Amazon lobbyists to be barred from European parliament
techradar.com
techradar.com
That has changed, hasn't it? Around 2020?
I'm saying that people used to cry about the EU like US companies were the victims, and you don't see that as much any more.
They have become pay to play by years and years of corruption and bribery.
Has it ever been different? I remember seeing texts from the 70s or 80s where the thesis was that regulation is either lobbied for by industry (and thus serving it) or created in complete ignorance of the actual situation in the industry (which usually also benefits industry, because in a market economy other people's ignorance is usually profitable).
A lobbyist's literal job is "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
all as part of a renegiotiation of what "the public" actually means given that we have now digital internet, which forces a re-evaluation of what it evens means to "be in public"
it's like there's two publics: digital (or cyber or virtual) and physical (in real world), but our laws are not aware of this??? dunno
1. You and your friends hire that lobbyist with your private funds.
2. The corporation as an entity hires the lobbyist.
They’re saying the second should be illegal and it’s unclear how your personal rights are impacted by that.
It’s really no different than a company defending itself in court. A legislative or regulatory proposal can be just as confiscatory or punitive, or have as many unexpected consequences, as a lawsuit. In both cases, the business needs to lawyer up and represent its interests.
Would you stand by this statement when the corporation is caught doing some illegal evil thing, like denying employers their rights, or damaging the environment? Even if you would, most shareholders of large corporations don't. They suddenly discover being a shareholder is a very "at arms length" thing.
Might work nicely if corporations were "the embodiment" at all times, or at no times. But selectively, it is quite bad.
You've just admitted the reason why you shouldn't be allowed to lobby as such—as I said earlier, your joint effort represents an unfair power advantage over other individual citizens.
Proof is in the pudding, take a good look at our fucked democracies.
The solution isn’t limits on people’s rights to debate and to advocate for their interests, it’s limits on the power of the thousands of elected rats running around DC and state capitals and city councils. We need less politics which means more centralization in the federal government and more power for the President.
Corporations are not a diffusion of their workers' voices, they're a diffusion of whoever owns 51% of stock - maybe even just one person.
There is a fundamental asymmetry between rich and poor people that is a real problem and that we don't really have a comprehensive solution for. But banning poor people from pooling resources together to get someone to talk on their behalf is not a step up; it's moving in the opposite direction.
Those small, diffuse shareholders aren’t typically represented by the board or executives, who are substantially controlled by a minority cabal. Do you think people with DIS in their retirement funds are happy Iger burned half the value on his politicking? — no, only his weirdo financier friends are. So why should we allow them to confiscate more assets from those small, diffuse shareholders to advocate their private politics and interests to the government?
If small, diffuse shareholders want to lobby Congress, they can do so individually as well, eg with a letter writing campaign or at public events.
A company has no interest in swaying the government, which represents the interests of the public. If the public (not the corporation) has concerns, they can privately advocate for those.
The bigger your company gets the more money you are able to put into lobbying and the more this distorts the democratic process. Big Business, especially Big Tech, is damaging our democracies beyond recognition.
This is why this barring of Amazon by the EC is to be welcomed.
Seriously so, why would you priorotize some potential future business over an existing one? To pamper founders?
I'm not keen on lobbyists drafting legislation. It saves the civil service effort and money, sure; but if the civil service don't have the competence to do the drafting themselves, who's going to review the draft?
There was recently a law passed by the lower house (Bundestag) in Germany, reflecting EU law, that ride-on lawn-mowers and other low-speed vehicles needed to be insured when on public land. This law failed in the upper house (Bundesrat), and no reconciliation between the two was possible, so the law has ultimately failed to be implemented.
Maybe not the only cause for the upper-house to reject the law, but insurance companies - i.e. the people who would benefit from providing this insurance - were actually against this law, and fought against it. I believe their argument was that it would be too expensive to roll-out, and there was an alternative fund which would be better used to provide for the very rare occasions when an insurance payout occurred.
[I've used lower/upper house terminology, it's a little bit more complicated than that, and can't be directly mapped to the US/UK/AU system, but hopefully that expresses the idea of what happened]
Like parts of the EU's AI act and Cybersecurity act are terrible for FOSS and small start-ups. It'd be like if compilers had been regulated as dangerous, and GCC stopped to hand Intel a monopoly in the 80s.
The bureaucrats often get it wrong, and are led astray (or bribed) by companies seeking regulatory capture (e.g. OpenAI and Microsoft).
But in practice the biggest corporations have the most resources and lawyers, so it just serves as another means of pushing regulatory capture.
