you and then see if you still feel this way.
XCSme
> boosts consumerism
Don't we live in a capitalist world?
ADeerAppeared
I have some excellent news for you about the legality of targeted advertising under the GDPR.
The GDPR is very clear about this. Advertising is not a legitimate interest or a functionally-required data processing, ergo, it may only be done with user consent. And that user consent may not be coerced in any way at all, you may not even refuse access to services if users reject their data being used.
It's taking a while to go up and down the courts, but the days of ad-tech are numbered.
Too
Good intentions but how well is that working out so far?
Only thing we got was annoying cookie popups everywhere, where consent is one click away and reject is three layers behind a small “learn more” button.
sensanaty
That just shows us that the companies don't give a shit and are implementing every dark pattern under the sun to keep harvesting data. The ePrivacy bill, GDPR and the EU cookie laws say nothing about cookie banners or anything of the sort, companies just make it as annoying as possible so that people get tired by it and mindlessly click reject.
Guess what, the whole hidden reject thing? That's not legal. Opting out should be equally as easy (or easier) than opting in, which a lot of EU companies realize.
afiori
every meeting I have been in wrt PII collection had some provvisions for 1) how will this be protected enough 2) how can we easily delete this if needed; so I would say decently.
xvector
[flagged]
aniviacat
There are no free web services. By watching ads you are paying with other people's money.
finolex1
Why would it benefit society to get less targeted ads as opposed to more targeted ones?
autoexec
> Why would it benefit society to get less targeted ads as opposed to more targeted ones?
Because more targeted ads require a dangerous and abusive system of pervasive surveillance while less targeted ads can still be targeted without hurting as many people in the process.
refurb
> Because more targeted ads require a dangerous and abusive system of pervasive surveillance
I don't think they require it.
A targeted ad can be as simple as geolocation via IP address and showing local businesses.
ozim
Ads can be targeted but not at individual.
If I am Tylor Swift fan I should get her merch advertising only when I am visiting swifties forum or group - but not when I am checking my fishing forum where I expect fishing gear ads. But nowadays I get adsg
ab5tract
Because there would be no incentive to commodify user activity, bundle it up, and resell it to ever more dubious information brokers?
amelius
Also it would help reduce overconsumption which is great given the finite resources we have on this planet.
llm_trw
You'd need to ban targeted marketing, not just advertising.
If I were selling widgets I still greatly care about knowing who buys a billion widgets a year and will pay good money to find out.
austhrow743
Ads would be less effective at convincing people to be unhappy.
_ink_
I agree to the fullest
AnarchismIsCool
I'd just say all advertising. It's effectively money time and effort we just light on fire.
thfuran
All advertising is a step too far, I think. But banning accepting any remuneration to deliver, display, or cause to be viewed any advertisement, and limiting physical ads in places viewable from public areas seems like it would improve things. Buildings shouldn't be covered in ads, and the internet shouldn't be largely based around scamming as much information out of people as possible to jam ads down their throat, but a business should be allowed to put up flyers on their own storefront. I mean, if you're really pedantic about banning all ads, that probably precludes restaurants posting menus out front.
amelius
Bring back yellow pages.
mjevans
Extremely limited, focused, designed to deliver facts rather than entertainment or flashy catchy content 'ads' could be informative and beneficial. The structure of the ad should be as close to sanitized textbook as possible, maybe even follow a regulated formula. Something like, "This is a thing that exists. Here's the benefit without dramatizing or 'selling' someone something they don't need. X brand can be found at Y location for Z cost."
It's easy to agree with all advertising. I think that's the quickest, easiest measure to cut that yields an outcome beneficial to society, and that more ads are nearly always worse.
I also think that sales are worse for society than every day prices that deliver value; sales do make sense for things like seasonal items which are in abundance due to just being harvested.
null0pointer
I’ve wondered the same thing. How much does a company have to spend on ads just to keep up with their competitors’ ad spend? I don’t know but if I had to guess I’d say most of the ad budget. Not to mention that ads are a cancer that infest and overrun anything they touch.
BoingBoomTschak
Would be a dream. Then a more-or-less independent entity paid by our tax money could be used to test stuff according to objective and scientific standards. I mean, stuff like TÜV certification already exists, doing a bit more work to get a reliable measure of performance, repairability, etc... like some review websites do wouldn't be that difficult.
Instead, we're forced to turn to third-party testers with dubious manufacturer relations - even when the results aren't freely available! - or technical knowledge (e.g. Consumer Reports using 1/3 octave smoothed power response for loudspeakers)...
throwawayq3423
Why not make Sales illegal too.
ktosobcy
Happily. I'm not very fond of dumb calls from "sales" starting with "Let me introduce you to our new shiny product"...
ApolloFortyNine
This would kill the free internet tomorrow, and the one billion YouTube viewers would likely be quite upset about it.
Untargeted ads pay less than 5% what targeted ones do.
chmod775
> Untargeted ads pay less than 5% what targeted ones do.
Even assuming that is true, companies are bidding for user's attention and against each other. What do you think will happen to prices for context-based advertising if targeted advertising goes away?
> and the one billion YouTube viewers would likely be quite upset about it
Great example. Many of the ads that finance the YouTube ecosystem are context-based and not targeted.
burnerthrow008
> What do you think will happen to prices for context-based advertising if targeted advertising goes away?
It's quite obvious, isn't it? They will stop buying ads altogether.
The entire reason targeted ads pay better is because they have a higher conversion rate, so advertisers can afford to pay more.
> Many of the ads that finance the YouTube ecosystem are context-based and not targeted.
And that's why shovel-ware "personal finance" crap YouTube channels make mega-bux, while actually interesting creators earn pennies. If you want more "junk food content", have at it: Ban all the targeted ads!
Just don't come crying in five years when there's nothing good to watch or read.
rpbiwer2
The Internet existed before Internet ads (and particularly targeted ads) did. Personally, while I don't necessarily disagree with the point you're making, I'm curious to see what a pendulum swing in the opposite direction might look like.
fooker
If targetted ads are suddenly illegal, won't this mean the advertising market jumps 20x larger?
Either that, or we'll find out what just content based untargetted ads work pretty well.
kredd
I might be talking out of my depth, as I don’t live in Europe, but I’ve heard the same paraphrased headlines like these since at least 2016. Has status quo been swayed one way or another since then? Theoretically speaking, wouldn’t legislating away the top US players open the market to the local companies a la Naver in SK, WeChat in China or Line in Japan? I understand I’m dumbing it down, but assuming such legislations are supported by the local residents. I don’t think I would support it, personally, but I can see their point as well.
aranelsurion
I don't get this article.
Title is "Europe Is in Danger of Regulating Its Tech Market Out of Existence".
But then the subtitle says "Poorly designed laws are forcing *global firms* to leave." (emphasis mine)
Then you see a picture of an Apple Vision Pro. I've only skimmed through the article and there are 11 mentions of Apple and 12 mentions of Meta, then some mentions of X and such. These aren't even "global" firms, they are all American ones.
If anything, it sounds like they may be regulating away US products from the European market, and that's a big "maybe", which is different from what I understood from the title they chose.
whazor
A more practical example is that Facebook cannot promote its marketplace anymore. In Europe there are local alternatives for market places that get disadvantaged.
Spotify, an EU company, has to compete with Apple Music and YouTube Music. Both of which have their own mobile operating systems and markets.
Now we get a lot of backlash from these big tech firms as for years they have been integrating services into their walled gardens. Which now is hard to decouple from their platform.
fruit2020
This is not always good for the end user. Now I have to go to google maps manually because it’s most of the time no longer integrated with google search
insane_dreamer
Typical US centric reporting. “EU tech market” == US companies’ ability to make a profit in EU
Vinnl
It seems to hinge on extrapolating from Apple not doing AI in the EU that NVidia might leave the market, harming Mistral.
kranke155
Why would Nvidia leave the market?
jeremyjh
You seem to have confused "tech market" with "tech industry".
aranelsurion
IDK, are local products and products from elsewhere other than US are not meant when one says "european tech market"?
The title says the market is in danger of going out of existence, and the article solely mentions a handful of big US companies AFAICT.
Or maybe it's a dig at Europe for having large parts of its market dominated by US companies, and I'm missing that.
rty32
Same. I didn't see any explanation or example about "poorly designed" or "leave". And yes Vision Pro is completely irrelevant and very confusing. To me the entire article is just a well-formatted rant adapted from a random reddit post.
cheptsov
I’m living in Europe, I'm deeply disappointed by the current situation. The problems run much deeper than just regulations; they extend far beyond politics.
1. VCs outright avoid investing in deep tech, with only rare exceptions.
2. Founders overwhelmingly choose to build small, sustainable companies, steering clear of big tech.
3. Employees consistently prefer consulting jobs and value vacation days over equity.
4. The bureaucracy startups face when incorporating or raising funds is staggering (Germany, I'm looking at you).
While this may seem beneficial from a social perspective, it creates the worst possible environment for tech startups. I have immense respect for the few European startups that manage to survive and thrive despite these obstacles.
kredd
Fair enough. Unless I misunderstood your point it sounds like, what you guys have right now is good for people and their lives. Isn't that the entire point of life? I can see why general population might support it, while us techies would be pushing for deregulation and less of work-life balance. So my understanding of these articles is "it might be bad in a long term!", but Europe is still big enough market for all these companies eventually bend over backwards to get access to it.
