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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

#681

Post by BoingBoomTschak »

AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #106
thrance wrote: post #77

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

I'd just say all advertising. It's effectively money time and effort we just light on fire.

Would be a dream. Then a more-or-less independent entity paid by our tax money could be used to test stuff according to objective and scientific standards. I mean, stuff like TÜV certification already exists, doing a bit more work to get a reliable measure of performance, repairability, etc... like some review websites do wouldn't be that difficult.

Instead, we're forced to turn to third-party testers with dubious manufacturer relations - even when the results aren't freely available! - or technical knowledge (e.g. Consumer Reports using 1/3 octave smoothed power response for loudspeakers)...

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

#682

Post by RamblingCTO »

rsanek wrote: post #568
RamblingCTO wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever heard of Spotify or SAP maybe?

those are tech companies, but aren't really considered big tech. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech

If you consider salesforce big tech, then you gotta consider SAP big tech as well. They have 31 vs 34.5 billion. Spotify has only 13.x something tho

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

#683

Post by simonh »

killingtime74 wrote: post #660
paulddraper wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So.....,just like humans?

That's the point though. It's illegal for humans to do things during hiring that are not illegal for AI to do as it stands now (all sorts of discrimination). We want to at least level the playing field.

There’s no exemption from prosecution for racial bias because it was done by an algorithm. If a company uses such an algorithm, AI or not, they will be open to prosecution for it.

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

#684

Post by loa_in_ »

NegativeK wrote: post #197
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"We share the risk but the profit is mine" company mindset is no better than medieval thuggery

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

#685

Post by anticensor »

XCSme wrote: post #626
tcfhgj wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point we have to deal with the limits to growth, indeed. The economy should serve the people, not the way around.

This goes against the idea of capitalism. It expects infinite growth. If growth stops, we need a different economic model.

Which is fine, no economic system lasted forever, and capitalism is not expected to last forever either.

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

#686

Post by scarface_74 »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #676
scarface_74 wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

oakay

You ever read the first edition of Bill Gates “The Road Ahead” where he didn’t even mention the Internet?

Google thinking the future of phones were BlackBerry clones?

Palm CEO “The PC guys aren’t just going to walk in a figure this thing out” referring to the then rumored iPhone.

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

#687

Post by dang »

ADeerAppeared wrote: post #541
khuey wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AAPL's profit is roughly equivalent to the GDP of Slovakia.

[flagged]

Yikes, please don't break the site guidelines like that. We have to ban accounts that do.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

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

#688

Post by TimeBearingDown »

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]

Web apps have ways to track users, but users have ways to mitigate this via adblockers and privacy features in their browser. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ exists to help users check their own browser fingerprint.

Full apps on the other hand have many more ways to fingerprint users which aren’t as well known, such as “your free storage, your current volume level (to 3 decimal points) and even your battery level (to 15 decimal points)”. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/23/iphone-...)

Is one conclusively better than the other? I’m not sure, but web tracking and fingerprinting is still much more studied and users have more countermeasures, including using a different device where the user has more control.

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

#689

Post by kanbara »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #244
lolinder wrote: post #132

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...

it’s not 30%— in almost all cases it’s 15%. and by all means, if you think all the services and support for payments and returns and refunds and customer support are doable in 3%, you can have apple not do that too.

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

#690

Post by no_wizard »

simonh wrote: post #683
killingtime74 wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point though. It's illegal for humans to do things during hiring that are not illegal for AI to do as it stands now (all sorts of discrimination). We want to at least level the playing field.

There’s no exemption from prosecution for racial bias because it was done by an algorithm. If a company uses such an algorithm, AI or not, they will be open to prosecution for it.

The differential nugget is that LLMs and similar tech are auditable. You can audit the models, test for bias etc in a way that scales.
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