A interesting point missing from the BBC article is that they have different levels of expectations between small to medium businesses and large ones, to avoid regulatory capture ? :
> Platforms that reach more than 10% of the EU's population (45 million users) are considered systemic in nature, and are subject not only to specific obligations to control their own risks, but also to a new oversight structure.
Another interesting tidbit is the answer to the common trope that 'private platform can act as they wish since they are private' :
> The Digital Markets Act addresses the negative consequences arising from certain behaviours by platforms acting as digital “gatekeepers” to the single market. ... This can grant them the power to act as private rule-makers and to function as bottlenecks between businesses and consumers.
The road is still long before ratification, but it looks like a step in the good direction.
> 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 social media.
Anyway you're right but it's like, how would any of this concretely improve competition? In my experience, the problem is that giant companies steal your stuff, whether it's your code or your users, and that even when you want to enforce something like that, they can afford better lawyers than you.
Like nobody here is working on social networks, cellphones or web browsers. I bet you interact with IP law almost every single day though, and a lot of truly disruptive things have termination conditions like, "And then a giant company sues you for IP violations and you go bankrupt, even if you're in the right."
Maybe this benefits giant European tech companies, but it certainly doesn't benefit competition.
Everythings relative. You've got to start somewhere.
> Anyway you're right but it's like, how would any of this concretely improve competition?
I don't think this is just about competition. There has to be a recognition that social networks etc are natural monopolies, it's very hard to have competition there. Regardless of HNs utopian view of open protocols and distributed and federated social networks, the reality is that it's just not gonna happen.
So a I feel a big part of these laws isn't about creating competition, it's about making sure that mega-corporations like Facebook can't amase more power than democratically elected governments. These law make it clear that if you get to big, the EU will step in and make sure you're operating in line with their ideals, not the other way around.
> And then a giant company sues you for IP violations and you go bankrupt
Is this an issue with the FAANG giants? My sense is initiating IP litigation is more the province of legacy tech companies like IBM and Oracle. (Who aren’t being targeted by these EU laws)
I’ve seen very little examples of Apple, Google, or Amazon initiating patent lawsuits. Especially against small players. If anything most of their lobbying and litigation seems to aim to weaken IP law. (E.g. Google v. Oracle)
They like the current IP law landscape almost solely because it's the monster they know rather than the monster they don't. Moving the needle to either of the extremes (more ip control vs less) would have some positives but a load of unknown negatives.
App stores charging 30% are a majority of the EU market and Apple is a large part of it. EU tend to regulate such price fixing schemes when they get large enough, see for example credit cards.
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.
This is weird to me, the argument is not just that company X is a private platform so they should be able to do what they want it is that they're a private US platform and in the US they can do what they want because that's generally the law and social understanding of companies in the US. At least for me it was never that company X can do what they want globally.
That's silly they're subject to the laws of the jurisdiction under which they operate.
The EU is free to regulate them just like the US is free not to regulate them.
Corporations cannot do "what they want" in the US, they're subject to regulations and to anti-trust laws. The problem is that the government (both parties) has been very lax about anti-trust enforcement. So now we have companies that are virtual monopolies and oligopolies trying to remove whatever regulations still remain in the books.
Well duh. I stated as much in my last two lines. I swear people read like three words of other people's statements instead of the whole thing and then reply.
The argument that since they're a private platform they should be able to do what they want. I don't think it's ever been a blanket argument globally because the concept of a private entity is very different from nation to nation.
I am not sure anyone aside from a tiny minority of hardcore libertarians believes that "since they're a private platform they should be able to do what they want" is a valid argument.
Sure, I think I'd agree there but the OP phrased this like "Take that all you people who have been saying this" I was like that must be a fraction of a fraction of people who were.
EU have about much power to imprison you as Apple does, as in they can't unless they can convince the local police you have committed some crime. They lack power compared to US feds.
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.
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.
The EU has a legislature, it passes laws, has borders, citizens and a monetary policy.
It has limited executive functions but it does have some. It even has courts.
You sure about that? I’m open to the idea, but I don’t see it. A sui generis government that doesn’t perfectly fit the mold of prior systems is still a government. Maybe a more apt description is a government of governments? Sell me on your take.
This is a bit off-topic, but personally, I believe it to be a matter of when rather than if.
For now, the EU does have indirect ways of enforcing EU-wide legislation, as individual member countries will implement EU directives and enforce them. Thus, laws written in Brussels could result in people getting arrested, even if it ended up being a Dutch or Polish police officer doing the actual arresting.
The EU does, however, tend to stick to things that result in economical sanctions and fines, rather than incarceration.
Apple, on the other hand, has no such legislative powers.
As long as countries can leave the EU there is no way it will become as top down governed as US is. If the EU feds started to be as heavy handed as the US feds then the union would break apart, and since it is legal to leave in EU unlike US it wouldn't become a civil war.
> "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 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.
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.
No problem - the local coffee shop is also subject to regulations and needs to pay tax, need to respect hard fought worker laws (at least in most countries) and needs to respect the law.
Now there are some new regulations for bigger entities. What's the problem?
Is the problem the license plates or the license plate readers?
This is not a strong argument for the merits of “size” of business in the context of lawmaking. This demonstrates the privacy defects of what is a law enforcement tool intended for vehicle identification.
Arbitrary? Size correlates directly to power, monetary power, platform power. If size was arbitrary and meritless then why there are regulations on antitrust that are basically based on size of market capture?
Let me put it differently, market share does not equal profit share does not equal revenue share does not equal total number of people employed by does not equal share of ownership in a particular store or platform. So what is the measure?
Apple owns 100% of the App Store, but they do not recognize 100% of the revenue from the App Store on their financials.
An arbitrary number of people like 45M EU citizens choosing to use your service or buy your products or shop in your stores? I don’t see the merits for this distinction.
That’s an interesting point, but I don’t think it’s a matter of trusting one type of organization more than another.
I think we (Americans) don’t trust either without cause, and there’s more corporations than governments so there’s more opportunities to find corporations, actually scratch that, businesses, big or small, that we trust. But by default, I think we trust both about as far as we can throw them and businesses we do trust, maybe only slightly so and in a largely transactional manner. The question is whether we are getting value for the money, not whether the businesses and owners are trustworthy.
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"
I meant it as the EU has imposed regulations on big co and it hasn’t immediately ruined the EU. In the US we have this notion that if we impose even a tiny bit of common sense regulation that it will instantly ruin the economy and the country will fall apart as a result. Take minimum wage for example. Loads of economic research shows that federally mandated minimum of $15/hour would be good for the economy. Yet fully half the voters will scream bloody burger at that idea labeling it as radical. They would rather continue the government supplement the incomes of Walmart workers than having Walmart pay a fair wage because what if this hurts Walmart too much?
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.
Ugh. Ok. I don’t have time to understand this for you, but think about it this way: if a Walmart employee makes $7/hour but where he lives he needs to make $15/hour to not fall below the poverty line, you know who pays the extra $8/hour? The government. With all of its overhead of managing a social safety net program. Do you want the government to tax you so that Walmart can underpay by $8/hour? In what way does it benefit you to be taxed for that money? And remember that Walmart has plenty of money from their current prices already to pay $15/hour. Their prices need not go up to pay a living wage to their employees. So really if you are for small government, you are for raising the minimum wage and letting the market sort itself out rather than running social programs for those whose employers fail to pay them.
Small businesses will have to raise prices. But owning wage slaves isn’t justification enough for someone to run a small business.
Lastly, why this is good for the economy: you are free to do your own research but here is why this works. Give a billionaire an extra $1000/month and he will put it into his offshore account and never think about it again, let alone spend it. Give a poor person $1000/month and he will instantly put it back into the economy. This is why trickle down economy doesn’t work but stimulus programs do. If it was the other way around all the US government would have to do is hand over a few billion dollars to like five rich guys instead of negotiating stimulus deals every time there is a crisis. If you think that every time the working class is suffering the best thing to do is to prop up the rich then I, again, cannot understand for you why that’s wrong.
This right here is the difference. In the US we treat the government just like every other corporation. We expect it to screw us over and that we have no control over it and it is a self fulfilling prophecy. 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.
Re. effectiveness, see below. The EU has imposed a large number of regulations, some quite severe like the GDPR, and yet it didn’t fall apart. Not saying the GDPR is good as implemented or anything, just that despite its flaws it didn’t kill the economy or the EU, the perennial fear of right wing fear mongers.
> 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.
Trust me, the problem is not being ruled by 51% of the people, but being ruled by < 1%, which is the case with American oligarchy (or at least their final goal).
Could you please tell me more about this "oligarchy"? From my contact with the rich it seems like they want to give me lots of money so I could try some of my cool projects, not rule me - they want profit, not costs.
And trust me, being ruled by the 1% would give you way better chances than you got with the 51%. The 1% took money and gave us sci-fi technologies, the 51% took absurdly more money and gave us many problems.
Who's your coronavirus counter-strike leader - Gates or Trump?
The rich don't want to eat you. They don't care about you. They want profit, just like you. They will spend a lot of it on pleasure, just like you. Nobody makes profit in the world you're talking about, it grinds to halt, without pleasure (and freedom is connected with that) there is no point in working.
You can also avoid the 1%. They don't care, and if you're saying there are no other options then you didn't look. Actually I recommend to try - you'll find out that small and middle businesses exist, and they need your support now.
Well, that's one kind of 1%. Then there's the other kind that has enough money and uses it to amass power in domains outside of their core business. Think Koch brothers, George Soros, Rupert Murdoch. Think large donors and Super-PACs. Think politicians that, despite financial security, wield their power not for the masses but for the handful of people that will finance their next campaign instead. This is all enabled by money but going well past pure profit.
Even where only profit is concerned, there are downsides to concentrating the power in the 1%. Tax laws getting optimized for growth of capital over redistribution, loopholes large enough to allow for intergenerational dynasties over equal opportunity, copyright getting extended to a hundred years with free-use exceptions getting killed left and right.
I see your point and the likes of Gates (post-Microsoft) would make a positive difference. On the other hand, I'd prefer Joe Biden over Peter Thiel. It's very much a case-by-case kind of thing.
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.
In every generalisation, you're obviously going to miss some nuance.
French people have a long history of revolting against the political establishment, dating back to at least the French revolution, that makes them somewhat different than, say, Germany, where I live. So this is a fair point.
On the other hand, I would still think that throughout most of French history, and also now with the yellow vests, people rarely went to the streets to protest for "less regulation", and especially not in order to advocate for the interests of big corporations over those of the state. Yes, there was (is?) a French brand of anarchism, but that was always more of a "property is theft" kind of anarchism, and not a US-style libertarian anarcho-capitalism.
So, I think what I rather meant to say is the following:
Most people in Europe trust the idea of a powerful government (even if they violently disagree with its current incarnation) much more than the idea of equally powerful private corporations.
France is already over regulated. The yellow vests went to the streets to protest against reforms taxing fuel to somehow offset for climate change, then grew into an anti establishment movement.
Yes, it's true, we'd rather have a big government that runs the show than big corps (from overseas).
