I'm not suggesting that what the US is planning is good! I think it's not great. But it doesn't seem to be a pre-emptive thing that's being done.
Ala, Facebook bought Instagram. If there was no such restriction, could they not have just bought Tencent in its infancy?
Essentially ensuring that currently countries that have not developed will continually never develop.
Well, all except shareholders of those companies.
We need something better. Hobbling them won’t achieve that.
If the goal is to simply clone google or Facebook in Europe for reasons of politics then I agree - hobbling them would facilitate that.
If the goal is to actually produce something better, I think the opposite is true.
If you hobble them through protectionism, you create a vacuum which will be filled by a clone.
The clone will then have the same incentives to preserve the status quo as Google and Facebook are doing, just with different ownership.
The only way to replace Google and Facebook with something better is to identify and invest in something better - I.e. something that offers value that they can’t.
I do believe that government investment, can help with this.
I also believe that consumer rights laws etc can help.
I think the result would be inherently "actually" superior by virtue of being under the thumb of EU regulation to a degree that American corporations aren't. I'm not talking about technical superiority, which I don't care about. Having locally regulated technically inferior clones is preferable to the status quo.
> I also believe that consumer rights laws etc can help.
And such laws are best enforced against local companies, not foreign companies with foreign values. That's why it's a good idea for the EU to hobble, if not outright ban, American internet companies.
What kinds of regulation on social networking and or search would produce a better product?
I find your answer rather shallow.
They have the deep coffers to lure young people who otherwise might've started their own businesses. As a result, the IT and developer market is entirely fucked up here in Southern Germany. Yes, yes, "software eating the World" and all that — but the big players (US corps, mostly) are not just by buying up most of the talent but _they create unhealty expectations for the rest of the crowd_.
_"I know where to put a semicolon in JS, I expect a starting salary of €100k"_ etc.
Getting it right in Java or C is no special feat. Getting it 100% correct in Javascript... that's an accomplishment.
b) How entitled can you be to tell other people that it's fucked up not to risk it all to make a business where you please, or not to request salaries the industry is willing to pay. All in the name of... what? Nationalism?
Bol is also owned by Ahold (Albert Heijn). Which to be fair to them, is a pretty big technical powerhouse for this side of the pond. They've been developing self-checkout systems since the 80's.
1. Costs on top of salary are more expensive in the EU (better worker's rights, more vacation, higher taxes)
2. EU has a more fragmented market than the US in terms of language, demographics, regulations, etc.
These don't necessarily apply to China or India.
The fact that you're making such a statement about "the EU" shows how misleading or ignorant you're being, since this is not governed by EU law for the most part.
I'd argue that most EU countries have stronger de facto rights, since peaceful protests in the capital don't tend to get beaten into submission like what happened in the Washington last june.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/police-tear-gas-yello...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-03-19/free-s...
>On free speech, the U.S. and Europe have also gone different ways. The German minister of justice threatened Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc.’s Google search back in December, telling them they needed to move faster and better to remove hateful posts that violate German law. Now the minister is proposing a new law in fulfillment of the threat.
>To Americans, the idea of the government forcing social media to censor posts may seem to resemble China’s internet censorship. Such legislation wouldn’t just be unconstitutional; it would be almost unthinkable. Facebook and Twitter are private actors who could censor voluntarily under the Constitution -- indeed, their voluntary censorship would itself be protected speech.
>But the government can’t order private censorship any more than it can censor directly. That’s because U.S. constitutional tradition treats hate speech as the advocacy of racist or sexist ideas. They may be repellent, but because they count as ideas, they get full First Amendment protection.
Europe and the EU are much more heterogeneous than the US. Making comparison on national laws for the EU with US is not even falsifiable, you can usually find countries on both sides. This does not apply to EU law like GDPR of course.
“The jurisdictions that took the top 10 places, in order, were New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, Denmark and Luxembourg (tied in 6th place), Finland and Germany (tied in 8th place), and Ireland”
6 out of the top 10 most free countries are in Europe according to this one index.
