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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

#261

Post by echoangle »

sangnoir wrote: post #240
lolinder wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sure, you could always argue that about anything, but that's not a refutation of this particular argument in this particular situation. Apple's walled garden produces a lot of real benefits for its customers that are part of what make it successful, and dismantling their walled garden is going to harm consumers. I would never pick an Apple device for myself. I would also never recommend an Android phone to my m…

> Apple's walled garden produces a lot of real benefits for its customers that are part of what make it successful, and dismantling their walled garden is going to harm consumers. What are those benefits, and why would they evaporate if Apple adds an "Install from other sources" toggle? If you want to exclusively benefit from Apple's discernment, keep that toggle off and stay in the walled garden.If the benefits are…

The problem is that having the option of exiting the walled garden kills the garden. As soon as the most important apps aren’t available on the apple App Store any more, everyone will have to exit the garden. You can argue about the pros and cons of that, but you can’t deny that this has an effect on every apple user, not just the ones that choose to exit.

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

#262

Post by jlaporte »

It’s interesting to observe how detached the discussion here is from the issues created for Europe due to the DMA. A majority of the comments here make the implicit assumption that the DMA is good because it will penalize big tech companies and force them to change business models in the EU. This is not what is happening or will happen.

What’s really being destroyed by the DMA is Europe’s access to new technologies and services. It’s almost like a self-embargo on the AI building blocks of their future economy.

When Nvidia GPUs are supply constrained do you really think it matters to Nvidia if they need to redirect the small chunk of their supply constrained volume that they were previously selling into France? Who is harmed in this picture? The only EU AI player of note, Mistral, and other EU businesses.

Does it really harm Apple if the DMA forces them to withhold new AI features in Europe? They still earn their device and services revenues. Who is harmed in this picture? EU consumers and businesses.

We’ve now seen within just a couple months, Apple withhold AI features and Meta withhold multimodal AI models from the EU. Expect this cutting off of the EU from new features to become a recurring event over the next year.

DMA-supporting voices are under a serious misapprehension of what the effect of the DMA is and will be over the next few years. It’s cutting off European access (consumer, business & government) to critical technologies which are all being developed outside the bloc.

The DMA violates a number of longstanding principles of good legislation - it is vague, it’s written to enable arbitrary enforcement, it’s penalties are not designed to be proportionate to damages, or even require actual damages in order to be applied, the regulator’s actions stray into actual takings of property (European Commission opinion that Facebook cannot charge a subscription fee for its ad-free offering… so it must operate as a charity? This is a taking of property. European Commission opinion that Apple cannot charge a platform fee for use of its IP? This is a taking of property).

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

#263

Post by sensanaty »

dingnuts wrote: post #175
ktosobcy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BS. Lot's of companies / entities moved there because of said "millions" so you are unwillingly forced to use them as a mean of contact. And sadly open alternatives are blocked/unavailable...

you know it's possible to get through life without either Facebook or a Facebook alternative, right? I closed my account ten years ago, and I don't have an alternative. After the withdrawal period I stopped caring. My loved ones send me text messages of their kids. Exactly what is the point of Facebook?

My sister has kids, and their school exclusively uses whatsapp to broadcast events and other things happening in the school, despite repeated complaints from many parents. There's millions of little things like this out there. Many small businesses like repairmen or such only do Whatsapp. It's quite literally unavoidable in some countries.

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

#264

Post by pembrook »

monksy wrote: post #239
pembrook wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not that most people hate risk. It's that individuals whom are harmed by sociopathic individuals that exploit methodologies, techniques, and products to enrich, steal, and harm the population. (When I say that I mean financially, emotionally, socially, physically, etc). To add further insult to injury, defending ones self against these individuals is disproportionately impossible. Socially: Creating and cultivat…

I'm not insulting people who hate risk. For the stability and health of society, it's good that most people are that way. We need people who shake their fist at anything new or different to keep us sane (people like you it seems, from your laundry list of frustrations).

But we also need the people who do like risk taking and new stuff, and there's less of them. So innovation is much more of a fragile thing than stasis.

Even if you think society and human life in general can't be improved in any way, to just maintain the way things are now...will require many new innovations and people taking risk on new stuff. Your welfare, lifestyle, and security depends on the risk taking of others. So we should probably be careful about making it too hard for the folks taking risk (it's already hard enough).