Again, really no skin in the game, as I don't live there and I only have limited amount of perspective, which comes from my European resident non-techie friends.
ryandrake
I think a lot of the complaining on HN comes from the engineers themselves. "Ugh," they say, "We have to write all of this boring code to comply with regulations, rather than writing exciting features!" I see it a little differently. As someone who's spent a good part of the last 6-8 years working on GDPR and DMA compliance projects, the way I look at it is: "We are finally making our product better for users, working on privacy improvements that our companies have opposed until it was forced on them." EU-led regulation has been a great engineering opportunity and a product forcing-function.
cheptsov
Europe is an amazing place, which is why I moved here in the first place. But for techies, it can be pretty challenging. The issue isn't with the techies themselves, though. The problem is that the environment here holds back big tech, making Europe heavily dependent on the US.
pitaj
Comfortable stagnation is not a stable state for a society.
brigadier132
> what you guys have right now is good for people and their lives
Let's see how long it lasts, Europe's economy is terrible and their people are significantly poorer. I don't think their current welfare state is sustainable without tax revenue from large businesses. Eventually every European citizen will be a waiter, hotel staff, or a tour guide.
fl0id
from a personal and social perspective, I see nothing wrong with it. In fact, even in the EU we still ahve a lot of BS startups. We imo need more sustainable businesses, that value actual societal value/value to consumers or businesses over growth and shareholder value.
xvector
[flagged]
cheptsov
This seems like a very socialistic perspective to me, which might not align well with big tech and innovation. I suggest re-reading "Atlas Shrugged" for this topic.
skywhopper
Wait, these are problems? Other than #4 they all sound like good things.
spiderice
A working base that values vacation days over equity doesn’t sound like a place I’d want to start a business.
And I’m not the only one. Many companies don’t hire in Europe because it’s too risky to get a dud employee that you can’t fire without having to pay their salary for the next 6 months.
nrr
Germany's position in context is at least understandable: the Mittelstand is a force to be reckoned with, and that entire segment of Germany's trade system is extremely averse to risk. (It's also a lot of other things, part of which can be witnessed by hopping the border to Switzerland and reading through the platform for their self-proclaimed "Partei des Mittelstandes.")
kranke155
The real fundamental issue is VCs, which as you pointed out, are far more adventurous in America.
skywhopper
On the contrary, I see the VC influence on American tech has been incredibly destructive. No one builds companies or products or services to last. Everyone is only in it for the quick buck. Basically every service provided by big tech has turned into a chase to cover it with ads and seek as much rent as possible while never actually improving anything. The state of software has gone downhill precipitously in the past decade and it’s only getting worse as VCs gain more and more control over the entire economy from housing to education to financial services to insurance.
cheptsov
Unfortunately true, but one can also think that it’s a consequence and not the root cause. Why VC should invest if the environment isn’t supportive? A vicious circle :)
pornel
UK tried to have a "silicon roundabout" and attract VC investment, but then Brexit happened and the allure of English-speaking entry point into the EU market has disappeared.
Europe has missed out on the craze of getting millions to build an Uber for Cats.
LtWorf
Just paid articles trying to push their agenda.
We have no tech sector in europe. As soon as a company has more than 6 developers it gets bought by a USA company (that's a slight exaggeration, not by much).
Moldoteck
That's not a slight exaggeration, it's a huge exaggeration to try to make your point valid.
LtWorf
Try to find a job as a software developer in europe in a company with more than 50 developers that isn't foreign owned.
cheptsov
Just curious what their agenda can be…
LtWorf
FBs agenda? Be able to do whatever they want without paying taxes basically.
machiaweliczny
Yes, it’s exactly what is needed in EU. Especially now as we can’t trust in trans-Atlantic relations. EU will go with own tech and military 100%
tivert
I don't think big-tech companies exiting is a bad thing. They're so used to getting their own way and making the rules that it's probably signal that Europe is on the right track.
localfirst
Pretty much these articles from FP are notorious for their poor journalism and just a mouthpiece for billionaires
In fact a huge chunk of American MSM is turning out to be unreliable and quick to deceive its readers who are still stuck in the "why would they lie to us".
Europe is doing a good job and as are more sovereign countries waking up to the techno-colonialism at play.
If Google or Facebook is in your country, they do not share your country's interest and instead pushing their own American ideologies.
More and more countries should reject American tech companies that seek to interfere and spread their fcked up ideologies in the host country.
tivert
> If Google or Facebook is in your country, they do not share your country's interest and instead pushing their own American ideologies.
> More and more countries should reject American tech companies that seek to interfere and spread their fcked up ideologies in the host country.
I'd go father: even in America they don't share their country's interest and instead are pushing their own Silicon Valley ideologies (e.g. they're all for solving problems, only so long as the solution means using more of their products, making them even more money, etc.).
localfirst
to be exact, San Francisco ideology shaped by the images of their limitless compassion now spreading world wide and raising questions.
downrightmike
I don't think (orphan grinding machines) exiting is a bad thing. They're so used to getting their own way and making the rules that it's probably signal that Europe is on the right track.
CAP_NET_ADMIN
Tech sector pretending that the regulations that worked in all the other sectors don't and won't apply to them or they will upend the human civilization.
spongebobstoes
The real problem is that the requirements for a social platform are getting very onerous, to the point that it takes at least several engineers working full time on the problem.
That really hurts a startup's ability to initially launch in the market, especially one with less VC money. (Certain BigCo new products can be thought of as a startup too, with limited budgets.)
This doesn't just affect social media companies, it affects almost any product where a user can upload data, or any product with a social feature, no matter how peripheral the feature is.
Turns out that's a wide swathe of technology, and that social features are fairly valuable.
Of course the big companies will eventually get around to launching in Europe anyway, it will just trail behind the rest of the world.
ryandrake
This can be said about any regulation that makes it more difficult to deliver a product. Are food safety regulations "onerous" because the food company has to hire several people to ensure their food is safe? A food startup who can't afford to hire those people might argue that they are at a disadvantage and therefore the regulations are onerous and favor large companies.
llm_trw
>A food startup who can't afford to hire those people might argue that they are at a disadvantage and therefore the regulations are onerous and favor large companies.
That is literally the point of food regulations.
They are not prescriptive but descriptive.
No regulation says 'make food with >100 E-coli per KG' it always says 'use stainless steel table, no smaller than 2mx1m, in a well ventilated room of size...'.
yencabulator
> The real problem is that the requirements for a social platform are getting very onerous, to the point that it takes at least several engineers working full time on the problem.
There are only 19 companies in the world that are required to comply with the strict rules. I think they can pay those "several engineers" from the money they make in EU. This is not about startups, and this is not about launching.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act#Large_onl...
belorn
Most, if not all this kind of EU regulation has size limits, usually several steps between small startups with a small number of users, up to the size of gatekeeper platforms. There aren't many startups that start off as a gatekeeper since there is only six companies in the world that has that definition (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft).
zug_zug
Is that true though? Are there any 5-person startups with < 10k users getting sued/shutdown by this regulation?
spongebobstoes
That data point is very hard to provide any evidence for, and not sufficient to draw any conclusions from. For example, what if the company was never started? What if they pivoted after speaking to a lawyer?
lucianbr
> Criteria relating to the size of the companies: (a) a turnover of the company of at least 7.5 billion euro in the European Economic Area for three years at least or (b) a market capitalization or equivalent of at least 75 billion euro;
> Criteria relating to the place of the company in controlling access of other businesses to final customers: the company needs to have (a) more than 45 million monthly active end users in the EU and (b) more than 10,000 yearly active business in the EU;
> "An entrenched durable position" which is a qualitative criterion which the regulator considers met if the numbers of active users in the second criterion are met for three years in a row.
It is indeed very hard to find evidence that DMA does not affect startups, if you don't want to find that evidence.
You're seriously arguing that a startup founder would think "well, when I get to a 75 billion euro valuation, there will be some cumbersome rules, so I might as well not start anything"???
zug_zug
Frankly I'm not very convinced by that -- it seems that most social networks are already killed by winner-takes-all SV companies buying-out any possible threat.
The situation in America is an absolute nightmare with data being sold through all sorts of mechanisms with zero oversight (your ISP, your car, most apps on your phone, whoever does your credit scores) -- I'm sure there's some way to make successful tech that isn't the hellscape America has.
Vinnl
Which regulations are you referring to? Do those not apply just to those that have managed to obtain a dominant role, ie not startups entering the market?
themagician
The requirements for social platforms are just becoming more inline with all other industries. The period of special treatment is over. The era of, “If it’s on social media then no one is liable for this content or the harm it may cause, but also I can still monetize it,” is over.
It is a welcome change, but not for those who mean to exploit the special status that “social media” and “apps” have been given all these years.
betaby
In other words - classic regulatory capture.
jmclnx
Because the EU values their citizens privacy tech may leave. Personally I could live with that if that is the result of my privacy being protected.
betaby
> Otherwise businesses have no ability to plan for the future and investment stops.
And then there is a 'chat control' every year pushed relentlessly. Thus no, not at all. EU doesn't value citizens privacy.
dijit
The EU commission (made of elected statesmen from all over the EU) is free to propose as many laws as it wants, but these things never have broad appeal and do not pass parliament (the MEPs we directly elect).
Chat control keeps being proposed by the same Swedish politician, and she will continue to do so and she will continue to fail- because politicians in the EU are already aware its stupid.
rdm_blackhole
You are wrong, most MEPs know that this will break encryption and are more than happy to go for the ride because they have exempted themselves from such regulation. Surveillance for thee not for me.
Chat control is not just the love child from the Swedish politician, it is being pushed by US surveillance companies that convinced the commission members that CP can be detected and stopped only if Europol has access to all your messages, emails, photos and videos until the end of time without having any recourse as to what it will be used for or by whom it will be viewed.
Then there is also Chat Control V1 which is currently extended each year despite being a temporary measure supposedly. Then there is also the data retention directive which everyone knows was illegal to start with and took 10 years to be overturned.