"2020 World Press Freedom Index" https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table
1 Norway 0 7.84 7.84 0.02 0
2 Finland 0 7.93 7.93 0.03 0
3 Denmark 0 8.13 8.13 -1.74 2
4 Sweden 0 9.25 9.25 0.94 -1
5 Netherlands 0 9.96 9.96 1.33 -1
6 Jamaica 0 10.51 10.51 -0.62 2
7 Costa Rica 0 10.53 10.53 -1.71 3
8 Switzerland 0 10.62 10.62 0.10 -2
9 New Zealand 0 10.69 10.69 -0.06 -2
10 Portugal 0 11.83 11.83 -0.80 2
edit: for those downvoting me for speaking the truth, why are you doing it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#E...
The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), signed on 4 November 1950, guarantees a broad range of human rights to inhabitants of member countries of the Council of Europe, which includes almost all European nations. These rights include Article 10, which entitles all citizens to free expression. Echoing the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights this provides that:
> Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include
> freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without
> interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall
> not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or
> cinema enterprises.
Google "freedom of speech in us vs europe" to see some of the differences.
These differences aren't common enough in day-to-day life to affect quality of life, but in certain controversial situations it leads to different laws being passed. I think that's what OP is getting at.
Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees the freedom of expression.
1. The right to be forgotten, which tries to turn back the clock to an earlier age when search engines did not exist.
2. Copyright extremism (yes, there are places where it is worse than the USA) e.g. the EU copright directive.
3. Photography rules, which, unlike the USA, restrict the use of cameras in public and may render selfies illegal in some cases.
4. GDPR
GDPR is fantastic and is forward-thinking.
As for the right to be forgotten, that is nothing more than an attempt to restore yesterday's status quo. The fact is that computers are very good at storing data, indexing that stored data, and finding more data to add to searchable indexes. The only reason this so-called "right" can even be enforced is that the search market is dominated by a single search engine; if that market were more competitive, something that could theoretically happen at any time (and ironically something the EU seems to want to have happen), it would quickly become impossible to actually enforce the "right." Basically this is like the "right to fly around on a broomstick" -- it is not really grounded in reality.
Switzerland 67.24 1 HI 1 EUR 1
Sweden 63.65 2 HI 2 EUR 2
USA 61.73 3 HI 3 NAC 1
Netherlands 61.44 4 HI 4 EUR 3
United Kingdom 61.30 5 HI 5 EUR 4
Finland 59.83 6 HI 6 EUR 5
Denmark 58.44 7 HI 7 EUR 6
Singapore 58.37 8 HI 8 SEAO 1
Germany 58.19 9 HI 9 EUR 7
Israel 57.43 10 HI 10 NAWA 1
Combined European countries have more top 100 science & technology innovation clusters (31) than the US (26) and China (18). That's using data on pages 64 and 65 of the report.
Where in Europe have you been to out of curiosity? I've been to multiple locales in Spain, France, Germany, UK, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, Ireland, Croatia, and Finland – passed through Austria and Slovenia. In fairness I do not know central and eastern Europe very well.
† “The Global Innovation Index (GII) is an annual ranking of countries by their capacity for, and success in, innovation. It is published by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), in partnership with other organisations and institutions” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Innovation_Index
It was incredibly disruptive, and continues to be so where 90% of servers runs off of it and almost all embedded systems use it.
Are you just trying to troll, or are you trying to rewrite history?
And while linux itself did not construct the open source market, linux + GNU did together strongly reroute the software (syadmin, dev) market towards open source models -- which of course screwed with all tooling development companies dramatically, creating the awkward divergent setup of SaaS w/ subscription vs Enterprise on-prem companies we have today (on-prem for non-enterprise mostly getting covered by OS) -- and that divergence is a pretty clear indicator that some kind of disruption occurred
I assume disruptive means the world would be different without the product.
Similarly, Git not being around wouldn’t change much practically speaking. For all we know, Git won because of Linus. Otherwise other version control were and are similar enough. Mercurial is a prime example for the nascent time period.
OTOH, GitHub changed things. Moved from Sourceforge and in some cases, some of the mailing lists/personally hosted source codes + being part of the reason some open source stopped using some of the popular but in my opinion, kitschy and lackluster bug trackers. GitHub also inspired the copy cat Gitlab project which is now itself a unicorn worth $2B or so. Yes I know Gitlab has differentiators before and even more now. It being very heavily inspired if not lifting from GitHub for parts of it is a point of GitHub’s influence, not a critique of Gitlab.