In fact Facebook threatened to leave the EU over a ban of sharing data with the US. I shall toast to the EU if this ever happens.
The EU didn't create its citizens (unlike Apple which created its products); saying that the EU 'owns' their market is quite a big step in assuming control over the lives of residents.
> quite a big step in assuming control over the lives of residents.
Have you heard of laws and governments before? This is exactly what they do, it’s also why democracy is such a big thing.
If you’re gonna give that much power to an organisation, you want to make sure you can change it if start going off the rails.
> The EU didn't create its citizens (unlike Apple which created its products);
It might not have “created” it’s citizens. But it certainly created and maintains the environment that make those citizens wealthy and capable of being a market for Apple.
I was just answering the parent's question: "I wonder what those people who keep saying it is Apple's platform they can do what ever they want had to say?"
They're nice views, I entertain myself that way sometimes, too.
But they all fall apart at the first meeting with the police, especially when you're the suspect. We're powerless.
And that's "just" the police, the military is the actual force of a government and they're absolutely not keen on listening to your philosophies. It's an interesting world, for sure.
No, at least not in the semi-democracy systems that are in use today. In most western countries the citizens are allowed to vote on a portion of the people that create and run the government. It varies between countries but even in those nearest a system that resembles democracy the citizens don't have much power over what happens or who most of the people running the system are.
Voters of France and Netherlands strongly rejected the treaty upon which the EU derives is legitimacy. Referendums were cancelled elsewhere.
Ursula von der Leyen did not receive any votes, she wasn't even part of the process, she was an unknown German figure until after the election, when she was plucked from obscurity by actors acting in total opacity, behind closed doors: "Here is your New Leader".
I respect much of the commercial facility of the EU, but it's severely lacking in democracy.
And while I think a lot of the intentions of the current system are reasonable, a lot of it is not ... and I'm super concerned that totally unelected and unaccountable elite are just going to be smashing their big hands into the economy, with the simplistic populist notions of 'American Economic Imperialism' and a kind of anti-American jealousy just under the surface.
It'd be nice to see much more thoughtfulness here, but more importantly, mechanisms to improve European competitiveness.
The EU democratic structure is complex, that for sure. But it's hardly undemocratic.
The EU has always struggled to explain how it works, why it's structure works the way it does. But all the leaders in the EU are elected, just not always via direct elections. A process that actually isn't that unusual in the world.
The US is actually a bit of an outlier, because they have direct elections for almost every position in government, with some slightly mixed results. The EU it's common for countries to select and organise their executive bodies via in-direct elections. For example in the UK our prime minister isn't directly elected, the general public didn't "choose" Boris Johnson. Instead the conservative party did, via its own methodology which it can change any time it does.
The current byzantine system exists out of a need to somehow balance the power of the EU as a federal entity, against the sovereignty of the individual nations. With irony come from the fact that the "unelected" leader only exist because it give more power to leaders of the member states, and takes it away from the EU as an organisation independent of its member states and their elected governments.
The EU democratic structure is complex, that for sure. But it's hardly undemocratic.
I don't really want to start a rehash of the entire Brexit debate we had in the UK, but the EU does have a serious democratic deficit.
Ask yourself this simple question: Can a citizen who is governed by the EU meaningfully influence who is doing that governing? In particular, can a large group of citizens affect who holds power within the EU and vote out those individuals they don't want, so any individual office holder has some degree of personal accountability to the electorate?
It would take quite a leap to argue that the European Commission, which is where most of the real power still lies in practice, would meet any of those standards.
It is debatable whether even the European Parliament does, though it is at least more directly affected by the public vote.
For example in the UK our prime minister isn't directly elected, the general public didn't "choose" Boris Johnson. Instead the conservative party did, via its own methodology which it can change any time it does.
Our arrangement here in the UK suffers from a similar problem of failing to faithfully represent the will of the electorate. FPTP is a deeply flawed voting system on purely mathematical grounds, and then the mechanics through which the PM and by extension the government come to power once MPs have been elected can be even more distorted.
If you don't think it matters that many of our population have little influence over who occupies Number 10, I would respectfully remind you that one of the first things each new PM does is handwrite four letters that could literally cause the end of the world as we know it.
> Can a citizen who is governed by the EU meaningfully influence who is doing that governing? In particular, can a large group of citizens affect who holds power within the EU and vote out those individuals they don't want, so any individual office holder has some degree of personal accountability to the electorate?
Erm yes. A large group of citizen can apply pressure to its local government to push for change in the EU, they can also to the same via MEP elections. You just need to remember that a "large group" need to be very large to be considered important relative to the EU 450 million citizens. The UK's total population only makes up 14% of the total EU population, what gives us the right to dictate terms over the remaining 86%?
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. As for the member picked by other governments, well you wouldn't expect to have power over an MP that doesn't represent you.
> It is debatable whether even the European Parliament does
The European Parliament obviously does. The only reason why the UK keeps getting short changed by the European Parliament is because we keep electing idiots into power. Most because our national government like to pretend MEPs don't exist, thus doesn't educate people on the importance of MEP elections, then acts surprised when the European Parliament doesn't represent the UK population.
> If you don't think it matters that many of our population have little influence over who occupies Number 10
I think it does matter, I think it matter quite a bit. But I'm not convinced that the general public is the best body to make that choice directly. 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.
My view on the EU debate in the UK has always boiled down to the fact the UK public has simply not bothered to engage with the democratic systems in the EU, so it's not a surprise that those systems don't represent us. The fix here was always for the UK to actually participate in the EU, not just strope, but that would require the UK national government to stop using the EU as it scapegoat for its own domestic failures. At least with Brexit the UK government won't be able to blame the EU for everything anymore, and we might actually get some competent leaders with a real vision for the UK.
The UK public has been told very little about the EU. There's very little local European news in the British media, and what does appear is often jokey and condescending or slanted in a negative.
A snowstorm in the US will get significant coverage, but an equivalent major weather event in France and Germany won't.
The reality is the British Establishment simply doesn't understand Europe as a social and political project. It has no clue what consensus building, social responsibility, and political integration are for, and simply sees the EU - at least, saw the EU - as an exploitable if rather shifty trading partner.
Now the EU is a competitor, the US has limited interest in the UK, the former commonwealth countries have been looking elsewhere, and the UK's rather minimal level of independent leverage is about to become very obvious.
"Erm yes. A large group of citizen can apply pressure to its local government to push for change in the EU, they can also to the same via MEP elections. "
This is obviously false, it has never happened in the history of the EU - just the opposite - citizens literally voted overwhelmingly against major treaties, and they were passed anyhow.
Explain to us right now how major nations voted against the Treaty of Lisbon, and it was enacted anyhow?
"It is debatable whether even the European Parliament does
The European Parliament obviously does. "
It obviously doe not, the evidence is clear: MEPs don't even have the right to introduce legislation, they don't chose or censure their leaders, they have almost no power at all.
"thus doesn't educate people on the importance of MEP elections, then acts surprised when the European Parliament doesn't represent the UK population."
Again, completely baseless claims. The level of awareness of MEP involvement is similarly low in other countries.
"My view on the EU debate in the UK has always boiled down to the fact the UK public has simply not bothered to engage with the democratic systems in the EU"
No - there is no meaningful way for individual citizens or groups to engage with on the EU level, by reason of scale and design, it was never meant to be that way.
Ask yourself the question:
+ Why can MEPs not introduce legislation?
+ Why can MEPs not meaningfully censure leaders?
+ Why can MEPs, the only elected officials, not chose the leadership cadre?
+ Why is election turnout a paltry 45%
Those were concrete, well designed choices, and the lack of democracy embodied in those choices was purposeful.
The EU was specifically designed with a democracy deficit to keep the plebes and populism at bay.
Those who defend the system are either ignorant of the reality of it, like Chinese commoners defending their President Xi on the basis of 'security and prosperity' - or they know the Machiavellian roots of the decisions and are just unwilling to admit it.
Pro EU people are so often unwilling to engage in any way in the issue, they're like Trumpers or the more hardcore patriotic America types who see no wrong or nuance in American foreign policy example.
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.
> 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.
In my country (France) there is exactly one level of indirection between me and Ursula von der Leyen: the President (currently Emmanuel Macron). Of course my voice is only one among 60 million French citizens, and 450 million EU citizens. And yet since I personally voted for Macron and IIRC Macron is the one who proposed Ursula von der Leyen, the line is pretty straight... In the UK there would be two levels: you elect your MPs, that then chose the Prime Minister, that then chose the European Commission President and Commissioners.
But I understand what you say. I had heard about Ursula von der Leyen as Germany defense minister before she became President of the European Commission (but that's only because I pay some attention to European defense affairs), yet when I cast my vote for Macron, I wasn't quite expecting to be voting for her.
I would prefer for the head of the European Commission to be elected by European MPs, but that would give too much power to the EU, a big no no for many EU members (including UK, at least while it was part of the EU). Notice the irony in that it's usually the political parties that criticize the EU the most for being undemocratic, that are the ones that oppose it becoming more democratic the most. It's disingenuous, yet logical, because a more democratic EU would have more power, so if you are anti-EU you don't want that.
As things stand the European Commission is only doing what the European Council is asking them to do. Which is somewhat ok (as in democratic), but lend itself more to shenanigans between states. If the European Commission was instead bound to the European Parliament, it would care less of the member states, and more of European citizens...
> 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.
In France it's usually perceived as a promotion. Our previous representative (Pierre Moscovici) was rather popular, and the current one (Thierry Breton) isn't even a politician: he was the CEO of Atos (a competitor of IBM I would say). Although he was minister once, from 2005 until 2007, so he is not a complete newbie in politics. Isn't it somewhat ironic that left-leaning France is sending a successful CEO to the European Commission, while UK is (was) recycling failing politicians?
> 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.
Well it up to each national government to decide this process. If you're not happy with the way your national government makes this selection, then I encourage you to reach out to you national government representative and make your views heard. If it's something you really care about, then start a grassroots movement, or join a large national political party, and advance change the same way you would for any other domestic issue.
It seems like at very large, and undemocratic, over step for the EU to dictate how national governments run their affairs within the boundaries of the treats that define the EU. Something that every national government in the EU ratified. If you're not happy with how your national government ratified those treaties, then I again recommend the above, contact your local national government representative and make your views heard.
> 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.
This is hardly a surprise. The whole point of European Commissioners is it's how national governments retain their own sovereignty. Of-course they're going to give the role to people they know and trust, they want them to be aligned with their own national interests, not the broader EU interests. Once again, you don't like it, talk to your national government, this is their choice, not the EU's. Most people in the EU with a federalist world view would much rather see more direct democracy within the EU, with a reduction in power of national governments in the process.
> so again at a minimum it fails my personal accountability criterion.
You have a strange concept of what personal accountability means, why does the electorate need a direct method of removing an individual? How would that even work? Not to mention the issue that it turns the entire political system into little more than a popularity contest. People who are good national leaders are not always good campaigners, and good campaigner are not always good leaders. Boris Johnson in the UK is a classic example of the latter.
> 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.
