Are you just counting on others being too exhausted to bring yet another moot argument to its predetermined conclusion?
I'll finish it to save everyone some time:
A: how much of gdp is facilitated through the search abilities of meta and google, though?
B: It doesn't matter.
A: Why not?
B: There will be someone else who is willing to play by the local rules fulfilling the same function in their place, just like in many countries around the world already.
> Building a competitive search engine [..] requires VC investment.
> VC investment requires a vibrant startup ecosystem, well crafted regulations and a risk-tolerant culture.
Yandex, Baidu, and many other lesser-known local-only search engines exist. There's also nothing stopping an already existing technology company from entering search. The statement is incorrect.
Meanwhile common sense tells us that obviously there's going to be investment into domestic search engines if Google voluntarily throws in the towel. Europe is a huge place and there's a lot of money to be made, even if it's merely with context-based advertising and no individual tracking.
> Building a competitive [..] AI model requires VC investment [..] and a risk-tolerant culture.
Training a large model anyways, since nobody has really figured out how to recoup that investment yet. Why are you trying to derail this from talking about search though?
> Are you just counting on others being too exhausted to bring yet another moot argument to its predetermined conclusion?
Umm, nope. I’m conjecturing that there could be an enabling aspect of huge scale, and that some smaller economies may fall below the threshold. Personally i hope what you wrote works.
Tech is very interconnected though, and the article points out an example where what you state is very much not true: "How would Mistral, a leading AI firm, survive if Nvidia exits the French market due to regulatory concerns?"
Would've been good if they had been able to come up with a realistic example that could be problematic, but they have not made the case at all while Nvidia would forego the EU market.
> Regulating the tech Market is great for local tech
Except, it is not. At least not in the situation that the EU is in. Because all regulations are a constant burden on business, small relative to big corporations, huge for medium companies and insurmountable for startups.
The EU has no big players, not a single one! We have a few medium players like SAP and that is it. So, we are already far behind and every weight we load on to drag us down is another nail in the coffin.
It's good the EU doesn't have a big player. Having big players is like having cancer. The EU has a functioning Immune system, the US is buckling under its immunu-comporomised ass. The resources ~~cancer cells~~ big players are extracting aren't going to the people.
Europe is a place to take social benefits; there is no tech, no innovation. It's better to sit on the couch and watch Netflix than start a business. There is too much risk, too many taxes, and too many regulations.
By my understanding, they didn't have to pay for the exorbitant North American interactive music licenses during their first five year. The EU rates were much more reasonable (plus I think they got grants and govt support?), allowing them to test the market and grow before entering the US.
I don't agree with the exaggeration in the parent comment, but your one counter-example pivoted their workforce expansion to the US after openly criticizing Sweden's business environment. They took issue with the shortage of employee housing due to over-regulated planning restrictions, unfavorable taxation of stock options, and a lack of programming and development education. Those issues (less so education) are applicable throughout the majority of the EU.
I can't see how the wages have anything to do with the points in the parent comment but you're never going to get US wages in Sweden as long as the unions are involved
What stops Spotify from paying USA wages in Stocholm or other cities in Europe that offer good quality of living and thus appealing to software developers? Software developer unions are going to say NO? Do such unions exist? Can they control software devs?
Sweden has collective agreements where workplace conditions including pay are decided between the unions and the employers rather than the government interfering in the process. Yes even software devs are covered under this.
Why would they want to move people around the world, deal with the unions who will force them to raise the floor of the local salaries etc when they can just hire the best talent in the US?
That complaint happened 10 years after they were founded and five years after they launched in the US. By that time, they were already a billion-dollar business.
My impression is that many if not most KDE developers are in Europe. That's some of the most useful user-facing software that exists. Most big American "tech" has essentially no utility, and is built around mindless scrolling, spying, and ads.
No utility you say? i’d argue all of this is relevant to consumers and/or businesses in europe:
• Microsoft windows
• microsoft office (excel, etc)
• google search
• google maps
• gmail and yahoo mail
• smartphones
• space-x (affordable satellite launches - for accurate weather forecasts and GPS)
• OpenAI (pioneering LLM’s from a product perspective)
• Visa and Mastercard networks
• AWS / Azure / GCP
• Adobe (photoshop, etc)
• Zoom / Webex (Skype is an exception, created in europe)
• Salesforce
• DocuSign
• AutoCAD
I can list more if you’d like…this was literally off the top of my head. All of these businesses and products were created in the united states, some with VC funding. They employ hundreds or thousands of engineers, product managers, etc. They provide critical business capabilities to businesses around the world. Some are user facing as well.
As far as critical business software Europe has created Skype, SAP, and i think that’s it? From the hardware side, major kudos for ASML and Airbus.
The stuff you read about in the news is focused on bad actors and toxic social media junk. thats a small piece of big tech.
> No utility you say? i’d argue all of this is relevant to consumers and/or businesses in europe:
>
> • Microsoft windows
>
> • microsoft office (excel, etc)
>
> • google search
>
> • google maps
>
> • gmail and yahoo mail
>
> • smartphones
>
> • space-x (affordable satellite launches - for accurate weather forecasts and GPS)
>
> • OpenAI (pioneering LLM’s from a product perspective)
>
> • Visa and Mastercard networks
>
> • AWS / Azure / GCP
>
> • Adobe (photoshop, etc)
>
> • Zoom / Webex (Skype is an exception, created in europe)
>
> • Salesforce
>
> • DocuSign
>
> • AutoCAD
>
> I can list more if you’d like…this was literally off the top of my head. All of these businesses and products were created in the united states, some with VC funding. They employ hundreds or thousands of engineers, product managers, etc. They provide critical business capabilities to businesses around the world. Some are user facing as well.
>
> As far as critical business software Europe has created Skype, SAP, and i think that’s it? From the hardware side, major kudos for ASML and Airbus.
>
> The stuff you read about in the news is focused on bad actors and toxic social media junk. thats a small piece of big tech.
Honestly, this comment inadvertently proves the need to quarantine US tech. Almost every product you listed is utter garbage, especially Windows.
There's nothing inherently better about Windows than Linux. Libre Office suit can become much better than MS Office if ot got enough suppoet - support that just goes away to M$ contracts.
Google search has become utter garbage.
Hetzner exists, and more Cloud companies would exist if it weren't for America's Big Tech having a competitive advantage due to their sheer size.
Adobe is a shit company with shit behavior. I'd welcome its implosion anytime. Again, if the billions siphoned away for their licenses was spent on FOSS alternatives, we'd end up with such healthier ecosystem.
Visa and Mastercard are leas innovation and more completely regulated duopoly at this point.
Also, with the exception of SpaceX, I'd gladly welcome the complete implosion of all companies you mentioned. I'd love to watch them burn to cinders, while the world finally breathes free.
ok, but real businesses and governments actually use them to run their business.
How long do you think a typical business would survive without excel? Do you realize how crazy powerful excel is? I hate that tool as an engineer but its utility is immense. I agree windows is junk, yet it somehow ends up in all the critical infrastructure lol. Crazy but that’s what happens. Same with autocad- good luck efficiently designing physical infrastructure like bridges in your country without that tool.
Hetzner is not struggling to compete with AWS or Azure because it’s smaller…it’s because Hetzner has almost no features. They have even less features than DigitalOcean. Hetzner basically offers VPS hosting, elastic block storage, and easy deployment of some common apps. Do they offer any of the building blocks for deploying a high traffic service into production? Or deploying something that requires a lot of distributed components? No. stuff like managed databases, flexible file storage (like S3), and most importantly a managed multi-container deployment. Like fargate, ECS or EKS.
unrelated, i think the LibreOfficr example is interesting. I think it would be difficult to design a competing product because at this time companies pay for a full suite including: outlook, office, sharepoint, etc. and office is available in the browser with realtime multi user editing too! Maybe the LibreOffice project should pivot in that direction? Perhaps they could offer a cheap online version of their products, as a way to fund continued development, while making the desktop version free?
No innovation in Europe? Who created Linux? Python? ARM? ASML? Outside of IT: BioNTech (first Covid mRNA vaccine), Ozempic from Novo Nordisk? A fee seconds of googling is enough to show how ridiculous this claim is.
The trouble with these examples is that many of them are foundations or open source projects. They don’t employ europeans and provide a direct boost to the european economy. So yes there is definitely innovation but is it translating to JOBS in europe?
Is python a company that hires hundreds or thousands of engineers, product managers, etc? no. Same with Linux. Also Linux was created by a european (torvalds) while he was living and working in the united states, and is now contributed to by engineers all over the world. I’d hardly call that a majority european innovation. A nitpick but I wanted to clarify that.
ASML, ARM, BioNtech and Ozempic are great examples though, i’ll give you that.
I might be talking out of my depth, as I don’t live in Europe, but I’ve heard the same paraphrased headlines like these since at least 2016. Has status quo been swayed one way or another since then? Theoretically speaking, wouldn’t legislating away the top US players open the market to the local companies a la Naver in SK, WeChat in China or Line in Japan? I understand I’m dumbing it down, but assuming such legislations are supported by the local residents. I don’t think I would support it, personally, but I can see their point as well.
Title is "Europe Is in Danger of Regulating Its Tech Market Out of Existence".
But then the subtitle says "Poorly designed laws are forcing *global firms* to leave." (emphasis mine)
Then you see a picture of an Apple Vision Pro. I've only skimmed through the article and there are 11 mentions of Apple and 12 mentions of Meta, then some mentions of X and such. These aren't even "global" firms, they are all American ones.
If anything, it sounds like they may be regulating away US products from the European market, and that's a big "maybe", which is different from what I understood from the title they chose.
Some people are calling for GPUs to be nerfed but that's fringe at this point. If you wanted to create the most extreme strawman of EU regulation possible... maybe that's one example you'd come up with.
CUDA is also viewed as anticompetitive by HN. Lots and lots of discussion about Nvidia's moat and how AMD could or can't break in. It's just here in the thread about regulation that some people suddenly forget.
A more practical example is that Facebook cannot promote its marketplace anymore. In Europe there are local alternatives for market places that get disadvantaged.
Spotify, an EU company, has to compete with Apple Music and YouTube Music. Both of which have their own mobile operating systems and markets.
Now we get a lot of backlash from these big tech firms as for years they have been integrating services into their walled gardens. Which now is hard to decouple from their platform.
This is not always good for the end user. Now I have to go to google maps manually because it’s most of the time no longer integrated with google search
what exactly prevents them from giving me a dropdown with links to apple maps, kagi maps, bing maps and google maps and my choice gets saved to my google account as the default? Instead all they show me is a useless javascript map which is still google maps but I cant do anything useful on it and it's super frustrating trying to get to a map for a place search
To play devils advocate - it costs money to integrate with all the competing map providers and to display them properly on the site. You could think of a plug in approach where map providers integrate themselves, still someone needs to maintain that plug in infra. Nothing is free.
And it’s the same story for any kind of service that’s subject to DMA.
Yes but this is a multi billion dollar company and the base integration could be as simple as opening the link and it doesn't even have to link to the correct place. They can have the ui make clear that it's a generic link to another map site. Although I just figured out how to link to something with a query text on bing in a minute: https://www.bing.com/maps?q=USA
The exact same thing works on kagi.com/maps btw. So I don't think that this is too much to ask for, I rather think that they are trying to create pressure on the EU.
> it doesn't even have to link to the correct place.
That's an obvious DMA violation. You can't preference your own service over others, like when you link to the exact pin on your service but just the general area on another.
They already commit a DMA violation by showing any google map at all then. It's not rocket science to conform to the spirit of the law, if they offer a simple API for other map providers to provide their own strings to google it will be solved in a day. They clearly just don't want to actually advertise other mapping providers for free which is something I understand fully btw. But the way they are currently doing it is actively hurting them because I hate how I can't jump to any map from the searc results now.
They don't want to link to their competition, so they'd rather not link to their own service and if users complain they tell them to complain to the EU.
Same. I didn't see any explanation or example about "poorly designed" or "leave". And yes Vision Pro is completely irrelevant and very confusing. To me the entire article is just a well-formatted rant adapted from a random reddit post.
I’m living in Europe, I'm deeply disappointed by the current situation. The problems run much deeper than just regulations; they extend far beyond politics.
1. VCs outright avoid investing in deep tech, with only rare exceptions.
2. Founders overwhelmingly choose to build small, sustainable companies, steering clear of big tech.
3. Employees consistently prefer consulting jobs and value vacation days over equity.
4. The bureaucracy startups face when incorporating or raising funds is staggering (Germany, I'm looking at you).
While this may seem beneficial from a social perspective, it creates the worst possible environment for tech startups. I have immense respect for the few European startups that manage to survive and thrive despite these obstacles.
Fair enough. Unless I misunderstood your point it sounds like, what you guys have right now is good for people and their lives. Isn't that the entire point of life? I can see why general population might support it, while us techies would be pushing for deregulation and less of work-life balance. So my understanding of these articles is "it might be bad in a long term!", but Europe is still big enough market for all these companies eventually bend over backwards to get access to it.
Again, really no skin in the game, as I don't live there and I only have limited amount of perspective, which comes from my European resident non-techie friends.
Europe is an amazing place, which is why I moved here in the first place. But for techies, it can be pretty challenging. The issue isn't with the techies themselves, though. The problem is that the environment here holds back big tech, making Europe heavily dependent on the US.
I think a lot of the complaining on HN comes from the engineers themselves. "Ugh," they say, "We have to write all of this boring code to comply with regulations, rather than writing exciting features!" I see it a little differently. As someone who's spent a good part of the last 6-8 years working on GDPR and DMA compliance projects, the way I look at it is: "We are finally making our product better for users, working on privacy improvements that our companies have opposed until it was forced on them." EU-led regulation has been a great engineering opportunity and a product forcing-function.
> what you guys have right now is good for people and their lives
Let's see how long it lasts, Europe's economy is terrible and their people are significantly poorer. I don't think their current welfare state is sustainable without tax revenue from large businesses. Eventually every European citizen will be a waiter, hotel staff, or a tour guide.
how is europe's economy terrible? by what metric?
considering that the EU still has a very large part of the global economy, especially compared to its population and size.
Also, the tech industry is not the only part of the economy. large parts of the EU are absolutely massive in terms of industrial machinery and scientific companies.
People on HN always seem to forget that a lot of money can be made by making something very high end which solves a specific problem, no matter if it is sexy or not.
40 years ago Europe (without former Warsaw Pact countries) accounted for 25% of global trade. These days it's ~12% and dropping. Since 2008 there is no meaningful GDP growth (1-2%) whereas US and China exploded in that time. India is on track to surpass EU by 2050. All that will be left is a large open-air museum.
It's not about flexing, it's about the diminishing importance of EU in the world. It doesn't matter if EU still has a better GDP PPP if India ends up with a bigger GDP overall as you are only as important as you have in the bank internationally. Competing for resources would then flip in favor of India; EU burning bridges with Russia sending it to China's orbit will likely accelerate the process as well.
Of course the influence of the EU will diminish over time, because they are currently very strong. It would be very weird if the Asian countries wouldn’t catch up, which automatically lets the EU have a smaller proportion of global trade.
Guess what, at some point, India and china will also overtake the US. Is that shocking to you? That’s just what happens when absolutely massive countries catch up to everyone else.
In what way was the US able to keep up with china? The GDP chart google shows has a factor of 3.2 for 2008 and 1.4 for 2022 when comparing the US to china. If you seriously think the EU falling back behind china is a EU problem, I don’t know what to tell you. It might happen at a different speed but it’s only a matter of time before china takes over the US.
Now imagine we are talking about companies: "We grew just our competitors grew 4x as much as we did." - that would be a prime candidate for an acquisition or being labeled a "zombie company" in a few years due to exponential growth effects.
That’s exactly what happens to every large company. At some point, growth is limited. You think google grows as fast as Kagi? Should google be concerned because kagi managed to 10x their users in the past year (made up figure, you get the point) and they didn’t?
Poorer is debatable. Ppl in eu usually can afford going to a hospital or going to school/uni- for us it isn't that straightforward
And saying eventually everyone will cater to tourism is peak us ignorance. The tourism sector in eu is fairly small, even in the (over) touristic italy. Just the fact you mentioned this leads me to think you are an ignorant american that likes how people suffer from being poor and being exploited by big corpos...
Unfortunately true, but one can also think that it’s a consequence and not the root cause. Why VC should invest if the environment isn’t supportive? A vicious circle :)
why are VC's somehow the cause of "tech industry"? this seems like a very US perspective on tech in general.
Also, VC's in the US have another large advantage. Very, very cheap money because the status of the US dollar as a reserve currency compared to the euro and other currencies.
> why are VC's somehow the cause of "tech industry"
Who else will give private capital for what is purely an idea?
Not Banks giving a business loan - they will demand interest at the current interest rate.
Not Private Equity - they only move private capital into public companies or late stage private companies
Not Hedge Funds - they only deploy capital into public markets
Not Growth Funds - they only deploy capital into late stage companies
The only funds that will deploy private capital into early stage companies are Angel Investors and VC Funds.
> this seems like a very US perspective on tech in general
Israel, India, China, UK, Russia (pre-2022), Ukraine (pre-2022), and ASEAN all developed a VC scene similar to the American scene.
Yet mainland West European investors are nowhere near as dynamic.
If the Western European market was more dynamic, Spotify would not have moved to NYC, Ghodsi would have founded Databricks in Stockholm instead of San Francisco, and Datadog would have remained a purely French company instead of moving most of hiring from Product Leadership to HR to the US a decade ago.
While you can mention ASML, the only reason ASML/Phillips even has EUV IP is because the US Government gave it to them instead of Canon or Nikon due to anti-trust reasons in the early 2000s and can very easily revoke IP access if prodded.
> Very, very cheap money because the status of the US dollar as a reserve currency compared to the euro and other currencies
Then why do high interest rate Israel, India, and China continue to have fairly robust VC scenes despite having high interest rates and currency controls and/or relatively illiquid currency markets?
The reality is "cheap money" as in interest rates don't really matter for early stage funding. Indtutional investors always leave some money on the side for VC funding as a diversification tool.
The difference is American, Israeli, Indian, Chinese, and ASEAN institutional investors will try to fund local VCs to build a local ecosystem, but Western European ones will just hand that money to an American, Israeli, Indian, or Chinese VC instead.
On the contrary, I see the VC influence on American tech has been incredibly destructive. No one builds companies or products or services to last. Everyone is only in it for the quick buck. Basically every service provided by big tech has turned into a chase to cover it with ads and seek as much rent as possible while never actually improving anything. The state of software has gone downhill precipitously in the past decade and it’s only getting worse as VCs gain more and more control over the entire economy from housing to education to financial services to insurance.
"... seek as much rent as possible ..." I think this is sorely understated in the context of understanding Europe's regulatory environment vis-à-vis American big tech companies or targeted advertising-supported (read: personal data mining) software startups.
We need to remember that Europe is the continent that gave us extractive colonialism. A player always knows their own game.
Germany's position in context is at least understandable: the Mittelstand is a force to be reckoned with, and that entire segment of Germany's trade system is extremely averse to risk. (It's also a lot of other things, part of which can be witnessed by hopping the border to Switzerland and reading through the platform for their self-proclaimed "Partei des Mittelstandes.")
A working base that values vacation days over equity doesn’t sound like a place I’d want to start a business.
And I’m not the only one. Many companies don’t hire in Europe because it’s too risky to get a dud employee that you can’t fire without having to pay their salary for the next 6 months.
I find it the other way- lots of contracting roles in europe coming from US/Switzerland. There are also many roles coming from different eu countries to other eu countries. In other words it doesn't seem to have such a big impact
> Many companies don’t hire in Europe because it’s too risky to get a dud employee that you can’t fire without having to pay their salary for the next 6 months.
That's what trial periods are for, within the first 1-12 months (depending on position and sector) you can very easily get rid of employees. That's when you're supposed to evaluate their performance and fit.
And if they don't do their job afterwards you reprimand them and they can then be fired for cause if you have actual causes.
from a personal and social perspective, I see nothing wrong with it. In fact, even in the EU we still ahve a lot of BS startups. We imo need more sustainable businesses, that value actual societal value/value to consumers or businesses over growth and shareholder value.
This seems like a very socialistic perspective to me, which might not align well with big tech and innovation. I suggest re-reading "Atlas Shrugged" for this topic.
Regulation can be good. For example car sector and expanding car centric infra including erasing old towns killed a lot more ppl and had a huge environmental impact in us compared to eu where this sector was more regulated. So long term the suffering got bigger in us compared to eu because us had poor regulation and poor decision makers
We have no tech sector in europe. As soon as a company has more than 6 developers it gets bought by a USA company (that's a slight exaggeration, not by much).
How would this change what I've said and you've said? Instead of providing real stats you just throw random affirmations and expect people to believe them
UK tried to have a "silicon roundabout" and attract VC investment, but then Brexit happened and the allure of English-speaking entry point into the EU market has disappeared.