It isn’t as certain that we would have one such dominant platform like GitHub and the new runner up and alternative of Gitlab if GitHub didn’t exist.
The first full scale fusion reactor: https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines
Europe is striving to be the first climate-neutral continent by 2050: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...
Both of those projects/initiatives “render entire industries obsolete” and “challenge cultural norms on a fundamental level, etc.”
Libertarian capitalism isn't the only source of disruptive innovation. I'd even go so far and say that without government intervention, disruptive innovation cannot be created. In your own example; by forcing technology to be carbon neutral, the EU forces companies to innovate out of well trodden paths and to consider new paradigms that otherwise would be worth cost. LED light technology wouldn't be where it is today without governments forcing out incandescent light bulbs.
As I said, "I guess I'll stay tuned, and maybe change what I said in 30 years once these projects are finished..."
Edit: To your other point about the EU forcing companies to innovate, the reality is that innovation cannot always be forced. The effort could simply fail to achieve its goals, or it may turn out that the technology needed to achieve those goals is not economically viable, etc. It is also possible that the innovation will not actually be disruptive, it may wind up augmenting existing industries and allowing those industries to grow by balancing their carbon emissions with e.g. some kind of carbon capture (powered by existing renewable technologies, avoiding the need for things like base load by being opportunistic with carbon capture), never actually challenging the status quo or enabling anything that would be unthinkable today.
[Where and how people spend their money is the best way of measuring what people really think].
Edit: I don’t recall now. The android app may have been in public beta or just released at the time.
That's sort of a strawman though.
There's a spectrum of "protection". What China does (and the Trump administration proposes, sorta, with its application-level bans) isn't to merely "protect" it's local companies, it's to entirely ban content from global competitors.
The problem isn't that Baidu search was "protected" while developing, it's that a Chinese citizen cannot do a search on Google at all. Or follow someone on Twitter. Or join a Facebook group. Anything you might show to the "public" on any of these sites is invisible in China.
That is the problem. Not "protection" per se.
I guess the diff is that Europe is still an open market as opposed to China.
But when a nation puts up barriers to trade, and grabs IP, then the government themselves back companies, using control of their nationalised banks and central bank - then it takes on a different form entirely.
Everything happening is a bit predictable.
Yes, lately the US has struggled to distribute that wealth domestically. But that’s not Chinas fault and scapegoating them Will not fox that problem.
And the idea that jobs that were formerly done in the US have not been exported to China is ludicrous.
Deng Xiaping's famous line during the chinese market reform era was "If you open the window, both fresh air and flies will be blown in."
The "fresh air" was a market economy, trade with western economies, even cultural liberalisation... as long as they weren't dangerous to the regime. They were still dubious of ideological capitalism, at its height in the 80s & 90s... but willing to compromise. They weren't willing to compromise on free press, speech, association, etc.. Those are the flies. They were not about to let them in.
The ccp felt entirely vindicated when the USSR collapsed, and doubly so by the 90s, when China's economy was obviously booming. Communist economics could be binned while maintaining chinese communism in all other realms. Liberal ideologists were wrong.
Anyway... by the time the www got big, this new version of chinese communism was mature, successful and confident. Google, wikipedia, later facebook... these are politically potent, and dangerous. The internet would influence political opinions. It would be exploited by foreign intelligence. It would harbour dissent, and dissent would grow into revolt... the ccp had no control of it. Besides politics, there were other issues. Economics, of course. Why not reserve these markets for chinese companies? Information security, espionage and other intelligence adjacent issues.
The ccp were correct on all points and the last decades proved it. The arab spring. Many elections worldwide, notably the 2016 US presidential. Prism. Flat earthers. $trn market caps. The ticktok backlash. All proof that Deng was right. Political potency. Intelligence potency. Economic potency. All too potent to stay hands off.
Back to the US... The US has basically come around to all these positions. Regardless of why Zuck is called to testify in congress, congressmen are most interested in political potency. Are you favouring my opponent's party more than mine? Is foreign intelligence operating on your platform?
US intelligence treats domestic internet companies as an asset, and foreign ones as adversaries. There isn't even much veneer anymore.
The economics also play, of course. It gets danced around for narrative/ideological reasons... but it's foolish to think the US would be neutral about Amazon's success vis a vis Alibaba.