The fact that people still associate EU with privacy is a joke. The EU wants your data just like Meta and Apple or Google. At least Meta is not trying to gaslight me into thinking that giving my data is to save the children or some other complete BS reason.
thrance
Chat control still has not passed, and GDPR arguably contains a few articles in favor of citizens privacy. I wouldn't say "not at all".
phyzix5761
If the EU cares about its citizen's privacy why does it do everything in its power to spy on its own citizens?
NekkoDroid
Are you talking about the "Chat Control" that keeps on getting shut down?
sunaookami
It was not shut down, it will certainly come. The DSA is another tool that is already in effect. Bit by bit all the pieces of a surveillance state are coming together in the EU.
cheptsov
It's socialism versus capitalism at its finest. The problem is that socialism risks regulating big tech out of existence. Is that an issue? Absolutely. By stifling big tech, Europe becomes heavily dependent on the US, which ultimately hurts our quality of life. As an entrepreneur living in Europe, the best thing you can do is move to the US.
nrr
I'm not sure I follow. The incumbent capital class is driving policy decisions around this. Where's the socialism?
kazen44
i don't think you know what socialism means if this is your interpretation.
Lets not forget that half of the EU actually lived under a quasi socialist regime not that long ago...
TheChaplain
Not only the tech market, they're on a pace in destroying the agricultural market as well. Small, medium size farmers are disappearing fast, they quit or at best being absorbed by large farmcorps.
insane_dreamer
That’s already happened in the US without regulation, little farms don’t stand a chance against giant agribusinesses which may not even be US owned (largest pork producer is owned by Chinese) . In fact regulation is probably preventing it from happening faster in the EU.
Zpalmtree
what are you talking about bro the US has tons of farming regulation haha
insane_dreamer
Fair point I was comparing US to EU.
kazen44
the agriculture market relies heavily on goverment intervention to even exist.
The EU and its member states give out huge subsidies to keep food production local in the EU without being completely destroyed by cheaper crops from third world countries.
The US does the same, and it is for good reason, to actually make sure a steady food supply exists inside the country/union.
stvltvs
American agriculture already went down that path. This might be a global pattern following the adoption of improved technology. Is there a reason to believe otherwise in the case of Europe? Or maybe it's a multifaceted phenomenon.
nradov
When it comes to commodity staple foods there's just no way that small farms can survive. It isn't realistic given advances in technology and economies of scale. This isn't a problem, it's just inevitable. Small farms that want to remain independent will have to switch from commodities to specialty foods that command higher profit margins.
threatofrain
For agriculture at large I wonder if that's not going to be the final economic state everywhere in the world, regardless of government. That's just more efficient. Is there anywhere in the world where this trend is reversing and looking healthy?
silverquiet
It's literal Econ 101 that economies of scale push towards monopolization. It's why we used to have anti-trust laws in the US.
stfp
Unless you only look at the financial side of things, and only from the perspective of the larger corps benefiting from this trend, it's not healthy at all.
threatofrain
I'm asking for counterexamples which are healthy. What is the leading example in your mind?
heavyset_go
There's this new book called The Grapes of Wrath that might interest you.
throwawaysleep
That’s not destroying it, that’s saving it from the doldrums of inefficiency and requiring masses of people focused on food production.
melbourne_mat
Not advocating for it but it's called economies of scale and it's happening in every country including mine (Australia)
lennixm
So making agricultural markets orders of magnitudes more efficient is destroying it in your view?
Woodi
>> Small, medium size farmers are disappearing fast, they quit or at best being absorbed by large farmcorps.
> So making agricultural markets orders of magnitudes more efficient is destroying it in your view?
Yes, of course it is.
It's like replacing families by hell called a "System" - wet dream of the eg. leftists.
It literaly destroy "market" becouse producers side disappear and you have just institution :)
It destroys it becouse no one know how or want to do that hard agriculture business. People will just prefer to sit in slums around big cities. What they can do anyway if everything is not big but giant ? How to buy such area ? How to even learn what to do with it ?? How to acquire buyers if you even get that giant area LOL ? And if it to big for one man or family how to get enough workers (why they even wanted to live slums ? how they even learn what to do??) ??
That giant and efficient (in one dimension) thing just extend himself into lack of self-sufficiency on multigeneration time scale.
Monoculture becose it's cheaper ? :>
Product quality ??? Compare to XO brandy, champagne or artisanal leather wallets. Not to boxed milk with "not yet discovered" PFASes or future "improvements".
Food security in case of war or invasion ? Or mass drone invasion ? Without small and medium agriculture you have nowhere to run. And why to even run - do one giant owner will take multiple ex-bigcity refugees to his home (and feed them few months) or just hire security to shot them or scary of his land ?
And even if giant owner want to help he can't. Becouse hi is only one. Compare to many small/farms - they are somehow just "human" and humanity sized...
Don Corleone was planting tomatoes at the end ;)
I met few peoples that when stopped to be young just moved to province and started peacefull living of the land. Giant farms are a no go for that purposes.
And yes, eg. China builds piggeries and cowsheds town-sized now. Now imagine one case of some-flue in that "town" - best case... And suddenly millions have prices hike or are starving. Or Africa countries get very cheap but toxic meat. Or animal food. Eg. with prions included...
And all of that are just real world facts and "technicals". Now add greeeeed by "lawful" owners. Tell me - is that hypothetical ? \s You easily can write long replay or tree of them just on that subject :>
Corect way is to not build hell on earth in the first place.
Lariscus
Is it time for our 'tech companies complaining about EU regulation' article again? Must be a day ending in Y.
venkat223
Europe is correct.Taking initiative on the moonlighting of hyper cheating of common citizens by big tech firms.It is investing all conceptual strength on wayward money making by the four tech "giants" at the cost if people.They act as sentinels and gatekeeoers to prevent cheats from secret money making.
jmyeet
No, it's not.
This is a not-so-thinly veiled argument for deregulation and rolling back consumer protections, pretty much like the US. It's common to use scare tactics when it comes to regulations and taxes. "Companies will leave". "You're killing companies".
As long as the EU has 400+ million consumers and they have spending power a market will exist and companies will adapt.
Take the example from the article of CUDA being a monopoly. Well, NVidia obviously isn't a European company but it will comply if the EU forces them to open CUDA because the alternative is to close themselves off to Europe. That's never going to happen.
Stop believing this "companies will leave" propaganda.
_nalply
Could articles like this bemoaning Europe's state of regulation be opinion pieces?
What if what Europe does is a good idea for the people but just inconvenient for companies?
Europe is one of the power houses of the world but with low self-esteem I am afraid. In the long term what matters is the people's quality of life and diversity.
Take China or the US: if a lot of people don't have purchasing power and leisure who are then buying stuff for themselves as end users?
llm_trw
>In the long term what matters is the people's quality of life and diversity.
I think you'll be surprised to find out just how many Europeans disagree with the diversity part. We are quite close to ethno-state Europe, just like how it was between 1800 and 1950.
Ask a European what they think of Gypsies for a wild time.
Terr_
> Could articles like this bemoaning Europe's state of regulation be opinion pieces?
I agree with the broader idea that a lot of this stuff is PR from vested interests, but this case it's not really secret, since the news outlet categorizes it as:
> Argument - An expert's point of view on a current event.
localfirst
> What if what Europe does is a good idea for the people but just inconvenient for companies?
Thats exactly the issue. What's good for Europeans isn't so good for American corporations.
Already populist presidents in America have signaled they don't care about Europe so why should Europeans nurture and allow a hostile country continue to operate in their lands?
This type of outrage from American MSM is quite baffling. Whether their billionaires like it or not countries are going their own way and the biggest slap in the face is that those billionaires do not even live in America.
FredPret
Are you under the impression that people in the US don't have purchasing power?
Also, Europe is a power house right now, but won't be a generation from now if trends continue. All forms of power are built on economic power or are a means to get economic power.
thrance
As an European, I heard that 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. I don't think our laws should focus on tech companies' freedom since it doesn't seem to improve the people's lives.
pembrook
No need to "hear." This is easily Googled.
Americans have the highest level of disposable income in the world, and it's not even close. Even Europe's mega-rich tax havens like Luxembourg have a lower disposable income than Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
Yea I know the rebuttal--"but I also heard they all have $100,000 hospital bills every year!!" The disposable per capita income numbers already account for healthcare expenditures.
FredPret
Not sure where that stat comes from - median wealth in the USA compares extremely favourably with the rest of the world, while the average blows everyone except Switzerland out of the water.
Also, living paycheck to paycheck != being poor. There are many people with high incomes but poor budgeting who live paycheck to paycheck, but will realistically be just fine if they have to tighten their braces.
burnerthrow008
> As an European, I heard that 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck
Yes, and we all declare bankruptcy every month, and charge $10,000 to our credit card to be allowed into the doctor's waiting room, where we announce our arrival by firing a gun in the air.
Where do you guys hear this stuff?
niemandhier
Before you can innovate you need to level the playing field.
Sure at the moment the amount of inner European Innovation in digital technologies is low, but local companies have to fight against foreign behemoths that simply disregard local regulations, or just buy the likes of Luxemburg or Ireland to get their own special law zones inside the single market.
Let the big US companies leave, the vacuum left behind will foster competition and local solutions.
COGlory
The article doesn't list much in the way of tech. LLMs, social media, and advertising hegemons leaving Europe is hardly a tech flight. In fact, it sounds like a best case scenario. Someone call me when Zeiss moves out because they can't compete in Europe, and I'll be concerned Europe is actually losing something of value.
graemep
The entire article keeps saying "Europe" when it means "EU". Many European countries, including some large ones (Russia, the UK, Norway, Switzerland, Ukraine...) are not EU members.
