Macron Wants to Rein in Silicon Valley, from Brussels | Hacker News Reader

Macron Wants to Rein in Silicon Valley, from Brussels

politico.eu

55 pointsawiesenhofer39 comments

This article is a bizarre set of weird talking points, trying to tie together a conspiratorial narrative through such breathless facts as:

> To lock down his influence in Brussels, Macron needs to make sure he has sufficient clout to weigh on commissioners’ nominations, an objective he can only achieve via a broad voting bloc in European Parliament. His centrist La République en Marche (LRM) party is at work forging alliances with like-minded groups in other EU countries, notably in Spain with the Ciudadanos party.

Yes. He's going to "lock down his influence" by ... finding like minded partners?

> To press his influence with other governments, Macron relies on Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire to conduct high-level diplomacy.

European Finance Ministers in "they talk to each other!" shocker

> Mahjoubi, who was hoisted to his current role after running the president-to-be’s digital campaign, has been more active lobbying the European Commission, frequently making the hour-and-twenty-minute train trip to Brussels to meet with top EU officials and stress French views on everything from the bloc’s artificial intelligence strategy to investment for startups.

The fuck is this crap? This article is really odd.

This was my feeling as well, the article tries really hard to incite some weird aggression based on a blurry case

> France, which is the only EU country to have a law against fake news on its statute books

Nope, the law has not been voted yet and has been rejected by the Senate.

I didn't know that. But the other house, the National Assembly, can have the last word and bypass the decision of the Senate (I think, I'm not a specialist)

Kind of, the Assembly has the last word (for the modifications) but they can't bypass the decision of the Senate.

One of the major concerns of EU skeptics has always been the ability (and the gall) to push ambitious acts of centralized control by like-minded European leaders. And more likely that big players like Google/FB will just buy off protections from mega-regulators than actually be "reigned in" as it always happens

That doesn't match up with history. Two of the more notable fines by the EU have been on Microsoft and Google. The UK recently fined Facebook the maximum that agency could - 500k [1]. The politicians are on record speaking out against data abusers in ways that sound like they are users. Nearly all of what the EU does centralised is still policed locally. There's barely any of the control that skeptics say there is, even if you include the control the countries willingly handed over.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44785151

Given what we have seen with the GDPR i have a feeling thats not entirely true

Highly likely Ireland is going to be against this but its going to be a lot harder to restrain many of the French governments more outlandish proposals when the Brits leave.

In France, we have the CNIL that has very few powers, but always gives very insightful advices and that is inspiring CNILs in other countries. We also have some politicians who are very well informed but are actively fighting against our freedom (like Kosciusko-Morizet who wanted madatory backdoors or Bernard Cazeneuve with his decrypt law). The problem is that the difference between a well balanced law and an insane nightmare is often a question of details.

Disappointed that Macron is following the old french playbook here. Was under the impression that he was a more of a liberal guy.

Unfortunately german conservatives are useless when it comes to internet regulation (see "Mitstörerhaftung", making platforms and operators of wifi access points liable if their users commit crimes), not sure how much resistance can be expected.

Mitstörerhaftung has lost it's bite, the latest court ruling makes network operators not responsible if someone commits a crime over their network. You might still get slapped with an order to block these sites but otherwise it's harmless now.

True, yet they stuck to it for years despite widespread resistance and mockery. This will not be forgotten so easily.

> Mitstörerhaftung

Without knowing anything about what that is, I'm having a lot of trouble looking up anything about what that is. Most of the links about that seem to be in German, and the ones in English are talking about it too tangentially to get any meaning from context clues.

Mitstörerhaftung ("co-disturber liability") in German law means that if you enable someone being a disturbance then you might get slapped too.

In relation to Wifi, this so far meant that if someone torrented a movie or uploaded music without license over your wifi, you'll get a free court visit too and possibly a fine. That made operating an open and free wifi hotspot a legally fairly risky problem (lots of free wifi here still has very aggressive content filtering). The law responsible was discontinued in october last year.

This has been recently confirmed by the BGH (some high court in germany, the case was from before the law was ended but the changed law was taken into consideration), though you're not entirely off; the court can rule that you need to install a site filter and prevent torrenting or even put up a password on your wifi if there is too much disturbance caused by activity on your hotspot.

It's a general legal concept that is mostly famous in one application: people having open (non password-protected) WiFis were considered to have full liability if some user misused their WiFi breaking copyright laws.

