Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence
foreignpolicy.com
foreignpolicy.com
Now, large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people (unlike say tobacco, or talc powder, 3M and half of their solvents, weed killer, most car makers, etc etc)
but they have been trying desperately to stop all competition.
They've also been trying to extract as much personal info as possible for profit. Because regulators in the USA are hamstrung, they are used to being able to basically doing stuff that would be illegal if it were in physical stores/pre-existing industries.
Every large company in every industry wants to do this.
> They've also been trying to extract as much personal info as possible for profit.
Why would you expect a company not to pursue profits?
And the point of regulation is to stop it and bring balance. Or are you happy with mono-/oligopolies?
In practice, regulation almost never actually does that.
Every major industry is a monopoly or duopoly if you're even a bit generous with the term.
I'm just pointing out there is nothing unique here with tech or data.
And the politics are mostly theater that often makes things more monopolistic, not less.
Is that correct? I have a hard time thinking that is true.
Adding a link to the Boston Fed report on it from a couple years ago: https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/current-policy-perspe...
People keep talking about the obligation to shareholders for a company to maximize profits, but there's a wide list of possibilities between not doing that and seeking to actively, wholesale ruin privacy.
I expect the people in companies to take responsibility for their actions instead of pretending that they're beholden to the company's wants.
> Why would you expect a company not to pursue profits?
And that's how you justify children in cobalt mines I suppose ?
Did you actually read the article? I don't know how you square this kobayashi maru situation, unless you think Meta is outright lying about it:
> Europe recently charged Meta with breaching EU regulations over its “pay or consent” plan. Meta’s business is built around personalized ads, which are worth far more than non-personalized ads. EU regulators required that Meta provide an option that did not involve tracking user data, so Meta created a paid model that would allow users to pay a fee for an ad-free service. This was already a significant concession—personalized ads are so valuable that one analyst estimated paid users would bring in 60 percent less revenue. But EU regulators are now insisting this model also breaches the rules, saying that Meta fails to provide a less personalized but equivalent version of Meta’s social networks. They’re demanding that Meta provide free full services without personalized ads or a monthly fee for users. In a very real sense, the EU has ruled that Meta’s core business model is illegal. Non-personalized ads cannot economically sustain Meta’s services, but it’s the only solution EU regulators want to accept.
Also, what about the CUDA situation? I don't see how any consumer is harmed by this, which is quite different from a social media company doing its thing.
Is this actually bad?
I closed my account ten years ago, and I don't have an alternative. After the withdrawal period I stopped caring.
My loved ones send me text messages of their kids. Exactly what is the point of Facebook?
So many people are in it’s if you don’t have it, it’s hard to be part of certain communities.
I deleted my Facebook like ten years ago, I missed out on a a LOT of party invites.
if they want me there, they can ask me directly. My social life has not significantly changed since I quit Facebook.
if you have good friends, they will find you. if you don't.. why do you care about losing them?
However, nothing I use could be called a Facebook replacement, either. WhatsApp isn't a Facebook replacement.
So the notion that you have complete freedom is somewhat false…
You might have heard of the phone network and email. Both provide you with choices as to which corporations you want to do business with without limiting what contacts you can talk to.
There are groups/communities (real ones, for example building or school) that settled on WA/FB group so while you are not necessarily forced to if you don't there is a high chance that you will miss some crucial info…
I don't use it in any manner for personal communication though…
But I don't go around pretending that that doesn't cut me out of social contacts. Not everyone will be as accomodating as your friends and relatives.
The EU regulators and select HN users might be okay with that, but EU citizens on average probably won't be.
More pointedly, that they can't be built in or run from the EU.
I wouldn't mind if FB left...
> The EU regulators and select HN users might be okay with that
Though FB should have never been allowed to buy WhatsApp and Instagram... (same for Google buying YouTube…)
Besides void would be filled sooner or later with something, hopefully something interoperable (XMPP maybe?)
No company should be allowed control over such a large portion of private communication.
All the younger people I know are on Instagram (yes Meta owns that). But another social network will take its place like it always has. I’m pretty sure Meta knows this since they also own WhatsApp.
If FB dies, we’ll all be fine.
> They’re demanding that Meta provide free full services without personalized ads or a monthly fee for users.
Meta is being sued because their paid plan is not honest - they are currently asking for 10€/month which is disproportionate - for comparison, a Business Standard Google Workspace account with 2Tb and Gemini costs 11€. From [1], "EU law requires that consent is the genuine free will of the user. Contrary to this law, Meta charges a 'privacy fee' of up to €250 per year if anyone dares to exercise their fundamental right to data protection".
[1] https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-files-gdpr-complaint-against-meta-ov...
In legal and economic contexts, reasonable profits are a thing that is routinely calculated. Where industries are more regulated, 'reasonable' profits are often bound by statutory guidelines. In more competitive markets, prices are not fixed in the same way but you can take a look at industry standards to ascertain what might be reasonable.
Where are they demanding that? Reading https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_24_..., their complaints seem to be that Facebook
- cannot call the ‘with adverts’ version ‘free’
- makes it too difficult for consumers to find out what exactly they give to facebook in exchange for this ‘free’ service
- is not clear enough about the fact that paying will not remove all ads
- forces existing users to choose between paid and ‘free’ versions before they can use the service again.
Nowhere do they say on that page that Meta "provide free full services without personalized ads or a monthly fee for users”. Am I reading the wrong page?
Yes. That's a separate investigation; "Today's action focuses specifically on the assessment of Meta's practices under EU consumer law and is distinct from the ongoing ... , and the assessment by the Irish Data Protection Commission under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)."
The illegality of "Pay or Consent" is a GDPR thing. The EDPB ruling on that issue is here: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2024-04/edpb_opinion...
But it's an extremely settled matter. The GDPR says explicitly that consent is not "freely given" if the provision of a service is dependent on said consent. (Where the service does not absolutely require the data processing in question; See Article 7, recital 43)
Maybe they’re thinking of Meta making Facebook paid for everybody, but giving users the option of getting paid for getting personalized ads? Apart from the wording, I don’t see how that’s different from “It’s free, but if you don’t want personalized have to pay”, though.
It would be different in that it makes it more explicit that users are selling something, though, so maybe it would be enough in the eyes of the EU?
You'll struggle to find people who are against the Digital Markets Act for this reason. It literally only targets the potential monopolists.
However, virtually every other piece of regulation does the opposite.
Regulation usually gets trotted out after the downside of doing [new innovation] is experienced. This always happens, because doing something new always involves unknown risk. Most people aren't entrepreneurs and hate risk, so they pass regulation, and the market gets locked down so nothing new happens again. Incumbents and their army of lawyers can easily comply or are grandfathered in, and challengers are permanently disadvantaged. That market is officially dead until the next fundamental leap forward in technology.
What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass this incumbent-cementing regulation before we've even had a chance to experience both the upside and downside, so the innovation never happens at all.
Combine this with a rapidly aging demography in Europe, and I only see this trend increasing. If there's one thing old people hate, it's risk and doing new things. Meanwhile, those same old folks are expecting massive payouts (social benefits) via taxation of the same private sector they're currently kneecapping with red tape. While ironic, those two trends converging aren't great for Europe.
I'm against the way it's being applied to Apple. I don't think that the government should dictate that consumers aren't allowed to choose a platform that's a locked down walled garden if that's what they want.
We have platforms that aren't walled gardens (Android) that many of us happily use (myself included), and Apple shouldn't have to become something that it didn't set out to be just because a few other big tech companies feel stifled by Apple's rules.
I would never pick an Apple device for myself. I would also never recommend an Android phone to my mother-in-law. I, myself, know to avoid the many Android security holes that exist because it's a relaxed platform. But for my non-technical loved ones, Apple provides a much better experience in large part because it's a walled garden that makes it very difficult to install garbage.
What are those benefits, and why would they evaporate if Apple adds an "Install from other sources" toggle? If you want to exclusively benefit from Apple's discernment, keep that toggle off and stay in the walled garden.If the benefits are so great, then surely everyone will choose to stay in the walled garden.
One example from a while back was banning an internal Facebook enterprise developer account because they were using it to install a VPN onto users devices for the purpose of monitoring user behavior for competitive market analysis. This is not anything that can be prevented by technical controls, and was only able to be published because enterprise profiles can deploy apps outside the store.
Apple wants their customers to be safe. Third party marketplaces take that responsibility and control out of their hands. Apple stopped that VPN abuse immediately upon finding out about it. How long would it take for European regulators to force Facebook to turn off such a self published app of their own accord?
How about LassPass, then? That made it onto the AppStore despite being designed to make money and steal credentials.
Maybe not $50/month, though. I love one Apple apologist's remarks on that aspect:
> Instead, the scam LassPass app tries to steer you to creating a “pro” account subscription for $2/month, $10/year, or a $50 lifetime purchase. Those are actually low prices for a scam app — a lot of scammy apps try to charge like $10/week.
Emphasis mine. "Look, I know you got your credentials stolen, but at least you didn't also get scammed out of as much money as some other scammy apps!"
Surely you've seen enough of the free market to know that this is baloney. The instant that the walled garden is gone abusive apps (Facebook et al) will start ushering users away from it into their own, abusive paths as the only way to install. And once the big abusive apps have started the trend, the walled garden is effectively gone. Businesses don't choose regulation if they can help it.
The only reason we don't see this with Android and Google Play is because Google hardly has any rules at all about what can go on the Play Store.
Does that change the garden for you? Can't users such as yourself remain in the Apple ecosystem? Do other users leaving affect you? Or Apple? Maybe they won't have as much cash?
Does Apple deserve the extra cash in perpetuity for being the first with the network effect? There might be a lot of better ideas out there, if they were given a chance, like Apple had back before them and Google took over the market.
> abusive apps (Facebook et al) will start ushering users away from it into their own, abusive paths as the only way to install
> Do other users leaving affect you?
To clarify, I'm not an Apple user. I use their competitors in all categories because they're not really my style. (Yes, choosing something other than Apple is a choice you can make!)
I'm just someone who feels the need to represent normal Apple users inside the HN bubble.
Facebook will leave the AppStore. Grandma can’t find Facebook anymore on her new iPhone, and will google “how to install Facebook on iPhone”. Thousands of websites will SEO for that, and give instructions (“There will be a popup that says ‘You might install dangerous software. Are you sure?’ Press YES.”) on how to install their AppStore with some Facebook clone/spyware/VPN MITM attack/keyloggers. They will have complete control of grandma’s phone, collect all the data they want. Soon she’ll have a new default browser with 7 toolbars, a new search engine, and be mining crypto on the side.
Nah. Users don't grok sideloading.
Even on android where it's always been possible, it's a fringe phenomenon. And every app is on Google Play. In fact it basically killed Huawei in the West not being able to offer it anymore.
The only exception is the epic store but they do it to make a point. Not because it actually works.
Even aside from that, you can't compare the Play Store to Apple's because the Play Store is a thousand times less restrictive. There's a reason why people are constantly complaining about the App Store and (aside from Epic) never the Play Store. Apple has a lot of restrictions, and while some of them are there to extract more money most are there to protect their customers.
I'm not "imagining" anything. This is the status quo on Android and even setting one switch to "allow installations from this source" (one that already pops up automatically no less!) already freaks users out.
And the EU is fine with this. They didn't specify any technical implementation to Apple so I'm sure they will make it as scary as they can.
> Even aside from that, you can't compare the Play Store to Apple's because the Play Store is a thousand times less restrictive.
Apple has seen a lot of stuff slip by the reviewers too, and it's pretty much a hit and miss based on who you get. Just like with Google.
I'm sure a lot more app providers would love to get out from under Apple's heavy hand but in practice this is just wishful thinking. The tiny amount of friction there is on Android is more than enough for people not to bother.
> There's a reason why people are constantly complaining about the App Store and (aside from Epic) never the Play Store. Apple has a lot of restrictions, and while some of them are there to extract more money most are there to protect their customers.
We'll have to differ in opinion on that. I feel like most of the restrictions are there to protect their cash cow which is the app store.
To be clear, I think privacy laws like GDPR absolutely have a place for consumer protection.
I just don't think the DMA does. Watching how the DMA applies to Apple, it feels far less about consumer protection than it does about businesses, and that's what makes me uncomfortable. The EU is in this case listening to complaints from a bunch of other businesses who do not have consumer interests at heart and ignoring the very real damage that their actions could do to consumer protection.