Europe has missed out on the craze of getting millions to build an Uber for Cats.
Normally I wouldn't upvote a reply like this, but here in the US I got this one instead:
> There appears to be a technical issue with your browser
> This issue is preventing our website from loading properly. Please review the following troubleshooting tips or contact us at support@foreignpolicy.com.
I had to disable Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection in order to proceed. This is the first time since that feature was rolled out that I've had to remember where they put that disable switch.
EDIT: This isn't just a generic error handler, there's a specific piece of code that detects if their analytics provider loaded or not and shows that message if it didn't load. More details here:
// The tinypass.min.js script was blocked due to a browser content filter
console.log('Piano Script was blocked');
// Show error modal to user
FP.Utils.Piano.showBrowserCompatibilityErrorModal();
Looks like the code comes from their analytics provider: https://piano.io/
While adtech may be the most profitable part of tech industry, it's by far not the only part. Everything from advanced electronics to genomics to super-strong materials to reusable spacecraft is the "technology sector", and its parts are tightly intertwined.
The real problem is that the requirements for a social platform are getting very onerous, to the point that it takes at least several engineers working full time on the problem.
That really hurts a startup's ability to initially launch in the market, especially one with less VC money. (Certain BigCo new products can be thought of as a startup too, with limited budgets.)
This doesn't just affect social media companies, it affects almost any product where a user can upload data, or any product with a social feature, no matter how peripheral the feature is.
Turns out that's a wide swathe of technology, and that social features are fairly valuable.
Of course the big companies will eventually get around to launching in Europe anyway, it will just trail behind the rest of the world.
That data point is very hard to provide any evidence for, and not sufficient to draw any conclusions from. For example, what if the company was never started? What if they pivoted after speaking to a lawyer?
Frankly I'm not very convinced by that -- it seems that most social networks are already killed by winner-takes-all SV companies buying-out any possible threat.
The situation in America is an absolute nightmare with data being sold through all sorts of mechanisms with zero oversight (your ISP, your car, most apps on your phone, whoever does your credit scores) -- I'm sure there's some way to make successful tech that isn't the hellscape America has.
> Criteria relating to the size of the companies: (a) a turnover of the company of at least 7.5 billion euro in the European Economic Area for three years at least or (b) a market capitalization or equivalent of at least 75 billion euro;
> Criteria relating to the place of the company in controlling access of other businesses to final customers: the company needs to have (a) more than 45 million monthly active end users in the EU and (b) more than 10,000 yearly active business in the EU;
> "An entrenched durable position" which is a qualitative criterion which the regulator considers met if the numbers of active users in the second criterion are met for three years in a row.
It is indeed very hard to find evidence that DMA does not affect startups, if you don't want to find that evidence.
You're seriously arguing that a startup founder would think "well, when I get to a 75 billion euro valuation, there will be some cumbersome rules, so I might as well not start anything"???
Sure, but those quantitative criterion were not met by iPadOS, and the EC just said "nah, we gots the feelz" and declared it a gatekeeper platform anyway.
Who is to say they won't decide that a 6 person startup with 10 users doesn't qualify?
Which regulations are you referring to? Do those not apply just to those that have managed to obtain a dominant role, ie not startups entering the market?
The requirements for social platforms are just becoming more inline with all other industries. The period of special treatment is over. The era of, “If it’s on social media then no one is liable for this content or the harm it may cause, but also I can still monetize it,” is over.
It is a welcome change, but not for those who mean to exploit the special status that “social media” and “apps” have been given all these years.
This can be said about any regulation that makes it more difficult to deliver a product. Are food safety regulations "onerous" because the food company has to hire several people to ensure their food is safe? A food startup who can't afford to hire those people might argue that they are at a disadvantage and therefore the regulations are onerous and favor large companies.
>A food startup who can't afford to hire those people might argue that they are at a disadvantage and therefore the regulations are onerous and favor large companies.
That is literally the point of food regulations.
They are not prescriptive but descriptive.
No regulation says 'make food with >100 E-coli per KG' it always says 'use stainless steel table, no smaller than 2mx1m, in a well ventilated room of size...'.
Most, if not all this kind of EU regulation has size limits, usually several steps between small startups with a small number of users, up to the size of gatekeeper platforms. There aren't many startups that start off as a gatekeeper since there is only six companies in the world that has that definition (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft).
> The real problem is that the requirements for a social platform are getting very onerous, to the point that it takes at least several engineers working full time on the problem.
There are only 19 companies in the world that are required to comply with the strict rules. I think they can pay those "several engineers" from the money they make in EU. This is not about startups, and this is not about launching.
Short of the EU directly designing products there's always going to be ambiguity. Most of the "controversy" over GDPR and DMA appears to be completely artificial and caused by malicious compliance.
The EU commission (made of elected statesmen from all over the EU) is free to propose as many laws as it wants, but these things never have broad appeal and do not pass parliament (the MEPs we directly elect).
Chat control keeps being proposed by the same Swedish politician, and she will continue to do so and she will continue to fail- because politicians in the EU are already aware its stupid.
You are wrong, most MEPs know that this will break encryption and are more than happy to go for the ride because they have exempted themselves from such regulation. Surveillance for thee not for me.
Chat control is not just the love child from the Swedish politician, it is being pushed by US surveillance companies that convinced the commission members that CP can be detected and stopped only if Europol has access to all your messages, emails, photos and videos until the end of time without having any recourse as to what it will be used for or by whom it will be viewed.
Then there is also Chat Control V1 which is currently extended each year despite being a temporary measure supposedly. Then there is also the data retention directive which everyone knows was illegal to start with and took 10 years to be overturned.
The fact that people still associate EU with privacy is a joke. The EU wants your data just like Meta and Apple or Google. At least Meta is not trying to gaslight me into thinking that giving my data is to save the children or some other complete BS reason.
How do you reason your thinking with the fact that the EU created GDPR?
The EU laws typically fall on the side of promoting privacy and protecting citizens against large multinational organisations (criminal and legitimate).
There is a need for greater powers to prevent crime, but nobody is going to weaken privacy for it. The most likely outcome is a centralised interpol-esque database to track and track suspects more quickly. Right now its very easy for criminals to just change hosting region and the investigating national police have no jurisdiction to do anything. It’s a large issue.
That is not what Chat control is. Chat Control is live analysis of all your messages/emails/photos and videos.
Chat Control breaks encryption because it wants to snoop on the messages/photos before being encrypted EtoE by the messaging providers.
There is no need for greater powers to prevent crime. It has been determined that there isn't enough funding to investigate the crimes reported already and now this system is supposed to report even more crime at the price of my privacy.
I could see potentially a system where known suspects are targeted specifically but in this case, everybody is a suspect. What happened to presumption of innocence?
The fact of the matter is that chat control is the digital Stasi, always listening to your conversations, analyzing your messages. God forbid the algorithm flags your innocent picture wrongly.
It's socialism versus capitalism at its finest. The problem is that socialism risks regulating big tech out of existence. Is that an issue? Absolutely. By stifling big tech, Europe becomes heavily dependent on the US, which ultimately hurts our quality of life. As an entrepreneur living in Europe, the best thing you can do is move to the US.
It was not shut down, it will certainly come. The DSA is another tool that is already in effect. Bit by bit all the pieces of a surveillance state are coming together in the EU.
Could articles like this bemoaning Europe's state of regulation be opinion pieces?
What if what Europe does is a good idea for the people but just inconvenient for companies?
Europe is one of the power houses of the world but with low self-esteem I am afraid. In the long term what matters is the people's quality of life and diversity.
Take China or the US: if a lot of people don't have purchasing power and leisure who are then buying stuff for themselves as end users?
> Could articles like this bemoaning Europe's state of regulation be opinion pieces?
I agree with the broader idea that a lot of this stuff is PR from vested interests, but this case it's not really secret, since the news outlet categorizes it as:
> Argument - An expert's point of view on a current event.
Are you under the impression that people in the US don't have purchasing power?
Also, Europe is a power house right now, but won't be a generation from now if trends continue. All forms of power are built on economic power or are a means to get economic power.
As an European, I heard that 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. I don't think our laws should focus on tech companies' freedom since it doesn't seem to improve the people's lives.
Not sure where that stat comes from - median wealth in the USA compares extremely favourably with the rest of the world, while the average blows everyone except Switzerland out of the water.
Also, living paycheck to paycheck != being poor. There are many people with high incomes but poor budgeting who live paycheck to paycheck, but will realistically be just fine if they have to tighten their braces.
Americans have the highest level of disposable income in the world, and it's not even close. Even Europe's mega-rich tax havens like Luxembourg have a lower disposable income than Americans.
Yea I know the rebuttal--"but I also heard they all have $100,000 hospital bills every year!!" The disposable per capita income numbers already account for healthcare expenditures.
You used the term "highest level of disposable income in the world".
Sorry to be so blunt, but it's not helpful if you look only at the average.
A better metric would be the median because it is well known that the super rich distort the disposable income in some countries (the US, but also some European countries).
I see in plutocraticish environments the rich and powerful sometimes very deftfully prevent measures inconvenient for Corporate but useful for the weaker part of the population.
I admit this also happens in Europe. But somehow it is just easier to live as a poorish person in many European countries.
Not sure if you checked the link, Wikipedia has both Mean equivalised and Median equivalised charts.
Americans rank #1 on both mean and median. So the point about the super rich distorting the mean is irrelevant.
> But somehow it is just easier to live as a poorish person in many European countries.
Perception and narratives are not reality. In fact, typically in economic matters it takes almost a decade for the public narrative to shift to match the reality of the numbers. Even if reality is right there in the data.
This is why bubbles usually go on for much longer than the "smart" people think they will. Look at any of Fama-French research; momentum is the strongest inefficiency in virtually all markets.
The other thing is - though US median performance is high and average performance is much higher - it's not just a couple of billionaires pulling up that average.
It's millionaires - tens of millions of them.
There's something special about a system that can create so many extremely successful people.
It does so by creating equally as many incredibly miserable people. Homelessness is rampant on the US and the average American is one health emergency away from poverty. That's also the same country well known for saddling college students with life-crippling debts.
> As an European, I heard that 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck
Yes, and we all declare bankruptcy every month, and charge $10,000 to our credit card to be allowed into the doctor's waiting room, where we announce our arrival by firing a gun in the air.
The numbers are debatable as usual but they're not taken from thin air
> A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses.
> Similarly, a 2023 Forbes Advisor survey revealed that nearly 70% of respondents either identified as living paycheck to paycheck (40%) or—even more concerning—reported that their income doesn’t even cover their standard expenses (29%).
The numbers are debatable as usual but they're not taken from thin air
> A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses.
> Similarly, a 2023 Forbes Advisor survey revealed that nearly 70% of respondents either identified as living paycheck to paycheck (40%) or—even more concerning—reported that their income doesn’t even cover their standard expenses (29%).
>In the long term what matters is the people's quality of life and diversity.
I think you'll be surprised to find out just how many Europeans disagree with the diversity part. We are quite close to ethno-state Europe, just like how it was between 1800 and 1950.
Ask a European what they think of Gypsies for a wild time.
> What if what Europe does is a good idea for the people but just inconvenient for companies?
Thats exactly the issue. What's good for Europeans isn't so good for American corporations.
Already populist presidents in America have signaled they don't care about Europe so why should Europeans nurture and allow a hostile country continue to operate in their lands?
This type of outrage from American MSM is quite baffling. Whether their billionaires like it or not countries are going their own way and the biggest slap in the face is that those billionaires do not even live in America.
The core issue with the DMA is that there is no kind of pre-vetting or assurances available. This is combined with a very wide set of interpretations from a vague set of texts. We've already seen the DMA being waged against a scenario which Margrethe Vestager¹ herself had originally stated would be an ideal outcome of the DMA.²
When 10% of global revenue is on the line it makes adequate sense to tread carefully with EU releases until there is some legal precedent. (And 20% if the EU finds that compliance isn't being met.)
Margrethe Vestager has stated that withholding features is proof of anti-competitive behaviour. Such a statement would be hilarious if it wasn't so obviously preordained, and patently tone-deaf from the consequences of her own statements.
So what's the end game for the EU? In theory this should allow local and small competitors to fill the void since they're not beholden to the DMA. My expectation is that it'll just be the EU perpetually several steps behind the rest of the world and some types of tech involvement only available via US-based purchases/import basis.
There as much ai shenanigans going on here in Europe as in US. DMA rules do not apply to startups. GDPR is good and stings larger corporations more than smaller ones.
Apple and Google are holding a beta risky feature and leveraging it as reason to get some sympathy.
I am an avid reader of Show HNs. And I remember many that became successful businesses. But not a single European one.
All the "startups" that I see here in Europe are very classical businesses. They build software tools for local enterprises.
It seems nobody in Europe is building something for the open web. Maybe because nobody here understands all the regulations that come with it. The GDPR alone is 100 pages of legal mumbo jumbo.
That's probably not a regulation issue that's mostly hitting US big tech, though.
European schools and universities tend to drill people towards employment and not to take too many risks so starting companies isn't as widespread and considered too bureaucratic.
Then there's the issue of multiple currencies and not every checkout SaaS supporting all of them and their various options of payment (afaik), which limits reach. That's a problem the US, India, China and Russia don't have.
Most show HNs are just some shitty wrapper around OpenAI APIs these days, from what I've noticed. "Searching for papers with AI!" Doesn't exactly sound like the next Google to me, but maybe I'm just out of touch.
Or consider the recent charges the EU levied against X. Under Elon Musk’s ownership, anyone can now purchase a blue check with a paid subscription, whereas blue checks were previously reserved for notable figures. EU regulators singled out the new system for blue checks as a deceptive business practice that violates the bloc’s Digital Services Act.
What are they thinking?? The blue check mark is supposed to mean verified. They changed it to simply mean paid subscription. They took a symbol of trust and utterly ripped out the trust part. I don't care how much you publicize it, that's not acceptable.
Would he be ok with my going and purchasing a SSL certificate for www.x.com???
Don't be naive. It was never a symbol of trust. At most it was a symbol of prominence or notability as decided by a biased, unaccountable group of Twitter employees. Many of the old blue check mark accounts routinely posted inaccurate information or outright lies.
The new X Community Notes system is far superior for establishing trust.
Fundamentally just because a software feature worked a certain way at one time doesn't create an obligation for tech companies to keep it working the same way. Whether you consider that acceptable is entirely irrelevant.
>Many of the old blue check mark accounts routinely posted inaccurate information or outright lies.
There are always going to be misinformation. It's crazy to think a company or any committee can determine these for us though. It's not even logical yet alone practical. then you need to determine whether said entity made any judgment errors in assessing a person or claim. Those who demand centralized 'truth' authorities are useful idiots for power seeking authoritarians.
> Many of the old blue check mark accounts routinely posted inaccurate information or outright lies.
So? The point of the old blue checkmark wasn't to assure me that what the account said was true. It was to provide some assurance that the account was really the account of the prominent or notable person with that name.
Nah, it was never a symbol of trust in identity. A lot of those accounts were actually managed by social media staff, not by the "verified" people themselves. It was always just a meaningless vanity mark.
It's not a certificate, it's a blue mark on a site that tell's you user is verified through payment. It should never be a symbol of trust, as twitter or anyone can't assess the trustworthiness of individuals :)
>as twitter or anyone can't assess the trustworthiness of individuals
You need to rethink what was being implied. Twitter CAN assess whether or not you can trust that the person that owns the account is who they say they are. That's what the blue checkmark was. It was NOT implying that the person was trustworthy.
It’s probably smarter to only kick-in regulations after certain size thresholds are met. You can definitely strangle an organization with paperwork before it even has enough money to hire people to do the paperwork.
That's the case for most, if not all, of the new European regulations, such as the Digital Markets Act. The number of companies to which it applies can be counted on your hands, and they all have tens of billions of dollars of revenue.
Nah, not really. The EU will have a thriving tech market. It just won't have ad-supported sites. Because if anyone hasn't noticed, "data privacy" is just targeted ads.
"This company was caught tracking which users visited each page" Yes, for targeted ads.
"Cambridge Analytica was" Yes, for targeted ads.
"3rd party" Yes, targeted ads.
It's all targeted ads. They want to serve you targeted ads. Any attempt to paint "data privacy" as something other than this is irresponsible fearmongering.
Apparently the author founded the "Center for New Liberalism". I tried to find out how that's funded, but could only see memberships that gives access to a 700+-person Slack, and couldn't find what the dues are. Would be interested in learning more about that, if anyone knows more.
Not only the tech market, they're on a pace in destroying the agricultural market as well. Small, medium size farmers are disappearing fast, they quit or at best being absorbed by large farmcorps.
For agriculture at large I wonder if that's not going to be the final economic state everywhere in the world, regardless of government. That's just more efficient. Is there anywhere in the world where this trend is reversing and looking healthy?
Unless you only look at the financial side of things, and only from the perspective of the larger corps benefiting from this trend, it's not healthy at all.
American agriculture already went down that path. This might be a global pattern following the adoption of improved technology. Is there a reason to believe otherwise in the case of Europe? Or maybe it's a multifaceted phenomenon.
the agriculture market relies heavily on goverment intervention to even exist.
The EU and its member states give out huge subsidies to keep food production local in the EU without being completely destroyed by cheaper crops from third world countries.
The US does the same, and it is for good reason, to actually make sure a steady food supply exists inside the country/union.
When it comes to commodity staple foods there's just no way that small farms can survive. It isn't realistic given advances in technology and economies of scale. This isn't a problem, it's just inevitable. Small farms that want to remain independent will have to switch from commodities to specialty foods that command higher profit margins.
That’s already happened in the US without regulation, little farms don’t stand a chance against giant agribusinesses which may not even be US owned (largest pork producer is owned by Chinese) . In fact regulation is probably preventing it from happening faster in the EU.
>> Small, medium size farmers are disappearing fast, they quit or at best being absorbed by large farmcorps.
> So making agricultural markets orders of magnitudes more efficient is destroying it in your view?
Yes, of course it is.
It's like replacing families by hell called a "System" - wet dream of the eg. leftists.
It literaly destroy "market" becouse producers side disappear and you have just institution :)
It destroys it becouse no one know how or want to do that hard agriculture business. People will just prefer to sit in slums around big cities. What they can do anyway if everything is not big but giant ? How to buy such area ? How to even learn what to do with it ?? How to acquire buyers if you even get that giant area LOL ? And if it to big for one man or family how to get enough workers (why they even wanted to live slums ? how they even learn what to do??) ??
That giant and efficient (in one dimension) thing just extend himself into lack of self-sufficiency on multigeneration time scale.
Monoculture becose it's cheaper ? :>
Product quality ??? Compare to XO brandy, champagne or artisanal leather wallets. Not to boxed milk with "not yet discovered" PFASes or future "improvements".
Food security in case of war or invasion ? Or mass drone invasion ? Without small and medium agriculture you have nowhere to run. And why to even run - do one giant owner will take multiple ex-bigcity refugees to his home (and feed them few months) or just hire security to shot them or scary of his land ?
And even if giant owner want to help he can't. Becouse hi is only one. Compare to many small/farms - they are somehow just "human" and humanity sized...
Don Corleone was planting tomatoes at the end ;)
I met few peoples that when stopped to be young just moved to province and started peacefull living of the land. Giant farms are a no go for that purposes.
And yes, eg. China builds piggeries and cowsheds town-sized now. Now imagine one case of some-flue in that "town" - best case... And suddenly millions have prices hike or are starving. Or Africa countries get very cheap but toxic meat. Or animal food. Eg. with prions included...
And all of that are just real world facts and "technicals". Now add greeeeed by "lawful" owners. Tell me - is that hypothetical ? \s You easily can write long replay or tree of them just on that subject :>
Corect way is to not build hell on earth in the first place.
I think we can debate regulations being productive or not all day and either side of the camp will never agree, however my biggest personal issue is that the government is removing the choice from anyone involved. As an adult you should be able to chose for yourself - if everyone chose no, then nobody would use these services and the companies wouldn’t do it. I think the effort needs to be focused on awareness and education, not restriction.
If the average user is fine with their data being sold in exchange for a service, then why not let them?
I’m personally not okay with it and I keep my data footprint as low as I can, but I know lots of people who just do not care if they get a service in return, and are fully understanding of what that means.
Companies circumvent real choice all the time. Regulations prevent them from doing so. There's no equivalency here. EU has repeatedly made legislation that does something or anything to counteract the power these tech companies have over the lives of billions. The EU has an interest in serving the needs of EU citizens. Tech companies do not. Tech companies only care about their bottom line, regardless of the human or financial cost to anybody else. There is no option for individuals to do anything about these companies. That's what we need governments for.
The US has largely decided that companies shouldn't be regulated at all (particularly with the recent Supreme Court decisions). This isn't a good thing. It will not benefit the vast majority of US citizens. There is no "choice" citizens can make that will undo the unraveling of government regulations on industry/business, unless it's voting for a political party that one that will reform the Supreme Court and revert their insane decisions, a party that isn't the GOP.