The conservatives and social-democrats finally got around to kill this by law (although there are some fine details that are still not good), and the highest court basically affirmed this change, applying it even retroactively.

But grandparent is not proposing a coherent argument, he's just expressing his dislike for the conservative party.

And this is how FAANG ends up destroying democracy in Europe like our lobbyists destroyed our democracy in the US.

These words are dangerous to the life of these companies. I can easily see (trillion dollar) companies starting various forms of political donations in EVERY country.

Google cannot afford to lose its euro market, but google can afford to buy policies.

EDIT: Whats the criticism? For the first time in human history, money wont be able to buy politics?

Too bad campaign contributions are heavily regulated in Europe. It's a bit harder to buy politicians here.

You can't regulate corruption, by definition

Making it illegal still reduces it.

But you can buy newspapers and use them in support of a candidate.

Jacob Rees-Mogg and co would not agree with you.

Really? Isn't Spain in Europe?

You have too much fate on politicians and government regulations.

Those words are essentially saying that France (and Europe) want to stop competing. Macrons words might put some inconvenience on Google et al. but the result will be that the US as a place to be for companies becomes even stronger.

I am not saying this.

I'm saying that as we have seen again and again in history, money will influence politics.

I did not mean you but Macron/the article

I think this is all about money really. EU lost the tech war so they try to make winners life so hard so that they could either squeeze more money from them or enforce some government supported - controlled inferior products to replace them. These may be the excuse key words: "protecting civil rights, hate speech, terrorism, privacy"

It's much more than that. If you believe what Assange wrote--or even if you don't--these American companies must comply with the legal (and not-so-legal) requests of our various surveillance apparati.

Having a foreign Google integrated into their web activities as much as we have a domestic Google integrated into ours is a threat to their own sovereignty.

Similar with rules to traffic, the rules are there for the cops to make some pocket money not not for our safety /s

I think is easy to see that you need to always had some new rules when someone finds a way to do harm to the society, I am sorry that the rules makes some billionaires have a few less billions.

I think it's naïve to believe these decisions are completely free of political considerations, and that the Commissioners responsible are merely the purest of heart rule implementers - on the contrary, I'd suggest that those at the upper echelons of EU decision making are by definition extremely sophisticated political operators; if not, how could they end up in a position of such power?

I do not understand how some people want free/fair market and at the same time you accept unfair practices like monopoly abuses or special deals or tricks to avoid taxes that only big companies can do, where is the fairness in the big players having advantage over smaller ones?

That's not what I said. I'm saying it's naïve to think there is no political aspect to a decision to impose a fine of e.g. billions of euro. It's possible to both make this observation and to support the fine itself.

So, what is your point ? Is it correct to punish bad actors but not if it could have a possible political aspect to it?

I mean party leaders/ministers are put in jail when they do illegal things(though all of them complain it is a political attack), the point should be the facts, who was harmed and how to punish and prevent it to happen again if possible.

Why does there have to be a point beyond what I've already made? Your post I responded to satirised the idea that there is anything but a legal component to the decision, then went on to assert that the decision was purely legal. If I have that wrong please correct me. Otherwise, I stick to my point - to portray the decision making behind these fines as purely legal is similarly one-dimensional as portraying them as being purely driven by European envy of the US.

Apart from that I am quite happy to be free of supposed tech giants' 'innovation' when that involves them selling my personal information to whoever they choose and so support the EU from that aspect, but at the same time I have a sneaking suspicion that the rules would be less zealously applied if the tech giants were European. VAG seem to have got off pretty easily for the emissions scandal. Do you seriously believe that if a European company is threatened with EU fines that that country's leaders will not be on the phone to Brussels, and that these calls will not have an impact, moreso than a similar call from outside the EU?

I mean what politicians are behind this? Do you think that some party has to gain by this? Or is just anti american and big European companies enjoy preferential treatment?

That’s just a complete straw man.

There is no one who thinks politicians make decisions without politics. I mean, the word is in the name.

I was replying to a post that seemed to me to emphasise the primacy of the law in the decision; having worked in Brussels I'd say there's little the Commission does that is not political. I'm honestly not trying to straw man.

The thing is, the winners have the money to put up with any amount of onerous hoop-jumping that the EU tries to put in place. For the non-established players, the cost and liability of all this shit is too high to break in.

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