The article makes a number of questionable assertions such as "Non-personalized ads cannot economically sustain Meta’s services". I do not know whether that is true or not. Apple has a history of malicious so. I think there are multiple reasons the US dominates tech, and I do not believe "the EU’s rules all but ensure there are no comparably successful European companies". There are many successful European tech companies, as the article mentions later on (it links to a list of the largest that is clearly out of date - for example that omits ARM).
I also disagree with its analysis of why. If you look at their list of large tech companies, and there are a lot of Chinese ones which largely exist because China was protectionist and favoured domestic over US companies. I would argue, if anything, the EU (and other European companies) have not regulated American companies enough, to produce their own competitors. In particular they rarely block takeovers by established players of potential future competitors.
I agree the EU's approach to regulation is often badly flawed, but the DMA seems to be a reasonable approach - as other comments have said it only targets businesses with a lot of market power.
kabes
Tech is more than social networks though
Loughla
Yeah, it's advertising too.
hepinhei
The article seems unfounded to me. We need regulation because companies are gaining more power, money, and data. Social networks are shaping entire societies to behave in different ways. Android is able to comply with these rules when implementing AI why not Apple? Late? Poor implementation? . However, I hope that movements like this will push the EU to create conditions and finance channels to enable competition in the tech space. I agree that Europe is lagging more and more behind, but Apple not releasing their products here is not the problem. Not having big tech companies is the problem
mensetmanusman
It’s probably smarter to only kick-in regulations after certain size thresholds are met. You can definitely strangle an organization with paperwork before it even has enough money to hire people to do the paperwork.
Denvercoder9
That's the case for most, if not all, of the new European regulations, such as the Digital Markets Act. The number of companies to which it applies can be counted on your hands, and they all have tens of billions of dollars of revenue.
mensetmanusman
Each country may have its own regulations though, which makes it difficult, because not all of them are threshold based.
Avamander
I don't think safely handling data subject's data for example is something that should start only from a certain size.
Let's only make the small bridges unsafe?
Vinnl
Like the gatekeeper designation in the DMA, or the threshold for assigning a data privacy officer in GDPR, you mean?
yokoprime
If your company requires removing privacy laws and measures to stifle anti-competitive behavior, then by all means leave. I don’t want to live in a technological dystopia just to be “cutting edge”
dotcoma
Funny how any effort to limit Big Tech’s ability to do whatever they want is seen as a negative thing.
IMHO attention to privacy and privacy regulations will help make Europe the leader in privacy-respecting services.
yalok
One of the clearest examples of this to me is the requirement to show consent to store cookies. This just simply ruined web surfing experience, where now every site has to show a popup of all kinds of shapes and forms.
Why not let the users decide in whole-sale, if they wish? like with this extension - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/accept-all-cookies/...
Anamon
AFAIK there is no general requirement to ask for consent. For example, to store session tokens or language preferences. A lot of sites probably wouldn't have to show cookie consent prompts, if they don't share profiling data with third parties or do other shady stuff, but still show them because they're afraid of doing it wrong or because everybody else seems to be doing it. It's been a while since I read the text of the law, but I remember thinking that the line from which consent was required seemed reasonably drawn and that websites who cross it are right to be forced to declare what exactly they do. There was a post about this recently, titled something like "there is no cookie banner law".
An option for a general setting may be nice. I personally approximate it by only accepting cookies from whitelisted domains, and using ad blocking filter lists to hide cookie consent prompts.
kkfx
Forcing global firms to leave is GOOD actually, but EU have essentially no domestic tech markets: most part of the ruling elite have no idea about IT and while they have made many wise choice in theory (eIDAS, e-billings, certified signed emails and so on) the implementation is obscene and mostly done on the shoulders of non-EU firms by not really competent local developers and the result is a practical MESS. All other the EU we almost have smart-card nfc IDs but using them is a pain because of crappy proprietary middlewaren and crapplications even more crappy on top, with public services designed by some mentally ill child with a keyboard. We have public accurate maps of the territory and no unified public way to access them, there is no public common conferencing decentralized/federated infra, some public body offer Big Blue Button or Jitsi meet based infra, others choose some USA private firm. Public money, public code is told everywhere but only told in most of the cases.
The sole way we can fill the gap is MANDATE FLOSS, publicly funding existing FLOSS projects and offering them all the infra through public universities and research bodies to create an EU-FLOSS ecosystem because that's the future we need, where once spread everywhere (desktops, smartphones, cars, domestic IoT etc) will allow private sector to pick and evolve individual ideas. This is the European way and we know it works, IF DONE. Unfortunately most fails to understand IT at all so it's not done, simply. As a result no digital sovereignty is possible on scale.
skywhopper
This is silly. So a bunch of American companies are refusing to go along with EU regulations that cramp their own monopolistic style. That doesn’t mean they are killing the local tech market.
nradov
Is the local tech market alive?
hintymad
I'm curious on why European people allow such heavy regulation. They really think that the Europe can enjoy their prosperity with little innovation for years to come?
hcfman
Well. The laws are made up by a non elected commission. And these people don’t give a shit about what the people think.
Governments that don’t toe the line to what the commission want get pressured into ultimately complying.
ttepasse
The bills are voted in the law by the democratically elected Members of the European Parliament and the democratically elected governments in the Council of the European Union.
(And the Commission itself often gets its mandate for writing bills from the European Parliament, the Council of the EU or the European Council.)
solenoid0937
I agree -- these comments are bizarre to me. Technology is the single biggest predictor of QoL in human history.
You can only miss out on so many Industrial Revolutions before you begin to lose power (economic, military, financial, social) and fade into irrelevancy. That will certainly hurt QoL more than any short-term gain from preventing Memoji AI from existing in your region, or strangling your next AI startup in the cradle.
voiceblue
The comments here seem ignorant of how regulations in the EU have become and what the dynamic is. Regulation is being lionized [0] as a political badge of honor, and as TFA shows, things are getting ridiculous: it is not enough that you can a) not use facebook, b) pay for it, or c) consent to let them use your data -- you MUST have d) use facebook for free without letting them use your data. In other words, socialist values must be upheld by corporations, now everyone must be able to avail of your product at no cost, to be subsidized by the wealthy, which in this case is the corporation itself! Of course businesses are just going to stop operating in this environment!
The comments here seem blind to this simple calculus. Then they will say, "nothing of value was lost": then think who is the arbitrator of value here? It is clearly not the consumer*, but the consumer's nanny. Was something of value lost in that philosophy? No? Perhaps China and North Korea are not so bad, then.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-iphone-15-usb-c-eu-malta-4240...
* Consumers vote with their wallet and their feet when it comes to products and establishments
jokethrowaway
There are too many layers of government.
We have no way to influence what our leaders do in our own governments. Go figure how much our representative in the EU parliament will be able to represent the will of the people.
Ask anyone in EU who is their country representative. They won't be able to tell you. Heck, ask who the president of the EU commission is. Nobody will be able to tell you and she's been ruining our lives for 5 years already.
MEP are just partying with the lobbyist in Bruxelles and challenging each other who can get the bigger bribe.
hcfman
Here here. Well said!
hcfman
And Ursula wants a never ending war for the next few generations. She loves war. No money left for innovation or for fighting climate change, which is going to be very expensive.
trinsic2
The headline should be corporations are in danger of criminalizing themselves out of existence.
meiraleal
Regulating the tech Market is great for local tech só what happens is pretty the opposite. No country will lose GDP if meta or google leave
3np
FP tends to have pro-US spin. This article reads as propaganda attempting to protect US interests.
Lichtso
> Regulating the tech Market is great for local tech
Except, it is not. At least not in the situation that the EU is in. Because all regulations are a constant burden on business, small relative to big corporations, huge for medium companies and insurmountable for startups.
The EU has no big players, not a single one! We have a few medium players like SAP and that is it. So, we are already far behind and every weight we load on to drag us down is another nail in the coffin.
GreenWatermelon
It's good the EU doesn't have a big player. Having big players is like having cancer. The EU has a functioning Immune system, the US is buckling under its immunu-comporomised ass. The resources ~~cancer cells~~ big players are extracting aren't going to the people.
dnissley
Tech is very interconnected though, and the article points out an example where what you state is very much not true: "How would Mistral, a leading AI firm, survive if Nvidia exits the French market due to regulatory concerns?"
Vinnl
Would've been good if they had been able to come up with a realistic example that could be problematic, but they have not made the case at all while Nvidia would forego the EU market.
dnissley
Theoretically it would just be the French market, due to: https://www.reuters.com/technology/french-antitrust-regulato...
jjtheblunt
how much of gdp is facilitated through the search abilities of meta and google, though?
Avamander
Search abilities increasingly loathed for poor quality, blocked by providers, made useless by AI slop and superseded by the likes of even TikTok?
chmod775
Are you just counting on others being too exhausted to bring yet another moot argument to its predetermined conclusion?
I'll finish it to save everyone some time:
A: how much of gdp is facilitated through the search abilities of meta and google, though?
B: It doesn't matter.
A: Why not?
B: There will be someone else who is willing to play by the local rules fulfilling the same function in their place, just like in many countries around the world already.
threeseed
> There will be someone else who is willing to play by the local rules
Building a competitive search engine or AI model requires VC investment.
It's simply too expensive to do otherwise.
VC investment requires a vibrant startup ecosystem, well crafted regulations and a risk-tolerant culture.
jjtheblunt
> Are you just counting on others being too exhausted to bring yet another moot argument to its predetermined conclusion?
Umm, nope. I’m conjecturing that there could be an enabling aspect of huge scale, and that some smaller economies may fall below the threshold. Personally i hope what you wrote works.
rty32
Did I miss anything?
