The EU’s new internet rules will hurt the continent’s startups | Hacker News Reader

The EU’s new internet rules will hurt the continent’s startups

economist.com

115 pointsjeo123436 comments

I don't understand such articles, maybe someone can clarify the issue for me? If a company can do Harmful Things X and Y, and then a law appears that bans it from doing X but for some reason does not cover Y, then how is the rule hurting the victims of that company? How can reducing but not completely eliminating harmful things actually be actively hurting?

Its all about loopholes actually. Lets take for example a simple law that says all employers must give their employees health insurance. No sane person is against people having health insurance, its just the ways companies might get around this law that is the problem. For instance, lets say this applies to fulltime employees, well then the company might lay people off, hire more contractors and part-timers, then those same people have less job security, perhaps lower wages because other laws regarding fulltime employees dont apply, and still no health insurance.

That is essentially what this EU law boils down to: a law with lots of loophole room for companies to exploit.

In less words; side-effects of modified incentives.

If adding or removing one incentive or disincentive makes some completely different option more profitable than the intended one, that's a loophole that's likely to be abused.

>Lets take for example a simple law that says all employers must give their employees health insurance. No sane person is against people having health insurance

Given that in many countries apart from the US, health insurance is provided by the government and/or private sector, I'd posit that there are quite a few sane people who don't believe having employers be responsible for providing health insurance is necessarily a good idea.

An example found by some quick Googling: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/05/12/how-emp...

I do not live in the US, I chose a specificlly US example because most people are probably familiar with the US system here. Regardless, if you read my statement, it has nothing to do with whether a company/govt should or should not provide insurance, just that "no sane person is against people having health insurance". If someone thinks, in general, people should not have health care services I think there is something wrong with them i.e. they are not being sane.

A better example could have perhaps been rent ceilings in large cities, since there are many classic examples of this loophole behavior in economics.

Sorry, I assumed from the sentence preceding it that you meant that no sane person would be against employers providing health insurance.

The European Parliament has partially eroded net neutrality with its decision on the 27th October due to loopholes.

No. The Parliament had written a version without loopholes.

The Council then modified it, and said "If you don’t add these loopholes, we’ll veto it and all future variants of it".

As the council is representatives of the governments of the nations, complain to your government, not to the EU.

It's the same pattern as always: If the EU does something positive, then "your countries government worked really hard for that". If it's something people think critical of, blame the evil EU and deny your involvment.

An often cited example in Germany is Regulation (EC) 244/2009 which bans classical light bulbs. Always blamed on the EU. What nobody tells you, is that it was proposed by then-minister for environment Gabriel and heavily lobbied for by chancellor Merkel. Doesn't stop one of them to use it as an example of over-regulation.

And all the bullshit that UK's tabloids like to write, than then gets regurgitated by the regular press in the mainland. Things like "straightening bananas", "reclassifying snails as fish", "declaring juice to be a juice" - every time I actually went to check the actual regulations, they made absolute, perfect sense. But the press misrepresents it to mock the EU and thus general population believes EU is just bunch of idiot bureaucrats out to codify everything.

I feel that this is such an important topic. The EU is an easy target for blame shifting, the opponents are so much more vocal and the union itself may be under threat in not too distant future.

I think it needs better marketing and PR, and for us, individual pro-EU citizens to not allow our local politicians to divert attention from their incapabilities.

Of course, the EU is much stronger than its PR suggests because of this: National leaders really like it, although semi-secretly, so when push comes to shove the EU is surprisingly resilient.

It does feed the perception that the EU is undemocratic, though, which may be harmful over time.

And, as a German:

EC 244/2009 led to lots of LED manufacturers trying to push their products and competing, leading to 8W 1200 Lumen warm-white LED light bulbs being available for less than 15€ by now everywhere.

In my family, before the regulation we had several light bulbs and mercury-bulbs from IKEA which were expensive, but now we switched to these LEDs and have better light at lower cost. (At $0.40 per kWh German electricity prices make switching to LED make sense).

Also many fun fair attraction owners switched to LED, and quickly discovered how having a programmable LED array is far better for flashy lights than few larger lights.

--------------------

In general, though: Yes. It always happens.

Same as in the refugee crisis, too. For the cost of building fences between all the EU countries that we did, we could have built a fence at the outer borders twice.

The lightbulb situation is a mess. For some reason people insist on buying the banned incandescent ones (things slowly change because LEDs are getting cheaper), which led to them coming back into all shops as "industrial material, not for home use". Of course everyone buys them anyway, but now that producers don't need to conform to norms for home use, they start to fail deadly. My mother bought one recently (she didn't have time to get a proper energy-saving one from a home improvement store where she buys them bulk), and we had it literally explode at home, throwing glass shards all around the kitchen, when my brother tried to turn on the light.

Fences: neatly ignoring that a lot of the countries not building fences don't actually WANT fences around the EU.

What exactly can my government (country population < 2 million) do when german telekom bribes their way through the council?

Well, push for the council to be replaced with a democratically elected representation?

Only issue: that would mean each EU country would transfer its full sovereignty to the EU. The UK especially dislikes this.

Expose that corruption. Evidence, proof, sound recordings, and so on.

Where can we see these two version of the legislation?

You can view the whole procedure on the EPs website:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheprocedure.do?...

You wanted Net Neutrality. They gave you "Net Neutrality". You're now satisfied.

I wish more people would up-vote this, the article isn't getting the attention it should :-/ or I'm just overly worried.

The main problem with this argument is that "net neutrality" is a poorly defined term.