Well interestingly have a healthy PR system with many parties makes this very easy. When your government is made up of many parties collaborating together, it's easier for the electorate to just vote for someone else, without it causing a huge swing in government direction.
I notice that in your previous comment, you talk about how terrible FPTP is, now your saying the PR is also bad. What exactly do you want?
> 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.
I'm glad you recognise that you're demands aren't fulfilled by any current form of democracy anywhere in the world. But, you know, this whole democracy thing is still a work in progress, to quote Churchill
> No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time
I'm personally not ready to throw the towel in just yet. Sure the EU needs work, I don't disagree, but I don't think it fundamentally less democratic than any other democratic government. Humanity is still trying to figure out this whole fair and equitable division of power and resources. And rather than just rubbishing all the work so far, I much prefer to focus on area where it's really worked. Such as the 75 years uninterrupted of peace the Europe has had, thanks to the EU, to grow and prosper into a place where countries like the UK can throw a tantrum and storm off, and no one needs to worry about a war.
Well, I'm a Brit, so the only response I can offer to much of your comment is that apparently enough of my fellow voters did feel strongly enough about these issues that Brexit was the result. Obviously not everyone agrees that leaving the entire organisation was a desirable or proportionate response to its perceived flaws, but that's what happened.
I'll address a couple of your other specific points directly.
You have a strange concept of what personal accountability means, why does the electorate need a direct method of removing an individual? How would that even work? Not to mention the issue that it turns the entire political system into little more than a popularity contest.
The argument is that representatives who have no credible accountability for their actions are free to misrepresent the people they supposedly act for. It creates a principal-agent problem.
As for how it would work, elections where individual candidates are personally supported by votes is one major factor. Powers of recall for representatives who fall far short of the expectations of their electorate are also not unusual, though obviously not universal.
And democracy is inevitably a popularity contest at first anyway. Only after someone has held office for a while can you judge them on their actions rather than their words. For example, when Johnson was elected in December 2019, I doubt many people voting for his party realised that the next year was going to be dominated by something very different to Brexit. At this point, if enough people felt that the Johnson government's response to the coronavirus situation was inadequate, a situation that was barely conceivable at the time the people last voted, is it not reasonable in a democracy that the people should be able to choose new leadership instead of enduring policies the current government had given no substantial indication about before the last election and any consequences they may have for public health?
I notice that in your previous comment, you talk about how terrible FPTP is, now your saying the PR is also bad. What exactly do you want?
I didn't say PR was bad in general. I said party list systems fail my criteria for individual accountability of representatives, which they do. I consider this a significant democratic deficit, and one which could have been avoided by using a better voting system at the relevant elections. Nevertheless, it still results in a more-or-less proportional representation, and in that respect it is clearly superior to FPTP.
> Can a citizen who is governed by the EU meaningfully influence who is doing that governing? In particular, can a large group of citizens affect who holds power within the EU and vote out those individuals they don't want, so any individual office holder has some degree of personal accountability to the electorate?
In theory, yes. But it would take a huge group of people. Which is practically impossible these days.
So you are right, there is a serious deficit of democracy, not only in the EU, but everywhere imo.
I realised after I wrote my original comment that I forgot to add a rider along the lines of "without causing profound and possibly unwanted side effects", which is often the fundamental problem with having indirectly elected (aka appointed without a popular vote) people in positions of power.
And you're right, this is a very widespread problem today. That doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge the issue and challenge the status quo where opportunities present, of course.
I don't see how Brexit was supposed to fix an alleged EU democratic deficit when the UK suffers from the same problems - even more so, because most EU countries don't have FPTP.
In fact the EC is just the EU's version of the UK cabinet, but on a bigger scale. Everyone present is elected by their national voters, but there are - as yet - no direct EU-wide elections for specific EU posts.
Opponents of the EU criticise this while simultaneously being furious at any hint of closer political union which might make direct EU-wide elections possible.
Just to be clear, I'm neither arguing for nor arguing against Brexit here.
Personally, I am a politically interested floating voter with no party affiliation. On the specific issue of Brexit, I have always had mixed feelings, for the simple reason that I expect it to have both some good and some bad effects for both the UK and the EU27, and I'm not sure anyone truly knows what the balance between them will end up being in the long term.
Something that does matter to me very much is how we run our governments, and that governments act with popular support and are accountable to their people. On this count, I do indeed make very similar criticisms of the way the EU operates and the way our own system of government operates here in the UK.
In that case I don't understand your point. You seem to be arguing for direct representation in the previous comment and arguing against it in the comment below.
I'm not really arguing for or against direct representation as such. I tend to judge democratic systems by their practical effects. Do they result in governments that act with popular support? Are the individuals who achieve power within those governments accountable to the people they supposedly act for, such that there will be consequences for them personally if they don't faithfully act for the people and do a decent job of it?
It's true that directly elected representatives are, in some situations, more likely to meet those standards. Indirectly elected officials are, by the nature of the system, not in need of a personal popular mandate to achieve power, nor directly accountable to the people, and the gap widens as more levels of indirection separate the official from someone who actually had to win a popular vote.
But I'm not necessarily arguing for directly electing everyone in public office. I don't think that works very well in practice either, because voters get election fatigue and anything but the big ticket elections can easily end up being more about which candidates have the best PR and spin rather than the best policies on the issues.
What I do think would be a big improvement in many cases is directly electing the people at the top of a system of government and having appointed officials subordinate to them. Many of the democratic deficits identified in this discussion, from forming the European Commission to choosing the PM and by extension the government in the UK, are examples where the lower level representatives are the only ones who actually have to win an election, and then some number of averages of averages up the tree you get the people with most of the real power being isolated from needing to attract or maintain popular support. I don't think this kind of arrangement is healthy for democracy, and I think forcing direct elections for those most senior positions would go some way to fixing the problem.
She was nominated by the Council of Europe (comprised of the heads of state for each of the EU nations), and confirmed by the European Parliament (which represents the European electorate).
That is a very uncharitable and weak interpretation of the grandparent. For the parliamentary elections, the bigger parties agreed to try to fix democracy deficits by promising to elect a nominated candidate (Frans Timmmermans and Manfred Weber) as president of the commission depending on which block won in parliament. Yet, after the election, in a typical EU backroom deal, von der Leyen was elected. So it is quite fair to say that no constituent voted for her in any meaningful way.
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.
This is not true, and the most recent election in the UK is strong evidence of this.
UK voters know which parties they are voting for, their platforms, and their leaders, turnout is high, and there is general awareness of the issues.
In mostly the same way in other 'good' EU nations.
Parliament can fall if there's a lack of confidence in leadership, particularly on an important issue, in which case, there's an election. This happen with Johnson in the UK wherein there was an 'issue election' called and people were well aware of the issues.
This was actually a pretty strong and democratic process: Johnson had not been elected, so he went to the polls and people had material, meaningful input.
In proportional representation systems, leaders can change without elections as well (see: Sweden, Finland etc.) and it's not exactly perfect but it works well enough.
The 'good' European nations have pretty good democracy at the national level.
It's at the EU level that it's all Byzantine. Pun intended.
It's only opaque if you don't care enough to study the question. Ursula von der Leyen was chosen by the members of the European Council.
The European Council, among other responsibilities, "decides on the EU's overall direction and political priorities", and "nominates and appoints candidates to certain high profile EU level roles, such as the ECB and the Commission". [1] If you have to know only one thing about the EU, it's that one: power lies in the hand of the European Council.
The current members of the European Council are: Alexander De Croo for Belgium, Boyko Borisov for Bulgaria, Andrej Babiš for the Czech Republic, Mette Frederiksen for Denmark, Angela Merkel for Germany, Jüri Ratas for Estonia, Micheál Martin for Ireland, Kyriakos Mitsotakis for Greece, Pedro Sánchez for Spain, Emmanuel Macron for France, Andrej Plenković for Croatia, Giuseppe Conte for Italy, Nicos Anastasiades for Cyprus, Krišjānis Kariņš for Latvia, Gitanas Nausėda for Lithuania, Xavier Bettel for Luxembourg, Viktor Orbán for Hungary, Robert Abela for Malta, Mark Rutte for the Netherlands, Sebastian Kurz for Austria, Mateusz Morawiecki for Poland, António Costa for Portugal, Klaus Iohannis for Romania, Janez Janša for Slovenia, Igor Matovič for the Slovak Republic, Sanna Marin for Finland, and finally Stefan Löfven for Sweden.
If you don't like the direction of the EU, ask your representant to do something about it. Otherwise pick another one. They are all democratically elected (directly, or indirectly in parliamentary systems).
The EU is currently based upon the Treaty of Lisbon [1] signed in 2007 after the referenda of 2005 for the new constitution (Spain yes, France and Netherlands nay)
Yes, exactly. Nations gave away sovereign, constitutional powers literally after their populations boldly rejected the terms, in a fair and open democratic processes.
Other European nations, verging on 'voting no' were denied the chance precisely because the EU apparatus knew what the outcome would be.
There's basically no defence of that issue, and the patronizing arguments defending 'indirect' nature of democracy of the EU wear thin - voters have no material impact on the EU, which is how it was designed, very much on purpose.
The limitation that MEPs have no ability to introduce legislation or frankly drive any of the real legislative process is by design.
It's mesmerizing to watch legions of young people defend an undemocratic system that their ancestors literally fought for 2000 years to overcome, with literally millions dead. 'Reason' lasted only one generation, before ostensibly well meaning actors took away the rights of the plebes before their eyes, and convinced them that it was in their best interest.
There is obvious need for reform, and if there was, I'll bet Norway and UK would be part of it, and possibly even Switzerland.
> It's mesmerizing to watch legions of young people defend an undemocratic system that their ancestors literally fought for 2000 years to overcome, with literally millions dead.
It's mesmerizing to watch legions of young people defend a Union they grew up in with no wars, with relative economic stability, with open borders and unencumbered travel. Compared to their ancestors who literally sacrificed millions of people fighting over each square millimiter of land for centuries on end.
> There is obvious need for reform, and if there was, I'll bet Norway and UK would be part of it, and possibly even Switzerland.
Norway and Switzerland are not part of EU [1]. UK has left the EU and it will be fascinating how it will function now that it has severed basically all ties with the EU.
[1] They are a part of the Schengen Area and various other treaties. They are, however, tightly integrated into the EU and are basically bound by most of EU's laws.
"It's mesmerizing to watch legions of young people defend a Union they grew up in with no wars, with relative economic stability, with open borders and unencumbered travel."
A little bit like a Chinese citizen, defending their lack of democracy 'because 7% growth every year and stability!'.
Not only are things things 1) possible without the EU, 2) they were mostly put in place long before the body politic existed (the EEC is a primary driver of the above) 3) it has nothing to do with the democracy deficit.
"UK has left the EU and it will be fascinating how it will function now that it has severed basically all ties with the EU."
The UK has not 'severed all ties' ... but, are you truly asking how it's possible for a sovereign nation to function without the EU?
How does Australia function?
How does Japan function?
?
They will all get along mostly fine.
Again - none of the arguments given point to any reasonable underlying motivation for denying EU citizens the right to chose their leaders.
