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EU Parliament Civil Liberties Committee adopts position on CSAR

europarl.europa.eu

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Re: EU Parliament Civil Liberties Committee adopts position on CSAR

#131

Post by Lutger »

zajio1am wrote: post #121
rippeltippel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still waiting for the day when we'll replace the word "lobbying" with "corruption".

Lobbying is just people or organizations making their case to politicians in a private way (e.g. meeting MP in their office) instead of a public way (e.g. putting an article to press).

That is what it is supposed to be. Offering a perspective someone said. In a michelin star restaurant, private resort full of prostitutes or after having donated substantial amounts of cash to their campaign ensuring their hold on power.

Somehow it seems different when 'presenting the case' is accompanied by gifts and money.

Re: EU Parliament Civil Liberties Committee adopts position on CSAR

#132

Post by pelorat »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #68

The EU needs to stop it with all this heavy handed regulation. At the end of the day it only hurts businesses. Businesses rely on the data contained within these communications in order to improve their services. This is why US tech companies are growing while EU equivalents are not. It's all well and good to consider user privacy and user safety but not when it stifles the market. [Please note that this is a satiric…

Those comments are not entirely wrong. Regulation does hurt, but the main issue is that even though the EU is a single market in theory, it's made up of nations that each have their own market and speak their own language. Not a lot of new tech companies target the entire EU, they mostly target their domestic market and certainly not the USA.

In the USA it's easy for a new tech company to put out a commercial to target the entire US population of more than 300 million people. This is practically impossible in the EU. The market here is actually very fractured.

We have "big" tech companies in each EU nation, but they cater only to the domestic market. "Big" as in they are dominant in their field inside their nation.

Take online payment systems for instance. While there are global EU companies like Klarna, most EU nations has their own system that everyone uses. So while you usually have a bunch of payment options to chose from, 99% picks the national one (usually no processing fees).

This also applies to a bunch of other apps in the EU.

If you create an app or a service in the EU and you want it to succeed, you need to target your domestic market first. However chances are there's already an app or service for your idea and you'll have zero chance to compete on the international market, even if you translate your service to as many languages you can think of.

Re: EU Parliament Civil Liberties Committee adopts position on CSAR

#133

Post by xxs »

gpderetta wrote: post #78
Maken wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The European Parliament has no saying in what laws it votes. The European Commission draft those, and the Parliament can at best rectify or reject them.

The Parliament can ask the Commission to table a specific law though. And it can dismiss the commission at will. So it doesn't have de-jure legislative powers, but de-facto it does.

> Commission to table a specific law though

Just for the folks on the West side of the Pond, pretty much means to drop the bill. "To table" is so weird.

Re: EU Parliament Civil Liberties Committee adopts position on CSAR

#134

Post by wodenokoto »

eigenket wrote: post #4

Despite the lobbying from American organisations (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir and others who worked with Thorn on this [1][2]) the EU Parliament did the right thing this time. [1] https://www.thorn.org/partnerships/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130420162917/http://www.wearet...

ELI5, why does google want regulation that tells them to scan user content for various suspicious activities?

Re: EU Parliament Civil Liberties Committee adopts position on CSAR

#135

Post by Lio »

qwytw wrote: post #66
bradley13 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you trust closeed-source from Microsoft, Google and Apple? Seriously? Open standards, open-source code. That's really the only option for code people are supposed to trust.

Why wouldn't you trust them? To some extent at least? I mean if they are claiming their messaging system is E2E and it turns out it isn't the cost to them (not only financial) would be much higher than whatever they earn from having access to your data.

> Why wouldn't you trust them?

Because historically we've already caught these companies doing dubious things and they're still in business, still making money hand over fist.

For example, Facebook saying they would only use phone numbers for two-factor authentication and just ignoring that because it was profitable.

Or Biobank saying they wouldn't share private medical data with insurance companies and then just ignoring that because it was profitable.

Or Microsoft and its subsidiaries bribing foreign officials to gain sales and block use of FOSS alternatives because it was profitable.

The naughty list is long and it doesn't seem to cause much reputational damage if any.

Re: EU Parliament Civil Liberties Committee adopts position on CSAR

#136

Post by pavlov »

antupis wrote: post #105
rsynnott wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> organise a lobbying group greater than the NRA ($2.93M in 2022) This is... a little misleading. They also have at least two PACs (here's the big one: https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs... ) Now, you could claim, though not particularly credibly, that money spent on PACs is not lobbying money.

Still that is rather small like here Finland average organization uses 34 – 57 million euros to lobbying. source https://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/1...

You’re misreading the study. It says they asked 115 people for a low and high range of organizational spend on lobbying, and the sum of the estimates was 34-57 million.

So divide 57 by 115, and you get about 0.5 million euros on average for the high estimate.

(Some of the respondents may work for the same organization which complicates calculating the average. Hence why they’re reporting the sums instead, I guess.)

Re: EU Parliament Civil Liberties Committee adopts position on CSAR

#137

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

Lutger wrote: post #117
eddtries wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that I find shocking about lobbying is just how cheap it is. In the FTX trial the amount they spent lobbying politicians for pro-crypto laws was released and we're talking low five figures. SBF even said lobbying was very cheap for the impact you can get. Naively I thought it would cost millions to get a politician to support you but actually it's cheap enough a FAANG engineer could individually pay enough…

How sure can you be that your lobby is successful? Can you like 'buy' a politician, effectively a legal bribe, or is it more nuanced? In the EU, a lot of laws are effectively written or co-authored by companies, which saves the politicians and their staffs incredible amounts of time and expertise. This must be quite expensive, just to have the lawyers on payroll who are able to do that.

If your company is literally writing the laws that will govern them, then yeah I'd say the lobby was successful.

Re: EU Parliament Civil Liberties Committee adopts position on CSAR

#138

Post by waihtis »

wodenokoto wrote: post #134
eigenket wrote: post #4

Despite the lobbying from American organisations (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir and others who worked with Thorn on this [1][2]) the EU Parliament did the right thing this time. [1] https://www.thorn.org/partnerships/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130420162917/http://www.wearet...

ELI5, why does google want regulation that tells them to scan user content for various suspicious activities?

Google has well enough resources to handle such an effort whereas a newer, competing entity will likely not. ("entry barriers")

Re: EU Parliament Civil Liberties Committee adopts position on CSAR

#140

Post by qwytw »

Lio wrote: post #135
qwytw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't you trust them? To some extent at least? I mean if they are claiming their messaging system is E2E and it turns out it isn't the cost to them (not only financial) would be much higher than whatever they earn from having access to your data.

> Why wouldn't you trust them? Because historically we've already caught these companies doing dubious things and they're still in business, still making money hand over fist. For example, Facebook saying they would only use phone numbers for two-factor authentication and just ignoring that because it was profitable. Or Biobank saying they wouldn't share private medical data with insurance companies and then just ign…

> because it was profitable

Yeah I agree that's the core issue. I'd only "trust" them because I don't see how promising E2E and then breaking it on a widescale would be profitable for them

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