Then it sounds like what you’re saying is there’s a financial market for users like you and I who would rather pay a subscription fee than our data be sold? Or an ad supported tier?
The problem with your argument is you’re removing any revenue source the company has. If you won’t pay a subscription, and you block all the ads, and they can’t sell data, how do they make money? Money is required to run the service, whether that leaves a sour taste or not.
If you think you have a financially viable model that protects data, then you should start a company on that premise, I’d genuinely love to see someone make it work.
> Then it sounds like what you’re saying is there’s a financial market for users like you and I who would rather pay a subscription fee than our data be sold? Or an ad supported tier?
And the vast majority of users don't deserve privacy? Nah, that's a ridiculous argument to make and I'm not going to waste my time with this line of discussion. You're not making a good faith argument. I'm not playing your stupid games.
There's plenty of interpretative room to view the above comment as honest discussion as opposed to dishonesty ("bad faith"). But now you've burned the bridge so hard why do you even bother making an argument? Just to get the last word?
I don’t think there’s need for anger, I’m not “playing games”. All I’m doing is pointing out that there has to be a source of revenue to run any given service - and if you remove all the sources of revenue then the service ceases to exist. Right now the only viable sources of revenue at that kind of online service scale is subscriptions, ads, or data collection and sale.
If there’s a method I’m not thinking of I’m genuinely curious what the financial model would look like.
No one is forcing you to use these services. I care very much about my privacy and only use a handful of services that respect that privacy. Stop giving your money to companies you disagree with and stop forcing your morality on others. Because all that does is set the precedent for someone to force their morality on you even if you disagree with it. That's how we get anti gay, xenophobic, extremists forcing their moral views on others.
Protection of the water we drink is a legal right. Which is why companies cannot dump waste into the river, no matter what financial impacts it has on them.
Protection of user data is a legal right, or increasingly recognized to be. Companies have no right to sell it, or misuse it, no matter what financial impacts it has on them.
Rights cannot be contracted away or sold. They are rights.
I rent my rights via a contract to certain defined aspects of my autonomy for about forty hours per week. In exchange for that I get tokens that I can exchange for food. If I couldn't contract away those rights I'd get hungry.
I'm also willing to rent my right to determine the contents of advertisements inserted into my daily news feed, for the right price. These things feel equivalent in kind to me.
I contract away time-slices of my human effort. I consider that I own that effort by right, and part of that ownership bundle is the right to destroy or exchange it. So it is consistent to both have a right and to trade parts of it away. It would be less of a right if I were prohibited from exchanging it for other priorities, like food.
You are saying I shouldn't be able to consent to letting someone sell my data? Can I sell my own data? How about if I shared it, would that be illegal?
When you knowingly agree to use a service that sells your data, that's fine. When you link it to Facebook and then give it access to your contacts and the name, email address, and phone number of every person you know gets sold to a company that then goes and uses that information to send personalized phishing emails and commit fraud that's a lot less fine.
At the end of the day its about liability. There are many tech companies that are responsible for harm at both the individual and societal level, and they are not held accountable.
> If the average user is fine with their data being sold in exchange for a service, then why not let them?
But they are not okay with it. I understand why Corporations like to insinuate that people who click OK to twenty pages of legalese in an EULA really are okay with whatever clauses in it, but in reality this practice is an abuse of contract law and exploiting asymmetric power relations. In theory, a potential customer could print EULAs out, suggest changes, and send back the revised contract for approval or further negotiation. In practice, nobody ever does that and corporations would freak out if it happened on a large scale.
The problem does not just occur with new big tech. Banks have been doing the same for decades. I recently put some money on a savings account and was greeted with pages and pages of fine print that literally only a lawyer can understand. Normally, nobody in their right mind would accept this. However, the bank serves as a utility, changing banks is very difficult where I live and they all have the same kind of contracts in their favor. There is no alternative. The same is true for social networks and other big tech. It's not really a free choice for a small business owner to have a Facebook account or for a self-published author to put their books on Amazon, for instance.
That's why strong regulations, good customer protection and privacy laws are needed.
All advertising is a step too far, I think. But banning accepting any remuneration to deliver, display, or cause to be viewed any advertisement, and limiting physical ads in places viewable from public areas seems like it would improve things. Buildings shouldn't be covered in ads, and the internet shouldn't be largely based around scamming as much information out of people as possible to jam ads down their throat, but a business should be allowed to put up flyers on their own storefront. I mean, if you're really pedantic about banning all ads, that probably precludes restaurants posting menus out front.
Extremely limited, focused, designed to deliver facts rather than entertainment or flashy catchy content 'ads' could be informative and beneficial. The structure of the ad should be as close to sanitized textbook as possible, maybe even follow a regulated formula. Something like, "This is a thing that exists. Here's the benefit without dramatizing or 'selling' someone something they don't need. X brand can be found at Y location for Z cost."
It's easy to agree with all advertising. I think that's the quickest, easiest measure to cut that yields an outcome beneficial to society, and that more ads are nearly always worse.
I also think that sales are worse for society than every day prices that deliver value; sales do make sense for things like seasonal items which are in abundance due to just being harvested.
I’ve wondered the same thing. How much does a company have to spend on ads just to keep up with their competitors’ ad spend? I don’t know but if I had to guess I’d say most of the ad budget. Not to mention that ads are a cancer that infest and overrun anything they touch.
Would be a dream. Then a more-or-less independent entity paid by our tax money could be used to test stuff according to objective and scientific standards. I mean, stuff like TÜV certification already exists, doing a bit more work to get a reliable measure of performance, repairability, etc... like some review websites do wouldn't be that difficult.
Instead, we're forced to turn to third-party testers with dubious manufacturer relations - even when the results aren't freely available! - or technical knowledge (e.g. Consumer Reports using 1/3 octave smoothed power response for loudspeakers)...
The great thing about them selling you something made to be as crappy as you will stand, is that then you'll then have to refund it all the time, making their re-targeting ads even more "effective" :)) What a virtuous cycle!
If you spent real money on something, you're far more likely to buy it again or buy it for someone or send that link to someone than a completely new product.
Tracking stats of your customers using the data they willingly gave you and making marketing decisions isn't the problem. Neither is making sponsorship agreements with content producers who make relevant content.
Creation of global markets with interconnected networks to track and share detailed personal information about mental states, political alignment, sexual life and more is the problem.
If I am Tylor Swift fan I should get her merch advertising only when I am visiting swifties forum or group - but not when I am checking my fishing forum where I expect fishing gear ads. But nowadays I get adsg
> Why would it benefit society to get less targeted ads as opposed to more targeted ones?
Because more targeted ads require a dangerous and abusive system of pervasive surveillance while less targeted ads can still be targeted without hurting as many people in the process.
The Internet existed before Internet ads (and particularly targeted ads) did. Personally, while I don't necessarily disagree with the point you're making, I'm curious to see what a pendulum swing in the opposite direction might look like.
> Untargeted ads pay less than 5% what targeted ones do.
Even assuming that is true, companies are bidding for user's attention and against each other. What do you think will happen to prices for context-based advertising if targeted advertising goes away?
> and the one billion YouTube viewers would likely be quite upset about it
Great example. Many of the ads that finance the YouTube ecosystem are context-based and not targeted.
> What do you think will happen to prices for context-based advertising if targeted advertising goes away?
It's quite obvious, isn't it? They will stop buying ads altogether.
The entire reason targeted ads pay better is because they have a higher conversion rate, so advertisers can afford to pay more.
> Many of the ads that finance the YouTube ecosystem are context-based and not targeted.
And that's why shovel-ware "personal finance" crap YouTube channels make mega-bux, while actually interesting creators earn pennies. If you want more "junk food content", have at it: Ban all the targeted ads!
Just don't come crying in five years when there's nothing good to watch or read.
What exactly do you mean by "targeted advertising"? I'm guessing you probably mean "behavioral advertising", which is a subset of "targeted advertising".
Targeted advertising includes contextual advertising (e.g., a company putting an ad for their bird watching binoculars on a bird watching blog) and I'm having trouble thinking of any reason to ban that.
I'd even go to banning all commercial ads, like several cities have done offline.
Reasons?
Click bait, boosts consumerism, ads imply essentially a tax for everyone (remember that ads have to be paid by the consumers), CEO spam, annoying, environmental costs
Making everything rely on subscription (consider European TV license fees as such) and word-of-mouth is what you end up with. Except in the case of former, over-subscription is getting into a problem too.
Oh no, companies can't manipulate people as easily and some will go bankrupt, because they can't give people as much FOMO and there will be less trash in the internet
I have some excellent news for you about the legality of targeted advertising under the GDPR.
The GDPR is very clear about this. Advertising is not a legitimate interest or a functionally-required data processing, ergo, it may only be done with user consent. And that user consent may not be coerced in any way at all, you may not even refuse access to services if users reject their data being used.
It's taking a while to go up and down the courts, but the days of ad-tech are numbered.
Good intentions but how well is that working out so far?
Only thing we got was annoying cookie popups everywhere, where consent is one click away and reject is three layers behind a small “learn more” button.
That just shows us that the companies don't give a shit and are implementing every dark pattern under the sun to keep harvesting data. The ePrivacy bill, GDPR and the EU cookie laws say nothing about cookie banners or anything of the sort, companies just make it as annoying as possible so that people get tired by it and mindlessly click reject.
Guess what, the whole hidden reject thing? That's not legal. Opting out should be equally as easy (or easier) than opting in, which a lot of EU companies realize.
every meeting I have been in wrt PII collection had some provvisions for 1) how will this be protected enough 2) how can we easily delete this if needed; so I would say decently.
A company that provides a phone service (mobile or other) has to conform to a large amount of regulatory red tape. Why? because either a company before tried to monopolise the entire country, or they killed someone.
Now, large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people (unlike say tobacco, or talc powder, 3M and half of their solvents, weed killer, most car makers, etc etc)
but they have been trying desperately to stop all competition.
They've also been trying to extract as much personal info as possible for profit. Because regulators in the USA are hamstrung, they are used to being able to basically doing stuff that would be illegal if it were in physical stores/pre-existing industries.
I read that as saying there's nothing to be done, monopolies are natural, we can't stop the order of things without making everything worse, we must just acquiesce and learn to live with them.
Is that correct? I have a hard time thinking that is true.
I think you're making a mistake confusing the way things are today in terms of market concentration with the way things were in the past. In terms of market concentration in the US at least, things were massively different even 20 years ago.
> Why would you expect a company not to pursue profits?
People keep talking about the obligation to shareholders for a company to maximize profits, but there's a wide list of possibilities between not doing that and seeking to actively, wholesale ruin privacy.
I expect the people in companies to take responsibility for their actions instead of pretending that they're beholden to the company's wants.
> They've also been trying to extract as much personal info as possible for profit. Because regulators in the USA are hamstrung, they are used to being able to basically doing stuff that would be illegal if it were in physical stores/pre-existing industries.
Did you actually read the article? I don't know how you square this kobayashi maru situation, unless you think Meta is outright lying about it:
> Europe recently charged Meta with breaching EU regulations over its “pay or consent” plan. Meta’s business is built around personalized ads, which are worth far more than non-personalized ads. EU regulators required that Meta provide an option that did not involve tracking user data, so Meta created a paid model that would allow users to pay a fee for an ad-free service.
This was already a significant concession—personalized ads are so valuable that one analyst estimated paid users would bring in 60 percent less revenue. But EU regulators are now insisting this model also breaches the rules, saying that Meta fails to provide a less personalized but equivalent version of Meta’s social networks. They’re demanding that Meta provide free full services without personalized ads or a monthly fee for users. In a very real sense, the EU has ruled that Meta’s core business model is illegal. Non-personalized ads cannot economically sustain Meta’s services, but it’s the only solution EU regulators want to accept.
Also, what about the CUDA situation? I don't see how any consumer is harmed by this, which is quite different from a social media company doing its thing.
BS. Lot's of companies / entities moved there because of said "millions" so you are unwillingly forced to use them as a mean of contact. And sadly open alternatives are blocked/unavailable...
That’s a pretty glib stance. Plenty of people have difficulty finding a friend group and not everyone can be an island until they do (see the loneliness epidemic). Perhaps consider that there are other people with different life situations than yours for whom demanding individualized treatment does not work, and they may have much less choice about what technologies they have to use as a result.
My sister has kids, and their school exclusively uses whatsapp to broadcast events and other things happening in the school, despite repeated complaints from many parents. There's millions of little things like this out there. Many small businesses like repairmen or such only do Whatsapp. It's quite literally unavoidable in some countries.
Whatsapp is not Facebook, and it's not social media. It's a messaging application. Different thing. I quit Facebook -- I didn't exit every messaging platform. Yes, if you eschew every messaging platform, nobody can reach you. That's obviously correct.
However, nothing I use could be called a Facebook replacement, either. WhatsApp isn't a Facebook replacement.
Sorry, this is just how technology works. There is going to be a way that the vast majority of people want to communicate and if you don't want to use it, it's going to be a pain in the ass for you. This is always going to be the case, and nobody is under any obligation to accommodate you. If you didn't want to have a home phone in the 90s it would have been the same thing.
So? Just because there are reasons to compromise our freedoms doesn't mean we should stop asking which compromises are worth it and saying no to those that aren't.
No, this is how monopolies build their turf. Individually it is almost impossible to say no to that but as society we can simply outlaw these lock in tactics.
You might have heard of the phone network and email. Both provide you with choices as to which corporations you want to do business with without limiting what contacts you can talk to.
I don't use Facebook but for example KLM/AF at least 5-6 years ago pushed hard "means of contact" as "talk to us at whatsapp/facebook". And they weren't the only one. And the track of thinking was probably "If everyone/millions use it then let's move away from this old pesky email"...
There are groups/communities (real ones, for example building or school) that settled on WA/FB group so while you are not necessarily forced to if you don't there is a high chance that you will miss some crucial info…
I don't use it in any manner for personal communication though…
Meta should've been nuked when Cambridge Analytica happened; the fact that US lawmakers did nothing after that is a complete joke. Zucc should be in jail alongside every other piece of shit who thinks it's their right to mass-harvest every single person's personal data indiscriminately for profit.
You know what they say: Only old people use Facebook.
All the younger people I know are on Instagram (yes Meta owns that). But another social network will take its place like it always has. I’m pretty sure Meta knows this since they also own WhatsApp.
For what is worth, I think Meta is lying about it, or at least playing the victim card too strongly.
> They’re demanding that Meta provide free full services without personalized ads or a monthly fee for users.
Meta is being sued because their paid plan is not honest - they are currently asking for 10€/month which is disproportionate - for comparison, a Business Standard Google Workspace account with 2Tb and Gemini costs 11€. From [1], "EU law requires that consent is the genuine free will of the user. Contrary to this law, Meta charges a 'privacy fee' of up to €250 per year if anyone dares to exercise their fundamental right to data protection".
I don't think reasonable prices are based on what the potential maximum profit per user is. Normally it's based on the expense per user plus a percentage for profit.
Reasonable is definitely an opinion, but that doesn't mean it's random.
In legal and economic contexts, reasonable profits are a thing that is routinely calculated. Where industries are more regulated, 'reasonable' profits are often bound by statutory guidelines. In more competitive markets, prices are not fixed in the same way but you can take a look at industry standards to ascertain what might be reasonable.
- makes it too difficult for consumers to find out what exactly they give to facebook in exchange for this ‘free’ service
- is not clear enough about the fact that paying will not remove all ads
- forces existing users to choose between paid and ‘free’ versions before they can use the service again.
Nowhere do they say on that page that Meta "provide free full services without personalized ads or a monthly fee for users”. Am I reading the wrong page?
Yes. That's a separate investigation; "Today's action focuses specifically on the assessment of Meta's practices under EU consumer law and is distinct from the ongoing ... , and the assessment by the Irish Data Protection Commission under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)."
But it's an extremely settled matter. The GDPR says explicitly that consent is not "freely given" if the provision of a service is dependent on said consent. (Where the service does not absolutely require the data processing in question; See Article 7, recital 43)
Thanks. They avoid saying Meta should have a free option without personalized ads; they only say Meta should consider it. I wonder what other options Meta has, though, apart from leaving the market.
Maybe they’re thinking of Meta making Facebook paid for everybody, but giving users the option of getting paid for getting personalized ads? Apart from the wording, I don’t see how that’s different from “It’s free, but if you don’t want personalized have to pay”, though.
It would be different in that it makes it more explicit that users are selling something, though, so maybe it would be enough in the eyes of the EU?
Do companies need onerous regulations that increase costs for consumers or do they need the incentive in form of not having their corporate charter cancelled and corporate officers banned from doing business as a threat to maintain a fair market?
Nobody is against regulation that disfavors large incumbents to support competition instead.
You'll struggle to find people who are against the Digital Markets Act for this reason. It literally only targets the potential monopolists.
However, virtually every other piece of regulation does the opposite.
Regulation usually gets trotted out after the downside of doing [new innovation] is experienced. This always happens, because doing something new always involves unknown risk. Most people aren't entrepreneurs and hate risk, so they pass regulation, and the market gets locked down so nothing new happens again. Incumbents and their army of lawyers can easily comply or are grandfathered in, and challengers are permanently disadvantaged. That market is officially dead until the next fundamental leap forward in technology.
What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass this incumbent-cementing regulation before we've even had a chance to experience both the upside and downside, so the innovation never happens at all.
Combine this with a rapidly aging demography in Europe, and I only see this trend increasing. If there's one thing old people hate, it's risk and doing new things. Meanwhile, those same old folks are expecting massive payouts (social benefits) via taxation of the same private sector they're currently kneecapping with red tape. While ironic, those two trends converging aren't great for Europe.
> You'll struggle to find people who are against the Digital Markets Act for this reason. It literally only targets the potential monopolists.
I'm against the way it's being applied to Apple. I don't think that the government should dictate that consumers aren't allowed to choose a platform that's a locked down walled garden if that's what they want.
We have platforms that aren't walled gardens (Android) that many of us happily use (myself included), and Apple shouldn't have to become something that it didn't set out to be just because a few other big tech companies feel stifled by Apple's rules.
this argument doesn't work, because you could always argue that the consumer chose this product, and thus its features and practices should be allowed. Apple had it coming for a long time already, one way or another. And Microsoft also will again the way they are going.
Yeah, sure, you could always argue that about anything, but that's not a refutation of this particular argument in this particular situation. Apple's walled garden produces a lot of real benefits for its customers that are part of what make it successful, and dismantling their walled garden is going to harm consumers.
I would never pick an Apple device for myself. I would also never recommend an Android phone to my mother-in-law. I, myself, know to avoid the many Android security holes that exist because it's a relaxed platform. But for my non-technical loved ones, Apple provides a much better experience in large part because it's a walled garden that makes it very difficult to install garbage.
> Apple's walled garden produces a lot of real benefits for its customers that are part of what make it successful, and dismantling their walled garden is going to harm consumers.
What are those benefits, and why would they evaporate if Apple adds an "Install from other sources" toggle? If you want to exclusively benefit from Apple's discernment, keep that toggle off and stay in the walled garden.If the benefits are so great, then surely everyone will choose to stay in the walled garden.
The problem is that having the option of exiting the walled garden kills the garden. As soon as the most important apps aren’t available on the apple App Store any more, everyone will have to exit the garden. You can argue about the pros and cons of that, but you can’t deny that this has an effect on every apple user, not just the ones that choose to exit.
The App Store review provides protections which are not a technical protections. Earlier someone talked about the failing of allowing a $50 subscription flashlight app into the store (dunno if they’d be able to find a citation). This was a failing of the expected business controls. There’s nothing technical to even be done to prevent these sorts of abuses.
One example from a while back was banning an internal Facebook enterprise developer account because they were using it to install a VPN onto users devices for the purpose of monitoring user behavior for competitive market analysis. This is not anything that can be prevented by technical controls, and was only able to be published because enterprise profiles can deploy apps outside the store.
Apple wants their customers to be safe. Third party marketplaces take that responsibility and control out of their hands. Apple stopped that VPN abuse immediately upon finding out about it. How long would it take for European regulators to force Facebook to turn off such a self published app of their own accord?
> Earlier someone talked about the failing of allowing a $50 subscription flashlight app into the store (dunno if they’d be able to find a citation). This was a failing of the expected business controls.
How about LassPass, then? That made it onto the AppStore despite being designed to make money and steal credentials.
Maybe not $50/month, though. I love one Apple apologist's remarks on that aspect:
> Instead, the scam LassPass app tries to steer you to creating a “pro” account subscription for $2/month, $10/year, or a $50 lifetime purchase. Those are actually low prices for a scam app — a lot of scammy apps try to charge like $10/week.
Emphasis mine. "Look, I know you got your credentials stolen, but at least you didn't also get scammed out of as much money as some other scammy apps!"
I am unsure your point - are you saying since the business controls are fallible, we should abandon them and have an internet's worth of potential side-loaded LastPass scam apps?
