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Comment by aranelsurion | Hacker News Reader

I don't get this article.

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.

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A more practical example is that Facebook cannot promote its marketplace anymore. In Europe there are local alternatives for market places that get disadvantaged.

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.

This is not always good for the end user. Now I have to go to google maps manually because it’s most of the time no longer integrated with google search

what exactly prevents them from giving me a dropdown with links to apple maps, kagi maps, bing maps and google maps and my choice gets saved to my google account as the default? Instead all they show me is a useless javascript map which is still google maps but I cant do anything useful on it and it's super frustrating trying to get to a map for a place search

To play devils advocate - it costs money to integrate with all the competing map providers and to display them properly on the site. You could think of a plug in approach where map providers integrate themselves, still someone needs to maintain that plug in infra. Nothing is free.

And it’s the same story for any kind of service that’s subject to DMA.

Yes but this is a multi billion dollar company and the base integration could be as simple as opening the link and it doesn't even have to link to the correct place. They can have the ui make clear that it's a generic link to another map site. Although I just figured out how to link to something with a query text on bing in a minute: https://www.bing.com/maps?q=USA The exact same thing works on kagi.com/maps btw. So I don't think that this is too much to ask for, I rather think that they are trying to create pressure on the EU.

> it doesn't even have to link to the correct place.

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.

They already commit a DMA violation by showing any google map at all then. It's not rocket science to conform to the spirit of the law, if they offer a simple API for other map providers to provide their own strings to google it will be solved in a day. They clearly just don't want to actually advertise other mapping providers for free which is something I understand fully btw. But the way they are currently doing it is actively hurting them because I hate how I can't jump to any map from the searc results now.

Google does a million things that cost money, every day. But this particular thing costing money is a problem. How about no.

If you do all the things that cost money, you can suddenly find yourself not being the big company anymore.

They don't want to link to their competition, so they'd rather not link to their own service and if users complain they tell them to complain to the EU.

That's Google's fault. They could offer an api for other map providers to be displayed.

Typical US centric reporting. “EU tech market” == US companies’ ability to make a profit in EU

It seems to hinge on extrapolating from Apple not doing AI in the EU that NVidia might leave the market, harming Mistral.

Why would Nvidia leave the market?

Unspecified future boogeyman AI regulations. Or antitrust which Nvidia is already being investigated for.

Realistically Nvidia did not leave China and they will not leave Europe.

which doesn't make any sense, b/c afaik almost here AI regulations impact usage etc, not chip makers.

Some people are calling for GPUs to be nerfed but that's fringe at this point. If you wanted to create the most extreme strawman of EU regulation possible... maybe that's one example you'd come up with.

Even with nerfed gpus why would nvidia leave? I mean they sell lots of nerfed gpus to china

Beats me, and the article also doesn't back that up at all, other than that Apple skipped a feature in the EU.

CUDA being viewed as anticompetitive by French regulators (source: the article).

CUDA is also viewed as anticompetitive by HN. Lots and lots of discussion about Nvidia's moat and how AMD could or can't break in. It's just here in the thread about regulation that some people suddenly forget.

Who said AMD couldn't break in? As far as I know, the HN consensus is that they never bothered to try.

You seem to have confused "tech market" with "tech industry".

IDK, are local products and products from elsewhere other than US are not meant when one says "european tech market"?

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.

The market is defined by the buyers, not the sellers.

Same. I didn't see any explanation or example about "poorly designed" or "leave". And yes Vision Pro is completely irrelevant and very confusing. To me the entire article is just a well-formatted rant adapted from a random reddit post.

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