The Apple App Store protects users from myriad abuses by myriad bad companies. The EU wants Apple to build a blessed, paved off-ramp that companies can strongly encourage prospective customers to use that brings them deeper into the manipulative control of those companies.
Does it? Are the $50/month subscription flashlight apps gone?
This is just a form of 'think of the children'. Think of all those evil hackers waiting around the corner for the poor unsuspecting iPhone users.
I'm not talking "evil hackers". I'm talking about Facebook just for a start. Once they pave the way and teach users how to use the off-ramp (or else not be able to use Facebook!) they'll be followed by dozens of smaller abusive companies that are eager to pass by Apple's review requirements.
I'm far less concerned about software vulnerabilities than I am about the companies that Apple's business policies currently keep in check.
Apple (and other big tech companies) locking the competition out of the market, or buying them, hurts consumers. It robs them of other innovative choices.
Having more choices and interoperability is generally good for consumers.
If you stick with the Apple defaults how does this hurt you?
> If you stick with the Apple defaults how does this hurt you?
Because people won't be able to stick with the defaults. One of the first dominoes to fall if the EU gets its wishlist will be Facebook, which will put a version of its app that wouldn't pass Apple's review out through unofficial channels and strongly encourage or force users to switch to it. Once Facebook has paved the way many other companies that are similarly inclined to abuse their users will follow.
A walled garden with a wide-open back door is no walled garden at all, and the many Apple users who liked the garden are going to be cranky when they realize what tech lobbyists have done in the EU.
And perhaps the legal system sees some of these garden wall as protecting Apple, falling under anti-trust, like the 30% markups on all financial transactions?
You mentioned malicious versions of the Facebook app that do an end-run around Apple's review. Maybe the EU is trying to cover this with new laws like the GDPR and DMA, making malicious app behaviour illegal. Might that not be better, protecting all users regardless of platform?
If I thought the EU could actually execute on that? Maybe. But I know that Apple executes on it, and the fallout from the gdpr doesn't give me a lot of confidence that the EU knows how to regulate tech in a way that achieves desired outcomes and doesn't just lead to the same behavior as before with malicious compliance stamped on top.
And consumers spoke, and now other consumers unhappy with those consumers choices, are demanding the deal be changed.
But it doesn't have to be, you can simply NOT regulate every damn little thing, especially when there are no victims and you are forbidding a simple trade between two entities who are both willing to engage.
No, developers who want to make money on the Apple Store are not victims. They can develop for Linux and sell apps there if they don't want to pay what Apple wants.
I'm one of them, I'm not supporting Apple or Google and I build everything on the web paying nothing.
If the opening up of Apple were as difficult to use as getting root on Android is I wouldn't have a problem. But that's not what's being proposed, and any attempts by Apple to make it less than perfectly smooth for someone to exit the walled garden are most likely going to be shot down.
Game company Bar decides to launch their own store and pull their game - we’ll call it Nortfite - from the App Store so they can add something shady like crypto features. Nortfite is a massive social game that all your friends play and it’s a huge part of your teenage social life. Your only device capable of playing it is your second-hand iPad. Do you really have a choice about staying in the walled garden? Who needs friends anyway, amirite?
Just how can you not see there's probably 20% of every purchase sitting on the table if competition was ever allowed to occur.
Not to mention the simple freedom of choosing what you want to install yourself, and not just what Apple allows you to...
I have the freedom to install whatever I want. I get that freedom by using Linux and Android. I choose to have that freedom by selecting platforms that provide it.
Many HN users seem to want all the benefits of Apple's approach with none of the downsides, and it doesn't work that way. Apple is what it is because it has a tight, coherent strategy, and forcing Apple to change that strategy will have knock-on effects that most Apple users won't like.
If you value freedom to install whatever you want, you chose the wrong ecosystem, and hijacking the ecosystem to satisfy your values is unfair to the vast majority of customers whose values already align with the ecosystem's.
It's no different than Nintendo's entry into the game console market being what it is—some people will choose that experience because what it offers is valuable for them.
For myself, I'm an Android phone user and a PC gamer, but just because I wouldn't choose those experiences for myself doesn't mean I begrudge their existence.
It does not apply to consoles.
It does make it possible for companies to keep some more money, but most importantly it allows them to sidestep the protections for my privacy that I pay a premium to Apple for.
A real DMA would force facebook, twitter, etc to open up for alternative clients. That would bring competition in and benefit the end user.
Not that whatever digital slot machnine company is allowed to keep a higher percentage of the diamonds they sell you in their free to pay game.
This is entirely because the experts and fundraisers in the field promoted the technology as existentially and societally dangerous before they even got it to do anything commercially viable. "This has so much potential that it could destroy us all!" was the sales pitch!
Of course regulators are going to take that seriously, as there's nobody of influence vested in trying to show them otherwise.
The EU was dumb enough to dig it for them.
Mostly its being used to generate text that fit a query.
I'm using it to quickly localize our application into different languages, such as Arabic. German took like a few hours to get from non existing to 100% functional. Arabic was sketchy with Arabic mixed with French text, now it's 100% Arabic.
Ok but what is your plan for letting people who lost their jobs to AI to do more meaningful things? Because unless there are bigger societal changes all it means those people will not have to find jobs that are even more bullshit.
> regulators...take that seriously
That's how.
For example, it’s being used to job screen applicants even though we have proven that AI models still suffer from thing like racial bias. Companies don’t disclose how their models are trained to negate bias or anything like that either and that’s one example I remember off the top of my head
I bet they also suffer from other biases that are harder to detect and maybe some biases we can't even imagine and thus control for.
Just because you graduated from a CS program doesn't mean you will always write bug free code using the ideal algorithm and design pattern.
But you know what you should be striving for, can more readily identify issues, and maybe sometimes you actually are perfect.
I feel like it's really the opposite.
There is a major problem with using AI to screen CVs, which is that AI is bad at screening CVs. It excludes good candidates and offers mediocre ones, and opens up a bunch of hacks the equivalent of black hat SEO, which gives an undesired advantage to people inclined to dirty tricks.
But "it's racist" is a political hot button, so before people can start to point that out, someone scrambles to push the hot button and suck all the oxygen out of the room. Then the purveyors of snake oil can munge the algorithm until it passes the naive oversimplified racial bias test someone made up (probably making it even worse at its intended purpose), and then claim "the problem" is solved, as if that was the main and only problem.
Everytime they do this test, considerable bias is found to still exist.
I think it gives a much higher signal on candidates than a resume, and is more "blind" in terms of bias than a human.
It's based on voice messages. Open to all here if anyone wants to take it for a spin. https://candit.net
It is like orchestras used to use auditions where the judges could see the people; when they went to auditions where they couldn't see the people, the number of women being hired went right up.
There is a famous study on this topic, usually presented in much the way you describe. But usually people are more careful not to lie about the results. The rate of women being hired went down, not up. The "success" for women was contained to advancement through particular audition rounds.
The original paper is not exactly a model of investigative integrity:
>> Women are about 5 percentage points more likely to be hired than are men in a completely blind audition, although the effect is not statistically significant. The effect is nil, however, when there is a semifinal round, perhaps as a result of the unusual effects of the semifinal round.
Abstract from the original paper:
> A change in the audition procedures of symphony orchestras--adoption of "blind" auditions with a "screen" to conceal the candidate's identity from the jury--provides a test for sex-biased hiring. Using data from actual auditions, in an individual fixed-effects framework, we find that the screen increases the probability a woman will be advanced and hired. Although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction, the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras.
The whole point is that the paper doesn't actually support any of the claims, which it's fairly open about -- that's those "large standard errors".
They did not in fact find that the screen increases the probability of a woman being hired. They found that it increased the probability of a woman passing the final round of auditions. There's more than one round.
It's up to you, I guess, whether you want to follow the original authors to their conclusion that the semifinal round is fundamentally unlike the final and quarterfinal audition rounds. I wouldn't.
The paper is meritless, but even it's actual worthless findings aren't in the direction that people like to claim. Here's Andrew Gelman: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-...
> First, some equivocal results:
> This is not very impressive at all. Some fine words but the punchline seems to be that the data are too noisy to form any strong conclusions.
> Huh? Nothing’s statistically significant but the estimates “show that the existence of any blind round makes a difference”? I might well be missing something here. In any case, you shouldn’t be running around making a big deal about point estimates when the standard errors are so large. I don’t hold it against the authors—this was 2000, after all, the stone age in our understanding of statistical errors. But from a modern perspective we can see the problem.
> Anyway, where’s the damn “50 percent” and the “increases by severalfold”? I can’t find it. It’s gotta be somewhere in that paper, I just can’t figure out where.
> Pallesen’s objections are strongly stated but they’re not new. Indeed, the authors of the original paper were pretty clear about its limitations. The evidence was all in plain sight.
> For example, here’s a careful take posted by BS King in 2017:
>> Okay, so first up, the most often reported findings: blind auditions appear to account for about 25% of the increase in women in major orchestras. . . . [But] One of the more interesting findings of the study that I have not often seen reported: overall, women did worse in the blinded auditions. . . .
If you read the paper, you'd notice the problems.
But you might not want to run the risk of, um, "racism" that seems to be inherent in reading a paper on the impact of blind auditions on women.
Quote from your second, more respectable, link:
> Pallesen’s objections are strongly stated but they’re not new. Indeed, the authors of the original paper were pretty clear about its limitations.
When I read the original papers, like your second link, I find a level headed paper working with limited data they had available.
I would suggest that the annoyance is with pop science retelling at best, or just a quack selling anger online to fuel his weird obsessions at worst.
Another is that a health insurance company was caught using AI to determine if a claim should be denied or not which lead to a scandal as a whistleblower leaked the practice, as it was wrought with errors and ethical concerns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
Other governments around the world have done similar (non-AI) things in the past with similar terrible results. They'll likely try an AI version of things too in the near future, just because "AI" apparently solves all the problems. Ugh.
A range of different people interviewing are going to be alot harder to pin down.
The implications of deepfakes and similar frauds alone are potentially devastating to informed political debate in democracies, safe and effective dissemination of public health information in emergencies, and plenty of other realistic and important trust scenarios.
The implications of LLMs are potentially wonderful in terms of providing better access to information for everyone but we already know that they are also capable of making serious mistakes or even generating complete nonsense that a non-expert user might not recognise as such. Again it is not hard to imagine a near future where chat-based systems have essentially displaced search engines and social media as the default ways to find information online but then provide bad advice on legal, financial, or health matters.
There is a second serious concern with LLMs and related technologies, which is that they could very rapidly shift the balance from compensating those who produce useful creative content to compensating those who run the summary service. It's never healthy when your economics don't line up with rewarding the people doing the real work and we've already seen plenty of relevant stories about the AI training data gold rush.
Next we get to computer vision and its applications in fields like self-driving vehicles. Again we've already seen plenty of examples where cars have been tricked into stopping suddenly or otherwise misbehaving when for example someone projected a fake road sign onto the road in front of them.
Again there is a second serious concern with systems like computer vision, audio classification, and natural language processing and that is privacy. It's bad enough that we all carry devices with cameras and microphones around with us almost 24/7 these days and the people whose software runs on those devices seem quite willing to spy on us and upload data to the mothership with little or any warning. That alone has unprecedented implications for privacy and associated risks. With the increased ability to automatically interpret raw video and audio footage - with varying degrees of accuracy and bias of course - that amplifies the potential dangers of these systems greatly.
There is enormous potential in modern AI/ML techniques for everything from helping everyday personal research to saving lives through commoditising sophisticated analysis of medical scans. But that doesn't mean there aren't also risks we already know about at the same kind of scale - even without all the doomsday hypotheticals where suddenly a malicious AGI emerges that takes over the universe.
> The implications of deepfakes and similar frauds alone are potentially devastating to informed political debate in democracies, safe and effective dissemination of public health information in emergencies, and plenty of other realistic and important trust scenarios.
The horse is out of the barn on this one. You can't stop this by regulating anything because the models necessary to do it have already been released, would continue to be released from other countries, and one of the primary purveyors of this sort of thing will be adversarial nation states, who obviously aren't going to comply with any laws you pass.