> If the benefits are so great, then surely everyone will choose to stay in the walled garden.
Surely you've seen enough of the free market to know that this is baloney. The instant that the walled garden is gone abusive apps (Facebook et al) will start ushering users away from it into their own, abusive paths as the only way to install. And once the big abusive apps have started the trend, the walled garden is effectively gone. Businesses don't choose regulation if they can help it.
The only reason we don't see this with Android and Google Play is because Google hardly has any rules at all about what can go on the Play Store.
Does that change the garden for you? Can't users such as yourself remain in the Apple ecosystem? Do other users leaving affect you? Or Apple? Maybe they won't have as much cash?
Does Apple deserve the extra cash in perpetuity for being the first with the network effect? There might be a lot of better ideas out there, if they were given a chance, like Apple had back before them and Google took over the market.
> abusive apps (Facebook et al) will start ushering users away from it into their own, abusive paths as the only way to install
> Do other users leaving affect you?
To clarify, I'm not an Apple user. I use their competitors in all categories because they're not really my style. (Yes, choosing something other than Apple is a choice you can make!)
I'm just someone who feels the need to represent normal Apple users inside the HN bubble.
Facebook will leave the AppStore. Grandma can’t find Facebook anymore on her new iPhone, and will google “how to install Facebook on iPhone”. Thousands of websites will SEO for that, and give instructions (“There will be a popup that says ‘You might install dangerous software. Are you sure?’ Press YES.”) on how to install their AppStore with some Facebook clone/spyware/VPN MITM attack/keyloggers. They will have complete control of grandma’s phone, collect all the data they want. Soon she’ll have a new default browser with 7 toolbars, a new search engine, and be mining crypto on the side.
Still seems more of a "we need the mafia because they prevent you from buying hard drugs" kind of argument. If Facebook is so harmful then we should deal with it directly instead of giving another private company control over what individuals can install and what businesses can or cannot reach half of the population. More to the point whe should require Facebook to allow alternative applications which don't violate your privacy and thus could be on the app store so grandma never has to go searching for the "real" facebook to interact with her friends unless that's something she specifically wants.
> Surely you've seen enough of the free market to know that this is baloney. The instant that the walled garden is gone abusive apps (Facebook et al) will start ushering users away from it into their own, abusive paths as the only way to install.
Nah. Users don't grok sideloading.
Even on android where it's always been possible, it's a fringe phenomenon. And every app is on Google Play. In fact it basically killed Huawei in the West not being able to offer it anymore.
The only exception is the epic store but they do it to make a point. Not because it actually works.
First and most importantly: you're imagining a sideloading method that is much less first-class than that the EU wants to impose.
Even aside from that, you can't compare the Play Store to Apple's because the Play Store is a thousand times less restrictive. There's a reason why people are constantly complaining about the App Store and (aside from Epic) never the Play Store. Apple has a lot of restrictions, and while some of them are there to extract more money most are there to protect their customers.
> First and most importantly: you're imagining a sideloading method that is much less first-class than that the EU wants to impose.
I'm not "imagining" anything. This is the status quo on Android and even setting one switch to "allow installations from this source" (one that already pops up automatically no less!) already freaks users out.
And the EU is fine with this. They didn't specify any technical implementation to Apple so I'm sure they will make it as scary as they can.
> Even aside from that, you can't compare the Play Store to Apple's because the Play Store is a thousand times less restrictive.
Apple has seen a lot of stuff slip by the reviewers too, and it's pretty much a hit and miss based on who you get. Just like with Google.
I'm sure a lot more app providers would love to get out from under Apple's heavy hand but in practice this is just wishful thinking. The tiny amount of friction there is on Android is more than enough for people not to bother.
> There's a reason why people are constantly complaining about the App Store and (aside from Epic) never the Play Store. Apple has a lot of restrictions, and while some of them are there to extract more money most are there to protect their customers.
We'll have to differ in opinion on that. I feel like most of the restrictions are there to protect their cash cow which is the app store.
When the tech support scammer calls your mother, there’s a decent chance it convinces to check that box and install who knows what that backdoors the phone.
Apple needs to get out of the infrastructure business if they want to play by their own rules. They aren't selling Gameboys and washing machines, they are storing people's private data and selling primary communication devices. That needs to be regulated and the consumer needs to have the final say, not Apple.
> they are storing people's private data and selling primary communication devices.
To be clear, I think privacy laws like GDPR absolutely have a place for consumer protection.
I just don't think the DMA does. Watching how the DMA applies to Apple, it feels far less about consumer protection than it does about businesses, and that's what makes me uncomfortable. The EU is in this case listening to complaints from a bunch of other businesses who do not have consumer interests at heart and ignoring the very real damage that their actions could do to consumer protection.
The Apple App Store protects users from myriad abuses by myriad bad companies. The EU wants Apple to build a blessed, paved off-ramp that companies can strongly encourage prospective customers to use that brings them deeper into the manipulative control of those companies.
> Think of all those evil hackers waiting around the corner for the poor unsuspecting iPhone users.
I'm not talking "evil hackers". I'm talking about Facebook just for a start. Once they pave the way and teach users how to use the off-ramp (or else not be able to use Facebook!) they'll be followed by dozens of smaller abusive companies that are eager to pass by Apple's review requirements.
I'm far less concerned about software vulnerabilities than I am about the companies that Apple's business policies currently keep in check.
Crypto comments aside, that could have happened on a Windows desktop too. Yet when MS tried to go walled garden with their store everyone complained. I don't see why Apple should get a free pass.
I guess with the iPhone it was walled from the start so anyone buying one knew what they were getting. I'd be pissed off if they walled gardened my mac. I've got an iPhone and have mixed feelings about the restrictions on it. They can be annoying but on the other hand I have significant investments and more and more banks are insisting you access them via an app and for that I'd probably prioritize security.
On the other hand, an example i've posted before: i want DaisyDisk for my iPhone. It will never be available as long as Apple can censor what's released for their phones.
> complaints from a bunch of other businesses who do not have consumer interests at heart
Apple (and other big tech companies) locking the competition out of the market, or buying them, hurts consumers. It robs them of other innovative choices.
Having more choices and interoperability is generally good for consumers.
If you stick with the Apple defaults how does this hurt you?
To clarify: I don't use Apple. I chose their competitors instead because I like the features offered by the competition better.
> If you stick with the Apple defaults how does this hurt you?
Because people won't be able to stick with the defaults. One of the first dominoes to fall if the EU gets its wishlist will be Facebook, which will put a version of its app that wouldn't pass Apple's review out through unofficial channels and strongly encourage or force users to switch to it. Once Facebook has paved the way many other companies that are similarly inclined to abuse their users will follow.
A walled garden with a wide-open back door is no walled garden at all, and the many Apple users who liked the garden are going to be cranky when they realize what tech lobbyists have done in the EU.
Interesting. I had thought of the garden walls as being in the way of users, based on my personal experience, but you bring up the point that the walls can also be in the way of nefarious companies. I assume both can be true.
And perhaps the legal system sees some of these garden wall as protecting Apple, falling under anti-trust, like the 30% markups on all financial transactions?
You mentioned malicious versions of the Facebook app that do an end-run around Apple's review. Maybe the EU is trying to cover this with new laws like the GDPR and DMA, making malicious app behaviour illegal. Might that not be better, protecting all users regardless of platform?
> Maybe the EU is trying to cover this with new laws like the GDPR and DMA, making malicious app behaviour illegal. Might that not be better, protecting all users regardless of platform?
If I thought the EU could actually execute on that? Maybe. But I know that Apple executes on it, and the fallout from the gdpr doesn't give me a lot of confidence that the EU knows how to regulate tech in a way that achieves desired outcomes and doesn't just lead to the same behavior as before with malicious compliance stamped on top.
But it doesn't have to be, you can simply NOT regulate every damn little thing, especially when there are no victims and you are forbidding a simple trade between two entities who are both willing to engage.
No, developers who want to make money on the Apple Store are not victims. They can develop for Linux and sell apps there if they don't want to pay what Apple wants.
I'm one of them, I'm not supporting Apple or Google and I build everything on the web paying nothing.
I agree, mostly. It is worth noting that until the forced opening of the market occurred, safari was conspicuously lacking in PWA support, especially wasm support. I am a recovering libertarian, and I now see the need for regulation in more places. Largely because of regulatory capture, true, but I don't think anarcho-capitalism works. It just makes lawyers top of the heap instead of warriors (in pure anarchy). Which, when the lawyers command the soldiers, isn't any better.
Because they can collect more data with a native app. A native app is far better from their perspective, but not from the user's, unless it is something computationally bound that can't handle overhead (mostly games?). The last exception is banking apps. They do a lot of weird stuff to fingerprint your phone too, but in this case the user definitely wants them to.
I think flash and actionscript might be a counterexample? People have different standards too. In thebearly days of win3.1 I liked apps that had different widget sets, now anything that doesn't look native is considered garbage. And some people seem to consider rastered fonts equivalent to baby-eating in a professional context. I don't think I have any common axioms or value systems to carry on conversations with them, but I believe they do care, so it is probably just that PWAs are my preference, but no one elses. I prefer the web mattermost to the app for instance.
Flash is actually an example of how bad cross platform frameworks are compared to native.
Despite what Adobe said when the iPhone first came out, there was no way that Flash was ever going to run on the first generation iPhone. It had only 128MB RAM and 400 MHz processor. When Flash finally came to Mobile in late 2010 on Android, it required 1GB RAM and 1Ghz processor. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Heck Safari could barely run on the first iPhone, it would do checkerboards until rendering could catch up with the scrolling.
And if you remember Apple’s cross platform Windows apps - iTunes, QuickTime and the short lived Safari, they also looked very bad on Windows.
Both Google and Facebook at different times said they are moving away from cross platform frameworks and web based technologies for iOS to more native software. Google has all but abandoned their cross platform mobile framework.
Web apps have ways to track users, but users have ways to mitigate this via adblockers and privacy features in their browser. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ exists to help users check their own browser fingerprint.
Full apps on the other hand have many more ways to fingerprint users which aren’t as well known, such as “your free storage, your current volume level (to 3 decimal points) and even your battery level (to 15 decimal points)”. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/23/iphone-...)
Is one conclusively better than the other? I’m not sure, but web tracking and fingerprinting is still much more studied and users have more countermeasures, including using a different device where the user has more control.
The question isn't whether anyone could choose to stay inside if they want to, the question is whether I can trust that {insert older relative here} will stay inside the garden and not get tricked by a sketchy website into installing something through the back doors the EU is mandating.
If the opening up of Apple were as difficult to use as getting root on Android is I wouldn't have a problem. But that's not what's being proposed, and any attempts by Apple to make it less than perfectly smooth for someone to exit the walled garden are most likely going to be shot down.
You need app Foo on your phone for work (like Slack, maybe). Foo is in the App Store and worked great on your iPhone but decides they want to install via their own store so they can monetize employees’ data (location, whatever) to make more money. The new store launches, the new app version abuses private APIs, and the App Store version stops working. Your company announces that all employees need to download from the new source. Do you really have a choice about staying in the walled garden? Sure, neither your company nor Foo should suck, but we all know plenty of companies that don’t care about employees or users.
Game company Bar decides to launch their own store and pull their game - we’ll call it Nortfite - from the App Store so they can add something shady like crypto features. Nortfite is a massive social game that all your friends play and it’s a huge part of your teenage social life. Your only device capable of playing it is your second-hand iPad. Do you really have a choice about staying in the walled garden? Who needs friends anyway, amirite?
Those examples all sound like issues that should be dealth with by appropriate laws instead of hoping that the maffia ends up protecting you from worse criminals.
> Not to mention the simple freedom of choosing what you want to install yourself, and not just what Apple allows you to...
I have the freedom to install whatever I want. I get that freedom by using Linux and Android. I choose to have that freedom by selecting platforms that provide it.
Many HN users seem to want all the benefits of Apple's approach with none of the downsides, and it doesn't work that way. Apple is what it is because it has a tight, coherent strategy, and forcing Apple to change that strategy will have knock-on effects that most Apple users won't like.
If you value freedom to install whatever you want, you chose the wrong ecosystem, and hijacking the ecosystem to satisfy your values is unfair to the vast majority of customers whose values already align with the ecosystem's.
Apple is providing an entry into the free smartphone market that is a closed system with a highly controlled and curated software ecosystem. That is their product, that's what they offer.
It's no different than Nintendo's entry into the game console market being what it is—some people will choose that experience because what it offers is valuable for them.
For myself, I'm an Android phone user and a PC gamer, but just because I wouldn't choose those experiences for myself doesn't mean I begrudge their existence.
The DMA does not allow you to install what you want.
It does not apply to consoles.
It does make it possible for companies to keep some more money, but most importantly it allows them to sidestep the protections for my privacy that I pay a premium to Apple for.
A real DMA would force facebook, twitter, etc to open up for alternative clients. That would bring competition in and benefit the end user.
Not that whatever digital slot machnine company is allowed to keep a higher percentage of the diamonds they sell you in their free to pay game.
it’s not 30%— in almost all cases it’s 15%. and by all means, if you think all the services and support for payments and returns and refunds and customer support are doable in 3%, you can have apple not do that too.
Are you also for workers being able to choose to live in company towns where they have to spend their incomes at the company store? When lock in and network effects come into play then yes the government should make sure that people have real and not only theoretical choices.
> What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass potential market killing regulation
This is entirely because the experts and fundraisers in the field promoted the technology as existentially and societally dangerous before they even got it to do anything commercially viable. "This has so much potential that it could destroy us all!" was the sales pitch!
Of course regulators are going to take that seriously, as there's nobody of influence vested in trying to show them otherwise.
The experts did that specifically so we would regulate barriers to entry into existence. It isn't a mew trick. Regulatory capture takes many guises, "think of the":
Children,
Consumers,
...
Under booked hotels we could put you in.
It quickly generates BS text that costs billions of man hours to generate by people doing BS jobs, which could be doing something more useful, such as childcare.
I'm using it to quickly localize our application into different languages, such as Arabic. German took like a few hours to get from non existing to 100% functional. Arabic was sketchy with Arabic mixed with French text, now it's 100% Arabic.
> which could be doing something more useful, such as childcare.
Ok but what is your plan for letting people who lost their jobs to AI to do more meaningful things? Because unless there are bigger societal changes all it means those people will not have to find jobs that are even more bullshit.
I think they're going to do the same jobs they are doing now, but using AI instead which should probably reduce the amount of BS they have to deal with everyday. For instance some of the low pay work companies would use freelancers for, like processing huge amounts of data, manually transcribing text from documents, or content moderation.
Specifically with AI I don’t want to experience the downside of innovation before we regulate because of how wide spread its use already is, and it’s problems have already become apparent.
For example, it’s being used to job screen applicants even though we have proven that AI models still suffer from thing like racial bias. Companies don’t disclose how their models are trained to negate bias or anything like that either and that’s one example I remember off the top of my head
That's the point though. It's illegal for humans to do things during hiring that are not illegal for AI to do as it stands now (all sorts of discrimination). We want to at least level the playing field.
There’s no exemption from prosecution for racial bias because it was done by an algorithm. If a company uses such an algorithm, AI or not, they will be open to prosecution for it.
Humans can be asked to explain their decissions and personally take accountability for them. Even if AI processes were less biased, using them introduces the opacity of relying on models that simply can't be fully intuited or explained. For life-altering decisions, merely performing better than a human is not the benchmark.
there maybe better examples of why AI biases provide deep systemic problems but: CV screening? are contemporary LLM really worse that previous screening tech and processes?
How can you combat bias in a team of humans if humans are susceptible to bias? How do you even know what neutral is if it's not a physically measurable quantity?
> This sounds like an argument for never educating people and doing nothing about the problem.
I feel like it's really the opposite.
There is a major problem with using AI to screen CVs, which is that AI is bad at screening CVs. It excludes good candidates and offers mediocre ones, and opens up a bunch of hacks the equivalent of black hat SEO, which gives an undesired advantage to people inclined to dirty tricks.
But "it's racist" is a political hot button, so before people can start to point that out, someone scrambles to push the hot button and suck all the oxygen out of the room. Then the purveyors of snake oil can munge the algorithm until it passes the naive oversimplified racial bias test someone made up (probably making it even worse at its intended purpose), and then claim "the problem" is solved, as if that was the main and only problem.
There are still plenty of proxies that can amount to the same thing. Not a lot of white graduates of HBCUs, for instance. Are we removing the names of all schools, too?
How do you get an unbiased evaluation of someone with an accent that differs from your training set? It took about a decade for my friends with Indian English accents to be able to use voice controls in luxury cars. And honestly young people from India have a much more American accent than my generation.
It‘s 2024. There are decades or research with a lot of data, there exist best practices and products that help combating the bias. The toolkit available to HRs is rich and there’s plenty of things that work. E.g. I have absolutely no problem hiring women in tech roles, because I simply adjusted my process. I heard complaints from other engineering leaders that they want to increase diversity but struggle to find candidates: they do not realize that they have bias in job descriptions, they apply same screening criteria and do the post-interview evaluation the same way regardless of candidate gender or background. Many people can do the job, but they communicate it differently and it is important to account for that when you see the CV or talk to them.
Isn't not knowing that bias exists just the same problem that the average HR department has? You solve that by educating people about biases. If anything that should be easier with LLMs because you're not asking people to alter their sense of self ("I wouldn't do that!"), you're just informing them of technical limitations.
I don’t understand your argument. The whole purpose of AI-driven recruitment is to reduce human effort by doing some work for them. If AI due to existing bias reduces diversity in your pool of candidates, what can you do with it? You either do not notice the bias and just think that those people are indeed the best fit, you willingly accept the bias („But it reduces our hiring costs! We deal with diversity later, when this technology matures!“), or you go to see the unfiltered stream and put such an amount of work into it that makes AI useless. HR departments are not the people who will build their own solution, they will buy it from a third party and they won’t have control over or the budget for the fine-tuning.
You do not understand how HR works then. They are not LLM researchers and just apply the available toolkit, e.g. organizing regular training for hiring managers. When they buy AI-driven solution from a third party, they have no tools neither to detect if it’s just a statistical fluctuation or there’s a bias they need to find a workaround for, nor to act on this information in a cost-efficient way. Most likely they won‘t even have enough data to reach any statistical significance. The vendor in theory could do it, but most of them are startups now and they do not have diversity in their OKRs, at least not now. It’s not the UVP of their product.
Of course they could be. A company that doesn't want a racial bias won't intentionally filter on names, but might accidentally deploy an LLM that can discern race from name.
The humans will do it unconsciously if they can see the names.
It is like orchestras used to use auditions where the judges could see the people; when they went to auditions where they couldn't see the people, the number of women being hired went right up.
See, this is the problem with just deciding to invent your own facts.
There is a famous study on this topic, usually presented in much the way you describe. But usually people are more careful not to lie about the results. The rate of women being hired went down, not up. The "success" for women was contained to advancement through particular audition rounds.
The original paper is not exactly a model of investigative integrity:
>> Women are about 5 percentage points more likely to be hired than are men in a completely blind audition, although the effect is not statistically significant. The effect is nil, however, when there is a semifinal round, perhaps as a result of the unusual effects of the semifinal round.
Are you citing a weird racist blogger on medium that disagrees with the stated conclusion of the paper? Is that how science works now?
Abstract from the original paper:
> A change in the audition procedures of symphony orchestras--adoption of "blind" auditions with a "screen" to conceal the candidate's identity from the jury--provides a test for sex-biased hiring. Using data from actual auditions, in an individual fixed-effects framework, we find that the screen increases the probability a woman will be advanced and hired. Although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction, the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras.
You'll get more accurate results if you look at the paper's conclusion, not the abstract.
The whole point is that the paper doesn't actually support any of the claims, which it's fairly open about -- that's those "large standard errors".
They did not in fact find that the screen increases the probability of a woman being hired. They found that it increased the probability of a woman passing the final round of auditions. There's more than one round.
It's up to you, I guess, whether you want to follow the original authors to their conclusion that the semifinal round is fundamentally unlike the final and quarterfinal audition rounds. I wouldn't.
> This is not very impressive at all. Some fine words but the punchline seems to be that the data are too noisy to form any strong conclusions.
> Huh? Nothing’s statistically significant but the estimates “show that the existence of any blind round makes a difference”? I might well be missing something here. In any case, you shouldn’t be running around making a big deal about point estimates when the standard errors are so large. I don’t hold it against the authors—this was 2000, after all, the stone age in our understanding of statistical errors. But from a modern perspective we can see the problem.
> Anyway, where’s the damn “50 percent” and the “increases by severalfold”? I can’t find it. It’s gotta be somewhere in that paper, I just can’t figure out where.
> Pallesen’s objections are strongly stated but they’re not new. Indeed, the authors of the original paper were pretty clear about its limitations. The evidence was all in plain sight.
