Specifically, this is another Parliament vs Commission issue. The Commission loves to have little deals away from the public where everything is quietly smoothed over, while the Parliament is trying to build popular legitimacy.
> Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly voiced his dissatisfaction and sought support from Trump, while Apple’s Tim Cook reportedly asked the White House to directly intervene against EU fines imposed on his company.
Apple even went so far as to demand the EU repeal these laws, and is likely still non-compliant in several ways; for which they should have been fined tens of billions of dollars by now!
> they should have been fined tens of billions of dollars by now!
Maybe cartoonishly large fines levied against powerful entities wasn’t such a great idea. Other incentives may have been better suited to getting the populace what they want in the long term.
>Maybe cartoonishly large fines levied against powerful entities
right, the tradition is that fines be cartoonishly small so that breaking the law can be factored into the cost of doing business, who the hell does the EU think they are to go against tradition!!?
I don't think there is an incentive lawmakers could offer that is worth more to Apple than monopolizing fees and subverting competition, there is practically no limits they will go to to preserve that status quo around the world.
The only time they have eagerly complied with anything relating to this is when Judge YGR gave them this ultimatum, they approved Fortnite a full day early once someone had to be personally responsible for defying her order a second time:
That seems like a better model than stupefying fines against the corporate entity then. Forget about billion dollar fines, just give them a slap on the wrist while telling them explicitly what they have to stop doing, but then if they keep doing it the executives are personally held in contempt.
It also solves the perverse incentive of "fine the foreign companies as a revenue generation method" because the result is getting them to comply instead of either repeatedly fining them for not doing it or trying to extract a fine so large it becomes an international political issue.
The EU should abandon the stupid Commission structure and have a real Parliament that can actually draft legislation. The current one can just vote down legislation drafted by the Commission.
What they ought to do is have a process for passing EU-wide laws where they get introduced by a popularly elected legislature but to be enacted they also have to be approved by the majority of the legislatures of the member states. That gives you a good check on centralized power grabs because the member states have to approve anything that could usurp their role, but you can still pass things that make sense at that level like a common set of antitrust rules.
The current system is new legislation has to be drafted by the Commission, which is the indirectly elected executive branch. That allows what would otherwise be popular proposals to never even be introduced. Whereas if you have legislation introduced by the directly elected body, popular proposals at least get a public debate and people get to see what they are and who is blocking them, but you still ultimately want the check on power grabs and populist nonsense before it actually gets enacted.
I'm mixed on this... the article itself is relatively one-sided... of course you negotiate among concerned parties when it comes down to laws regarding anything largely produced outside your nation's purview.
The EU can absolutely make all the invasive laws they want, the US has been happily doing the same... the individual EU nations and US states with more variations than practical on top of that. Age verification as a prominent example.
Concerned parties will of course try to leverage what they are able to.. if that is a prominent political figure, foreign or domestic, it happens. This can be good, bad or even very bad. While I can totally understand criticism at any level... US in EU politics, or UK trying to coerce entirely US companies with fines that don't apply to them.
The reality is negotiations happen all the time... you an accept/reject/renegotiate on every aspect of every topic.. and to some extent, make take it or leave it laws, where you are simply no longer a customer.
For example, really curious to see how the foreign router ban (US) is going to shake out. As long as my OpnSense box and commercial AP continue to work, I should be okay for now... but who knows.
The European Commission and Council are becoming increasingly unpopular among my peers. Sentiment towards the Parliament is generally still positive. But it's clear that two thirds of the Trilogue essentially don't give a shit about European people, their rights, their freedoms or their wellbeing. Things like Age Verification and Chat Control are going to blow up in their faces.
>"two thirds of the Trilogue essentially don't give a shit about European people, their rights, their freedoms or their wellbeing"
Every bureaucracy works for themselves eventually. The EU's main task is to make superstate they can control. Since they are trying to eliminate / reduce rights of member countries one can imagine what kind of concerns they have towards individual people and their freedom.
I don't buy the superstate argument, since the EC consistently avoids or waters down attempts towards federalisation (full fiscal union, directly elected Commission, Parliament with legislative initiative, yada yada). Making a superstate would constrain the Commission, not empower it. The current ambiguity of having enough integration to override member states, but not enough to be democratically challenged and kept in check is the sweet spot for unaccountable technocratic capture.
Don't get me wrong, I'm completely against the EC, but I wish they were actually trying to create a superstate
Because the commission is proposed by the national governments through the European council.
Meaning any attempt at making the commission directly elected reduces the national governments powers.
What you see isn’t the commission watering down the proposals, what you see is the natural tug of war between the national governments and the European Parliament.
The EU overall either will start acknowledging that there are problems and serious reforms are needed or history will repeat once again and we'll have another fallen empire situation.
It's not just the age verification and chat control - the list crimes is much longer and doesn't revolve solely around IT sector. The recent Mercosur agreement that just showed how the heads of EU pissed over its own agricultural sector.
Somehow, I'm afraid that we're already for at least 15 years on a path of slow fall - we're once again in the history the peasants and EU politicians has become king and queens, again not listening to vox populi at all.
After decades of trying and broadly failing to regulate American tech corps, at what point does the EU admit that leveling fines against Meta will never stop Meta from being Meta, that American megacorps are essentially ungovernable in Europe (or elsewhere for that matter) and the best course of action is to ban and block them in Europe?
Just more fines. Bigger fines, surely this will work eventually... It's been 20 years, its not working. A new approach is needed.
In it he espouses going a little further. He posits that other countries should repeal their versions of the DMCA and just start jailbreaking American megacorps' app stores, hardware, software, etc. and providing their own, much cheaper (or free) versions. Free trade has already broken down, what do they have to lose?
As you might guess he puts it a lot better than I do.
Or: a guy who is anti-copyright is performing an angle shoot to see if he can get some legislators to bite.
The EU taking staunchly anti-American positions and targeting American businesses looking for a way to “legally” rob them blind is probably not going to work out for them in the long run.
So rob American businesses blind, but say you didn’t, but if you did, they had it coming anyway because of an unsubstantiated flimsy moral justification that disregards the purchasing choices of the EU citizenry, businesses and governments?
Apple's policies banning developers from referring customers to alternative payments has been widely ruled illegal around the world, first and foremost in the USA where they were even referred for criminal investigation for continuing to do it after being court ordered to stop.
