One gossamer-thin silver lining in this current geopolitical lunacy is that it's likely to show the current Commission's pro-corpo anti-citizen endeavors like this, to bend the knee to US corporate interests, in an increasingly bad light. Particularly given that activating anti-coercion measures that target those very corporate interests is now being seriously discussed.
Given the EPP’s result after the corruption scandals of the previous administration, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Voters like a charismatic leader, and the lovely and charming deals-behind-doors Ursula did very well.
Almost nobody in europe cares about these things. Nobody has gone out demonstrating for digital rights vs american companies. If we did we we would have already firewalled europe outside big tech.
Why are these articles finding their way here? In europe , this is not news, never.
Luckily, the orange idiot in charge is doing us (the Europeans) a favor showing us that America (and its companies) are no longer a trustworthy partner. In a way i really hope he goes through with the Greenland stuff... this would be the final nail in the coffin.
"Oxfam, the world-renowned advocacy group, issued a report ahead of the Davos event which showed that billionaire wealth rose by more than 16% last year, three times faster than the past five-year average, to more than $18 trillion. It drew on Forbes magazine data on the world’s richest people.
Oxfam said the $2.5 trillion rise in the wealth of billionaires last year would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over. Their wealth has risen by more than four-fifths since 2020, while nearly half the world’s population lives in poverty, the group said.
The Trump administration has led a “pro-billionaire agenda,” the group said, through actions such as slashing taxes for the wealthiest, fostering the growth of AI-related stocks that help rich investors get richer, and thwarting efforts to tax giant companies."
Ironic if Trump's Greenland stunt ends up killing the Digital Omnibus. Hard to gift-wrap GDPR rollbacks for US tech giants while they're simultaneously being tariffed.
The article paints a situation where the EU is caving in to US pressure and completely ignores the very real criticisms of the current regulatory push coming from the EU itself.
A significant part of the Draghi report on European competitiveness is about how the Parliament has been stifling the ability of EU companies to efficiently compete under the weight of more and more complex laws.
It's not very useful being the first to put in place complex regulations if nothing remains to regulate because every company has moved somewhere else.
This has been my prediction for the last year: the EU is going to be forced to take the China approach of creating their own version of all US tech companies.
The current US administration has done more to destroy US soft power on the world stage than any other in the country's history. The administration seems intent on destroying NATO. Personally I'm fine with that because it's a protection racket and a tool of imperialism. But this is going to materially hurt the US defense contractors who profit off of arms sales. That's really the turning point for any fascist regime: when you start screwing up the bag.
US tech companies are also a tool of American foreign policy in pretty much the exact same way the administration accuses China of doing.
So the EU needs to be responsible for its own security. And it's own platforms. But it may be too late for that as the EU itself may well splinter under the rise of far-right governments that are currently in place (eg Hungary) and only one election away from taking place (eg UK, Geermany maybe even France; even though the UK isn't in the EU I'm still counting it as part of Europe).
Unfortunately the EU (and the UK) is too committed to the US imperial project, such as in the Middle East. People don't seem to realize just how connected things like imperialism and the erosion of your own rights at home are inextricably intertwined.
I don’t see/share the HN outrage. If the EU wants to stay in the game, it has to be realistic about how regulation affects scaling and investment ... tweaking or rolling back parts of digital rules to compete with US/China tech isn’t “evil” .. it’s just how global competition works tbh.
As a European founder building startups since 2015, I’ve spent a massive chunk of my career navigating the "alphabet soup" of EU regulation: GDPR, DSA, DMA, AI Act, CSRD, SFDR, CBAM... the list is exhausting.
While the goals are usually noble, I’m increasingly convinced we’re regulating ourselves into irrelevance. I’m not a Big Tech company yet my interests align with theirs. We desperately need an EU that prioritizes actual growth over well-intentioned paperwork. To me, the AI Act and the GDPR are the worst offenders here, representing the largest possible gap between "good intentions" and the actual effect they have on the ground.
Consider frontier LLM labs. We have the talent, the Nordic data centers, and access to the GPUs. But why would any investor drop $100B on a frontier LLM lab here when the legislative environment is fundamentally more hostile than the US? It feels like we’ve already watched Mistral and Aleph Alpha get left in the dust.
To give you an idea of the "compliance vs. reality" GDPR gap: I worked on a project processing healthcare data for millions of people. We had a clear, easy-to-find privacy policy and a responsive DPO. Total GDPR requests for info or deletion? Exactly 53. Out of millions. We spent thousands of hours building systems for rights that only 0.001% of our users cared to use.
If you look at the courts, the "damage" being prevented is equally vague. Since EU courts don't really do punitive damages, most awards are tiny unless there’s actual identity theft. Most of what GDPR protects is "mental distress" or "loss of control"-concepts so ambiguous that courts rarely award anything for them unless something else went wrong.
The result of all this "protection"? No FAANG-equivalent, no frontier AI leader, and no homegrown ad-tech. It turns out the most perfectly regulated company is the one that never exists in the first place.
Article by article: how lawyers created impractical regulations that made sure big tech monopolized Europe and made sure small players had more trouble participating, and how the legal-industrial complex is fighting to keep milking that cow
One thing bothers me a lot is, if government organizations can be influenced by lobby groups, which primarily owned by corporations, then why do we need government?