> For example, here’s a careful take posted by BS King in 2017:
>> Okay, so first up, the most often reported findings: blind auditions appear to account for about 25% of the increase in women in major orchestras. . . . [But] One of the more interesting findings of the study that I have not often seen reported: overall, women did worse in the blinded auditions. . . .
If you read the paper, you'd notice the problems.
But you might not want to run the risk of, um, "racism" that seems to be inherent in reading a paper on the impact of blind auditions on women.
The racism was more the guy having very strong opinions about black people's IQs and immigrants destroying western civilization on twitter (plus being against COVID vaccines and human rights and other stuff that suggest you are not a level-headed truth seeker).
Quote from your second, more respectable, link:
> Pallesen’s objections are strongly stated but they’re not new. Indeed, the authors of the original paper were pretty clear about its limitations.
When I read the original papers, like your second link, I find a level headed paper working with limited data they had available.
I would suggest that the annoyance is with pop science retelling at best, or just a quack selling anger online to fuel his weird obsessions at worst.
You realize this is a huge problem right? Even if that was my only complaint (it’s not!) that is 100% not acceptable. If it’s doing it with CVs it’s doing it with other things in other scenarios.
Another is that a health insurance company was caught using AI to determine if a claim should be denied or not which lead to a scandal as a whistleblower leaked the practice, as it was wrought with errors and ethical concerns
It's almost guaranteed there are people trying to sell an AI version of Robodebt right now to the Australian government, even though the last (non-AI) version of it was an absolute cluster fuck:
Other governments around the world have done similar (non-AI) things in the past with similar terrible results. They'll likely try an AI version of things too in the near future, just because "AI" apparently solves all the problems. Ugh.
I think a worse feature for them to have is consistency. Imagine being someone that has fallen through the cracks of software a significant number of employers are using... Basically soft-locked out of employment with no recourse.
Discrimination in this sense is a statistical property. If Jimbob gets rejected everywhere as an individual it isn't really discrimination but that doesn't mean it isn't an issue.
I would argue that we already have experienced enough of the downsides of "AI" that there is reasonable cause for concern.
The implications of deepfakes and similar frauds alone are potentially devastating to informed political debate in democracies, safe and effective dissemination of public health information in emergencies, and plenty of other realistic and important trust scenarios.
The implications of LLMs are potentially wonderful in terms of providing better access to information for everyone but we already know that they are also capable of making serious mistakes or even generating complete nonsense that a non-expert user might not recognise as such. Again it is not hard to imagine a near future where chat-based systems have essentially displaced search engines and social media as the default ways to find information online but then provide bad advice on legal, financial, or health matters.
There is a second serious concern with LLMs and related technologies, which is that they could very rapidly shift the balance from compensating those who produce useful creative content to compensating those who run the summary service. It's never healthy when your economics don't line up with rewarding the people doing the real work and we've already seen plenty of relevant stories about the AI training data gold rush.
Next we get to computer vision and its applications in fields like self-driving vehicles. Again we've already seen plenty of examples where cars have been tricked into stopping suddenly or otherwise misbehaving when for example someone projected a fake road sign onto the road in front of them.
Again there is a second serious concern with systems like computer vision, audio classification, and natural language processing and that is privacy. It's bad enough that we all carry devices with cameras and microphones around with us almost 24/7 these days and the people whose software runs on those devices seem quite willing to spy on us and upload data to the mothership with little or any warning. That alone has unprecedented implications for privacy and associated risks. With the increased ability to automatically interpret raw video and audio footage - with varying degrees of accuracy and bias of course - that amplifies the potential dangers of these systems greatly.
There is enormous potential in modern AI/ML techniques for everything from helping everyday personal research to saving lives through commoditising sophisticated analysis of medical scans. But that doesn't mean there aren't also risks we already know about at the same kind of scale - even without all the doomsday hypotheticals where suddenly a malicious AGI emerges that takes over the universe.
The issue is, the regulations are tailored to address any of those concerns, some of which may not even be solvable through regulation at all:
> The implications of deepfakes and similar frauds alone are potentially devastating to informed political debate in democracies, safe and effective dissemination of public health information in emergencies, and plenty of other realistic and important trust scenarios.
The horse is out of the barn on this one. You can't stop this by regulating anything because the models necessary to do it have already been released, would continue to be released from other countries, and one of the primary purveyors of this sort of thing will be adversarial nation states, who obviously aren't going to comply with any laws you pass.
> The implications of LLMs are potentially wonderful in terms of providing better access to information for everyone but we already know that they are also capable of making serious mistakes or even generating complete nonsense that a non-expert user might not recognise as such.
Which is why AI summaries are largely a gimmick and people are figuring that out.
> they could very rapidly shift the balance from compensating those who produce useful creative content to compensating those who run the summary service.
This already happened quite some time ago with search engines. People want the answer, not a paywall, so the search engine gives them an unpaywalled site with the answer (and gets an ad impression from it) and the paywalled sites lose to the ad-supported ones. But then the operations that can't survive on ad impressions lose out, and even the ad-supported ones doing original research lose out because you can't copyright facts so anyone paying to do original reporting will see their stories covered by every other outlet that doesn't. Then the most popular news sites become scummy lowest-common-denominator partisan hacks beholden to advertisers with spam-laden websites to match.
Fixing this would require something along the lines of the old model NPR used to use, i.e. "free" yet listener-supported reporting, but they stopped doing that and became a partisan outlet supported by advertising. The closest contemporary thing seems to be the Substacks where most of the stories are free to read but you're encouraged to subscribe and the subscriptions are enough to sustain the content creation.
The AI thing doesn't change this much if at all. A cheap AI summary isn't going to displace original content any more than a cheap rephrasing by a competing outlet does already.
> Next we get to computer vision and its applications in fields like self-driving vehicles. Again we've already seen plenty of examples where cars have been tricked into stopping suddenly or otherwise misbehaving when for example someone projected a fake road sign onto the road in front of them.
But where does the regulation come in here? When it does that it's obviously a bug and the manufacturers already have the incentive to want to fix it because their customers won't like it. And there are already laws specifying what happens when a carmaker sells a car that doesn't behave right.
> Again there is a second serious concern with systems like computer vision, audio classification, and natural language processing and that is privacy.
Which is really almost nothing to do with AI and the main solutions to it are giving people alternatives to the existing systems that invade their privacy. Indeed, the hard problem there is replacing existing "free" systems with something that doesn't put more costs on people, when the existing systems are "free" specifically because of that privacy invasion.
If a government wants to do something about this, fund the development of real free software that replaces the proprietary services hoovering up everyone's data.
Let’s stipulate that all you said was true. How is EU regulation suppose to prevent that? Are they going to stop open source models from being used in Europe? Are they going to stop foreign adversaries from using deep fakes?
It’s just like trying to restrict DVD encryption keys from being published or 128 bit encryption from being “exported” in browsers back in the car.
> The implications of LLMs are potentially wonderful in terms of providing better access to information for everyone but we already know that they are also capable of making serious mistakes or even generating complete nonsense that a non-expert user might not recognise as such. Again it is not hard to imagine a near future where chat-based systems have essentially displaced search engines and social media as the default ways to find information online but then provide bad advice on legal, financial, or health matters.
I think a bigger concern is LLMs providing deliberately biased results and stating them as fact.
> For example, it’s being used to job screen applicants even though we have proven that AI models still suffer from thing like racial bias.
Can't we just say racism is illegal, and if a company uses an AI to be racist, they get fined the same way they would if they were racist the old fashioned way?
Look up the Dutch tax return scandal where the Dutch tax arm of the government (‘IRS’) used machine learning to identify fraud but it turned out to be very racially biased and it uprooted thousands of families with years of financial struggles and legal battles.
Fence at the top of a cliff (make sure the AI is unbiased and can be fixed when it turns out it is) vs. Ambulance at the bottom (letting people sue if they think the machine is wrong).
When you make specific methods illegal, it tends to lead to loopholes. If you just make the result illegal then nobody can try and get around it by using a slightly different system design.
But which way around does that apply? Racism is a concrete example of what AI may incorrectly automate, it's not the only bias that AI can have — any correlation in the training data will be learned, but not necessarily causation — and the goal of these laws is to require the machines to be accurate, unbiased, up to date, respectful of privacy etc., with "not racist" as merely one example of why that matters.
(Also the existing laws on racial equality were not removed by GDPR; to the previous metaphor, the fence being better doesn't mean you can fire the ambulance service).
It's not that most people hate risk. It's that individuals whom are harmed by sociopathic individuals that exploit methodologies, techniques, and products to enrich, steal, and harm the population. (When I say that I mean financially, emotionally, socially, physically, etc). To add further insult to injury, defending ones self against these individuals is disproportionately impossible.
Socially: Creating and cultivating a culture that screws up dating.
Emotionally: Filter bubbles, and data analyitics to push proganda and motivate people in directions (cambridge). Additionally subjecting people to material to manipulate.
Stealing: Scooter companies are actively stealing the public space to operate their business (sidewalks), endorsing their users to run over people on the sidewalk (also making it difficult to identify the individual), etc.
Privacy wise: Companies are forcing you to give up your private info to live. (Retail tracking to individuals.. even accross multiple companies [see "The Retail Equation"])
I'm not insulting people who hate risk. For the stability and health of society, it's good that most people are that way. We need people who shake their fist at anything new or different to keep us sane (people like you it seems, from your laundry list of frustrations).
But we also need the people who do like risk taking and new stuff, and there's less of them. So innovation is much more of a fragile thing than stasis.
Even if you think society and human life in general can't be improved in any way, to just maintain the way things are now...will require many new innovations and people taking risk on new stuff. Your welfare, lifestyle, and security depends on the risk taking of others. So we should probably be careful about making it too hard for the folks taking risk (it's already hard enough).
Trust me, the risk-averse folks will still be the dominant voice either way. Even this forum--which started as a community of risk-taking entrepreneurial types--is now dominated by the risk-averse majority.
In theory I agree with your argument, but in practice I find it’s very often the AI and other dominant companies — often tech — that are at the root of the risk averse landscape you observe. To put it simply, major tech companies are among the greatest driving forces of that landscape because they would prefer to operate without any competition.
My point being “letting the risk adverse take risks” is not the same thing as “don’t rein in VC backed attempted monopolies”. You can do the latter without doing the former (theoretically of course; in practice doing the latter is impossible without a substantive change in the underlying incentive structure of current global society).
> Stealing: Scooter companies are actively stealing the public space to operate their business (sidewalks), endorsing their users to run over people on the sidewalk (also making it difficult to identify the individual), etc.
OMG I cannot wait for these companies to be fined out of existence.
How can you be allowed to have a business model that relies on people leaving your trash wherever they feel like it.
I have no idea. Chicago had a limited period in which the scooters could operate a few years back. I saw someone that had an experience where the scooter wasn't picked up more than a week past the end. I contacted the alderman to get streets and sanitation to remove the vehcile.
What I got was: The alderman employee tried to get this cleared with the scooter company rather than towed.
I was blown away.. if I parked in front of the Division blue line station my car would be fined, towed, charged with storage fees, potentially vandalized within an hour. Them? Oh the gov employee will do CS for them. I filed a complaint with the city ombudsman and later found out she was removed.
>> Most people aren't entrepreneurs and hate risk, so they pass regulation, and the market gets locked down so nothing new happens again
I think that the bigger issue is that the people who suffer when the risk goes bad and the people who benefit when the risk goes well usually aren't the same people.
> You'll struggle to find people who are against the Digital Markets Act for this reason
You missed most of the discussions about DMA on HN, I guess. There's always someone ready to say how EU will kill all innovation and make Google/Apple exit the market because they dare to question anything.
"before we've even had a chance to experience both the upside and downside, so the innovation never happens at all."
----
Let me laugh out loud. Those, who govern these companies know 10 years ahead how and what will happen. Bigdiks higher up has 10-20 year plans. And people talk about "before we had a chance to experience the upsides and the downsides". Get a grip on reality.
Yea, so wildly out of touch with reality. The governing elite are wizards of prediction!
Sundar at Google knew LLMs were going to be huge after Google invented them, so that’s why they were first to market and…
Oops. Maybe not?
While it might make risk-averse types feel good to imagine the people in charge are all-knowing (see religion), the truth is the world is a chaotic and reflexive system of unpredictability. Scary, I know!
I think you're the one who needs to get a grip on reality. There's no cabal of businessmen playing the world like a puppet. They don't have some secret knowledge of the future. They're often just as stupid as the rest of us, and prone to the same biases. If they were as prescient as you think, I assume companies would simply never fail - as others point out, they often miss things or make mistakes.
>Regulation usually gets trotted out after the downside of doing [new innovation] is experienced. This always happens, because doing something new always involves unknown risk.
I would challenge "unknown"-- it very well seems like the risks have been known every time, they just don't give a shit
>What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass this incumbent-cementing regulation before we've even had a chance to experience ...
Sounds good to me? It's sociopathic and opportunistic to want to risk major socioeconomic issues for the mere chance of a corporate "innovation"
> Nobody is against regulation that disfavors large incumbents to support competition instead.
Actually pretty much all EU regulations and especially enforcement of those regulations gets pundits shouting that the EU is only trying to milk US megacorporations.
> However, virtually every other piece of regulation does the opposite.
Not true but even if so not all regulation concerns itself with monopolies. GDPR in particular is about user rights and should therefore apply to everyone, same for similar kinds of regulations. If corporations cannot survive without violating you in every way possible then they should not be allowed to live. If anything is lacking it's enforcement against incumbents.
> What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass this incumbent-cementing regulation before we've even had a chance to experience both the upside and downside, so the innovation never happens at all.
Good. Not all "innovation" should happen.
> Combine this with a rapidly aging demography in Europe, and I only see this trend increasing. If there's one thing old people hate, it's risk and doing new things.
Again, good. Moving fast and breaking things at societal scale is not a good idea.
> Now, large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people (unlike say tobacco, or talc powder, 3M and half of their solvents, weed killer, most car makers, etc etc)
It's nearly as bad. Social media causes addiction and mental health problems especially for the youth. PISA scores are going down. It can already be seen now, although not many 20 year olds have had a smartphone for more than 10 years. Here in this country every 7 year old has a smartphone and it will get only worse. Physical health is impacted because of kids are tapping on a screen instead of running and playing. It has impact already to language learning and social development of babies because parents interact with their smartphone several hours a day and instead of interacting with their baby.
Of course there is other tech than social media and smartphones. But at least in these areas equally strong regulation as for tobacco and alcohol would be required.
What do they do that would be illegal in physical stores? If I wanted to open a physical store that gave away free stuff but you had to agree to give a bunch of personal info that would be completely legal (but not profitable).
"full-self-driving doesn't self drive", "wear a helmet on the bird scooter", and "safety is our first priority at facebook" is the 21st century version of "don't get roundup all over yourself"
I don't disagree, in general. Roundup also fed many people. But there are certainly poor choices evident in the above examples that weren't necessary for the progress to be made, but were just disregarded by an organization operating without guardrails. They deserve the pressure to course correct.
Not all progress is good progress. Adding lead to paint was progress at the time. Same with using asbestos for insulation. We’ve since decided that the costs outweigh the benefits there.
Regulators should and do weigh both the harm and good of restricting the usage of new technology. The fact that they don’t always get it right isn’t a reason to stop regulation altogether.
> Regulators should and do weigh both the harm and good of restricting the usage of new technology. The fact that they don’t always get it right isn’t a reason to stop regulation altogether.
That might or might not be wrong, but is certainly a typically European perspective. The U.S. Bill of Rights is full of clauses specifying things like "Congress shall make no law regarding..." freedom of speech, establishments of religion, etc. because of the notion that the government's inability to reliably get it right is indeed a good reason to stop altogether.
I wasn't attempting to express my entire worldview in a comment. Yes, technology often brings both risk and reward. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize/criticize/discuss those risks.
> large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people
Facebook's and Twitter's recommended feed algorithms and blocking procedures, have to a significant extent determined the outcome of elections, coup attempts, protest movements. These companies have custom tuned their algorithms for particular countries at particular times, during such events. Many people have died, or their lives negatively affected because of the decisions by these companies.
I have a feeling there's a lot of analogies to be had between parenting, regulation and AI alignment.
All three are about trying to persuade an intelligent organism to adopt acceptable, rich and virtuous behaviour. All three seems to have similar failure modes.
Too much red tape and you'll get over fitting, lack of creative and new behaviour.
Except listed companies are sociopathic. They have no empathy. And their only goal is shareholder value. There’s no appealing to their conscience, so carrots and sticks it is
Do increases in suicide rates from social media addiction count?
There are emails unearthed from the early days of Facebook where utilizing addiction feedback loops were discussed to retain and maximize young users.
The Anxious Generation provides a lot of evidence correlating the rise of social media and a major increase in depression and anxiety related disorders.
Most importantly all this tech is not reducing cost of living, but is increasing it. Tech is reducing prices of compute and memory and software but everyone's monthly bill increases. This is only possible through parasitic behavior. And we know how to kill parasites. The life and times of a parasite are not as fun as the worthies who come up with these unsustainable business models think.
Large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people in the same way big tobacco haven't killed any people. Nobody smokes a cigarette and immediately die. But one would have to be immensely dense not to see the correlation between smoking habit and lung disease, or Facebook refusing to moderate social media activity in Burma and some of the worst atrocities committed on humans anywhere this century.
> A company that provides a phone service (mobile or other) has to conform to a large amount of regulatory red tape. Why? because either a company before tried to monopolise the entire country, or they killed someone.
you sweet summer child
no, that's not how the red tape got put in place. the government put the red tape in place to protect the established companies in the space from upstart competitors
Apple kills migrant workers in China when fires break out or through stress, Samsung kills women working with solvents banned in the US, Exxon kills oil rig workers operating dangerously, etc.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 390 ms ] threadI'll finish it to save everyone some time:
A: how much of gdp is facilitated through the search abilities of meta and google, though?
B: It doesn't matter.
A: Why not?
B: There will be someone else who is willing to play by the local rules fulfilling the same function in their place, just like in many countries around the world already.
Building a competitive search engine or AI model requires VC investment.
It's simply too expensive to do otherwise.
VC investment requires a vibrant startup ecosystem, well crafted regulations and a risk-tolerant culture.
> VC investment requires a vibrant startup ecosystem, well crafted regulations and a risk-tolerant culture.
Yandex, Baidu, and many other lesser-known local-only search engines exist. There's also nothing stopping an already existing technology company from entering search. The statement is incorrect.
Meanwhile common sense tells us that obviously there's going to be investment into domestic search engines if Google voluntarily throws in the towel. Europe is a huge place and there's a lot of money to be made, even if it's merely with context-based advertising and no individual tracking.
> Building a competitive [..] AI model requires VC investment [..] and a risk-tolerant culture.
Training a large model anyways, since nobody has really figured out how to recoup that investment yet. Why are you trying to derail this from talking about search though?
So no, ot doesn't require VC cash to build something useful for people.
Umm, nope. I’m conjecturing that there could be an enabling aspect of huge scale, and that some smaller economies may fall below the threshold. Personally i hope what you wrote works.
Except, it is not. At least not in the situation that the EU is in. Because all regulations are a constant burden on business, small relative to big corporations, huge for medium companies and insurmountable for startups.
The EU has no big players, not a single one! We have a few medium players like SAP and that is it. So, we are already far behind and every weight we load on to drag us down is another nail in the coffin.
Rdio, LastFM, Rhapsody, and Grooveshark all existed well before Spotify entered North America. Some of them actually predate Spotify
https://www.wsj.com/articles/spotify-founders-blast-swedens-...
Also, Spotify could open offices in other places in Sweden (or Europe) if they want to be in places with lower CoL than Stockholm.
Why would they want to move people around the world, deal with the unions who will force them to raise the floor of the local salaries etc when they can just hire the best talent in the US?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/spotify-s-t...
So all innovation requires you to capture user's data for profit via advertisement or data brokerage?
Maybe it is for the best. I don't really trust those billion-dollar companies.
Target Advertisement? Gig Economy?
Er... We have different ideas of what innovation is desirable, maybe.
And, no. Most I spoke to certainly did not prefer it.
• Microsoft windows
• microsoft office (excel, etc)
• google search
• google maps
• gmail and yahoo mail
• smartphones
• space-x (affordable satellite launches - for accurate weather forecasts and GPS)
• OpenAI (pioneering LLM’s from a product perspective)
• Visa and Mastercard networks
• AWS / Azure / GCP
• Adobe (photoshop, etc)
• Zoom / Webex (Skype is an exception, created in europe)
• Salesforce
• DocuSign
• AutoCAD
I can list more if you’d like…this was literally off the top of my head. All of these businesses and products were created in the united states, some with VC funding. They employ hundreds or thousands of engineers, product managers, etc. They provide critical business capabilities to businesses around the world. Some are user facing as well.
As far as critical business software Europe has created Skype, SAP, and i think that’s it? From the hardware side, major kudos for ASML and Airbus.
