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Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

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Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#131

Post by Kwpolska »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #63
patrickmcnamara wrote: post #37

> the eight-year-old General Data Protection Regulation Wow. It's actually only been enforced for six years but that time absolutely flew by.

Remember when local US companies with zero EU presence were geo-blocking EU visitors in-case they were found to be in-violation of the GDPR? Presumably the fear was a crack team of EU secret service agents would kidnap and illegally extradite them to stand trial in Brussels.

> in-case they were found to be in-violation of the GDPR

Oh, they definitely are.

Those geo-blocks still exist, not only for small mom-n-pop businesses.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#132

Post by yorwba »

riffraff wrote: post #43
kernal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple should play their Trump card and threaten to pull out of the EU. The EU would blink first because the public backlash would be career ending.

The EU commission and EU parliament are somewhat removed from public backlash, it's one of the reasons people complain about the EU being "undemocratic". So the commission or random EU MEP would be affected after 5 years or so. Tim Cook would get backlash from stockholders the moment he announced he wanted to stop getting EU revenue rather than comply with regulations.

The main thing that's isolating MEPs from backlash in this case is that "The Digital Services Act was adopted with 539 votes in favour, 54 votes against and 30 abstentions. The Digital Markets Act - with 588 in favour, 11 votes against and 31 abstentions." https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220701IP...

This was not a vote along party lines, all big European parties voted in favor, so nobody who matters can credibly campaign on an anti-DSA/DMA platform, so the issue is unlikely to become politicized to the point where it might influence careers.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#133

Post by pjerem »

SXX wrote: post #27
kernal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple should play their Trump card and threaten to pull out of the EU. The EU would blink first because the public backlash would be career ending.

Yeah sure. Apple continue presence in Russia, paying fines and taxes there and comply with every murderous dictatorship demand. Like censoring political apps 2 years into full scale war. Yet they'll pull out of EU. Sure.

Also, Apple feels less brave when it comes to China.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#134

Post by wnolens »

aebtebeten wrote: post #40
pheggs wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same. The GDPR appears super difficult to comply with, even impossible in some cases, and very restricting. I just hope negative effects of (in my opinion) overregulation wont hurt the EUs economy too badly, but that wont be visible for another couple of decades

The GDPR is trivial to comply with: don't track (let alone process) personal data.

It applies to all data. So it amounts to building a force delete and export feature to any platform you build. I've worked on a few data platforms where the product is literally.. customers give you data, you store it and process it for then. It's not hard to comply, but it does cost quite a bit of money which if you're small you might not have.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#135

Post by Cu3PO42 »

Scarblac wrote: post #93
Caligatio wrote: post #28

I always scratch my head about articles that lump Meta, Apple, and Google together when it comes to regulations. They all have different problems that require different solutions. Apple - consumers give the company for hardware which is locked into a closed ecosystem. Apple extracts extra revenue by enforcing this closed ecosystem. There can be no competition other than not purchasing their hardware in the first plac…

Google and Meta could behave like normal companies and require users to pay them money and not sell PII. If that makes them far less successful that's good news for competitors.

You actually can pay Meta €9.99/month for ad-free Facebook+Instagram in the EU. I would hope this also causes them to track and use much less PII, but I couldn't find anything substantiating that.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#136

Post by pheggs »

tyfon wrote: post #67
pheggs wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I agree its a good idea to not track personal data, but thats by far not the only rule in GDPR

What other rule do you find impossible? Data portability? The users right to delete data? Data processing agreements? Data security? Article 30? They are all fairly trivial unless you do shady stuff really. Step one if is really looking at what you process as stipulated by article 30, a lot of the other stuff is much easier after that. One of my roles is as a DPO in a bank in Europe, and it's far from impossible to c…

I understand you are an expert on the field, and I am sure it's trivial for you. IMO the complexity arises from the many small things, imagine a smallish startup without having someone hired full time to deal with it.

I am not an expert on the field, I tried a couple of times to get into the topic but found it difficult to navigate and left me with more questions than answers personally. What exactly does deleting user data mean? Do I have to search the weblogs for the users IP? Do I have to search the mail servers for his emails - of all employees? What if he used multiple emails to communicate? Am I in breach if an ISP decides to route internet packets through the US? If I put people on CC in a mail, I am leaking everyone's email, probably without their consent - is that a breach? What if my mail provider decides to replicate their servers to another country?

If you have resources to read up on this and how to handle all of it, I would really appreciate it! Happy to be convinced that it actually is trivial

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#137

Post by lispm »

davidgerard wrote: post #91
bee_rider wrote: post #8

The EU will win this if they want. Their trump card is that, actually, making the EU not a viable market for the most annoying US tech companies would be a huge win for many of their constituents.

yep. From Baldur Bjarnason: > For months, we’ve been hearing leaks about Apple’s talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e... The EU cannot allow a large business to mess around like this.

> The purpose of is the EU single market

That's also a misconception. The EU single market is an important project, but there is a constant failure to understand the actual reason why the EU exists or also a purposeful misinterpretation. Countries joining the EU are requested not to join because of the single market, but because they want to join the political project of a more peaceful and an improving Europe.

At its core the EU is a project to bring Europe together, to cooperate instead of being in wars (... WW1, WW2, Cold War, ...).

The EU is even more a political project as it is an economic project. But there are many other projects. The market is not the EU, it's a large and important project, the EU can't be thought without it. But there is more. The main motive behind all that is the will to work together. Even the "single market" is at its core a political project.

We have seen it with Brexit. The UK never bought into the "political project". UK politicians also mislead the public about that. The EU is as much about social standards, political standards, environment, competition, building up the countries, joint research, joint infrastructure, a common law, common currency, being competitive in a larger world, ... and so on. During Brexit it was promised by some UK politicians for a short time that the UK would leave the EU, but not the single market. Misleading the public that this was a topic of economics, while the EU really is a political integration project, not just a project to build a single market.

France and Germany at war for many centuries, now have a common integration project (in a larger EU), free movement, no physical border, an EU passport, a single currency, joint projects, ... these are the things which moved us forward.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#138

Post by paganel »

MrDresden wrote: post #19
kernal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple should play their Trump card and threaten to pull out of the EU. The EU would blink first because the public backlash would be career ending.

You are taking the side of a 3 trillion dollor consumer goods company's bottom line, rather than 500 million people's right to choice and privacy. You do realise that, don't you?

The ghouls in Brussels do not represent us all, they do not represent anyone, if we’re talking democracy. It’s a battle over clout and economic resources between whoever is backing these technocrats and some of the biggest corporations in the world, most of us EU citizens have a lot of more important worries on our minds.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#139

Post by Kwpolska »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #60

Imagine a world in which the EU instead funded research & implementation of public protocols to undermine US big tech? IE, they mention chat clients in the text, why not create something in the spirit of XMPP (or even revive it if the technical merits remain relevant?) I can almost feel it in my bones that there's a protocol behind "feed" websites like twitter & linkedin. Break the walled garden with open standards.…

XMPP never died. A more modern open standard is Matrix. The problem with open/alternative chat apps is the network effect — everyone is already on iMessage/WhatsApp/Messenger/etc and they aren't going to install Element and figure out the entire decentralised network thing to talk with one weirdo.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#140

Post by xandrius »

fwlr wrote: post #38
MrDresden wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are taking the side of a 3 trillion dollor consumer goods company's bottom line, rather than 500 million people's right to choice and privacy. You do realise that, don't you?

It's governments vs corporations; the 500 million people aren't actually being represented in either camp. Being a subject is little better than being a consumer, and in some ways much worse.

EU is totally representing me by taking this stance, so there's that.
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