Google has been twice convicted of antitrust monopoly abuse in the last year in the USA, and found to have exploited user privacy settings several times.
Meta's harmful practices have been continuously revealed in court: allowing sex trafficking and prostitution to help train their AI, allowing scam ads because they're profitable, deliberately exploiting children spending in games because it's profitable, and illegally tracked users.
Amazon's antitrust for exploiting vendor data is ongoing, so I guess you can have a point there.
Haven't you heard? Google is changing their traditional policy on """side loading""" apps and are, quite soon from now, planning to lock the whole thing down and make users submit to anal probing to opt out. Android has been good but times are changing and we need to stop trusting old institutions.
My monkey brain would love to see if corporate strategy would work here:
For repeating offenses fines should rise much faster, multiplied by 10x-100x every time, until we find fines so big they are physically unable to pay even if corps would consider liquidating their all global assets. Then lower it just slightly, so that being operational in Europe would produce no financial benefits and see if they'll comply, or just quit themselves.
Recent political and technical events makes me question why do we even attempt to keep such strong relations with megacorp businesses (and, by extension, US gov). We would still be here even if multiple megacorps would die. It would take us decades to build up capacity to have complex tech of our own (fully local). But meanwhile we'd be just fine, just less trendy.
The DMA and DSA already allow fines up to 10 - 20% of global turnover (effectively 30 - 40% of annual profit) and breaking up noncompliant companies.
The issue is nobody wants to pull the trigger because the companies that would get fined or broken up have curried favour with Trump to circumvent these consequences.
That's a similar scale as GDPR violations. And EU companies I worked with were always very serious about GDPR regulations, even if their internal training confirms fines were always really small compared to maximums.
US doesn't care about warnings and small fines, though. If penalties are not enforced, it's like they don't exist.
Well you have to ask why fines aren’t working. In Meta’s case, recent revelations show that they make choices based on how much they stand to make by refusing compliance and just paying the fine. They decided the fine was small relative to the billions they made. A fine could still work but it needs to reach maybe unprecedented punitive levels.
Per the book “Careless People” Meta started “backing” right wing candidates everywhere (via algorithms, not money) to avoid regulation and taxes as soon as the EU tried to tax and regulate it more - thus leading to a surge of that sentiment all over the EU.
At some point, EU needs to build an alternative to those corps and that will never happen as long as they keep holding on to their precious pearl clutching regional and linguistic issues. EU needed to be a single country like 10 years ago.
what do you mean by single country? All the cultures in these countries can not disappear in 10, hell even 100 years. And i would prefer that they would not.
It's very hard to imagine the EU enacting a ban on products that over half of Europeans use, regardless of the theoretical benefits of doing so. It doesn't seem like a practical option.
> After decades of trying and broadly failing to regulate American tech corps, at what point does the EU...
The crux of the matter is it's a subset of the European Parliament versus a subset of EU member states.
When push comes to shove, EU member states can and already do ignore the EP for anything tangentially related to national security, and national politicans don't and won't give up sovereign power to the EU.
Additonally, the incentives of individual EU states with strong US FDI ties and not as strong domestic champions such as Poland, Ireland, Czechia, Luxembourg, and Romania means they fight tooth and nail to ensure American FDI continues. Member states like Hungary and Spain do this for China and Hungary and Austria for Russia.
There's also the added issue of perception - the EP was historically (and for larger states like France and Germany still is) used as a way to sideline unpopular domestic politicans or as a cushy retirement posting. There's a reason VdL is in Bruxelles and not the Bundeskanzleramt.
Plus, European companies have massive fixed capital investments in the US, especially after the IRA [0], so they don't want to face retaliation from American regulators, and are especially cozy with the Trump admin [1].
Also, European politicos also heavy leverage the revolving door of lobbying like their American peers. The "spend a couple years in Bundestag or Bruxelles and then take a cushy gig at Harvard [2][3]" remains strong. Heck, we'd always organize a fest where the wine would flow and European leaders would network with American and European policymakers studying and working in the US or in Europe [4].
it's the fact that fines are part of agency's income and it is their best interest(as a bureaucratic agency) to keep them at highest level where companies will still pay them.
Effectively this makes this a tax, enshittifying everything even worse.
if fines were decoupled from agencies, and had exponentially rising curve for repeat offenses, i think that would work better than ban, as much i would prefer for them to get banned.
> it's the fact that fines are part of agency's income and it is their best interest(as a bureaucratic agency) to keep them at highest level where companies will still pay them.
and yet there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they've done this. The fines that have been levied are easy to pay.
What you're seeing here is why the US has such a massive amount of leverage over the EU.
The US has for some time fostered an environment where people build and grow businesses. I've started many myself, some totally for fun.
And as it happens some of those US businesses have grown into massive corporations, and yes, some not so great ones too.
I think the EU in general (not everyone of course) leans more in the realm of letting the government take care of everything.
This of course creates dependency, not just on that government, but upon companies who create things that government can't provide.
Because of that dependency upon the government, there isn't any recourse against a business' practices because at some point, the fines and penalties will fall flat.
In the US, a pretty normal response to a bad/annoying/corrupt business is: "ok cool, I'll build a competitor."
If instead of creating a culture of dependency in the EU, one of innovation and creativity was fostered instead, this point in time could be very different.
You can not like the statement, and call it whatever you like, however, it is objectively true.
You are far more likely to find a government regulation on a US business/product than you are to find any EU-based product used widely in the United States.
That is the main point I was making and it is true by any objective measure.
There is far more leverage with the country exporting goods/services globally then there is importing those things and then nanny-stating them into a form they think is better.
Also the picture of the US is totally fictional for the vast majority of people. The US has fostered an environment where only a tiny subset of the population can start a business. Even opening up a restaurant you are usually met with an avalanche of paperwork, of requirements to fulfill, and unless you have a lot of money to fix any issue, they rule some aspect of your business in violation. Even a tiny business like a food cart you need to make sure you keep it x meters from a public restroom, that your neighbors don‘t complaint, that you provide 2 parking spaces per gas-burner (or 3 if you use an induction stove) etc. etc.
Hint: the reason why your observations about reality doesn’t match up to your expectations is because the premise you’ve built for yourself is wrong.