The stuff you read about in the news is focused on bad actors and toxic social media junk. thats a small piece of big tech.
Honestly, this comment inadvertently proves the need to quarantine US tech. Almost every product you listed is utter garbage, especially Windows.
There's nothing inherently better about Windows than Linux. Libre Office suit can become much better than MS Office if ot got enough suppoet - support that just goes away to M$ contracts.
Google search has become utter garbage.
Hetzner exists, and more Cloud companies would exist if it weren't for America's Big Tech having a competitive advantage due to their sheer size.
Adobe is a shit company with shit behavior. I'd welcome its implosion anytime. Again, if the billions siphoned away for their licenses was spent on FOSS alternatives, we'd end up with such healthier ecosystem.
Visa and Mastercard are leas innovation and more completely regulated duopoly at this point.
Also, with the exception of SpaceX, I'd gladly welcome the complete implosion of all companies you mentioned. I'd love to watch them burn to cinders, while the world finally breathes free.
How long do you think a typical business would survive without excel? Do you realize how crazy powerful excel is? I hate that tool as an engineer but its utility is immense. I agree windows is junk, yet it somehow ends up in all the critical infrastructure lol. Crazy but that’s what happens. Same with autocad- good luck efficiently designing physical infrastructure like bridges in your country without that tool.
Hetzner is not struggling to compete with AWS or Azure because it’s smaller…it’s because Hetzner has almost no features. They have even less features than DigitalOcean. Hetzner basically offers VPS hosting, elastic block storage, and easy deployment of some common apps. Do they offer any of the building blocks for deploying a high traffic service into production? Or deploying something that requires a lot of distributed components? No. stuff like managed databases, flexible file storage (like S3), and most importantly a managed multi-container deployment. Like fargate, ECS or EKS.
example showing how Volkswagen uses AWS and why it’s not a good fit for Hetzner: https://youtu.be/OLy8CgRn8ts?si=VpOYlelneiGI7XZk
—————-
unrelated, i think the LibreOfficr example is interesting. I think it would be difficult to design a competing product because at this time companies pay for a full suite including: outlook, office, sharepoint, etc. and office is available in the browser with realtime multi user editing too! Maybe the LibreOffice project should pivot in that direction? Perhaps they could offer a cheap online version of their products, as a way to fund continued development, while making the desktop version free?
Is python a company that hires hundreds or thousands of engineers, product managers, etc? no. Same with Linux. Also Linux was created by a european (torvalds) while he was living and working in the united states, and is now contributed to by engineers all over the world. I’d hardly call that a majority european innovation. A nitpick but I wanted to clarify that.
ASML, ARM, BioNtech and Ozempic are great examples though, i’ll give you that.
Title is "Europe Is in Danger of Regulating Its Tech Market Out of Existence".
But then the subtitle says "Poorly designed laws are forcing *global firms* to leave." (emphasis mine)
Then you see a picture of an Apple Vision Pro. I've only skimmed through the article and there are 11 mentions of Apple and 12 mentions of Meta, then some mentions of X and such. These aren't even "global" firms, they are all American ones.
If anything, it sounds like they may be regulating away US products from the European market, and that's a big "maybe", which is different from what I understood from the title they chose.
The title says the market is in danger of going out of existence, and the article solely mentions a handful of big US companies AFAICT.
Or maybe it's a dig at Europe for having large parts of its market dominated by US companies, and I'm missing that.
Realistically Nvidia did not leave China and they will not leave Europe.
Spotify, an EU company, has to compete with Apple Music and YouTube Music. Both of which have their own mobile operating systems and markets.
Now we get a lot of backlash from these big tech firms as for years they have been integrating services into their walled gardens. Which now is hard to decouple from their platform.
And it’s the same story for any kind of service that’s subject to DMA.
That's an obvious DMA violation. You can't preference your own service over others, like when you link to the exact pin on your service but just the general area on another.
1. VCs outright avoid investing in deep tech, with only rare exceptions.
2. Founders overwhelmingly choose to build small, sustainable companies, steering clear of big tech.
3. Employees consistently prefer consulting jobs and value vacation days over equity.
4. The bureaucracy startups face when incorporating or raising funds is staggering (Germany, I'm looking at you).
While this may seem beneficial from a social perspective, it creates the worst possible environment for tech startups. I have immense respect for the few European startups that manage to survive and thrive despite these obstacles.
Again, really no skin in the game, as I don't live there and I only have limited amount of perspective, which comes from my European resident non-techie friends.
Let's see how long it lasts, Europe's economy is terrible and their people are significantly poorer. I don't think their current welfare state is sustainable without tax revenue from large businesses. Eventually every European citizen will be a waiter, hotel staff, or a tour guide.
Also, the tech industry is not the only part of the economy. large parts of the EU are absolutely massive in terms of industrial machinery and scientific companies.
People on HN always seem to forget that a lot of money can be made by making something very high end which solves a specific problem, no matter if it is sexy or not.
the invasion of ukraine has a major impact on the european economy, but that has very little to do with the article in question...
And saying eventually everyone will cater to tourism is peak us ignorance. The tourism sector in eu is fairly small, even in the (over) touristic italy. Just the fact you mentioned this leads me to think you are an ignorant american that likes how people suffer from being poor and being exploited by big corpos...
why are VC's somehow the cause of "tech industry"? this seems like a very US perspective on tech in general.
Also, VC's in the US have another large advantage. Very, very cheap money because the status of the US dollar as a reserve currency compared to the euro and other currencies.
Who else will give private capital for what is purely an idea?
Not Banks giving a business loan - they will demand interest at the current interest rate.
Not Private Equity - they only move private capital into public companies or late stage private companies
Not Hedge Funds - they only deploy capital into public markets
Not Growth Funds - they only deploy capital into late stage companies
The only funds that will deploy private capital into early stage companies are Angel Investors and VC Funds.
> this seems like a very US perspective on tech in general
Israel, India, China, UK, Russia (pre-2022), Ukraine (pre-2022), and ASEAN all developed a VC scene similar to the American scene.
Yet mainland West European investors are nowhere near as dynamic.
If the Western European market was more dynamic, Spotify would not have moved to NYC, Ghodsi would have founded Databricks in Stockholm instead of San Francisco, and Datadog would have remained a purely French company instead of moving most of hiring from Product Leadership to HR to the US a decade ago.
While you can mention ASML, the only reason ASML/Phillips even has EUV IP is because the US Government gave it to them instead of Canon or Nikon due to anti-trust reasons in the early 2000s and can very easily revoke IP access if prodded.
> Very, very cheap money because the status of the US dollar as a reserve currency compared to the euro and other currencies
Then why do high interest rate Israel, India, and China continue to have fairly robust VC scenes despite having high interest rates and currency controls and/or relatively illiquid currency markets?
The reality is "cheap money" as in interest rates don't really matter for early stage funding. Indtutional investors always leave some money on the side for VC funding as a diversification tool.
The difference is American, Israeli, Indian, Chinese, and ASEAN institutional investors will try to fund local VCs to build a local ecosystem, but Western European ones will just hand that money to an American, Israeli, Indian, or Chinese VC instead.
We need to remember that Europe is the continent that gave us extractive colonialism. A player always knows their own game.
And I’m not the only one. Many companies don’t hire in Europe because it’s too risky to get a dud employee that you can’t fire without having to pay their salary for the next 6 months.
That's what trial periods are for, within the first 1-12 months (depending on position and sector) you can very easily get rid of employees. That's when you're supposed to evaluate their performance and fit.
And if they don't do their job afterwards you reprimand them and they can then be fired for cause if you have actual causes.
>I suggest re-reading "Atlas Shrugged" for this topic.
Ah yes, that's the problem. We all need to read and subscribe to the ideology of Ayn Rand, then we'd understand and everything would be better!
We have no tech sector in europe. As soon as a company has more than 6 developers it gets bought by a USA company (that's a slight exaggeration, not by much).
Europe has missed out on the craze of getting millions to build an Uber for Cats.
„We & our 735 technology partners ask you to consent to the use of cookies to store and access personal data on your device.“
> There appears to be a technical issue with your browser
> This issue is preventing our website from loading properly. Please review the following troubleshooting tips or contact us at support@foreignpolicy.com.
I had to disable Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection in order to proceed. This is the first time since that feature was rolled out that I've had to remember where they put that disable switch.
EDIT: This isn't just a generic error handler, there's a specific piece of code that detects if their analytics provider loaded or not and shows that message if it didn't load. More details here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41082004
Link to the source: https://foreignpolicy.com/_static/??-eJy1lNtuwjAMhl9oIYCQGBf...
There are a lot of websites that make your phone boil in your hand with the amount of trackers, js and other crap
Yes the cookie banners are annoying. But not more than the sign up ones, the maling list ones, the "Summer sale" ones, etc
They do need to ask for cookies meant to siphon off people's data for all other purposes.
That really hurts a startup's ability to initially launch in the market, especially one with less VC money. (Certain BigCo new products can be thought of as a startup too, with limited budgets.)
This doesn't just affect social media companies, it affects almost any product where a user can upload data, or any product with a social feature, no matter how peripheral the feature is.
Turns out that's a wide swathe of technology, and that social features are fairly valuable.
Of course the big companies will eventually get around to launching in Europe anyway, it will just trail behind the rest of the world.
The situation in America is an absolute nightmare with data being sold through all sorts of mechanisms with zero oversight (your ISP, your car, most apps on your phone, whoever does your credit scores) -- I'm sure there's some way to make successful tech that isn't the hellscape America has.
> Criteria relating to the place of the company in controlling access of other businesses to final customers: the company needs to have (a) more than 45 million monthly active end users in the EU and (b) more than 10,000 yearly active business in the EU;
> "An entrenched durable position" which is a qualitative criterion which the regulator considers met if the numbers of active users in the second criterion are met for three years in a row.
It is indeed very hard to find evidence that DMA does not affect startups, if you don't want to find that evidence.
You're seriously arguing that a startup founder would think "well, when I get to a 75 billion euro valuation, there will be some cumbersome rules, so I might as well not start anything"???
Who is to say they won't decide that a 6 person startup with 10 users doesn't qualify?
It is a welcome change, but not for those who mean to exploit the special status that “social media” and “apps” have been given all these years.
That is literally the point of food regulations.
They are not prescriptive but descriptive.
No regulation says 'make food with >100 E-coli per KG' it always says 'use stainless steel table, no smaller than 2mx1m, in a well ventilated room of size...'.
There are only 19 companies in the world that are required to comply with the strict rules. I think they can pay those "several engineers" from the money they make in EU. This is not about startups, and this is not about launching.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act#Large_onl...
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4411743
And then there is a 'chat control' every year pushed relentlessly. Thus no, not at all. EU doesn't value citizens privacy.
Chat control keeps being proposed by the same Swedish politician, and she will continue to do so and she will continue to fail- because politicians in the EU are already aware its stupid.
Chat control is not just the love child from the Swedish politician, it is being pushed by US surveillance companies that convinced the commission members that CP can be detected and stopped only if Europol has access to all your messages, emails, photos and videos until the end of time without having any recourse as to what it will be used for or by whom it will be viewed.
Then there is also Chat Control V1 which is currently extended each year despite being a temporary measure supposedly. Then there is also the data retention directive which everyone knows was illegal to start with and took 10 years to be overturned.
The fact that people still associate EU with privacy is a joke. The EU wants your data just like Meta and Apple or Google. At least Meta is not trying to gaslight me into thinking that giving my data is to save the children or some other complete BS reason.
The EU laws typically fall on the side of promoting privacy and protecting citizens against large multinational organisations (criminal and legitimate).
There is a need for greater powers to prevent crime, but nobody is going to weaken privacy for it. The most likely outcome is a centralised interpol-esque database to track and track suspects more quickly. Right now its very easy for criminals to just change hosting region and the investigating national police have no jurisdiction to do anything. It’s a large issue.
Chat Control breaks encryption because it wants to snoop on the messages/photos before being encrypted EtoE by the messaging providers.
There is no need for greater powers to prevent crime. It has been determined that there isn't enough funding to investigate the crimes reported already and now this system is supposed to report even more crime at the price of my privacy.
I could see potentially a system where known suspects are targeted specifically but in this case, everybody is a suspect. What happened to presumption of innocence?
The fact of the matter is that chat control is the digital Stasi, always listening to your conversations, analyzing your messages. God forbid the algorithm flags your innocent picture wrongly.
Is this the future we want?
Lets not forget that half of the EU actually lived under a quasi socialist regime not that long ago...
What if what Europe does is a good idea for the people but just inconvenient for companies?
Europe is one of the power houses of the world but with low self-esteem I am afraid. In the long term what matters is the people's quality of life and diversity.
Take China or the US: if a lot of people don't have purchasing power and leisure who are then buying stuff for themselves as end users?
I agree with the broader idea that a lot of this stuff is PR from vested interests, but this case it's not really secret, since the news outlet categorizes it as:
> Argument - An expert's point of view on a current event.
Also, Europe is a power house right now, but won't be a generation from now if trends continue. All forms of power are built on economic power or are a means to get economic power.
Also, living paycheck to paycheck != being poor. There are many people with high incomes but poor budgeting who live paycheck to paycheck, but will realistically be just fine if they have to tighten their braces.
Americans have the highest level of disposable income in the world, and it's not even close. Even Europe's mega-rich tax havens like Luxembourg have a lower disposable income than Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
Yea I know the rebuttal--"but I also heard they all have $100,000 hospital bills every year!!" The disposable per capita income numbers already account for healthcare expenditures.
Sorry to be so blunt, but it's not helpful if you look only at the average.
A better metric would be the median because it is well known that the super rich distort the disposable income in some countries (the US, but also some European countries).
I see in plutocraticish environments the rich and powerful sometimes very deftfully prevent measures inconvenient for Corporate but useful for the weaker part of the population.
I admit this also happens in Europe. But somehow it is just easier to live as a poorish person in many European countries.
Americans rank #1 on both mean and median. So the point about the super rich distorting the mean is irrelevant.
> But somehow it is just easier to live as a poorish person in many European countries.
Perception and narratives are not reality. In fact, typically in economic matters it takes almost a decade for the public narrative to shift to match the reality of the numbers. Even if reality is right there in the data.
This is why bubbles usually go on for much longer than the "smart" people think they will. Look at any of Fama-French research; momentum is the strongest inefficiency in virtually all markets.
It's millionaires - tens of millions of them.
There's something special about a system that can create so many extremely successful people.
Yes, and we all declare bankruptcy every month, and charge $10,000 to our credit card to be allowed into the doctor's waiting room, where we announce our arrival by firing a gun in the air.
Where do you guys hear this stuff?
> A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses.
> Similarly, a 2023 Forbes Advisor survey revealed that nearly 70% of respondents either identified as living paycheck to paycheck (40%) or—even more concerning—reported that their income doesn’t even cover their standard expenses (29%).
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-pa...
> A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses.
> Similarly, a 2023 Forbes Advisor survey revealed that nearly 70% of respondents either identified as living paycheck to paycheck (40%) or—even more concerning—reported that their income doesn’t even cover their standard expenses (29%).
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-pa...
I think you'll be surprised to find out just how many Europeans disagree with the diversity part. We are quite close to ethno-state Europe, just like how it was between 1800 and 1950.
Ask a European what they think of Gypsies for a wild time.
Thats exactly the issue. What's good for Europeans isn't so good for American corporations.
Already populist presidents in America have signaled they don't care about Europe so why should Europeans nurture and allow a hostile country continue to operate in their lands?
This type of outrage from American MSM is quite baffling. Whether their billionaires like it or not countries are going their own way and the biggest slap in the face is that those billionaires do not even live in America.
When 10% of global revenue is on the line it makes adequate sense to tread carefully with EU releases until there is some legal precedent. (And 20% if the EU finds that compliance isn't being met.)
Margrethe Vestager has stated that withholding features is proof of anti-competitive behaviour. Such a statement would be hilarious if it wasn't so obviously preordained, and patently tone-deaf from the consequences of her own statements.
So what's the end game for the EU? In theory this should allow local and small competitors to fill the void since they're not beholden to the DMA. My expectation is that it'll just be the EU perpetually several steps behind the rest of the world and some types of tech involvement only available via US-based purchases/import basis.
¹ Margrethe Vestager: "I would like to have a Facebook in which I pay a fee each month, but I would have no tracking and advertising and the full benefits of privacy." https://www.euractiv.com/section/competition/interview/vesta...
² Facebook and Instagram’s ‘pay or consent’ ad model violates the DMA, says the EU https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/1/24189796/eu-meta-dma-viola...
And if they are not going to bring AI SDKs to the EU because of the regulatory risk then an entire class of potential startups will never exist.
Apple and Google are holding a beta risky feature and leveraging it as reason to get some sympathy.
I am an avid reader of Show HNs. And I remember many that became successful businesses. But not a single European one.
All the "startups" that I see here in Europe are very classical businesses. They build software tools for local enterprises.
It seems nobody in Europe is building something for the open web. Maybe because nobody here understands all the regulations that come with it. The GDPR alone is 100 pages of legal mumbo jumbo.
European schools and universities tend to drill people towards employment and not to take too many risks so starting companies isn't as widespread and considered too bureaucratic.
Then there's the issue of multiple currencies and not every checkout SaaS supporting all of them and their various options of payment (afaik), which limits reach. That's a problem the US, India, China and Russia don't have.
- HN in 2007
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Or consider the recent charges the EU levied against X. Under Elon Musk’s ownership, anyone can now purchase a blue check with a paid subscription, whereas blue checks were previously reserved for notable figures. EU regulators singled out the new system for blue checks as a deceptive business practice that violates the bloc’s Digital Services Act.
What are they thinking?? The blue check mark is supposed to mean verified. They changed it to simply mean paid subscription. They took a symbol of trust and utterly ripped out the trust part. I don't care how much you publicize it, that's not acceptable.
Would he be ok with my going and purchasing a SSL certificate for www.x.com???
The new X Community Notes system is far superior for establishing trust.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/biden-clai...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-22/elon-m...
Fundamentally just because a software feature worked a certain way at one time doesn't create an obligation for tech companies to keep it working the same way. Whether you consider that acceptable is entirely irrelevant.
There are always going to be misinformation. It's crazy to think a company or any committee can determine these for us though. It's not even logical yet alone practical. then you need to determine whether said entity made any judgment errors in assessing a person or claim. Those who demand centralized 'truth' authorities are useful idiots for power seeking authoritarians.
So? The point of the old blue checkmark wasn't to assure me that what the account said was true. It was to provide some assurance that the account was really the account of the prominent or notable person with that name.
As someone described it: You know that https://www.satan.com is actually Satan but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to sell your soul there.
You need to rethink what was being implied. Twitter CAN assess whether or not you can trust that the person that owns the account is who they say they are. That's what the blue checkmark was. It was NOT implying that the person was trustworthy.
Let's only make the small bridges unsafe?
"This company was caught tracking which users visited each page" Yes, for targeted ads.
"Cambridge Analytica was" Yes, for targeted ads.
"3rd party" Yes, targeted ads.
It's all targeted ads. They want to serve you targeted ads. Any attempt to paint "data privacy" as something other than this is irresponsible fearmongering.
The EU and its member states give out huge subsidies to keep food production local in the EU without being completely destroyed by cheaper crops from third world countries.
The US does the same, and it is for good reason, to actually make sure a steady food supply exists inside the country/union.
> So making agricultural markets orders of magnitudes more efficient is destroying it in your view?
Yes, of course it is.
It's like replacing families by hell called a "System" - wet dream of the eg. leftists.
It literaly destroy "market" becouse producers side disappear and you have just institution :)
It destroys it becouse no one know how or want to do that hard agriculture business. People will just prefer to sit in slums around big cities. What they can do anyway if everything is not big but giant ? How to buy such area ? How to even learn what to do with it ?? How to acquire buyers if you even get that giant area LOL ? And if it to big for one man or family how to get enough workers (why they even wanted to live slums ? how they even learn what to do??) ??
That giant and efficient (in one dimension) thing just extend himself into lack of self-sufficiency on multigeneration time scale.
Monoculture becose it's cheaper ? :>
Product quality ??? Compare to XO brandy, champagne or artisanal leather wallets. Not to boxed milk with "not yet discovered" PFASes or future "improvements".
Food security in case of war or invasion ? Or mass drone invasion ? Without small and medium agriculture you have nowhere to run. And why to even run - do one giant owner will take multiple ex-bigcity refugees to his home (and feed them few months) or just hire security to shot them or scary of his land ?
And even if giant owner want to help he can't. Becouse hi is only one. Compare to many small/farms - they are somehow just "human" and humanity sized...
Don Corleone was planting tomatoes at the end ;)
I met few peoples that when stopped to be young just moved to province and started peacefull living of the land. Giant farms are a no go for that purposes.
And yes, eg. China builds piggeries and cowsheds town-sized now. Now imagine one case of some-flue in that "town" - best case... And suddenly millions have prices hike or are starving. Or Africa countries get very cheap but toxic meat. Or animal food. Eg. with prions included...
