Hacker News Reader

Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

One nice and welcome example of consumer-friendly legislation, btw: The EU prohibited mobile operators from charging voice and data roaming fees within the EU. So, now on holiday in Spain, say, you can just keep using your mobile contract including free minutes and data. (A typical deal is <10$ a month for unlimited calls, unlimited SMS, and, say, 3 GB data; or 15$ for >10 GB data.)

When traveling outside the EU, it's still best to buy a local SIM to avoid the ludicrous roaming charges, but there's no need to do that within the EU anymore.

View on HN

Very interesting (or disturbing) in this regard is the UK after Brexit, where one by one the mobile operators are all reintroducing roaming charges now that the relevant EU law no longer applies.

Elections have consequences.

Another consumer-friendly regulation that Brexit has destroyed is the cap on interchange fees (0.2% for consumer debit cards and 0.3% for consumer credit cards).[1]

[1] https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/37706/visa-hikes-uk-eu-...

Only partially true, let's not be misleading. It works for short vacations, that's about it. The EU has a so called "fair use policy", that basically give mobile operators the possibility to charge you more when you're more than xx days out of the country of registration (it's more complicated than this, but it's the idea anyway). In my case, traveling often abroad, means I'm constantly hitting this limit which force me to buy local sim card from time to time. It's nowhere near like in the US if some were thinking at this for comparison.

Yup. And there's exceptions galore too. You can just claim that free roaming will cause "financial hardship" and still get away with charging roaming fees anyway. Nearly every provider in Finland immediately applied the exemption and kept charging roaming fees anyway.

Goddamn 2021 and we're still pretending electrons cost more based on distance.

That's strange because I have separate roaming data in my contract and it's way less than my local one.

Then you have either a very old contract or one of the special no roaming ones.

I renewed five contracts this year, neither of them had the same amount of data for roaming as they did for local. Calls and SMS, they did (unlimited, basically). This seems to be the norm for Orange here. I would assume the same goes for Vodafone since they generally seemed to always offer less for more.

That being said, it's absolutely lovely to be able to travel for business or holiday and to be able to find your way around, purchase things and get access to public transportation information abroad. Roaming costs before that always tended to be so eye-watering that I never really knew anyone who thought they were worth putting up with. I really dislike going outside of the European Union because of them, myself, too.

If memory serves, the amount of roaming data you get is computed on the basis of 'what would you get if you paid roughly the same amount of money to a typical provider in the country where I am travelling', with some caps in both directions.

I live in Italy which has low prices, so I get 50 GB/mo for 8€ (and 200 GB/mo during the summer). Last summer I travelled to Austria and Czechia, I had 4GB available in both countries, and indeed checking their biggest ISPs' landing pages it looks like 8€ wouldn't have bought me even a gig! So 4GB is probably a mandatory minimum.

That's interesting, thanks you for the explanation, makes sense to me!

You have less data because the law is for roaming not for people who want a Polish data plan they can use all year in Italy.

There are some provisions about ”normal usage”, and operators are allowed to charge extra in certain cases. But not more than 3€/GB.

As a comparison, my operator charges roughly ten times that for roaming in the US (and in 250 MB blocks, expiring in 24 hours).

Thankfully, if you have an eSIM compatible phone, you can use a service like https://www.airalo.com/ to quickly get a local data plan. Let's see if this forces carriers to reduce their roaming fees.

I find it interesting that our main hope for forcing the big tech to follow ethical/environment_friendly/user_friendly procedures is not the US, but the EU.

I'm not European, but can anyone tell me how does the political system in the EU let (or even motivate) law-makers and governments to support such mandates and laws that are in favor of consumers?

I'm not an expert by any means, but my impression is that, while they certainly still have some influence, lobbyists and big companies hold a lot less sway in European politics than in the US. Part of that may be tighter rules around campaign finance, part of it may be cultural.

Also, the EU government is not hugely popular in the public opinion. Years ago the EU government was popularly known for creating nonsensical rules (and there are indeed examples of nonsensical rules).

To claim their future existence, the EU government really has to prove their usefulness for the EU citizens.

