It's not about antitrust. It's about national security.
2,750 karma · joined September 29, 2021
The Chinese government, while not openly supporting Russia, has been repeatedly accused of covertly doing so. Imagine what kind of harm a device used for reconnaissance could do if it secretly works for the other side.
This is why other countries legally cap election campaign spending.
On a related note, Vienna has been leading Global Quality of Life rankings for years.
See also this short documentary about what that looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxuACFQBwxs
Long story short, yes, a lot of people here do. It's the temporarily embarrassed millionaire syndrome that drives a lot of American politics, but in a tech context.
They believe that one day, they could be the lunatics running the mega corporation and exploiting users, and when that day comes, they don't want the EU to stand in their way.
Apple has become the IBM in their famous 1984 ad. "A garden of pure ideology", indeed.
I used to pay for Netflix and Prime. It keeps getting more fragmented, more expensive and more shittified.
Like Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. I'm willing to pay a reasonable monthly fee for a good service. Unfortunately the only ones providing that are pirates.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/24/yanis-varoufak...
> “Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook,” he writes. “You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”
> It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs”, so lacking in class consciousness that we don’t even realise that the tweeting and posting that we’re doing is actually building value in these companies.