> The implications of LLMs are potentially wonderful in terms of providing better access to information for everyone but we already know that they are also capable of making serious mistakes or even generating complete nonsense that a non-expert user might not recognise as such.
Which is why AI summaries are largely a gimmick and people are figuring that out.
> they could very rapidly shift the balance from compensating those who produce useful creative content to compensating those who run the summary service.
This already happened quite some time ago with search engines. People want the answer, not a paywall, so the search engine gives them an unpaywalled site with the answer (and gets an ad impression from it) and the paywalled sites lose to the ad-supported ones. But then the operations that can't survive on ad impressions lose out, and even the ad-supported ones doing original research lose out because you can't copyright facts so anyone paying to do original reporting will see their stories covered by every other outlet that doesn't. Then the most popular news sites become scummy lowest-common-denominator partisan hacks beholden to advertisers with spam-laden websites to match.
Fixing this would require something along the lines of the old model NPR used to use, i.e. "free" yet listener-supported reporting, but they stopped doing that and became a partisan outlet supported by advertising. The closest contemporary thing seems to be the Substacks where most of the stories are free to read but you're encouraged to subscribe and the subscriptions are enough to sustain the content creation.
The AI thing doesn't change this much if at all. A cheap AI summary isn't going to displace original content any more than a cheap rephrasing by a competing outlet does already.
> Next we get to computer vision and its applications in fields like self-driving vehicles. Again we've already seen plenty of examples where cars have been tricked into stopping suddenly or otherwise misbehaving when for example someone projected a fake road sign onto the road in front of them.
But where does the regulation come in here? When it does that it's obviously a bug and the manufacturers already have the incentive to want to fix it because their customers won't like it. And there are already laws specifying what happens when a carmaker sells a car that doesn't behave right.
> Again there is a second serious concern with systems like computer vision, audio classification, and natural language processing and that is privacy.
Which is really almost nothing to do with AI and the main solutions to it are giving people alternatives to the existing systems that invade their privacy. Indeed, the hard problem there is replacing existing "free" systems with something that doesn't put more costs on people, when the existing systems are "free" specifically because of that privacy invasion.
If a government wants to do something about this, fund the development of real free software that replaces the proprietary services hoovering up everyone's data.
It’s just like trying to restrict DVD encryption keys from being published or 128 bit encryption from being “exported” in browsers back in the car.
I think a bigger concern is LLMs providing deliberately biased results and stating them as fact.
Regulating it the way you say just means "zero innovation!".
Can't we just say racism is illegal, and if a company uses an AI to be racist, they get fined the same way they would if they were racist the old fashioned way?
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_sca...
Fence at the top of a cliff (make sure the AI is unbiased and can be fixed when it turns out it is) vs. Ambulance at the bottom (letting people sue if they think the machine is wrong).
But which way around does that apply? Racism is a concrete example of what AI may incorrectly automate, it's not the only bias that AI can have — any correlation in the training data will be learned, but not necessarily causation — and the goal of these laws is to require the machines to be accurate, unbiased, up to date, respectful of privacy etc., with "not racist" as merely one example of why that matters.
(Also the existing laws on racial equality were not removed by GDPR; to the previous metaphor, the fence being better doesn't mean you can fire the ambulance service).
Any idea what software is being used ?
I've seen some places collect that information which is wild. But you can decline.
Socially: Creating and cultivating a culture that screws up dating.
Emotionally: Filter bubbles, and data analyitics to push proganda and motivate people in directions (cambridge). Additionally subjecting people to material to manipulate.
Stealing: Scooter companies are actively stealing the public space to operate their business (sidewalks), endorsing their users to run over people on the sidewalk (also making it difficult to identify the individual), etc.
Privacy wise: Companies are forcing you to give up your private info to live. (Retail tracking to individuals.. even accross multiple companies [see "The Retail Equation"])
But we also need the people who do like risk taking and new stuff, and there's less of them. So innovation is much more of a fragile thing than stasis.
Even if you think society and human life in general can't be improved in any way, to just maintain the way things are now...will require many new innovations and people taking risk on new stuff. Your welfare, lifestyle, and security depends on the risk taking of others. So we should probably be careful about making it too hard for the folks taking risk (it's already hard enough).
Trust me, the risk-averse folks will still be the dominant voice either way. Even this forum--which started as a community of risk-taking entrepreneurial types--is now dominated by the risk-averse majority.
The issue with that is that risk is usually not borne by the people getting rewards.
My point being “letting the risk adverse take risks” is not the same thing as “don’t rein in VC backed attempted monopolies”. You can do the latter without doing the former (theoretically of course; in practice doing the latter is impossible without a substantive change in the underlying incentive structure of current global society).
OMG I cannot wait for these companies to be fined out of existence.
How can you be allowed to have a business model that relies on people leaving your trash wherever they feel like it.
What I got was: The alderman employee tried to get this cleared with the scooter company rather than towed.
I was blown away.. if I parked in front of the Division blue line station my car would be fined, towed, charged with storage fees, potentially vandalized within an hour. Them? Oh the gov employee will do CS for them. I filed a complaint with the city ombudsman and later found out she was removed.
I think that the bigger issue is that the people who suffer when the risk goes bad and the people who benefit when the risk goes well usually aren't the same people.
You missed most of the discussions about DMA on HN, I guess. There's always someone ready to say how EU will kill all innovation and make Google/Apple exit the market because they dare to question anything.
----
Let me laugh out loud. Those, who govern these companies know 10 years ahead how and what will happen. Bigdiks higher up has 10-20 year plans. And people talk about "before we had a chance to experience the upsides and the downsides". Get a grip on reality.
No company can accurately predict where technology is headed a decade from now.
Google thinking the future of phones were BlackBerry clones?
Palm CEO “The PC guys aren’t just going to walk in a figure this thing out” referring to the then rumored iPhone.
Sundar at Google knew LLMs were going to be huge after Google invented them, so that’s why they were first to market and…
Oops. Maybe not?
While it might make risk-averse types feel good to imagine the people in charge are all-knowing (see religion), the truth is the world is a chaotic and reflexive system of unpredictability. Scary, I know!
You're commenting on an article doing exactly that. So that was not much of a struggle.
I would challenge "unknown"-- it very well seems like the risks have been known every time, they just don't give a shit
>What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass this incumbent-cementing regulation before we've even had a chance to experience ...
Sounds good to me? It's sociopathic and opportunistic to want to risk major socioeconomic issues for the mere chance of a corporate "innovation"
Actually pretty much all EU regulations and especially enforcement of those regulations gets pundits shouting that the EU is only trying to milk US megacorporations.
> However, virtually every other piece of regulation does the opposite.
Not true but even if so not all regulation concerns itself with monopolies. GDPR in particular is about user rights and should therefore apply to everyone, same for similar kinds of regulations. If corporations cannot survive without violating you in every way possible then they should not be allowed to live. If anything is lacking it's enforcement against incumbents.
> What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass this incumbent-cementing regulation before we've even had a chance to experience both the upside and downside, so the innovation never happens at all.
Good. Not all "innovation" should happen.
> Combine this with a rapidly aging demography in Europe, and I only see this trend increasing. If there's one thing old people hate, it's risk and doing new things.
Again, good. Moving fast and breaking things at societal scale is not a good idea.
It's nearly as bad. Social media causes addiction and mental health problems especially for the youth. PISA scores are going down. It can already be seen now, although not many 20 year olds have had a smartphone for more than 10 years. Here in this country every 7 year old has a smartphone and it will get only worse. Physical health is impacted because of kids are tapping on a screen instead of running and playing. It has impact already to language learning and social development of babies because parents interact with their smartphone several hours a day and instead of interacting with their baby.
Of course there is other tech than social media and smartphones. But at least in these areas equally strong regulation as for tobacco and alcohol would be required.
Teen suicides are a thing. It isn’t lung cancer, sure, but it also isn’t nothing.
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Family/parents-kids-died-after-dr...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/business/instagram-suicid...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/electric-scooter-electric-bike-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/family-sues-airbnb-19-m...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/rohingya-seek-reparat...
https://www.thedrive.com/news/40234/no-one-was-driving-in-te...
"full-self-driving doesn't self drive", "wear a helmet on the bird scooter", and "safety is our first priority at facebook" is the 21st century version of "don't get roundup all over yourself"
I believe your worldview is correct and also incomplete. It’s really fucking hard to come up with general rules that cannot be gamed.
e.g FSD is mostly fine as a technology but lives would likely be saved if it were marketed more responsibly
Facebook's and Twitter's recommended feed algorithms and blocking procedures, have to a significant extent determined the outcome of elections, coup attempts, protest movements. These companies have custom tuned their algorithms for particular countries at particular times, during such events. Many people have died, or their lives negatively affected because of the decisions by these companies.
All three are about trying to persuade an intelligent organism to adopt acceptable, rich and virtuous behaviour. All three seems to have similar failure modes.
Too much red tape and you'll get over fitting, lack of creative and new behaviour.
There are emails unearthed from the early days of Facebook where utilizing addiction feedback loops were discussed to retain and maximize young users.
The Anxious Generation provides a lot of evidence correlating the rise of social media and a major increase in depression and anxiety related disorders.
you sweet summer child
no, that's not how the red tape got put in place. the government put the red tape in place to protect the established companies in the space from upstart competitors
Apple kills migrant workers in China when fires break out or through stress, Samsung kills women working with solvents banned in the US, Exxon kills oil rig workers operating dangerously, etc.
There's zero reason to think that this will mean the EU won't have a tech market. It just won't have one that includes Apple products which refuse to follow the law. Seems like a massive win for the EU, and because Apple is the one deciding to pull their products rather than follow the law they can't really complain either, so win/win I guess.
Tencent buys basically all game companies, microsoft buys basically all communication companies (skype, nokia come to mind), google buys basically everything. Even ARM is owned by Softbank after starting out in the UK.
The Automotive industry and ASML are just about the only things resistant to this because they're so large already; Automotive acts a lot like big tech. (a clear similarity I saw after being in BMW R&D and Googles Zurich and SF campuses)
If you are publicly traded there is little you can do to prevent people buying shares - though you are right that people sell privately held companies a little too often.
Ubisoft in particular created many poison pills to prevent companies getting too dug in, however that didn’t prevent anything except a total buyout. Their board is stacked with Microsoft and Tencent which causes weird, extremely harmful, decision making in the org.
Nobody can force you to sell your shares. Nobody can force you to make your company public. It's all voluntary. You can't have your cake and eat it. Want to get that juicy foreign investor money then cry that the foreigners are taking over?
Once you sell a share you don't get to control who it is sold to afterwards, you could give shares to people as stock-options, and they are (rightly) going to sell their shares regardless who the buyer is, only based on the price.
So. Seriously, shut the fuck up, you're suggesting that the only answer is isolationism.
Identification of an issue (people buying up European talent before it gets large enough to be competitive) is not an invitation for absurd and deficiently reasoned victim blaming.
If you want to keep control of a company - or anything - within certain hands, then you can't sell that thing to others. As evident by millions of companies never having their shares publicly listed or sold on any market. If you sell, you have to accept that you don't have any control of who owns in the future. You can't have your cake and eat it. Not even Europeans can do that.
"People buying up European talent" - they can only buy if Europeans are willing to sell. Such victims...
This reminds me of people complaining about foreign investors buying up real estate. But of course, no blame is to be put on the greedy sellers who slurped up that juicy foreign money.
Yes, people sell things voluntarily. (In particular, small companies being bought and killed by monopolies is usually very benefitial to the small companies' owners, even if it's bad for the economy as a whole.) That does not contradict the parent comments.
If you do not want that, do not voluntarily sell your company.
I like my cat. I don't want others owning my cat. I probably shouldn't sell my cat then right? I can't take the money now and complain later the neighbor owns my cat.
For example, you mentioned Nokia. Nokia was blown out of the market by superior Chinese manufacturing and US design [0]. It wasn't a close battle, the EU contender was crushed. Apple's motivation for entering the market was that among other things that companies like Nokia were so bad at making phones that Apple reckoned it could break in to a new vertical. That is a very EU-led-industry problem to have. The reason they sold out was because the EU turned out to be incapable of incubating a modern, successful phone manufacturer in the 21st century even with an incredible lead and Nokia was being outmanoeuvred everywhere.
[0] Both looked like regulatory issues to me, we've seen how the EU responds to things like micromanaging the iPhone charging port.