In essence, the Dengist position has been adopted in the US. The internet americans access must be american controlled. Political reasons first. Intelligence reasons second. Economic reasons quitely.
In the short term this might be true. But any view that holds non-democratic authoritarianism up as a superior long-term approach has to grapple with the fact that open societies have systematically outperformed authoritarian ones over the past century. This is in the face of world war, revolutions, and developments in communications technology that destabilized entire political movements.
Protests and electoral chaos are bad things, and new communications technologies can make them more destabilizing. But the ability to peacefully avoid something like 25 years of Maoism is worth an immeasurable amount of short-term chaos. We should be a little bit careful before we copy the Chinese approach.
Perhaps they don't care about performance, but rather control. The Qing dynasty of Imperial Chine ruled from 1644-1912:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_dynasty
They got their asses handed to them starting in the 1800s of course:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
But the current leadership may be happy with performing at 75% of open societies if they still get to run things: enough development to keep the outsiders at bay, not enough openness to cause trouble.
As long as their general rising prosperity, it may be good enough for most folks in China as well:
> It must be understood that liberalism and nationalism developed in China in lockstep, with one, in a sense, serving as means to the other. That is, liberalism was a means to serve national ends — the wealth and power of the country. And so when means and end came into conflict, as they inevitably did, the end won out. Nationalism trumped liberalism. Unity, sovereignty, and the means to preserve both were ultimately more important even to those who espoused republicanism and the franchise.
> China’s betrayal at Versailles did not help the cause of liberalism in China. After all, it was the standard bearers of liberalism — the U.K., France, and the United States — that had negotiated secret treaties to give Shandong to the Japanese.
> Former liberals gravitated toward two main camps, both overtly Leninist in organization, both unapologetically authoritarian: the Nationalists and the Communists. By the mid-1920s, the overwhelming majority of Chinese intellectuals believed that an authoritarian solution was China’s only recourse.
* https://supchina.com/2019/07/22/why-do-chinese-people-like-t...
I do, however, think the view that "open societies have systematically outperformed authoritarian ones over the past century" is potentially naive, dangerous even. Did the 18th and 19th century "prove" that expansionist imperialism is superior to nationalism, democratic liberalism, etc?
We have a tendency to narrate history with cause-effect dynamics that compliment our ideals. If you believe in open society (I do), you tend to make this an anchor in your historical worldview.
In any case... the west, especially the US, is what "outperformed." If Roosevelt had been Russian & Lenin American, I don't think the 20th century would have played out the same but backwards. There are too many factors at play. History is not determined by ideological positions.
Post WWII, western european states certainly did outperform warsaw pact states. I think that's the strongest evidence of "superiority," but again there are many factors. Not least among them, Western germany traded within a much wealthier trade block. A similar dynamic affected China in the 80s. They suddenly had access to wealthy western markets. This creates wealth regardless of governing economic systems.
In my view, the political imperative is backwards. Open society must succeed for open society ideals to prevail. This as opposed to "success is important, therefore open societies ideas must be adopted." There is no ideological position that guarantees success. That is itself a communist perspective... messianic rationalism.
I don't believe history to be deterministic. Open societies are valuable for their own sake. How they perform is, IMO, attributable to "execution" above all else.
A lot of other discussions use “selective” facts to support their “superficial” points.
Edit: it was probably a much more significant change from the Chinese point of view than the Western one, since propertionally more Chinese speak English and browse English sites than Westerners speak Mandarin and browse Chinese sites.
Also, China did not ban US companies, but requires all foreign companies abide Chinese laws when operate in China. Apple have setup their data centre in China, iCloud is not banned. Similar story to Bing search, AWS, Azure etc..
> China did not ban US companies
Blocking domains via a countrywide firewall is as close as you get to “banning”. If it was about following laws you’d enforce that through legal means like everyone else, and not brute force.
Eg, they do exist in Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral...), Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Japan) etc..
I agree with the thrust of your general argument, but feel it necessary to point out that the list of countries with substantial and automatic filtering mechanisms is much larger than that. Eg, I've experienced censorship in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India.
Legal means can still involve brute force; for example, when a court somewhere decides that a certain type of content is abhorrent and should be put on an automatic DNS blacklist that ISPs are required to use.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surv...