This is obvious to the outsider. The premise that you made up for yourself is that Europe wants to change Meta and how it works to protect its citizens. It’s obvious to me that this is not the goal. The goal is to extract wealth from those companies under the guise of consumer protection.
The EU makes more from regulating and taxing US tech companies than it makes from its own quaint tech sector. Ban and blocking those companies is never going to happen for this reason. Why destroy your cash cow?
As a European I have been deeply disappointed with how toothless the EC has been on enforcing the Digital Markets Act. I have exactly one submission to Hacker News from 20 July 2022 when the DMA was approved (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163704). I was incredibly hopeful, given the indicated timelines, that Apple would be forced to open up iOS and iPadOS. Meaning install an application from the internet without restriction, like with any other operating system. The wording clearly requires this (with some wiggle room for security). Apple has dragged this legal process out longer than even my most cynical prediction. I can only surmise that someone in the Commission or senior leadership has decided that enforcing the DMA is not politically expedient right now.
I don't know how to force this issue as a European. There are just too many levels of abstraction between me and Brussels. It looks like many layers of bureaucracy and a lot of opaque backroom deals and discussions. I don't like it at all. Especially given that the EU moves so much faster when it comes to regulations like forcing all of us in Denmark to use timesheets, annoying lids on our bottles, and invasive surveillance laws. All I see is my life getting worse with their actions. I am not alone. Sentiment towards the EU internally is not good right now. Either they start creating regulations which benefit ordinary people, or we're going to get a pretty radical rightward shift in leadership soon, and there are many risks associated with this.
> I don't know how to force this issue as a European. There are just too many levels of abstraction between me and Brussels.
> EU moves so much faster when it comes to regulations like forcing all of us in Denmark to use timesheets, annoying lids on our bottles, and invasive surveillance laws.
Rediscovering the principle of subsidiarity from first principles...
Ceding? Any legal control the EU has over tech has been slowly drawn out of the US’s grasp. It was just that the US dominance over legal control of all these networked interconnections wasn’t so actively and visibly utilized until more recently.
I continue to find it bizarre that some Americans are offended that Europeans do not want to be dragged into the American corporate surveillance, advertising, and consumption cult. Will nothing be sovereign until Europe is also littered with personal injury attorney billboards, broadcasting pharmaceutical ads, and other pox marks of a degraded culture? Why search for a better way when you can normalize awful (because it's more profitable).
Americans don't either, but the "free" (with ads*) model is so wildly popular with humans that it is unavoidable.
If anything it's more interesting that it has American origins. At it's core, the model provides flat rate access to anyone of any class at no upfront cost. High value users with high ad conversion rates subsiding the platforms for low income low consumer spending users. That's something that is particularly European, and not very American.
Suing for damages here isn't profitable enough for attorneys, because "damages" with free healthcare means "missed a week of work", instead of "got a $200k bill".
It does happen, but it's way less lucrative. Tends to be limited to actual damages rather than punitive damages. There have been some scam-ish sub-industries (fake whiplash claims, suing councils for tripping over cracks in the pavement). It's very rare to see advertising for lawyers.
It's also rare because advertising for lawyers (and doctors) is strictly regulated in some member states. A sign in front of the office saying "S. Goodman, attorney, specialized in drugs, organized crime and whiplash" is OK, billboards, TV spots, newspaper ads and any kind of claims beyond "I'm an attorney and this is my office and specialty" are verboten.
Insurance and "worker rights" don't cover cases of lifetime pain or loss of energy due to negligence causing trauma. They'll cover your medical bills and your time off work.
Personal injury cases exist everywhere, but most countries impose very strict restrictions on legal advertising, which greatly reduce the phenomenon of the "personal injury guy" who plasters his face everywhere with text about how much money he'll get you. In the US, most such restrictions were prohibited by the Supreme Court in the 80s.
But no you don't have ambulance chasers or personal injury lawyers trying to get millions out of someone who had a car crash and now their neck feels funny
I once read that PayPal was not successful outside the US because people outside the US couldn't understand why not just do a normal bank transfer. PayPal realized this and tried lobbying governments outside the US to make bank transfers harder.
No idea if this claim is true. How do Americans transfer money? Don't your banking apps allow that?
I don't know if that Paypal story is true, but that definitely is the situation with Intuit/TurboTax in America.
> How do Americans transfer money? Don't your banking apps allow that?
If the exchange isn't online and is a fairly large amount of money, something like buying a car, checks (cheques) or even envelopes of cash are a lot more common than PayPal. Online, those aren't easy so that's where Paypal and their competitors shine. Americans also now use other apps for small money exchanges, like paying somebody for mowing your lawn, although refusing the app and offering/demanding cash is still relatively normal.
As far as I can remember, Paypal was successful in Europe because of the tie-in with Ebay and because bank transfers at time were slow thanks to asynchronous settlement. SEPA fixed that, I don't know how much lobbying in the EU was involved but I'm certain payment processors eschewing banking regulation hastened it (the same way the push for WERO and the Digital Euro is coming from the problematic VISA/MasterCard duopoly).
Meh, you're right but the EU also makes laws in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect). In the end it's not about who makes the law but whether it's a good law. Ecodesign laws making US vacuum cleaners more economical is good. Trade pressures undermining EU privacy protections maybe not so good.
Who cares where a law originates? What matters is whether it’s a good idea or bad. Eroding privacy protections is bad. If the EU had come up with that all on their own (and they try that aplenty too; chat control anyone?) then it’s also bad.
In my country, I discovered a few days ago that my gov (EU country), had its web technical directives line-up with big tech web (in 2015/2016): during the last decade I have been suffering the breakage of the classic web interop of the gouv admnistration web replaced using a lot of bucks by "exclusive big tech" web apps, aka requiring only those massive bloat and kludge web engines from the "whatng" cartel (mozilla/apple/google): no more small, alternative and reasonably sized (SDK included) web browsers anymore.
The most amazing thing is with everything I did in the last decade, the consulting of lawyers, member of internet/IT/software specialized user groups, I still don't know how I have managed to be aware _NOT_ for years that those very web technical directives are actually... law.
Only the prime minister, then also the president, have the power to modify/fix those technical directives. The parliaments, or any technical authorities have ZERO power over them.