Subtitle says "Poorly designed laws are forcing global firms to leave." I didn't see anything in the article that elaborates on the "poorly designed" part or any company that is forced to leave. Instead, the article uses a number of totally irrelevant examples to argue... nothing. I am really confused.
Vinnl
Apparently the author founded the "Center for New Liberalism". I tried to find out how that's funded, but could only see memberships that gives access to a 700+-person Slack, and couldn't find what the dues are. Would be interested in learning more about that, if anyone knows more.
1vuio0pswjnm7
Works where archive.ph is blocked:
x=https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/07/26/europe-tech-regulation-apple-meta-google-competition/
tnftp -4o"|(echo '<meta charset=utf-8>';grep -o '<p>.*</p>')" $x > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
links -force-html 1.htm
links $x
ripped_britches
I think it should be remembered that the personalized ads are not just valuable for ad platforms - most of the personalization value actually accrues to advertisers themselves, who basically represent the entire economy.
EU regulators think their enemy is big American tech companies, but they are hurting their domestic advertisers and domestic economies even more.
I am saying this as someone who hates seeing ads and uses adblock, but I greatly appreciate the societal value.
We should be making laws that foster competition and safety. I struggle to see how cross-site tracking and personalized advertising by itself is anti-competitive or unsafe. The bigger issues that need to be solved on these platforms are gatekeeper monopolies, social division, and mental health.
QuietWatchtower
With ads there is incentive for tech companies to harvest more and more data points for advertisers to use their magic orbs to find out whether you like Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi more. This in turn leads to powerful and concerning levels of understanding of a certain individuals personality and worse, behavior, that allows them to exploit those flaws in your personality, or exploit your emotion more than a billboard ever could.
On top of this, it creates an unregulated sky-is-the-limit 3rd party economy of data brokers who will sell these bulk collections of data to whoever coughs up the money for it. Enter in governmental intelligence agencies, there now is a concern of governments either sidestepping laws on lawful intelligence collection or outright breaking them, as the NSA and FBI have already admitted too if I recall correctly.
Edit: I'd also like to say, can you imagine how the intelligence agencies would pressure their legislators during attempts of reforming data brokers? "You can't take this away! We stopped this attack from happening with this! If you take this away, you'll cause 9/11 2.0!" That's exactly what they did for the FISA re-authorization this year in the US.
Moldoteck
Regardless, personalized ads are evil and should be banned at least for granular types. People will survive with less personalized ads but we'll avoid a lot of problems by ditching them
multimoon
I think we can debate regulations being productive or not all day and either side of the camp will never agree, however my biggest personal issue is that the government is removing the choice from anyone involved. As an adult you should be able to chose for yourself - if everyone chose no, then nobody would use these services and the companies wouldn’t do it. I think the effort needs to be focused on awareness and education, not restriction.
If the average user is fine with their data being sold in exchange for a service, then why not let them?
I’m personally not okay with it and I keep my data footprint as low as I can, but I know lots of people who just do not care if they get a service in return, and are fully understanding of what that means.
13415
> If the average user is fine with their data being sold in exchange for a service, then why not let them?
But they are not okay with it. I understand why Corporations like to insinuate that people who click OK to twenty pages of legalese in an EULA really are okay with whatever clauses in it, but in reality this practice is an abuse of contract law and exploiting asymmetric power relations. In theory, a potential customer could print EULAs out, suggest changes, and send back the revised contract for approval or further negotiation. In practice, nobody ever does that and corporations would freak out if it happened on a large scale.
The problem does not just occur with new big tech. Banks have been doing the same for decades. I recently put some money on a savings account and was greeted with pages and pages of fine print that literally only a lawyer can understand. Normally, nobody in their right mind would accept this. However, the bank serves as a utility, changing banks is very difficult where I live and they all have the same kind of contracts in their favor. There is no alternative. The same is true for social networks and other big tech. It's not really a free choice for a small business owner to have a Facebook account or for a self-published author to put their books on Amazon, for instance.
That's why strong regulations, good customer protection and privacy laws are needed.
Sakos
Companies circumvent real choice all the time. Regulations prevent them from doing so. There's no equivalency here. EU has repeatedly made legislation that does something or anything to counteract the power these tech companies have over the lives of billions. The EU has an interest in serving the needs of EU citizens. Tech companies do not. Tech companies only care about their bottom line, regardless of the human or financial cost to anybody else. There is no option for individuals to do anything about these companies. That's what we need governments for.
The US has largely decided that companies shouldn't be regulated at all (particularly with the recent Supreme Court decisions). This isn't a good thing. It will not benefit the vast majority of US citizens. There is no "choice" citizens can make that will undo the unraveling of government regulations on industry/business, unless it's voting for a political party that one that will reform the Supreme Court and revert their insane decisions, a party that isn't the GOP.
multimoon
Then it sounds like what you’re saying is there’s a financial market for users like you and I who would rather pay a subscription fee than our data be sold? Or an ad supported tier?
The problem with your argument is you’re removing any revenue source the company has. If you won’t pay a subscription, and you block all the ads, and they can’t sell data, how do they make money? Money is required to run the service, whether that leaves a sour taste or not.
If you think you have a financially viable model that protects data, then you should start a company on that premise, I’d genuinely love to see someone make it work.
abdullahkhalids
Protection of the water we drink is a legal right. Which is why companies cannot dump waste into the river, no matter what financial impacts it has on them.
Protection of user data is a legal right, or increasingly recognized to be. Companies have no right to sell it, or misuse it, no matter what financial impacts it has on them.
Rights cannot be contracted away or sold. They are rights.
Sakos
> Then it sounds like what you’re saying is there’s a financial market for users like you and I who would rather pay a subscription fee than our data be sold? Or an ad supported tier?
And the vast majority of users don't deserve privacy? Nah, that's a ridiculous argument to make and I'm not going to waste my time with this line of discussion. You're not making a good faith argument. I'm not playing your stupid games.
themagician
It's not (necessarily) about you.
When you knowingly agree to use a service that sells your data, that's fine. When you link it to Facebook and then give it access to your contacts and the name, email address, and phone number of every person you know gets sold to a company that then goes and uses that information to send personalized phishing emails and commit fraud that's a lot less fine.
At the end of the day its about liability. There are many tech companies that are responsible for harm at both the individual and societal level, and they are not held accountable.
sensanaty
Always hilarious reading big tech propaganda. They're trying oh so hard to convince people that, no, us harvesting every single iota of information and selling it to data brokers is progress, actually!!!
The best part, for me, is while they flail and scream about the big bad EU, Japan and India are following suit with similar laws and regulations. It's only a matter of time until more and more countries start adopting these laws, and the tears from the techbros is going to be delicious.
The website the "article" (aka paid propaganda piece) is hosted on has over 700 partners that they'd like me to consent to having my data shared with. It also completely shits itself thanks to uBlock, meaning it's made so terribly that blocking the privacy-invasive trackers they have breaks the whole site.
If this is their idea of innovation, they can keep it and shove it where the sun don't shine.
udev4096
I find this extremely misleading. It's not surprising, given the average american publication is not aware of the fact that the "big tech" relies on so many obscure open source software from all around the world
bestnameever
What does one have to do with the other?
snowpid
In my little buble hanging around the Berlin start up scene (not founder) I've never heard about complains for DMA, Ai Act etc. (only GDPr for medical stuff , but that is tackled by new laws... With less privacy).
Current stuff (other mentions): Germany's state of digitalisation and bureaucracy, investments.
So this guy clearly gives an lousy tech lobbyist .
Giving his initiative DMA is certainly pro market oriented. Why does he have a problem with it?
totallywrong
Well done EU and good riddance to any company that doesn't like these laws.
baal80spam
We have a tech market?
DataDaemon
Europe is a place to take social benefits; there is no tech, no innovation. It's better to sit on the couch and watch Netflix than start a business. There is too much risk, too many taxes, and too many regulations.
surgical_fire
> no innovation
So all innovation requires you to capture user's data for profit via advertisement or data brokerage?
bamboozled
Had to laugh at that
xvector
[flagged]
surgical_fire
I wonder how much we are actually losing on this side of the pond with that.
Maybe it is for the best. I don't really trust those billion-dollar companies.
ndriscoll
My impression is that many if not most KDE developers are in Europe. That's some of the most useful user-facing software that exists. Most big American "tech" has essentially no utility, and is built around mindless scrolling, spying, and ads.
lurking_swe
No utility you say? i’d argue all of this is relevant to consumers and/or businesses in europe:
• Microsoft windows
• microsoft office (excel, etc)
• google search
• google maps
• gmail and yahoo mail
• smartphones
• space-x (affordable satellite launches - for accurate weather forecasts and GPS)
• OpenAI (pioneering LLM’s from a product perspective)
• Visa and Mastercard networks
• AWS / Azure / GCP
• Adobe (photoshop, etc)
• Zoom / Webex (Skype is an exception, created in europe)
• Salesforce
• DocuSign
• AutoCAD
I can list more if you’d like…this was literally off the top of my head. All of these businesses and products were created in the united states, some with VC funding. They employ hundreds or thousands of engineers, product managers, etc. They provide critical business capabilities to businesses around the world. Some are user facing as well.
As far as critical business software Europe has created Skype, SAP, and i think that’s it? From the hardware side, major kudos for ASML and Airbus.
The stuff you read about in the news is focused on bad actors and toxic social media junk. thats a small piece of big tech.
