A European Commission proposal to create a single market in data | Hacker News Reader

A European Commission proposal to create a single market in data

reuters.com

54 pointsckcheng57 comments

How about we try something a little simpler first. A single market for movies, series, and music. Ensuring that companies can create streaming services that can be accessed by all 500 million EU citizens without a needless negotiation in all member states for the rights.

I say we try that first and see how effectively the EU can actually create a single market, before we try something as fluffy as "data".

I'm not a lawyer or legal expert, but I think that over the past century the entertainment industry has successfully gotten a myriad of laws and court rulings in their favor which complicates something like that a lot. Data is new and fluffy and there are still many areas where it's unsettled who owns the data. The EU probably sees the opportunity to write the rules in a more "blank sheet of paper" kind of way when this industry is still relatively young, and not repeat the mistakes of the entertainment industry where the governments have been sleepwalking for the better part of a century.

There's something along those lines here (in progress in 2017), but I don't know the status.

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/proposal-...

This is actually not simpler as it's governed by a billion different licensing agreements, rules etc.

To give one example: These are nationally negotiated because languages vary. One key and for once reasonable argument for why you need national licenses is the language issue: if you allow more easy transfer across borders the market for translated versions will basically crash as may don't need them - at the same time a number of people to depend on them, and for any smaller country (say: Estonia, Malta, Czechia, even Greece) there simply won't be any more dubbed versions if the English version is more easily available.

Another reason is the chance for local players to do anything at all. If you give single licenses basically all the small local players (say a Latvian TV station) will have to pay the same as someone streaming across Europe, and basically anything from football league matches to Hollywood movies will end up locked into the big channels like RTL and Sky.

Dubbed movies can die in a fire for all I care.

Well, I'm in a country where they tried introducing one dubbed movie in cinemas once and that triggered so much of a scandal that they never tried again.

With the exception of little kid's movies, but even those are available subtitled in the original language.

> there simply won't be any more dubbed versions if the English version is more easily available.

This is a good thing. Dubbing needs to die and it cannot happen fast enough. The vast majority of German speakers think dubbing is normal, but if they actually watch original language material for a couple of months they cannot go back to dubbed versions because it is just so abhorrent, unnatural, and unsynchronized.

> Another reason is the chance for local players to do anything at all.

How does this work in the US or other big countries with a single market? Does a small radio station get (and pay) the licence to broadcast some song nationwide?

There are large blanket licenses that professional broadcasters can acquire.

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-radio-station-able-to-play-...

But how does that solve the problem that the poster above me mentioned?

Why would it be harder or more expensive for a small European radio station, compared to small US radio station?

It's difficult to know what this means since the original document isn't shown so all we have is some quotes that read like political sound bites with little real substance.

If it means the EU leadership is finally noticing that it's not creating a particularly business-friendly environment, particularly in the tech sector, then at least that's something, even if it's a decade or two late to the party.

On the other hand, if this is just setting up an excuse for the new Commission to wade in with yet more well-intentioned but horribly implemented regulation, I'm afraid that's not going to have the outcome the bureaucrats are hoping for. You can't keep making heavyweight, often ambiguous regulations with disproportionate penalty regimes attached and not expect that to have a chilling effect on entrepreneurialism and investment.

The US has google, Russia has yandex, China has baidu. Europe is the only major economic area that has failed to create a tech giant, and I tell people here in Europe that if this plan to create a common data market "works", instead of wasting €10b, I'll stop complaining about the European innovation environment.

While regulation is a problem, I think the European public innovation funding system through government grants is a bigger problem. Almost any R&D is partially funded by grants, which means any innovation idea also has to be sold to a board of bureaucrats. There will also be rules affecting things like the maximum salary they will reimburse per employee, which means businesses won't pay for top level talent. Finally, the whole process is a huge waste of human resources on both the companies' and government's side, to the extent that it has spawned a cottage industry of professional proposal writers who take sizeable commission.

In addition to getting the grants, they also like to see that you are cooperating with a company or entity from another member state. I mean I get the approach is trying to build a cohesion between member states, but as you say, it adds to another layer of bureaucracy.

That said, I would really like to see EU build up more of its own home grown tech industry. Although for me being in the UK and now in a limbo with Brexit, I am not sure how that's all gonna affect us here.

There are good and bad elements of this. As someone who has worked with academic EU grants in the past, the collaboration part is good for transmitting know-how/tacit knowledge to newer member states.

There's a cost to this of course, but I understand why they do it given that integration is probably the largest challenge facing the EU at the moment.

I would say they're late to the game, but I wouldn't entirely discount the EU tech scene.

The EU is doing very well in Fintech, for instance: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/european-unicorns-break-out...