And all of that are just real world facts and "technicals". Now add greeeeed by "lawful" owners. Tell me - is that hypothetical ? \s You easily can write long replay or tree of them just on that subject :>
Corect way is to not build hell on earth in the first place.
If the average user is fine with their data being sold in exchange for a service, then why not let them?
I’m personally not okay with it and I keep my data footprint as low as I can, but I know lots of people who just do not care if they get a service in return, and are fully understanding of what that means.
The US has largely decided that companies shouldn't be regulated at all (particularly with the recent Supreme Court decisions). This isn't a good thing. It will not benefit the vast majority of US citizens. There is no "choice" citizens can make that will undo the unraveling of government regulations on industry/business, unless it's voting for a political party that one that will reform the Supreme Court and revert their insane decisions, a party that isn't the GOP.
The problem with your argument is you’re removing any revenue source the company has. If you won’t pay a subscription, and you block all the ads, and they can’t sell data, how do they make money? Money is required to run the service, whether that leaves a sour taste or not.
If you think you have a financially viable model that protects data, then you should start a company on that premise, I’d genuinely love to see someone make it work.
And the vast majority of users don't deserve privacy? Nah, that's a ridiculous argument to make and I'm not going to waste my time with this line of discussion. You're not making a good faith argument. I'm not playing your stupid games.
One cannot unring a bell.
If there’s a method I’m not thinking of I’m genuinely curious what the financial model would look like.
Let people decide what is right for them.
Protection of user data is a legal right, or increasingly recognized to be. Companies have no right to sell it, or misuse it, no matter what financial impacts it has on them.
Rights cannot be contracted away or sold. They are rights.
I'm also willing to rent my right to determine the contents of advertisements inserted into my daily news feed, for the right price. These things feel equivalent in kind to me.
Usually capitalist rhetoric refers to contracting as a right in itself, muddying your point significantly.
When you knowingly agree to use a service that sells your data, that's fine. When you link it to Facebook and then give it access to your contacts and the name, email address, and phone number of every person you know gets sold to a company that then goes and uses that information to send personalized phishing emails and commit fraud that's a lot less fine.
At the end of the day its about liability. There are many tech companies that are responsible for harm at both the individual and societal level, and they are not held accountable.
But they are not okay with it. I understand why Corporations like to insinuate that people who click OK to twenty pages of legalese in an EULA really are okay with whatever clauses in it, but in reality this practice is an abuse of contract law and exploiting asymmetric power relations. In theory, a potential customer could print EULAs out, suggest changes, and send back the revised contract for approval or further negotiation. In practice, nobody ever does that and corporations would freak out if it happened on a large scale.
The problem does not just occur with new big tech. Banks have been doing the same for decades. I recently put some money on a savings account and was greeted with pages and pages of fine print that literally only a lawyer can understand. Normally, nobody in their right mind would accept this. However, the bank serves as a utility, changing banks is very difficult where I live and they all have the same kind of contracts in their favor. There is no alternative. The same is true for social networks and other big tech. It's not really a free choice for a small business owner to have a Facebook account or for a self-published author to put their books on Amazon, for instance.
That's why strong regulations, good customer protection and privacy laws are needed.
Then ask yourself how exactly the architects were self-medicating.
It's easy to agree with all advertising. I think that's the quickest, easiest measure to cut that yields an outcome beneficial to society, and that more ads are nearly always worse.
I also think that sales are worse for society than every day prices that deliver value; sales do make sense for things like seasonal items which are in abundance due to just being harvested.
Instead, we're forced to turn to third-party testers with dubious manufacturer relations - even when the results aren't freely available! - or technical knowledge (e.g. Consumer Reports using 1/3 octave smoothed power response for loudspeakers)...
If you spent real money on something, you're far more likely to buy it again or buy it for someone or send that link to someone than a completely new product.
If yes, it suddenly makes sense to show the ad to the ~1000 people in your target group.
If it wasn’t allowed, the value of all this personal information wouldn’t be as high.
If I were selling widgets I still greatly care about knowing who buys a billion widgets a year and will pay good money to find out.
Creation of global markets with interconnected networks to track and share detailed personal information about mental states, political alignment, sexual life and more is the problem.
The plural of anecdote is data after all.
If I am Tylor Swift fan I should get her merch advertising only when I am visiting swifties forum or group - but not when I am checking my fishing forum where I expect fishing gear ads. But nowadays I get adsg
Because more targeted ads require a dangerous and abusive system of pervasive surveillance while less targeted ads can still be targeted without hurting as many people in the process.
I don't think they require it.
A targeted ad can be as simple as geolocation via IP address and showing local businesses.
Untargeted ads pay less than 5% what targeted ones do.
Even assuming that is true, companies are bidding for user's attention and against each other. What do you think will happen to prices for context-based advertising if targeted advertising goes away?
> and the one billion YouTube viewers would likely be quite upset about it
Great example. Many of the ads that finance the YouTube ecosystem are context-based and not targeted.
It's quite obvious, isn't it? They will stop buying ads altogether.
The entire reason targeted ads pay better is because they have a higher conversion rate, so advertisers can afford to pay more.
> Many of the ads that finance the YouTube ecosystem are context-based and not targeted.
And that's why shovel-ware "personal finance" crap YouTube channels make mega-bux, while actually interesting creators earn pennies. If you want more "junk food content", have at it: Ban all the targeted ads!
Just don't come crying in five years when there's nothing good to watch or read.
Either that, or we'll find out what just content based untargetted ads work pretty well.
Targeted advertising includes contextual advertising (e.g., a company putting an ad for their bird watching binoculars on a bird watching blog) and I'm having trouble thinking of any reason to ban that.
Reasons?
Click bait, boosts consumerism, ads imply essentially a tax for everyone (remember that ads have to be paid by the consumers), CEO spam, annoying, environmental costs
Don't we live in a capitalist world?
The economy should serve the people, not the way around.
Removing ads would require being willing to make micro payments to some random shady news site you found on google to read their article.
In the current payment world, that would require sharing a lot of private information in the case of PayPal or, even worse, sharing your CC number.
The Digital Euro might fix this, if it turns out to be well implemented.
Once a well implemented Digital Euro arrives, an internet without advertising would be a real possibility.
The GDPR is very clear about this. Advertising is not a legitimate interest or a functionally-required data processing, ergo, it may only be done with user consent. And that user consent may not be coerced in any way at all, you may not even refuse access to services if users reject their data being used.
It's taking a while to go up and down the courts, but the days of ad-tech are numbered.
Only thing we got was annoying cookie popups everywhere, where consent is one click away and reject is three layers behind a small “learn more” button.
Guess what, the whole hidden reject thing? That's not legal. Opting out should be equally as easy (or easier) than opting in, which a lot of EU companies realize.
Now, large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people (unlike say tobacco, or talc powder, 3M and half of their solvents, weed killer, most car makers, etc etc)
but they have been trying desperately to stop all competition.
They've also been trying to extract as much personal info as possible for profit. Because regulators in the USA are hamstrung, they are used to being able to basically doing stuff that would be illegal if it were in physical stores/pre-existing industries.
Every large company in every industry wants to do this.
> They've also been trying to extract as much personal info as possible for profit.
Why would you expect a company not to pursue profits?
And the point of regulation is to stop it and bring balance. Or are you happy with mono-/oligopolies?
In practice, regulation almost never actually does that.
Every major industry is a monopoly or duopoly if you're even a bit generous with the term.
I'm just pointing out there is nothing unique here with tech or data.
And the politics are mostly theater that often makes things more monopolistic, not less.
Is that correct? I have a hard time thinking that is true.
Adding a link to the Boston Fed report on it from a couple years ago: https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/current-policy-perspe...
People keep talking about the obligation to shareholders for a company to maximize profits, but there's a wide list of possibilities between not doing that and seeking to actively, wholesale ruin privacy.
I expect the people in companies to take responsibility for their actions instead of pretending that they're beholden to the company's wants.
> Why would you expect a company not to pursue profits?
And that's how you justify children in cobalt mines I suppose ?
Did you actually read the article? I don't know how you square this kobayashi maru situation, unless you think Meta is outright lying about it:
> Europe recently charged Meta with breaching EU regulations over its “pay or consent” plan. Meta’s business is built around personalized ads, which are worth far more than non-personalized ads. EU regulators required that Meta provide an option that did not involve tracking user data, so Meta created a paid model that would allow users to pay a fee for an ad-free service. This was already a significant concession—personalized ads are so valuable that one analyst estimated paid users would bring in 60 percent less revenue. But EU regulators are now insisting this model also breaches the rules, saying that Meta fails to provide a less personalized but equivalent version of Meta’s social networks. They’re demanding that Meta provide free full services without personalized ads or a monthly fee for users. In a very real sense, the EU has ruled that Meta’s core business model is illegal. Non-personalized ads cannot economically sustain Meta’s services, but it’s the only solution EU regulators want to accept.
Also, what about the CUDA situation? I don't see how any consumer is harmed by this, which is quite different from a social media company doing its thing.
Is this actually bad?
I closed my account ten years ago, and I don't have an alternative. After the withdrawal period I stopped caring.
My loved ones send me text messages of their kids. Exactly what is the point of Facebook?
So many people are in it’s if you don’t have it, it’s hard to be part of certain communities.
I deleted my Facebook like ten years ago, I missed out on a a LOT of party invites.
if they want me there, they can ask me directly. My social life has not significantly changed since I quit Facebook.
if you have good friends, they will find you. if you don't.. why do you care about losing them?
However, nothing I use could be called a Facebook replacement, either. WhatsApp isn't a Facebook replacement.
So the notion that you have complete freedom is somewhat false…
You might have heard of the phone network and email. Both provide you with choices as to which corporations you want to do business with without limiting what contacts you can talk to.
There are groups/communities (real ones, for example building or school) that settled on WA/FB group so while you are not necessarily forced to if you don't there is a high chance that you will miss some crucial info…
I don't use it in any manner for personal communication though…
But I don't go around pretending that that doesn't cut me out of social contacts. Not everyone will be as accomodating as your friends and relatives.
The EU regulators and select HN users might be okay with that, but EU citizens on average probably won't be.
More pointedly, that they can't be built in or run from the EU.
I wouldn't mind if FB left...
> The EU regulators and select HN users might be okay with that
Though FB should have never been allowed to buy WhatsApp and Instagram... (same for Google buying YouTube…)
Besides void would be filled sooner or later with something, hopefully something interoperable (XMPP maybe?)
No company should be allowed control over such a large portion of private communication.
All the younger people I know are on Instagram (yes Meta owns that). But another social network will take its place like it always has. I’m pretty sure Meta knows this since they also own WhatsApp.
If FB dies, we’ll all be fine.
> They’re demanding that Meta provide free full services without personalized ads or a monthly fee for users.
Meta is being sued because their paid plan is not honest - they are currently asking for 10€/month which is disproportionate - for comparison, a Business Standard Google Workspace account with 2Tb and Gemini costs 11€. From [1], "EU law requires that consent is the genuine free will of the user. Contrary to this law, Meta charges a 'privacy fee' of up to €250 per year if anyone dares to exercise their fundamental right to data protection".
[1] https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-files-gdpr-complaint-against-meta-ov...
In legal and economic contexts, reasonable profits are a thing that is routinely calculated. Where industries are more regulated, 'reasonable' profits are often bound by statutory guidelines. In more competitive markets, prices are not fixed in the same way but you can take a look at industry standards to ascertain what might be reasonable.
Where are they demanding that? Reading https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_24_..., their complaints seem to be that Facebook
- cannot call the ‘with adverts’ version ‘free’
- makes it too difficult for consumers to find out what exactly they give to facebook in exchange for this ‘free’ service
- is not clear enough about the fact that paying will not remove all ads
- forces existing users to choose between paid and ‘free’ versions before they can use the service again.
Nowhere do they say on that page that Meta "provide free full services without personalized ads or a monthly fee for users”. Am I reading the wrong page?
Yes. That's a separate investigation; "Today's action focuses specifically on the assessment of Meta's practices under EU consumer law and is distinct from the ongoing ... , and the assessment by the Irish Data Protection Commission under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)."
The illegality of "Pay or Consent" is a GDPR thing. The EDPB ruling on that issue is here: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2024-04/edpb_opinion...
But it's an extremely settled matter. The GDPR says explicitly that consent is not "freely given" if the provision of a service is dependent on said consent. (Where the service does not absolutely require the data processing in question; See Article 7, recital 43)
Maybe they’re thinking of Meta making Facebook paid for everybody, but giving users the option of getting paid for getting personalized ads? Apart from the wording, I don’t see how that’s different from “It’s free, but if you don’t want personalized have to pay”, though.
It would be different in that it makes it more explicit that users are selling something, though, so maybe it would be enough in the eyes of the EU?
You'll struggle to find people who are against the Digital Markets Act for this reason. It literally only targets the potential monopolists.
However, virtually every other piece of regulation does the opposite.
Regulation usually gets trotted out after the downside of doing [new innovation] is experienced. This always happens, because doing something new always involves unknown risk. Most people aren't entrepreneurs and hate risk, so they pass regulation, and the market gets locked down so nothing new happens again. Incumbents and their army of lawyers can easily comply or are grandfathered in, and challengers are permanently disadvantaged. That market is officially dead until the next fundamental leap forward in technology.
What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass this incumbent-cementing regulation before we've even had a chance to experience both the upside and downside, so the innovation never happens at all.
Combine this with a rapidly aging demography in Europe, and I only see this trend increasing. If there's one thing old people hate, it's risk and doing new things. Meanwhile, those same old folks are expecting massive payouts (social benefits) via taxation of the same private sector they're currently kneecapping with red tape. While ironic, those two trends converging aren't great for Europe.
I'm against the way it's being applied to Apple. I don't think that the government should dictate that consumers aren't allowed to choose a platform that's a locked down walled garden if that's what they want.
We have platforms that aren't walled gardens (Android) that many of us happily use (myself included), and Apple shouldn't have to become something that it didn't set out to be just because a few other big tech companies feel stifled by Apple's rules.
I would never pick an Apple device for myself. I would also never recommend an Android phone to my mother-in-law. I, myself, know to avoid the many Android security holes that exist because it's a relaxed platform. But for my non-technical loved ones, Apple provides a much better experience in large part because it's a walled garden that makes it very difficult to install garbage.
What are those benefits, and why would they evaporate if Apple adds an "Install from other sources" toggle? If you want to exclusively benefit from Apple's discernment, keep that toggle off and stay in the walled garden.If the benefits are so great, then surely everyone will choose to stay in the walled garden.
One example from a while back was banning an internal Facebook enterprise developer account because they were using it to install a VPN onto users devices for the purpose of monitoring user behavior for competitive market analysis. This is not anything that can be prevented by technical controls, and was only able to be published because enterprise profiles can deploy apps outside the store.
Apple wants their customers to be safe. Third party marketplaces take that responsibility and control out of their hands. Apple stopped that VPN abuse immediately upon finding out about it. How long would it take for European regulators to force Facebook to turn off such a self published app of their own accord?
How about LassPass, then? That made it onto the AppStore despite being designed to make money and steal credentials.
Maybe not $50/month, though. I love one Apple apologist's remarks on that aspect:
> Instead, the scam LassPass app tries to steer you to creating a “pro” account subscription for $2/month, $10/year, or a $50 lifetime purchase. Those are actually low prices for a scam app — a lot of scammy apps try to charge like $10/week.
Emphasis mine. "Look, I know you got your credentials stolen, but at least you didn't also get scammed out of as much money as some other scammy apps!"
Surely you've seen enough of the free market to know that this is baloney. The instant that the walled garden is gone abusive apps (Facebook et al) will start ushering users away from it into their own, abusive paths as the only way to install. And once the big abusive apps have started the trend, the walled garden is effectively gone. Businesses don't choose regulation if they can help it.
The only reason we don't see this with Android and Google Play is because Google hardly has any rules at all about what can go on the Play Store.
Does that change the garden for you? Can't users such as yourself remain in the Apple ecosystem? Do other users leaving affect you? Or Apple? Maybe they won't have as much cash?
Does Apple deserve the extra cash in perpetuity for being the first with the network effect? There might be a lot of better ideas out there, if they were given a chance, like Apple had back before them and Google took over the market.
> abusive apps (Facebook et al) will start ushering users away from it into their own, abusive paths as the only way to install
> Do other users leaving affect you?
To clarify, I'm not an Apple user. I use their competitors in all categories because they're not really my style. (Yes, choosing something other than Apple is a choice you can make!)
I'm just someone who feels the need to represent normal Apple users inside the HN bubble.
Facebook will leave the AppStore. Grandma can’t find Facebook anymore on her new iPhone, and will google “how to install Facebook on iPhone”. Thousands of websites will SEO for that, and give instructions (“There will be a popup that says ‘You might install dangerous software. Are you sure?’ Press YES.”) on how to install their AppStore with some Facebook clone/spyware/VPN MITM attack/keyloggers. They will have complete control of grandma’s phone, collect all the data they want. Soon she’ll have a new default browser with 7 toolbars, a new search engine, and be mining crypto on the side.
Nah. Users don't grok sideloading.
Even on android where it's always been possible, it's a fringe phenomenon. And every app is on Google Play. In fact it basically killed Huawei in the West not being able to offer it anymore.
The only exception is the epic store but they do it to make a point. Not because it actually works.
Even aside from that, you can't compare the Play Store to Apple's because the Play Store is a thousand times less restrictive. There's a reason why people are constantly complaining about the App Store and (aside from Epic) never the Play Store. Apple has a lot of restrictions, and while some of them are there to extract more money most are there to protect their customers.
I'm not "imagining" anything. This is the status quo on Android and even setting one switch to "allow installations from this source" (one that already pops up automatically no less!) already freaks users out.
And the EU is fine with this. They didn't specify any technical implementation to Apple so I'm sure they will make it as scary as they can.
> Even aside from that, you can't compare the Play Store to Apple's because the Play Store is a thousand times less restrictive.
Apple has seen a lot of stuff slip by the reviewers too, and it's pretty much a hit and miss based on who you get. Just like with Google.
I'm sure a lot more app providers would love to get out from under Apple's heavy hand but in practice this is just wishful thinking. The tiny amount of friction there is on Android is more than enough for people not to bother.
> There's a reason why people are constantly complaining about the App Store and (aside from Epic) never the Play Store. Apple has a lot of restrictions, and while some of them are there to extract more money most are there to protect their customers.
We'll have to differ in opinion on that. I feel like most of the restrictions are there to protect their cash cow which is the app store.
To be clear, I think privacy laws like GDPR absolutely have a place for consumer protection.
I just don't think the DMA does. Watching how the DMA applies to Apple, it feels far less about consumer protection than it does about businesses, and that's what makes me uncomfortable. The EU is in this case listening to complaints from a bunch of other businesses who do not have consumer interests at heart and ignoring the very real damage that their actions could do to consumer protection.
The Apple App Store protects users from myriad abuses by myriad bad companies. The EU wants Apple to build a blessed, paved off-ramp that companies can strongly encourage prospective customers to use that brings them deeper into the manipulative control of those companies.
Does it? Are the $50/month subscription flashlight apps gone?
This is just a form of 'think of the children'. Think of all those evil hackers waiting around the corner for the poor unsuspecting iPhone users.
I'm not talking "evil hackers". I'm talking about Facebook just for a start. Once they pave the way and teach users how to use the off-ramp (or else not be able to use Facebook!) they'll be followed by dozens of smaller abusive companies that are eager to pass by Apple's review requirements.
I'm far less concerned about software vulnerabilities than I am about the companies that Apple's business policies currently keep in check.
Apple (and other big tech companies) locking the competition out of the market, or buying them, hurts consumers. It robs them of other innovative choices.
Having more choices and interoperability is generally good for consumers.
If you stick with the Apple defaults how does this hurt you?
> If you stick with the Apple defaults how does this hurt you?
Because people won't be able to stick with the defaults. One of the first dominoes to fall if the EU gets its wishlist will be Facebook, which will put a version of its app that wouldn't pass Apple's review out through unofficial channels and strongly encourage or force users to switch to it. Once Facebook has paved the way many other companies that are similarly inclined to abuse their users will follow.
A walled garden with a wide-open back door is no walled garden at all, and the many Apple users who liked the garden are going to be cranky when they realize what tech lobbyists have done in the EU.
And perhaps the legal system sees some of these garden wall as protecting Apple, falling under anti-trust, like the 30% markups on all financial transactions?
You mentioned malicious versions of the Facebook app that do an end-run around Apple's review. Maybe the EU is trying to cover this with new laws like the GDPR and DMA, making malicious app behaviour illegal. Might that not be better, protecting all users regardless of platform?
If I thought the EU could actually execute on that? Maybe. But I know that Apple executes on it, and the fallout from the gdpr doesn't give me a lot of confidence that the EU knows how to regulate tech in a way that achieves desired outcomes and doesn't just lead to the same behavior as before with malicious compliance stamped on top.
