EU unveils package of laws to curb power of big tech firms
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Similar issue with running windows binaries on linux, and worse, hardware vendors limit compatibility with only microsoft’s operating systems.
This needs to change and vendors must be forced to publish specs and the source of any software required to use their product while microsoft should be forced to publish any documentation needed to make their stuff run smoothly on other os’.
Linux for instance already does that and linux specific binaries can be run on windows.
Also on NetBSD, FreeBSD, and illumos:) There's something there about win32 .exe being the most portable binary format thanks to WINE, but Linux ELF being the second most portable option on account of Linux being popular enough for others to spend effort on supporting it.
Everyone seems to assume that it won't happen.. that public companies can't ignore the EU market without shareholder revolt, but if the EU's vision of tech is more restrictive than the rest of the world's, it might just be the way that things go.
add to that, us tech giant were made in a time where opensource & privacy concerns weren't knew as much as now
On the other hand neither TikTok or Instagram are actually a product which a society will miss its functionality, a lot would argue that we would actually be better off if they didn't exist at all.
Google and Meta were at their product peaks somewhere much closer to their "2 guys in a garage with 128MB of ram" stage than their current "enormous adtech behemoth" stage. And it's my impression that much of what happens in innovation at both companies is primarily just fiddling with knobs on the adtech products to see if you can get 0.001% more money out of it, with some predatory copying of up-and-coming potential competitors apps to try to kill them and then a tiny bit of halfhearted actual innovation (quickly abandoned when it doesn't become the next ads in terms of revenue).
Look at all the products Google has launched, and then killed because it didn't compete with ads so they didn't care? Literally dozens of medium-sized businesses worth, and they leave behind a scarred market because incumbents likely got smashed when Google released their product.
I'm just saying - I think you would be surprised at how fast a google-shaped or meta-shaped hole would be filled. Especially since Google search is an entire screenful of ads before actual search results at this point.
Gmail competes primarily on having highly deliverable email due to its massive adoption. This is part of the problem of email in general, and not necessarily a good thing about gmail.
iOS - see android. Heck even Ubuntu has a phone OS, or did? There would be competitors here.
WhatsApp has a million competitors.
We're not talking about amazon or windows afaik? But Amazon is mainly competitive because it is a giant logistics network which isn't tech related and afaik not really something the EU generally takes issue with.
Windows is already dying (it has ads in its start menu!!) and has had competitors for ages, both Linux and Mac.
TikTok is notable primarily because it's good at addicting users which I think is something the EU would again be fine to lose.
Plenty of US and western companies operate to make a buck in far more restrictive markets around the world.
I watched Apple grow into a 1T dollar company doing the opposite of everything you said, while marketing everything you mentioned.
So... it might work.
That "certain point" is so far away, it might as well not exist.
you got to be kidding me, Apple is still doing business in China. The only reason a company ever opts out of the market is public perception or governmental pressure, companies don't care as long as they make a single cent. American tech companies operate in almost all countries in the world. Have you seen how the web is regulated in most of the world where American tech companies do business
Threads not yet launching in Europe says more about Facebook's expectation of Thread's profitability than anything else. They know themselves that nobody will be using that app in a year
That's an interesting perspective, given that the legislation is aimed at opening up the big players' platforms/products to more competition by forcing them to eliminate restrictions.
Any freedom can be viewed in one of two ways:
- A set of boundaries that sovereign states are required to respect (Congress shall make no law), or...
- A set of competing interests that have to be balanced in order to maximize the desired freedom for the maximum number of people (your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins).
The US codified the former in its constitution, because the formation of the current US government was a struggle between the people who found the prior Articles of Confederation to be unworkable[0] and the people who didn't want to build British Empire 2: Electric Boogaloo. The compromise was that we'd codify very obvious things the government was not allowed to do based on what horribly unpopular things the British did to the colonies. This is why we have a strong constitutional prohibition against being forced to quarter soldiers in one's home, even though you rarely see it get used in court. This as applied to freedom of speech is the 1st Amendment, which covers basically every way that the right of freedom of speech had been curtailed in Britain up to that point[1].
However, because we have this very strong prohibition on the government restricting speech, people have misinterpreted it to mean that only the government can restrict speech. That is, if Comcast refuses to let you watch Netflix unless they get paid more for the traffic, that's Comcast's protected speech, and any government regulation to unblock Netflix is censorship. Or, alternatively, if someone decides to publish your personal information in response to a video you don't like, the resulting mob justice against you isn't censorship because it's not the right person holding the gun, and taking down your personal information would be censoring the person who published it.
This is, of course, absurd. But the US has exported and normalized this thinking beyond the narrow realm of constitutional law scholars. Right-wingers were able to successfully appropriate 'free speech' to mean 'turn every website into 4chan', and in response, liberals made the mistake of adopting the Comcast Argument I listed above. This is how we got arguments like "Twitter and Facebook can't censor because it's a private platform", even though it's a monopoly. Now that Musk owns Twitter and boosts the far-right in exchange for them protecting Musk's fragile ego, I fully expect this calculus to flip and you'll see right-wingers go back to the Comcast Argument while liberals call for regulation.
The EU's tech regulations would be condemned by the same logic. i.e. the EU should not be allowed to regulate big tech, because only sovereigns can censor, and censorship is so bad that we should not even censor the people engaged in censorship[2]. The boundaries argument ends up with a nominal right to free speech that is defacto privatized censorship, which is a problem the balancing argument does not have.
[0] for reasons largely similar to the problems the EU faces being an international union rather than a federal state
[1] I would also argue that it is a de-facto ban on "culture war issues", given that religion and wars over minor church schisms were the European culture war of the 1700s.
[2] https://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/goebbels-on-the-reichst...