> To claim their future existence, the EU government really has to prove their usefulness for the EU citizens.

A lot of it has to do with the EU government being the punching bag of local politics. Like the German conservatives would throw up their hands "we can't do anything against this nonsensical EU legislation", completely omitting that they are represented in the EU parliament and could've done something against it there.

And the population buys it because the in general the EU population knows less about EU governance than US governance. A shame.

Lots of right wing parties in the EU advocate for a "countryname-exit" and thus lobbyism in the EU has to fight the fear of no-existing very soon. Thus, the government has to fight for the approval of the people every day at gunpoint and thus, good legislation may appear for fear of loosing ones power, job and by that even the lobbyism bribery income.

> Lots of right wing parties in the EU advocate for a "countryname-exit"

Not anymore, that was the past!

Bellies are still aching from laughter after Brexit, and EU has got the final approval stamp after 2016.

Most of the Eastern European countries have significant exit moves.

Afd in germany is going into the same direction

Also remember, until the day the brexit vote happened, the Brexxit was not possible,not real and not even worth discussing on HN.

Such things might not make waves in the high-tech bubble, but in the real world, such movements might be considerable. Lots of people see globalism as a attack on their life and community by now.

> Lots of people see globalism as a attack...

I agree with you on this point. It's worth noting that they are usually the same people who actually push for globalism, every time they choose "cheaper" over "local".

Do they really choose? Wage stagnation is very real- so going for the cheapest, is not really a choice, just a attempt to keep your economic downfall from materializing.

There is not really a 'european' government. There is a political body, which is setting some wider rules in the union, but only in areas which have been transferred by national governments.

However, there is a tendency of these national governments to introduce laws on that level, and then turn around to their citizens and tell them 'Bruxelles told us to do this'.

There are certainly some stupid laws on that level, especially in the area of tech. But most of the complaints (these laws are conflicting!) are just a meme.

In general is the support for the EU a majority [1] and the UK only succesfully 'won' the referendum to leave, and are now seeing the difference the EU has made in daily life.

The quotes research is a bit older, I am certain the Covid response and the fallout from Brexit has improved the support for the European union.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/10/14/the-european-u...

The EU is about the internal market, but having an internal market means it's about standards. There should be no technical difference between products from Denmark or Spain.

These rules are developed by the commision, but approved by national governments, which are then 'translated' into national laws.

In some areas the rules are very specific and detailed (eg chemicals) but in others the national governments are still in control (like protected titles such as baristers).

In the end is the motivation money. If you think your usb-c chargers are better than other countries, you would like to force apple to move to USB-C chargers. So it's a big economical incentive, and having countries on board like Germany, Scandinavia or the netherlands, makes the EU more suspicious of large companies, it's in their culture ;).

US has a more liberal policy where they make mistakes very costly, if you can succesfully bring a claim to the responsible party. The european mindset just tries to forbid things (Things aren't allowed if they aren't proven safe, instead of only things proven unsafe being forbidden)

The products in Denmark and Spain are already 'the same' with respect to chargers.

The standards don't vary across the region on this issue.

"If you think your usb-c chargers are better than other countries, you would like to force apple to move to USB-C chargers."

This is definitely not it. There is no secret cabal of 'cable margin corporations' pushing for this legislation to tilt the power in the EU.

This is just the EU legislators thinking about what is right in front of their faces and thinking of legislating about it.

There might be some opportunity there, but probably not.

If someone wanted to help, they could figure out how to recycle them properly,

Legislating pricing is something governments can do well. Legislating physical interconnect is an area where they are much more likely to be ignorant of the relevant requirements. I, for one, vastly prefer Lightning to USB-C despite the interoperability; I hope that if the EU goes down this road that Apple makes a Lightning phone for the rest of us.

> I, for one, vastly prefer Lightning to USB-C despite the interoperability;

Why do you prefer Lightning over USB-C ?

MUCH easier to connect in the dark, which I do a lot of. My broader point is that government regulators are not product managers / user researchers and shouldn’t get in the business of regulating specific features.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com