The EU, via a directive, only requires for the member states to publish those technical directives to the other member states for "discussion" before final approval.
In other words, deciding on those technical directives requires the same power than to decide to build an ICBM submarine or an aircraft carrier, not less. Maybe because they are not that un-important...
The irony, the gov of 2015/2016 which approved those technical directives which would, without any doubt, end up with everything web being big tech exclusive (and this is what actually happened) was... a left-ist gov(!!). I suspect corruption or brain washing grade lobbying (maybe with fraud while consulting experts, or those experts were mostly from big tech).
The bright side, if those technical directives are fixed in order to restore the classic web, the whole gov with its dependencies have 3 years to comply. Just need to tell the president or the prime minister... baw...
Those same Europeans so fond of their DSA would scream bloody murder if a Trump like administration would do the same. They have created this monster, and there will be tears and the gnashing of theeth should their factions ever lose control and their opponents get to wield those same weapons.
And no, the USAans are not in it for the 'free speech' either.
What are we witnessesing is the beginning of the end of the post-WW2 rules-based international order. What's truly bizarre is that the US designed this order to benefit themselves and they're the ones destroying it now. NATO is a protection racket to outsource European security but really to sell arms to Europe and give the US effetive control over the European militaries.
Over the years the control has grown ever-more pervasive, such as with the control over banking and international payments. One anecdote of the extent of this influence is that if one European Venmos another European and puts "Cuba" or "Syria" in the memo field, they can have their account flagged or permanently banned [1]. The US gets to decide who can use credit cards and what for, which is something the EU has finally picked up on as an issue [2].
What's clear in all this is that China was completely correct to maintain sovereignty over their tech companies, platforms and data. What the US risks is that the EU is going to follow the China model. That means EU versions of cloud platforms, computing platforms, networking infrastructure and so on. And they'll do it similar to how China did by creating demand. Specifically, the EU will mandate the use of European platforms with all their contracts, the European parliament will pass laws as such for national governments and generally the pressure will increase to wean off of US tech companies.
IMHO this shift is as big a change as the post-1945 world order.
It will be messy, but if the EU can make political and economic decisions for the benefit of their own people, instead of subservient to the US, this paradigm shift could turn out to be very healthy and productive for the region and future generations. China's prosperity is undeniable, and it's due to their willingness to question the unipolar dominance of the US in the decades since WWII. In terms of economic and geopolitical strategy, they've been ahead of the game and prepared for the disintegration of the "rules-based" order. Is the EU ready?
The "Digital Services Act" effectively takes the divisive dark money out of advertising and requires more than minimum-effort moderation, affecting Meta and X:
- bans targeted advertising based on a person’s sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or political beliefs and puts restrictions on targeting ads to children
- requires transparency on content algorithms and advertising
- requires online platforms prevent and remove posts containing illegal goods, services, or content in a timely fashion
The "Digital Markets Act" requires interoperability and competition:
- requires Apple to allow competing app stores, very contentious for Apple who invented a stack of fees for this
- requires Apple and Google to allow apps to freely use 3rd party payments, this is very contentious for Apple and they still charge for doing so
- allow 3rd parties interoperability, eg headphones and smartwatches for Apple and messaging clients for Meta, this is starting to improve
- allow removal of preinstalled apps, settings of new defaults, this is largely done although malicious compliance has kept rival browsers at bay on iPhone
Digital Services Act / Digital Markets Act (similar in spirit, but one targets online stores like Google Play, another one online services like Instagram more generally)
More specifically, both are already in effect, outlawing certain things, and designating certain companies as "digital gatekeepers" when they reach a certain threshold of users within the EU.
These regulations don't really specify what every gatekeeper needs to actually do (above the bare minimum), but say that once a company is designated as a gatekeeper, corrective action to prevent their monopolistic behaviour are going to be decided on a case-by-case basis. In practice this means that corrective actions can be something very significant (like iOS having to ask EU users to set a default browser during device setup instead of defaulting to Safari) or nothing, which is why this direct line of conversation shows spinelessness.
It's pretty much an equivalent of a judge having open discussions with a criminal about how the court should interpret the law to suit the criminal better.
Specifically, this is another Parliament vs Commission issue. The Commission loves to have little deals away from the public where everything is quietly smoothed over, while the Parliament is trying to build popular legitimacy.
Also, I'm not sure there's much pressure involved. Mass surveillance is a thing "centrist" EU politicians very much want themselves.
> Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly voiced his dissatisfaction and sought support from Trump, while Apple’s Tim Cook reportedly asked the White House to directly intervene against EU fines imposed on his company.
https://www.euractiv.com/news/widespread-alarm-over-commissi...
Apple even went so far as to demand the EU repeal these laws, and is likely still non-compliant in several ways; for which they should have been fined tens of billions of dollars by now!
https://www.reuters.com/business/apple-urges-eu-regulators-t...
Trump has delivered for them, made it a point of contention for trade deals and threatened sanctions on anyone enforcing them.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-weighs...
> they should have been fined tens of billions of dollars by now!
Maybe cartoonishly large fines levied against powerful entities wasn’t such a great idea. Other incentives may have been better suited to getting the populace what they want in the long term.
>Maybe cartoonishly large fines levied against powerful entities
right, the tradition is that fines be cartoonishly small so that breaking the law can be factored into the cost of doing business, who the hell does the EU think they are to go against tradition!!?
I don't think there is an incentive lawmakers could offer that is worth more to Apple than monopolizing fees and subverting competition, there is practically no limits they will go to to preserve that status quo around the world.
The only time they have eagerly complied with anything relating to this is when Judge YGR gave them this ultimatum, they approved Fortnite a full day early once someone had to be personally responsible for defying her order a second time:
https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1924499498513862720/phot...
That seems like a better model than stupefying fines against the corporate entity then. Forget about billion dollar fines, just give them a slap on the wrist while telling them explicitly what they have to stop doing, but then if they keep doing it the executives are personally held in contempt.
It also solves the perverse incentive of "fine the foreign companies as a revenue generation method" because the result is getting them to comply instead of either repeatedly fining them for not doing it or trying to extract a fine so large it becomes an international political issue.
It’s the public/private dichotomy you see everywhere.
Publicly pols say one thing or stand for one thing and privately they hold different views.