--> EU citizens are denied the right to vet, or vote for the leaders and their platforms, their elected officials cannot enact legislation, and their ability to censure the non-elected leaders (this is maybe the most important power) is basically non-existent.
Yes, a bit. A very tiny bit. And your inability to empathise with these people is telling.
> The UK has not 'severed all ties' ... but, are you truly asking how it's possible for a sovereign nation to function without the EU?
By spending decades building relationships with other countries.
The EU is UK's largest trading partner. It is a huge common market with no borders, barriers, or tariffs. The EU has trade agreements with over a hundred countries that all members benefit from. Including, yes, Australia and Japan.
By severing ties the UK establishes a barrier between itself and EU common market, it exits all trade agreements between EU and other countries, and so on and so forth. It will be decades before the UK re-establishes similar deals.
> EU citizens are denied the right to vet, or vote for the leaders and their platforms
Just a few years ago I voted in EU parliamentary elections. That doesn't sound like "denied the right to vet or vote".
By mining huge amounts of raw resources and selling to their near by neighbours as well as the rest of the world.
The U.K. doesn’t have access to any useful raw materials apart from perhaps coal.
> How does Japan function?
Through massive government borrowing. Their debt is 223% of GDP. Now it hasn’t really bitten them yet, but it’s increasingly looking like it’s gonna be a serious problem for them.
I’m not either of those options is something I would pick for the U.K.
> ancestors literally fought for 2000 years to overcome, with literally millions dead.
Not sure how good your history is. But the EU was built by an ancestors who were fed of fighting and dying by the millions in wars that did nothing to actually improve people lives.
The whole purpose of the EU from day zero was to ensure lasting peace in Europe, and given there haven't been any domestic European wars since its creation, I would say it's been pretty successful.
"The whole purpose of the EU from day zero was to ensure lasting peace in Europe"
?
You do realize the EU as a body politic is very recent?
(Not sure how good your history is. ?)
1) Yes, major powers who have economically integrated tend not to fight, that's great. It's the same all over the world. The US doesn't fight Japan either.
2) Europe's true sovereign guarantor, the US and their Nuclear Umbrella, which is the other 1/2 of the equation.
'The EU' is long after the fact.
Moreover - it's besides the point - as I articulated, the EU has fundamental flaws with respect to democracy that can't be addressed with any reasonable argument it seems.
EU citizens have little to no influence over their body politic, because all the power is a few points indirection away from their reach.
Europeans were told after the election who their anointed leader would be, what her political platform was, and what her vision for the EU was.
Just consider why for a moment the EU doesn't require leaders to be publicly announced and vetted before elections? Wouldn't that be a highly rational, reasonable, and arguably necessary element for legitimate democracy?
What were EU leaders thinking when they definitely decided that this would not be required?
It's absurd.
Many citizens saw it was absurd, voted against the Constitutional Treaty, and it was passed anyhow.
> Europeans were told after the election who their anointed leader would be, what her political platform was, and what her vision for the EU was.
> Just consider why for a moment the EU doesn't require leaders to be publicly announced and vetted before elections?
I'm from Italy. This is exactly what our Constitution provides about our Prime Ministers. They can be anybody, even without a seat in Parliament (or current Prime Minister doesn't.) The President of the Republic appoints them, probably even you because I don't see requirements about citizenship or residency. They must be confirmed by a vote of the Parliament (50%+1) and that's it. Actually, if they are not confirmed they still are Prime Minister until the President appoints somebody else. You can check Articles 92 to 96 of the Constitution at http://www.senato.it/documenti/repository/istituzione/costit... (PDF, English) from the site of one of the chambers of the Parliament.
I don't particularly like this but it's an example of how that is usual in Europe. Many other countries don't have direct elections for their leaders. Given this status it's normal that we don't elect the President of the Commission.
Furthermore what really matters is the Council, made by the leaders of each country. The Commission is the government but the real power is in the Council. A Commission going against the Council doesn't have any political backing.
I fail to understand how your particular case works. Not having a horse in the race but just a piece of paper you don't care about doesn't help you to make a point, which is what exactly?
I was replying to a comment that said: "The EU is its citizens. So in a sense the EU did create its citizens." I tried to show that I was a counter-example.
Of course the EU created her citizens, do you think European citizenship is some sort of fact of nature? Like people woke up in Europe in a cave and were like "Yeah of course we're cosmopolitan citizens of the United European states" ?
All the rules, all the borders, all their values have been created, quite hard earned in fact, with a lot of blood and sweat along the way I might add, even more so than at an Apple smartphone factory if you can believe it.
You might want to check what the Treaty on European Union (Title II, Article 9) says about that:
"Every national of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union. Citizenship of the Union shall be additional to and not replace national citizenship."[0]
It is possible to possess a citizenship without owning any legal documents that mention that fact.
Governments do however create corporations, which is an artificial structure that can only exist due to government control over the intersection between the marketplace and the legal system.
I'd be tempted to think the concept of "corporations" pre-dates "government" as we know them today, and these secular traditions were merely enshrined in Law.
you know what sort of corporations you get without governments? without schools and universities that educate their employers? or the research that has supported ALL the technologies that these companies have exploited? or build ALL the infrastructure (roads, electricity, water...)
> A interesting point missing from the BBC article is that they have different levels of expectations between small to medium businesses and large ones, to avoid regulatory capture ? :
It's easy to overlook, but the BBC article does have this line:
> It introduces a sliding scale, under which firms take on more obligations the larger and more influential they are.
> Another interesting tidbit is the answer to the common trope that 'private platform can act as they wish since they are private' :
In the US we have a similar trope with respect to social media companies, that they don't have a responsibility to protect free speech because they are a private entity; however, they also argue that they aren't responsible when they curate illegal content.
EDIT: Wow, I didn't expect this to be a controversial or particularly unpopular comment. I wonder if downvoters could elaborate a bit on their objections?
Strange argument your making there. One of the interesting side effects of free speech rights is also the prevention of forced speech. After all how can you have free speech if someone else can force to express views you don’t hold?
Why should my right to free speech trump your right to not be forced to speak? Equally what right to I have to force any corporation to publish and distribute speech they don’t agree with?
Based on the argument your making, you’re saying that I have the right to go to your home, plaster it with posters that you disagree with, then prevent you from removing them.
I don't see how I am forcing you as a person to say a damn thing. You've entered into a new level of tactical nihilism here.
> you’re saying that I have the right to go to your home, plaster it with posters that you disagree with, then prevent you from removing them.
How is your personal home the same thing as a gigantic, billion-user social network that has effectively (especially in 2020) replaced the pub, the bar, the town square, and the public forum? It's not, and you know it isn't.
Step back and look at yourself: you're defending the right of billion dollar corporations to tell you what you can and cannot say.
> How is your personal home the same thing as a gigantic, billion-user social network that has effectively (especially in 2020) replaced the pub, the bar, the town square, and the public forum? It's not, and you know it isn't.
I think the scale is a good point (no idea what your original post contained since it was flagged before I read it). Twitter and a handful of other social media companies handle (by which I mean "choose who gets to see what content") such an enormous volume of speech that its moderation policies can influence elections and therefore public policy. Moreover, their power is inherently anti-competitive--users can't take their network to another platform because these platforms don't interoperate by design. It seems like this is an antitrust issue, especially since these networks tend to lobby together to protect their interests.
It’s a bulletin board with a bunch of hired people with megaphones around it. The company decides which announcements the people with megaphones shout out. It’s free to decide not to.
I think you have the FB issue upside down. Do you think the EU is interested in 'free speech'? No, the EU want to make sure that they able to suppress language they don't like. In some cases, it's probably for the common good, but in many others ... not so much.
The EU, US and other actors definitely want FB et. al. to suppress information which they deem as 'factually innacurate' (things that can sway elections, scare people away from vaccines etc.) in addition to a few other points of interest, for example, things they deem 'hate speech' etc..
Edit:
Personally - I'm not sure how I feel about any of it really, but it's definitely not the case that either the EU is primarily to ensure 'free speech'.
Austria high court ruling for a form of censorship:
"that Facebook remove a post insulting a former Green Party leader, keep equivalent posts off its site, and do so on a global scale." [1]
And at then at the EU level: "Facebook Risks EU Court Order to Censor Hateful Posts Globally" [2]
This is the general theme of EU judicial and legislative activity.
I don't see anything really that much in the other direction.
>A interesting point missing from the BBC article is that they have different levels of expectations between small to medium businesses and large ones, to avoid regulatory capture ? :
Yes that does seem like it could be bumpy. I like the UK approach https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55230704
which seems to be that they will have more flexibility - hopefully not over-flex, but a set of rules catering for the large companies, which at the scale is maybe a more manageable approach without culling all the middle/small growing companies with some solid rule that is less fiscally impacting upon the large players.
However, a final thought for all - countries been doing their own TAX laws for ages and the companies that always manage to play that game better than those who write the rules are....large companies of the type these are targeting. So I don't think it will improve overnight, but does seem that the right direction would be a good place to start.
> The road is still long before ratification, but it looks like a step in the good direction.
Yes and with the EU, just one country could hold the whole thing up and Ireland may have more of a vested interest in the large tech firms than many others, so may or may not be more suitable to corporate lobbying factors.
I haven't read the details, but I'm surprised not only by the tiers, but that the measure would be something like "reach". How do you accurately and consistently measure "reach" with the internet? Language adapted sites as a ratio of the population that is possibly able or actively accesses the internet? Accounts? Active accounts?
Also, my first thought is to simply then start breaking up into smaller social media companies that are somehow networked. It may actually be that this brings about just that, that we get a kind of adversarial competition or interoperability (I think it's being referred to).
I just find it extremely disheartening that with all the good work and forward thinking it seems the EU is doing, their free speech policies are right out of a dystopian terror novel, the more so as ever more and tighter speech and though control measures are put in place.
It WILL snuff out and strangle innovation and creativity when there is constant fear of drawing the ire of the Thought Police based on intentionally ambiguous thought and speech limitations that are arbitrarily enforced. It's unfortunate that Europeans do not have the courage and conviction to allow for free speech, but it also seems like it is being snuffed out in the USA too. Pursuant consequences will inevitably follow.
the free speech in the usa is also something out of a dystopian terror novel. Writers (e.g. in the atlantic) like to say that our time is less like 1984 and more like brave new world in that all the noise that is allowed through free speech leads to bad results (trump, brexit, anti-social media etc.) that are not necessarily better than what the EU is trying to avert with its free speech agenda.
I'd argue some regulation is necessary since the popularity contests that thrive within the current media environment do not lead to enlightened people (since it's not necessarily the smartest/most empathetic argument that wins/gets all the attention). However, it's a slippery road, that's for sure (and you CAN deconstruct my arguments in that way) - but let's be honest: allowing ALL free speech and letting the loudmouth that makes fun about the out-group win all the arguments is not a solution either.
I don't see the connection at all. Neither the UK nor the US are dystopian or anywhere close to it. You can call Trump and Brexit bad results, but the people voted for that. It was their choice. Saying that we need limits on speech so that people wouldn't vote for them sounds dystopian instead.
