893 karma · joined January 26, 2018
It's a story about unsavory government behavior going unchecked not about private industry achievement.
Much like #deleteuber this #deletefacebook tantrum is about Trump. Facebook was roundly lauded for helping Obama get elected.
That aside: Ireland has a lower corporate tax rate than say france, so for example a soap company based in ireland doing business in france pays the irish corporate tax rate, it's not illegal and they're not part of the "mafia", now the EU is saying that soap companies will have to pay 3% tax on soap sold in france (in addition to VAT) further still they have no problem with non soap companies and that it's a coincidence that most soap companies affected come from the same country.
Not to mention that taxing specific companies that happen to come from the same country while the keeping the tax rules unchanged for the rest of the economy isn't fair or free trade and would justifiably require retaliation.
They don't like it.
After so many targeted requirements, restrictions, investigations, fines, and taxes no one's really buying that denial.
It's tariff by other name, which lends credence to Trump's rhetoric about how we haven't been treated fairly by our so called allies.
EU governance and enforcement lends itself to be hijacked by the bloc's most powerful members (france and germany, in this particular case the french) and use them as a cudgel against perceived business threats.
The larger point is that China is practicing extreme protectionism while benefitting greatly from free trade.
They don't even brother with tariffs they prohibit all competition and coerce rivals to hand over the fruits of their research. It's diabolical.
The fact that none of that triggered WTO action points to just how broken that organization is.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-qualcomm-m-a-broadcom/sin...
And will Intel buy any of the companies involved?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/intel-considers-possible-bid-fo...
People will choose what to ultimately watch and spent their time on, this insistence on shielding and infantilizing the general public is patronising, not to mention that there are no studies that would indicate any of the content is changing anyone's opinion, the few scientific studies on this "fake news" scare would suggest that mainstream outlets were and are the shapers of public opinion e.g. https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud
The attacks on youtube are especially alarming with the scope of the censorship demands ever increasing with every new feature being blamed, first it was about running ads on obscure videos and the channels of "controversial" personalities and now they demand that the viewer not be suggested content that the author thinks is objectionable as though they are forces to watch it "A Clockwork Orange" style. I'm old enough to remember when this author and her peers were defending web firms against censorship attempts by governments around the world.
Everyone has a job to do, and I'm sure that some sort of a bug tracker is attainable for everyone by now, it's not a company DNA thing, you allocate enough resources to something then you can adequately support it.
It's not a "culture", you either hire a bunch of people or delegate to a contractor or outsource the whole thing, it's not this fundamental thing.
I pay for G suite their customer service is fine.
That aside, so what if “fiction was outperforming reality”? it’s a marketplace of ideas and people choose to spend their time watching what they may, stop infantilizing them.
I realise that the media has been under “attack” lately (if you really consider name calling as serious attack) but they would benefit from some introspection, not only are they scapegoating social media and calling for it to be regulated - freedom of speech be damned - they also keep advancing the invented notion of a “backlash against tech firms” projecting their own aversions onto the rest of the world.
See: no real evidence of any such backlash:
It's the "Wall Street Journal", a Murdoch business publication that approves of every business as long as it isn't Google.
1) Some of the ideas in there are welcome.
2) When you put roadblocks in front of every data point it's difficult to develop a half decent pattern matching system. A consent prompt upon joining ought to suffice.
> technology companies are only suffering because in the past they have collected personal data indiscriminately on the basis that it might be useful some day
Perhaps, but the "might be useful someday" part is a route for many an innovation that I want to preserve.
That seems like a disingenuous question, the companies that are mainly impacted by these laws are US companies. It might theoretically apply to all companies but in reality they had a handful of US companies in mind when they wrote theses regulations.
As for the impeded innovation question, yes I feel that something is lost when a "cool" and useful feature is prevented from materializing.
>Among their provisions, the rules enshrine the so-called right to be forgotten into European law
Codifying a terrible ruling into law.
>The rules also require anyone under 16 to obtain parental consent before using popular digital services
It's like COPA but at least an order of magnitude worse.
>... the company unveiled a program that uses artificial intelligence to monitor Facebook users for signs of self-harm. But it did not open the program to users in Europe... The social network has also kept out of Europe facial recognition software that tracks when photos of users are posted across the platform.*
It hinders innovation, and these examples are probably the least of it.
It is very much apparent that these rules were meant for US companies but they will very likely hinder the growth and even the formation of smaller companies that in turn will have to dedicate non trivial resources to insure compliance. Inadvertently or not the EU have introduced a huge barrier to entry.
Why does everyone has to be an activist? On either side.
This is all counter productive, and I think that trying to create chaos and damage your employer is the most disturbing part.