Add the Unified Patent Court to the list.
Software patents through the backdoor, the President of the Court is already showing some love for EPO's practice, which they failed to copy/paste into law in 2002/2005.
Last company, megacorp, has a full-time guy in Brussels who does regulatory intelligence and represents the company in the legislative process.
I think EU MDR, the 2017 European medical device regulation, indicates there is probably some value in having meaningful input from the giant corporations in the relevant sector being regulated. The burden on med device manufacturers to get market access to the EU has become very high - the enforcement date of the regulation has been pushed back year after year because it's taking forever for companies to overhaul their technical documentation for this regulation (no grandfathering clause, everything state of the art), and taking forever to get review by notified bodies (not enough notified bodies, TON to review for every device family).
The result is that there are just fewer devices on the market. Companies are looking at their volumes vs the effort EU wants to maintain market access for something that's been available since 1985 and the choice is an obvious nope.
It seems like the regulation was created in a bit of a bubble. Perhaps if there were more stakeholders at the table who could say "Um this is a ridiculous hurdle and I'm going to drop from the market if you implement this" or "We don't want to be a notified for body EU MDR, the burden is just too high and costs don't work out"... maybe we wouldn't be in this absolute fi-esta.
(Source on market availability - https://www.medtecheurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/med...)
For example, some representatives may have a general political position that they want to protect local industry from overseas competition with worse standards. There is a valuable role for a lobbyist to come and say "hey, you have taken measures for the steel industry and honey imports, but what about us, the widget industry as represented by ACME inc. also is relevant your goals!" - and if the representative agrees that this should be done, it makes sense for them to ask the lobbyist / the industry to make an exact proposal to how different types of widgets should be defined/distinguished in that new law, instead of having it be written by some staff paralegal who doesn't understand what the industry is about and what those terms mean.
It's lazy politics. In the US where money is a driver for individuals (because campaigns paid with personal "campaign funds" are a big thing) it's even worse. There you could have people who owe business favors on day 1, because that's how they got their seat to begin with and if they want to keep they better fulfil their promises.
More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39527379
The quote from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39529974 might be more clear "The move comes after Amazon’s repeated refusal to attend hearings in the European Parliament on working conditions in Amazon warehouses."
We should pass a "European Foreign Lobbyists Act", and send them back to their own country.
Another way to look at it is that European companies are basically asleep at the wheel and should wake up and realize the nature of the game they're playing at before they get eaten alive.
Might as well try an pass a law to get them to wake up and realize the world they operate in.
Dollars are plenty, American companies keep using that advantage to get shit done here in the EU.
I can't possibly imagine what good Amazon's lobbying could do for our society, or any other corporate-sponsored lobbying, for that matter. I agree with the parent poster.
I looked and its hard to find definitive information on numbers of corporations. But I wouldnt be surprised if the US has more. Which would make the idea that there are more American lobbyists exactly what you should expect.
So that, they get a few euros more in exchange of peeing in bottles.
American companies are so abusive, that's why I invest on them, there's no way any other local European company can do the same that American companies can do here. They play under different laws around the world.
Nobody wants to say it, but I have the feeling countries eat it up because they need the tax revenue and bullets. It feels like the value of the dollar is backed by atomic bombs.
I find it amusing how much leeway Big techs have in the EU, everybody else need to follow the law, as European companies know that if they do things in a bad way, they'll get wrecked, 100% chance.
It doesn't feel like the EU is sovereign from the US, it's more like we're its vassal. They are above the rule of law and we're here to consume their shitty products.
See how much VW lost in Dieselgate, I've never seen a big America-n company getting that kind of scrutiny over here. They give a single billion digit fine and move on, even though they keep not respecting rules regularly.
You don't think this is immoral?
Some common examples: Housing equity competing with affordable housing. Stocks rise when new top management exploits existing resources for short term gains - making workers and products suffer.
It's hard to retire on morals.
Is the purchasing done by the brokers who purchase stocks or the HR dept that chooses a retirement fund or the employee who picks the employer that is least likely to leave them in financial straits?
Which of these shouldn't make an immoral investment choice - and should continually vet the ever rotating circumstances of their choices (and be ever ready to jump ship)?
For the most part this does not work. For one, the cheapest product tends to win. Consumers are highly price sensitive. Especially in the case where you have two mostly equal products that are only separated by their immorality in making the product.
