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Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

I see more and more AI solutions to be simply not available in European Union. EU is a big market, true, but apparently not big enough to justify all the hassle, risks of handling random bureaucrats who want to become famous because they managed to fine some rich company. EU managed to enforce GDPR to some extent (still many parties are practically ignoring it by making refusal for tracking really annoying), question how it will play out with AI.

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I tried to sign up for Claude 3 the other day but was met with a message that it’s not available in Sweden (which is a EU member state). It was available in Suriname though, so it’s not just a “US only for now” policy.

Really irritating. But yes, we deserve it.

the list specifically excludes EU countries

as always, it helps to maintain an identity in several geopolitical 'blocks', this time Montenegro worked :)

So you could still use it, you just had to lie about where you where?

Not commercially

> risks of handling random bureaucrats who want to become famous because they managed to fine some rich company

Do list the names of famous bureaucrats that got famous because they fined rich companies. There's Margrethe Vestager who is the commissioner for competition, and is neither famous nor famous for finning rich companies.

Also, do you have any actual criticism of specific legislation or is this a generic "laws bad because they make it harder for business which is bad" rant without any substance?

> Do list the names of famous bureaucrats that got famous because they fined rich companies.

Thierry Breton is another name that comes to mind.

The guy who was a CEO of a top 10 digital services (?) company worldwide, Atos, and before that of the biggest French telecom (France Telecom/Orange). He was named 3 times in the top 100 CEOs by Harvard Business Review. He was a minister of economics, finances and industry for 2 years. Also has a few sci-fi books.

And for you, he became popular when he was named European Commissioner? Which company did he fine to become famous with his new position?

The dude who can't submit a post to Twitter/bsky without including a glamor shot of himself?

Never heard of her.

The only actual example I can think of is Schrems and he didn't fine anyone, he merely dismantled the shoddily constructed EU-US privacy law circumventions (Privacy Shield etc). And I had to look up his first name (Max) because I only knew his name from the court cases (notably Schrems II).

Heh, great illustration of how hollow the "politician acting for fame" accusation is: the only name you could think of is of an EFF-like activist, he's not a politician at all :D

Turns out I had him down as a "politician" because I conflated him with the Greens politician who was doing elaborate flow charts on Brexit on social media. Incidentally I also forgot his name too.

I saw he's only listed as a "lawyer" (not a political position or party membership) when looking up his full name but given that I know literally nothing else about him (the face doesn't even feel familiar) I left it at that.

Also, he's not a bureaucrat or politician.

What is it with making this a bureaucracy problem before addressing the fact that AI models are often fed data that doesn't belong to the company training the model, which has usually been gathered with methods that would be considered outright theft or corporate espionage in other industries?

Of course there are bureaucracy issues, and there always will be, but I think it's absolutely not the main topic here.

If they harvest massive amounts of copyrighted and suspect data and send the worst parts of it to strangers over the Internet, everyone calls it "ML" and "training" and investors give them billions in funding but when I do it they call me a pirate and a pervert and throw me in jail.

The saddest part is that many legislations in other parts of the world try to blindly copy the european legislation, without any effort in thinking if it makes sense or not.

that's not that sad, especially when talking abt gdpr. I mean gdpr can be better by enforcing respecting some request headers but other than that, gdpr is good, just like punishing unauthorized use of other's work

The EU is also going to miss out on new AI companies, so no only are they at a competitive disadvantage because they're using less AI, they also aren't getting the job and tax benefits from the new companies that will form.

It's not the EU's fault that the US government has been completely useless for so long that big tech thinks they have a right to trample all over society to make an extra buck.

Couldn’t one argue that the current system is expressly in the interest of the US government? We are entering a new technological age with the US at the forefront and the EU falling further behind while busily erecting more obstacles. Economically, at least.

If it’s not US companies, it will just be Chinese ones. Homegrown isn’t an option the EU places much value on.

The US was stricter on its homegrown giants of the past, so I don't really buy into the idea that the US has to let big tech impose all of its dystopian ideals upon people to retain a lead over China.

The current approach may be benefiting the US economically, but it's also ticking up a time bomb in the form of an increasingly pissed off public.

Sadly they are not enforcing it for european websites (maybe by design?), a lot of accept cookies or pay nowadays.

I'd say that's a gray area. Several of these schemes have been found in violation (Heise's implementation of it got them sued for example and they had to modify it). The bigger point here is that ONLY European websites have been going that route whereas American websites mostly just try to circumvent the GDPR by being clever (e.g. abusing the legal term "legitimate interest" to add a tedious layer of opt-outs), which hilariously backfires because it demonstrates that the violation is intentional.

Note that the point with the compliant "accept or pay" ones is that they still can't coerce you to "accept all" - they still have to only bundle the minimum necessary and justify it, and they then have to opt out paying users from those. Keep in mind that the ePrivacy Directive explicitly requires having an "refuse all" (or in this case "accept minimum necessary") button with equal weight and visibility as an "accept all" if the latter exists. Most consent dialogs are still in violation of this as they didn't update since the GDPR initially came into effect.

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