On top of that, I'd argue that while the US and the UK aren't doing great as a result of those choices people made, you can't really know that they were disastrous choices. For one, the US and UK haven't gotten themselves into another war, which sounds like a major upside to me.
In the US hate speech is protected as free speech, but you can’t swear on air...
Also, protection of hate speech was the reason that enabled a substantial chunk of trump voters, so i wouldn’t be that quick to point a dystopian finger at the EU
I would say that any company that has 45 million customers is doing pretty good. 10% definitely makes many companies the largest in their sector, not every company is a Google or Amazon that’s completely consumed it’s market.
Maybe. I could see sites removing access to less profitable users, probably in lower income countries to stay below the 45 million threshold. Or perhaps boot low-engagement users in order to keep user-counts below the threshold. When regulation exists with a threshold, enterprises will strive to stay below it. Hence why there's such a huge drop-off in businesses with 50 or more employees in France [1] [2].
That could still be an improvement. It would mean that the reach of those sites can't grow beyond 10% in the EU. Other sites would then pick up the users that were left out.
> The operators of online platforms - such as social media apps and video-sharing sites of any size - must prioritise complaints raised by "trusted flaggers", who have a track record of highlighting valid problems.
Who determines which problems are valid? Unless I overlooked something, this article seems really vague.
> Likewise, all online stores must be able to trace traders selling goods via their platforms, in case they are offering counterfeit items or other illegal products. "[It] will require online marketplaces to check their sellers' identity before they are allowed on the platform, which will make it so much more difficult for dodgy traders to do their business," commented Mr Breton.
I'm excited about the crackdown on counterfeit products, but I also wonder if it will raise the barrier of entry for sellers (if Amazon has to spend money to validate a given seller, why should they do business with smaller sellers?). Hopefully this authentication mechanism can be inexpensive such that it doesn't disenfranchise too much legitimate business at the small end of the spectrum; big players already enjoy tremendous regulatory advantages over smaller players--no need to compound it further.
> In addition, once a year they must publish a report into their handling of major risks, including users posting illegal content, disinformation that could sway elections, and the unjustified targeting of minority groups.
I'm really wary of "disinformation that could sway elections" and "unjustified targeting of minority groups"; how do you litigate these fairly? One person's "racial advocacy" is another person's "racial patronization". These seem super subjective and thus ripe for abuse. Hopefully this too is just a case of poor journalism and the legislation is better.
The status of trusted flaggers under this Regulation shall be awarded, upon application by any entities, by the Digital Services Coordinator of the Member State in which the applicant is established, where the applicant has demonstrated to meet all of the following conditions:
(a) it has particular expertise and competence for the purposes of detecting, identifying and notifying illegal content;
(b) it represents collective interests and is independent from any online platform;
(c) it carries out its activities for the purposes of submitting notices in a timely, diligent and objective manner.
---
on a Single Market For Digital Services (Digital Services Act) and amending Directive 2000/31/EC
(50)
To ensure an efficient and adequate application of that obligation, without imposing any disproportionate burdens, the online platforms covered should make reasonable efforts to verify the reliability of the information provided by the traders concerned, in particular by using freely available official online databases and online interfaces, such as national trade registers and the VAT Information Exchange System, or by requesting the traders concerned to provide trustworthy supporting documents, such as copies of identity documents, certified bank statements, company certificates and trade register certificates. They may also use other sources, available for use at a distance, which offer a similar degree of reliability for the purpose of complying with this obligation. However, the online platforms covered should not be required to engage in excessive or costly online fact-finding exercises or to carry out verifications on the spot. Nor should such online platforms, which have made the reasonable efforts required by this Regulation, be understood as guaranteeing the reliability of the information towards consumer or other interested parties.
---
Not sure about your third point yet, I've only briefly jumped around in the (lengthy) full text.
The Internet Watch Foundation has made questionable calls in the past, like the one where they blocked Wikipedia for having a controversial (yet legal and historically relevant) image of a naked child.
Despite this, the IWF might be one of the more reputable "trusted flaggers", and this system may open the door for far worse ones to enter into the scene.
I agree that fact checkers are a nasty can of worms, but here they're only expected to flag illegal content, which I don't think is a comparable concern.
This sounds like it's something akin to YouTubecs DMCA process. I doubt that they will do a good job making sure that trusted flaggers won't abuse their power.
I'm not going to claim it'll be without issue, but it seems way more robust than DCMA, since there's an appeals process that can boot people out the program if they flag incorrectly too much.
> must prioritise complaints raised by "trusted flaggers"
That's the real concern here. Speech must be handled very carefully, but now we're elevating some specific people to be 'more equal' than others? Who are these people, and why do they get more say? I can see that opening a can of worms.
I don't live in the EU, but just like that well intentioned but shortsighted cookie law, the rest of us will have to deal with the fallout of that for a long time to come.
This is the trend of the past decade. More and more people are expected to work as replaceable drones without any real career advancement, or a shot at affording retirement, house, or family/kids. But the social pressure resulting from this is cleverly redirected. Instead of being passionate about starting their own business (and competing with the former employer), they are now passionate about policing what others can say or do. Instead of creating a new cool product, they create rules that others must follow in fear of being canceled.
This costs nothing on the corporate expense sheets, but makes the society increasingly more toxic.
Well you might address it also the way you have mentioned but there is a tiny issue. European culture and its laws are highly problematic in regards to todays behaviour and income that large internet companies profit from (spying on users and use their data essentially against them - even for just showing the ads). Today there is just no way to make your own 3rd party OS / search engine / social network (regardless if it would be better) as development is too expensive on the other side you dont have financing from the same murky practices that were just too new when current giants (and even those have monopoly so there is literally no way to finance yourself) came out.
Yes, they were first but now they are strangling everybody.
And this is not only true for EU, same goes for USA. Someone will have to do something about it but with the power of home lobbying I dont believe that the States will do anything meaningful. On the other side, EU needs to protect its market.
The purpose of this is to ensure that organizations like the European equivalents of RIAA and MPAA have basically one click disable buttons (not strictly required, but how most sites will implement it) for content they claim infringes their copyrights, or is otherwise illegal. This would also be used by organizations that track down child porn etc.
As for who is a trusted flagger: "The status of trusted flaggers under this Regulation shall be awarded, upon
application by any entities, by the Digital Services Coordinator of the Member State in which the applicant is established where the applicant has demonstrated to meet
all of the following conditions: (a) it has particular expertise and competence for the purposes of detecting,
identifying and notifying illegal content; (b) it represents collective interests and is independent from any online platform; (c) it carries out its activities for the purposes of submitting notices in a timely, diligent and objective manner. "
I.E. if you can convince your local government that you should be one, bam you are one, and online platform the EU needs to expedite processing of any notices you make.
On the other end of the spectrum, the companies are required to allow you to appeal takedowns and account suspensions/terminations (for TOS or illegal content reasons, not for non-payment reasons) for a 6 month period. Further, if you appeal a takedown or account suspension and the company rejects your appeal, the law will allow you to take the matter to binding arbitration. If the user wins, the company pays all costs, and must reinstate the content or account. If the user loses, they only pay their portion of arbitration costs. (The company's portion are just part of doing business in the EU).
This makes it very difficult to host any sort of "borderline" content in the E.U. If someone decides they don't like your decision on a contentious matter, and a court agrees with them, you're the one who'll take the fall for making the wrong call.
> That's the real concern here. Speech must be handled very carefully, but now we're elevating some specific people to be 'more equal' than others? Who are these people, and why do they get more say? I can see that opening a can of worms.
Well, who are the people that censor all other kinds of media? As far as I know movies are censored (Motion Picture Production Code, Motion Picture Association film rating system), music is censored (Parental Advisories), TV is censored (TV station licenses), radio (radio station licenses) is censored, news paper are censored (I can't find the exact reference).
The roof hasn't fallen because of existing censorship, or am I missing something?
To be clear, movie and music ratings aren't censorship. Moreover, only broadcast television and radio are censored (perhaps because radio waves are a public platform?). I'm not going to argue that censoring broadcast is ideal or valid, but I'm certainly less sympathetic to the plight of massive media companies than I am to millions of private citizens.
> To be clear, movie and music ratings aren't censorship.
To the extent they are incorporated with schemes that limit access to the rated content imposed by powerful entities outside of the transaction, they are part of schemes of censorship. (Public censorship schemes that incorporate movie ratings, and thus delegate to movie raters the role of public censor, are common.)
> I'm not going to argue that censoring broadcast is ideal or valid, but I'm certainly less sympathetic to the plight of massive media companies than I am to millions of private citizens.
Censorship by a third party equally impacts the rights of the parties on both sides of a potential transaction; broadcast media censorship restricts the freedom of both massive media companies and millions of private citizens.
> To the extent they are incorporated with schemes that limit access to the rated content imposed by powerful entities outside of the transaction, they are part of schemes of censorship. (Public censorship schemes that incorporate movie ratings, and thus delegate to movie raters the role of public censor, are common.)
No doubt they are part of "schemes of censorship" in some literal sense, but if someone publishes a rating and another chooses to use that rating as the basis of censorship, the onus is still squarely on the part of the censor and not the rater.
> Censorship by a third party equally impacts the rights of the parties on both sides of a potential transaction; broadcast media censorship restricts the freedom of both massive media companies and millions of private citizens.
You're conflating several things. Yes, censorship by a third party has similar effects to government censorship, but we treat them differently because the government is a special entity (ultimately because it enjoys a monopoly on violence and force). There are legitimate questions about when a third party becomes so powerful that it can unilaterally affect government (as with social media companies being a vector for the manipulation of elections), but this is the purview of anti-trust as I understand it (and I strongly support anti-trust action against social media corporations for precisely this reason).
The other conflated issues are "freedom to speak" vs "freedom to hear". Yes, restrictions on the content of broadcast media corporations limits the "freedom to hear" of millions of citizens as it does with restrictions on social media; however, restricting social media also infringes on millions' freedoms to speak.
Indeed, when you consider that the volume of communication in a social media network is combinatorial, the impact on regulations is far greater than for restrictions on traditional broadcast media.
> You're conflating several things. Yes, censorship by a third party has similar effects to government censorship, but we treat them differently
My post was discussing whether censorship occurred and whose freedom was affected. While it did mention certain explictly public schemes, it nowhere argued that other schemes should be treated as government censorship, so you are inventing a position here for the sole purpose of claiming it is in error and a conflation of different things.
>> You're conflating several things. Yes, censorship by a third party has similar effects to government censorship, but we treat them differently
> My post was discussing whether censorship occurred and whose freedom was affected. While it did mention certain explictly public schemes, it nowhere argued that other schemes should be treated as government censorship, so you are inventing a position here for the sole purpose of claiming it is in error and a conflation of different things.
You brought up the 'third party vs government' dynamic; I was merely mentioning that it's distinct from the dynamic of 'freedom to speak' vs 'freedom to hear'. I specifically never claimed that you were arguing that we should treat third parties the same as the government. No need to speculate about my motives.
> You brought up the 'third party vs government' dynamic
No, “third-party” contrasts with the parties involved in the transaction (mostly the source, which may exercise self-censorship, which does not restrict the freedom of the participants the way third-party censorship does.)
