Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

foreignpolicy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 761 posts

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

#631

Post by galangalalgol »

scarface_74 wrote: post #601
galangalalgol wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they can collect more data with a native app. A native app is far better from their perspective, but not from the user's, unless it is something computationally bound that can't handle overhead (mostly games?). The last exception is banking apps. They do a lot of weird stuff to fingerprint your phone too, but in this case the user definitely wants them to.

[flagged]

I think flash and actionscript might be a counterexample? People have different standards too. In thebearly days of win3.1 I liked apps that had different widget sets, now anything that doesn't look native is considered garbage. And some people seem to consider rastered fonts equivalent to baby-eating in a professional context. I don't think I have any common axioms or value systems to carry on conversations with them, but I believe they do care, so it is probably just that PWAs are my preference, but no one elses. I prefer the web mattermost to the app for instance.

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

#632

Post by Detrytus »

fragmede wrote: post #572
rsanek wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how many other large eu based tech companies can we name? like 3 total?

Accenture, Siemens, Nokia, Ericsson, Capgemini, Atos, Dassault Systems, Bosch, Ahold Delhaize, Dassault Systèmes? maybe little known outside the EU, but the EU has something like 20% of the world's software developers. GP will have to explain to me, at a grade school level, how they want to differentiate big tech and BIG tech.

You're mixing up many things here:

1. Accenture, Capgemini and Atos are consulting companies that don't produce anything, they just rent out their code monkeys to the customers. And you know what those code monkeys are trained in? Software stacks that were created mostly in the US.

2. The rest of the companies you mention do not employ that many software developers.

3. They also do not deliver terribly popular, or important products. I mean, Bosch produces commodities like dishwashers, vaccuum cleaners and power tools, hard to call it "tech company".

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

#633

Post by snowpid »

tomjen3 wrote: post #564
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The DMA does not allow you to install what you want. It does not apply to consoles. It does make it possible for companies to keep some more money, but most importantly it allows them to sidestep the protections for my privacy that I pay a premium to Apple for. A real DMA would force facebook, twitter, etc to open up for alternative clients. That would bring competition in and benefit the end user. Not that whatever…

WhatsApp and Facebook are forced to accept third party clients by these laws. So your concerns are addressed:)

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

#634

Post by afiori »

Too wrote: post #498
ADeerAppeared wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some excellent news for you about the legality of targeted advertising under the GDPR. The GDPR is very clear about this. Advertising is not a legitimate interest or a functionally-required data processing, ergo, it may only be done with user consent. And that user consent may not be coerced in any way at all , you may not even refuse access to services if users reject their data being used. It's taking a whil…

Good intentions but how well is that working out so far? Only thing we got was annoying cookie popups everywhere, where consent is one click away and reject is three layers behind a small “learn more” button.

every meeting I have been in wrt PII collection had some provvisions for 1) how will this be protected enough 2) how can we easily delete this if needed; so I would say decently.

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

#635

Post by treprinum »

onel wrote: post #579
treprinum wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but the pie did not remain the same and Europe's slice shrunk. Some parts of the pie just grew faster. It doesn't mean Europe went backwards

Now imagine we are talking about companies: "We grew just our competitors grew 4x as much as we did." - that would be a prime candidate for an acquisition or being labeled a "zombie company" in a few years due to exponential growth effects.

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

#636

Post by snowpid »

fallingknife wrote: post #321
sensanaty wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, this is just how technology works. There is going to be a way that the vast majority of people want to communicate and if you don't want to use it, it's going to be a pain in the ass for you. This is always going to be the case, and nobody is under any obligation to accommodate you. If you didn't want to have a home phone in the 90s it would have been the same thing.

It's not and it won't accepted. WhatsApp will be for third party clients.

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

#637

Post by paulddraper »

nottorp wrote: post #229
no_wizard wrote: post #191

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…

> it’s being used to job screen applicants even though we have proven that AI models still suffer from thing like racial bias I bet they also suffer from other biases that are harder to detect and maybe some biases we can't even imagine and thus control for.

So.....,just like humans?

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

#638

Post by paulddraper »

no_wizard wrote: post #191
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…

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…

How do you know the race?

I've seen some places collect that information which is wild. But you can decline.

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

#639

Post by carlosjobim »

dijit wrote: post #595
carlosjobim wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't buy anything unless Europeans are willing to sell.

Vivendi and Tencent attempting to buy Ubisoft via shares might be one thing in living memory that disagrees. If you are publicly traded there is little you can do to prevent people buying shares - though you are right that people sell privately held companies a little too often. Ubisoft in particular created many poison pills to prevent companies getting too dug in, however that didn’t prevent anything except a total…

> If you are publicly traded there is little you can do to prevent people buying shares

Nobody can force you to sell your shares. Nobody can force you to make your company public. It's all voluntary. You can't have your cake and eat it. Want to get that juicy foreign investor money then cry that the foreigners are taking over?

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

#640

Post by dijit »

carlosjobim wrote: post #639
dijit wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vivendi and Tencent attempting to buy Ubisoft via shares might be one thing in living memory that disagrees. If you are publicly traded there is little you can do to prevent people buying shares - though you are right that people sell privately held companies a little too often. Ubisoft in particular created many poison pills to prevent companies getting too dug in, however that didn’t prevent anything except a total…

> If you are publicly traded there is little you can do to prevent people buying shares Nobody can force you to sell your shares. Nobody can force you to make your company public. It's all voluntary. You can't have your cake and eat it. Want to get that juicy foreign investor money then cry that the foreigners are taking over?

I have a low tolerance for absurdly stupid comments.

Once you sell a share you don't get to control who it is sold to afterwards, you could give shares to people as stock-options, and they are (rightly) going to sell their shares regardless who the buyer is, only based on the price.

So. Seriously, shut the fuck up, you're suggesting that the only answer is isolationism.

Identification of an issue (people buying up European talent before it gets large enough to be competitive) is not an invitation for absurd and deficiently reasoned victim blaming.

Post reply on HN