GreenWatermelon
> No utility you say? i’d argue all of this is relevant to consumers and/or businesses in europe: > > • Microsoft windows > > • microsoft office (excel, etc) > > • google search > > • google maps > > • gmail and yahoo mail > > • smartphones > > • space-x (affordable satellite launches - for accurate weather forecasts and GPS) > > • OpenAI (pioneering LLM’s from a product perspective) > > • Visa and Mastercard networks > > • AWS / Azure / GCP > > • Adobe (photoshop, etc) > > • Zoom / Webex (Skype is an exception, created in europe) > > • Salesforce > > • DocuSign > > • AutoCAD > > I can list more if you’d like…this was literally off the top of my head. All of these businesses and products were created in the united states, some with VC funding. They employ hundreds or thousands of engineers, product managers, etc. They provide critical business capabilities to businesses around the world. Some are user facing as well. > > As far as critical business software Europe has created Skype, SAP, and i think that’s it? From the hardware side, major kudos for ASML and Airbus. > > The stuff you read about in the news is focused on bad actors and toxic social media junk. thats a small piece of big tech.
Honestly, this comment inadvertently proves the need to quarantine US tech. Almost every product you listed is utter garbage, especially Windows.
There's nothing inherently better about Windows than Linux. Libre Office suit can become much better than MS Office if ot got enough suppoet - support that just goes away to M$ contracts.
Google search has become utter garbage.
Hetzner exists, and more Cloud companies would exist if it weren't for America's Big Tech having a competitive advantage due to their sheer size.
Adobe is a shit company with shit behavior. I'd welcome its implosion anytime. Again, if the billions siphoned away for their licenses was spent on FOSS alternatives, we'd end up with such healthier ecosystem.
Visa and Mastercard are leas innovation and more completely regulated duopoly at this point.
Also, with the exception of SpaceX, I'd gladly welcome the complete implosion of all companies you mentioned. I'd love to watch them burn to cinders, while the world finally breathes free.
amai
No innovation in Europe? Who created Linux? Python? ARM? ASML? Outside of IT: BioNTech (first Covid mRNA vaccine), Ozempic from Novo Nordisk? A fee seconds of googling is enough to show how ridiculous this claim is.
lurking_swe
The trouble with these examples is that many of them are foundations or open source projects. They don’t employ europeans and provide a direct boost to the european economy. So yes there is definitely innovation but is it translating to JOBS in europe?
Is python a company that hires hundreds or thousands of engineers, product managers, etc? no. Same with Linux. Also Linux was created by a european (torvalds) while he was living and working in the united states, and is now contributed to by engineers all over the world. I’d hardly call that a majority european innovation. A nitpick but I wanted to clarify that.
ASML, ARM, BioNtech and Ozempic are great examples though, i’ll give you that.
GreenWatermelon
This is less a nitpick and more moving the goalpost. GP Talked about innovation, while you argue job creation.
ab5tract
Ah yes, innovation can only emerge from glorious pits of pain and hellfire.
radley
Spotify benefitted from starting in the EU.
lucaspm98
I don't agree with the exaggeration in the parent comment, but your one counter-example pivoted their workforce expansion to the US after openly criticizing Sweden's business environment. They took issue with the shortage of employee housing due to over-regulated planning restrictions, unfavorable taxation of stock options, and a lack of programming and development education. Those issues (less so education) are applicable throughout the majority of the EU.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/spotify-founders-blast-swedens-...
radley
That complaint happened 10 years after they were founded and five years after they launched in the US. By that time, they were already a billion-dollar business.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/spotify-s-t...
tuna74
Most devs in Sweden would be very happy to get US wages so this feels pretty much like bullshit.
Also, Spotify could open offices in other places in Sweden (or Europe) if they want to be in places with lower CoL than Stockholm.
spongebobstoes
I haven't heard that perspective before, can you elaborate?
radley
By my understanding, they didn't have to pay for the exorbitant North American interactive music licenses during their first five year. The EU rates were much more reasonable (plus I think they got grants and govt support?), allowing them to test the market and grow before entering the US.
self_awareness
That's why there is low risk for them to compete with anyone who didn't get EU funds. Even if the tech is better.
jsnell
> But politicians such as Vestager don’t get to then act shocked and outraged when tech companies choose to leave.
Much as I dislike Vestager, that is not an accurate description. This appears to be the original source:
https://www.youtube.com/live/GmQ5SsMFbsU?si=IgTi-ezhulsCl6Gp...
That is not someone "shocked" or "outraged" at Apple not bringing the AI features to EU markets. Vestager doesn't give a fuck about whether iOS ships with AI features or not. She is just saying that by citing the DMA as the reason, Apple are pretty much admitting that the features as implemented are anti-competitive. And she is stunned that Apple would be stupid enough to make that admission.
Like, you'd at least expect the Apple C-suite to pretend it's because of some technical reason, or because the cost structure isn't viable to support in Europe, or something other than that it's breaking competition laws.
tdiff
I think that people outside EU who believe it does not need big tech may be unaware that average salary in EU IT is around 80k, and actually a lot of people (not only IT, but also doctors, for instance) relocate to US/UK/Swiss hoping to make much more money. Its not clear who will be running innovative companies here and how EU is going to compete with China's completely different work ethics.
GreenWatermelon
Big tech didn't create linux or git. Big tech isn't working on Firefox or Kagi.
Big tech created windows, chrome, and ads. Big tech puts ads in everything, everywhere, all the time.
I'd say big tech going away is a good thing. We need more linixes, firefoxes, wnd Kagis.
Log_out_
I used to not understand these aggressive "everything else is shit" articles, as in whats the value proposition for the audience.horra patriotism is not in the market dor analysis. Nowadays i understand better, these articles is the closest thing the us has to systemic self-doubt for deciders.
phendrenad2
Nah, not really. The EU will have a thriving tech market. It just won't have ad-supported sites. Because if anyone hasn't noticed, "data privacy" is just targeted ads.
"This company was caught tracking which users visited each page" Yes, for targeted ads.
"Cambridge Analytica was" Yes, for targeted ads.
"3rd party" Yes, targeted ads.
It's all targeted ads. They want to serve you targeted ads. Any attempt to paint "data privacy" as something other than this is irresponsible fearmongering.
orbital-decay
Didn't US lose most of its production capability for the same reason? US protected its workers' rights, but there are other places with cheap labor treating the workers like shit, so businesses are using factories in other places, which then build massive expertise at production.
This is similar. EU is trying to protect the rights of its citizens for good, but there are also places like US where rights are less protected, or not at all. (and frankly, a sizeable amount of people there don't even give a crap about rights that seem ephemeral for them, like privacy). So naturally businesses go to those places.
It's not poorly designed laws, or at least not just it. It's also a tragedy of commons in a global economy, moving too fast vs too slow, and many other things.
alephnerd
> EU is trying to protect the rights of its citizens for good
Western Europe is not the entire EU.
Czechia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and the rest of Eastern Europe give plenty of leeway to businesses who bring FDI in.
The Czech government indirectly pushed a former employer of mine to force employees back into the office from remote work by threatening to withhold tax credits they used to establish a tech/outsourcing center in Praha.
Plenty of similar stories in Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, etc.
Oh, and the SEZs and Law Firms that the investment agencies made us use were always very closely connected to the incumbent poltical parties (and either indirectly or directly owned by them)
You can take Eastern Europe out of the Warsaw Pact, but you can't take the Warsaw Pact out of Easrern Europe's political and business establishment
jokethrowaway
They're not rights, they're needs. They don't have space in regulation.
If you want privacy, purchase the privacy conscious option. Don't force the entire market to make ads worthless, forcing companies to charge for things, forcing ME and my adblock to pay for crap I got for free until yesterday.
hcfman
It’s all European regulation really. The cyber resilience security act is another example. You are compelled to come out with security fixes for the life of the product. If this is embedded hardware this gets increasingly difficult.
Imagine you come out with a secure boot product for the pi. Currently this is considered beta at the moment. In any case it’s quite possible that it could change, making it impossible to provide an update.
So under this regulation do you think anyone will offer any extended warranties ? The small amount of extra money will not be worth the massive extra risk.
15 million euros fine or 2% of your income doesn’t make for a very attractive incentive on platforms where it’s complex and risky to perform low level upgrades for example.
So expect increasingly shorter product lifetimes going forward and more and more products that just won’t be released in Europe, I expect even ones developed by European companies. And what do you think about small players who can’t even afford one court care for example ?
throwaway14356
while we use it a lot apple is not our tech market.
threeseed
No but between Apple and Google they are the foundation of mobility.
And if they are not going to bring AI SDKs to the EU because of the regulatory risk then an entire class of potential startups will never exist.
guax
There as much ai shenanigans going on here in Europe as in US. DMA rules do not apply to startups. GDPR is good and stings larger corporations more than smaller ones.
Apple and Google are holding a beta risky feature and leveraging it as reason to get some sympathy.
pmlnr
Good.
Tech needs to slow down; neither society has caught up, nor quality controls.
CommanderData
1. Pay to play (tax)
2. Comply to play (regulation)
These are big markets with massive winnings even with regulation and tax. Corps can either step aside and let someone else profit or comply and play.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos
Please don't dissuade them/us from doing so.
jlaporte
It’s interesting to observe how detached the discussion here is from the issues created for Europe due to the DMA. A majority of the comments here make the implicit assumption that the DMA is good because it will penalize big tech companies and force them to change business models in the EU. This is not what is happening or will happen.
What’s really being destroyed by the DMA is Europe’s access to new technologies and services. It’s almost like a self-embargo on the AI building blocks of their future economy.
When Nvidia GPUs are supply constrained do you really think it matters to Nvidia if they need to redirect the small chunk of their supply constrained volume that they were previously selling into France? Who is harmed in this picture? The only EU AI player of note, Mistral, and other EU businesses.
Does it really harm Apple if the DMA forces them to withhold new AI features in Europe? They still earn their device and services revenues. Who is harmed in this picture? EU consumers and businesses.
