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EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

politico.eu

291–300 of 351 posts

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

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like this can't really make end to end encryption interoperable. There will be no encryption at the transitions between systems. Clients would have to use something that can work over arbitrary textual channels like OTR or PGP.

HTTPS works encrypted between multiple clients, servers and proxies without issues (mostly). There is nothing impossible about encrypted communication. It's just that all servers and clients need to work together to achieve this.

HTTPS is not end to end. End to end encryption does not require a server and could not use one anyway. Effective end to end encryption has to entirely happen on the ends.

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

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fe…

I understand that it's related to taxes and that it's not exclusive to Germany (that's just the one I'm most familiar with). But there are better ways to do this that don't involve the government or my employer. These things violate my personal privacy far beyond what an advertising company does, or at least have an actual effect on my life. I also think you're massively underestimating how much people care, especial…

Why are Germans ok with registering their religion with their government after the government rounded up everyone of a certain religion and killed them?

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

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the user experience will be worse off Two points 1. User experience is already bed. No access to game streaming services and many valid open source apps not available on iOS 2. User experience is not be the only matrix that matters. What about poor indie developer whose app is banned due to opaque App store rules. What about having control over device you bought with your own money

Why not just buy a different product with different features then? Mobile phones have a lot of different features. Some have better cameras than others. Some have longer battery life, can fold, or come in different colors. Some have different operating systems. App stores/software isn't any different. The user experience on the Nintendo Switch is terrible. I can't play World of Warcraft of Halo on it at all! And why…

> They'll just have the opportunity to get banned from more than one store I guess.

1. More app store will compete with each other to provide better app delivery service to developers.

2. Host the app on a website and install it from there. No need for app stores. There I solved it for you

I'm not going to reply to you anymore as your arguments lack depth and seriousness

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

#294
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Signal? Moxie is strongly against it. Although the app and protocols are open, he doesn't tolerate third party clients on Signal official servers and he doesn't want federation. Even though I disagree, he has some good arguments. And if WhatsApp has to interoperate, why not Signal?

To quote the original article : "platforms with a market capitalization of €75 billion or turnover in the European Economic Area equal to or above €7.5 billion" I'm not sure what the current market cap for Signal is, but I'm fairly sure they don't have a turnover of 7+bn in the EU.

It doesn’t seem moral to do this on revenue. The only thing that should matter to regulators is the active-users metric, as a percentage of the population.

Doing it by money seems like sour grapes. You succeeded in the free market so we’re going to hamper your progress.

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

#295
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If government thinks access to a commonground chat platform is a necessity for the public, then they should either provide it themselves or buy/outsource a state-operated private service instead of messing up with private companies' private platforms. What they are doing is equivalent of trespassing private property, such laws shouldn't exist in 2022.

> a state-operated private service If they implement a public service, freemarketers not unlike yourself will accuse them of unfair competition and spend their lives sabotaging them, like Murdoch does with the BBC in the UK. The reality is that your position is effectively that nothing should change, and everything in this space is as good as it can be. The public at large clearly disagrees, and this is a step in the…

Confiscating someone's land should also be illegal, but unfortunately government has too much power.

Mandating size of plugs is a good thing for anyone to build things that can operate with electricity, mandating some private entity with a perfectly functional ecosystem without any interest to open its system to provide a certain type of socket, is not.

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

#296
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…

> KING US Government charging 20-45% income tax

> DUKE Apple charging 30% App Store tax

Note that Income tax is in reality earnings tax (as expenditures are generally subtracted), while Apple/Google fee is based on just income.

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

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it brought up to here what we have. Even though there are many people complaining, what we currently have, even if fragmented, is a great collection of apps that are free and allow us to send text/images/videos/rich links to anyone using the app on Earth in a split second. Not saying that it couldn't happen in other setting, but innovation definitely did happen in the current fragmentation of silos.

We have had that for over a decade now

There's nothing that I'm aware of that is standard in all (acceptably decent) phones, built into the standard by, say, 3GPP, without need to install an external app, that can send a good quality (so no MMS here) images and videos to any group of people, with verifiable E2EE, with welcome features of things like realtime location sharing (with explicit permission of sender of course), read notifications, online/delivered status, reactions to messages, and starting video calls (3G video features never took off), other "fun" and convenient features like shareable stickers etc.

Almost all of WhatsApp, Telegram, Apple ecosystem, Discord, Slack etc. have almost all of it.

Which public standard that's available on phones do we have that provides these features worldwide?

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

#298
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…

I wouldn’t be surprised if the response was a Chrome-esque “drown the competition in feature velocity” approach. iMessage could add new features (with totally necessary payload shape updates) fast enough to prevent any integrations from working well and competing effectively. Throw in some EME-style approval-requiring binary blobs to enable decryption and a dash of CSAM-style regulation compliance and open vs closed…

They can do that as long as they keep the interoperability. Text with UTF8 emojis should be enough to start with.

Actually I expect the usual outrage about limiting innovation or threats to leave the EU but consider that this interoperability is also a moat especially if they agree on some complicated protocol with no previous implementation.

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

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say 30% fees are immoral, I said 30% fee walled gardens are immoral. Especially when you make it all but impossible for third parties to operate outside of that walled garden.

Yea but you except and promote them in other areas of your life. Even countries are walled gardens. I don’t think third parties really add value either. It’s just going to result in a bunch of spam and scams, with us losing out on privacy features and convenience.

Countries are walled gardens. The only thing stopping them from being immoral is democracy and respect for individual rights, neither of which exists in tech giants' walled gardens.

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

#300

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.

The future will be/is that entrepreneurs create new cool stuff, and runs it until the valuation is high enough they feel it's pay day. They sell to big corp, who are large code maintenance (and patent accumulation) shops, scales them to bigger users and runs until deprecation.

The entrepreneurs, though, continue on with the next idea.

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