Good for us, EU citizens. You might believe everything coming from the US is a godsend. It’s not, I’d rather have your privacy invading, gate keeping monopolies be forbidden here, as much as possible. Makes more room for the EU tech scene.
That would be a wonderful, wonderful thing. It limits the scope of these behemot monopolies. The immediate consequence would be different companies serving different markets instead of global monopolies.
Depending on your age you (the general you) might think how can people communicate then? If my family in europe can't be on facebook but I'm on facebook in the US? (Or substitue facebook for any walled-garden proprietary ecosystem).
The answer was the reality back in the 90s. The world was full of thousands of hyper-local ISPs. Everyone communicated via standardized decentralized protocols such as email and usenet. Nobody owns it, everyone can participate. This was the best of all possible worlds.
If cutting off the walled-garden monopolies from some countries or regions can move us back to that decentralized ideal, it would be a wonderful thing.
There are so many things wrong with those companies, in terms of non-competitive practices, that I find that the EU or any regulator have trouble figuring out where to start. I believe that's why things are in that bad situation.
People mention that you(developer/company), shouldn't be hostage of any platform and develop ideas that aren't so dependent on them. Which is true, as it isn't worth the risk, or not be entirely dependant on it.
Which in business terms, makes sense. But from a regulatory standpoint, why is it acceptable? Imagine if any developer or small company could compete on a fair ground against thos e big tech companies, I bet none of them would be >$1T market cap.
It's funny how things are uncompetitive for silly things like weather apps, imagine how it is to compete on a really wide and profitable category. And don't come to me saying regulations are bad to consumers, how's having a monopoly even on weather apps good to consumers?
I really fail to see the mental gymnastics americans do to explain why those regulation initiatives from the EU are bad, much less when it comes from a big tech employee.
The amount of rugpulls that those platforms have done on the last decade on small players is impossible to count, and they've been mostly left unscathed.
This is all a side-effect of companies being able to shove a Terms of Service(ToS) down the throat of everyone, I think platforms need to be heavily regulated.
If you build something on top of some other "private property" that would take trillions to build a competitor yourself, and suddenly be unpublished or having an API change completely destroy your business.
I can't see that being fair, and this condition is pretty much analogous to slavery and thievery, as many times you are doing actually R&D for those companies, to get rugpulled, copied and increasing their trillions, making their advantage even more unfair.
Having to pay for development and maintenance for 50 competing weather apps could mean higher prices for everybody. Also, third party apps have a tendency to 'blow up' their importance and be over engineered and distracting. Get ready for Electron Weather, using 2 Gb of memory just to show you if it rains.
> If you build something on top of some other "private property" that would take trillions to build a competitor yourself, and suddenly be unpublished or having an API change completely destroy your business.
Depends on what that API change tries to accomplish. If it's because an API is abused I prefer my security to your business model. Making companies liable for security _and_ API compatibility could lead to an impossible task.
I agree some companies are uncomfortably big, but I see lots of developers having problems with Apple's policies, but as a user I appreciate Apple for taking a stand to make sure your 'right' to get my attention, clicks, ads or use other distracting patterns doesn't impede my ability to actually use my computer.
I'll just let you read your own comment, and reflect whether they do this out of self-interest (as Apple claims their right to decide on what your attention should be focused on)
... or is it because they are a very innocent company with positive intent.
If you are still unsure, after reflecting on that, please search for old Steve Jobs emails leaked and you'll know what are their true intentions (maximizing shareholder value, their revenues AKA not your attention. I invest in Apple, but I don't drink the kool-aid).
I don't really believe I have the power to change those things, but in a way, I like how EU thinks more about this than the US.
They will have to open some, such as those required for third party browser engines, voice assistants, app stores, and SMS.
Because Facebook having access to that API is a nightmare scenario. Granted, if the user has full control over it - something the OS should be able to do - then I agree with you.
This happens... when exactly? Do these people even know what they are talking about?
PS: But I don't see how the DMA covers that specific issue
But yeah, I don't think the DMA's particularly relevant here.
Apple exempts themselves from all of these requirements for their own applications. They have access to the full specs, and have lots of advanced warning when change is on the road map.
Perhaps you haven't observed it because, well, it kills the app.
[0] I suspect the reason for this is because free texting was the norm in the US while EU carriers charged per message. While iMessage was free in both cases, it relies on you knowing that green bubbles are green because they cost money, whereas "just install Whatsapp and its free" is easier to know.
I'd suggest they're better advised than you infer as the EU has enormous resources to access. Just because the EU develops policies that are distasteful to many doesn't mean it's ignorant about the issues (I say that as someone who has gripes with many EU polices).
Anyway, in this instance, I'm very happy with this policy as I'll be able de-crap my phone without having to root it (rooting phones is often a pain).
In that circumstance I don’t think there’s anything with APIs being private since it’s only temporary.
> Microsoft Senior Vice President Brad Silverberg later sent another memo, stating: "What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS."
That's obviously a very extreme example (involving deliberately actively sabotaging interoperability), but private APIs, used to privilege first party software over third party software, are and were common.
What you've quoted is an explainer aimed at non-programmers, but I'm pretty sure they're talking about private APIs.
Yes, this is actually a good summary, as good as a layman can be expected to produce. Just because they don't use the right jargon doesn't mean they are stupid.
We have thousands of examples of big tech firms breaking interoperability on purpose, and it is in their interest to do so.
Should the EU force RAM to be removable and switchable on phones so the user has a choice?
Okay... Now replace RAM with "Weather App". How is the situation different?
The EU argues that one ought to be replaceable and not the other. Yet the line of which components should be replaceable and which not is undefined.
Now replace "iPhone" with "Nespresso" and "Weather App" with "Coffee Beans"...