581–590 of 761 posts
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I'd even go to banning all commercial ads, like several cities have done offline. Reasons? Click bait, boosts consumerism, ads imply essentially a tax for everyone (remember that ads have to be paid by the consumers), CEO spam, annoying, environmental costs
You should ask an economist to model this scenario for you and then see if you still feel this way.
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No, but the EU and the citizens thereof should then accept that Meta or other similar companies in similar situations can't operate within the EU. The EU regulators and select HN users might be okay with that, but EU citizens on average probably won't be.
Meta should've been nuked when Cambridge Analytica happened; the fact that US lawmakers did nothing after that is a complete joke. Zucc should be in jail alongside every other piece of shit who thinks it's their right to mass-harvest every single person's personal data indiscriminately for profit.
The most telling feature of the DMA is that it doesn't include Spotify. Spotify would not be compliant under the DMA for the same reason why the EU has charged Meta with non-compliance: > Under Article 5(2) of the DMA, gatekeepers must seek users’ consent for combining their personal data between designated core platform services and other services, and if a user refuses such consent, they should have access to a les…
I thought it was common knowledge that EU regulations target big foreign companies while ignoring big domestic ones? If they truly cared about monopolies/duopolies, they'd target LVMH, Luxottica.
Here's the direct Twitter quote from Thierry Breton regarding the charge against Meta:
The #DMA is here to give back users the power to decide over their #data #Meta has forced millions of users across EU into a binary choice : “pay or consent”. In our preliminary conclusion this is a breach of the DMA. Today we take an important step to ensure Meta complies.
https://x.com/ThierryBreton/status/1807715743129043342
Meanwhile Spotify, all data brokers and any other non-DMA'd companies can take and exchange private user data. I believe the rule should apply to all companies because I don't see the point of "protecting" users from a handful of companies when that is a drop in the ocean of data collectors.
He also makes strange bed fellows, such as frequently advocating for Fortnite, the game title which the FTC found to be deliberately tricking children into unwanted purchases, then killing their Fornite accounts in retaliation should they obtain a refund.¹
https://x.com/ThierryBreton/status/1766167580497117464
¹ https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/... Note this fine is finalised because Epic didn't challenge the FTC's claims.
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And you think they will manage to keep up in the future? You don’t think china will be 1.5x the US in 26 years?
The point is that since 2008 US was able to keep up with rapidly expanding China whereas EU stood still. We are discussing future of EU here.
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?
And that's how you justify children in cobalt mines I suppose ?
It’s probably smarter to only kick-in regulations after certain size thresholds are met. You can definitely strangle an organization with paperwork before it even has enough money to hire people to do the paperwork.
That's the case for most, if not all, of the new European regulations, such as the Digital Markets Act. The number of companies to which it applies can be counted on your hands, and they all have tens of billions of dollars of revenue.
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…
You're commenting on an article doing exactly that. So that was not much of a struggle.
"Europeans could end up living in an online backwater with out-of-date phones, cut off from the rest of the world's search engines and social media sites, unable to even access high-performance computer chips." Sounds like a paradise. More healthy lifestyle. For most people much of this stuff is unnecessary. If one wants to live life "online", glued a screen digesting garbage and propaganda 24/7, then one can relocat…
If we (EU) are not allowed to have high end AI chips strapped on quadcopters and Russia is, well, good luck to EU.
Furthermore all of this applies to consumer tech, not military tech. Consumers are not allowed to have military drones, attack fighters, and tanks either.
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Nah, the first iPhone was too expensive, slow, and limited in capabilities (no App Store). They quickly iterated to improve on all of that. The first watch also kind of sucked. The initial iPod wasn’t a blockbuster, either - didn’t work well on Windows, required FireWire. I’m sure there are other initial misses. I think there’s something there with Vision Pro, they just need to iterate and get the cost down.
Are you really saying the original iPhone was a "product miss"???
My point is, don’t write off this whole product category because people balked at the price of the first iteration, it happened with the first iPhone, too. Apple grinds its way to excellent products.
"Europeans could end up living in an online backwater with out-of-date phones, cut off from the rest of the world's search engines and social media sites, unable to even access high-performance computer chips." Sounds like a paradise. More healthy lifestyle. For most people much of this stuff is unnecessary. If one wants to live life "online", glued a screen digesting garbage and propaganda 24/7, then one can relocat…
It’s a short term paradise. You’re not going to be able to keep it that way when the rest of the world is more technologically advanced and you slip into poverty.
The DMA is really about regulating basic common sense free market rules, not regulating technology as such.