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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

After living in the US for several years, I was happy to return to the EU where regulations exist to protect against the worst corporate behavior.

My American bank sold my credit card transactions to advertisers. My American mobile operator had insane fees for roaming and other features that are basic in Europe. Sending a bank transfer in America was unreliable and slow and expensive because there was nothing like SEPA instant 24/7 free transfer (I guess FedWire does that nowadays, I don’t know if consumers actually have guaranteed access at all banks like they do in EU).

When American AI companies become established Fortune 100 members, they’ll start abusing their customers just like all the others in that club, those banks and phone operators and Microsoft and the rest. Google once pretended to be different, now they have the corporate cancer. No reason to believe the same won’t happen to OpenAI and Anthropic.

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There is regulation that is effective and useful (e.g. plenty of consumer protection laws) and regulation that actually makes markets more competitive and efficient. Then there is a lot of what EU is doing which leads to less efficient markets and more stagnation.

Even a lot of their attempts to increase competitiveness like forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores have been halfassed and not very effective.

Oh one hand sure, on the other, moving fast and breaking things is exactly where the customer ends up footing the bill or suffering damages.

How exactly ?

We heard this since Uber days and all it did was break the old taxi systems and brought taxi service to a wider audience. As a consumer I benefited immensely from Uber.

Likewise for AirBnB and hotels.

Not saying that these don't have secondary effects on the society - but as a consumer they were and arguably still are pretty amazing.

You benefitted temporarily. Those offering the service are often worse off. Various regulatory bodies had to beat these companies into submission, that no, you cannot hire all your employees as contract workers and deprive them of their benefits. After the competition is murdered, they will raise their prices over and over again.

All these companies thrive on the externalization of costs and killing an economy to then use their monopoly position to maximize money extraction.

Airbnb maybe, in Europe booking.com seems to have better deals even if they offer similar service to Airbnb these days.

Uber and other ride sharing apps improved UX immensely and still are cheaper for consumers than regular taxes.

> their monopoly position to maximize money extraction.

Neither AirBnB or Uber are anywhere close to being monopolies aside from maybe a few markers that I'm not aware of.

> you cannot hire all your employees as contract workers and deprive them of their benefits

For employees yeah, pay and conditions are not great compared to normal taxi drivers OTH the demand is higher and there are more "jobs" on aggregate.

I think in this case, the contract workers are the ones taking the L, generally. Taxis are not overpriced just from a lack of competition, but because they are an actual full time job with all that comes along with it, and not well.. part time gamified bullshit where you fight for scraps.

Most of the does EU has Uber now, and Wolt and some others, so it's not like we avoided anything there in practice though.

> the contract workers are the ones taking the

True, OTH it's not obvious that these jobs would even exist in the first place without Uber/etc. since demand has certainly increased

Hi, fellow American here.

Me and quite a few others are getting real tired of the constant name-dropping of mega-corporations that do not care about your safety, health, or well-being. This does not resonate with anyone except a small circle of wealthy tech elitists.

If they can make a profit from those things, great, but they will also not hesitate to make a profit from your suffering as well. Ask the lung doctors of the people living next to xAI's data centers if their patients are better off than before.

Sure but it's not the government calling for regulation, it's Mistral. At times they seem like a government mouthpiece to check the waters, which I could accept if their models were at least any good

Did you miss the Anthropic and OpenAI blog posts screeching for regulation?

Yes, now that they are in place they want to put barriers for new entrants.

Didn't both Amodei and Altman called for regulation of open-weight models? Not that long ago on xitter....

They've both been insisting that humanity's survival is contingent on regulation since the start and employ armies of lobbyists to try to shape the policies they want that hold significant sway in their own country. But of course Americans doing this is smart and entrepreneurial...

Meh, OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the same. The US shtick is "our models are too powerful, government, please hold them back (and buy 10% of the company)".

Edit: forgot, they also call for banning Chinese models and open weights models...

Ah, "Americans are awful. Now we can be just awful"

> they also call for banning Chinese models and open weights models...

So I guess Anthropic called for banning Chinese models when they said "but let me state it clearly so that there is no doubt: Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models."? - [0]

May be they imply it? They work behind the scene for it? well, who knows. My guess is as good as yours. But since we're acting like a child, bending the truth is allowed?

By the way, China is decisive. They just banned outright Claude and Open AI. I guess no open arguments about regulation is good?

[0] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599059

> I would just ban US software companies like China did (I'd obviously also ban Chinese software companies, too). The resulting chaos would end up with some pretty solid EU software companies, the know how is there.

I'm all for following positive examples, as long as we keep democracy. We don't need to copy everything, just the good parts.

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