E.U.’S New Digital Czar: ‘Most Powerful Regulator of Big Tech’

> I am both glad that Margrethe Vestager remains in the same position and sorry that she hasn't been promoted to even more important posts.

Indeed; I was hoping that she would become the President of the European Commission. But I'm certainly glad she'll still be Competition Commissioner and, now, Executive Vice-President of the college.

Pai isn't doing any useful work, he only does the bidding of his monopolistic masters.

Agreed, it's a great feeling to see the number of major cases where I felt her team and her and thus the European Competition Comission was in line with what I wished would happened and protected our interests as citizen of the EU.

It also sometimes has large ramification outside the EU (like the Apple / Qualcomm case), but unlike what I often see from american commenters in thread about these I genuinely don't feel like the position has been used to give more advantage to the EU, only to ensure fair competitive practice (and if anything, they've been even harder on stricly EU companies they come against).

Then I'll offer a counterpoint - Vestager sums up everything wrong with the EU and why every country should leave.

Firstly, her position violates all known good principles of governance. Her office acts as judge, jury and executioner. There's no clear separation of executive from judiciary from legislature: the Commission creates the laws, enforces the laws, and imposes the penalties under those laws. It can levy massive fines against businesses at will without having to win any kind of court case or in fact convince anyone of anything at all. The resulting fines go straight into the EU budget and the EU is always desperate for cash, giving her a huge conflict of interest.

Vestager is the manifestation of the EU's total capitulation to its own forces of stagnation and apathy. There are no big tech firms in Europe, unless we generously count ARM (now owned by Asian countries) or SAP, but SAP doesn't play in the consumer space and is hardly a force for innovation.

Rather than encourage tech firms, the Commission under Vestager has repeatedly sent the powerful message that no matter what you do or how hard you try, if you get big and successful you'll be found guilty of violating some vague, badly thought out bit of EU law.

Spend hundreds of millions on trying to comply with the GDPR, a piece of law so vague it literally says things are illegal unless you need to do them in which case they aren't? Irrelevant: no amount of spend will protect you from being found in violation. The EU Commission was violating the GDPR itself on the day enforcement began, but the apparent difficulty of compliance is also irrelevant: they simply announced they don't have to follow their own laws.

Create Android and actually open source it, thus saving the competitive ecosystem of phone OEMs from the iOS juggernaut? Doesn't matter, you're still "anti competitive" whereas iOS - totally proprietary - isn't. In upside down Vestager world allowing other firms to compete against your own phones with your own OS is worse for competition than building a vertically integrated and totally closed ecosystem. How exactly can you not be found anti-competitive? That's left undefined.

Add useful features to your useful search engine? No Comrade, that's illegal. Can't find anyone who actually suffered harm as a result of this new feature, not a single person anywhere? Doesn't matter; Vestager's laws are not justified by actually protecting consumers. The lack of harm doesn't matter.

Why should anyone bother trying to create tech firms in Europe, when people like Vestager are waiting for you to get successful so they can step in and "save" the consumer from your products, conveniently funding her own salary and bloated pensions at the same time?

Vestager vs Pai sums up EU vs America and in one swift comparison, sums up why America dominates the tech world. It's nothing to be proud of.

I think at this stage it is not companies vs governments but companies vs people.

An average user has no idea what is happening while using an Android phone or chatting on Messenger. As anecdotal evidence i was showing to people that I cannot send a particular website over to them over messenger because Facebook classified that website not suitable to be sent over. 9 out of 10 was shocked that Facebook reads their messages. The recent developments about audio recordings also crazy.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/13/facebook-...

> where it doesn't seem like a tech issue per se,

Much of the privacy issues around "tech" companies revolves around the fact that they are advertising companies. That is the driving force behind them spying on users. But we do not group them as such

The remaining issues around "tech" companies usually revolve around their monopolistic nature, which is also an issue in other sectors.

I guess what I am barking at is that phrasing this as a battle against "tech" is a misnomer and might lead to unfortunate backlashes.

That being said, I am happy that Fru Vestager gets to soldier on, the fight itself is definitely valid. Now if we could just get our governments to stop spying on us we would be golden

Breaking up Google / Facebook is obviously not going to work. The services / companies benefit from strong network effects, it's a natural winner-takes-all industry with only a few powerful players.

That doesn't mean that they should not be controlled. I find it completely repulsive how they are able to set non-transparent, arbitrary policy (regarding censorship, payments etc.) that affect billions of people all over the world, who just have to accept it without recourse.

I don't know. Digital services and connected devices are becoming essential to almost all areas of modern life.

Yes, you can decline to use many of the services of you have serious dedication and want to miss out on all technological progress of the last decades. But other services are almost unavoidable: You need a bank account and email address to take part in society; You need a car to travel, which today is most likely already a rolling computer with cloud uplink. In the future, just walking on the street might place you into some database via automatic facial recognition.

Currently, control about all those services is seen purely as a business topic and therefore the service providers are given complete freedom. I think that mismatches greatly with the impact those services have have on modern life, so I think there is a case to put them under democratic control.

> As a minor example, consider how cookie prompts solved nothing.

(Disclaimer: not a lawyer)

I don't know about the original cookie law, but as for the horrible GDPR prompts, the GDPR is not mandating those at all - in fact, there is language in there that could be interpreted as forbidding them (denial of consent must not make the service unusable).

However, the GDPR goes head-on against the main business model conducted on the web and I imagine for many companies, fulfilling the GDPR in good faith is simply not possible because it would threaten the core of their business. So they add the prompts as something between a loophole and a cargo-cult action.