And consumers spoke, and now other consumers unhappy with those consumers choices, are demanding the deal be changed.
But it doesn't have to be, you can simply NOT regulate every damn little thing, especially when there are no victims and you are forbidding a simple trade between two entities who are both willing to engage.
No, developers who want to make money on the Apple Store are not victims. They can develop for Linux and sell apps there if they don't want to pay what Apple wants.
I'm one of them, I'm not supporting Apple or Google and I build everything on the web paying nothing.
Despite what Adobe said when the iPhone first came out, there was no way that Flash was ever going to run on the first generation iPhone. It had only 128MB RAM and 400 MHz processor. When Flash finally came to Mobile in late 2010 on Android, it required 1GB RAM and 1Ghz processor. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Heck Safari could barely run on the first iPhone, it would do checkerboards until rendering could catch up with the scrolling.
And if you remember Apple’s cross platform Windows apps - iTunes, QuickTime and the short lived Safari, they also looked very bad on Windows.
Both Google and Facebook at different times said they are moving away from cross platform frameworks and web based technologies for iOS to more native software. Google has all but abandoned their cross platform mobile framework.
Full apps on the other hand have many more ways to fingerprint users which aren’t as well known, such as “your free storage, your current volume level (to 3 decimal points) and even your battery level (to 15 decimal points)”. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/23/iphone-...)
Is one conclusively better than the other? I’m not sure, but web tracking and fingerprinting is still much more studied and users have more countermeasures, including using a different device where the user has more control.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Battery_Sta...
Web audio api
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...
If the opening up of Apple were as difficult to use as getting root on Android is I wouldn't have a problem. But that's not what's being proposed, and any attempts by Apple to make it less than perfectly smooth for someone to exit the walled garden are most likely going to be shot down.
Game company Bar decides to launch their own store and pull their game - we’ll call it Nortfite - from the App Store so they can add something shady like crypto features. Nortfite is a massive social game that all your friends play and it’s a huge part of your teenage social life. Your only device capable of playing it is your second-hand iPad. Do you really have a choice about staying in the walled garden? Who needs friends anyway, amirite?
Just how can you not see there's probably 20% of every purchase sitting on the table if competition was ever allowed to occur.
Not to mention the simple freedom of choosing what you want to install yourself, and not just what Apple allows you to...
I have the freedom to install whatever I want. I get that freedom by using Linux and Android. I choose to have that freedom by selecting platforms that provide it.
Many HN users seem to want all the benefits of Apple's approach with none of the downsides, and it doesn't work that way. Apple is what it is because it has a tight, coherent strategy, and forcing Apple to change that strategy will have knock-on effects that most Apple users won't like.
If you value freedom to install whatever you want, you chose the wrong ecosystem, and hijacking the ecosystem to satisfy your values is unfair to the vast majority of customers whose values already align with the ecosystem's.
It's no different than Nintendo's entry into the game console market being what it is—some people will choose that experience because what it offers is valuable for them.
For myself, I'm an Android phone user and a PC gamer, but just because I wouldn't choose those experiences for myself doesn't mean I begrudge their existence.
It does not apply to consoles.
It does make it possible for companies to keep some more money, but most importantly it allows them to sidestep the protections for my privacy that I pay a premium to Apple for.
A real DMA would force facebook, twitter, etc to open up for alternative clients. That would bring competition in and benefit the end user.
Not that whatever digital slot machnine company is allowed to keep a higher percentage of the diamonds they sell you in their free to pay game.
This is entirely because the experts and fundraisers in the field promoted the technology as existentially and societally dangerous before they even got it to do anything commercially viable. "This has so much potential that it could destroy us all!" was the sales pitch!
Of course regulators are going to take that seriously, as there's nobody of influence vested in trying to show them otherwise.
The EU was dumb enough to dig it for them.
Mostly its being used to generate text that fit a query.
I'm using it to quickly localize our application into different languages, such as Arabic. German took like a few hours to get from non existing to 100% functional. Arabic was sketchy with Arabic mixed with French text, now it's 100% Arabic.
Ok but what is your plan for letting people who lost their jobs to AI to do more meaningful things? Because unless there are bigger societal changes all it means those people will not have to find jobs that are even more bullshit.
> regulators...take that seriously
That's how.
For example, it’s being used to job screen applicants even though we have proven that AI models still suffer from thing like racial bias. Companies don’t disclose how their models are trained to negate bias or anything like that either and that’s one example I remember off the top of my head
I bet they also suffer from other biases that are harder to detect and maybe some biases we can't even imagine and thus control for.
Just because you graduated from a CS program doesn't mean you will always write bug free code using the ideal algorithm and design pattern.
But you know what you should be striving for, can more readily identify issues, and maybe sometimes you actually are perfect.
I feel like it's really the opposite.
There is a major problem with using AI to screen CVs, which is that AI is bad at screening CVs. It excludes good candidates and offers mediocre ones, and opens up a bunch of hacks the equivalent of black hat SEO, which gives an undesired advantage to people inclined to dirty tricks.
But "it's racist" is a political hot button, so before people can start to point that out, someone scrambles to push the hot button and suck all the oxygen out of the room. Then the purveyors of snake oil can munge the algorithm until it passes the naive oversimplified racial bias test someone made up (probably making it even worse at its intended purpose), and then claim "the problem" is solved, as if that was the main and only problem.
Everytime they do this test, considerable bias is found to still exist.
I think it gives a much higher signal on candidates than a resume, and is more "blind" in terms of bias than a human.
It's based on voice messages. Open to all here if anyone wants to take it for a spin. https://candit.net
It is like orchestras used to use auditions where the judges could see the people; when they went to auditions where they couldn't see the people, the number of women being hired went right up.
There is a famous study on this topic, usually presented in much the way you describe. But usually people are more careful not to lie about the results. The rate of women being hired went down, not up. The "success" for women was contained to advancement through particular audition rounds.
https://archive.is/xmvp2
The original paper is not exactly a model of investigative integrity:
>> Women are about 5 percentage points more likely to be hired than are men in a completely blind audition, although the effect is not statistically significant. The effect is nil, however, when there is a semifinal round, perhaps as a result of the unusual effects of the semifinal round.
Abstract from the original paper:
> A change in the audition procedures of symphony orchestras--adoption of "blind" auditions with a "screen" to conceal the candidate's identity from the jury--provides a test for sex-biased hiring. Using data from actual auditions, in an individual fixed-effects framework, we find that the screen increases the probability a woman will be advanced and hired. Although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction, the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.90.4.715
The whole point is that the paper doesn't actually support any of the claims, which it's fairly open about -- that's those "large standard errors".
They did not in fact find that the screen increases the probability of a woman being hired. They found that it increased the probability of a woman passing the final round of auditions. There's more than one round.
It's up to you, I guess, whether you want to follow the original authors to their conclusion that the semifinal round is fundamentally unlike the final and quarterfinal audition rounds. I wouldn't.
The paper is meritless, but even it's actual worthless findings aren't in the direction that people like to claim. Here's Andrew Gelman: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-...
> First, some equivocal results:
> This is not very impressive at all. Some fine words but the punchline seems to be that the data are too noisy to form any strong conclusions.
> Huh? Nothing’s statistically significant but the estimates “show that the existence of any blind round makes a difference”? I might well be missing something here. In any case, you shouldn’t be running around making a big deal about point estimates when the standard errors are so large. I don’t hold it against the authors—this was 2000, after all, the stone age in our understanding of statistical errors. But from a modern perspective we can see the problem.
> Anyway, where’s the damn “50 percent” and the “increases by severalfold”? I can’t find it. It’s gotta be somewhere in that paper, I just can’t figure out where.
> Pallesen’s objections are strongly stated but they’re not new. Indeed, the authors of the original paper were pretty clear about its limitations. The evidence was all in plain sight.
> For example, here’s a careful take posted by BS King in 2017:
>> Okay, so first up, the most often reported findings: blind auditions appear to account for about 25% of the increase in women in major orchestras. . . . [But] One of the more interesting findings of the study that I have not often seen reported: overall, women did worse in the blinded auditions. . . .
If you read the paper, you'd notice the problems.
But you might not want to run the risk of, um, "racism" that seems to be inherent in reading a paper on the impact of blind auditions on women.
Quote from your second, more respectable, link:
> Pallesen’s objections are strongly stated but they’re not new. Indeed, the authors of the original paper were pretty clear about its limitations.
When I read the original papers, like your second link, I find a level headed paper working with limited data they had available.
I would suggest that the annoyance is with pop science retelling at best, or just a quack selling anger online to fuel his weird obsessions at worst.
Another is that a health insurance company was caught using AI to determine if a claim should be denied or not which lead to a scandal as a whistleblower leaked the practice, as it was wrought with errors and ethical concerns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
Other governments around the world have done similar (non-AI) things in the past with similar terrible results. They'll likely try an AI version of things too in the near future, just because "AI" apparently solves all the problems. Ugh.
A range of different people interviewing are going to be alot harder to pin down.
The implications of deepfakes and similar frauds alone are potentially devastating to informed political debate in democracies, safe and effective dissemination of public health information in emergencies, and plenty of other realistic and important trust scenarios.
The implications of LLMs are potentially wonderful in terms of providing better access to information for everyone but we already know that they are also capable of making serious mistakes or even generating complete nonsense that a non-expert user might not recognise as such. Again it is not hard to imagine a near future where chat-based systems have essentially displaced search engines and social media as the default ways to find information online but then provide bad advice on legal, financial, or health matters.
There is a second serious concern with LLMs and related technologies, which is that they could very rapidly shift the balance from compensating those who produce useful creative content to compensating those who run the summary service. It's never healthy when your economics don't line up with rewarding the people doing the real work and we've already seen plenty of relevant stories about the AI training data gold rush.
Next we get to computer vision and its applications in fields like self-driving vehicles. Again we've already seen plenty of examples where cars have been tricked into stopping suddenly or otherwise misbehaving when for example someone projected a fake road sign onto the road in front of them.
Again there is a second serious concern with systems like computer vision, audio classification, and natural language processing and that is privacy. It's bad enough that we all carry devices with cameras and microphones around with us almost 24/7 these days and the people whose software runs on those devices seem quite willing to spy on us and upload data to the mothership with little or any warning. That alone has unprecedented implications for privacy and associated risks. With the increased ability to automatically interpret raw video and audio footage - with varying degrees of accuracy and bias of course - that amplifies the potential dangers of these systems greatly.
There is enormous potential in modern AI/ML techniques for everything from helping everyday personal research to saving lives through commoditising sophisticated analysis of medical scans. But that doesn't mean there aren't also risks we already know about at the same kind of scale - even without all the doomsday hypotheticals where suddenly a malicious AGI emerges that takes over the universe.
> The implications of deepfakes and similar frauds alone are potentially devastating to informed political debate in democracies, safe and effective dissemination of public health information in emergencies, and plenty of other realistic and important trust scenarios.
The horse is out of the barn on this one. You can't stop this by regulating anything because the models necessary to do it have already been released, would continue to be released from other countries, and one of the primary purveyors of this sort of thing will be adversarial nation states, who obviously aren't going to comply with any laws you pass.
> The implications of LLMs are potentially wonderful in terms of providing better access to information for everyone but we already know that they are also capable of making serious mistakes or even generating complete nonsense that a non-expert user might not recognise as such.
Which is why AI summaries are largely a gimmick and people are figuring that out.
> they could very rapidly shift the balance from compensating those who produce useful creative content to compensating those who run the summary service.
This already happened quite some time ago with search engines. People want the answer, not a paywall, so the search engine gives them an unpaywalled site with the answer (and gets an ad impression from it) and the paywalled sites lose to the ad-supported ones. But then the operations that can't survive on ad impressions lose out, and even the ad-supported ones doing original research lose out because you can't copyright facts so anyone paying to do original reporting will see their stories covered by every other outlet that doesn't. Then the most popular news sites become scummy lowest-common-denominator partisan hacks beholden to advertisers with spam-laden websites to match.
Fixing this would require something along the lines of the old model NPR used to use, i.e. "free" yet listener-supported reporting, but they stopped doing that and became a partisan outlet supported by advertising. The closest contemporary thing seems to be the Substacks where most of the stories are free to read but you're encouraged to subscribe and the subscriptions are enough to sustain the content creation.
The AI thing doesn't change this much if at all. A cheap AI summary isn't going to displace original content any more than a cheap rephrasing by a competing outlet does already.
> Next we get to computer vision and its applications in fields like self-driving vehicles. Again we've already seen plenty of examples where cars have been tricked into stopping suddenly or otherwise misbehaving when for example someone projected a fake road sign onto the road in front of them.
But where does the regulation come in here? When it does that it's obviously a bug and the manufacturers already have the incentive to want to fix it because their customers won't like it. And there are already laws specifying what happens when a carmaker sells a car that doesn't behave right.
> Again there is a second serious concern with systems like computer vision, audio classification, and natural language processing and that is privacy.
Which is really almost nothing to do with AI and the main solutions to it are giving people alternatives to the existing systems that invade their privacy. Indeed, the hard problem there is replacing existing "free" systems with something that doesn't put more costs on people, when the existing systems are "free" specifically because of that privacy invasion.
If a government wants to do something about this, fund the development of real free software that replaces the proprietary services hoovering up everyone's data.
It’s just like trying to restrict DVD encryption keys from being published or 128 bit encryption from being “exported” in browsers back in the car.
I think a bigger concern is LLMs providing deliberately biased results and stating them as fact.
Regulating it the way you say just means "zero innovation!".
Can't we just say racism is illegal, and if a company uses an AI to be racist, they get fined the same way they would if they were racist the old fashioned way?
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_sca...
Fence at the top of a cliff (make sure the AI is unbiased and can be fixed when it turns out it is) vs. Ambulance at the bottom (letting people sue if they think the machine is wrong).
But which way around does that apply? Racism is a concrete example of what AI may incorrectly automate, it's not the only bias that AI can have — any correlation in the training data will be learned, but not necessarily causation — and the goal of these laws is to require the machines to be accurate, unbiased, up to date, respectful of privacy etc., with "not racist" as merely one example of why that matters.
(Also the existing laws on racial equality were not removed by GDPR; to the previous metaphor, the fence being better doesn't mean you can fire the ambulance service).
Any idea what software is being used ?
https://hirebee.ai/
I've seen some places collect that information which is wild. But you can decline.
Socially: Creating and cultivating a culture that screws up dating.
Emotionally: Filter bubbles, and data analyitics to push proganda and motivate people in directions (cambridge). Additionally subjecting people to material to manipulate.
Stealing: Scooter companies are actively stealing the public space to operate their business (sidewalks), endorsing their users to run over people on the sidewalk (also making it difficult to identify the individual), etc.
Privacy wise: Companies are forcing you to give up your private info to live. (Retail tracking to individuals.. even accross multiple companies [see "The Retail Equation"])
But we also need the people who do like risk taking and new stuff, and there's less of them. So innovation is much more of a fragile thing than stasis.
Even if you think society and human life in general can't be improved in any way, to just maintain the way things are now...will require many new innovations and people taking risk on new stuff. Your welfare, lifestyle, and security depends on the risk taking of others. So we should probably be careful about making it too hard for the folks taking risk (it's already hard enough).
Trust me, the risk-averse folks will still be the dominant voice either way. Even this forum--which started as a community of risk-taking entrepreneurial types--is now dominated by the risk-averse majority.
The issue with that is that risk is usually not borne by the people getting rewards.
My point being “letting the risk adverse take risks” is not the same thing as “don’t rein in VC backed attempted monopolies”. You can do the latter without doing the former (theoretically of course; in practice doing the latter is impossible without a substantive change in the underlying incentive structure of current global society).
OMG I cannot wait for these companies to be fined out of existence.
How can you be allowed to have a business model that relies on people leaving your trash wherever they feel like it.
What I got was: The alderman employee tried to get this cleared with the scooter company rather than towed.
I was blown away.. if I parked in front of the Division blue line station my car would be fined, towed, charged with storage fees, potentially vandalized within an hour. Them? Oh the gov employee will do CS for them. I filed a complaint with the city ombudsman and later found out she was removed.
I think that the bigger issue is that the people who suffer when the risk goes bad and the people who benefit when the risk goes well usually aren't the same people.
You missed most of the discussions about DMA on HN, I guess. There's always someone ready to say how EU will kill all innovation and make Google/Apple exit the market because they dare to question anything.
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Let me laugh out loud. Those, who govern these companies know 10 years ahead how and what will happen. Bigdiks higher up has 10-20 year plans. And people talk about "before we had a chance to experience the upsides and the downsides". Get a grip on reality.
No company can accurately predict where technology is headed a decade from now.
Google thinking the future of phones were BlackBerry clones?
Palm CEO “The PC guys aren’t just going to walk in a figure this thing out” referring to the then rumored iPhone.
Sundar at Google knew LLMs were going to be huge after Google invented them, so that’s why they were first to market and…
Oops. Maybe not?
While it might make risk-averse types feel good to imagine the people in charge are all-knowing (see religion), the truth is the world is a chaotic and reflexive system of unpredictability. Scary, I know!
You're commenting on an article doing exactly that. So that was not much of a struggle.
I would challenge "unknown"-- it very well seems like the risks have been known every time, they just don't give a shit
>What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass this incumbent-cementing regulation before we've even had a chance to experience ...
Sounds good to me? It's sociopathic and opportunistic to want to risk major socioeconomic issues for the mere chance of a corporate "innovation"
Actually pretty much all EU regulations and especially enforcement of those regulations gets pundits shouting that the EU is only trying to milk US megacorporations.
> However, virtually every other piece of regulation does the opposite.
Not true but even if so not all regulation concerns itself with monopolies. GDPR in particular is about user rights and should therefore apply to everyone, same for similar kinds of regulations. If corporations cannot survive without violating you in every way possible then they should not be allowed to live. If anything is lacking it's enforcement against incumbents.
> What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass this incumbent-cementing regulation before we've even had a chance to experience both the upside and downside, so the innovation never happens at all.
Good. Not all "innovation" should happen.
> Combine this with a rapidly aging demography in Europe, and I only see this trend increasing. If there's one thing old people hate, it's risk and doing new things.
Again, good. Moving fast and breaking things at societal scale is not a good idea.
It's nearly as bad. Social media causes addiction and mental health problems especially for the youth. PISA scores are going down. It can already be seen now, although not many 20 year olds have had a smartphone for more than 10 years. Here in this country every 7 year old has a smartphone and it will get only worse. Physical health is impacted because of kids are tapping on a screen instead of running and playing. It has impact already to language learning and social development of babies because parents interact with their smartphone several hours a day and instead of interacting with their baby.
Of course there is other tech than social media and smartphones. But at least in these areas equally strong regulation as for tobacco and alcohol would be required.
Teen suicides are a thing. It isn’t lung cancer, sure, but it also isn’t nothing.
We don't look at heart transplants and say "look how many people died! we should ban them"
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Family/parents-kids-died-after-dr...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/business/instagram-suicid...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/electric-scooter-electric-bike-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/family-sues-airbnb-19-m...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/rohingya-seek-reparat...
https://www.thedrive.com/news/40234/no-one-was-driving-in-te...
"full-self-driving doesn't self drive", "wear a helmet on the bird scooter", and "safety is our first priority at facebook" is the 21st century version of "don't get roundup all over yourself"
Regulators should and do weigh both the harm and good of restricting the usage of new technology. The fact that they don’t always get it right isn’t a reason to stop regulation altogether.
That might or might not be wrong, but is certainly a typically European perspective. The U.S. Bill of Rights is full of clauses specifying things like "Congress shall make no law regarding..." freedom of speech, establishments of religion, etc. because of the notion that the government's inability to reliably get it right is indeed a good reason to stop altogether.
I believe your worldview is correct and also incomplete. It’s really fucking hard to come up with general rules that cannot be gamed.
e.g FSD is mostly fine as a technology but lives would likely be saved if it were marketed more responsibly
Facebook's and Twitter's recommended feed algorithms and blocking procedures, have to a significant extent determined the outcome of elections, coup attempts, protest movements. These companies have custom tuned their algorithms for particular countries at particular times, during such events. Many people have died, or their lives negatively affected because of the decisions by these companies.
All three are about trying to persuade an intelligent organism to adopt acceptable, rich and virtuous behaviour. All three seems to have similar failure modes.
Too much red tape and you'll get over fitting, lack of creative and new behaviour.
There are emails unearthed from the early days of Facebook where utilizing addiction feedback loops were discussed to retain and maximize young users.
The Anxious Generation provides a lot of evidence correlating the rise of social media and a major increase in depression and anxiety related disorders.
you sweet summer child
no, that's not how the red tape got put in place. the government put the red tape in place to protect the established companies in the space from upstart competitors
Apple kills migrant workers in China when fires break out or through stress, Samsung kills women working with solvents banned in the US, Exxon kills oil rig workers operating dangerously, etc.