Also keep in mind that a lot of European startups migrate over to the states or split offices for financing & legal reasons, so there are several American companies that are, for all intents and purposes, based in the EU.

Given that successful companies will need to travel to the US for funding anyway, I wonder how long before the standard vehicle for a EU startup becomes a Delaware LLC.

Regarding FinTech, you have a strong point there.

I think they're part of the way there, at least for companies looking to do a series a or more.

That said I also think they're becoming less reliant on American funding, since it seems like the EU (or at least the German/central european) investment scene is starting to mature.

There is still a long way to go before things are at all equal, though. Just look at the difference in salaries for technical roles between the SV giants and European businesses. There are kids right out of university with negligible skill and experience whose starting salaries in the US tech hubs are several times what a position at the top of the scale with a relatively good employer would pay here in the UK, and even taking into account cost of living, it's clearly a different world. The US giants can afford to do that partly because of the huge amounts of VC funding that set them up a few years ago.

Europe is the only major economic area that has failed to create a tech giant

I'm not sure that's entirely true. After all, the likes of ARM are European originally.

However, yes, in terms of the sort of high-tech firms we talk about a lot on HN, Europe is sadly lacking.

I think this is partly because European governments at both national and international level don't really understand how to deal with the rapidly evolving tech sector. The list of measures that successive governments here in the UK have mentioned when saying how much they want to support our businesses bears little resemblance to the list of significant problems any of my businesses actually have.

> Europe is the only major economic area that has failed to create a tech giant

Skype? Spotify? Supercell? ($10bn valuation!)

And that's leaving out all the "old" tech companies like Siemens, BASF, Philips, Ericsson, ABB, the fallen giant Nokia, and the telcos, and the financial services companies ...

(And I've left out UK tech companies because of Brexit!)

Not gonna put a single dent in FAANG. Humans love centralization, we don't like to have things scattered around. It's in our nature, hence there will always be FAANG companies that will have more data than everyone else.

Best case scenario EU will have some centralization on their own where people will come and give data there which will achieve nothing more than having EU joining FAANG club.

Worse case scenario? EU will implement same stuff like China with their great firewall continuing the current trend to have Splinternet instead of Internet

> Humans love centralization, we don't like to have things scattered around. It's in our nature

Do you have any proof to back this up? And especially how a desire for tidiness in our daily lives would translate to large scale societal centralization?

My strong suspicion is that things are centralized because of the nature of modern/neoliberal capitalism, not human nature. By the same token you could say that human nature made the Soviet Union centralized - we all saw how that went in the end...

Proof? Let's see.

Didn't your grandparents kept all photos in one place? Didn't your parents send you to same school as all other kids in your street? Didn't you went to same dancing places like your friends when you started sniffing for girls (I'm assuming you're male, reverse the gender otherwise)? Don't you keep your tools in same box(es)?

Like I said, our specie love centralization. Same village priest, same blacksmith, same doctor, same military outposts throughout centuries.

We don't keep photos separated and scattered in different rooms in our houses. We don't school kids at home (except for very few rich who can afford). We don't have each a dancing room in our house. We don't scatter tools throughout the house.

Need any more proof?

> Need any more proof? :) yup, a lot more.

I'll address your points individually:

1. > Didn't your grandparents kept all photos in one place?

Perhaps, but not sure how this trickles up to societal/economic centralization.

2. > Didn't your parents send you to same school as all other kids in your street?

Nope, but again, this would be an instance of societal imposition of structure, or more often due to necessity. If you live in a remote village it's hard to attend a school other than the closest.

3. > Didn't you went to same dancing places like your friends when you started sniffing for girls (I'm assuming you're male, reverse the gender otherwise)?

I did, but these places were quite dispersed in space :D. In total we had probably a dozen or so over the years (I come from a big city though, might be different in towns).

4. > Don't you keep your tools in same box(es)?

Yes, but again this is an instance of tidiness in daily life, not of societal centralization.

To sum up, I think that it can be said that our species prefers order of some kind to pure chaos - this I agree with.

I also agree that there are social network effects that cause clustering/centralization of some sort to emerge.

I however don't agree that the extreme centralization that we see in the tech/internet space is inevitable or desirable. I also don't see how the natural forces we discussed can lead to such extreme centralization. FB for example built its monopoly by often acquiring/copying its competition. If this had been prevented I think people would have gladly used a broader range of social networks.

OK smarty-pants, answer me this. How many e-mail addresses do you use to communicate with your social circle?

Me, personally, as inherent human being, I use just one. I switched in past 2 years, slowly, from yahoo to protonmail. Do you use currently 10 at least so you can safely say you do not centralize your life too?

Well, it happens that I use 3 addresses currently :)) But I agree that this is uncommon.

