Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

EU isn't ever going to have its own "tech" industry as long as US has full access to EU markets and IMHO the ChatControl thing is totally unrelated.

Anyone who has a "tech" industry besides US has it thanks to trade barriers and embargoes because otherwise doesn't make sense to have it. The product doesn't have a considerable marginal cost to distribute, doesn't make sense to have it made in more than one place. 50 US states don't have EU regulations and yet everything is still happening in SV only, the rest of the "tech" in US is about as developed as in the rest of the world and they all feed into SV one way or another. Also, there's no way for competition as the capital in US(which can come from Europe, Arabs etc. too) can provide the services at loss for 10-20 years until drives everyone out of business.

EU tried to be open for business and have sovereignty through things like privacy and data control laws but the end result was that whoever is worth their salt goes to SV and sell it in EU from there and when tangental industries like VW or Mercedes need top talent for their software there's no one left or those who are still in EU are not doing things that transfers well into their niche.

ChatControl, IMHO is just some career move of some politicians from the ultra low corruption small northern countries where people trust the government way too much. They appear to believe that they can solve some issues with it. Not that different from all the governments who want control and each one wants as much control as possible.

I think the age control attempts are much more interesting and consequential. Why? Because bots don't have age. If implemented in a way that preserves anonymity while ensuring that the things are written by a real person(or at least has someone responsible for it even if its AI written) it can actually solve the bot problem and social manipulation problems like people from other countries pushing an agenda that doesn't actually have organic roots in the society.

Anyway, the issues are real and the risk are real and I think its a good idea to seek methods to mitigate the risks while keeping in mind that even if you currently like the government in few years the people who you don't like might be in power so, be careful.

>I think the age control attempts are much more interesting and consequential.

Exactly. The age verification and the "human identification" problem are the same problem. Anyone who thinks this tech/policy ends with identifying 16-year olds is out of their depth. Everyone, including governments and adtech firms, is planning for a world post-AI whether they're smart enough to realize it or not. I'm just worried about the details of that world.

>EU isn't ever going to have its own "tech" industry as long as US has full access to EU markets and IMHO the ChatControl thing is totally unrelated.

It's even simpler - EU does not foster any form of framework for growing any industry, they incentivize things that were already successful elsewhere and were found necessary to have in EU. It's all top-down in form of EU grants/benefits/whatevers.

And even then - those grants are are tied up with basically pre-planned prince2 style project management that makes deviating from them hard, and sometimes impossible. Purchases have to be pre-planned, for almost anything.

>ChatControl, IMHO is just some career move of some politicians from the ultra low corruption small northern countries where people trust the government way too much. They appear to believe that they can solve some issues with it. Not that different from all the governments who want control and each one wants as much control as possible.

Yes but no - it comes from Denmark, which has a lot of issues with overstepping legal bounds when it comes to data gathering and privacy. It seems more like attempt to legalize those using excuse of "EU forced us to adopt it :)".

>I think the age control attempts are much more interesting and consequential. Why? Because bots don't have age. If implemented in a way that preserves anonymity while ensuring that the things are written by a real person(or at least has someone responsible for it even if its AI written) it can actually solve the bot problem and social manipulation problems like people from other countries pushing an agenda that doesn't actually have organic roots in the society.

I think it's quite the opposite - identity fraud will become more profitable, while "open" internet will be infantilized into child-safe zone. Full of bots, but now any real form of communication will have your full doxx attached to it - doesn't matter if visible or not, just possiblity of it is enough. You will self censor yourself just in case.

Also all of those systems do not preserve anonymity, and basically are another mass surveillance tool.

It is just another step towards ChatControl, one surveils, other forces self-censorship.

While reverse would make sense - make children only internet that's actively monitored, accessible only via government issued smartcard/e-sim/thingy, while leaving it up to parents if their child should or should not access real internet.

