EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech

It doesn’t have to because the national governments are charged with enforcing EU laws.

All businesses have owners, with equity as a proxy for who owns how much. A coffee shop might have one equity holder or it might have a dozen or it might be Starbucks with as many shareholders as they have. As far as the difference goes, it is the difference between an S-Corp or a C-Corp and each has their own tax advantages and disadvantages from a tax perspective.

Each has one thing in common though: if you don’t like their crap, you don’t buy it. If the coffee sucks or you can’t install the software you want, you buy something else. Apple’s power is over the products they sold and the services they continue to provide after the purchase. You can install any kind of software that you can get working, what Apple doesn’t do is promise any kind of support for getting every type of software to run on the products they sold, nor are they obligated to. Those are the terms, they are fairly well known, you can take that information with you into the marketplace and choose from what’s available or try to scrape something together that will do the same thing from parts. Might not be as nice as Apple’s stuff, but it will have as much capability as you put into it.

I seriously don’t get the siren song of regulation as it is sung here. I see value in some laws, I don’t see value in laws as a reaction to every move a corporation makes to try to bend them to the public’s will. Corporations aren’t people, but they represent the private interests, time and money of real people, but that concept seems so abstract to people that they can treat large organizations as public bodies with all the responsibilities of something that has much more power over their lives and many more people under their employ which can abuse that power when in reality, Apple has no more power over your life than your coffee shop, just whatever power you choose to give it.

> You started by comparing Apple to a government.

I know these threads can run long and it is easy to list the thread but here is what I originally responded to:

>> Another interesting tidbit is the answer to the common trope that 'private platform can act as they wish since they are private' :

> Now the EU is saying the same thing to Apple. It is their market, and they dictate the rules. Which is perhaps a taste of Apple's own medicine?

> I wonder what those people who keep saying it is Apple's platform they can do what ever they want had to say?

I didn’t like the mindset this commentary reflected, in particular the idea that the EU or any of its member nations “own their markets” the way Apple owns the App Store, because that is dangerously close to saying governments own people. Markets are reflective of the individual choices of people. You can own the NASDAQ, but you can’t own the people trading on the NASDAQ and you don’t own the companies listed on the NASDAQ merely by owning the NASDAQ, but you can set the criteria by which you list companies on the NASDAQ.

A nation can have jurisdiction over its internal market, businesses, a place where their laws are enforced, and don’t get me wrong, their laws, good or bad, are still their laws. I won’t dispute that, but having jurisdiction is not the same as ownership, and the market is some kind of central body or organization you can own, it’s all the people in a market who trade with all the other people in a market, whether that market is a dozen people or all the people in the world.

The police follow their local laws and not EU laws and EU laws aren't automatically adopted by countries. And so far local politicians often refuse to enact EU laws when they don't make sense, and there isn't much EU can do about it since the local politicians are more powerful than EU politicians, instead EU tend to make exceptions for those who refuse.

Lastly unlike US countries can still leave EU. If they make it illegal to leave then I'd worry, but until then the local government always comes first, since if EU pressures them too much they'd just leave.

> Between that and identity politics becoming the main issue voters vote on and we have a recipe for the government becoming self-executing power vehicles just like Walmart, Amazon, Facebook, etc. There is no by the people, for the people currently.

I think you’re mixing cause and effect here. The government is a vehicle of power because it has power vested in it and it represents people who wield that power.

Voting is one such power, we vote on laws, sheriffs, representatives at many levels, senators, district attorneys, even for some damned foolish reason, judges. Not just POTUS. Whatever government we have at any point in time is pretty much the government we deserve because we put it there with our choices.

It’s naïve to think power will not be exploited though, and because the difference between the lawful powers of a government and the lawful powers of a private company are so vast and disparate, we’re a lot more concerned with curbing government power.

Any elected official is a person, not a mindless automaton, and people have interests which they can and do put above the public good almost all the time. It’s the exception when they do not, not the rule, even when it is only their own family. If an elected official or a bureaucrat employed by them can use the knowledge and experience and power they have to save a member of their own family or protect them, they bloody will. Similarly many will find ways to profit from their positions, I don’t know why we expect they won’t.

But hey, maybe all the elected officials and bureaucrats of the EU and it’s member nations are actually Angels sent down from Heaven to show the world how it is done. Great if that’s the case, but I wouldn’t put money on that.

Even when elected officials are not involved, people vote for bad laws all the time. California is one such place, San Francisco is another. We have the power to hang ourselves here, and we exercise that right regularly. It gets even worse because elected officials have realized they can punt anything remotely controversial onto the ballot box rather than exercise discretion and judgement in their own decision making, because doing so would make them accountable to their constituents.

I was hoping for some more concrete examples of what the EU has done right, but I’ll address the minimum wage.

> Take minimum wage for example. Loads of economic research shows that federally mandated minimum of $15/hour would be good for the economy.

In what ways has it been shown it would be good for the economy?

How does it address the fact that the minimum wage is actually zero and unemployed is the real minimum wage? How does it help small retail stores that need a minimum number of bodies behind the counter when the store is open in order to stay in business?

I live in a place that did implement $15/hour minimum wage, and ultimately what is been slowly doing is making some businesses unviable. Even before the pandemic forced its closure, one of my favorite shops, one I used to work at in fact when I was younger and I’ve kept in touch since, was slowly going out of business because the owner needed two bodies behind the counter to ensure timely service and his costs were greater than >$30/hour once you factored in mandatory insurance costs and taxes in addition to the usual operational overhead of just being open 16 hours in the first place. What was once a perfectly viable business was already dying just from the extra labor costs alone, with the owner who had been in the business for over 30 years putting in longer hours and making less money just because he wanted to keep his crew employed. He also had to raise prices every single year to keep up with the additional costs. He kept it going, but by the end he was putting in more money than he was taking out, and the pandemic forced its closure when his insurance company wouldn’t pay out for the spoiled product.

The new owner changed business models, rather than freshly made on-site lunch, you get whatever was pre-made at her other business, no customizations, and the product and experience are completely different. The business under the original owner and the business under the new owner share a name, but they are essentially entirely different businesses.

And you know what? That’s business. That’s how things go sometimes, but could he have remained in business if his labor costs weren’t so high? I think he wanted to, and it’s not like he never issued raises. Each generation of staff typically had one or two people who were earning a lot more than the rest of the crew, greater than what the minimum wage eventually became even, because the earned it by making him more money.

The entire economy isn’t Walmart and Apple Stores, but the more costs you impose on businesses and the higher you raise the floor, the sooner it will be. It doesn’t matter if everyone ought to be able to afford 4oz of ice cream at $5, if fewer people are willing to pay for it at that price to cover the additional labor costs.