No, Nokia was blown out of the market via the exclusive deal with Microsoft, which in turn made the dumbest management decisions ever. Nokia bled under the horrible management of Steve Ballmer and their own ignorance with regards to Android. They also proved later on that you don't need any expertise to produce decent Android phones, as HMD global used their name as a brand and has been thriving.
To add to this: It's not that hard to develop a mobile operating system that's on par or better than Android, despite what Google might want you to think.
I honestly think Android was a net loss for mobile computing, both in terms of platform and performance.
But when Nokia starts with an overwhelming incumbents advantage, their board doesn't even have confidence that Nokia's internal talent pool can lead them to make a mobile phone! They couldn't defend themselves from multiple companies in completely different industries with no prior competence in the mobile phone world. That was an A-Team EU hardware company's performance.
The issue here isn't company size, it is something specific to the EU. I'm not sure what, but since it is a geographic thing I'd start with regulation and branch out from there.
I'm sorry but it's honestly pointless discussing this as no one in this thread wants to spend even an ounce of time into researching this. Reading your comment in it's entirety tells me you weren't there when stuff was happening.
> That was an A-Team EU hardware company's performance.
For the record, the Lumia phones had A-Tier hardware in them. They boasted the best low light cameras on phones for a while around ~2012.
Nokia made the Lumia phones, MS provided the operating system. Previously, Nokia had their own Linux based OS, called Maemo, which was originally supposed to run on what became Lumia. It later formed into Sailfish OS, which had it's own device family.
The issue wasn't the hardware platform itself, it was the fact that Nokia decided to go with the MS ecosystem, instead of Android. And honestly, I don't even think that was a bad move. I am at a loss trying to figure out how device manufacturers actually make profits based on what has turned into extremely restrictive licensing deals with Google in order to get GAPPS on their phones.
I think it comes down to two things:
1) The US is a large, uniform (regulation, language, media, etc.) making it easier to grow quickly. This puts the US competitor in a better place to buy the EU competitor than vice-versa.
2) More significantly, the US capital market is bigger & better. That starts with VC funding but is also the case with IPOs and publicly traded companies. That‘s how the EU tech standouts such as Spotify end up IPOing in the US.
#2 is certainly something the EU can work on improving but it has very little to do with tech regulation.
My point is, don’t write off this whole product category because people balked at the price of the first iteration, it happened with the first iPhone, too. Apple grinds its way to excellent products.
The web browsing wasn't slow - part of what made it so compelling was that you could browse the real web without going insane. No WAP nonsense.
Yes, it was rough compared to the later versions, but even the first one was insanely better than anything else. It was pretty clear what the issues were (battery life and lack of 3G as you said).
I don't think the Vision Pro is like that at all. It's big issues aren't missing features or lack of polish. It fundamentally makes no sense as a product even if they improve the resolution, speed, battery life, etc.
I was pretty alive at the time, I was an intern on the iPhone team at Apple when it launched and the run-up, so I was using the first gen phone/touch all day every day, and I was paying pretty close attention to its launch (but just watching what was said in the press/by the people I knew, nothing privileged on the sales side). Looking around at sales figures, it looks like the first gen sold low single digit million units total, 1.4M in 2007. The 3G sold 1M on the first weekend (the press release tagline was "Twice as Fast at Half the Price", and that lower price is a big part of what brought it mainstream). Now they’re up to a couple hundred million phones per year.
I wouldn't say it was a "miss", it was very good compared to the status quo trash on the market, but it also wasn't the company defining success it turned into until the following gens, it made much less revenue than Macs at the time, and the Mac was pretty niche. My point was that it took a bit to really dial it in, and Apples first gen products don’t usually reflect their eventual success very well.
I don’t think Vision Pro is at 1M sold yet, and Apple products definitely have more sales reach now, but again, I wouldn’t count it out. I was pretty impressed when I tried it, they really nailed a lot of the hard technical problems, especially around text rendering, and if it was 1/3 the cost, I’d definitely have one now, maybe at 1/2. Which means that unless they really dilute the capabilities or drop the cost less than I expect, I’ll probably have one within the next couple of iterations (I'm also assuming they'll sub out the metal for cheaper/lighter materials to improve long-term comfort). But yeah, maybe it’ll end up being a modern day Newton, we’ll see.
Yeah, they've actually sold less than that, but in context, it's still very much a "let's throw it at the wall and see what sticks" kind of thing. It also nonetheless fits how Apple communicates their product vision in new areas.
The accusatory use of the second person implies that you're in my head enough to know that I'm trying to win an argument. It's patently untrue; I want to be loudly wrong so that I have more than merely a snowball's chance in hell of garnering understanding here.
If you have corrections to offer, I'm receptive to them.
What we need more of these days is 155 mm shells, chip fabs, nuclear power plants, solar cells and rail, not Facebook and Apple equivalents complaining about regulations.
We get so focused on big tech being social media/ad companies that we ignore the rest of it, which is actually huge.
GP will have to explain to me, at a grade school level, how they want to differentiate big tech and BIG tech.
1. Accenture, Capgemini and Atos are consulting companies that don't produce anything, they just rent out their code monkeys to the customers. And you know what those code monkeys are trained in? Software stacks that were created mostly in the US.
2. The rest of the companies you mention do not employ that many software developers.
3. They also do not deliver terribly popular, or important products. I mean, Bosch produces commodities like dishwashers, vaccuum cleaners and power tools, hard to call it "tech company".
If so, Apple and Nvidia won‘t qualify. They‘re more of a hardware company.
BTW Bosch‘s main business is automotive supplies. They‘re doing everything down to having their own fabs for automotive chips. It‘s just completely invisible to us as consumers that‘s why you consider it a dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and power tools company.
Big tech has caused a lot of problems for society. Echo chambers on social media, monopolistic behaviour, teen depression and addiction.
We want the tech, without the grifting.
Historically the victims of contagion have been oldsters in a moral panic. This time I think it is actually true - there’s a mind virus loose.
EU usually doesn't let companies to grow uncontrollable sizes that the government is completely controlled by them not the citizens.
The existence of Big Tech means that the government did a very poor job in protecting the consumers and the free and fair market
This is the thing that so many Americans in tech don't seem to understand. VC Twitter is full of smugposting about how the US has "$5 trillion market-cap of startups" and the EU doesn't.
And what they miss is that the EU doesn't want Silicon Valley. It doesn't want the "trillions in startups". Because essentially none of them turn any profit. Why on earth would anyone want $5 trillion dollars in companies that do not make financial sense yet have awful externalities.
Who is benefiting from Apple’s profits being the size of a small country’s GDP? Not most people, therefore, why would this be optimized for?
Do you think that if you compare the profit that Apple makes to the value that that users get that Apple has the larger share of it? To a disturbing degree?
https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/LAZONICK_Willia... (“Profits Without Prosperity: How Stock Buybacks Manipulate the Market, and Leave Most Americans Worse Off”)
It is easy to forget that the economic system of fiat and capital is a shared delusion, agreed upon rules that can change when needed. The intent is to encourage outcomes, not to be the primary function.
That is a non-sequitur.
Off the top of my head, probably the millions of people who have a pension through one of Apple’s institutional investors like CalPERS. The effects of Apple’s profitability goes far and wide.
This doesn’t entirely discount that CalPERS holds almost 40M shares (~$8.7B) of Apple (its top holding), just that them doing so is not reason enough to be more judicious about governing corporate profits. Still profits, but less. Those profits have to come from somewhere.
(CalPERS has $502.9B AUM ending June 2024, making APPL ~1.72% of their total assets)
https://www.calpers.ca.gov/docs/forms-publications/acfr-2023... (page 115)
https://calpers.ca.gov/page/newsroom/calpers-news/2024/calpe...
That's like a member of the working poor who owns one share of stock, "benefiting" from company lobbying to keep the minimum wage down.
He's got two-hundredths of a cent more in dividends, and has lost many hundreds of dollars in potential wages.
You make this sound like a bad thing. There are diamonds to be found generating genuine value, but quite a bit of activity is simply low value under the guise of innovation.
I would caution against mistaking clarity and understanding for hubris. Europe doesn’t have line go up, but their citizens live better lives by most objective measures. From an optimization and first principles perspective, we should always be mindful of what we are optimizing for, so when I see people come out swinging with “Such profits! Much Tech! Innnnnnnovaaaaaation!” I approach it from a “simmer down now, lets decompose the system and observe” approach. What are the desired outcomes and what is value perspective we can compromise on as “good,” and then work backwards.
I'm sure they are quite proud of that achievement
Currently Apple has been complying with the letter of EU law (opening their devices to alternative app stores, etc) but not the spirit of the law (leaving the EU market).
I'm intentionally taking this out of context to point out that laws can act as gatekeepers and help preserve incumbent's positions.
Stuff like "minimum service requirement" which require new entrants to front a massive initial investment, preventing them from getting a foothold (see: France telecom landscape in the 90s-'10s). GDPR was crafted by the likes of Google & Meta that were strong enough to weather the transition, but kill off smaller competition.
There are always tradeoffs, but those aren't talked about as much.
Apple is also free to lobby the US government and people to take action against the EU. Especially if Trump gets elected, Apple complaining about Europe taking advantage of American companies would resonate with a lot of the officials likely to staff such an administration.
Given Russia, it is likely that the US has far more leverage on the EU than the EU has on the US.
Sounds like a paradise. More healthy lifestyle. For most people much of this stuff is unnecessary. If one wants to live life "online", glued a screen digesting garbage and propaganda 24/7, then one can relocate to some country where that's what people do. Chances are, tourists from such countries will want to visit Europe even more.
We are all living in an "online backwater" in case the author hasn't noticed. The web is a sewer of surveillance, marketing and ads. Despite the information access possibilities the internet presents, the distribution of factual information seems to be at an all-time low, at least in the lifetime I am living. I have never seen people who were so detached from commonly shared reality as a result of "search engines and social media sites". To access facual information, cf. marketing and propaganda, worthless opinions, and "AI" generated garbage, one did not and does not need the latest "phone" or "high-performance computer chips". This stuff is not making people smarter. Is it is not making society better.
I would be willing to bet the countries that have the populations that are most reliant on "search engines and social media sites" and "high performance computer chips" are going to have the highest rates of mental illness and other complications that arise from too much screen time, and the lowest test scores. These will be dumbed down, whacked out societies. They will have the worst quality of life.
I was listening to an interview with Jonathan Kanter recently and the interviewer tried to get him to comment on Europe's approach to regulation of "Big Tech". He was hesitant to accept any comparison. But I am confident there are plenty of folks, generally _not people who comment on HN_, who are envious of the direction Europe is taking.
The idea that regulating Apple and Meta, companies that exploit people commercially as they use computers, e.g., as data collection sources and ad targets, is going to contribute to cause "poverty" or deprive Europe of useful networking and computer technology, e.g., the type used for national defense, is absurd.
I think you're failing to make important distinctions. Being "less advanced" in algorithmic addiction machines, ad targeting, personal privacy invasion, or monopoly is not going to cause any of those things.
As an American, a good chunk of American consumer technology is more akin to a parasitic burden than any advantage.
The DMA is really about regulating basic common sense free market rules, not regulating technology as such.
They will probably move to those whacked out societies.
You mean the ones fabricated with European photolithography machines?
I think you missed the GP's point: a lot of so-called "innovation" is crap, providing as much true value as a parasite (maybe one of those lovely ones that will kill you if you try to kill it).
Interesting discussion recently, I forget if it was on here. Those lithography machines are built with the worst spaghetti code imaginable and the engineering is so close to black magic that development is painfully slow. In other words, that space is ripe for disruption and there might be some attempts at that in the near future.
It sounds like "spaghetti code" is not actually the competitive disadvantage software engineers imagine it to be.
I say that as a software engineer.
Pretty sure there's a lot more to those machines than software.
> In other words, that space is ripe for disruption and there might be some attempts at that in the near future.
Not because of "spaghetti code," but because of US-led sanctions. China has technical talent, a lot of money, and now motivation to enter that space.
I agree with you. A lot of innovation is indeed crap. But there are times when they are not crap, but brilliant instead.
So these crappy and brilliant innovators are going to move to the whacky societies. It's for Europeans to judge if that is a net loss or a net gain.
Whether or not an innovation is crap can only be judged in hindsight.
