Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

politico.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 351 posts

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

#91

Post by black_puppydog »

chmod775 wrote: post #14

> mandates to allow users to install apps from third-party platforms Some people at Apple are getting a headache right now. Other companies that have been dabbling with the idea to lock down their OS probably too. If this happens my next phone might even be an iPhone.

This is nice to see. It's fully in line with a report [1] by a (relatively new) French "expert group" within the government found. They were looking specifically at the security implications. Of course, the report is short and written for political decision makers, so not super technical.

Money quote:

> The checks made during the audits conducted by current application stores owned by operating system developers are indeed all reproducible by third parties.

[1]: https://www.peren.gouv.fr/rapports/2022-02-18%20-%20Eclairag...

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

#92

Post by drumhead »

mschuster91 wrote: post #76
drumhead wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you saying they'll miss out on a multi billion dollar profit opportunity because "it's not a short drive". Many VC firms have European offices, there's Zoom or a plane flight. Cross border investment is not a new or alien thing so dealing with taxes or regulation isn't something they can't cope with. So money not being available isn't a convincing reason.

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

#93

Post by thow-58d4e8b »

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…

> websites don't follow the "spirit of the law"

A perfect counter-example to people rambling about EU legislation - Wikipedia.

Consistently in the top 10 sites in the world for 15 years, yet there's no cookie banner, no GDPR consent screen, no personal data hoarding, no dark patterns, etc.

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

#94

Post by dchftcs »

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.

If one side supports a feature, the other side doesn't, they're not interoperable.

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

#95

Post by ckastner »

naoqj wrote: post #45

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

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

The EU is choosing to favor acting on behalf of their people, rather than some sector. If that sector can't make money in ways that are not immoral with regards to the people, so be it.

For example: Why shouldn't a 30%-fee walled garden be destroyed?

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

#96

Post by grishka »

dchftcs wrote: post #94
grishka wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If one side supports a feature, the other side doesn't, they're not interoperable.

If one side supports a feature and the other doesn't, they're still interoperable, just without that feature.

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

#97

Post by kmlx »

eterevsky wrote: post #4

> EU officials have agreed on landmark rules I'm not sure what this means in terms of the timeline. Will it be voted for in European Parliament and if yes, when? To what extent this may be changed in the final edition? And if it's adopted as a law, how much of a grace period will the companies have?

lots of confusion in this comment.

> Will it be voted for in European Parliament and if yes, when?

the European Parliament only votes on a text. It cannot take decisions by itself. it can only present a voted upon text to the EU Council. and even then it's not a given it will become a directive.

> And if it's adopted as a law

There is no such thing as a "law" in the European Union. (Simplified) The EU has directives and regulations. Text is drafted by the EU Commission, which is then sent to the EU Parliament which is then sent to the EU Council. And the same text can bounce between those institutions for some time. Finally, if all goes well, it becomes an EU Directive. After this member states have a few years to put the Directive into national law.

This process is extremely cumbersome, full of gotcha's, and overall, inefficient, but it's the best thing these politicians came up with. Most likely the next level of simplification would normally involve some sort of federal union.

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

#98

Post by hnlmorg »

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…

Not always. One can use an open base but add proprietary extensions. This is exactly how the web has evolved from Netscape and IE having different tags in the 90s to the 00s CSS `ms-` / `o-`, prefixes. This is also how XMPP was designed: common base but support for extensions (open or otherwise).

Email is a totally different problem because it's a suite of a multitude of different standards used across countless different platforms. At least with proprietary messaging services Facebook et al will still be the implementation standard that most people will use (given that habit has already been well established) but lesser used 3rd party clients wont have to worry as much about Facebook breaking the protocol to intentionally break support for 3rd party clients. However I'd wager you will still see new proprietary features added that will not function in 3rd party clients if just to convince users that the 1st party app is the better client.

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

#99

Post by zaroth »

gcthomas wrote: post #51
FreeHugs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is the most powerful tools that I want restricted. the milli-second bidding auctions for ad placements and the tracking that goes on to enable that is unethical and illegal. There are perfectly good alternatives that don't abuse my personal data — companies should use those.

That’s great, but the question is about the second order effects.

Have you taken them fully into account when you declare that these regulations are what you want? Or do you want the first order effects only (who wouldn’t?!) and just stop your analysis there?

Declaring that there are “perfectly good alternatives” sounds like dismissal of the second order effects, which certainly makes supporting the regulations much easier to sit with.

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

#100

Post by kmlx »

agilob wrote: post #44
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…

>interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger Who will be decrypting WA and Signal message to pass them to Facebook Messanger?

yeah, i don't think this was thought out, or at least i haven't read anything on this subject. how does the draft text deal with cryptography?
Post reply on HN