EU doesn't have top down control, in fact EU has very little control over anything and that's why its ineffective in its current form despite having enormous wealth as a block. All these initiative this initiative that are, IMHO, just political FOMO and I don't expect them to amount to much.

EU doesn't have the capacity to plan stuff, even under grave danger from the war in Ukraine EU barely coordinates building some bombs. EU is able to bite only when each country is coordinated well enough to implement some laws, i.e. GDPR thing bites through the regulators of each country and not through EU. If EU eventually becomes a state then thing can change but thats not the case at the moment.

EU is not a communist state and doesn't have a top down planning, its a coordination centre for 27 free market countries and its up to the EU capitalist and engineers to come up with technology and investment. They actually do, that's why EU is huge exporter of stuff. Believe it or not, there's more in this world than coding, there are all kinds of engineers that deal with atoms and electricity. However the "tech" doesn't flourish in Europe because doesn't make economic sense. US has full access to EU markets, they already have the know how and capital concentration, so why bother to re-invent the wheel in EU? Just go do it in US or do work for the US companies cementing their position even further.

US can afford not to have much regulations over the "tech" because they have the HQs and all the important people in SV. The moment some company that's not from US becomes big they take it down. TikTok for example, they forced a sale to fking Oracle, US doesn't allow foreign communications on its land. Its a semi-open knowledge that US government is working with those "tech" companies to control its own population and interests.

I don't know, if the US way of doing this is the better one, maybe EU should just force all the US "tech" companies to sell to EU owners just like with TikTok. Then get rid of all these regulations and just summon the local people when things go bad, like the "wrong" ideas spread like the way it happened on TikTik with Israel-Palestine conflict. The US way is like, oh you are not cooperating and not pushing the right agenda? Oh that's fine but too bad the new employment rules will hurt you and you can forget about this datacenter permit thing.

I'm not saying they have top-down control.

I'm saying they are trying top-down initiatives - the difference is subtle but important.

This is about attitude and how attempts are made - not how successful they are at it. This isn't central planning - this is just plan ineptitude that's sabotaged by inter-country conflicts of interests, with extremely bloated beaurocracy - sometimes just to have enough representation from each party.

EU is stuck between worst of both worlds, and i don't see anything changing for better in here without a shift - either towards more looser union akin to trade union(original idea) or a federation.

They aren't try, they don't have tools to even try doing these things. But I agree, it needs to shift to a new format. Ideally federation because as we see with Greenland and Switzerland being a small independent country comes with significant risks in this new world order.

Personally i would prefer trade union, as EU countries have shown themselves already incapable of offering support in case of any real threat due to conflicting interests, and federation would most likely end up being run by Germany/France duopoly.

also look at energy and AI initiatives for examples of top down initiatives.

In most non-western EU countries the only realistic way to get a tech startup going is via EU grant process which is extremely top down with keywords they want for specific year, and basically prevents any form of pivoting as a business.

It's not some top brass of party, soviet style, making top-down decisions. Its the whole system that's designed to operate that way - bureaucrats here and there incentivized to do so, committee here and there setting up guidelines for results.

what they should do is to setup a framework in which results emerge.

Whatever it becomes, IMHO it needs to have much more clear set of responsibilities and adequate tools to fulfill those duties.

Currently everything is too patchy, the currency the passport the agencies like ESA, the trade barriers within itself - everything needs a re-do in the integration or scaling down the scope.

Coordination center? We have hundreds of unelected people who make rules for countries to determine what they must do, and if not, they need to suck it up and pay huge fines.

How is that a coordinator?

Can you vote for the EU government? You can only vote for the EU parliament, a bunch of relatively useless people.

The real power, the EU commission, is a delegation of a delegation of a delegation of Democracy.

> "Why bother and reinventing the wheel?"

Because these are strategic technologies. You can minimize or criticize it all you want, but look at how Amazon has changed entirely the way e-commerce is done. Without even mentioning AWS or similar.