However, again, don't see how this relates to the point.

The fact that a given person will likely use a single email address doesn't mean that we all have to use the same email provider. As a matter of fact we don't. Gmail is the largest, but there are many alternatives out there. Unlike for social networks for example.

Did someone read the actual proposal? Article doesn't make sense: free access to some data sets and remove competition rules to improve competition? Hope it's not another incumbent lobby group carving I better deal for themselves.

There's no specifics mentioned in that article, other than new commons data standards across the industries (good idea IMO).

The more time goes, the more I’m disappointed at how out of touch with reality EU legislation is when it comes to technology related issues. I still don’t get why the EU Cookie law put the burden on websites instead of forcing browsers to offer better, more accessible cookie management.

The same is true for other non-tech fields. For example, MiFID 2.

>>> Competitors such as China and the U.S. are already innovating quickly and projecting their concepts of data access and use across the globe,” it said.

Wait what? The EU's GDPR is seen as a globally leading "concept of data access and use". Several US states are putting something like it into place, and hoping to get Federal buy in. China, yeah DGAF, but saying "we are behind other governments on data and privacy" seems ... odd.

What do they mean then? Is this just a "single market or bust" thing?

It feels like Europe tries to regulate their way out of their problems, but the instruments of government are too slow compared to the rapid pace of innovation in China and the US.

Bureaucrats don’t make the innovations, you cannot innovate fast by having a “fast” government. Dictatorships are very fast, not necessarily very successful.

Regulation don’t really matter that much, the US states operate under the same regulations but you don’t have a silicon valley in every state.

What EU can do is to enable scale by having a level playing field and market access but even that won’t do anything about the language barriers, so the more successful innovators in EU are those who have good language education(alongside with good science education).

They can do a good job at cutting down on open corruption though, which is a large part of why EU grants have such a large effort overhead.

The EU in large part is trying to bring up the quality of life in eastern/newer member states. Making sure that grant participants from (insert state here) don't steal a large part of the grant award is a very real challenge.

Their use of the word "data" seems incredibly vague.

This text references external document ("The 25-page document also underlined the urgency of the task ahead. "). Is there a link to that document ?

As an european it is hard to read.

Government to offer policies to current businesses `to ensure that markets stay open and fair`. Can there be something more evil than this proposal? There cannot be anything more fair than a free market because it allows competition and is voluntary. Laws described are exactly what makes markets unfair

There cannot be anything more fair than a free market because it allows competition and is voluntary.

Not when it leads to a monopoly.

If there are no government laws preventing from competition popping up - it cannot lead to a monopoly. (I assume monopoly means certain business can sell their goods priced highly and competition cannot enter with lower prices)

>If there are no government laws preventing from competition popping up - it cannot lead to a monopoly.

Yes, it can. It is called a natural monopoly and it occurs when cost of entry and effects of scale are so large that the most efficient provider of a good or service is a single supplier. Not only do quite a lot of them exist, they're actually the desirable form of business in those cases as they provide goods at the lowest unit cost to the consumer. They need however to be regulated so that they cannot abuse their market power.

Excuse my bad definition, I was referring to 'non-natural' monopolies. On the other note, as a consumer I prefer these natural monopolies exist over that they don't. I would rather have an expensive railway than to not have any railway at all. Obviously investors will want their return on investment. Alternatives with lower capital requirements to setup businesses always exist (rail -> bus/trucks, electricity -> solar panels, internet -> 4G or similar solution, and so on.)

Those railways wouldn't exist without the monopoly of the state bringing em about and we've seen how they operate if privatised in the UK and that's still regulated and not even a monopoly. It's shit. Similarly I don't want to see roads privatised because it leads to incredible inefficiency and the open access to the roads provides immense value to the rest of the free market.

Railways are basically impossible to build without government intervention or at least eminent domain because they require continuous land.

4G also requires some process for radio spectrum allocation in order to be usable at all.

A monopolistic market is not a free market.

Free markets tend not to be free once you have monopolies. Try doing a partnership with LinkedIn for example to access their data (after they shut it down - https://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/02/12/linkedin-takes-aim-deve... ). As a small startup there’s no way you’re getting access - they’re simply going to ignore you unless you have some back door into the company. And that’s before you start talking price.

I might misunderstand your meaning, it if I get it right (Free Markets good, regulation bad) it seems ... well we have heard it before.

We have a fairly free market in data right now, and we have weather apps selling everyone's location data to brokers who will provide marketing leads on pregnant single women with gambling problems - I don't think this is a situation most people feel is fine and dandy.

Most free markets aren't where any of us want to go. Well regulated markets are usually fine.

I guess it is a question of what you define as regulation.

Free market for security. Hope you’ve got more money than your neighbor.