Second, companies love morality washing. Put up a bunch of advertisements on how good for the world they are at whatever touches their buyers hearts and opens their purse strings. It's all bullshit, using immoral money to buy happy feeling of morality.
And lastly companies love buying premium 'moral' brands without much fanfare turning them into their corporate level of depravity while still pretending like the brand is a seperate moral entity.
It doesn't fucking work for the end user, between the massive consolidation of companies in must industries giving us no choices, and between the constant amount of work needed to ensure the product you buy isn't owned by vampires it's almost like we need business regulation.
I do not consider consumers as faceless automatons purchasing the cheapest items based on the latest advertisements. They are each intelligent, obligated citizens who vote with purchases every day to elevate the industry they want to enrich.
Companies are entities made up of such people and as such do not love (or hate) anything.
Consider that your business regulators are also vampires, many of whom previously worked in the industries and may very well return. I suggest that quickly seeking an authoritative solution to a problem is very similar to buyers purchasing the cheapest product based on the latest advertisement.
Then you have made a great mistake about the capabilities of your fellow humans and are not paying attention to their actual behaviors.
>They are each intelligent
Please define your definition of intelligence, there is no common standard definition that is agreed upon, and by the basis of your claim you seem to have a very particular definition.
>obligated citizens who vote with purchases
By buying the items they can actually afford, hence most commonly the cheapest item.
>Companies are entities made up of such people and as such do not love (or hate) anything
A convenient fiction you tell yourself, but this is a complete fiction. If I, for example, create a corporate and direct it, the company represents my loves and hates. We see this behavior in a large number of companies. It's funny you bring up anti-authoritarian sentiments, when companies are 100% authoritarian structures kept under control by regulations as to prevent them from simply buying compliance from everyone in the government.
When you choose your doctor, you choose based on morality rather than what your insurance allows?
When you choose your food at the grocery store, you choose based on morality rather than the 3 different potentially immoral brands the store carries?
You seem hopelessly out of touch with actual consumer behaviors. Maybe you're one of the lucky few that has the kind of wealth that opens up options like this. But you do not represent the average persons behavior at all.
This is a good observation. What is our obligation when our cognitive dissonance enables immoral/unethical activity at scale?
morality aside, it's not "cognitive dissonance".
That would require "behavior does not align with their values or beliefs", and they never stated their values on the matter.
"If nothing is right/ethical/moral so I can do whatever to the other"
If you meant they couldn't create Amazon the product, then there are lots of bookshops in Europe, thanks for asking.
Ozempic-maker Novo Nordisk enters the room
no, there are many "American companies" but you are thinking of certain, aggressive, investment backed ones, which you quickly "invest in"
It is exactly "investors adding money to abusive companies to get faster returns" that YOU are part of
I think you forget that the 2 founding principles of the bureaucratic nightmare that is the EU are cronyism/wealth redistribution and fining US tech companies
Just as a heads up: Trump ain't President at the moment, and when he was, the US was weak they ever were...
The Houthi attacks in the Red Sea are affecting everybody. It's good to see the UK and now India get involved, but without the US the Houthis would more or less have free reign. Germany, Japan, even China plus many others are just as affected by it but what are they doing? What could they do?
Will playing whack-a-mole with Houthis help, as long as their backer Iran is left alone? (Not saying attacking Iran is a good idea, mind you! These things are complicated.)
The Red Sea will have to be pretty calm for a long time before shipments are routed there again. The Houthis need to strike only very occasionally to deny shipping.
I'm pretty sure America could afford European-style healthcare and vacations, if that was a priority for their society. They have instead decided they like large houses on large plots of land, very cheap gas, and the highest rate of private swimming pool ownership in the world.
I agree that Americans don't consider it a priority for their society to close the gap between rich and poor with things like free healthcare and free college education.
However, I don't think that's because they're oppressed by the tyrannous yoke of capitalism. That wealth inequality allows quite a lot of people to enjoy luxuries; they've got 1 swimming pool for every 30 people, that's a lot of people with private swimming pools!
Many Americans feel their high GDP per capita shows their low-tax approach is good for productivity, and that those swimming pools are proof that hard work gets rewarded in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
My point is, viewed at a national level, America isn't suffering from the burdensome cost of maintaining their large and expensive military, as gessha seemed to think. They're actually one of the richest countries in the world.
Re: Dieselgate, the CEOs of Audi and VW at the time are currently on trial in Germany.
I hate it, really hate it, tgat everytime something international coms up, people cry about some country not being souvereign because of blabla...
I personally would not even call these tech giants American anymore, they are as powerful as countries.