We’ve now seen within just a couple months, Apple withhold AI features and Meta withhold multimodal AI models from the EU. Expect this cutting off of the EU from new features to become a recurring event over the next year.
DMA-supporting voices are under a serious misapprehension of what the effect of the DMA is and will be over the next few years. It’s cutting off European access (consumer, business & government) to critical technologies which are all being developed outside the bloc.
The DMA violates a number of longstanding principles of good legislation - it is vague, it’s written to enable arbitrary enforcement, it’s penalties are not designed to be proportionate to damages, or even require actual damages in order to be applied, the regulator’s actions stray into actual takings of property (European Commission opinion that Facebook cannot charge a subscription fee for its ad-free offering… so it must operate as a charity? This is a taking of property. European Commission opinion that Apple cannot charge a platform fee for use of its IP? This is a taking of property).
Nathanba
I think the topic is hard to talk about because the EU is technically trying to do the right thing but reality often rewards the conquerors and the US, China etc. (aka the competitors) still believe in the right of tech conquest. They don't stop their companies from taking whatever they want whether it's properly licensed or not. So we are in a situation where the EU is dotting their i's and shaking hands in their moral superiority while not understanding that we have to compete with people who don't care if they steal something or rob you by force. It's similar in all these other areas like the DMA and GDPR... we are competing with markets who simply don't care that they are violating people's privacy and it's more profitable to rob people and sell their stuff. The EU in my opinion has to create regulations that understand this reality and create an even stronger wall for european companies. So please go create these regulations, fine.. but understand that you should make unfair exceptions for european companies.
Let european companies that are situated here violate these regulations and make this explicit: As long as the US and China do not have equivalent regulations, EU companies are explicitly allowed to steal US and chinese content. Yes really, make that very explicit. Make laws with the full understanding of what reality we are living in. We are dealing with competitors who will take our last shirt by force, not friends and "partners" as they so lovingly put it in their press releases.
tomxor
Yes yes, we took away Apple's money funnel...
Let me go find the thinnest violin, to match this thinly veiled tantrum.
shreddit
As always, empty space will be filled sooner or later. The question is, filled with better or worse?
smitty1e
Think of regulation as a higher form of tech.
Then ask yourself how exactly the architects were self-medicating.
TekMol
I think it already did.
I am an avid reader of Show HNs. And I remember many that became successful businesses. But not a single European one.
All the "startups" that I see here in Europe are very classical businesses. They build software tools for local enterprises.
It seems nobody in Europe is building something for the open web. Maybe because nobody here understands all the regulations that come with it. The GDPR alone is 100 pages of legal mumbo jumbo.
sensanaty
Most show HNs are just some shitty wrapper around OpenAI APIs these days, from what I've noticed. "Searching for papers with AI!" Doesn't exactly sound like the next Google to me, but maybe I'm just out of touch.
alephnerd
"Why use Dropbox when I can use rsync or FTP" [0]
- HN in 2007
jinushaun
I wish there was more to the US tech industry than social networks and ads.
dang
I've noticed that European Show HNs tend to be open-source projects rather than startups. Not interpreting, just noticing.
jasonvorhe
That's probably not a regulation issue that's mostly hitting US big tech, though.
European schools and universities tend to drill people towards employment and not to take too many risks so starting companies isn't as widespread and considered too bureaucratic.
Then there's the issue of multiple currencies and not every checkout SaaS supporting all of them and their various options of payment (afaik), which limits reach. That's a problem the US, India, China and Russia don't have.
xtiansimon
Interesting they start the article using Apple. *In general* Apple has(had?) a reputation for creating smart and useful products which work in surprisingly simple and convenient ways. Apple is dogmatic (and aggressive), but the goal has been _something great_. Drawn into the article, you ask yourself--Why is the EU handcuffing Apple? The article wouldn't have the same momentum if you started with, say, Facebook. The rules described are perverse (ex. Twitter/X's blue checkbox). The imagined outcome is a shocking lack of products which people enjoy freely elsewhere in the world.
Then I started thinking of this through the lens of B2B SaaS software I use in small business every day. The outside of the box makes promises. Sales reps make promises. Demos abound. Contracts are signed. Setup fees are paid. Setup manhours are invested. And then you start using these services and products. Support issues go unresolved--not supported at this time--and go on the 'wish list' void. What you thought of as a solution to your business needs turns to questions of sunk cost. Total frustration resulting from the obviously profit seeking economizing decisions not described on the box--devil is in the details. Who is the more naive? Businesses for having purchased these products or the companies who develop and market them as industry solutions (vs. just another product with hidden cost-benefit determinations)?
Now think of the B2C environment the article is talking about where there are known deceptive practices working to profit on user's personal privacy. I have to laugh. Seems fitting to read about naive regulation against the decisions of manufacturers and developers making abhorrent conditions in the consumer market. I see the same frustrated naive decisions of business owners trying to get out of contracts for bad products and services they have chosen.
account42
I would hope that the EU regulates a silicon-valley style tech market out of existence. That the US is more than happy to let their megacorporations go wild as long as it benefits their economy doesn't mean that others need to do do the same.
m3kw9
Europe is very afraid, too much protectionism for the people. It will solve itself when it most definitely back fires in the form of the actual harm showing up because of it
lincon127
If only
ponorin
You know you're out of good arguments when you have to defend the eX-Twitter's blue checkmark fiasco
AzzyHN
No they won't but okay.
ein0p
I wonder if Silicon Valley lobbyists are deliberately sabotaging the Eurozone regulatory environment. Technically there’s no reason why almost all huge Western tech companies have to be located in the US. European cost of labor in this space is much lower, and access to markets is much better, since they’re on the same continent. Their ineptitude in high tech can’t be coincidental
silexia
I have noticed all the comments on HN now are pro socialist and pro regulation. I remember a time when they were mostly pro libertarian. What changed? Are these AI generated comments to push a specific viewpoint?
Log_out_
Actually if europe builds tech working well and delivering within regulations and the us sink into ccc capitalism caused civilunrest,europas overregulated tech may be the last man standing and the one trusted by the world for stability.
quitit
The most telling feature of the DMA is that it doesn't include Spotify.
Spotify would not be compliant under the DMA for the same reason why the EU has charged Meta with non-compliance:
>Under Article 5(2) of the DMA, gatekeepers must seek users’ consent for combining their personal data between designated core platform services and other services, and if a user refuses such consent, they should have access to a less personalised but equivalent alternative. Gatekeepers cannot make use of the service or certain functionalities conditional on users’ consent.
- Source: EC statement¹
However the EU doesn't deem there to be any gatekeepers for music.² YouTube has over 80 million music subscribers. To avoid this obvious conflict they label "YouTube" as a video sharing site, deliberately ignoring one of the largest drivers of youtube traffic is music videos. Something which Google themselves advertise.³
If the EU cared about privacy and user harm they'd make the DMA protections apply to every business, not just big foreign ones.
Spotify's ads website actually brags about how it targets and tracks users and the various 3rd party data companies they partner with to extend that beyond Spotify.⁴
It's clear as day that the EU doesn't care about user harm or privacy, they just want that money for themselves. A view that is buttressed by what they're trying to do to encrypted chat communications.
¹ https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
² https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
³ https://www.youtube.com/trends/records/
⁴ https://ads.spotify.com/en-US/goals/audience-targeting/ https://ads.spotify.com/en-US/partner-directory/
aurareturn
I thought it was common knowledge that EU regulations target big foreign companies while ignoring big domestic ones?
If they truly cared about monopolies/duopolies, they'd target LVMH, Luxottica.
quitit
I note this because they're constantly lying that their goals are for the protection of users, when their actions send a different message.
Here's the direct Twitter quote from Thierry Breton regarding the charge against Meta:
The #DMA is here to give back users the power to decide over their #data #Meta has forced millions of users across EU into a binary choice : “pay or consent”. In our preliminary conclusion this is a breach of the DMA. Today we take an important step to ensure Meta complies.
https://x.com/ThierryBreton/status/1807715743129043342
Meanwhile Spotify, all data brokers and any other non-DMA'd companies can take and exchange private user data. I believe the rule should apply to all companies because I don't see the point of "protecting" users from a handful of companies when that is a drop in the ocean of data collectors.
He also makes strange bed fellows, such as frequently advocating for Fortnite, the game title which the FTC found to be deliberately tricking children into unwanted purchases, then killing their Fornite accounts in retaliation should they obtain a refund.¹
https://x.com/ThierryBreton/status/1766167580497117464
¹ https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/... Note this fine is finalised because Epic didn't challenge the FTC's claims.
zelphirkalt
If there is one thing we need to be afraid of, it is, that we don't regulate tech giants enough. That they can continue to exploit people. Maybe also, that GDPR continues to be violated by 90% of companies, because they think they will get away with it.
quitit
The core issue with the DMA is that there is no kind of pre-vetting or assurances available. This is combined with a very wide set of interpretations from a vague set of texts. We've already seen the DMA being waged against a scenario which Margrethe Vestager¹ herself had originally stated would be an ideal outcome of the DMA.²
When 10% of global revenue is on the line it makes adequate sense to tread carefully with EU releases until there is some legal precedent. (And 20% if the EU finds that compliance isn't being met.)
Margrethe Vestager has stated that withholding features is proof of anti-competitive behaviour. Such a statement would be hilarious if it wasn't so obviously preordained, and patently tone-deaf from the consequences of her own statements.
So what's the end game for the EU? In theory this should allow local and small competitors to fill the void since they're not beholden to the DMA. My expectation is that it'll just be the EU perpetually several steps behind the rest of the world and some types of tech involvement only available via US-based purchases/import basis.
