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Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

If we’re talking about a reset, then the EU should ban Google/Apple/Amazon/Huawei/Xiaomi/Meta/etc products and services in their entirety, and finance/incentivize local companies to provide replacements.

As a EU citizen I don’t see why those companies should have the disproportionate amount of control and oversight in our daily lives they have today while our bureaucracies are stuck in a constant game of cat and mouse against them, as they have proven countless times they see EU regulation as hurdles to be worked around rather than fundamental rules to play by.

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We need that reset in America too. These companies are too big and powerful. There is no fair free market with them just due to their size. Let alone anti competitive actions or lobbying or regulatory capture.

Can we get a reset on the state actors while we're at it? Because I'm sure there are a number of countries who can't infiltrate 2025 FAANG, but could infiltrate 2015 FAANG, and any start-up is going to be dealing with scaling and will have vulnerabilities that rhyme with 2015 FAANG.

Is that realistic? Or would the pain of that be high enough to cause a revolt against the law to allow people’s beloved phone OSes back?

I’m not arguing the status who is good, more “is it too late to fix?”

"The biggest startup ideas are terrifying. And not just because they'd be a lot of work. The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you'd have enough ambition to carry them through [...] The best ideas are just on the right side of impossible."

https://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

>Or would the pain of that be high enough to cause a revolt against the law to allow people’s beloved phone OSes back?

Nobody that is not a developer loves an OS, and there's a large subset of developers who don't even care that much.

Have you talked to many apple users?

I can’t imagine anyone in my environment becoming really angry over this. Some of them would have to find new time sinks though—-hopefully ones that actually benefit them instead of turning them into commodities.

If the one thing people revolt over is those companies, that consumerism, then our civilization is dead and it is not worth to save it.

Yes. But that would happen, just need to check Nepal

I think that's quite an unfair misrepresentation of what happened in Nepal which had many confounding factors and was years in the making. The narrative that it was "just gen z wanting their apps" only serves the purposes of the old regime.

this can be said about any revolt against any government. It is not a coincidence that there are riots when governments try to regulate apps.

Can that not be said of any revolt?

That is a very strange way of looking at things. Should people not get upset at their desires being interfered with based upon some arrogant busybody's concept of the ideal? For the crime of being liked by too many people?

Frankly declaring a civilization dead over not doing what you want sounds very much like an egocentric "elite tantrum". Like all of the arrogants who think that they can know the best interests of others better than them in spite of the fact that every time that has tried it just amounts to an unaccountable autocracy. After all the nobility were supposed to 'know better' for the peasantry and represent them.

It's always too late to fix and too big to fail until it happens and everyone sees it's not that bad.

China is doing it. Huawei now has its own proper OS (and no, it is not Linux. Lookup HarmonyOS Next). I played with the laptop a bit a couple months ago. It is very basic but it has a functioning browser and some really neat features.

Realistically they are not irreplaceable. They provide convenience for coordination of some stuff but a company that would be able to sell smartphones at scale with an alternative OS could get there pretty fast. All the very useful apps are some sort of marketplace/coordinating software (with an identity/messaging system) that already has a web version anyway.

The major issue is the massive web index since that would take a lot of capital and time to recreate but there are already various alternatives that could get better with use. For the commercial web it doesn't matter as much since it's always evolving anyway and every big website already has its own search engine. Would be inconvenient at first but not something that would affect people's lives as drastically as tech people like to think.

Ironically the main examples are places like Russia and China who built their own local versions of everything.

Look at the reaction to "cookie dialogs" which are the companies trying to toe the line as close as possible on compliance (and arguably often over it) at the expense of UX. Banning Android and iOS would absolutely trigger a much stronger reaction and would seem to me to be away to torpedo any regulation by including it such a requirement

> finance/incentivize local companies to provide replacements

The EU has been trying to do that for as long as I can remember and they have little to show for it. What reason is there to believe this will suddenly produce useful results?

First time I hear about this funding. Where can I apply?

It depends. How big and politically connected are you?

Can you just link the tenders/funding if it exists?

Is this deflection?

> How big and politically connected are you?

I’m not allowed to divulge that information. Can you tell me where to apply?

I only know of one project which is reserved for free software, it's NGI0 <https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/>, which is going to be cut in 2027 <https://edri.org/our-work/european-commission-cuts-funding-s...>.

However, most other EU programmes do allow and even claim to encourage free software companies to apply.

There are many EU citizens who don't hold your opinion. Are they allowed to do business with the these entities on their own terms? Why can't you just de-google and de-apple and de-meta and let other people make their own decisions?

Sure they can, by setting up a VPN. The same kind of software-config friction people have to overcome to avoid the anticompetitive megacorpos. I'd say it's sensible to have the default lazy option land somewhere in the middle rather than completely lopsided against users.

