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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

#521
The entire article keeps saying "Europe" when it means "EU". Many European countries, including some large ones (Russia, the UK, Norway, Switzerland, Ukraine...) are not EU members.

The article makes a number of questionable assertions such as "Non-personalized ads cannot economically sustain Meta’s services". I do not know whether that is true or not. Apple has a history of malicious so. I think there are multiple reasons the US dominates tech, and I do not believe "the EU’s rules all but ensure there are no comparably successful European companies". There are many successful European tech companies, as the article mentions later on (it links to a list of the largest that is clearly out of date - for example that omits ARM).

I also disagree with its analysis of why. If you look at their list of large tech companies, and there are a lot of Chinese ones which largely exist because China was protectionist and favoured domestic over US companies. I would argue, if anything, the EU (and other European companies) have not regulated American companies enough, to produce their own competitors. In particular they rarely block takeovers by established players of potential future competitors.

I agree the EU's approach to regulation is often badly flawed, but the DMA seems to be a reasonable approach - as other comments have said it only targets businesses with a lot of market power.

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

#522
post #410
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> boosts consumerism Don't we live in a capitalist world?

What does it matter?

People need to constantly buy stuff for the economy to keep growing, this is how the economy is designed.

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

#523

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…

"before we've even had a chance to experience both the upside and downside, so the innovation never happens at all." ---- Let me laugh out loud. Those, who govern these companies know 10 years ahead how and what will happen. Bigdiks higher up has 10-20 year plans. And people talk about "before we had a chance to experience the upsides and the downsides". Get a grip on reality.

Google didn’t know in 2006 where cell phones were headed. If they did, they wouldn’t have made an Android as a BlackBerry clone.

No company can accurately predict where technology is headed a decade from now.

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

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The humans will do it unconsciously if they can see the names. It is like orchestras used to use auditions where the judges could see the people; when they went to auditions where they couldn't see the people, the number of women being hired went right up.

See, this is the problem with just deciding to invent your own facts. There is a famous study on this topic, usually presented in much the way you describe. But usually people are more careful not to lie about the results. The rate of women being hired went down , not up. The "success" for women was contained to advancement through particular audition rounds. https://archive.is/xmvp2 The original paper is not exactly…

Are you citing a weird racist blogger on medium that disagrees with the stated conclusion of the paper? Is that how science works now?

Abstract from the original paper:

> A change in the audition procedures of symphony orchestras--adoption of "blind" auditions with a "screen" to conceal the candidate's identity from the jury--provides a test for sex-biased hiring. Using data from actual auditions, in an individual fixed-effects framework, we find that the screen increases the probability a woman will be advanced and hired. Although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction, the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.90.4.715

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

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ei…

I would argue that we already have experienced enough of the downsides of "AI" that there is reasonable cause for concern. The implications of deepfakes and similar frauds alone are potentially devastating to informed political debate in democracies, safe and effective dissemination of public health information in emergencies, and plenty of other realistic and important trust scenarios. The implications of LLMs are p…

Let’s stipulate that all you said was true. How is EU regulation suppose to prevent that? Are they going to stop open source models from being used in Europe? Are they going to stop foreign adversaries from using deep fakes?

It’s just like trying to restrict DVD encryption keys from being published or 128 bit encryption from being “exported” in browsers back in the car.

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

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'll struggle to find people who are against the Digital Markets Act for this reason. It literally only targets the potential monopolists. I'm against the way it's being applied to Apple. I don't think that the government should dictate that consumers aren't allowed to choose a platform that's a locked down walled garden if that's what they want. We have platforms that aren't walled gardens (Android) that many of…

Going out of your way on the internet to defend apples right to take 30% of every sale on the app store is insane to me. Just how can you not see there's probably 20% of every purchase sitting on the table if competition was ever allowed to occur. Not to mention the simple freedom of choosing what you want to install yourself, and not just what Apple allows you to...

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

#527
post #423

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"In the future, everyone will see how right I am". Sure thing bud.

My point was about the repetitious and not-very-insightful arguments made now whenever this topic comes up, including in this very discussion.

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

#528
I think that people outside EU who believe it does not need big tech may be unaware that average salary in EU IT is around 80k, and actually a lot of people (not only IT, but also doctors, for instance) relocate to US/UK/Swiss hoping to make much more money. Its not clear who will be running innovative companies here and how EU is going to compete with China's completely different work ethics.

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

#529
post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Apple App Store protects users from myriad abuses by myriad bad companies. Does it? Are the $50/month subscription flashlight apps gone? This is just a form of 'think of the children'. Think of all those evil hackers waiting around the corner for the poor unsuspecting iPhone users.

A friend recently lost his life savings though a hack of a crypto wallet on an Android phone. Phone security isn't trivial.

Crypto comments aside, that could have happened on a Windows desktop too. Yet when MS tried to go walled garden with their store everyone complained. I don't see why Apple should get a free pass.

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

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority. But it doesn't have to be, you can simply NOT regulate every damn little thing, especially when there are no victims and you are forbidding a simple trade between two entities who are both willing to engage. No, developers who want to make money on the Apple Store are not victims. They can develop for Linux and sell apps there if they don't want to pay what Apple wants.…

I agree, mostly. It is worth noting that until the forced opening of the market occurred, safari was conspicuously lacking in PWA support, especially wasm support. I am a recovering libertarian, and I now see the need for regulation in more places. Largely because of regulatory capture, true, but I don't think anarcho-capitalism works. It just makes lawyers top of the heap instead of warriors (in pure anarchy). Which…

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