Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

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Other countries (notably the EU) recognize foreign interests as a threat and force them to comply with competition law. The US was notoriously lax with antitrust ever since Bush decided to stop prosecuting the Microsoft case. If anything, this is just regression to the mean.

Big Tech is fundamentally the result of two things:

1. A favorable regulatory environment for owning everything (e.g. lax antitrust, little to no ownership restrictions, open international markets)

2. A favorable creators' monopolies regime so that everything can be owned (e.g. absurdly-long copyright terms, patents that cover round rects, etc)

The first term makes it possible to buy everything under the sun and the latter makes it advantageous to do so. We've already seen this in media; but Congress likes the idea of having Disney be the cultural imperialism arm of the US Government. Congress also liked the idea of Big Tech being it's propaganda arm for a while, too; until they realized that Big Tech wasn't going to play ball in the same way Hollywood does.

EU is not a country. It is a maze of red tape that applies its regulations to its subjects without any consequences to themselves or any accountability what so ever. UK left EU for a a reason and more countries will follow suite soon.

> The first term makes it possible to buy everything under the sun and the latter makes it advantageous to do so. We've already seen this in media; but Congress likes the idea of having Disney be the cultural imperialism arm of the US Government. Congress also liked the idea of Big Tech being it's propaganda arm for a while, too; until they realized that Big Tech wasn't going to play ball in the same way Hollywood does.

All these are good things for USA. USA burning its tech sector might be good for EU but not good for Americans.

> EU is not a country. It is a maze of red tape that applies > its regulations to its subjects without any consequences to > themselves or any accountability what so ever. UK left EU > for a a reason and more countries will follow suite soon.

Yes, exactly.

Just because some people are in the EU parliament via a democratic vote does not mean they are accountable to anyone.

Least of all, you know, voters.

Sheesh.

You have clearly got a number of hobby horses you want to flog. But the thing with people who flog horses is, they often do not realise they are already dead.

You have the EU upside-down. It's not something that imposes upon it's member states, it's something it's member states use to impose their desired policies upon themselves.

When a political party in a member state wants to support something unpopular, they push for it behind closed doors with other member states in the EU. Then the politician blames the EU for being too bureaucratic or something to throw the blame off themselves.

The UK leaving the EU was not a reasoned act of statecraft; it was Tories trying to solve their own political problems by proposing a referendum they expected to fail. When it turned out to win by a hair, everyone involved immediately jumped ship. The thing is, all of the red tape and bureaucracy are things that citizens complain about. Politicians are the ones imposing it and the EU is just the rubber stamp they use.

You'd think so; that is an old narrative.

But right now I know of people who are burning the midnight oil due to all the red tape introduced by Brexit.

Empirically, it turns out the EU might actually have been an engine for the reduction of red tape all along. :-/

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