EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by mschuster91 » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 9:59 AM UTC

trh0awayman wrote: post #43

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…

I would say most people don't agonize over it because most people don't follow GDPR here in Germany. I think more and more people are slowly complying, but certainly in the last 3 years no one has cared. I personally believe GDPR will never be properly enforced and most people will ignore it. The easy parts of GDPR (cookies, fonts, I guess CDNs now) are automatically detectable, and the hard parts (deletion of data,…

> But every single citizen has to inform the government where they live and their religion. You also have to inform your boss of your religion.

That depends on the religion. For a bit more context (read the full history in [1]): As part of the 1800s separation between state and church, the major ones (Catholic and Evangelic-Lutheran) got the right to a percentage of employed people's wages as a sort of "membership fee". This gets deducted by the employer out of your paycheck and collected by the tax office, then distributed to the church you're a member of. Over the years, the right to collect these taxes expanded by quite a number, although currently only the Roman Catholic, Old Catholic, Evangelic-Lutheran, Free Protestant and Jewish synagogues use that right.

In real life, no one but HR at onboarding cares which religion you specify.

Also note, this is not exclusive to Germany. Italy, Sweden, Austria, Finland, Denmark and Switzerland all have a similar system.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchensteuer_(Deutschland)

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

#72

Post by giorgioz » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 9:59 AM UTC

Oh founders please do not sell your shares to Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook/Amazon!

We are in danger of creating Big Monsters that will devour everything until there won't be founders anymore...only employees. Once there will be only employees in truth there will be only servants.

We need a lot of small/medium tech companies to maintain freedom and competition instead of 2-5 mega corps.

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

#73

Post by drumhead » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 10:02 AM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #11

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 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…

Why aren't they investing their "dumb money" in EU web start ups then?

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

#74

Post by blue1 » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 10:03 AM UTC

giorgioz wrote: post #65

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. KIN…

*Marquis

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

#75

Post by fifticon » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 10:05 AM UTC

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…

I fail to see any relevant innovation happen in the current fragmentation of giant silos.

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

#76

Post by mschuster91 » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 10:05 AM UTC

drumhead wrote: post #73

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…

Why aren't they investing their "dumb money" in EU web start ups then?

Easier to invest into something if you only have a short car drive to the company you're investing in; additionally everything cross-border involves a lot more effort with coordinating taxes.

In any case at least YC does invest into European companies [1] - the key thing is you have to get far enough to have a meaningful product that VC funds can invest in, and unlike the US we don't have a lot of billionaire former founders who go around throwing a couple thousand dollars left and right for promising ideas they hear in an elevator.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/library?categories=Europe

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

#77

Post by belter » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 10:07 AM UTC

Digital Markets Act- [Status]: "Awaiting Parliament's position in 1st reading"

https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheproc...

"The Digital Markets Act: ensuring fair and open digital markets"

https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...

From here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30777016

"...The legislation is now expected to target companies that have a market capitalisation of at least €75bn and run one core online “platform” service such as a social network or web browser, according to two people directly involved in the deal..." "...To qualify as a “gatekeeper” — the powerful internet groups that are the focus of the new law — a company will also have to have at least 45,000 active users, the same people said..."

"...Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft all meet this standard, but it is likely to also include far more groups than previously thought such as accommodations site Booking.com and ecommerce group Alibaba..."

----------------------------------------

Examples of the “do’s” - Gatekeeper platforms will have to:

- Allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations

- Allow their business users to access the data that they - generate in their use of the gatekeeper’s platform

- Provide companies advertising on their platform with the tools and information necessary for advertisers and publishers to carry out their own independent verification of their advertisements hosted by the gatekeeper

- Allow their business users to promote their offer and conclude contracts with their customers outside the gatekeeper’s platform

Example of the “don’ts” - Gatekeeper platforms may no longer:

- Don't treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform

- Don't prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms

- Don't prevent users from un-installing any pre-installed software or app if they wish so

----------------------------------------

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

#78

Post by CaptainNegative » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 10:08 AM UTC

mhitza wrote: post #55

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…

Every developer should try to understand GDPR to a basic level, as those basic principles are good enough of a baseline. Won't go into minutia, cause at the enterprise/large scale level you'll need a DPO (data protection officer) and follow stricter auditing practices (among other things). Second, cookie banners are unrelated to GDPR. They became mandatory years before the GDPR, and the level of intrusiveness is beca…

A high level overview may be possible, but any amount of actionable detail is impossible for laymen and lawyers alike. The GDPR is intentionally vague; there are entire academic papers from respected researches dedicated to trying to parse individual sentences from the document. See e.g. Cohen and Nissim's 33 page article on intepreting the sentence

> To determine whether a natural person is identifiable account should be taken of all the means reasonably likely to be used, such as singling out, either by the controller or by another person to identify the natural person directly or indirectly.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.06009.pdf

Turns out writing vague laws lets you turn entities you don't like into cash cows.

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

#79

Post by thow-58d4e8b » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 10:09 AM UTC

ivancho wrote: post #19

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…

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.

This is already a pattern in HN discussions: legislation is proposed, news outlets vaguely summarize it, the HN crowd interprets the summary in absurdly maximalist way without bothering to read the spirit and letter of the law; outrage ensues. This is coupled with an "I-know-better" condescension towards authorities, reinforced by a weird ideology that code is above law

The legislation, at least the one coming from Brussels, is nearly always reasonable in scope, extent, impacts, penalties, and tends to strike a fair balance between specificity and vagueness as to allow the courts for some wiggle room for interpretation

As an example, with interoperability, the final legislation might stipulate something similar to this:

* once a software service reaches sufficient market size

* the core functionality of the service must be exposed for interoperability

* any breaking changes to core functionality must allow for sufficient period of backwards-compatibility and deprecation warnings. Exceptions for security breaches or other emergencies

So, for Youtube, this would mean logging in, viewing videos and history. It doesn't mean that every single feature of every single web site must be publicly exposed and be backwards-compatible for eternity

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

#80

Post by giorgioz » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 10:09 AM UTC

naoqj wrote: post #68

giorgioz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks for clarifying.

>Included in the rules' scope will be platforms with a market capitalization of €75 billion or turnover in the European Economic Area equal to or above €7.5 billion

So the rules are meant to target only the TOP part of the Tech Sector. Not the Whole Tech Sector. There could be backfires on everyone though.

I do feel though that the Apple/Facebook/Microsoft/Google/Amazon are innovating less and less and are going into cash squeeze mode. There has been a lot of talk on Hacker News on how Google search quality is decreasing.

All the privacy laws containing Facebook push them to bet on something new Meta/Oculus. So I think here the effort is to allow smaller tech to thrive and grow.