Corporations and governments should be considered as balancing forces, one works to increase its profits by any means, other works to protect humans living in that area by any means.
You might say, corporations benefit its employees, true, but it is a small subset of people living in the country. If you allow everything to corporations, they will set up a slavery system from the birth of a baby
The EU must fix itself, and that means ignoring those NGOs. The EU's current tech laws penalize EU startups vs. US Big Tech. It should be reversed. Remove these worthless regulations (except DMA), and explicitly start discriminating against US Big Tech vs. domestic firms, like China.
Then the low-hanging fruits: mandate exclusive data storage in the EU, encryption keys in the EU, ban AWS/Azure/GCP and Windows/Office from government procurement, force JV's or GTFO, force Linux government use.
These NGOs are saboteurs in disguise that will never lead you to the promised land of EU tech sovereignty. China's playbook was: deregulate to build a domestic ecosystem, then regulate to protect society once the ecosystem is mature. Flipping that playbook around is insidious wrecker shit.
24 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 43.7 ms ] threadIf you want to do your part as a consumer, boycott all American products:
https://www.goeuropean.org/
Why are these articles finding their way here? In europe , this is not news, never.
Hmmmm
if there was selling of influence it's within the EPPO's jurisdiction (as far as I understand)
Oxfam said the $2.5 trillion rise in the wealth of billionaires last year would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over. Their wealth has risen by more than four-fifths since 2020, while nearly half the world’s population lives in poverty, the group said.
The Trump administration has led a “pro-billionaire agenda,” the group said, through actions such as slashing taxes for the wealthiest, fostering the growth of AI-related stocks that help rich investors get richer, and thwarting efforts to tax giant companies."
AI is killing humanity
A significant part of the Draghi report on European competitiveness is about how the Parliament has been stifling the ability of EU companies to efficiently compete under the weight of more and more complex laws.
It's not very useful being the first to put in place complex regulations if nothing remains to regulate because every company has moved somewhere else.
The current US administration has done more to destroy US soft power on the world stage than any other in the country's history. The administration seems intent on destroying NATO. Personally I'm fine with that because it's a protection racket and a tool of imperialism. But this is going to materially hurt the US defense contractors who profit off of arms sales. That's really the turning point for any fascist regime: when you start screwing up the bag.
US tech companies are also a tool of American foreign policy in pretty much the exact same way the administration accuses China of doing.
So the EU needs to be responsible for its own security. And it's own platforms. But it may be too late for that as the EU itself may well splinter under the rise of far-right governments that are currently in place (eg Hungary) and only one election away from taking place (eg UK, Geermany maybe even France; even though the UK isn't in the EU I'm still counting it as part of Europe).
Unfortunately the EU (and the UK) is too committed to the US imperial project, such as in the Middle East. People don't seem to realize just how connected things like imperialism and the erosion of your own rights at home are inextricably intertwined.
While the goals are usually noble, I’m increasingly convinced we’re regulating ourselves into irrelevance. I’m not a Big Tech company yet my interests align with theirs. We desperately need an EU that prioritizes actual growth over well-intentioned paperwork. To me, the AI Act and the GDPR are the worst offenders here, representing the largest possible gap between "good intentions" and the actual effect they have on the ground.
Consider frontier LLM labs. We have the talent, the Nordic data centers, and access to the GPUs. But why would any investor drop $100B on a frontier LLM lab here when the legislative environment is fundamentally more hostile than the US? It feels like we’ve already watched Mistral and Aleph Alpha get left in the dust.
To give you an idea of the "compliance vs. reality" GDPR gap: I worked on a project processing healthcare data for millions of people. We had a clear, easy-to-find privacy policy and a responsive DPO. Total GDPR requests for info or deletion? Exactly 53. Out of millions. We spent thousands of hours building systems for rights that only 0.001% of our users cared to use.
If you look at the courts, the "damage" being prevented is equally vague. Since EU courts don't really do punitive damages, most awards are tiny unless there’s actual identity theft. Most of what GDPR protects is "mental distress" or "loss of control"-concepts so ambiguous that courts rarely award anything for them unless something else went wrong.
The result of all this "protection"? No FAANG-equivalent, no frontier AI leader, and no homegrown ad-tech. It turns out the most perfectly regulated company is the one that never exists in the first place.
Article by article: how lawyers created impractical regulations that made sure big tech monopolized Europe and made sure small players had more trouble participating, and how the legal-industrial complex is fighting to keep milking that cow
Corporations and governments should be considered as balancing forces, one works to increase its profits by any means, other works to protect humans living in that area by any means.
You might say, corporations benefit its employees, true, but it is a small subset of people living in the country. If you allow everything to corporations, they will set up a slavery system from the birth of a baby
Then the low-hanging fruits: mandate exclusive data storage in the EU, encryption keys in the EU, ban AWS/Azure/GCP and Windows/Office from government procurement, force JV's or GTFO, force Linux government use.
These NGOs are saboteurs in disguise that will never lead you to the promised land of EU tech sovereignty. China's playbook was: deregulate to build a domestic ecosystem, then regulate to protect society once the ecosystem is mature. Flipping that playbook around is insidious wrecker shit.