¹ Margrethe Vestager: "I would like to have a Facebook in which I pay a fee each month, but I would have no tracking and advertising and the full benefits of privacy." https://www.euractiv.com/section/competition/interview/vesta...
² Facebook and Instagram’s ‘pay or consent’ ad model violates the DMA, says the EU https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/1/24189796/eu-meta-dma-viola...
cynicalsecurity
That's hilarious to see Apply trying to punish Europeans for standing up for their rights.
Good luck with that, we don't care for your "intelligence".
preya2k
Oh the irony of this article being covered by a consent screen that starts with:
„We & our 735 technology partners ask you to consent to the use of cookies to store and access personal data on your device.“
lolinder
Normally I wouldn't upvote a reply like this, but here in the US I got this one instead:
> There appears to be a technical issue with your browser
> This issue is preventing our website from loading properly. Please review the following troubleshooting tips or contact us at support@foreignpolicy.com.
I had to disable Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection in order to proceed. This is the first time since that feature was rolled out that I've had to remember where they put that disable switch.
EDIT: This isn't just a generic error handler, there's a specific piece of code that detects if their analytics provider loaded or not and shows that message if it didn't load. More details here:
_nalply
Whenever something changes on the screen while reading Reader Mode gets activated immediately and without remorse.
golergka
Do you think it was deliberate or just a general reaction to an uncaught exception somewhere in the ad part of the app?
lolinder
This is the code that does it:
// The tinypass.min.js script was blocked due to a browser content filter
console.log('Piano Script was blocked');
// Show error modal to user
FP.Utils.Piano.showBrowserCompatibilityErrorModal();
Link to the source: https://foreignpolicy.com/_static/??-eJy1lNtuwjAMhl9oIYCQGBf...
raverbashing
The experience mirrors mine
There are a lot of websites that make your phone boil in your hand with the amount of trackers, js and other crap
Yes the cookie banners are annoying. But not more than the sign up ones, the maling list ones, the "Summer sale" ones, etc
amidang
[flagged]
_Microft
They can use any cookies required for providing services without having to ask users at all.
They do need to ask for cookies meant to siphon off people's data for all other purposes.
nine_k
While adtech may be the most profitable part of tech industry, it's by far not the only part. Everything from advanced electronics to genomics to super-strong materials to reusable spacecraft is the "technology sector", and its parts are tightly intertwined.
mensetmanusman
If only the media had consolidated/unionized to be at the size scale of tech companies extracting advertising value from their reporting…
Avamander
This is the "innovation" the article is also talking about though, so it's great they give an example.
marmaduke
The Human Brain Project's final 3 year period could have actually delivered a platform for actually modeling real human brain data, and GDPR totally blew that possibility out of the water: no one had the budget to take on the legal risk, and everything was finished up with synthetic/augmented datasets or done "locally".
our colleagues in the US and China are chuckling, so we'll just move our science there.
Caius-Cosades
It's not like europe has any viable economic future left anyways. They've regulated, taxed and sanctioned their own industries out of existence and tourism is an excessively poor substitute economically. Good luck having high-tech industry or market without domestic support for it.
Pretty much only thing Europe is consistently producing nowadays is new legislations (EU and national, which are enforced incoherently and at the times contradictory)
segasaturn
Quite frankly I would prefer no tech industry over today's large, unregulated, monopolistic and aggressive tech industry. I feel like my life has not significantly improved at all relative to the enormous growth of the US tech industry in the last ten years, I'm no happier today than I was back then. Almost all of the gains have gone to a concentrated elite that I am not part of. Lately I've been looking at my phone and devices and other tech toys and asking "was any of this worth it?".
djohnston
Pretty sure they already did that. Isn’t their flagship SAP? Lol
DyslexicAtheist
did goon lawyers in Silicon Valley write this?
kmeisthax
Foreign Policy is pearl-clutching because they've seen what actually enforced antitrust law looks like for the first time since Borke and Reagan ratfucked it.
The thing is, the tech business is uniquely conducive to generating monopolies, for a handful of reasons. The biggest being we're a copyright industry. Congress made the mistake of putting software under the same legal framework as Mickey Mouse, so the monopoly tech companies have over interoperability is government granted, has little bounds on its power, and lasts forever. And when tech and creative industries got together to enforce those legal rights through software, we got DMCA 1201, an awful law that gives anyone with a valid copyright veto rights over technological progress. The only way you get shit done in the tech industry is to get acquired so that you have enough market power to license and collaborate.
Outside of copyright we have online services firms like Google and Facebook, who operate primarily through surveillance capitalism. In prior media landscapes, if you wanted to sell to New York Times readers, you had to buy inventory in the Times. Today, you ask Google and Facebook to put ads on anyone who went on nytimes.com in the past week, which is just as lucrative for the ad buyer but Google and Facebook can pay the other sites less than what an actual NYT ad would command. Targeted advertising moves money away from a diverse and distributed group of publishers towards a pair of ad networks who know exactly everything about everyone at all times.
Facebook absolutely could be 'paid for' through nontargeted ads, but it makes Facebook a far less valuable business if they can't siphon data off you and sell it to other companies. Hell, Apple already proved this: iOS 14 moved ad tracking to opt-in[0], so nobody opted in, and Facebook had a revenue hit.
Europe is not inhospitable to tech, but it is inhospitable to tech monopolization, which is predominantly how American firms operate. And to be honest, I don't think Europe is wrong to do this. In fact, I want America's government to start doing the same thing. I want a government that acts less like a rubber stamp for a handful of megacorporations and more like the villains in an Ayn Rand novel.
Do you want to see what the alternative is? Simple: the end of democracy. Trump was just a preview. Democracy is not a given, it requires distributed political power, which requires distributed wealth and economic power. If a handful of firms can centralize economic power to themselves, then they become the economy, and they can start pulling the strings politically. We already saw this with oil in the 70s, but basically every American industry works this way. The only vestige of democracy left is that sometimes industries have conflicting economic interests and that sometimes the working class hurls an orange brick through everyone's windows.
[0] Unless you're Apple, who can still track you. Related note: Google is basically being forced to keep third-party cookies in Chrome because they dragged their feet on removing them for far too long.
bigbacaloa
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helf
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gogasca
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dash2
[flagged]
lucianbr
"In the future, everyone will see how right I am". Sure thing bud.
dash2
My point was about the repetitious and not-very-insightful arguments made now whenever this topic comes up, including in this very discussion.
threeseed
[flagged]
wmf
Short of the EU directly designing products there's always going to be ambiguity. Most of the "controversy" over GDPR and DMA appears to be completely artificial and caused by malicious compliance.
threeseed
DMA was specifically designed to be flexible i.e. ambiguous:
LorenPechtel
They have some valid gripes but then they get to:
Or consider the recent charges the EU levied against X. Under Elon Musk’s ownership, anyone can now purchase a blue check with a paid subscription, whereas blue checks were previously reserved for notable figures. EU regulators singled out the new system for blue checks as a deceptive business practice that violates the bloc’s Digital Services Act.
What are they thinking?? The blue check mark is supposed to mean verified. They changed it to simply mean paid subscription. They took a symbol of trust and utterly ripped out the trust part. I don't care how much you publicize it, that's not acceptable.
Would he be ok with my going and purchasing a SSL certificate for www.x.com???
nradov
Don't be naive. It was never a symbol of trust. At most it was a symbol of prominence or notability as decided by a biased, unaccountable group of Twitter employees. Many of the old blue check mark accounts routinely posted inaccurate information or outright lies.
The new X Community Notes system is far superior for establishing trust.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/biden-clai...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-22/elon-m...
Fundamentally just because a software feature worked a certain way at one time doesn't create an obligation for tech companies to keep it working the same way. Whether you consider that acceptable is entirely irrelevant.
tzs
> Many of the old blue check mark accounts routinely posted inaccurate information or outright lies.
So? The point of the old blue checkmark wasn't to assure me that what the account said was true. It was to provide some assurance that the account was really the account of the prominent or notable person with that name.
eadler
By "the new X community notes system" do you mean the same one that existed and was entirely developed before Elon bought Twitter?
LorenPechtel
It was a symbol of trust in identity, not trust in veracity. Same as SSL certificates.
nradov
Nah, it was never a symbol of trust in identity. A lot of those accounts were actually managed by social media staff, not by the "verified" people themselves. It was always just a meaningless vanity mark.
johnthewise
>Many of the old blue check mark accounts routinely posted inaccurate information or outright lies.
There are always going to be misinformation. It's crazy to think a company or any committee can determine these for us though. It's not even logical yet alone practical. then you need to determine whether said entity made any judgment errors in assessing a person or claim. Those who demand centralized 'truth' authorities are useful idiots for power seeking authoritarians.
johnthewise
It's not a certificate, it's a blue mark on a site that tell's you user is verified through payment. It should never be a symbol of trust, as twitter or anyone can't assess the trustworthiness of individuals :)
p_j_w
>as twitter or anyone can't assess the trustworthiness of individuals
You need to rethink what was being implied. Twitter CAN assess whether or not you can trust that the person that owns the account is who they say they are. That's what the blue checkmark was. It was NOT implying that the person was trustworthy.
johnea
Eliminating goggle, apple and meta could only be regarded as a good thing...
Throw out bozo too for the win-win...
the_optimist
The efficacy of bureaucratic destruction is explicit in warfare guidance [0]. We pretend peacetime is different. It’s not.
So among non-EU-dwellers, let’s raise a glass to our fallen competitors and erstwhile comrades. Better than Nordstreaming them, or at least more subtle. Onward, toward a new vassal-state future!
edit: It appears that EU subjects are distraught, or the topic is too raw. Let me know!
https://archive.ph/sLsnW