Furthermore all of this applies to consumer tech, not military tech. Consumers are not allowed to have military drones, attack fighters, and tanks either.
If tech companies cannot provide us a means to control our personal information, and require us to be locked into their gatekeep-y, nanny-state, walled gardens and submit to using locked-down devices that don't actually obey what we want them to do, then those tech companies should not exist.
I've gotten a little bit of a taste of some of this stuff in the form of the CCPA/CPRA, and it's delightful. Getting to tell companies they're not allowed to sell any of my information to third parties is wonderful. I just wish that was the default and I didn't have to opt out.
Big tech is far, far under-regulated, even in Europe, too, and that needs to change.
Though TBF when it comes to poorly thought out regulation, the amount of human time lost to clicking cookie consent/reject screens surely has to be a net loss to society.
And if people are better informed of how far and wide their data will be prostituted, then I'd call it a win.
I guess browsing life would be much easier if something was implemented at the browser level and cookie pop ups become the exception.
It's easy to agree with all advertising. I think that's the quickest, easiest measure to cut that yields an outcome beneficial to society, and that more ads are nearly always worse.
I also think that sales are worse for society than every day prices that deliver value; sales do make sense for things like seasonal items which are in abundance due to just being harvested.
Instead, we're forced to turn to third-party testers with dubious manufacturer relations - even when the results aren't freely available! - or technical knowledge (e.g. Consumer Reports using 1/3 octave smoothed power response for loudspeakers)...
If you spent real money on something, you're far more likely to buy it again or buy it for someone or send that link to someone than a completely new product.
If yes, it suddenly makes sense to show the ad to the ~1000 people in your target group.
If it wasn’t allowed, the value of all this personal information wouldn’t be as high.
If I were selling widgets I still greatly care about knowing who buys a billion widgets a year and will pay good money to find out.
Creation of global markets with interconnected networks to track and share detailed personal information about mental states, political alignment, sexual life and more is the problem.
The plural of anecdote is data after all.
If I am Tylor Swift fan I should get her merch advertising only when I am visiting swifties forum or group - but not when I am checking my fishing forum where I expect fishing gear ads. But nowadays I get adsg
Because more targeted ads require a dangerous and abusive system of pervasive surveillance while less targeted ads can still be targeted without hurting as many people in the process.
I don't think they require it.
A targeted ad can be as simple as geolocation via IP address and showing local businesses.
Untargeted ads pay less than 5% what targeted ones do.
Even assuming that is true, companies are bidding for user's attention and against each other. What do you think will happen to prices for context-based advertising if targeted advertising goes away?
> and the one billion YouTube viewers would likely be quite upset about it
Great example. Many of the ads that finance the YouTube ecosystem are context-based and not targeted.
It's quite obvious, isn't it? They will stop buying ads altogether.
The entire reason targeted ads pay better is because they have a higher conversion rate, so advertisers can afford to pay more.
> Many of the ads that finance the YouTube ecosystem are context-based and not targeted.
And that's why shovel-ware "personal finance" crap YouTube channels make mega-bux, while actually interesting creators earn pennies. If you want more "junk food content", have at it: Ban all the targeted ads!
Just don't come crying in five years when there's nothing good to watch or read.
Either that, or we'll find out what just content based untargetted ads work pretty well.
Targeted advertising includes contextual advertising (e.g., a company putting an ad for their bird watching binoculars on a bird watching blog) and I'm having trouble thinking of any reason to ban that.
Reasons?
Click bait, boosts consumerism, ads imply essentially a tax for everyone (remember that ads have to be paid by the consumers), CEO spam, annoying, environmental costs
Don't we live in a capitalist world?
The economy should serve the people, not the way around.
Removing ads would require being willing to make micro payments to some random shady news site you found on google to read their article.
In the current payment world, that would require sharing a lot of private information in the case of PayPal or, even worse, sharing your CC number.
The Digital Euro might fix this, if it turns out to be well implemented.
Once a well implemented Digital Euro arrives, an internet without advertising would be a real possibility.
The GDPR is very clear about this. Advertising is not a legitimate interest or a functionally-required data processing, ergo, it may only be done with user consent. And that user consent may not be coerced in any way at all, you may not even refuse access to services if users reject their data being used.
It's taking a while to go up and down the courts, but the days of ad-tech are numbered.
Only thing we got was annoying cookie popups everywhere, where consent is one click away and reject is three layers behind a small “learn more” button.
Guess what, the whole hidden reject thing? That's not legal. Opting out should be equally as easy (or easier) than opting in, which a lot of EU companies realize.
Title is "Europe Is in Danger of Regulating Its Tech Market Out of Existence".
But then the subtitle says "Poorly designed laws are forcing *global firms* to leave." (emphasis mine)
Then you see a picture of an Apple Vision Pro. I've only skimmed through the article and there are 11 mentions of Apple and 12 mentions of Meta, then some mentions of X and such. These aren't even "global" firms, they are all American ones.
If anything, it sounds like they may be regulating away US products from the European market, and that's a big "maybe", which is different from what I understood from the title they chose.
The title says the market is in danger of going out of existence, and the article solely mentions a handful of big US companies AFAICT.
Or maybe it's a dig at Europe for having large parts of its market dominated by US companies, and I'm missing that.
Realistically Nvidia did not leave China and they will not leave Europe.
Spotify, an EU company, has to compete with Apple Music and YouTube Music. Both of which have their own mobile operating systems and markets.
Now we get a lot of backlash from these big tech firms as for years they have been integrating services into their walled gardens. Which now is hard to decouple from their platform.
And it’s the same story for any kind of service that’s subject to DMA.
That's an obvious DMA violation. You can't preference your own service over others, like when you link to the exact pin on your service but just the general area on another.
1. VCs outright avoid investing in deep tech, with only rare exceptions.
2. Founders overwhelmingly choose to build small, sustainable companies, steering clear of big tech.
3. Employees consistently prefer consulting jobs and value vacation days over equity.
4. The bureaucracy startups face when incorporating or raising funds is staggering (Germany, I'm looking at you).
While this may seem beneficial from a social perspective, it creates the worst possible environment for tech startups. I have immense respect for the few European startups that manage to survive and thrive despite these obstacles.
Again, really no skin in the game, as I don't live there and I only have limited amount of perspective, which comes from my European resident non-techie friends.
Let's see how long it lasts, Europe's economy is terrible and their people are significantly poorer. I don't think their current welfare state is sustainable without tax revenue from large businesses. Eventually every European citizen will be a waiter, hotel staff, or a tour guide.
Also, the tech industry is not the only part of the economy. large parts of the EU are absolutely massive in terms of industrial machinery and scientific companies.
People on HN always seem to forget that a lot of money can be made by making something very high end which solves a specific problem, no matter if it is sexy or not.
the invasion of ukraine has a major impact on the european economy, but that has very little to do with the article in question...
And saying eventually everyone will cater to tourism is peak us ignorance. The tourism sector in eu is fairly small, even in the (over) touristic italy. Just the fact you mentioned this leads me to think you are an ignorant american that likes how people suffer from being poor and being exploited by big corpos...
why are VC's somehow the cause of "tech industry"? this seems like a very US perspective on tech in general.
Also, VC's in the US have another large advantage. Very, very cheap money because the status of the US dollar as a reserve currency compared to the euro and other currencies.
Who else will give private capital for what is purely an idea?
Not Banks giving a business loan - they will demand interest at the current interest rate.
Not Private Equity - they only move private capital into public companies or late stage private companies
Not Hedge Funds - they only deploy capital into public markets
Not Growth Funds - they only deploy capital into late stage companies
The only funds that will deploy private capital into early stage companies are Angel Investors and VC Funds.
> this seems like a very US perspective on tech in general
Israel, India, China, UK, Russia (pre-2022), Ukraine (pre-2022), and ASEAN all developed a VC scene similar to the American scene.
Yet mainland West European investors are nowhere near as dynamic.
If the Western European market was more dynamic, Spotify would not have moved to NYC, Ghodsi would have founded Databricks in Stockholm instead of San Francisco, and Datadog would have remained a purely French company instead of moving most of hiring from Product Leadership to HR to the US a decade ago.
While you can mention ASML, the only reason ASML/Phillips even has EUV IP is because the US Government gave it to them instead of Canon or Nikon due to anti-trust reasons in the early 2000s and can very easily revoke IP access if prodded.
> Very, very cheap money because the status of the US dollar as a reserve currency compared to the euro and other currencies
Then why do high interest rate Israel, India, and China continue to have fairly robust VC scenes despite having high interest rates and currency controls and/or relatively illiquid currency markets?
The reality is "cheap money" as in interest rates don't really matter for early stage funding. Indtutional investors always leave some money on the side for VC funding as a diversification tool.
The difference is American, Israeli, Indian, Chinese, and ASEAN institutional investors will try to fund local VCs to build a local ecosystem, but Western European ones will just hand that money to an American, Israeli, Indian, or Chinese VC instead.
We need to remember that Europe is the continent that gave us extractive colonialism. A player always knows their own game.
And I’m not the only one. Many companies don’t hire in Europe because it’s too risky to get a dud employee that you can’t fire without having to pay their salary for the next 6 months.
That's what trial periods are for, within the first 1-12 months (depending on position and sector) you can very easily get rid of employees. That's when you're supposed to evaluate their performance and fit.
And if they don't do their job afterwards you reprimand them and they can then be fired for cause if you have actual causes.
>I suggest re-reading "Atlas Shrugged" for this topic.
Ah yes, that's the problem. We all need to read and subscribe to the ideology of Ayn Rand, then we'd understand and everything would be better!
We have no tech sector in europe. As soon as a company has more than 6 developers it gets bought by a USA company (that's a slight exaggeration, not by much).
Europe has missed out on the craze of getting millions to build an Uber for Cats.
In fact a huge chunk of American MSM is turning out to be unreliable and quick to deceive its readers who are still stuck in the "why would they lie to us".
Europe is doing a good job and as are more sovereign countries waking up to the techno-colonialism at play.
If Google or Facebook is in your country, they do not share your country's interest and instead pushing their own American ideologies.
More and more countries should reject American tech companies that seek to interfere and spread their fcked up ideologies in the host country.
> More and more countries should reject American tech companies that seek to interfere and spread their fcked up ideologies in the host country.
I'd go father: even in America they don't share their country's interest and instead are pushing their own Silicon Valley ideologies (e.g. they're all for solving problems, only so long as the solution means using more of their products, making them even more money, etc.).
Are you talking about the homeless encampments? I suppose that's another part of it.
But I was thinking about the ideology that says that more computerization (and less friction) is always more better. Basically, "We care about teen mental health, just as long as those teens are still glued all day to Instagram, even if Instagram itself is the problem."
That really hurts a startup's ability to initially launch in the market, especially one with less VC money. (Certain BigCo new products can be thought of as a startup too, with limited budgets.)
This doesn't just affect social media companies, it affects almost any product where a user can upload data, or any product with a social feature, no matter how peripheral the feature is.
Turns out that's a wide swathe of technology, and that social features are fairly valuable.
Of course the big companies will eventually get around to launching in Europe anyway, it will just trail behind the rest of the world.
The situation in America is an absolute nightmare with data being sold through all sorts of mechanisms with zero oversight (your ISP, your car, most apps on your phone, whoever does your credit scores) -- I'm sure there's some way to make successful tech that isn't the hellscape America has.
> Criteria relating to the place of the company in controlling access of other businesses to final customers: the company needs to have (a) more than 45 million monthly active end users in the EU and (b) more than 10,000 yearly active business in the EU;
> "An entrenched durable position" which is a qualitative criterion which the regulator considers met if the numbers of active users in the second criterion are met for three years in a row.
It is indeed very hard to find evidence that DMA does not affect startups, if you don't want to find that evidence.
You're seriously arguing that a startup founder would think "well, when I get to a 75 billion euro valuation, there will be some cumbersome rules, so I might as well not start anything"???
Who is to say they won't decide that a 6 person startup with 10 users doesn't qualify?
It is a welcome change, but not for those who mean to exploit the special status that “social media” and “apps” have been given all these years.
That is literally the point of food regulations.
They are not prescriptive but descriptive.
No regulation says 'make food with >100 E-coli per KG' it always says 'use stainless steel table, no smaller than 2mx1m, in a well ventilated room of size...'.
