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Comment by IAmEveryone | Hacker News Reader

It must be increasingly frustrating for anyone in Brussels if every opponent of any legislation always starts with threatening the whole idea of European cooperation. “Do anything I disagree with and I’ll vote for the fascists in the next election” really isn’t constructive. The accusation of being on the side of big business is also insincere, as exemplified by your two examples of recent legislation that quite clearly side with consumers over large businesses.

Even this legislation, while misguided, is actually aimed at large businesses (mostly YouTube) while the beneficiaries (publishers and artists) are rather small, comparatively.

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> every opponent of any legislation always starts with threatening the whole idea of European cooperation

Well, nothing else really works.

The European parliament in general tends to be fairly good on these issues, but it's not in control of the agenda and the whole system is very vulnerable to being captured by industry groups. It's inherently difficult for the public to participate and there's seldom any discussion in the press while legislation is underway.

There's also no recognition of or exemption for small businesses in EU legal thinking. It's one of the things that the UK tends to do fairly well, but EU law sort of assumes that businesses start at 100 employees with multi-million-Euro turnover and can afford compliance.

Putting the "fascist!" comment aside, what alternatives are there than the threat of breaking from the EU if every legislation seems to* head toward a US style federation?

Think of it like the SOPA/PIPA/whatever fight: You manage to barely resist some bill from being enacted into law but then just a few months/years later another version of the same law is proposed.

*: from the perspective of someone

There are a few political parties that call for a reform of the EU without breaking up. I'll try to vote for one of them.

It's clear that the EU needs serious fixing, and German politicians/Brussels technocrats aren't up to the task because they don't care.

Unfortunately, at the time being, these reform parties (mostly social democrats, but not exclusively, and not of the "old kind" of social democrats) aren't big, because the emotional way to deal with the crisis is "To hell with them, let's roll-back to nation-states so we can take over control". Unfortunately, we'll bitterly find out that breaking up won't solve the problem. We'll lose all the benefits of being able to lobby together for a better solutions, and still suffer from all the problems of the EU, even without being in it, because the big institutions won't be stopped by border checks..

Unfortunately you don't get heard otherwise. Commission members have explicitly stated that they do not serve the citizens of the EU. Oettinger for example is notorious of only meeting lobbyists.

Consumer friendly regulations come only into play if it doesn't hurt European big companies. GDPR hurts the big new economy companies in the US far more than the EU companies, for one. Free roaming is also in corporate interest. Big industry lobbyists lament in a regular fashion about too little migration.

> Commission members have explicitly stated that they do not serve the citizens of the EU.

See, that’s just completely unbelievable.

> Free roaming is also in corporate interest. Big industry lobbyists lament in a regular fashion about too little migration.

It’s somewhat funny that you’d associate “roaming” with what I can only presume are imaginary hordes of immigrant scavenging the countryside.

But, in this case, it was referring to mobile phone “roaming”. Something European telecoms taught with all the might of their lobbying power.

(Oettinger is an idiot, I give you that)

>See, that’s just completely unbelievable.

I was referring to this http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/i-didn-t-think-ttip-coul... article, which I had remembered incorrectly but the money quote is I do not take my mandate from the European people by Malmström.

Good one for the roaming I totally misunderstood that. I admit this is beneficial for citizens and against interests of Telcos. However many companies (especially big ones) operate throughout EU and have frequent travels from their employees so there may have been a bit of lobbyism at play here as well. But I concede that it is a rather weak argument.

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