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Comment by tomphoolery | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else sick of the "European Parliament" deciding the rules for the rest of the Internet? I know I sound like a dumbass American here, but I feel like there's gotta be a way for the EU to get what they want without bothering everyone else in the world constantly...

The issue is that they keep enacting laws that have good intentions, but are written poorly and without any sort of experience in the technical realm. This results in the laws' implementation being filled with weird loopholes that you can use to get around the extra work while still maintaining the legality, but completely missing the intention of the law in the first place. It just seems like a massive waste of time to me.

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Is anyone else sick of the US deciding the rules for the rest of the Internet? I'm fed up of American advertiser-friendly doctrine deciding what is acceptable content anywhere in the world.

(joking, but this is kind of an unsolveable problem of having a global network without a global governance system, you're going to run into mismatches)

Basically, you are ok with only the US influencing the rest of the world?

Because the US has control of the DNS root zones, is powerful enough to create a chip ban on China and has back doors in half the planet's machines through programs like PRISM or systems like IME. I think from an influence point of view, they are quite powerful enough.

Given the US also went to war with Irak despite the entire UN voting against it and while lying about WMD, have a mass spy program on their population, and will soon reelect a convicted felon, it's a good balance to have other parts of the world trying to have a say as well.

The human world is full of imperfections, but we usually average it at scale.

I'm not really sure what you mean, changing the timezone of a country is certainly their prerogative and "technical experience" doesn't really have anything to do with it.

The EU is one example here but many other countries have timezone/DST changes, the EU is one of the places that don't change timezones often. The US on the other hand has such variety in timezones and DST observance, not even following state borders, that it's a real pain to support.

How do European timezone rules bother you?

EU pondering daylight saving in its territory bothers you? Well, too bad.

That has nothing to do with the European Parliament. Or not in the general case. If you're interested, dig yourself into the changelog of tzdata. Timezones are inherently political.

Do you know who last arbitrarily changed how summer time works, and dragged other countr(ies) along with it?

It was the US, in 2005.

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