So yes, I think the tension between the GDPR and the tech business models is real and likely leads to unnecessary prompts as a result - but it's not as is the lawmakers demanded the prompts to be there.

I think you're going to get more cookie warnings with more bureaucrats running the internet.

> we wouldn't have all those stupid cookie warnings

Why wouldn't we? Those are the effect of web people not understanding the law. It doesn't matter whether the law is written by a more international alliance, they would still misunderstand it.

Another example: in the hey-day of the Web, a German court ruled that you cannot escape liability for slanderous statements on another web site you linked to, just by writing a disclaimer notice on your web site.

Because in that case the author had clearly endorsed it in many, many words, and the disclaimer was obviously not meant seriously.

From then on you could find the "the court has ruled that I'm responsible for linked content, unless I'm adding this disclaimer" notices everywhere. Including other courts' web pages.

Although the ruling was exactly opposite. People just copied and pasted this magic formula that would keep them out of trouble.

Or see the recent Instagram hoax, where you had to post some boilerplate text, in order to keep the rights to your content. Well-known celebrities fell for it.

People are stupid, they go with the flow, and they will get legal stuff wrong.

That is just not true. In the UK at least, the ICO has begun prosecutions for breaches. There is, to me at least, a real change in awareness among devs about privacy and data security. Surely a sign it's working.

GDPR is far (very far) from perfect, but it already has done wonders for big corporations. Where normally data would simply be shared (I received entire customer databases via e-mail), people now stop and wonder "Should we share this data? Do we have permission? Do we really need to store this?".

I agree that Article 13 is a major misfiring. I really hate that narrative though where Article 13 and GDPR are lumped together as a "EU regulation bad" narrative. One (Article 13) is a major product of corporate lobbyism and misguided profits protection, the other (GDPR) is a major protection for consumers. They couldn't be more different.

As a EU citizen and person directly involved with GDPR consequences, I also strongly disagree with the view that GDPR is either ineffective or not worth it.

OK, so what level of regulation would you like to see?

I can’t and won’t go into details, but the large companies I’m familiar with have largely completely overhauled how they treat customer data for the better as a result of GDPR.

It was never going to work perfectly at first time of trying, especially when the industry is already mature and is set in its ways. As experience continues and education in privacy matters continue then I am confident things will get better. It has to, because privacy is important, so at least it's high on the agenda in one part of the world.

P.S. One of the benefits of the website tracking prompts is that if I can't turn off all tracking right there and then on the page then I know that that company treats visitors as the product, not the customer.

I like the GDPR. Since its introduction, removing my account and data has gotten easy. More importantly, in my experience people and organizations have started to ask for (irrelevant) personal information less and less. Furthermore, I now can ask them why and for what they want that information and I get a reasonable answer or it appears they do not need it anyway. Before I often got answers like "That is required", "Everyone needs to do this", "This is a government regulation" (almost never true), or "Because the system needs it", and it was difficult to get out of under it.

Personally I also like the GDPR and cookie walls on websites. When I get one I cannot get rid off by clicking "Decline" or something, most often I decide to not use that website after all. I do not feel I am missing anything and I see a lot less crap during my internet searches.

I disagree. Just like with pretty much every aspect of life governments are lagged behind with regulation. It used to be not required wearing a seatbelt while driving a car. Now it is. It used to be that Google and Facebook could use anything they wanted to conduct unwarranted surveillance on you, not it is getting harder and harder.

The deficiencies you've mentioned are real. However, given the less than impressive performance of individuals to date in the US and Europe who are allegedly qualified, she's can only be an improvement.

States regularly fail to reign in their own most powerful industries due to regulatory capture, so other states have to do it. It's better than nothing.

Yeah, because professional technologists are doing such a great job in US. Proliferation of monopolies, privacy scandals and elections meddling are primary examples of how great it’s going. Not to mention your companies are basically demanding tax breaks to actually pay tax at all. Woohoo, greatest democracy on the planet.

As a UE citizen I very much approve of Vestager's activity, if I'm not mistaken she's one of the main reasons why we now pay close to nothing in terms of roaming charges whenever we visit another country (which is a very, very big thing).

If people like her had been more active even earlier in the internet space (think 2008-2010) maybe we wouldn't have had to deal with the current FANG oligopoly. I personally used to work for a local business directory whose data was almost instantly copied and used by the recently launched back then Google Places. There was no recourse for a company like ours back then (other then keeping our fingers crossed for the likes of Yelp in their fight against Google, which goes to say how helpless we were), so the fact that a person like Vestager now exists and has so much power to control this sort of bad behavior is all for the best.

She has a track record of understanding tech quite well. Cannot see the downsides of her also being an educated politician.

At least she's elected by the people of Europe. No, sorry, I got that wrong. As with all the other commissioners, the only ones able to initiate legislation affecting everyone in the EU, she's appointed by an elite clique who know how to deal with recalcitrant folk in Denmark, France and Ireland whose majority vote is ignored. As someone remarked ' We have no power to sack them. They don't have to account for their actions. We can't elect them but we can download a poster picture of them.'

Any idea why powerful bureaucrats are called Czars? Why not Dukes, for example? Drug Duke..

Wouldn't it be "Tsarina" when Anglicized?

For that matter, why does the gender need to be baked into a title unrelated to gender? We don't have separate occupational titles for female engineers, taxi drivers, or astronauts, so why for tsars? Not trying to push any agendas here, just posing a question.