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Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

foreignpolicy.com

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Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#191

Post by no_wizard »

pembrook wrote: post #124
KaiserPro wrote: post #88

A company that provides a phone service (mobile or other) has to conform to a large amount of regulatory red tape. Why? because either a company before tried to monopolise the entire country, or they killed someone. Now, large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people (unlike say tobacco, or talc powder, 3M and half of their solvents, weed killer, most car makers, etc etc) but they have been trying desperately t…

Nobody is against regulation that disfavors large incumbents to support competition instead. You'll struggle to find people who are against the Digital Markets Act for this reason. It literally only targets the potential monopolists. However, virtually every other piece of regulation does the opposite. Regulation usually gets trotted out after the downside of doing [new innovation] is experienced. This always happens…

Specifically with AI I don’t want to experience the downside of innovation before we regulate because of how wide spread its use already is, and it’s problems have already become apparent.

For example, it’s being used to job screen applicants even though we have proven that AI models still suffer from thing like racial bias. Companies don’t disclose how their models are trained to negate bias or anything like that either and that’s one example I remember off the top of my head

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#192

Post by pornel »

kredd wrote: post #10

I might be talking out of my depth, as I don’t live in Europe, but I’ve heard the same paraphrased headlines like these since at least 2016. Has status quo been swayed one way or another since then? Theoretically speaking, wouldn’t legislating away the top US players open the market to the local companies a la Naver in SK, WeChat in China or Line in Japan? I understand I’m dumbing it down, but assuming such legislati…

UK tried to have a "silicon roundabout" and attract VC investment, but then Brexit happened and the allure of English-speaking entry point into the EU market has disappeared.

Europe has missed out on the craze of getting millions to build an Uber for Cats.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#193

Post by llm_trw »

ab5tract wrote: post #181
finolex1 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it benefit society to get less targeted ads as opposed to more targeted ones?

Because there would be no incentive to commodify user activity, bundle it up, and resell it to ever more dubious information brokers?

You'd need to ban targeted marketing, not just advertising.

If I were selling widgets I still greatly care about knowing who buys a billion widgets a year and will pay good money to find out.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#194

Post by treprinum »

kazen44 wrote: post #117
brigadier132 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what you guys have right now is good for people and their lives Let's see how long it lasts, Europe's economy is terrible and their people are significantly poorer. I don't think their current welfare state is sustainable without tax revenue from large businesses. Eventually every European citizen will be a waiter, hotel staff, or a tour guide.

how is europe's economy terrible? by what metric? considering that the EU still has a very large part of the global economy, especially compared to its population and size. Also, the tech industry is not the only part of the economy. large parts of the EU are absolutely massive in terms of industrial machinery and scientific companies. People on HN always seem to forget that a lot of money can be made by making somet…

40 years ago Europe (without former Warsaw Pact countries) accounted for 25% of global trade. These days it's ~12% and dropping. Since 2008 there is no meaningful GDP growth (1-2%) whereas US and China exploded in that time. India is on track to surpass EU by 2050. All that will be left is a large open-air museum.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#195

Post by wmf »

fl0id wrote: post #142
wmf wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unspecified future boogeyman AI regulations. Or antitrust which Nvidia is already being investigated for. Realistically Nvidia did not leave China and they will not leave Europe.

which doesn't make any sense, b/c afaik almost here AI regulations impact usage etc, not chip makers.

Some people are calling for GPUs to be nerfed but that's fringe at this point. If you wanted to create the most extreme strawman of EU regulation possible... maybe that's one example you'd come up with.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#196

Post by llm_trw »

ryandrake wrote: post #66
spongebobstoes wrote: post #17

The real problem is that the requirements for a social platform are getting very onerous, to the point that it takes at least several engineers working full time on the problem. That really hurts a startup's ability to initially launch in the market, especially one with less VC money. (Certain BigCo new products can be thought of as a startup too, with limited budgets.) This doesn't just affect social media companies…

This can be said about any regulation that makes it more difficult to deliver a product. Are food safety regulations "onerous" because the food company has to hire several people to ensure their food is safe? A food startup who can't afford to hire those people might argue that they are at a disadvantage and therefore the regulations are onerous and favor large companies.

>A food startup who can't afford to hire those people might argue that they are at a disadvantage and therefore the regulations are onerous and favor large companies.

That is literally the point of food regulations.

They are not prescriptive but descriptive.

No regulation says 'make food with >100 E-coli per KG' it always says 'use stainless steel table, no smaller than 2mx1m, in a well ventilated room of size...'.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#197

Post by NegativeK »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #102
KaiserPro wrote: post #88

A company that provides a phone service (mobile or other) has to conform to a large amount of regulatory red tape. Why? because either a company before tried to monopolise the entire country, or they killed someone. Now, large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people (unlike say tobacco, or talc powder, 3M and half of their solvents, weed killer, most car makers, etc etc) but they have been trying desperately t…

> but they have been trying desperately to stop all competition. Every large company in every industry wants to do this. > They've also been trying to extract as much personal info as possible for profit. Why would you expect a company not to pursue profits?

> Why would you expect a company not to pursue profits?

People keep talking about the obligation to shareholders for a company to maximize profits, but there's a wide list of possibilities between not doing that and seeking to actively, wholesale ruin privacy.

I expect the people in companies to take responsibility for their actions instead of pretending that they're beholden to the company's wants.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#198

Post by melbourne_mat »

TheChaplain wrote: post #74

Not only the tech market, they're on a pace in destroying the agricultural market as well. Small, medium size farmers are disappearing fast, they quit or at best being absorbed by large farmcorps.

Not advocating for it but it's called economies of scale and it's happening in every country including mine (Australia)

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#199

Post by 13415 »

multimoon wrote: post #75

I think we can debate regulations being productive or not all day and either side of the camp will never agree, however my biggest personal issue is that the government is removing the choice from anyone involved. As an adult you should be able to chose for yourself - if everyone chose no, then nobody would use these services and the companies wouldn’t do it. I think the effort needs to be focused on awareness and ed…

> If the average user is fine with their data being sold in exchange for a service, then why not let them?

But they are not okay with it. I understand why Corporations like to insinuate that people who click OK to twenty pages of legalese in an EULA really are okay with whatever clauses in it, but in reality this practice is an abuse of contract law and exploiting asymmetric power relations. In theory, a potential customer could print EULAs out, suggest changes, and send back the revised contract for approval or further negotiation. In practice, nobody ever does that and corporations would freak out if it happened on a large scale.

The problem does not just occur with new big tech. Banks have been doing the same for decades. I recently put some money on a savings account and was greeted with pages and pages of fine print that literally only a lawyer can understand. Normally, nobody in their right mind would accept this. However, the bank serves as a utility, changing banks is very difficult where I live and they all have the same kind of contracts in their favor. There is no alternative. The same is true for social networks and other big tech. It's not really a free choice for a small business owner to have a Facebook account or for a self-published author to put their books on Amazon, for instance.

That's why strong regulations, good customer protection and privacy laws are needed.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#200

Post by llm_trw »

_nalply wrote: post #23

Could articles like this bemoaning Europe's state of regulation be opinion pieces? What if what Europe does is a good idea for the people but just inconvenient for companies? Europe is one of the power houses of the world but with low self-esteem I am afraid. In the long term what matters is the people's quality of life and diversity. Take China or the US: if a lot of people don't have purchasing power and leisure wh…

>In the long term what matters is the people's quality of life and diversity.

I think you'll be surprised to find out just how many Europeans disagree with the diversity part. We are quite close to ethno-state Europe, just like how it was between 1800 and 1950.

Ask a European what they think of Gypsies for a wild time.

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