The government would be an example of a third-party censor, not something distinct from it.
Fair enough, I misunderstood your meaning; thanks for clarifying. The "'freedom to listen' vs 'freedom to speak'" concern still stands (i.e., no, restricting private citizens' speech on social media platforms doesn't have exactly the same effect as limiting the content that broadcast media corps can publish on the airwaves).
Censored for children only. I don’t think anyone over 18 is subject to the censorship. That is disregarding laws specifically targeting pornography, of course.
Imposing a proof burden on someone to view content is a restriction of their freedom even if they meet the requirement and have access to the required proof.
I was distinguishing between "rating films" with "restricting access", but yeah, the content of the films doesn't matter--it's censorship whether the content is LGBT+ or Al Qaeda beheadings. The pertinent question is whether a third party is obligated to show you that content. As it relates to social media companies, my position is that if a company is exercising the right to censor (effectively to curate content) then they must also take responsibility when they curate illegal content, such as child pornography or intellectual property--they don't get to have it both ways.
Similarly, I don't think your local theater's prohibition on minors viewing 'adult' content compares favorably to a large social media company which steers and manipulates so much communication that it can unilaterally sway national elections. The latter is an issue of national sovereignty.
Like I said, I'm not going to die defending censorship of Hollywood or CBS or whomever, but I am much more concerned with the rights of ordinary citizens who only recently got the right to communicate in any sort of broadcast fashion (still nowhere near the power that the media industry enjoys).
The internet was such a big deal because groups of people could finally interact without the mediation and filtering of a large (typically corporate) entity determining what's "fit to print". You don't have to search very hard to find the bounds of acceptable thought from corporate-sponsored media, even pre-internet. I don't think I'm alone in feeling constrained and frustrated with that situation. Sure, it's not a North Korea situation, but it's not great either.
There are some very real problems with unfettered access to communication, and I don't think we've solved them yet. I am very concerned that this law will have a range of unintended negative consequences, and I don't think defending our existing (flawed) structure really proves that it'll all be fine.
Specifically we're talking about moving from a model of centralized media control (eg: media companies and the conglomerates that own them) to one where a select group of people get to manage the filtering of content on the largest platforms. That seems like something that will be almost impossible to manage properly, and ripe for (at a minimum) political manipulation.
Trusted flaggers sounds to me like crazy people who spend all day reporting content because they are obsessed or have absolutely nothing to do. Having a system like this in place would lead to bad outcomes.
No these are organizations that an EU government has granted special status to:
"The status of trusted flaggers under this Regulation shall be awarded, upon application by any entities, by the Digital Services Coordinator of the Member State in which the applicant is established where the applicant has demonstrated to meet all of the following conditions: (a) it has particular expertise and competence for the purposes of detecting, identifying and notifying illegal content; (b) it represents collective interests and is independent from any online platform; (c) it carries out its activities for the purposes of submitting notices in a timely, diligent and objective manner."
edit: Yeah, NGOs and also MPAA/RIAA style associations will probably be the most common entities.
Who are these people, and why do they get more say?
I assumed their level of "trustworthy" comes from them consistently flagging content or issues of the platform and those reports being valid, as some sort of reputation system, and not some users being selected for more arbitrary reasons.
Vanilla reputation systems don't optimize for "validity"; rather, they optimize for consensus--whatever opinions are popular get hyper-reinforced in tight feedback loops. If you believe that our society is irredeemably racist, then a vanilla reputation system will optimize for racism. Basically, the reputation system can't dictate what is valid--that has to be determined outside of the reputation system. In other words, set a clear, objective standard for "valid" content and use a reputation system that holds moderators accountable to that external definition of "validity".
> Who determines which problems are valid? Unless I overlooked something, this article seems really vague.
We're still early doors on this, but presumably the legislation when it's written will have more details.
But based on how most other regulation in the EU is handled, and thinking of how these questions are handled in the banking industry, I assume the company gets to decide. But the company will be expect to demonstrate to regulators that their content guidelines are:
1. A a minimum restrict illegal content, already defined in law
2. Don't discriminate against protected classes
3. Are fair, along with an explanation of why they're fair
4. There are policies and procedures that ensure they're applied fairly (again with explanation of why it's fair), and there's evidence they're actually being followed.
I expect that there will be significant latitude for regulators to decide what level of evidence is required, and how you demonstrate fairness. After all no one really know how to do this, so it doesn't make sense to write prescriptive detailed laws which are guaranteed to wrong. The different regulators will end up converging on a common understanding, if the don't, then expect the EU to setup a super regulator or similar to force greater convergence.
As for the standard argument of "oh but then how am I meant to know what to do" etc
1. Regulators will publish guidelines
2. Regulators will work with companies to make sure everyone agrees nothing draconian is happening, and equally make sure companies don't get off scot free.
3. Regulators won't punish companies that are clearly making a best effort attempt to follow the spirit of the law.
4. The EU has plenty of expertise doing this, look at financial regulation, GDPR etc No one who's actually had to follow tricky EU regulation before is worrying about this, unless it looks like the regulation basically outlaws their business.
> Hopefully this authentication mechanism can be inexpensive such that it doesn't disenfranchise too much legitimate business at the small end of the spectrum;
You'll be glad to hear it basically already exists in the EU. Open banking will make this process so much easier. Amazon will be able to lean on banks to handle some of this process, rather than building from scratch, with Open banking providing unified APIs to connect to almost any bank in the EU. And talking as someone whos help build bank grade Know Your Customer and Know Your Business processes and systems, it's much easier than you think (not easy, but Amazon won't struggle). Not to mention there's a flourishing industry of tech companies already solving these problems for FinTechs.
> I'm really wary of "disinformation that could sway elections" and "unjustified targeting of minority groups"; how do you litigate these fairly? One person's "racial advocacy" is another person's "racial patronization". These seem super subjective and thus ripe for abuse. Hopefully this too is just a case of poor journalism and the legislation is better.
As with the "trusted flaggers" above, I expect there to be quite a lot of latitude for regulators to decide. With your specific example, entities like the European Court of Human Rights will be the ultimate backstop for preventing abuse. It may take 5-10 years for all the court cases to be raised and litigated to that level, but it'll happen. The EU has good track record of balancing these concerns, and providing the legal infrastructure to allow these thing to be litigated. No doubt it'll figure it out, just like its done plenty of times before.
The actual legislation text (i.e. skipping the recitals) starts on page 43. "problems" here consists of reported illegal content, whether copyright violation or child porn. The legislation is basically an enhanced EU version of DCMA's safe harbor system, but with a focus on all illegal content, not just copyright infringement, and with more ability of the company to reject clearly invalid notices.
One 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, and perhaps even become a liability, if an EU startup seeks an exit to a US buyer. That's a huge problem since all major EU exits are sales to US buyers.
It's pretty clear the Silicon valley innovation model didn't work for Europe. But Europe still needs to figure out how to get money circulating back into productive capital. Negative interest rates mean you can park your money in real estate and ride the stagflation.
The current model seems to be for the government to fund all R&D, but please trust me as someone who spends way too much time writing grant applications that this model sucks.
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 schemes.
I'm not a fan of more government oversight, but it's a good thing if it can control some of these tech giants.
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.
> Now not only has the EU declared unicorns unwelcome, but also European users will be discounted, and perhaps even become a liability, if an EU startup seeks an exit to a US buyer. That's a huge problem since all major EU exits are sales to US buyers.
This is a problem for the founders and investors wanting to make a buck, not for us European users and even less for the European market as being owned by foreign entities is exactly a source of the problems for EU's tech industry.
How would Americans feel if the only exit strategy for US startups was to be sold to Chinese behemoths?
Its much easier to star a business in a homogeneous market like US. Where a culture is almost identical across each state.
In contrast EU countries speak different languages and there are different cultural norms and habits. And while laws are similar there are differences between countries.
I would say this is the biggest factor why us is the default unicorn location.
Ok, I will probably get downvoted for this. But I will still speak my mind: I am an EU citizen and I don’t think that’s the right approach because it’s distracting from what really happened: We missed the big Internet bus because we were so much focused on keeping things the way they were. Now we try to regulate us out. It makes me unbelievably sad.
And it continues. The car was invented here but it takes an Australian visionary to push our car companies into the future. I am sure we will want to regulate Tesla soon too.
>It seems that Europe has decided to stop evolving and just do anything to protect the status quo. Innovation is forbidden here. But hey! It’s for our own good.
Yeah, this. Europe is an old continent that's mostly old money. The Europeans of today are rich mostly due to inherited wealth and former imperialism, not wealth they created themselves through innovation, with some families tracing their wealth back for centuries when land was cheap and plentiful and taxes were next to nothing that any hardworking person could buy land and build a business and while the wealth didn't go stratospheric, it still multiplied handsomely for their successors since "time in the market beats timing the market".
If you look at Europe's biggest and wealthiest companies, most of them are several decades if not centuries old with some of their major shareholders still being old European nobility, in contrast to the US where the top tech companies are at most 30 years old, with older ones that fail to innovate always dying in a healthy cycle (IBM, Sun, Oracle, SGI, etc.), leaving room for new players(FAANG) to come on the market and eat the lunch of the dinosaurs. While in Europe, with so much of the pie taken by the old players, there's no more room for new players to spring up since the old established ones pulled the ladder up after them.
The image of the typical wealthy successful German is not that of a hip 20-30 year old who built some cool business in his dorm room or his parents' garage like in the US, but of a 40 year old man with a Porsche who inherited his dad's machine shop and rolodex(typical owner of the famous Mittelstand that's always revered here on HN).
All this old wealth is very risk adverse and feels threatened by disruptions and will fight tooth and nail to keep their status quo.
And further: don’t bother starting that business dear citizen. Don’t worry your pretty little head with entrepreneurship, it’s too complicated for you.
Just take one of these comfy government jobs we’re providing and you’ll be fine. We'll even take care of your pension and give you "free" health care.
Don't do this kind of generalisation, this is exactly the opposite mindset of Sweden, for example. Here entrepreneurship is valued and supported by the government, not only directly but indirectly with a good safety net in case of failures, trying to start a company is completely doable and encouraged.
Yeah, let's be like the US in the corona pandemic, not.
That adored business mostly exploited either their users or their employees. Facebook, Amazon, Uber, etc.
Couldn't agree more. The EU is well behind the rest of the world in terms of innovation. We spend all our time thinking about new taxes & regulations. IMO all this bureaucracy will kill the EU.
The EU is a diverse place. I think trying to generalize “the EU” as being a certain way is making a too crude generalization. But when all is said and done I’d sure much rather have EU regulation and EU share of internet companies, than anything else.
Also who’s the Aussie? If anyone is pushing on car companies these days I’d say it’s Elon Musk (Who is a South Africa born American)
I can’t comment on why Europe isn’t the world leader in tech... but are we really missing out on much? The head counts (=jobs) of these companies are low compared to other sectors. Most (all?) have a strong European presence. Anyone can buy their stocks and share their wealth. It’s not like we don’t have strong engineering talent, either. Is there something I’m missing?