There are only 19 companies in the world that are required to comply with the strict rules. I think they can pay those "several engineers" from the money they make in EU. This is not about startups, and this is not about launching.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act#Large_onl...
And then there is a 'chat control' every year pushed relentlessly. Thus no, not at all. EU doesn't value citizens privacy.
Chat control keeps being proposed by the same Swedish politician, and she will continue to do so and she will continue to fail- because politicians in the EU are already aware its stupid.
Chat control is not just the love child from the Swedish politician, it is being pushed by US surveillance companies that convinced the commission members that CP can be detected and stopped only if Europol has access to all your messages, emails, photos and videos until the end of time without having any recourse as to what it will be used for or by whom it will be viewed.
Then there is also Chat Control V1 which is currently extended each year despite being a temporary measure supposedly. Then there is also the data retention directive which everyone knows was illegal to start with and took 10 years to be overturned.
The fact that people still associate EU with privacy is a joke. The EU wants your data just like Meta and Apple or Google. At least Meta is not trying to gaslight me into thinking that giving my data is to save the children or some other complete BS reason.
The EU laws typically fall on the side of promoting privacy and protecting citizens against large multinational organisations (criminal and legitimate).
There is a need for greater powers to prevent crime, but nobody is going to weaken privacy for it. The most likely outcome is a centralised interpol-esque database to track and track suspects more quickly. Right now its very easy for criminals to just change hosting region and the investigating national police have no jurisdiction to do anything. It’s a large issue.
Chat Control breaks encryption because it wants to snoop on the messages/photos before being encrypted EtoE by the messaging providers.
There is no need for greater powers to prevent crime. It has been determined that there isn't enough funding to investigate the crimes reported already and now this system is supposed to report even more crime at the price of my privacy.
I could see potentially a system where known suspects are targeted specifically but in this case, everybody is a suspect. What happened to presumption of innocence?
The fact of the matter is that chat control is the digital Stasi, always listening to your conversations, analyzing your messages. God forbid the algorithm flags your innocent picture wrongly.
Is this the future we want?
Lets not forget that half of the EU actually lived under a quasi socialist regime not that long ago...
The EU and its member states give out huge subsidies to keep food production local in the EU without being completely destroyed by cheaper crops from third world countries.
The US does the same, and it is for good reason, to actually make sure a steady food supply exists inside the country/union.
> So making agricultural markets orders of magnitudes more efficient is destroying it in your view?
Yes, of course it is.
It's like replacing families by hell called a "System" - wet dream of the eg. leftists.
It literaly destroy "market" becouse producers side disappear and you have just institution :)
It destroys it becouse no one know how or want to do that hard agriculture business. People will just prefer to sit in slums around big cities. What they can do anyway if everything is not big but giant ? How to buy such area ? How to even learn what to do with it ?? How to acquire buyers if you even get that giant area LOL ? And if it to big for one man or family how to get enough workers (why they even wanted to live slums ? how they even learn what to do??) ??
That giant and efficient (in one dimension) thing just extend himself into lack of self-sufficiency on multigeneration time scale.
Monoculture becose it's cheaper ? :>
Product quality ??? Compare to XO brandy, champagne or artisanal leather wallets. Not to boxed milk with "not yet discovered" PFASes or future "improvements".
Food security in case of war or invasion ? Or mass drone invasion ? Without small and medium agriculture you have nowhere to run. And why to even run - do one giant owner will take multiple ex-bigcity refugees to his home (and feed them few months) or just hire security to shot them or scary of his land ?
And even if giant owner want to help he can't. Becouse hi is only one. Compare to many small/farms - they are somehow just "human" and humanity sized...
Don Corleone was planting tomatoes at the end ;)
I met few peoples that when stopped to be young just moved to province and started peacefull living of the land. Giant farms are a no go for that purposes.
And yes, eg. China builds piggeries and cowsheds town-sized now. Now imagine one case of some-flue in that "town" - best case... And suddenly millions have prices hike or are starving. Or Africa countries get very cheap but toxic meat. Or animal food. Eg. with prions included...
And all of that are just real world facts and "technicals". Now add greeeeed by "lawful" owners. Tell me - is that hypothetical ? \s You easily can write long replay or tree of them just on that subject :>
Corect way is to not build hell on earth in the first place.
This is a not-so-thinly veiled argument for deregulation and rolling back consumer protections, pretty much like the US. It's common to use scare tactics when it comes to regulations and taxes. "Companies will leave". "You're killing companies".
As long as the EU has 400+ million consumers and they have spending power a market will exist and companies will adapt.
Take the example from the article of CUDA being a monopoly. Well, NVidia obviously isn't a European company but it will comply if the EU forces them to open CUDA because the alternative is to close themselves off to Europe. That's never going to happen.
Stop believing this "companies will leave" propaganda.
What if what Europe does is a good idea for the people but just inconvenient for companies?
Europe is one of the power houses of the world but with low self-esteem I am afraid. In the long term what matters is the people's quality of life and diversity.
Take China or the US: if a lot of people don't have purchasing power and leisure who are then buying stuff for themselves as end users?
I agree with the broader idea that a lot of this stuff is PR from vested interests, but this case it's not really secret, since the news outlet categorizes it as:
> Argument - An expert's point of view on a current event.
Also, Europe is a power house right now, but won't be a generation from now if trends continue. All forms of power are built on economic power or are a means to get economic power.
Also, living paycheck to paycheck != being poor. There are many people with high incomes but poor budgeting who live paycheck to paycheck, but will realistically be just fine if they have to tighten their braces.
Americans have the highest level of disposable income in the world, and it's not even close. Even Europe's mega-rich tax havens like Luxembourg have a lower disposable income than Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
Yea I know the rebuttal--"but I also heard they all have $100,000 hospital bills every year!!" The disposable per capita income numbers already account for healthcare expenditures.
Sorry to be so blunt, but it's not helpful if you look only at the average.
A better metric would be the median because it is well known that the super rich distort the disposable income in some countries (the US, but also some European countries).
I see in plutocraticish environments the rich and powerful sometimes very deftfully prevent measures inconvenient for Corporate but useful for the weaker part of the population.
I admit this also happens in Europe. But somehow it is just easier to live as a poorish person in many European countries.
Americans rank #1 on both mean and median. So the point about the super rich distorting the mean is irrelevant.
> But somehow it is just easier to live as a poorish person in many European countries.
Perception and narratives are not reality. In fact, typically in economic matters it takes almost a decade for the public narrative to shift to match the reality of the numbers. Even if reality is right there in the data.
This is why bubbles usually go on for much longer than the "smart" people think they will. Look at any of Fama-French research; momentum is the strongest inefficiency in virtually all markets.
It's millionaires - tens of millions of them.
There's something special about a system that can create so many extremely successful people.
Yes, and we all declare bankruptcy every month, and charge $10,000 to our credit card to be allowed into the doctor's waiting room, where we announce our arrival by firing a gun in the air.
Where do you guys hear this stuff?
> A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses.
> Similarly, a 2023 Forbes Advisor survey revealed that nearly 70% of respondents either identified as living paycheck to paycheck (40%) or—even more concerning—reported that their income doesn’t even cover their standard expenses (29%).
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-pa...
> A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses.
> Similarly, a 2023 Forbes Advisor survey revealed that nearly 70% of respondents either identified as living paycheck to paycheck (40%) or—even more concerning—reported that their income doesn’t even cover their standard expenses (29%).
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-pa...
I think you'll be surprised to find out just how many Europeans disagree with the diversity part. We are quite close to ethno-state Europe, just like how it was between 1800 and 1950.
Ask a European what they think of Gypsies for a wild time.
Thats exactly the issue. What's good for Europeans isn't so good for American corporations.
Already populist presidents in America have signaled they don't care about Europe so why should Europeans nurture and allow a hostile country continue to operate in their lands?
This type of outrage from American MSM is quite baffling. Whether their billionaires like it or not countries are going their own way and the biggest slap in the face is that those billionaires do not even live in America.
Sure at the moment the amount of inner European Innovation in digital technologies is low, but local companies have to fight against foreign behemoths that simply disregard local regulations, or just buy the likes of Luxemburg or Ireland to get their own special law zones inside the single market.
Let the big US companies leave, the vacuum left behind will foster competition and local solutions.
The article makes a number of questionable assertions such as "Non-personalized ads cannot economically sustain Meta’s services". I do not know whether that is true or not. Apple has a history of malicious so. I think there are multiple reasons the US dominates tech, and I do not believe "the EU’s rules all but ensure there are no comparably successful European companies". There are many successful European tech companies, as the article mentions later on (it links to a list of the largest that is clearly out of date - for example that omits ARM).
I also disagree with its analysis of why. If you look at their list of large tech companies, and there are a lot of Chinese ones which largely exist because China was protectionist and favoured domestic over US companies. I would argue, if anything, the EU (and other European companies) have not regulated American companies enough, to produce their own competitors. In particular they rarely block takeovers by established players of potential future competitors.
I agree the EU's approach to regulation is often badly flawed, but the DMA seems to be a reasonable approach - as other comments have said it only targets businesses with a lot of market power.
Let's only make the small bridges unsafe?
IMHO attention to privacy and privacy regulations will help make Europe the leader in privacy-respecting services.
Why not let the users decide in whole-sale, if they wish? like with this extension - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/accept-all-cookies/...
An option for a general setting may be nice. I personally approximate it by only accepting cookies from whitelisted domains, and using ad blocking filter lists to hide cookie consent prompts.
The sole way we can fill the gap is MANDATE FLOSS, publicly funding existing FLOSS projects and offering them all the infra through public universities and research bodies to create an EU-FLOSS ecosystem because that's the future we need, where once spread everywhere (desktops, smartphones, cars, domestic IoT etc) will allow private sector to pick and evolve individual ideas. This is the European way and we know it works, IF DONE. Unfortunately most fails to understand IT at all so it's not done, simply. As a result no digital sovereignty is possible on scale.
We have no way to influence what our leaders do in our own governments. Go figure how much our representative in the EU parliament will be able to represent the will of the people.
Ask anyone in EU who is their country representative. They won't be able to tell you. Heck, ask who the president of the EU commission is. Nobody will be able to tell you and she's been ruining our lives for 5 years already.
MEP are just partying with the lobbyist in Bruxelles and challenging each other who can get the bigger bribe.
You can only miss out on so many Industrial Revolutions before you begin to lose power (economic, military, financial, social) and fade into irrelevancy. That will certainly hurt QoL more than any short-term gain from preventing Memoji AI from existing in your region, or strangling your next AI startup in the cradle.
The comments here seem blind to this simple calculus. Then they will say, "nothing of value was lost": then think who is the arbitrator of value here? It is clearly not the consumer*, but the consumer's nanny. Was something of value lost in that philosophy? No? Perhaps China and North Korea are not so bad, then.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-iphone-15-usb-c-eu-malta-4240...
* Consumers vote with their wallet and their feet when it comes to products and establishments
Governments that don’t toe the line to what the commission want get pressured into ultimately complying.
(And the Commission itself often gets its mandate for writing bills from the European Parliament, the Council of the EU or the European Council.)
I'll finish it to save everyone some time:
A: how much of gdp is facilitated through the search abilities of meta and google, though?
B: It doesn't matter.
A: Why not?
B: There will be someone else who is willing to play by the local rules fulfilling the same function in their place, just like in many countries around the world already.
Building a competitive search engine or AI model requires VC investment.
It's simply too expensive to do otherwise.
VC investment requires a vibrant startup ecosystem, well crafted regulations and a risk-tolerant culture.
> VC investment requires a vibrant startup ecosystem, well crafted regulations and a risk-tolerant culture.
Yandex, Baidu, and many other lesser-known local-only search engines exist. There's also nothing stopping an already existing technology company from entering search. The statement is incorrect.
Meanwhile common sense tells us that obviously there's going to be investment into domestic search engines if Google voluntarily throws in the towel. Europe is a huge place and there's a lot of money to be made, even if it's merely with context-based advertising and no individual tracking.
> Building a competitive [..] AI model requires VC investment [..] and a risk-tolerant culture.
Training a large model anyways, since nobody has really figured out how to recoup that investment yet. Why are you trying to derail this from talking about search though?
So no, ot doesn't require VC cash to build something useful for people.
Umm, nope. I’m conjecturing that there could be an enabling aspect of huge scale, and that some smaller economies may fall below the threshold. Personally i hope what you wrote works.
