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EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

politico.eu

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Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#31

Post by FreeHugs »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #23
FreeHugs wrote: post #8

One reason the EU missed out on the internet is our unlimited willingness to be regulated. And we keep piling more and more bureaucracy on top of it. This only cements the power of US big tech like Google and Facebook. And it sets the stage for the next big applications of the web all being build outside the EU as well. Here in Germany, everyone is afraid to start a web startup. And if they do, they spend endless amo…

One reason the EU missed out on the internet… Here in Germany, everyone is afraid to start a web startup The EU does actually have a variety of "internet" companies – and that includes Germany! There are certainly less of them; regulation could be one of the things that affects that, but it seems way more likely to be a wildly different environment for funding. Investors are more conservative and far less likely to t…

That sounds very theoretical. I witness the journey of several German startups for a while now and get a very different picture.

Many of the most powerful web tools are not compatible with the GDPR. Google Analytics. Ad marketplaces. Free CDNs. And its all a moving target. I see small companies struggling for years now with these problems. And they will keep struggling for the forseeable future.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#32

Post by scim-knox-twox »

dureuill wrote: post #25
hrnnnnnn wrote: post #2

> Parliament also succeeded in convincing the Council of interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms. For group chats, this requirement will be rolled out over a period of four years. This would be great. I remember using pidgin back in the day and it was really convenient…

good news. we also need interoperability requirements for social networks. like twitter and facebook must be mandated by law to provide access to their networks to smaller networks. only then would people be free to leave these networks without suffering from "network effect"

So, you mean "Fediverse" ;)

https://wikiless.org/wiki/Fediverse?lang=en

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#33

Post by zdkl »

Zenst wrote: post #27
elcomet wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say it was a fiasco ? It seems to have worked as expected, browsers are much better than IE from those days due to competition.

Time they did anything, the problem/market had sorted itself out.

You believe the (very public) inquiries had no effect on the market?

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#34

Post by hnbad »

FreeHugs wrote: post #22
ivancho wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, man, such a shame about all these laws.. [checks notes].. protecting users from predatory company behavior. Things would be so much easier if we didn't have those laws - we could all start web startups.

Regulating local companies is making things only worse. That is the reason why all of Europe depends on foreign tools in the first place. It is a similar death spiral to how we deal with the housing problem. People have a hard time finding affordable apartments in the city centers? Create more laws that limit rents! Does this create more apartments? No. It just send the local housing market further down the drain.

And yet US companies keep biting the bullet and abiding by regulations (or bleeding money to pay the massive fines for violating them) to keep doing business in the EU. So what if those companies can get away with abusing their non-EU users and use those to generate most of their profits. Are you more concerned about providing services and improving quality of life in the EU or with a handful of rich kids in the EU being able to rake in the same kind of cash as their American counterparts?

It's funny you think deregulating housing would solve the housing crisis. If you think rent limits are a disincentive to build more affordable housing, how about we just subsidize loans for non-commercial home ownership instead of expecting investors who want a ROI to either make their luxury apartments more affordable for no good reason or adhere to health and safety standards in their barely profitable social housing projects? After all, if tenants can cough up the money to regularly pay ever-increasing rents they can surely pay back loans with similar rates.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#35

Post by mschuster91 »

FreeHugs wrote: post #24
mschuster91 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One reason the EU missed out on the internet is our unlimited willingness to be regulated. Bollocks. The key difference between here and the US is the simple fact that we don't have enormous amounts of "dumb money" from pension and hedge funds screaming to be invested into anything that remotely smells like it could be worth money one time - remember Yo! which got 1M funding?! - and then founders making big money a…

Dumb money is not the basis for the web as we know it. Look at where we are communicating here. On a US website built by a single person.