The EU should abandon the stupid Commission structure and have a real Parliament that can actually draft legislation. The current one can just vote down legislation drafted by the Commission.
What they ought to do is have a process for passing EU-wide laws where they get introduced by a popularly elected legislature but to be enacted they also have to be approved by the majority of the legislatures of the member states. That gives you a good check on centralized power grabs because the member states have to approve anything that could usurp their role, but you can still pass things that make sense at that level like a common set of antitrust rules.
Isn't that how QMV works?
The current system is new legislation has to be drafted by the Commission, which is the indirectly elected executive branch. That allows what would otherwise be popular proposals to never even be introduced. Whereas if you have legislation introduced by the directly elected body, popular proposals at least get a public debate and people get to see what they are and who is blocking them, but you still ultimately want the check on power grabs and populist nonsense before it actually gets enacted.
I'm mixed on this... the article itself is relatively one-sided... of course you negotiate among concerned parties when it comes down to laws regarding anything largely produced outside your nation's purview.
The EU can absolutely make all the invasive laws they want, the US has been happily doing the same... the individual EU nations and US states with more variations than practical on top of that. Age verification as a prominent example.
Concerned parties will of course try to leverage what they are able to.. if that is a prominent political figure, foreign or domestic, it happens. This can be good, bad or even very bad. While I can totally understand criticism at any level... US in EU politics, or UK trying to coerce entirely US companies with fines that don't apply to them.
The reality is negotiations happen all the time... you an accept/reject/renegotiate on every aspect of every topic.. and to some extent, make take it or leave it laws, where you are simply no longer a customer.
For example, really curious to see how the foreign router ban (US) is going to shake out. As long as my OpnSense box and commercial AP continue to work, I should be okay for now... but who knows.
The European Commission and Council are becoming increasingly unpopular among my peers. Sentiment towards the Parliament is generally still positive. But it's clear that two thirds of the Trilogue essentially don't give a shit about European people, their rights, their freedoms or their wellbeing. Things like Age Verification and Chat Control are going to blow up in their faces.
I don't get how blind these institutions are.
>"two thirds of the Trilogue essentially don't give a shit about European people, their rights, their freedoms or their wellbeing"
Every bureaucracy works for themselves eventually. The EU's main task is to make superstate they can control. Since they are trying to eliminate / reduce rights of member countries one can imagine what kind of concerns they have towards individual people and their freedom.
I don't buy the superstate argument, since the EC consistently avoids or waters down attempts towards federalisation (full fiscal union, directly elected Commission, Parliament with legislative initiative, yada yada). Making a superstate would constrain the Commission, not empower it. The current ambiguity of having enough integration to override member states, but not enough to be democratically challenged and kept in check is the sweet spot for unaccountable technocratic capture.
Don't get me wrong, I'm completely against the EC, but I wish they were actually trying to create a superstate
Because the commission is proposed by the national governments through the European council.
Meaning any attempt at making the commission directly elected reduces the national governments powers.
What you see isn’t the commission watering down the proposals, what you see is the natural tug of war between the national governments and the European Parliament.
The EU overall either will start acknowledging that there are problems and serious reforms are needed or history will repeat once again and we'll have another fallen empire situation.
It's not just the age verification and chat control - the list crimes is much longer and doesn't revolve solely around IT sector. The recent Mercosur agreement that just showed how the heads of EU pissed over its own agricultural sector.
Somehow, I'm afraid that we're already for at least 15 years on a path of slow fall - we're once again in the history the peasants and EU politicians has become king and queens, again not listening to vox populi at all.
After decades of trying and broadly failing to regulate American tech corps, at what point does the EU admit that leveling fines against Meta will never stop Meta from being Meta, that American megacorps are essentially ungovernable in Europe (or elsewhere for that matter) and the best course of action is to ban and block them in Europe?
Just more fines. Bigger fines, surely this will work eventually... It's been 20 years, its not working. A new approach is needed.
This talk from Cory Doctorow made the rounds on HN when it happened:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
In it he espouses going a little further. He posits that other countries should repeal their versions of the DMCA and just start jailbreaking American megacorps' app stores, hardware, software, etc. and providing their own, much cheaper (or free) versions. Free trade has already broken down, what do they have to lose?
As you might guess he puts it a lot better than I do.
Brilliant idea, my appreciation for Doctorow has grown even more than before.
Or: a guy who is anti-copyright is performing an angle shoot to see if he can get some legislators to bite.
The EU taking staunchly anti-American positions and targeting American businesses looking for a way to “legally” rob them blind is probably not going to work out for them in the long run.
Not rob them blind, just rob them a tiny bit to make up for a generation's worth of extortion.
So rob American businesses blind, but say you didn’t, but if you did, they had it coming anyway because of an unsubstantiated flimsy moral justification that disregards the purchasing choices of the EU citizenry, businesses and governments?
What is not substantiated?
Practically everything the EU DMA/DSA addresses was highlighted in the "House Antitrust Report on Big Tech" back in 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/06/technology/ho...
But if that's not enough, since then:
Apple's policies banning developers from referring customers to alternative payments has been widely ruled illegal around the world, first and foremost in the USA where they were even referred for criminal investigation for continuing to do it after being court ordered to stop.
Google has been twice convicted of antitrust monopoly abuse in the last year in the USA, and found to have exploited user privacy settings several times.
Meta's harmful practices have been continuously revealed in court: allowing sex trafficking and prostitution to help train their AI, allowing scam ads because they're profitable, deliberately exploiting children spending in games because it's profitable, and illegally tracked users.
Amazon's antitrust for exploiting vendor data is ongoing, so I guess you can have a point there.
You are free to not trade with EU citizens then. Nobody forces you to accept their money.
Except it's already possible to install a third-party app store or OS on Android devices. The process isn't trivial, but it's officially supported.
Haven't you heard? Google is changing their traditional policy on """side loading""" apps and are, quite soon from now, planning to lock the whole thing down and make users submit to anal probing to opt out. Android has been good but times are changing and we need to stop trusting old institutions.
That's cool, but on a practical level, can I generate whatever the APK equivalent for iOS is and just give it to my friends with iPhones?
Yes. They will have to reload the app every 7 days, but yes.
> Free trade has already broken down, what do they have to lose?
The US parking an aircraft carrier nearby so the crew can enjoy a sunny vacation.