Oh really the same usual bullshit about EU? Can you tell me who is voting for a French or UK prime minister or a German chancellor? Who is voting for the federal council member in Switzerland? Yeah all this countries are governed by unelected people like the EU… EU commission is confirmed by the EU parliament in the same as most of the executive of the EU countries.

Uh?

In Germany people vote for the parties, and then the Bundespresident "randomly" picks the chancellor: the person that throughout the campaign/pre-election period mentioned everywhere on tv and in the news "I want to be the chancellor, because ...". At the same time, it's (again) "randomly" the person belonging to the party who won with the most votes.

Then the Bundestag has to assess whether the President chose really properly and randomly this person: was it actually the person who belongs to the party who won the most votes and that said throughout the campaign "I want to be the chancellor" or did the President play a trick on us? Most of the times, they are indeed the person that screamed the loudest throughout the campaign. So it matches. AFAIK it never happened that the President actually randomly picked someone else.

Literally everyone knows who is the "chancellor candidate" in case their party reaches the majority. OK, the President could play a trick, but concretely this never happens, so it's good enough for most people.

Now, go and tell the people who voted for CSU / Weber Spitzenkandidat and got Von Der Leyen instead ;)

The EU certainly has some too indirectly elected politicians with too much power (the damn EU commission!) doing too little of what citizens want and too much of what they (or their... sponsors) want.

> EU does not foster any form of framework for growing any industry

You are right. Pharma, automotive, financial in EU all come from the US. Companies like Nokia, Siemens, Bosch, BMW... all american names.

All those industries were fostered by individual countries with little-to-no transnational support from the EU.

On top of that, traditional European industries like Automotive have not kept up with challengers, the financial industry across Europe itself is morose in comparison to similar markets in the US or China, and European Pharma itself is overwhelmingly clustered in Switzerland which is not an EU member.

Nokia itself was at the brink of collapse in the early 2010s, and Siemens and Bosch have faced increasing stress at the bottom market from Chinese players and at the upper market by American players, plus states like the US and India required significant firewalls between those companies operations in their countries and Europe.

Long story short, while individual European states may have been able to build innovative companies, that muscle has largely atrophied over the past 20 years.

Why would politicians do any of that? Did United States House of Representatives invent anything?

All these EU companies are all private enterprises and they are %100 from a country in EU because there's no such thing as EU as a country, EU doesn't have companies(beyond entities created to fulfill certain functions). This too may change soon because they are looking into introducing a 28th regime which would be like virtual EU member.

I think there's huge confusion on what is EU.

BTW, EU has roots in "European Coal and Steel Community" and role in forming the Airbus but even in these ase it was just a facilitator.

All these expectation that are based on imaginary things(don't take it personally please, I see these things all the time) shows that EU desperately needs to become a country by its own right. Its so confusing to understand what EU can and can't do, what organization is under EU control and how much.

> Why would politicians do any of that? Did United States House of Representatives invent anything?

Most industries in the US developed due to state and federal government subsidizes and industrial strategy.

You can see this with the development of semiconductor clusters in Oregon, Arizona, and New York in the 1990s-2010s because of state level industrial policy, the development of the telecom hub in Dallas TX in the 90s becuase of Texas's state level industrial policy to leverage the telco boom, and historically Michigan and now South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and TN's industrial policy for automotive manufacturing.

Furthermore, this ignores the impact that the IRA and IIJA subsidizes and investment promotion had in bringing European manufacturing industries to the US at the expense of their European operations - so much so that both France and Germany lobbied at all levels of the US during the Biden admin to try and kneecap the policy.

> All these EU companies are all private enterprises and they are %100 from a country

Absolutely, as are companies in the US yet our states have been open to leveraging industrial policy where possible in order to attract and retain investments.

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I am under no illusion that the EU is a country. Heck, if you re-read my initial comment that is my point.

I know that it is Germany, France, Netherlands, etc who are setting policies, but the EU at a macro-level can help solve the coordination problem that exists amongst individual EU member states to develop industrious policies.

