https://www.euractiv.com/news/widespread-alarm-over-commissi...
Apple even went so far as to demand the EU repeal these laws, and is likely still non-compliant in several ways; for which they should have been fined tens of billions of dollars by now!
https://www.reuters.com/business/apple-urges-eu-regulators-t...
Trump has delivered for them, made it a point of contention for trade deals and threatened sanctions on anyone enforcing them.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-weighs...
Maybe cartoonishly large fines levied against powerful entities wasn’t such a great idea. Other incentives may have been better suited to getting the populace what they want in the long term.
right, the tradition is that fines be cartoonishly small so that breaking the law can be factored into the cost of doing business, who the hell does the EU think they are to go against tradition!!?
The only time they have eagerly complied with anything relating to this is when Judge YGR gave them this ultimatum, they approved Fortnite a full day early once someone had to be personally responsible for defying her order a second time:
https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1924499498513862720/phot...
It also solves the perverse incentive of "fine the foreign companies as a revenue generation method" because the result is getting them to comply instead of either repeatedly fining them for not doing it or trying to extract a fine so large it becomes an international political issue.
Publicly pols say one thing or stand for one thing and privately they hold different views.
But being able to originate legislation in the directly elected legislature is important. Even the original U.S. constitutional design, which was quite anti-populist, made the directly elected House the main originator of legislation. (Either the House or Senate could do it, but only the House could introduce appropriations bills giving it primacy in the legislative process.)
What's needed is accountability for drafted laws and removal of those who repeatedly draft laws rejected by parliament.
While I believe I understand where you are coming from, this seems unduly broad and harsh.
What limit on time, number of attempts, etc. whould we apriori in advance place on laws like equality, climate monitoring, abortion rights, etc. before the gate is dropped on any more of that kind of thing?
That’s democracy.
And there's money spent lobbying in Brussels (where the EU Commission is) than lobbying in the entire US.
And corrupt eurocrats are known to be very cheap whores.
I don't get how blind these institutions are.
It's not just the age verification and chat control - the list crimes is much longer and doesn't revolve solely around IT sector. The recent Mercosur agreement that just showed how the heads of EU pissed over its own agricultural sector.
Somehow, I'm afraid that we're already for at least 15 years on a path of slow fall - we're once again in the history the peasants and EU politicians has become king and queens, again not listening to vox populi at all.
The EU has definitely done a lot of good over the years as well, but the system is beginning to lean away from democracy and towards a weirdly inscrutible authoritarianism.
The question is if there's any chance for changes or EU falls apart much to the delight of its enemies. Because there are people in the continent who'd gladly revert back to political status-quo and alliances from the past and they do work to achieve their goals.
Every bureaucracy works for themselves eventually. The EU's main task is to make superstate they can control. Since they are trying to eliminate / reduce rights of member countries one can imagine what kind of concerns they have towards individual people and their freedom.
Don't get me wrong, I'm completely against the EC, but I wish they were actually trying to create a superstate
Meaning any attempt at making the commission directly elected reduces the national governments powers.
What you see isn’t the commission watering down the proposals, what you see is the natural tug of war between the national governments and the European Parliament.
Just more fines. Bigger fines, surely this will work eventually... It's been 20 years, its not working. A new approach is needed.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
In it he espouses going a little further. He posits that other countries should repeal their versions of the DMCA and just start jailbreaking American megacorps' app stores, hardware, software, etc. and providing their own, much cheaper (or free) versions. Free trade has already broken down, what do they have to lose?
As you might guess he puts it a lot better than I do.
The US parking an aircraft carrier nearby so the crew can enjoy a sunny vacation.
Or meddling with elections.
Or both.
The EU taking staunchly anti-American positions and targeting American businesses looking for a way to “legally” rob them blind is probably not going to work out for them in the long run.
Practically everything the EU DMA/DSA addresses was highlighted in the "House Antitrust Report on Big Tech" back in 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/06/technology/ho...
But if that's not enough, since then:
Apple's policies banning developers from referring customers to alternative payments has been widely ruled illegal around the world, first and foremost in the USA where they were even referred for criminal investigation for continuing to do it after being court ordered to stop.
Google has been twice convicted of antitrust monopoly abuse in the last year in the USA, and found to have exploited user privacy settings several times.
Meta's harmful practices have been continuously revealed in court: allowing sex trafficking and prostitution to help train their AI, allowing scam ads because they're profitable, deliberately exploiting children spending in games because it's profitable, and illegally tracked users.
Amazon's antitrust for exploiting vendor data is ongoing, so I guess you can have a point there.
For repeating offenses fines should rise much faster, multiplied by 10x-100x every time, until we find fines so big they are physically unable to pay even if corps would consider liquidating their all global assets. Then lower it just slightly, so that being operational in Europe would produce no financial benefits and see if they'll comply, or just quit themselves.
Recent political and technical events makes me question why do we even attempt to keep such strong relations with megacorp businesses (and, by extension, US gov). We would still be here even if multiple megacorps would die. It would take us decades to build up capacity to have complex tech of our own (fully local). But meanwhile we'd be just fine, just less trendy.
The issue is nobody wants to pull the trigger because the companies that would get fined or broken up have curried favour with Trump to circumvent these consequences.
US doesn't care about warnings and small fines, though. If penalties are not enforced, it's like they don't exist.
The crux of the matter is it's a subset of the European Parliament versus a subset of EU member states.
When push comes to shove, EU member states can and already do ignore the EP for anything tangentially related to national security, and national politicans don't and won't give up sovereign power to the EU.