The problem is the future. Automation is undoubtedly going to be the key technology in the future. You want to have as healthy of a tech industry as possible to not miss the point when the balance starts shifting heavily towards automation. You can't expect to always be able to buy from China/the US.
I guess, but it’s not like the European tech sector is falling behind in terms of engineering. We have a healthy tech industry, just not a lot of world-dominating unicorns.
Europe didn’t miss the internet bus because of regulations, there were no regulations until the dust settled.
The thing is, there’s no US style capital in EU. The American capitalist bankrolled all the internet when there was no clear path to make money from it.
I remember when YouTube was burning billions per year, Facebook being labeled as “would never be profitable”.
Is there the kind of money in Europe that would take these risks?
There was no way for the internet to be EU thing because when it was fresh god knows how many billions had to be spent to have it operate and cross fingers to be able to recoup that investment. Simply, there is no that kind of money in Europe.
If you made the YouTube in Europe you would go bankrupt because you wouldn’t be able to pay the server bills.
I don’t think you’re wrong about the lack of VC funding having an effect on the European startup scene.
That said, I’m a little baffled that Ottawa can produce a behemoth like Shopify which has a market cap ($130bn) larger than Spotify (~$60bn) and Adyen (~55Bn) combined.
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
The thing is, Shopify isn't a new business model. We've had payment processors for years. If you missed on Stripe, PayPal or Square then Shopify sounds like a pretty good investment.
Same thing with them building online shopping websites; Amazon and Etsy already did the market research for them. It's either go with Amazon, setup your online sales infrastructure really fast or get crushed.
Now, in terms of market defining companies like Google or Apple, Canada has none. BlackBerry got crushed and failed to innovate. Nortel was wiped by Cisco and Huawei. Finally Bombardier's flagship plane was pretty much gifted to Airbus by the Trudeau administration who immediately submitted to the Trump administration.
You describe the post-1993 evolution of the internet, but I feel the need to add that in 1993, the internet had already been in constant operation for 24 years; it was already the largest network of computers ever. And many could see that it would probably transform society (which I know about from personal conversations with people before 1993). And before 1993 there was basically zero investor interest in the internet.
Before 1993 the internet was funded mostly by the US Government, which started funding research into packet-switched networking in 1961. In 1977, unhappy with the cost of operating the network, the US Government offered the internet to AT&T for a token sum. AT&T could see no way to make money from it, so declined. In 1987, they offered it to them for a token sum again, with the same response.
(Some pedants maintain the internet did not begin until 1987 with the introduction of the TCP/IP protocol, and that before then there was the ARPAnet. I feel that using the word "internet" for the network before 1987 is justified because the same services, e.g., email, mailing lists, ftp, telnet, netnews (what we now call Usenet, i.e., the newsgroups) that ran on the 1987 internet ran on the ARPAnet. Many users of the network probably didn't realize (or were only dimly aware) that anything had changed!)
Starting about 1986 for-profit corporations started offering access to the internet for a fee, but before 1993 even the largest of these for-profits -- Netcom probably -- was small as American corporations go. I would not be surprised if most of Netcom's revenue came from renting out shell accounts on Unix boxes with internet connections for $20 a month to individuals. (Before for-profit ISPs, the way an organization got on the internet was basically to lease a dedicated phone line from a telephone company. The organization at the other end of the dedicated phone line rarely charged money for routing the new organization's traffic.)
Aside from government contractors (e.g., Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc, and the Mitre Corporation) and the early ISPs I just described, possibly the largest internet for-profit at the start of 1993 was Brad Templeton's Clari-Net, which posted the output of some "news wire" (e.g., Associated Press or such) to netnews. (Netnews was much bigger then the web at the start of 93.) I doubt Clari-Net ever had more than 3 employees. It probably only ever had one.
In comparison, before the start of 1993, the US government had spent many billions of dollars on the internet -- over the course of 32 years if we count the package-switching research, not just when the internet got deployed in 1969.
> Europe didn’t miss the internet bus because of regulations, there were no regulations until the dust settled.
False. In France at least, state-monopoly Minitel services shadowed early initial Internet development. Even as Internet took over, communication state monopolies clamped development with overpriced phone bills for a couple of years minimum. It is only when France Telecom got privatized and Free (owned by a former Minitel erotic chat mogul) disrupted them with widescale ADSL development that thing really took off.
> If you made the YouTube in Europe you would go bankrupt because you wouldn’t be able to pay the server bills.
False again, EU Youtube was Dailymotion, nothing but mismanagement over mismanagement, bad political decision over bad political decision.
That's not internet regulation, that's utility regulation. Not different than electricity connection and doesn't have anything to do with the stuff on the internet that turned out to be big deal and countries are now looking to regulate those.
And, nobody cares about Dailymotion. The Americans are shooting for complete take over of a media, not being just another small business doing video. That's why the huge capital is needed and that's why Youtube was never profitable until being acquired by Youtube and that's why only now "Youtube ads are so annoying".
Just to be clear: I never said we missed the bus because of regulation. But the fact that we react like that now shows we don’t have other ideas or means to respond.
Having your communication run by foreign entities is dangerous. it’s no longer even direct communication, it’s curated. It can be used to create political problems, social unrest or movements, it can be used as commercial advantage on other areas.
China happened to actually have a true competitor, TikTok and the first instinct of the USA was to try to ban it or force acquisition.
The Big Tech that the EU is targeting is mostly US-based, and the US is an EU ally. The US wasn't banning or forcing acquisitions for foreign competitors like WhatsApp or Line, and the EU isn't making moves on Visa/Mastercard which are arguably just as critical. If the EU was making this move based on national security reasons, I'd also expect them to be upfront about it.
Just because the US is an ally doesn't mean the EU can build themselves to be reliant on the US. It gives the US too much leverage.
>and the EU isn't making moves on Visa/Mastercard which are arguably just as critical.
They're arguably not as important in Europe. Credit cards aren't nearly as common here. It's largely debit cards and bank transfers. As I understand it, SEPA [0] allows Europe to sidestep Visa and MasterCard when necessary.
CERN invented the text format of a webpage. I think that is roughly 0% of the R&D required to make the internet work as we know it today.
This is like me developing a text rendering app on my laptop and claiming credit for the work of hardware engineering companies like Intel, Apple, etc.
>The American capitalist bankrolled all the internet when there was no clear path to make money from it.
Umm, no, the US DARPA bankrolled the intrnet, then corporations took it mainstream and for profit, not for loss. The modern WWW originated at CERN in Switzerland.
>Simply, there is no that kind of money in Europe.
Europe definitely has money to throw away, just look at Berlin airport and all the useless projects being bankrolled from EU tax money. How many startups could that have funded?
>If you made the YouTube in Europe you would go bankrupt because you wouldn’t be able to pay the server bills.
Edit: Dailymotion(not Vimeo) is European and it seems to be able to pay their server bills.
Why would you be downvoted? You're speaking in favor of your enemies, which are the tech companies in the U.S. the employees of which comprises most of the HN crowd.
It is in the best interest of the E.U. to regulate Big Tech, if only because they are all from the U.S.
But with massive amount of economic muscle that tech companies can muster, specially if they work together, not to mention most of EU still "protected" by NATO, I doubt EU will manage to anything big anytime soon.
Perhaps in the short term, but regulating Big Tech to the ground is not really in the EU's long term interest. I suspect it will actually setback its own tech industry relative to global players for the meagre benefit of temporarily slowing down Big Tech in the EU market.
Ok, but it doesn't look like they are. These are broad EU digital market rules. Blatant protectionism isn't popular in developed countries (except in certain industries, not this one at least).
- Prohibit a number of practices which are clearly unfair, such as blocking users from un-installing any pre-installed software or apps;
"
I'm curious about what other "clearly unfair" practices they are referring tho, but this alone could have implications for potentially getting rid of bundled applications on Android phones, as an example. This assumes that the clause extends to the Android operating system as it is installed on devices made by manufacturers possibly not regulated under these Acts.
Bundling is explicitly allowed by the regulation. Some examples of other ‘clearly unfair’ practices are restricting the use of third-party software or stores, or preventing them from accessing them other than from the company's channels.
>" so would only come into force after the Brexit transition period has ended."
Well so this isn't going to do anything for 40 years.
> "Furthermore, the law specifies that local officials can send cross-border orders to make tech firms remove content or provide access to information, wherever their EU headquarter is based."
I feel that this is very open to abuse especially with this example provided
>"A commission spokesman gave the example of Amsterdam's local government being able to ask a service like Airbnb, which is based in Dublin, to remove a listing of a non-registered apartment and share details about a host suspected of not paying taxes."
I get the feeling although this law started with the right idea it is being used as an excuse for law enforcement to expand their reach, without actually helping people.
I don’t see why that Airbnb example is problematic — enforcement of local laws using information not stored locally. The other option is requiring data to be stored within whichever jurisdiction the data concerns, which could be done but seems contrary to the point of the single market (not a huge difficulty if they can afford local translators and content moderators, but still against the point of the single market).
Can you give a better example of how this could be abused?
>> " so would only come into force after the Brexit transition period has ended."
> Well so this isn't going to do anything for 40 years.
I wish, but it's pretty clear the brexit transition period is ending 17 days whether the UK is ready or (more likely) not.
> I feel that this is very open to abuse especially with this example provided
Not sure how else you could manage this. If you don't put this stipulation you'll end up with the privacy equivalent of the double-Irish. Where a smaller EU country either writes the weakest version of the law they can get away with, or just turns a blind eye to abuse, and uses that to attract companies like Facebook to move their "HQ" there.
> I get the feeling although this law started with the right idea it is being used as an excuse for law enforcement to expand their reach, without actually helping people.
Not sure how this is an example of a regulator expanding their reach. If a regulator has the authority to regulate the housing in a city, why should they not be able to force companies that help people actively flout their regulation to turn over details on those flouters.
In the EU there's a cross-border agreement to help police identify car owners for speeding tickets etc. Is that also an over reach?
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.
Articles 5 and 6 are the ones of most interest. A quick summary:
- no preventing businesses from using other intermediaries (i.e. payment processors for app stores)
- ensuring businesses can contract with users outside the platform, and then fulfil the contract via the platform (i.e. selling an app directly, but delivering via a store/platform)
- not use data gained as a platform operator to compete with the businesses on the platform giving that data
And the big one:
- "allow the installation and effective use of third party software applications or software application stores [...] to be accessed by means other than the core platform services of that gatekeeper"
As 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.
Doesn't look like the type of regulation we were hoping for. The regulation seems to apply to content moderation and controlling information. Basically the exact opposite of what we need.
Yeah, based on the article Facebook reactly quite positively to the proposed laws, which isn't a good sign. I'd like to be proven wrong, and there are some parts I like, such as not allowing preinstalled/unremovable apps. But on the whole I think the increased moderation/verification burdens are just going to cement existing companies in their market position, and create all kinds of oppurtunities for corruption in how content moderation disputes are handled.
Well corruption in how disputes are handled might not be a huge issue.