Except, it is not. At least not in the situation that the EU is in. Because all regulations are a constant burden on business, small relative to big corporations, huge for medium companies and insurmountable for startups.
The EU has no big players, not a single one! We have a few medium players like SAP and that is it. So, we are already far behind and every weight we load on to drag us down is another nail in the coffin.
Subtitle says "Poorly designed laws are forcing global firms to leave." I didn't see anything in the article that elaborates on the "poorly designed" part or any company that is forced to leave. Instead, the article uses a number of totally irrelevant examples to argue... nothing. I am really confused.
x=https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/07/26/europe-tech-regulation-apple-meta-google-competition/
tnftp -4o"|(echo '<meta charset=utf-8>';grep -o '<p>.*</p>')" $x > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
links -force-html 1.htm
links $x
EU regulators think their enemy is big American tech companies, but they are hurting their domestic advertisers and domestic economies even more.
I am saying this as someone who hates seeing ads and uses adblock, but I greatly appreciate the societal value.
We should be making laws that foster competition and safety. I struggle to see how cross-site tracking and personalized advertising by itself is anti-competitive or unsafe. The bigger issues that need to be solved on these platforms are gatekeeper monopolies, social division, and mental health.
On top of this, it creates an unregulated sky-is-the-limit 3rd party economy of data brokers who will sell these bulk collections of data to whoever coughs up the money for it. Enter in governmental intelligence agencies, there now is a concern of governments either sidestepping laws on lawful intelligence collection or outright breaking them, as the NSA and FBI have already admitted too if I recall correctly.
Edit: I'd also like to say, can you imagine how the intelligence agencies would pressure their legislators during attempts of reforming data brokers? "You can't take this away! We stopped this attack from happening with this! If you take this away, you'll cause 9/11 2.0!" That's exactly what they did for the FISA re-authorization this year in the US.
If the average user is fine with their data being sold in exchange for a service, then why not let them?
I’m personally not okay with it and I keep my data footprint as low as I can, but I know lots of people who just do not care if they get a service in return, and are fully understanding of what that means.
The US has largely decided that companies shouldn't be regulated at all (particularly with the recent Supreme Court decisions). This isn't a good thing. It will not benefit the vast majority of US citizens. There is no "choice" citizens can make that will undo the unraveling of government regulations on industry/business, unless it's voting for a political party that one that will reform the Supreme Court and revert their insane decisions, a party that isn't the GOP.
The problem with your argument is you’re removing any revenue source the company has. If you won’t pay a subscription, and you block all the ads, and they can’t sell data, how do they make money? Money is required to run the service, whether that leaves a sour taste or not.
If you think you have a financially viable model that protects data, then you should start a company on that premise, I’d genuinely love to see someone make it work.
And the vast majority of users don't deserve privacy? Nah, that's a ridiculous argument to make and I'm not going to waste my time with this line of discussion. You're not making a good faith argument. I'm not playing your stupid games.
One cannot unring a bell.
If there’s a method I’m not thinking of I’m genuinely curious what the financial model would look like.
Let people decide what is right for them.
Protection of user data is a legal right, or increasingly recognized to be. Companies have no right to sell it, or misuse it, no matter what financial impacts it has on them.
Rights cannot be contracted away or sold. They are rights.
I'm also willing to rent my right to determine the contents of advertisements inserted into my daily news feed, for the right price. These things feel equivalent in kind to me.
Usually capitalist rhetoric refers to contracting as a right in itself, muddying your point significantly.
When you knowingly agree to use a service that sells your data, that's fine. When you link it to Facebook and then give it access to your contacts and the name, email address, and phone number of every person you know gets sold to a company that then goes and uses that information to send personalized phishing emails and commit fraud that's a lot less fine.
At the end of the day its about liability. There are many tech companies that are responsible for harm at both the individual and societal level, and they are not held accountable.
But they are not okay with it. I understand why Corporations like to insinuate that people who click OK to twenty pages of legalese in an EULA really are okay with whatever clauses in it, but in reality this practice is an abuse of contract law and exploiting asymmetric power relations. In theory, a potential customer could print EULAs out, suggest changes, and send back the revised contract for approval or further negotiation. In practice, nobody ever does that and corporations would freak out if it happened on a large scale.
The problem does not just occur with new big tech. Banks have been doing the same for decades. I recently put some money on a savings account and was greeted with pages and pages of fine print that literally only a lawyer can understand. Normally, nobody in their right mind would accept this. However, the bank serves as a utility, changing banks is very difficult where I live and they all have the same kind of contracts in their favor. There is no alternative. The same is true for social networks and other big tech. It's not really a free choice for a small business owner to have a Facebook account or for a self-published author to put their books on Amazon, for instance.
That's why strong regulations, good customer protection and privacy laws are needed.
The best part, for me, is while they flail and scream about the big bad EU, Japan and India are following suit with similar laws and regulations. It's only a matter of time until more and more countries start adopting these laws, and the tears from the techbros is going to be delicious.
The website the "article" (aka paid propaganda piece) is hosted on has over 700 partners that they'd like me to consent to having my data shared with. It also completely shits itself thanks to uBlock, meaning it's made so terribly that blocking the privacy-invasive trackers they have breaks the whole site.
If this is their idea of innovation, they can keep it and shove it where the sun don't shine.
Current stuff (other mentions): Germany's state of digitalisation and bureaucracy, investments.
So this guy clearly gives an lousy tech lobbyist .
Giving his initiative DMA is certainly pro market oriented. Why does he have a problem with it?
Rdio, LastFM, Rhapsody, and Grooveshark all existed well before Spotify entered North America. Some of them actually predate Spotify
https://www.wsj.com/articles/spotify-founders-blast-swedens-...
Also, Spotify could open offices in other places in Sweden (or Europe) if they want to be in places with lower CoL than Stockholm.
Why would they want to move people around the world, deal with the unions who will force them to raise the floor of the local salaries etc when they can just hire the best talent in the US?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/spotify-s-t...
So all innovation requires you to capture user's data for profit via advertisement or data brokerage?
• Microsoft windows
• microsoft office (excel, etc)
• google search
• google maps
• gmail and yahoo mail
• smartphones
• space-x (affordable satellite launches - for accurate weather forecasts and GPS)
• OpenAI (pioneering LLM’s from a product perspective)
• Visa and Mastercard networks
• AWS / Azure / GCP
• Adobe (photoshop, etc)
• Zoom / Webex (Skype is an exception, created in europe)
• Salesforce
• DocuSign
• AutoCAD
I can list more if you’d like…this was literally off the top of my head. All of these businesses and products were created in the united states, some with VC funding. They employ hundreds or thousands of engineers, product managers, etc. They provide critical business capabilities to businesses around the world. Some are user facing as well.
As far as critical business software Europe has created Skype, SAP, and i think that’s it? From the hardware side, major kudos for ASML and Airbus.
The stuff you read about in the news is focused on bad actors and toxic social media junk. thats a small piece of big tech.
Honestly, this comment inadvertently proves the need to quarantine US tech. Almost every product you listed is utter garbage, especially Windows.
There's nothing inherently better about Windows than Linux. Libre Office suit can become much better than MS Office if ot got enough suppoet - support that just goes away to M$ contracts.
Google search has become utter garbage.
Hetzner exists, and more Cloud companies would exist if it weren't for America's Big Tech having a competitive advantage due to their sheer size.
Adobe is a shit company with shit behavior. I'd welcome its implosion anytime. Again, if the billions siphoned away for their licenses was spent on FOSS alternatives, we'd end up with such healthier ecosystem.
Visa and Mastercard are leas innovation and more completely regulated duopoly at this point.
Also, with the exception of SpaceX, I'd gladly welcome the complete implosion of all companies you mentioned. I'd love to watch them burn to cinders, while the world finally breathes free.
How long do you think a typical business would survive without excel? Do you realize how crazy powerful excel is? I hate that tool as an engineer but its utility is immense. I agree windows is junk, yet it somehow ends up in all the critical infrastructure lol. Crazy but that’s what happens. Same with autocad- good luck efficiently designing physical infrastructure like bridges in your country without that tool.
Hetzner is not struggling to compete with AWS or Azure because it’s smaller…it’s because Hetzner has almost no features. They have even less features than DigitalOcean. Hetzner basically offers VPS hosting, elastic block storage, and easy deployment of some common apps. Do they offer any of the building blocks for deploying a high traffic service into production? Or deploying something that requires a lot of distributed components? No. stuff like managed databases, flexible file storage (like S3), and most importantly a managed multi-container deployment. Like fargate, ECS or EKS.
example showing how Volkswagen uses AWS and why it’s not a good fit for Hetzner: https://youtu.be/OLy8CgRn8ts?si=VpOYlelneiGI7XZk
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unrelated, i think the LibreOfficr example is interesting. I think it would be difficult to design a competing product because at this time companies pay for a full suite including: outlook, office, sharepoint, etc. and office is available in the browser with realtime multi user editing too! Maybe the LibreOffice project should pivot in that direction? Perhaps they could offer a cheap online version of their products, as a way to fund continued development, while making the desktop version free?
Is python a company that hires hundreds or thousands of engineers, product managers, etc? no. Same with Linux. Also Linux was created by a european (torvalds) while he was living and working in the united states, and is now contributed to by engineers all over the world. I’d hardly call that a majority european innovation. A nitpick but I wanted to clarify that.
ASML, ARM, BioNtech and Ozempic are great examples though, i’ll give you that.
Much as I dislike Vestager, that is not an accurate description. This appears to be the original source:
https://www.youtube.com/live/GmQ5SsMFbsU?si=IgTi-ezhulsCl6Gp...
That is not someone "shocked" or "outraged" at Apple not bringing the AI features to EU markets. Vestager doesn't give a fuck about whether iOS ships with AI features or not. She is just saying that by citing the DMA as the reason, Apple are pretty much admitting that the features as implemented are anti-competitive. And she is stunned that Apple would be stupid enough to make that admission.
Like, you'd at least expect the Apple C-suite to pretend it's because of some technical reason, or because the cost structure isn't viable to support in Europe, or something other than that it's breaking competition laws.
Big tech created windows, chrome, and ads. Big tech puts ads in everything, everywhere, all the time.
I'd say big tech going away is a good thing. We need more linixes, firefoxes, wnd Kagis.
"This company was caught tracking which users visited each page" Yes, for targeted ads.
"Cambridge Analytica was" Yes, for targeted ads.
"3rd party" Yes, targeted ads.
It's all targeted ads. They want to serve you targeted ads. Any attempt to paint "data privacy" as something other than this is irresponsible fearmongering.
This is similar. EU is trying to protect the rights of its citizens for good, but there are also places like US where rights are less protected, or not at all. (and frankly, a sizeable amount of people there don't even give a crap about rights that seem ephemeral for them, like privacy). So naturally businesses go to those places.
It's not poorly designed laws, or at least not just it. It's also a tragedy of commons in a global economy, moving too fast vs too slow, and many other things.
If you want privacy, purchase the privacy conscious option. Don't force the entire market to make ads worthless, forcing companies to charge for things, forcing ME and my adblock to pay for crap I got for free until yesterday.
Western Europe is not the entire EU.
Czechia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and the rest of Eastern Europe give plenty of leeway to businesses who bring FDI in.
The Czech government indirectly pushed a former employer of mine to force employees back into the office from remote work by threatening to withhold tax credits they used to establish a tech/outsourcing center in Praha.
Plenty of similar stories in Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, etc.
Oh, and the SEZs and Law Firms that the investment agencies made us use were always very closely connected to the incumbent poltical parties (and either indirectly or directly owned by them)
You can take Eastern Europe out of the Warsaw Pact, but you can't take the Warsaw Pact out of Easrern Europe's political and business establishment
Imagine you come out with a secure boot product for the pi. Currently this is considered beta at the moment. In any case it’s quite possible that it could change, making it impossible to provide an update.
So under this regulation do you think anyone will offer any extended warranties ? The small amount of extra money will not be worth the massive extra risk.
15 million euros fine or 2% of your income doesn’t make for a very attractive incentive on platforms where it’s complex and risky to perform low level upgrades for example.
So expect increasingly shorter product lifetimes going forward and more and more products that just won’t be released in Europe, I expect even ones developed by European companies. And what do you think about small players who can’t even afford one court care for example ?