They should at a minimum tax these services like goods. They’re mining our attention and extracting insane profits and pay nothing for it.

You are proposing that every citizen decides which laws apply to them and which not?

> finance/incentivize local companies to provide replacements

No thanks, just fund local-only and self-hosted open source instead.

100%. Europe could suddenly be a leader and the sacrifice is just giving up technologies that are making us sick

How do you think Google Calendar or Google Sheets or Google Keep are making you sick?

Keeping you locked in an ecosystem that is so much more than those singular examples.

How exactly do you expect to sell it internationally after banning all competition? Odds are very good that the world will flip you the bird too and ban your software in kind. These central planners as usual lack the empathy to be effective when dealing with their own economies, let alone international ones.

We keep on hearing those nationalism-protectionist rackets proposed as if that will produce something better than an also-ran reinventing the wheel. And expecting to sell internationally after denying the world the same chance? You aren't that special.

Saying that they need first for there to be no alternatives and then they will produce something better should raise some major red flags. You wouldn't accept an exclusivity contract of that nature with your grocery store but accepting it for your communications? Not to mention the real reason for such protectionism goes unspoken: more government spying and backdoors and more censorship and control. That was why China rolled their own.

> As a EU citizen I don’t see why those companies should have the disproportionate amount of control and oversight in our daily lives

Because they pay for it. Sincerely, the EC.

Yes. For all the things that get done in the name of "national security", this is the biggest threat to national security there is.

sucks that market forces doesn't allow a lone developer to be noticed against one of these companies because people refuse to spend time to try something new. as if time costs money. if we spend time on marketing we will be worse developers. then be surprised when one person takes down entire sector.

It's not just that: it's that the hyper platform companies have been allowed to turn {build a better X} into {build a better X + rebuild their entire platform/ecosystem}.

That's the real harm to competition, and why the Digital Markets Act is a great idea.

Fuck Google et al. maintaining their market hegemonies.

In order to build a better web browser, once should not also have to build a highly trafficked search engine AND a widely deployed mobile phone OS.

Yet that's exactly the situation that missing monopoly enforcement has allowed to come into being...

> If we’re talking about a reset, then the EU should ban Google/Apple/Amazon/Huawei/Xiaomi/Meta/etc products and services in their entirety, and finance/incentivize local companies to provide replacements.

I don't think you appreciate quite how much easier it is to write down rules and use your populace as economic hostages to get fines out of companies created in places with good economic policies, than it is to make your own stuff internally.

Trump seems to have figured that out with Tiktok at least...

Fair! And more seriously than the tiktok algorithm, there's a load of manufacturing work figured out in countries that the US is happy to apply sanctions to.

The same can be said about the EU bureaucracies, why do they have a disproportionate amount of control and oversight in daily lives of EU citizens?

We need a full reset from them. Countries should get their powers back. Take it back from the non elected EU bureaucrats.

There are some very worrisome things going on in the EU with Chat Control, Ministry of Truth, Digital ID Systems, and Central Bank Digital Currencies.

Each individual piece will be introduced to fix something or prevent something. But it is a slippery slope to also use it for something else, and more and more. Before we know it we will live in a continent that is ruled by an authoritarian mob like in China.

At least in the EU people have some kind of vote. But I can't vote for not having OneDrive my default saving space for documents.

macOS, chrome os, Debian, Ubuntu, red hat, nix, FreeBSD, openbsd, haiku os, react os, pop, etc etc etc.

In perhaps one of the weirder twists of fate you probably have more options for voting on where your documents get saved now than at any other time in computing history. And if you would respond that many of those aren’t viable alternatives to windows or incur massive switching costs, what about doing a “reset” / ban solves that problem?

This is the same as telling me, that I could just leave the EU and only have to never interact with them or one of its citizens to not be effected by their rules, and since travelling is easier then ever why wouldn't this be an easier option?

Sure it’s the same in that I’m telling you that you need to give up your existing lifestyle for a different one to get what you want.

But I would suggest that installing a new OS is vastly less complicated, less expensive, less disruptive and less fraught with life threatening peril than immigrating to an entirely new country and continent. And I’d wager you’re vastly more likely to get the results you want changing your OS than you are voting for a politician when you’re unhappy with the current state of things.

All true, and I would still have to deal with Office files. Wasn't it an EU regulation that forced Microsoft to make it's file format publicly accessible?

> macOS

you need special HW for this

> chrome os

i once searched for a download link

> red hat

I tought it costs money

> nix

"never heard about it" /s

> haiku os

does it run on x86 ?

You forgot plan9, Ilumnos and AIX. /s

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