Trust me, the risk-averse folks will still be the dominant voice either way. Even this forum--which started as a community of risk-taking entrepreneurial types--is now dominated by the risk-averse majority.

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

#265

Post by dwaite »

sangnoir wrote: post #240
lolinder wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sure, you could always argue that about anything, but that's not a refutation of this particular argument in this particular situation. Apple's walled garden produces a lot of real benefits for its customers that are part of what make it successful, and dismantling their walled garden is going to harm consumers. I would never pick an Apple device for myself. I would also never recommend an Android phone to my m…

> Apple's walled garden produces a lot of real benefits for its customers that are part of what make it successful, and dismantling their walled garden is going to harm consumers. What are those benefits, and why would they evaporate if Apple adds an "Install from other sources" toggle? If you want to exclusively benefit from Apple's discernment, keep that toggle off and stay in the walled garden.If the benefits are…

The App Store review provides protections which are not a technical protections. Earlier someone talked about the failing of allowing a $50 subscription flashlight app into the store (dunno if they’d be able to find a citation). This was a failing of the expected business controls. There’s nothing technical to even be done to prevent these sorts of abuses.

One example from a while back was banning an internal Facebook enterprise developer account because they were using it to install a VPN onto users devices for the purpose of monitoring user behavior for competitive market analysis. This is not anything that can be prevented by technical controls, and was only able to be published because enterprise profiles can deploy apps outside the store.

Apple wants their customers to be safe. Third party marketplaces take that responsibility and control out of their hands. Apple stopped that VPN abuse immediately upon finding out about it. How long would it take for European regulators to force Facebook to turn off such a self published app of their own accord?

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

#266

Post by chmod775 »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #246
thrance wrote: post #77

I wish targeted advertising was made completely illegal here, I am sure our society would greatly benefit from that.

This would kill the free internet tomorrow, and the one billion YouTube viewers would likely be quite upset about it. Untargeted ads pay less than 5% what targeted ones do.

> Untargeted ads pay less than 5% what targeted ones do.

Even assuming that is true, companies are bidding for user's attention and against each other. What do you think will happen to prices for context-based advertising if targeted advertising goes away?

> and the one billion YouTube viewers would likely be quite upset about it

Great example. Many of the ads that finance the YouTube ecosystem are context-based and not targeted.

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

#267

Post by sensanaty »

cheptsov wrote: post #167
fl0id wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from a personal and social perspective, I see nothing wrong with it. In fact, even in the EU we still ahve a lot of BS startups. We imo need more sustainable businesses, that value actual societal value/value to consumers or businesses over growth and shareholder value.

This seems like a very socialistic perspective to me, which might not align well with big tech and innovation. I suggest re-reading "Atlas Shrugged" for this topic.

We should definitely take the word of an infamous welfare queen (Ayn Rand) on how to run society, indeed

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

#268

Post by echoangle »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #252
autoexec wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not on Apple's scale, but with apple pulling products from the market, this opens the door for someone else to step up and fill that highly profitable gap in the market apple abandoned. I really hope that they do. The more players there are in the game from other countries the better off we'll all be.

But Apple also fumbled with the Vision Pro. They won't remain on the top for much longer I think.

How is apple impacted if Vision Pro fails? You think they care about the lost R&D cost? Or do you think others will leapfrog them in the VR/AR space?

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

#269

Post by Nathanba »

fruit2020 wrote: post #190
whazor wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more practical example is that Facebook cannot promote its marketplace anymore. In Europe there are local alternatives for market places that get disadvantaged. Spotify, an EU company, has to compete with Apple Music and YouTube Music. Both of which have their own mobile operating systems and markets. Now we get a lot of backlash from these big tech firms as for years they have been integrating services into their…

This is not always good for the end user. Now I have to go to google maps manually because it’s most of the time no longer integrated with google search

what exactly prevents them from giving me a dropdown with links to apple maps, kagi maps, bing maps and google maps and my choice gets saved to my google account as the default? Instead all they show me is a useless javascript map which is still google maps but I cant do anything useful on it and it's super frustrating trying to get to a map for a place search

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

#270

Post by okanat »

llm_trw wrote: post #193
ab5tract wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tracking stats of your customers using the data they willingly gave you and making marketing decisions isn't the problem. Neither is making sponsorship agreements with content producers who make relevant content.

Creation of global markets with interconnected networks to track and share detailed personal information about mental states, political alignment, sexual life and more is the problem.

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