And if they are not going to bring AI SDKs to the EU because of the regulatory risk then an entire class of potential startups will never exist.
Apple and Google are holding a beta risky feature and leveraging it as reason to get some sympathy.
Tech needs to slow down; neither society has caught up, nor quality controls.
2. Comply to play (regulation)
These are big markets with massive winnings even with regulation and tax. Corps can either step aside and let someone else profit or comply and play.
What’s really being destroyed by the DMA is Europe’s access to new technologies and services. It’s almost like a self-embargo on the AI building blocks of their future economy.
When Nvidia GPUs are supply constrained do you really think it matters to Nvidia if they need to redirect the small chunk of their supply constrained volume that they were previously selling into France? Who is harmed in this picture? The only EU AI player of note, Mistral, and other EU businesses.
Does it really harm Apple if the DMA forces them to withhold new AI features in Europe? They still earn their device and services revenues. Who is harmed in this picture? EU consumers and businesses.
We’ve now seen within just a couple months, Apple withhold AI features and Meta withhold multimodal AI models from the EU. Expect this cutting off of the EU from new features to become a recurring event over the next year.
DMA-supporting voices are under a serious misapprehension of what the effect of the DMA is and will be over the next few years. It’s cutting off European access (consumer, business & government) to critical technologies which are all being developed outside the bloc.
The DMA violates a number of longstanding principles of good legislation - it is vague, it’s written to enable arbitrary enforcement, it’s penalties are not designed to be proportionate to damages, or even require actual damages in order to be applied, the regulator’s actions stray into actual takings of property (European Commission opinion that Facebook cannot charge a subscription fee for its ad-free offering… so it must operate as a charity? This is a taking of property. European Commission opinion that Apple cannot charge a platform fee for use of its IP? This is a taking of property).
Let european companies that are situated here violate these regulations and make this explicit: As long as the US and China do not have equivalent regulations, EU companies are explicitly allowed to steal US and chinese content. Yes really, make that very explicit. Make laws with the full understanding of what reality we are living in. We are dealing with competitors who will take our last shirt by force, not friends and "partners" as they so lovingly put it in their press releases.
Let me go find the thinnest violin, to match this thinly veiled tantrum.
Then ask yourself how exactly the architects were self-medicating.
I am an avid reader of Show HNs. And I remember many that became successful businesses. But not a single European one.
All the "startups" that I see here in Europe are very classical businesses. They build software tools for local enterprises.
It seems nobody in Europe is building something for the open web. Maybe because nobody here understands all the regulations that come with it. The GDPR alone is 100 pages of legal mumbo jumbo.
European schools and universities tend to drill people towards employment and not to take too many risks so starting companies isn't as widespread and considered too bureaucratic.
Then there's the issue of multiple currencies and not every checkout SaaS supporting all of them and their various options of payment (afaik), which limits reach. That's a problem the US, India, China and Russia don't have.
- HN in 2007
Then I started thinking of this through the lens of B2B SaaS software I use in small business every day. The outside of the box makes promises. Sales reps make promises. Demos abound. Contracts are signed. Setup fees are paid. Setup manhours are invested. And then you start using these services and products. Support issues go unresolved--not supported at this time--and go on the 'wish list' void. What you thought of as a solution to your business needs turns to questions of sunk cost. Total frustration resulting from the obviously profit seeking economizing decisions not described on the box--devil is in the details. Who is the more naive? Businesses for having purchased these products or the companies who develop and market them as industry solutions (vs. just another product with hidden cost-benefit determinations)?
Now think of the B2C environment the article is talking about where there are known deceptive practices working to profit on user's personal privacy. I have to laugh. Seems fitting to read about naive regulation against the decisions of manufacturers and developers making abhorrent conditions in the consumer market. I see the same frustrated naive decisions of business owners trying to get out of contracts for bad products and services they have chosen.
Spotify would not be compliant under the DMA for the same reason why the EU has charged Meta with non-compliance:
>Under Article 5(2) of the DMA, gatekeepers must seek users’ consent for combining their personal data between designated core platform services and other services, and if a user refuses such consent, they should have access to a less personalised but equivalent alternative. Gatekeepers cannot make use of the service or certain functionalities conditional on users’ consent.
- Source: EC statement¹
However the EU doesn't deem there to be any gatekeepers for music.² YouTube has over 80 million music subscribers. To avoid this obvious conflict they label "YouTube" as a video sharing site, deliberately ignoring one of the largest drivers of youtube traffic is music videos. Something which Google themselves advertise.³
If the EU cared about privacy and user harm they'd make the DMA protections apply to every business, not just big foreign ones.
Spotify's ads website actually brags about how it targets and tracks users and the various 3rd party data companies they partner with to extend that beyond Spotify.⁴
It's clear as day that the EU doesn't care about user harm or privacy, they just want that money for themselves. A view that is buttressed by what they're trying to do to encrypted chat communications.
¹ https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
² https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
³ https://www.youtube.com/trends/records/
⁴ https://ads.spotify.com/en-US/goals/audience-targeting/ https://ads.spotify.com/en-US/partner-directory/
If they truly cared about monopolies/duopolies, they'd target LVMH, Luxottica.
Here's the direct Twitter quote from Thierry Breton regarding the charge against Meta:
The #DMA is here to give back users the power to decide over their #data #Meta has forced millions of users across EU into a binary choice : “pay or consent”. In our preliminary conclusion this is a breach of the DMA. Today we take an important step to ensure Meta complies.
https://x.com/ThierryBreton/status/1807715743129043342
Meanwhile Spotify, all data brokers and any other non-DMA'd companies can take and exchange private user data. I believe the rule should apply to all companies because I don't see the point of "protecting" users from a handful of companies when that is a drop in the ocean of data collectors.
He also makes strange bed fellows, such as frequently advocating for Fortnite, the game title which the FTC found to be deliberately tricking children into unwanted purchases, then killing their Fornite accounts in retaliation should they obtain a refund.¹
https://x.com/ThierryBreton/status/1766167580497117464
¹ https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/... Note this fine is finalised because Epic didn't challenge the FTC's claims.
When 10% of global revenue is on the line it makes adequate sense to tread carefully with EU releases until there is some legal precedent. (And 20% if the EU finds that compliance isn't being met.)
Margrethe Vestager has stated that withholding features is proof of anti-competitive behaviour. Such a statement would be hilarious if it wasn't so obviously preordained, and patently tone-deaf from the consequences of her own statements.
So what's the end game for the EU? In theory this should allow local and small competitors to fill the void since they're not beholden to the DMA. My expectation is that it'll just be the EU perpetually several steps behind the rest of the world and some types of tech involvement only available via US-based purchases/import basis.
¹ Margrethe Vestager: "I would like to have a Facebook in which I pay a fee each month, but I would have no tracking and advertising and the full benefits of privacy." https://www.euractiv.com/section/competition/interview/vesta...
² Facebook and Instagram’s ‘pay or consent’ ad model violates the DMA, says the EU https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/1/24189796/eu-meta-dma-viola...
Good luck with that, we don't care for your "intelligence".
„We & our 735 technology partners ask you to consent to the use of cookies to store and access personal data on your device.“
> There appears to be a technical issue with your browser
> This issue is preventing our website from loading properly. Please review the following troubleshooting tips or contact us at support@foreignpolicy.com.
I had to disable Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection in order to proceed. This is the first time since that feature was rolled out that I've had to remember where they put that disable switch.
EDIT: This isn't just a generic error handler, there's a specific piece of code that detects if their analytics provider loaded or not and shows that message if it didn't load. More details here:
// The tinypass.min.js script was blocked due to a browser content filter
console.log('Piano Script was blocked');
// Show error modal to user
FP.Utils.Piano.showBrowserCompatibilityErrorModal();
Link to the source: https://foreignpolicy.com/_static/??-eJy1lNtuwjAMhl9oIYCQGBf...
There are a lot of websites that make your phone boil in your hand with the amount of trackers, js and other crap
Yes the cookie banners are annoying. But not more than the sign up ones, the maling list ones, the "Summer sale" ones, etc
They do need to ask for cookies meant to siphon off people's data for all other purposes.
our colleagues in the US and China are chuckling, so we'll just move our science there.
Pretty much only thing Europe is consistently producing nowadays is new legislations (EU and national, which are enforced incoherently and at the times contradictory)
The thing is, the tech business is uniquely conducive to generating monopolies, for a handful of reasons. The biggest being we're a copyright industry. Congress made the mistake of putting software under the same legal framework as Mickey Mouse, so the monopoly tech companies have over interoperability is government granted, has little bounds on its power, and lasts forever. And when tech and creative industries got together to enforce those legal rights through software, we got DMCA 1201, an awful law that gives anyone with a valid copyright veto rights over technological progress. The only way you get shit done in the tech industry is to get acquired so that you have enough market power to license and collaborate.
Outside of copyright we have online services firms like Google and Facebook, who operate primarily through surveillance capitalism. In prior media landscapes, if you wanted to sell to New York Times readers, you had to buy inventory in the Times. Today, you ask Google and Facebook to put ads on anyone who went on nytimes.com in the past week, which is just as lucrative for the ad buyer but Google and Facebook can pay the other sites less than what an actual NYT ad would command. Targeted advertising moves money away from a diverse and distributed group of publishers towards a pair of ad networks who know exactly everything about everyone at all times.
Facebook absolutely could be 'paid for' through nontargeted ads, but it makes Facebook a far less valuable business if they can't siphon data off you and sell it to other companies. Hell, Apple already proved this: iOS 14 moved ad tracking to opt-in[0], so nobody opted in, and Facebook had a revenue hit.
Europe is not inhospitable to tech, but it is inhospitable to tech monopolization, which is predominantly how American firms operate. And to be honest, I don't think Europe is wrong to do this. In fact, I want America's government to start doing the same thing. I want a government that acts less like a rubber stamp for a handful of megacorporations and more like the villains in an Ayn Rand novel.
Do you want to see what the alternative is? Simple: the end of democracy. Trump was just a preview. Democracy is not a given, it requires distributed political power, which requires distributed wealth and economic power. If a handful of firms can centralize economic power to themselves, then they become the economy, and they can start pulling the strings politically. We already saw this with oil in the 70s, but basically every American industry works this way. The only vestige of democracy left is that sometimes industries have conflicting economic interests and that sometimes the working class hurls an orange brick through everyone's windows.
[0] Unless you're Apple, who can still track you. Related note: Google is basically being forced to keep third-party cookies in Chrome because they dragged their feet on removing them for far too long.
Or consider the recent charges the EU levied against X. Under Elon Musk’s ownership, anyone can now purchase a blue check with a paid subscription, whereas blue checks were previously reserved for notable figures. EU regulators singled out the new system for blue checks as a deceptive business practice that violates the bloc’s Digital Services Act.
What are they thinking?? The blue check mark is supposed to mean verified. They changed it to simply mean paid subscription. They took a symbol of trust and utterly ripped out the trust part. I don't care how much you publicize it, that's not acceptable.
Would he be ok with my going and purchasing a SSL certificate for www.x.com???
The new X Community Notes system is far superior for establishing trust.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/biden-clai...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-22/elon-m...
Fundamentally just because a software feature worked a certain way at one time doesn't create an obligation for tech companies to keep it working the same way. Whether you consider that acceptable is entirely irrelevant.
There are always going to be misinformation. It's crazy to think a company or any committee can determine these for us though. It's not even logical yet alone practical. then you need to determine whether said entity made any judgment errors in assessing a person or claim. Those who demand centralized 'truth' authorities are useful idiots for power seeking authoritarians.
So? The point of the old blue checkmark wasn't to assure me that what the account said was true. It was to provide some assurance that the account was really the account of the prominent or notable person with that name.
As someone described it: You know that https://www.satan.com is actually Satan but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to sell your soul there.
You need to rethink what was being implied. Twitter CAN assess whether or not you can trust that the person that owns the account is who they say they are. That's what the blue checkmark was. It was NOT implying that the person was trustworthy.
Throw out bozo too for the win-win...
So among non-EU-dwellers, let’s raise a glass to our fallen competitors and erstwhile comrades. Better than Nordstreaming them, or at least more subtle. Onward, toward a new vassal-state future!
edit: It appears that EU subjects are distraught, or the topic is too raw. Let me know!