The article doesn't list much in the way of tech. LLMs, social media, and advertising hegemons leaving Europe is hardly a tech flight. In fact, it sounds like a best case scenario. Someone call me when Zeiss moves out because they can't compete in Europe, and I'll be concerned Europe is actually losing something of value.
Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence
381–390 of 761 posts
Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence
#382I think it already did. I am an avid reader of Show HNs. And I remember many that became successful businesses. But not a single European one. All the "startups" that I see here in Europe are very classical businesses. They build software tools for local enterprises. It seems nobody in Europe is building something for the open web. Maybe because nobody here understands all the regulations that come with it. The GDPR…
Most show HNs are just some shitty wrapper around OpenAI APIs these days, from what I've noticed. "Searching for papers with AI!" Doesn't exactly sound like the next Google to me, but maybe I'm just out of touch.
"Why use Dropbox when I can use rsync or FTP" [0]
- HN in 2007
Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence
#383A 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…
Most importantly all this tech is not reducing cost of living, but is increasing it. Tech is reducing prices of compute and memory and software but everyone's monthly bill increases. This is only possible through parasitic behavior. And we know how to kill parasites. The life and times of a parasite are not as fun as the worthies who come up with these unsustainable business models think.
Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
> no innovation So all innovation requires you to capture user's data for profit via advertisement or data brokerage?
[flagged]
I wonder how much we are actually losing on this side of the pond with that.
Maybe it is for the best. I don't really trust those billion-dollar companies.
Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence
#385Foreign Policy is pearl-clutching because they've seen what actually enforced antitrust law looks like for the first time since Borke and Reagan ratfucked it.
The thing is, the tech business is uniquely conducive to generating monopolies, for a handful of reasons. The biggest being we're a copyright industry. Congress made the mistake of putting software under the same legal framework as Mickey Mouse, so the monopoly tech companies have over interoperability is government granted, has little bounds on its power, and lasts forever. And when tech and creative industries got together to enforce those legal rights through software, we got DMCA 1201, an awful law that gives anyone with a valid copyright veto rights over technological progress. The only way you get shit done in the tech industry is to get acquired so that you have enough market power to license and collaborate.
Outside of copyright we have online services firms like Google and Facebook, who operate primarily through surveillance capitalism. In prior media landscapes, if you wanted to sell to New York Times readers, you had to buy inventory in the Times. Today, you ask Google and Facebook to put ads on anyone who went on nytimes.com in the past week, which is just as lucrative for the ad buyer but Google and Facebook can pay the other sites less than what an actual NYT ad would command. Targeted advertising moves money away from a diverse and distributed group of publishers towards a pair of ad networks who know exactly everything about everyone at all times.
Facebook absolutely could be 'paid for' through nontargeted ads, but it makes Facebook a far less valuable business if they can't siphon data off you and sell it to other companies. Hell, Apple already proved this: iOS 14 moved ad tracking to opt-in[0], so nobody opted in, and Facebook had a revenue hit.
Europe is not inhospitable to tech, but it is inhospitable to tech monopolization, which is predominantly how American firms operate. And to be honest, I don't think Europe is wrong to do this. In fact, I want America's government to start doing the same thing. I want a government that acts less like a rubber stamp for a handful of megacorporations and more like the villains in an Ayn Rand novel.
Do you want to see what the alternative is? Simple: the end of democracy. Trump was just a preview. Democracy is not a given, it requires distributed political power, which requires distributed wealth and economic power. If a handful of firms can centralize economic power to themselves, then they become the economy, and they can start pulling the strings politically. We already saw this with oil in the 70s, but basically every American industry works this way. The only vestige of democracy left is that sometimes industries have conflicting economic interests and that sometimes the working class hurls an orange brick through everyone's windows.
[0] Unless you're Apple, who can still track you. Related note: Google is basically being forced to keep third-party cookies in Chrome because they dragged their feet on removing them for far too long.
Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much these articles from FP are notorious for their poor journalism and just a mouthpiece for billionaires In fact a huge chunk of American MSM is turning out to be unreliable and quick to deceive its readers who are still stuck in the "why would they lie to us". Europe is doing a good job and as are more sovereign countries waking up to the techno-colonialism at play. If Google or Facebook is in your country,…
> If Google or Facebook is in your country, they do not share your country's interest and instead pushing their own American ideologies. > More and more countries should reject American tech companies that seek to interfere and spread their fcked up ideologies in the host country. I'd go father: even in America they don't share their country's interest and instead are pushing their own Silicon Valley ideologies (e.g.…
to be exact, San Francisco ideology shaped by the images of their limitless compassion now spreading world wide and raising questions.
Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence
#387A 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…
> large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people Facebook's and Twitter's recommended feed algorithms and blocking procedures, have to a significant extent determined the outcome of elections, coup attempts, protest movements. These companies have custom tuned their algorithms for particular countries at particular times, during such events. Many people have died, or their lives negatively affected because of t…
Not to mention the effect of platforms like Facebook and Instagram on young boys and girls.
Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
there maybe better examples of why AI biases provide deep systemic problems but: CV screening? are contemporary LLM really worse that previous screening tech and processes?
You can combat bias in a team of people, but in LLM you may not even know it exists.
of course you can know it exists. you just need to observe inputs and outputs and compare with precious non LLM ways.
Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can you combat bias in a team of humans if humans are susceptible to bias? How do you even know what neutral is if it's not a physically measurable quantity?
They send resumes with the same accomplishments and names that indicate race and observe the relative degrees of acceptance. Everytime they do this test, considerable bias is found to still exist.
remove names then. problem solved.
Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
> complaints from a bunch of other businesses who do not have consumer interests at heart Apple (and other big tech companies) locking the competition out of the market, or buying them, hurts consumers. It robs them of other innovative choices. Having more choices and interoperability is generally good for consumers. If you stick with the Apple defaults how does this hurt you?
To clarify: I don't use Apple. I chose their competitors instead because I like the features offered by the competition better. > If you stick with the Apple defaults how does this hurt you? Because people won't be able to stick with the defaults. One of the first dominoes to fall if the EU gets its wishlist will be Facebook, which will put a version of its app that wouldn't pass Apple's review out through unofficial…
Interesting. I had thought of the garden walls as being in the way of users, based on my personal experience, but you bring up the point that the walls can also be in the way of nefarious companies. I assume both can be true.
And perhaps the legal system sees some of these garden wall as protecting Apple, falling under anti-trust, like the 30% markups on all financial transactions?
You mentioned malicious versions of the Facebook app that do an end-run around Apple's review. Maybe the EU is trying to cover this with new laws like the GDPR and DMA, making malicious app behaviour illegal. Might that not be better, protecting all users regardless of platform?