Regulate or shake down?
It's a proxy war against Irish tax independence. Tax harmonisation and geo revenue targeting are the goal.
EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech
291–300 of 332 posts
Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The difference is that Apple is not a government Yes, and this is a key difference between Europeans and (at least the libertarian/SV type of) Americans. We trust governments more than corporations because governments were elected by us. It's really a difference in culture.
Please do not generalise the "we". The yellow vests definitely did not trust their government and took it to the streets. If one doesn't trust a corporation they should not work for/with them.
Ah, the "don't work for them" motto.
I 100% agree but quite frankly i'm starting to feel like I'm missing out.
A lot of FAANG people are going to agree with most left-wing arguments but they won't renounce their fat paychecks.
Their argument is usually "if I'm not working for a FAANG company somebody else will do anyway" which looks quite shallow to me.
So in the meantime they get to look cool and forward-looking, actually contribute to the growth of many problems, and bring home a fat paycheck.
Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech
#293As a European citizen I find it amazing that there are so many people in here saying there is no cities in EU that can compare with Silicon Valley.
A growing city that creates reliable technology in Europe is Stockholm [1]. Which apparently is the second city after Silicon valley producing unicorn companies per capita in the world.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-stockholm-becoming-silico...
Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, ev…
> it’s a bloody government with all the powers that entails Still doesn’t have any physical police authority.
Yet.
Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech
#295One consequence is that this will continue to keep European tech valuations low. Silicon valley startup valuations allow some crazy and amazing ideas to be tried, but it's all based a premise that startups may one day become a unicorns. This also supports Silicon Valley level wages, which are almost non existent in Europe. Now not only has the EU declared unicorns unwelcome, but also European users will be discounted…
As a consumer I can't see that as anything but positive. Most SV unicorns are overvalued and their technology is not nearly as important to the world as they think it is. Once they reach a certain scale it can easily do more harm than good. The endless pursuit to "disrupt" and grow to please shareholders is the wrong dangling carrot for entrepreneurs. It only promotes "growth hacking" and other shady get-rich-quick s…
As a consumer I also believe something that needs to be done to regulate big tech, but the problem of directing money into productive capital is huge.
Every unicorn's valuation is basically realized by establishing some sort of monopoly or monopsony. This leads to another less-than-ideal situation, where companies are incentivized to spend money protecting their monopoly instead of innovating. Fundamentally this is bad.
But it turns out that the capital cost of new technology is extremely high, and it becomes a corollary that anyone who wants to spend their lives developing the next technology should locate themselves in the most favorable funding environment.
Europe can avoid being a tech backwater if it can figure out how to provide a favorable funding environment.
One technocratic solution would be to make it the governments problem to reap reasonable returns from tech. Offering every citizen the option of purchasing up to 100.000 euros in tech bonds yielding 5% that EU governments become responsible for investing would unleash trillions of euros while exerting significant pressure on unproductive assets.
Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "The difference is that Apple is not a government." That means they are not an organization that is accountable to the public. That means they are an organization that cares more about profit and market share, than about human/civil rights.
You could say the same thing about your local coffee shop. What's the problem?
You started by comparing Apple to a government. The difference is that the government represents you, while Apple represents their share holders.
Of course my local coffeeshop also represents their owner (no idea if they have share holders), so what's the difference with Apple? Size. I don't know what your local coffeeshop is like, but mine is not a trillion dollar company. Apple is. And Apple's products are used by millions of people all over the world. That means Apple wields a lot of power. They may not be able to lock you in prison, but they are able to block or restrict your usage of your electronic devices. They have a lot of power over other companies that want to provide services through those devices.
And without regulation, all of that power is unchecked; they wield that power for the profit of their shareholders, not for the public good. They have in the past harmed users and companies because Apple saw a way to make more money by monopolising certain functionality.
Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that in the US we don’t trust the government to the point where even though that’s the one we have more control over, we do not choose to use it against bad corporate behavior for fear that the government will do it wrong. The EU sees that it can effectively regulate corporations so they use their government the way it was intended to.
Governments are self-executing power vehicles. Ascribing intent onto them isn’t particularly useful when a government has a mechanism for rewriting its reason foe existence through law. That said: > The EU sees that it can effectively regulate corporations so they use their government the way it was intended to. What is the basis for your claims on their effectiveness?
I think he used "effective" as in: "they have the power to, they are able to/it fall in their domain", not as in "they did it perfectly without overhead"
Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I sometimes wonder had Apple not been such an arse with its App Store and monopolistic rules. Would these regulations ever come up. Nah these regulations were always coming. Everyone always likes to pick on Apple and the App Store, but quite frankly in the EU (where iPhones market share is only 24% compared to 49% in the US) Apple is small fries compared to companies like Facebook which basically owns 100% of socia…
Facebook owns 100% of social media? Do you not consider any of Twitter, Snapchat, Tiktok, Reddit to be social media?
I dunno about the rest of Europe, but at least in Iceland, Facebook is _the_ social network for interacting with people you know (and WhatsApp is _the_ messaging service).
Sure, people use the others ones, but for instance all my communication with my landlord and socializing with coworkers goes through Facebook, not through any other platform. The rest are optional. Facebook isn't.
Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It was basically useless" Could you elaborate and perhaps point towards what makes you think this way? I ask because I have worked in a rather large corporation which had to implement massive changes to ensure they were being more respectful and careful towards user data. In my experience, the GDPR made them take it seriously which was otherwise ignored as it allowed them to profit off being negligent about these th…
GDPR only matters if the EU has jurisdiction. If it's a website run from China then GDPR can't really do anything. A better first step would've been to limit the information that's being sent out in the first place - the browsers and OS. If people had better control over what their computer sends out then the privacy issues would be much less worrying. After that you can talk about limitations on who can do what with…
https://ec.europa.eu/info/about-european-commission/contact_...
If you genuinely care and believe you can make a strong case, I suggest talking to them.
Re: EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech
#300One consequence is that this will continue to keep European tech valuations low. Silicon valley startup valuations allow some crazy and amazing ideas to be tried, but it's all based a premise that startups may one day become a unicorns. This also supports Silicon Valley level wages, which are almost non existent in Europe. Now not only has the EU declared unicorns unwelcome, but also European users will be discounted…
> This also supports Silicon Valley level wages, which are almost non existent in Europe.
As a software engineer in Europe, I'd say that this is a good thing. Income inequality is much lower in most European countries than it is in the US.