As another European, I'd say a market without rules and arbiters will in no way converge to an utopia of fairness and freedom.

I'm sure Google is all too happy to fight with tiny European companies and eat their lunch. But only the EU can fine Google some $B and make them really think / change.

I think the EU is on the right track with GDPR.

>I'm sure Google is all too happy to fight with tiny European companies and eat their lunch. But only the EU can fine Google some $B and make them really think / change.

>I think the EU is on the right track with GDPR.

So, no to free trade? Because that sounds very much like protectionism to me.

Also, the irony in your statement (and GDPR) is that it hurt EU-based ad trackers hard, but Google and Facebook gained market share.[0] Google doesn't have to eat their lunch, because GDPR already kept them out of the market.

[0] https://www.datainnovation.org/2019/06/what-the-evidence-sho...

> Also, the irony in your statement (and GDPR) is that it hurt EU-based ad trackers hard, but Google and Facebook gained market share.[0] Google doesn't have to eat their lunch, because GDPR already kept them out of the market.

What your source show for GDPR looks similar to what it would show for stronger environmental regulations or better worker rights. It doesn't actually say anything about it being good or bad, just that in the short term it is costing money.

It's bad for the businesses, but I assumed that was intended. This new regulation that's proposed sounds like they're surprised that this was the effect of GDPR.

That's because Google and Facebook are ignoring the GDPR. I wonder if the EU is determined enough to do something about that.

As for EU based tracking businesses being hurt, cry me a river.

Exactly this is the reason. Google and Facebook as companies based in USA are blatantly ignoring/stepping over/workarounding the GDPR while EU based companies follow the law. And exactly due to EU tracking businesses the EU commission (and they are complaining) will be forced to do something about it. Which is actually great.

Anyway, lowering profit for EU based tracking/ads businesses while Google and FB prosper, doesn't mean that the GDPR is bad. It just means that Google and FB are criminal enterprises.

>It just means that Google and FB are criminal enterprises.

I keep hearing this level of rhetoric. Every time I do I wonder what would happen if Google/FB just shut off their services in (some) EU countries. I think that this would significantly disrupt the lives of Europeans.

Well it would disrupt lives. For a month. Then alternatives would pop up and the life of EU would just continue. The reason for using google is that they have monopoly. If they would remove themself from equation, it would mean making space for someone else and believe me, a lot of EU and USA companies would work afterhours to get into 500 milion people market, and even now there are alternatives for every single google service, for years search was the only one really annoying to not have. Now even search has become terrible while ddg and qwant are becoming better and better. Actually qwant is becoming better (more relevant results) than even ddg or google,

(And you can trust me, I am not using anything of google, that is not forced on me like their cloud hosting, where sites I am using are using it, for over 10 years, and I am not missing anything. But to understand that you have to try. Take a google break for 1 month, take Maps instead of G Maps, take microg lineage, take qwant/ddg instead of gsearch, take protonmail instead of gmail. Amazon/azure instead of gcloud. You will be suprised how overblown google is, how worthless the android apps are. Just take into account, that you are currently, probably, vendor locked in, you need more than a month to get out. Like a heavy drug addiction. On the other side, if dealer forces you to go "cold turkey", you would heal very fast. You don't need to say anything, just try. For your own sake.)

> So, no to free trade? Because that sounds very much like protectionism to me.

Yes, absolutely. And this is why China has successful tech companies like Baidu and Europe doesn't. As long as the EU allows US giants like FAANG access to its market, it will be completely dominated by them because of the scale / home market advantage that they enjoy.

There is no an easy answer.

The free market in case of todays "survaillance capitalism" doesnt exist and even worse, the price is very hard to find or define. With money it was simple, the product costs X, it offers me those features compared to other product that costs Y. That was it. You had a competition in term of money and features.

Today, google is free. How can you compete to that? With what? Will you pay your customers for using your software to be cheaper? Features that you need to develop without having money flow as you have to develop a whole advertising network to support yourself. You can have better software, but you will starve to death as you cant monetize it - as all ways for monetization come back to the company you are competing against. Also all distribution channels (android), all means to be actually found as competition (search). This is monopoly that has to be destroyed. It is bad for development of software industry, for freedom of information, for interney, for the human as species.

The future is not as bright as some people will like to belive, I think that at some point EU will detach from USA companies like China and Russia did, not for the censorship and control but rather to actually have any chance to compete on its own market. The USA companies are literally forcing it to by ignoring and workarounding EU regulations.

> There cannot be anything more fair than a free market because it allows competition and is voluntary.

You mean like Microsoft preventing OEMs to sell their products with any other software on it thus preventing any competition in that space? It doesn't seem like free markets are conductive to competition.

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