Or meddling with elections.
Or both.
I doubt this would work for the better. As we have recently seen when carriers got parked near Iran.
That second one is already happening.
My monkey brain would love to see if corporate strategy would work here:
For repeating offenses fines should rise much faster, multiplied by 10x-100x every time, until we find fines so big they are physically unable to pay even if corps would consider liquidating their all global assets. Then lower it just slightly, so that being operational in Europe would produce no financial benefits and see if they'll comply, or just quit themselves.
Recent political and technical events makes me question why do we even attempt to keep such strong relations with megacorp businesses (and, by extension, US gov). We would still be here even if multiple megacorps would die. It would take us decades to build up capacity to have complex tech of our own (fully local). But meanwhile we'd be just fine, just less trendy.
The DMA and DSA already allow fines up to 10 - 20% of global turnover (effectively 30 - 40% of annual profit) and breaking up noncompliant companies.
The issue is nobody wants to pull the trigger because the companies that would get fined or broken up have curried favour with Trump to circumvent these consequences.
That's a similar scale as GDPR violations. And EU companies I worked with were always very serious about GDPR regulations, even if their internal training confirms fines were always really small compared to maximums.
US doesn't care about warnings and small fines, though. If penalties are not enforced, it's like they don't exist.
Block FB at IP level. Every domain, from FB to WA to IG and whatnot. No access from Europe unless you comply with privacy laws.
Well you have to ask why fines aren’t working. In Meta’s case, recent revelations show that they make choices based on how much they stand to make by refusing compliance and just paying the fine. They decided the fine was small relative to the billions they made. A fine could still work but it needs to reach maybe unprecedented punitive levels.
Per the book “Careless People” Meta started “backing” right wing candidates everywhere (via algorithms, not money) to avoid regulation and taxes as soon as the EU tried to tax and regulate it more - thus leading to a surge of that sentiment all over the EU.
Levy harder fines until they go away? At least some money goes into the union
At some point, EU needs to build an alternative to those corps and that will never happen as long as they keep holding on to their precious pearl clutching regional and linguistic issues. EU needed to be a single country like 10 years ago.
what do you mean by single country? All the cultures in these countries can not disappear in 10, hell even 100 years. And i would prefer that they would not.
It's very hard to imagine the EU enacting a ban on products that over half of Europeans use, regardless of the theoretical benefits of doing so. It doesn't seem like a practical option.
> After decades of trying and broadly failing to regulate American tech corps, at what point does the EU...
The crux of the matter is it's a subset of the European Parliament versus a subset of EU member states.
When push comes to shove, EU member states can and already do ignore the EP for anything tangentially related to national security, and national politicans don't and won't give up sovereign power to the EU.
Additonally, the incentives of individual EU states with strong US FDI ties and not as strong domestic champions such as Poland, Ireland, Czechia, Luxembourg, and Romania means they fight tooth and nail to ensure American FDI continues. Member states like Hungary and Spain do this for China and Hungary and Austria for Russia.
There's also the added issue of perception - the EP was historically (and for larger states like France and Germany still is) used as a way to sideline unpopular domestic politicans or as a cushy retirement posting. There's a reason VdL is in Bruxelles and not the Bundeskanzleramt.
Plus, European companies have massive fixed capital investments in the US, especially after the IRA [0], so they don't want to face retaliation from American regulators, and are especially cozy with the Trump admin [1].
Also, European politicos also heavy leverage the revolving door of lobbying like their American peers. The "spend a couple years in Bundestag or Bruxelles and then take a cushy gig at Harvard [2][3]" remains strong. Heck, we'd always organize a fest where the wine would flow and European leaders would network with American and European policymakers studying and working in the US or in Europe [4].
[0] - https://flow.db.com/topics/macro-and-markets/us-german-trade...
[1] - https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/trump-bernard-arnault-lv...
[2] - https://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/leo-varadkar
[3] - https://ces.fas.harvard.edu/people/ces-alumni/past-policy-fe...
[4] - https://euroconf.eu/speakers/
the issue isn't fines themselves
it's the fact that fines are part of agency's income and it is their best interest(as a bureaucratic agency) to keep them at highest level where companies will still pay them.
Effectively this makes this a tax, enshittifying everything even worse.
if fines were decoupled from agencies, and had exponentially rising curve for repeat offenses, i think that would work better than ban, as much i would prefer for them to get banned.
> it's the fact that fines are part of agency's income and it is their best interest(as a bureaucratic agency) to keep them at highest level where companies will still pay them.
and yet there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they've done this. The fines that have been levied are easy to pay.
What you're seeing here is why the US has such a massive amount of leverage over the EU.
The US has for some time fostered an environment where people build and grow businesses. I've started many myself, some totally for fun.
And as it happens some of those US businesses have grown into massive corporations, and yes, some not so great ones too.
I think the EU in general (not everyone of course) leans more in the realm of letting the government take care of everything.
This of course creates dependency, not just on that government, but upon companies who create things that government can't provide.
Because of that dependency upon the government, there isn't any recourse against a business' practices because at some point, the fines and penalties will fall flat.
In the US, a pretty normal response to a bad/annoying/corrupt business is: "ok cool, I'll build a competitor."
If instead of creating a culture of dependency in the EU, one of innovation and creativity was fostered instead, this point in time could be very different.
>I think the EU in general (not everyone of course) leans more in the realm of letting the government take care of everything.
Your understanding of business in EU countries seems to be make-believe and personal fantasy.
You can not like the statement, and call it whatever you like, however, it is objectively true.
You are far more likely to find a government regulation on a US business/product than you are to find any EU-based product used widely in the United States.
That is the main point I was making and it is true by any objective measure.
There is far more leverage with the country exporting goods/services globally then there is importing those things and then nanny-stating them into a form they think is better.
>"The goverment take care"...
So, like Boeing and tons of corpos too big to fail.
Also the picture of the US is totally fictional for the vast majority of people. The US has fostered an environment where only a tiny subset of the population can start a business. Even opening up a restaurant you are usually met with an avalanche of paperwork, of requirements to fulfill, and unless you have a lot of money to fix any issue, they rule some aspect of your business in violation. Even a tiny business like a food cart you need to make sure you keep it x meters from a public restroom, that your neighbors don‘t complaint, that you provide 2 parking spaces per gas-burner (or 3 if you use an induction stove) etc. etc.