For the web itself, yes. But for a lot of the services we use daily - Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Uber, AirBnB - lots of "dumb money" for cheap/free services or to outright price-dump the legitimate competition were the basis of their success.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#36

Post by pif »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #17
hrnnnnnn wrote: post #2

> Parliament also succeeded in convincing the Council of interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms. For group chats, this requirement will be rolled out over a period of four years. This would be great. I remember using pidgin back in the day and it was really convenient…

> meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms The way i read it, they're calling for open standards, which can be a good thing. Sadly, open standards also slow down the development of new features, as everybody needs to be "on board" for new features to roll out. Take email (SMTP, IMAP, etc) as an example, where no major progr…

> open standards also slow down the development of new features

On one hand, that is not right: open standards mean no walled garden, rather than each garden equally ugly.

On the other hand, that is exactly the point: no new feature can be used to buy the users' freedom to interact with customers of other services.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#37

Post by FreeHugs »

AitchEmArsey wrote: post #29
FreeHugs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulating local companies is making things only worse. That is the reason why all of Europe depends on foreign tools in the first place. It is a similar death spiral to how we deal with the housing problem. People have a hard time finding affordable apartments in the city centers? Create more laws that limit rents! Does this create more apartments? No. It just send the local housing market further down the drain.

By your own argument, foreign companies can navigate the rules for selling into Europe just fine - so what is stopping a European company from doing the same? If there is any remaining problem it is that the rules are not enforced strictly enough on tech giants.

Lets talk about startups first:

An indie dev in New York does not care about the GDPR. The just build cool shit and put it online. Look at all the Show HNs here.

In the EU, the situation is very different. Indie devs are super afraid and work hard to make their stuff less useful to please the GDPR.

Now about larger players:

EU companies agonize their worldwide users with cookie banners. Because that is what the GDPR tells them to do.

Non EU companies dont do that. Because why should they? Will a lone Italian traveller in the USA sue them for using Google fonts? Probably not. And if they do - they can handle it. So they only agonize their EU users with cookie banners.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#38

Post by pif »

pif wrote: post #36
8fingerlouie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms The way i read it, they're calling for open standards, which can be a good thing. Sadly, open standards also slow down the development of new features, as everybody needs to be "on board" for new features to roll out. Take email (SMTP, IMAP, etc) as an example, where no major progr…

> open standards also slow down the development of new features On one hand, that is not right: open standards mean no walled garden, rather than each garden equally ugly. On the other hand, that is exactly the point: no new feature can be used to buy the users' freedom to interact with customers of other services.

Would you like to go back to the dark times of IE6?

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#39

Post by ben_w »

FreeHugs wrote: post #24
mschuster91 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One reason the EU missed out on the internet is our unlimited willingness to be regulated. Bollocks. The key difference between here and the US is the simple fact that we don't have enormous amounts of "dumb money" from pension and hedge funds screaming to be invested into anything that remotely smells like it could be worth money one time - remember Yo! which got 1M funding?! - and then founders making big money a…

Dumb money is not the basis for the web as we know it. Look at where we are communicating here. On a US website built by a single person.

Here being the news portal of Y Combinator? Y Combinator being a startup fund? The combined valuation of YC companies being over $600B?

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#40

Post by DocTomoe »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #17
hrnnnnnn wrote: post #2

> Parliament also succeeded in convincing the Council of interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms. For group chats, this requirement will be rolled out over a period of four years. This would be great. I remember using pidgin back in the day and it was really convenient…

> meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms The way i read it, they're calling for open standards, which can be a good thing. Sadly, open standards also slow down the development of new features, as everybody needs to be "on board" for new features to roll out. Take email (SMTP, IMAP, etc) as an example, where no major progr…

Open Standards enable downward compatibility, they do not prevent innovation that builds on top of them.

Nothing prevents people from releasing a new RFC describing their feature and how to implement it. See: EMail attachments (RFC 1521) which came after the original EMail definition (in RFC 822). And what you describe as "email insecurity" is just a common disagreement which encryption method to use in your MIME attachment (defined in RFC 989) - your argument sounds a bit like protesting that not everyone is using Word files when sending text attachments.

(Note: EMail metadata is deeply "insecure" and can theoretically be used to glean information about communication - but if that's your concern, maybe email is just the wrong format for you and something like encrypted messages over a network of Kafka-style message streams, ideally with lots of noise in it, would be better suited).

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