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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

#61

Post by 8fingerlouie »

kuboble wrote: post #21
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…

Yes. That lowest common denominator will be probably being able to send text messages. Maybe a little more. It's a big thing. And it's a great thing. Already in email you have some cool features that only work Gmail to Gmail but you can still send basic emails to people outside of Gmail. Businesses will not need business accounts on 6 different platforms just so thay can have a simple chat with all their customers.

> That lowest common denominator will be probably being able to send text messages. Maybe a little more.

It was my understanding that we already have a (fairly old) standard that does just that, which also currently works as a lowest common denominator for texting between at least android and iOS.

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

#62

Post by mschuster91 »

CJefferson wrote: post #50
pif wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All the browsers since IE6 are built on open standards. It was stagnation and lack of openness (ActiveX) which caused IE6 to hang around so long.

ActiveX was relatively open-ish. Back in the days young me used a Visual Studio 6 off of eDonkey to develop applets in VB6.

The problems were that:

- unlike modern compiled code for the web - WASM and transpiled JavaScript - Java and ActiveX got executed with host privileges which made both an incredible entry point for malware such as "dialers" and early viruses.

- many corporations and governments (e.g. Korea [1]) built their stuff in ActiveX or mandated its use in actual laws and regulations, while only MS Internet Explorer ever implemented ActiveX out of said security reasons.

- many corporations and governments only ever coded and tested against IE6 which meant that their sites and products were dependent on IE6-specific quirks

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/elaineramirez/2016/11/30/south-...

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

#63

Post by 8fingerlouie »

grishka wrote: post #48
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…

> Sadly, open standards also slow down the development of new features, as everybody needs to be "on board" for new features to roll out. Capability negotiation is a thing. It's perfectly fine to support some baseline feature set (one-to-one text messages) and build more optional features on top of it. But, yes, it's important that the protocol is designed to be extensible in the first place.

> It's perfectly fine to support some baseline feature set (one-to-one text messages) and build more optional features on top of it.

So keep the status quo (SMS/MMS) and build more features on top of that ?

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

#64

Post by Narishma »

pif wrote: post #38
pif wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Are you arguing with yourself?

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

#65

Post by giorgioz »

emsy wrote: post #16

It will be fun to see how tech companies will react when they get to taste their own “my platform my rules” medicine.

ah wow this is a brilliant sentence! I never saw governments as platforms but they DO ARE! In fact I was always critizing Apple App Store 30% by saying: "What is the App Store a government that can charge me a 30% tax?" and in fact my fear is the reconstruction of a DIGITAL FEUDAL SYSTEM.

Where there is a King that charge a tax and then there is smaller and smaller nesting of feudal lords that charge other taxes.

KING US Government charging 20-45% income tax

  DUKE Apple charging 30% App Store tax
  
  DUKE Google charging 30% Google Play Store tax
  
  DUKE Microsoft charging X% Microsoft Store tax
    
    MARQUEES Spotify/Netflix/Airbnb charging a fee for their platform
I think we need to be careful to not smother the fire of innovation which brings social mobility across classes/income groups. If we allow Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook to suffocate the innovation coming from the smaller companies we might find ourselves into a new medieval/dark age period with a lot of zero sum games and hierarchy and little innovation.

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

#66

Post by koonsolo »

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…

Fellow EU entrepreneur here: you being downvoted says enough about what kind of people are commenting here.

US works with a "better ask forgiveness than permission" model, where you are pretty free to do what you want, but people can sue you.

EU works with the opposite: create rules and keep companies compliant with those rules.

It's pretty obvious to see that the 1st model is very beneficial for startups and bootstrappers.

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

#67

Post by 8fingerlouie »

DocTomoe wrote: post #40
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 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 att…

> maybe email is just the wrong format for you and something like encrypted messages over a network of Kafka-style message streams

How long before the instant message formats of today becomes “the wrong format” ?

Email is an open standard, and as such it should be easy to push out a new RFC that secures metadata, yet that hasn’t happened in 25+ years.

I essentially agree that communication should be done over open, secure standards, but I’m not sure legislation is the right way of getting there. We will see how it all plays out.

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

#68

Post by naoqj »

giorgioz wrote: post #56
naoqj wrote: post #45

It's so easy to destroy a sector when you have nothing to lose.

Can you clarify in this instance what is - the sector - who has nothing to lose - and what could be lost I think I understand who/what you imply but I don't want to misunderstand you.

* Tech sector

* The EU

* Tech sector

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

#69

Post by the_duke »

can16358p wrote: post #28

While I think big tech needs to be controlled, I think this is the wrong approach. This will slow down development by being forced to implement interop where they shouldn't be forced to IMO, and will confuse less savvy users (e.g. "Why can't I send this $platform_native_content to Bob but can send perfectly to Alice in the same app?"). Controlling entities' presence within the public (the Internet) is one thing, forc…

Full functionality with platform native users, limited functionality with third parties is still a lot better than no functionality for third parties.

The bigger issue is malicious compliance. I can see companies deliberately making the experience horrible.

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

#70

Post by emptysongglass »

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…

You are declaring things as facts but my experience is yes startups do spend huge capital on ensuring GDPR compliance and neurotically worry over it.

I also have experience from two start-up scale-ups that many clients are saying we won't work with you if you use a US Big Cloud. The EU alternatives are much worse and this causes lots of developer waste now ensuring the platform runs as well on the Big Cloud as it does with really terrible EU-cloud.

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