What it has come to symbolise in the states is the lack competition, and the ability of At&t verizon and timewarner to stifle competition.

For example: the netflix fiasco.

Comcast wanted money for peering directly with netflix.

In the UK and most of Europe that sort of dick waving is very very difficult to achieve.

Firstly because there is competition in the UK, holland, france etc., there is more than one provider of broadband in most areas (and very very tight rules about what the monopoly can charge.)

That means that if netflix is slow because a certain company is playing hardball, customers will leave. So deliberately slowing down a key legal service is going to loose you customers. Doing so in an effort to boost your own rival will also lead to successful prosecution (unlike in the states)

Secondly here in europe, peering is cheap and easy. Places like LINX, LONAP and the european equivalents means that peering centres are co-owned by all the people peering. Not a Big ISP. There are still peering agreements where money is changed hands.

Thirdly ISPs here are more than happy to have Edge caches. why? because it cuts down on the need for peak bandwidth to non local traffic. It also cuts down on bandwidth going other third-party connections(which again cost money).

Crucially, Not all traffic is treated the same. For the last 10 years QoS has been applied to virtually all domestic connections. You literally cannot have cheap broadband, with full connectivity and no traffic shaping and it be usable. To make sure that your domestic internet is usable the ISP would have to provision your full link speed in the backhaul, to all upstream networks.

ISPs may say that they don't traffic manage, but they are 100% telling porkies. In the UK, all ISPs have a fair use policy. This states that certain types of traffic will be slowed during peak hours, or that if you use too much bandwidth your whole connection will be slowed.

Traffic management is universal.

With "special services" insufficiently defined, this opens up a lot of possibilities. Just today, Deutsche Telekom announced that "According to our [Deutsche Telekom] ideas, they [startups] pay for it as part of a revenue sharing of a few percent. That would be a fair contribution for the use of infrastructure."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10472765

With "video conferencing, online gaming, telemedicine automated traffic control and self-steering cars up to integrated production processes in the industry" as examples of users needing to pay, this goes a lot further than what has always been argued for by the commission.

a UK conservative magasine against an EU action, so surprising. To them, even if EU cured cancer it would still be wrong. Why do we see so many links of this website here actually? Like most UK people they hate the EU, and they are only part of it for subversion.

'Internet' and 'rules' in the same sentence is a contradiction in terms. The web was not designed for the kind of draconian oversight you see in the EU and elsewhere. Anything that resembles some form of rigidity will be made less rigid and force startups to 'think differently' and more fluid. It's a form of present shock (as Rushkoff has coined) which people are not used to that you see in bustling Shoreditch and other tech melting pots. You actually have people who look like The Internet in those places with USB flash drives as necklaces...

Completely unrelated to the topic, but did anyone notice that the article is from the future? Has Oct. 31st as publication date.

I've been saying that Net Neutrality was a bad idea from day 1. Nobody would listen.

There you go.

Regulation is always a bad thing.

Did you read the article?

"Regulation is always a bad thing."

I know, right? I long for the days in which companies could dump whatever sludge they wanted in the water, and where meatpackers could let the rats roam free over the half rotted meat they were going to grind into sausage.

Yet another reason why I live in Switzerland, which is NOT in the EU. Read my story here: "Eight reasons why I moved to Switzerland (to work in IT)": https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t... If you are interested in coming to Switzerland, just shoot me a mail.

That's why any startup that wants business will make an Inc in the US.

It's legally much simpler to do so, and leave your offices in the cheap EU. US Inc can employ your offices and at the same time have no people working in the US.

US is saved by ruthless capitalism. When I see what politicians from my country voted on I'm realizing that journalists, political science majors, historians, spanish/english/lang language teachers, philosophers, artists and bunch of other social scientists know much about nothing - maybe it says something about our national universities, maybe about these science areas as a whole, who knows. But for some reason they think they are capable of having a career in politics, and it works.

  That's why any startup that wants business will make an Inc in the US.
  
  It's legally much simpler to do so, and leave your offices in the cheap 
  EU. US Inc can employ your offices and at the same time have no people 
  working in the US.

  US is saved by ruthless capitalism. When I see what politicians from my 
  country voted on I'm realizing that journalists, political science 
  majors, historians, spanish/english/lang language teachers, 
  philosophers, artists and bunch of other social scientists know much 
  about nothing - maybe it says something about our national universities, 
  maybe about these science areas as a whole, who knows. But for some 
  reason they think they are capable of having a career in politics, and 
  it works.

Eh? Did you read the article?

It states that the US has more stringent and complete controls on net neutrality than the EU. The EU has loopholes, therefore less controlling and protectionist (consumer) than the US.

If you want to take corporate advantage of lax net neutrality protection laws, then you are better off utilising "ruthless capitalism" in the EU (for this particular instance), and not in the US.

You argument is backwards.

And each EU country implements the directives as it sees fit and can vary widely compare how TUPE is handled for example.

So you can expect some EU countries to play favorites with there ex PTO or Powerful Media interests.

If you operate an independent Office of a foreign company in Germany (what your suggestion boils down to) you have to abide by almost the same laws that would apply if you had been incorporated in Germany. I assume it's the same in most other countries. Only huge companies can get around this by operating in many different countries and actually having employees in each of those.

You don't have to. You have an office in Germany, you work for the office in the US. Both companies are entirely unrelated, only thing that bonds them is a contract for doing the work. You are outsourcing the stuff from US company to yourself in Germany.

What US company is selling, or doing, isn't something EU would control.

"saved"?

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