That said the current status quo needs to end - either member states need to admit the EU as a central body is powerless and return to the pre-2000s vision of the European Union, or admit that a unified Europe is ideal and centralize.

The current status quo is the worst of both worlds, because the delimitation of power is wonky, and leads to nation state-EU clashes.

> either member states need to admit the EU as a central body is powerless and return to the pre-2000s vision of the European Union,

Which is what's happening.

This is purely self inflicted BS that we accumulated for roughly 30 years now by making it increasingly harder to say no to things we don't all agree with. Even with all the opt-outs possible, countries still have to follow strict rules to avoid huge fines as a punishment, when they all they ever wanted was free trading and movement between countries. That was pretty much it. I agree you need a coordinator for certain subjects, but that's far away from what we have today.

You cannot have free trade without a common legal framework otherwise countries will just drop all norms to compete. If you think that you can have fred trade in Europe without this legal alignment I have a bridge to sell you.

Nope. Don't get the economical aspects mixed up with the political ones.

EU (or EEC) up until the 1992 Maastricht treaty was exactly what people wanted/countries needed: free trade / movement of goods etc.

In 1992 the good and bad of what we see today began.

> shows that EU desperately needs to become a country by its own right

And what will be the language spoken in this country? German, I guess, of French? Or English, ironically the language of the only country who left EU? And most importantly of all, what about taxes? That's another EU war right there.

More than a country by its own right, we need less regulations, more freedom of trading, but that's pretty much it. Leave it to the countries to innovate and how. Some regulations are not bad, like the USB stuff, but countries should be free to choose how to do things, without committing to either long term nonsense goals nor to force some countries to accept some things their people don't agree with - in the name of xyz.

EU as a single country means not understanding a single bit of our EU history, of what makes us Europeans, rather than Americans, Indians or Chinese.

Oh really Ireland is not a member?

I forgot they speak English there.

Intuitively it's easier to think it was "due to" England, but you're right.

> And what will be the language spoken in this country?

Why does that matter? There are multiple countries in the world that have more than one official language. With AI translation having multiple languages in one country is a lower barrier than ever.

Pharma is miles behind US,

Financial central was mostly London due to favorable local laws.

Nokia fills very small niche now, basically services backbone

Bosch and Siemens predate EU

BWM also, but i wouldn't put it at forefront of innovation with how automotive industry is going.

did you notice that not even a single company you've mentioned is something new, and all of them basically come from "western" side of EU or are already established industries sometimes predating WW1?

You:

> EU does not foster any form of framework for growing any industry

Also you:

> did you notice that not even a single company you've mentioned is something new

K, but that was not your point since they did indeed "grow as an industry". Aren't you saying that auotomotive hasn't grown as an industry in the EU, I hope. Also,

> Pharma is miles behind US,

Source?

> Financial central was mostly London due to favorable local laws.

You mean like Paribas, MPS, Allianz... none of which are in the UK?

You are wrong in few ways, ie pharma - check where your ozempic comes from, that mostly US money has become a significant factor in Denmark's economy.

I get it, its easy to throw various statements around to feel oneself' good, but can you please back them up with some hard facts to have a healthy discussion? This site strives for a better behavior.

Some pharma companies in the EU come up sometimes with good ideas (famously BioNTech), but it's the US and its money, building on that or just simply coming on top in most cases and ripping off the benefits. But let's not forget, that like for BMW or Bosch or others, the EU pharma companies that are somewhat competitive with the US companies are companies which exist for decades ...

Americans really believe in this stuff ha, comedians on TikTok weren't exaggerating when they talk about how they used to believe that US invented everything, has everything and the rest of the world live around dirt roads. Amazing.

Anyway, BMW and Bosch is also American because they make their money by selling to Americans. Don't let anybody say its not true.

> Pharma is miles behind US

Ozempic was invented by a Danish company, Novo Nordisk. Only recently did Eli Lilly, an American company, catch up.

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