As a first step the companies are required to allow you to appeal takedowns and account suspensions/terminations (for TOS or illegal content reasons, not for non-payment reasons) for a 6 month period.
Further, if you appeal a takedown or account suspension and the company rejects your appeal, the law will allow you to take the matter to binding arbitration. If the user wins, the company pays all costs, and must reinstate the content or account. If the user loses, they only pay their portion of arbitration costs. (The company's portion are just part of doing business in the EU).
Oh and the user (not the company) get to decide which arbitrator to use, from among those that have been certified by any Member state, with the relevant expertise for the type of social network and content or TOS violation in question.
Obviously all of this is subject to change if the proposed law is changed before being enacted.
Those seem like some decent mitigations, but I still have a hard time believing that wealthy corporations and people won't be able to abuse such a system for their own gain as they have done with the DMCA. And how those well meaning restrictions could easily throttle a competitive startup, because Facebook et al have the scale, technical and legal experience to handle these things whereas they may not
The not allowing uninstallable apps part is interesting. Looking through their FAQ, they don't really seem to define what a "app" is. Could this not mean the entire OS should be replaceable with one that wasn't made by a "gatekeeper"? Because if say, Apple, allows you to remove Messages.app but keeps the Messages API private or locked behind an Apple-only entitlement, that isn't very useful, and the user should be able to load another OS at their discretion that lets them run whatever SMS client they want. Unless they want to require that all of the system services be able to be accessed by whatever app the user installs, which seems like a bigger kettle of fish.
> all of the system services be able to be accessed by whatever app the user installs
It would be nice if they started by requiring that phone OSes add back the ability for apps to put the phone into / out of Airplane Mode. The API for that used to be available to unrooted Android phones, until version 4.2.2 came out which broke some apps[0].
A phone should be able to listen on Wi-Fi (or even FM) for a packet that indicates an incoming call, so that the rest of the time it can be disconnected from the cellular network and not reveal the user's approximate location.
From the EU perspective, this is aimed at disentangling fundamental services for the general public from private corp monopolies. Good in principle, very difficult to implement?
It would be easier to throw away the code and have the EU create its own cloned services. I look at software as mostly prototyping. By now we've figured out that email is something we want. Buy some servers and create a mailbox for the citizens. Have an open source feature set. Let people make add-ons, migrate some of these into the default set. It will be hard to get in the way of it becoming something nice and useful.
> Furthermore, the law specifies that local officials can send cross-border orders to make tech firms remove content or provide access to information, wherever their EU headquarter is based.
The article goes on to give an example of how Amsterdam could use the law to request earnings data for local hosts from Airbnb.
The way the BBC explains it, this law would give EU governments ready access to user data with no oversight.
This represents a huge loss of privacy and freedom for EU residents.
Having Dutch law apply to the owners of Dutch property doesn't seem like a huge government overreach. If, however, the law ends up giving the Dutch government information about, for example, Estonian freelancers, then there would be reason to complain.
The "smell test" for this will be whether the person whose data is accessed is allowed to be informed by the service provider when a government request comes in, and from which government, and why.
This is interesting timing given the FTC announcement for data collection from social media companies in the US yesterday.
I wonder if there is any connection here like some government cooperation happening behind the scenes. The two events have differences and apply to a slightly different set of companies, but they are both in the spirit of trying to control or better understand how big tech companies are operating (and especially, using customer data).
I don't have much idea about regulations but I have the feeling that western countries reactions in this terms have been slow.
I am not sure if this has been intentional to not slow the fast pace of the industry, they could just nod do it or they have not realized the impact of it.
I think in some way the the almost immediate reaction to most of the regulatory problems that appeared during the COVID pandemic demonstrate that is possible to solve some of the bureaucratic barriers if needed. Not comparing the situations per se at but yes the practical resolutions.
That users should be able to uninstall it. People like Siri, so I don't really anticipate a precipitatious drop-off -- the people who will be uninstalling Siri are the people who currently don't use it, so I'd expect a drop in install base without any drop in MUA.
I’d imagine for something like Siri they’d argue it is too deeply embedded to be replaced and the rules would have exemptions for that. I think the rules applies more to superfluous apps on Windows and Android that you can’t remove like the Xbox app on Windows or having Facebook preinstalled on Android.
Watching this with great interest.
The platform we are launching next year is focused on letting people vote the $40 trillion in shares they own through their collective investments.
A core feature is the ability to support externally proposed company resolutions so that they trigger minority shareholder rights, creating a mechanism for getting the issues that matter to you onto the only corporate agenda that counts.
We'll be operating 'Citizen Shareholder Assemblies' in which anyone will be able to participate.
We're super aware of the need for open debate and free speech but at the same time we want arguments to be based on data.
As Citizen Shareholders are able to follow the voting pattern of Default Advisors, we are particularly keen on preventing the 'obtaining of votes by deception'. You'd think there would be lot's of best practice we could follow from the wonderful world of politics, but it turns out that isn't a thing in the 'real world'.
If we achieve our ambitions in a few years we will have 10% of the EU population, and even more in the US (103.7 million US citizens own shares through collective investments).
Rather than waiting for problems to arise we are looking to get ahead of this curve.
We have a number of things going for us, 1. we are not reliant on advertising revenues 2. we will know who everyone is (free speech doesn't have to equal anonymous speech) and 3. we have so many examples of how not to do this.
We ;ook forward to the constructive criticism we will undoubtedly get from groups like hacker news.
Any upfront thoughts would be much appreciated.
> The focus of the Digital Services Act is to create a single set of rules for the EU to keep users safe online, protect their freedom of expression and help both them and local authorities hold tech companies to account.
You can either have freedom of expression or safety online. You can't have both. And the second might be an impossible goal regardless.
The world isn't so black and white. Even in the US, the home of free speech, you can't post child pornogaphy online. You could easily put forward the argument then that freedom of expression doesn't exist in the US.
Freedom of expression has never really meant you're completely free to say and anything (at least no in a civilized world). There are always going to be gray areas, but equally there are areas where expression should obviously be protected.
An example would be, if Facebook decided to eradicate all homosexual content. Clearly the EU stepping in and saying you can't discriminate against gay speech is protecting the gay communities freedom of expression.
Equally the EU stepping in and saying the Facebook isn't doing enough to protect victims of revenge porn is providing safety online. And is a reasonable balance between the rights of free expression from the poster vs the victim.
Let us say the internet was created 50 years ago, and Facebook decided to eradicate all homosexual content. Perhaps, not even maliciously but as collateral damage for another goal. Would it have been as shocking or obviously bad?
The internet is not the only place the social changes happens.
Equally the EU isn't applying the same regulation to every company, the most significant ones only apply to companies with 10% market share. It would be quite plausible for gay friendly social networks to spring up to fill that gap, and I would entirely expect it to happen. Apps like Grindr basically proves it would happen.
It's weird how politicians never talk about regulating Visa and Mastercard. They too can pick and choose who they do business with (freedom of expression). There are a lot of middle-men with a lot of power who get ignored in favor of chasing the most popular target of the day.
> It's weird how politicians never talk about regulating Visa and Mastercard
These are two of the most heavily regulated corporations in the world. I don't even understand the premise of your comment. Banking and money is extremely regulated and they have to ask for permission to do pretty much anything.
Ok, most of those do seem reasonable to me. That said, I still wonder where all this motivation comes from? Have we really shown that big tech is harmful? And exactly to what kind of harm? And how we know alternatives arn't more harmful?
Another money grab from EU bureaucrats. Control the narrative in digital space, regulate small businesses, and get the position of Gatekeeper from big tech. It looks nice on paper.
The money for huge clientele networks milking the EU funds in Eastern Europe and the money for propping up losing businesses and bloated social services in Western Europe have to come from somewhere.
It's simple. EU stops giving money to corrupt Eastern Europe criminals masked as a "politicians". The people there have not gained nothing. EU regulations are made to serve agendas of big members only.
> Furthermore, the law specifies that local officials can send cross-border orders to make tech firms remove content or provide access to information, wherever their EU headquarter is based.
That just sounds like the opposite of privacy and additionally restrictions on free speech. If Poland doesn’t like a YouTube video criticizing their government it sounds like they now have a legal framework to get that removed, for example.
> The idea is to prevent the firms gaining unfair advantages via their elevated positions.
Anyone who is serious about this needs to stop attacking all the symptoms and address the root cause of Big Tech's monopoly power: Imaginary Property Laws ("IP"). Everything else is just tissues to sooth a runny nose instead of medicine to fight the virus.
End IP and bring real competition and democratization to Big Tech.
I think what they're trying to do is force Apple (and other OS makers) to provide the ability to uninstall built-in apps. So, your iPhone will come with Apple's default messaging app, but you would potentially have the ability to uninstall it.
Hehe, for sure. I suppose if we extrapolated the governance goals: break up large companies into smaller parts to create a more competitive marketplace.
So, maybe a powerful enough government may say, "no, Apple, you're not even allowed to make apps that compete with 3rd party makers - you can only provide a platform"
By today's standards, that would be quite revolutionary.
Such a government would have to do the same to Costco, Microsoft, Amazon, and any number of platforms on which smaller vendors earn their bread.
Sometimes I think GDPR was secretly pushed by Big Tech to make it harder for smaller business's to compete.
It was basically useless.
I wouldn't even be surprised if Google or Facebook helped write the legislation.
Whatever noise EU is making now I have very little hope for.
If the US government was so fearful that a fun video app made in China had the power of compromising National Security, stealing and spying on citizen's data, and even radicalizing people through their mobile Skinner Boxes and algo-driven Ludovico Technique pleasure therapy apps -------- you would think they would be doing WAY more, WAY faster.
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 things.
Also, it's a bit like food handling and storage related regulations for restaurants. While it might seem like a pain for the guy running the restaurant, it helps reduce the risk the consumers could otherwise face.
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 the data. Just having the latter means that people are still leaking all of their data, but companies are basically just promising not to use it.
The GDPR is good in spirit as it forces a certain standard of privacy, but it is extremely vague (which means countries can effectively neuter it, or it could be over-enforced), and there is an extraterritorial component which set the precedent for global take-downs of content.
But all that compliance busy-work is generally done in the country that enacts these regulations. So you just created a bunch of non-technical jobs at tech companies.
Meanwhile, engineering is still done in California.
Actually no, it's the opposite. It's governments regulating companies, and thereby taking responsibility. Going a step further would make governments actively intervene in day-to-day-operations.
Ehh one of the major complaints about EU legislation is it's left intentionally vague and relies on the companies to guess what the goal is, which of course misses something, take their yearly fines and tweak their system after each round of fines.
> Platforms that reach more than 10% of the EU's population (45 million users) are considered systemic in nature, and are subject not only to specific obligations to control their own risks, but also to a new oversight structure.
Another interesting tidbit is the answer to the common trope that 'private platform can act as they wish since they are private' :
> The Digital Markets Act addresses the negative consequences arising from certain behaviours by platforms acting as digital “gatekeepers” to the single market. ... This can grant them the power to act as private rule-makers and to function as bottlenecks between businesses and consumers.
The road is still long before ratification, but it looks like a step in the good direction.