EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

The UK has exactly the same opacity. People vote for parties, and the winning party can replace its leader at any time. Voters have exactly zero input into who is chosen. That choice is down to the party hierarchy, with some token show-voting from party members once a shortlist has been selected.

Dont underestimate being next to America, having a FTA, same language and same timezone,among many other advantages for Canada compared to say France or Italy

These are the usual arguments in defence of the EU's democratic credentials. The fundamental problem I have with them is that they don't actually meet the simple, transparent standards I set out for meaningful democratic representation.

National governments pick the members of the European Commision, so if you're not happy with your European Commission representative, take it up with your national government.

How, specifically, should someone do that in practice? Does someone cast an anonymous vote to indicate their preference? Will some robust system then make an objective determination of the outcome based on the popular vote? This is how the people customarily determine their representatives in a representative democracy.

In reality, the number of levels of indirection between you or me as ordinary people who vote in elections and Ursula von der Leyen as the most powerful person in the EU government removes any meaningful requirement for her to either achieve a popular mandate before taking office or accept any meaningful personal accountability for her performance while in office.

And more generally, European Commissioner is infamous for being a role you give a national politician who is still in favour with the leadership but perhaps has lost popular support. Just look at the past roles of the people who get nominated to these positions by their respective governments. There's an incredible number of ex-representatives, and often not ex- by choice but because the electorate chose not to re-elect them.

The European Parliament obviously does.

Not in my country. While it operates a PR system, it's a party list, so again at a minimum it fails my personal accountability criterion. The only way for the people to remove a particular individual they don't like from power is, in this case, to remove everyone from that individual's party from power in that electoral region.

In fact, this is the same basic problem with many of the situations we've been discussing here. You can in theory indirectly influence which individual holds power. The catch is that your only way to remove them is some sort of nuclear option. Don't like your nation's choice for European Commissioner? No problem, just elect a different entire national government at the last election. Don't like the UK's current PM? No problem, just make sure no-one votes for any MPs in that person's party at the last election. Don't like the current European Commission President? Sorry, I can't help you much with that one because hardly anyone (including hundreds of MEPs, by the way) actually knows how she got the job.

The whole point of have a representatives is that they have the time and resources to educate themselves on the minutiae of state, and make better decisions than the general public. Not because they're smarter or better, but because they're better informed.

Again, so the theory goes. But as someone who has interacted with various MPs personally, and through them also with senior figures in government on a few occasions, I can promise you that it is a work of fiction in practice.

Just look at the nonsense MPs on both sides of the Brexit debate were shouting from the rooftops before the referendum. Or for something a little less inflammatory, try the arguments they've made about regulating business and technology, including in the EU measures we're discussing here and the roughly analogous UK plans also announced today. Those weren't the arguments of well-informed experts who have studied the issues and drawn rational conclusions. In many cases, they weren't even the arguments of a moderately well-informed member of the general public. And they were statements not just from elected representatives but often from senior government figures!

The truth is that there is absolutely nothing about our current system of government that requires our MPs to be qualified to make or capable of making better decisions than members of the public who are well-informed about and personally interested in any particular issue. Even those who are intelligent and trying to do a good job, as I'm sure many MPs actually are despite all the negative press they get, can't possibly become experts on everything and don't have the resources to staff it out. And even on issues they do choose to prioritise, unless they are members of the party in power and take a government position with all the strings that are attached to doing so, their power to influence policy is often very limited even when acting in quite large groups.

And the same is true of most other elected representatives and political appointments, whether in the UK or EU. This isn't about Brexit, or about being pro- or anti-EU, if that even means anything anyway. It's a problem with systems of government operating at national and international levels where those in power are so well insulated from the voting public that they don't require a popular mandate and aren't required to be accountable to the people for whom they supposedly act. That's not democracy, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word.

As a European citizen I’m hopeful for this regulation. The tech giants would rather police themselves, but they should be subject to oversight to ensure that they don’t abuse their market power.

If this goes well I hope to see more competition and more innovation. I don’t believe that this will send Europe into some digital dark age, if anything it will make it easier for small to medium businesses to compete and innovate.

They’re still a collaborative governmental entity with governments enforcing its laws, so they pass muster as far as being a “State” goes, unless you want to go into specifics about the various treaties and how this is really a treaty organization and blah. In the looks, walks and quacks like a duck, with all the other ducks around treating it like a duck, it’s a bloody government with all the powers that entails, even if enforcement is a matter left to the member nations that do have all of the powers I just outlined. I actually did write recently in a HN comment outlining the difference between the EU and Feds, but in terms of power, the EU is closer to the US Federal Government than to Apple because it still has laws.

Apple is a private organization with a corporate charter, owned by shareholders, controlled by its Board of Directors and with the ability to engage in lawful business activity, with none of the powers that governments have. They don’t have jurisdiction, they have stores. They don’t make laws, they write policies. They don’t levy taxes, they trade. The fees of the App Store are a known quantity, and you can take them or leave them.

So in that light, does it still make sense to try to control Apple like a government entity or treat them like some kind of pseudo-government or rhetorically refer to their business practices using language we use to describe governments? Why do we demand so much more accountability from governments including supranational intergovernmental treaty organizations controlled by governments than we do from private shareholder owned and controlled organizations? Honestly think about it.