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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

#711

Post by BlueCooled »

okanat wrote: post #250
cheptsov wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except EU doesn’t have big tech.

EU didn't go into an uncontrolled spree investing every company that had .com in its name and ruined thousands of lives and wasted billions of dollars. EU usually doesn't let companies to grow uncontrollable sizes that the government is completely controlled by them not the citizens. The existence of Big Tech means that the government did a very poor job in protecting the consumers and the free and fair market

> The existence of Big Tech means that the government did a very poor job in protecting the consumers and the free and fair market

I'm sure they are quite proud of that achievement

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

#712

Post by account42 »

I would hope that the EU regulates a silicon-valley style tech market out of existence. That the US is more than happy to let their megacorporations go wild as long as it benefits their economy doesn't mean that others need to do do the same.

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

#713

Post by aniviacat »

carlosjobim wrote: post #363
dijit wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything that gets close gets bought or killed by non-european giants. Tencent buys basically all game companies, microsoft buys basically all communication companies (skype, nokia come to mind), google buys basically everything. Even ARM is owned by Softbank after starting out in the UK. The Automotive industry and ASML are just about the only things resistant to this because they're so large already; Automotive act…

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

What's your intended message?

Yes, people sell things voluntarily. (In particular, small companies being bought and killed by monopolies is usually very benefitial to the small companies' owners, even if it's bad for the economy as a whole.) That does not contradict the parent comments.

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

#714

Post by account42 »

pembrook wrote: post #124
KaiserPro wrote: post #88

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…

> Nobody is against regulation that disfavors large incumbents to support competition instead.

Actually pretty much all EU regulations and especially enforcement of those regulations gets pundits shouting that the EU is only trying to milk US megacorporations.

> However, virtually every other piece of regulation does the opposite.

Not true but even if so not all regulation concerns itself with monopolies. GDPR in particular is about user rights and should therefore apply to everyone, same for similar kinds of regulations. If corporations cannot survive without violating you in every way possible then they should not be allowed to live. If anything is lacking it's enforcement against incumbents.

> What's different now though, is the hysteria over AI is leading regulators to pass this incumbent-cementing regulation before we've even had a chance to experience both the upside and downside, so the innovation never happens at all.

Good. Not all "innovation" should happen.

> Combine this with a rapidly aging demography in Europe, and I only see this trend increasing. If there's one thing old people hate, it's risk and doing new things.

Again, good. Moving fast and breaking things at societal scale is not a good idea.

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

#715

Post by account42 »

corimaith wrote: post #659
BobbyJo wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a worse feature for them to have is consistency . Imagine being someone that has fallen through the cracks of software a significant number of employers are using... Basically soft-locked out of employment with no recourse.

I'd argue consistency in discrimination is easier because it makes it easier to detect and account for. A range of different people interviewing are going to be alot harder to pin down.

Discrimination in this sense is a statistical property. If Jimbob gets rejected everywhere as an individual it isn't really discrimination but that doesn't mean it isn't an issue.

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

#716

Post by account42 »

Silhouette wrote: post #329
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…

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…

> The implications of LLMs are potentially wonderful in terms of providing better access to information for everyone but we already know that they are also capable of making serious mistakes or even generating complete nonsense that a non-expert user might not recognise as such. Again it is not hard to imagine a near future where chat-based systems have essentially displaced search engines and social media as the default ways to find information online but then provide bad advice on legal, financial, or health matters.

I think a bigger concern is LLMs providing deliberately biased results and stating them as fact.

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

#717

Post by aniviacat »

tcfhgj wrote: post #613
FMecha wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making everything rely on subscription (consider European TV license fees as such) and word-of-mouth is what you end up with. Except in the case of former, over-subscription is getting into a problem too.

why does nobody think of micro payments?

Micro payments would be the way to go, but the current payment systems do not enable this method of transaction.

Removing ads would require being willing to make micro payments to some random shady news site you found on google to read their article.

In the current payment world, that would require sharing a lot of private information in the case of PayPal or, even worse, sharing your CC number.

The Digital Euro might fix this, if it turns out to be well implemented.

Once a well implemented Digital Euro arrives, an internet without advertising would be a real possibility.

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

#718

Post by account42 »

petre wrote: post #670
monksy wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the value that OpenAI is bringing to the US right now? Mostly its being used to generate text that fit a query.

It quickly generates BS text that costs billions of man hours to generate by people doing BS jobs, which could be doing something more useful, such as childcare. I'm using it to quickly localize our application into different languages, such as Arabic. German took like a few hours to get from non existing to 100% functional. Arabic was sketchy with Arabic mixed with French text, now it's 100% Arabic.

> which could be doing something more useful, such as childcare.

Ok but what is your plan for letting people who lost their jobs to AI to do more meaningful things? Because unless there are bigger societal changes all it means those people will not have to find jobs that are even more bullshit.

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

#719

Post by aniviacat »

xvector wrote: post #362
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…

[flagged]

There are no free web services. By watching ads you are paying with other people's money.

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

#720

Post by account42 »

lolinder wrote: post #132
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…

> 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…

Are you also for workers being able to choose to live in company towns where they have to spend their incomes at the company store? When lock in and network effects come into play then yes the government should make sure that people have real and not only theoretical choices.
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