Hint: the reason why your observations about reality doesn’t match up to your expectations is because the premise you’ve built for yourself is wrong.
This is obvious to the outsider. The premise that you made up for yourself is that Europe wants to change Meta and how it works to protect its citizens. It’s obvious to me that this is not the goal. The goal is to extract wealth from those companies under the guise of consumer protection.
The EU makes more from regulating and taxing US tech companies than it makes from its own quaint tech sector. Ban and blocking those companies is never going to happen for this reason. Why destroy your cash cow?
Do you have any numbers for this? I somehow have doubts that US tech companies pay more taxes in EU.
As a European I have been deeply disappointed with how toothless the EC has been on enforcing the Digital Markets Act. I have exactly one submission to Hacker News from 20 July 2022 when the DMA was approved (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163704). I was incredibly hopeful, given the indicated timelines, that Apple would be forced to open up iOS and iPadOS. Meaning install an application from the internet without restriction, like with any other operating system. The wording clearly requires this (with some wiggle room for security). Apple has dragged this legal process out longer than even my most cynical prediction. I can only surmise that someone in the Commission or senior leadership has decided that enforcing the DMA is not politically expedient right now.
I don't know how to force this issue as a European. There are just too many levels of abstraction between me and Brussels. It looks like many layers of bureaucracy and a lot of opaque backroom deals and discussions. I don't like it at all. Especially given that the EU moves so much faster when it comes to regulations like forcing all of us in Denmark to use timesheets, annoying lids on our bottles, and invasive surveillance laws. All I see is my life getting worse with their actions. I am not alone. Sentiment towards the EU internally is not good right now. Either they start creating regulations which benefit ordinary people, or we're going to get a pretty radical rightward shift in leadership soon, and there are many risks associated with this.
> I don't know how to force this issue as a European. There are just too many levels of abstraction between me and Brussels.
> EU moves so much faster when it comes to regulations like forcing all of us in Denmark to use timesheets, annoying lids on our bottles, and invasive surveillance laws.
Rediscovering the principle of subsidiarity from first principles...
All this so Meta and X can sell politically divisive and hateful advertising with zero transparency.
Ceding? Any legal control the EU has over tech has been slowly drawn out of the US’s grasp. It was just that the US dominance over legal control of all these networked interconnections wasn’t so actively and visibly utilized until more recently.
I continue to find it bizarre that some Americans are offended that Europeans do not want to be dragged into the American corporate surveillance, advertising, and consumption cult. Will nothing be sovereign until Europe is also littered with personal injury attorney billboards, broadcasting pharmaceutical ads, and other pox marks of a degraded culture? Why search for a better way when you can normalize awful (because it's more profitable).
Americans don't either, but the "free" (with ads*) model is so wildly popular with humans that it is unavoidable.
If anything it's more interesting that it has American origins. At it's core, the model provides flat rate access to anyone of any class at no upfront cost. High value users with high ad conversion rates subsiding the platforms for low income low consumer spending users. That's something that is particularly European, and not very American.
but the result is loud, crass and distasteful so...
> personal injury attorney
> ... a degraded culture
Do matters of personal injury liability not apply in Europe?
Suing for damages here isn't profitable enough for attorneys, because "damages" with free healthcare means "missed a week of work", instead of "got a $200k bill".
"damages" can be a lot more than just "missed a week of work" or "got medical bills". It can be lifetime debilitation.
Obviously it can, but it usually isn't. If 90% of your target market isn't there, the economics are different.
It does happen, but it's way less lucrative. Tends to be limited to actual damages rather than punitive damages. There have been some scam-ish sub-industries (fake whiplash claims, suing councils for tripping over cracks in the pavement). It's very rare to see advertising for lawyers.
It's also rare because advertising for lawyers (and doctors) is strictly regulated in some member states. A sign in front of the office saying "S. Goodman, attorney, specialized in drugs, organized crime and whiplash" is OK, billboards, TV spots, newspaper ads and any kind of claims beyond "I'm an attorney and this is my office and specialty" are verboten.
Insurance and worker rights probably takes care of that here. What is it that personal injury lawyers usually do?
Insurance and "worker rights" don't cover cases of lifetime pain or loss of energy due to negligence causing trauma. They'll cover your medical bills and your time off work.
FWIW it took me multiple US television shows to figure out what "ambulance chasers" are and why they exist.
Pretty sure this is illegal now across the board.
lawyers or law firms are very limited in how they are allowed to promote themselves.
Personal injury cases exist everywhere, but most countries impose very strict restrictions on legal advertising, which greatly reduce the phenomenon of the "personal injury guy" who plasters his face everywhere with text about how much money he'll get you. In the US, most such restrictions were prohibited by the Supreme Court in the 80s.
Most non-US countries only award money for actual damages, not punitive charges.
It's also assumed that people have at least a little common sense and that your average adult knows more than a toddler.
mostly handled by insurance. Payouts are also a lot less, and typically standardized.
WAY less than in the US
But no you don't have ambulance chasers or personal injury lawyers trying to get millions out of someone who had a car crash and now their neck feels funny
Not on dirty great billboards, no. Not yet.
I once read that PayPal was not successful outside the US because people outside the US couldn't understand why not just do a normal bank transfer. PayPal realized this and tried lobbying governments outside the US to make bank transfers harder.
No idea if this claim is true. How do Americans transfer money? Don't your banking apps allow that?
I don't know if that Paypal story is true, but that definitely is the situation with Intuit/TurboTax in America.
> How do Americans transfer money? Don't your banking apps allow that?
If the exchange isn't online and is a fairly large amount of money, something like buying a car, checks (cheques) or even envelopes of cash are a lot more common than PayPal. Online, those aren't easy so that's where Paypal and their competitors shine. Americans also now use other apps for small money exchanges, like paying somebody for mowing your lawn, although refusing the app and offering/demanding cash is still relatively normal.
As far as I can remember, Paypal was successful in Europe because of the tie-in with Ebay and because bank transfers at time were slow thanks to asynchronous settlement. SEPA fixed that, I don't know how much lobbying in the EU was involved but I'm certain payment processors eschewing banking regulation hastened it (the same way the push for WERO and the Digital Euro is coming from the problematic VISA/MasterCard duopoly).
Most banking apps now allow that using Zelle but it came many years after PayPal.
Better Call Saul was a docudrama.
Common claims from a subset of Americans:
"They hate our freedom!"
"They want to destroy our culture!"
Since every accusation is a confession with these people, I guess this is what they want to do to others.
Isn't it strange how Washington makes laws in the EU?
I wonder if these lobbyists get paid a lot.
Money is the international language, after all. Why would oligarchs limit their influence to their own country?
Meh, you're right but the EU also makes laws in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect). In the end it's not about who makes the law but whether it's a good law. Ecodesign laws making US vacuum cleaners more economical is good. Trade pressures undermining EU privacy protections maybe not so good.
I like how out of all examples to pit up against eroding privacy protections was consumer vacuum stuff from ages ago.
Who cares where a law originates? What matters is whether it’s a good idea or bad. Eroding privacy protections is bad. If the EU had come up with that all on their own (and they try that aplenty too; chat control anyone?) then it’s also bad.
Why no ban like china? Weak
In my country, I discovered a few days ago that my gov (EU country), had its web technical directives line-up with big tech web (in 2015/2016): during the last decade I have been suffering the breakage of the classic web interop of the gouv admnistration web replaced using a lot of bucks by "exclusive big tech" web apps, aka requiring only those massive bloat and kludge web engines from the "whatng" cartel (mozilla/apple/google): no more small, alternative and reasonably sized (SDK included) web browsers anymore.
The most amazing thing is with everything I did in the last decade, the consulting of lawyers, member of internet/IT/software specialized user groups, I still don't know how I have managed to be aware _NOT_ for years that those very web technical directives are actually... law.
Only the prime minister, then also the president, have the power to modify/fix those technical directives. The parliaments, or any technical authorities have ZERO power over them.
The EU, via a directive, only requires for the member states to publish those technical directives to the other member states for "discussion" before final approval.
In other words, deciding on those technical directives requires the same power than to decide to build an ICBM submarine or an aircraft carrier, not less. Maybe because they are not that un-important...
The irony, the gov of 2015/2016 which approved those technical directives which would, without any doubt, end up with everything web being big tech exclusive (and this is what actually happened) was... a left-ist gov(!!). I suspect corruption or brain washing grade lobbying (maybe with fraud while consulting experts, or those experts were mostly from big tech).
The bright side, if those technical directives are fixed in order to restore the classic web, the whole gov with its dependencies have 3 years to comply. Just need to tell the president or the prime minister... baw...
Those same Europeans so fond of their DSA would scream bloody murder if a Trump like administration would do the same. They have created this monster, and there will be tears and the gnashing of theeth should their factions ever lose control and their opponents get to wield those same weapons.
And no, the USAans are not in it for the 'free speech' either.
What are we witnessesing is the beginning of the end of the post-WW2 rules-based international order. What's truly bizarre is that the US designed this order to benefit themselves and they're the ones destroying it now. NATO is a protection racket to outsource European security but really to sell arms to Europe and give the US effetive control over the European militaries.
Over the years the control has grown ever-more pervasive, such as with the control over banking and international payments. One anecdote of the extent of this influence is that if one European Venmos another European and puts "Cuba" or "Syria" in the memo field, they can have their account flagged or permanently banned [1]. The US gets to decide who can use credit cards and what for, which is something the EU has finally picked up on as an issue [2].
What's clear in all this is that China was completely correct to maintain sovereignty over their tech companies, platforms and data. What the US risks is that the EU is going to follow the China model. That means EU versions of cloud platforms, computing platforms, networking infrastructure and so on. And they'll do it similar to how China did by creating demand. Specifically, the EU will mandate the use of European platforms with all their contracts, the European parliament will pass laws as such for national governments and generally the pressure will increase to wean off of US tech companies.
IMHO this shift is as big a change as the post-1945 world order.
[1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/venmo-cuba-sanctions_n_571f80...
[2]:https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/business/europes-24-tri...
The EU has been a huge free rider on defense and pharma spending from the US, they're going to have a rough time reorganizing their economies.
It will be messy, but if the EU can make political and economic decisions for the benefit of their own people, instead of subservient to the US, this paradigm shift could turn out to be very healthy and productive for the region and future generations. China's prosperity is undeniable, and it's due to their willingness to question the unipolar dominance of the US in the decades since WWII. In terms of economic and geopolitical strategy, they've been ahead of the game and prepared for the disintegration of the "rules-based" order. Is the EU ready?
European countries should try to get off those training wheels and learn to live their own lives.
Is it just me or is there not actual meat to this article? Like what specifically are the rules at issue here?
The "Digital Services Act" effectively takes the divisive dark money out of advertising and requires more than minimum-effort moderation, affecting Meta and X:
- bans targeted advertising based on a person’s sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or political beliefs and puts restrictions on targeting ads to children
- requires transparency on content algorithms and advertising
- requires online platforms prevent and remove posts containing illegal goods, services, or content in a timely fashion
The "Digital Markets Act" requires interoperability and competition:
- requires Apple to allow competing app stores, very contentious for Apple who invented a stack of fees for this
- requires Apple and Google to allow apps to freely use 3rd party payments, this is very contentious for Apple and they still charge for doing so
- allow 3rd parties interoperability, eg headphones and smartwatches for Apple and messaging clients for Meta, this is starting to improve
- allow removal of preinstalled apps, settings of new defaults, this is largely done although malicious compliance has kept rival browsers at bay on iPhone
Digital Services Act / Digital Markets Act (similar in spirit, but one targets online stores like Google Play, another one online services like Instagram more generally)
More specifically, both are already in effect, outlawing certain things, and designating certain companies as "digital gatekeepers" when they reach a certain threshold of users within the EU.
These regulations don't really specify what every gatekeeper needs to actually do (above the bare minimum), but say that once a company is designated as a gatekeeper, corrective action to prevent their monopolistic behaviour are going to be decided on a case-by-case basis. In practice this means that corrective actions can be something very significant (like iOS having to ask EU users to set a default browser during device setup instead of defaulting to Safari) or nothing, which is why this direct line of conversation shows spinelessness.
It's pretty much an equivalent of a judge having open discussions with a criminal about how the court should interpret the law to suit the criminal better.