Additonally, the incentives of individual EU states with strong US FDI ties and not as strong domestic champions such as Poland, Ireland, Czechia, Luxembourg, and Romania means they fight tooth and nail to ensure American FDI continues. Member states like Hungary and Spain do this for China and Hungary and Austria for Russia.
There's also the added issue of perception - the EP was historically (and for larger states like France and Germany still is) used as a way to sideline unpopular domestic politicans or as a cushy retirement posting. There's a reason VdL is in Bruxelles and not the Bundeskanzleramt.
Plus, European companies have massive fixed capital investments in the US, especially after the IRA [0], so they don't want to face retaliation from American regulators, and are especially cozy with the Trump admin [1].
Also, European politicos also heavy leverage the revolving door of lobbying like their American peers. The "spend a couple years in Bundestag or Bruxelles and then take a cushy gig at Harvard [2][3]" remains strong. Heck, we'd always organize a fest where the wine would flow and European leaders would network with American and European policymakers studying and working in the US or in Europe [4].
[0] - https://flow.db.com/topics/macro-and-markets/us-german-trade...
[1] - https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/trump-bernard-arnault-lv...
[2] - https://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/leo-varadkar
[3] - https://ces.fas.harvard.edu/people/ces-alumni/past-policy-fe...
it's the fact that fines are part of agency's income and it is their best interest(as a bureaucratic agency) to keep them at highest level where companies will still pay them.
Effectively this makes this a tax, enshittifying everything even worse.
if fines were decoupled from agencies, and had exponentially rising curve for repeat offenses, i think that would work better than ban, as much i would prefer for them to get banned.
and yet there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they've done this. The fines that have been levied are easy to pay.
This is obvious to the outsider. The premise that you made up for yourself is that Europe wants to change Meta and how it works to protect its citizens. It’s obvious to me that this is not the goal. The goal is to extract wealth from those companies under the guise of consumer protection.
The EU makes more from regulating and taxing US tech companies than it makes from its own quaint tech sector. Ban and blocking those companies is never going to happen for this reason. Why destroy your cash cow?
The US has for some time fostered an environment where people build and grow businesses. I've started many myself, some totally for fun.
And as it happens some of those US businesses have grown into massive corporations, and yes, some not so great ones too.
I think the EU in general (not everyone of course) leans more in the realm of letting the government take care of everything.
This of course creates dependency, not just on that government, but upon companies who create things that government can't provide.
Because of that dependency upon the government, there isn't any recourse against a business' practices because at some point, the fines and penalties will fall flat.
In the US, a pretty normal response to a bad/annoying/corrupt business is: "ok cool, I'll build a competitor."
If instead of creating a culture of dependency in the EU, one of innovation and creativity was fostered instead, this point in time could be very different.
Your understanding of business in EU countries seems to be make-believe and personal fantasy.
You are far more likely to find a government regulation on a US business/product than you are to find any EU-based product used widely in the United States.
That is the main point I was making and it is true by any objective measure.
There is far more leverage with the country exporting goods/services globally then there is importing those things and then nanny-stating them into a form they think is better.
Spotify?
If you don't mind including companies that offer multiple things: Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Mistral, SAP
I'm also assuming there that you're only referring to tech products and services, otherwise you probably want to look at the long, long, long list of pharmaceuticals, cars and other products.
I think the issue is more that you don't have a good understanding of which products and services aren't American.
> There is far more leverage with the country exporting goods
True leverage comes from import, not export of goods and materials. The thing that grows GDP is buying materials cheaper from elsewhere, turning them into something and selling on at a healthy margin (whether domestic or as an export).
> then nanny-stating them into a form they think is better.
I'm no fan of nanny-stating, but I don't think that that's the case here.
There certainly are examples of that, but then the ones that I can think of (age verification in particular) are also getting pushed hard in the US. In fact, by all accounts, a lot of that pushing is being driven/funded by Meta
So, like Boeing and tons of corpos too big to fail.
The EU can absolutely make all the invasive laws they want, the US has been happily doing the same... the individual EU nations and US states with more variations than practical on top of that. Age verification as a prominent example.
Concerned parties will of course try to leverage what they are able to.. if that is a prominent political figure, foreign or domestic, it happens. This can be good, bad or even very bad. While I can totally understand criticism at any level... US in EU politics, or UK trying to coerce entirely US companies with fines that don't apply to them.
The reality is negotiations happen all the time... you an accept/reject/renegotiate on every aspect of every topic.. and to some extent, make take it or leave it laws, where you are simply no longer a customer.
For example, really curious to see how the foreign router ban (US) is going to shake out. As long as my OpnSense box and commercial AP continue to work, I should be okay for now... but who knows.
I don't know how to force this issue as a European. There are just too many levels of abstraction between me and Brussels. It looks like many layers of bureaucracy and a lot of opaque backroom deals and discussions. I don't like it at all. Especially given that the EU moves so much faster when it comes to regulations like forcing all of us in Denmark to use timesheets, annoying lids on our bottles, and invasive surveillance laws. All I see is my life getting worse with their actions. I am not alone. Sentiment towards the EU internally is not good right now. Either they start creating regulations which benefit ordinary people, or we're going to get a pretty radical rightward shift in leadership soon, and there are many risks associated with this.
> EU moves so much faster when it comes to regulations like forcing all of us in Denmark to use timesheets, annoying lids on our bottles, and invasive surveillance laws.
Rediscovering the principle of subsidiarity from first principles...
I wonder if these lobbyists get paid a lot.
If anything it's more interesting that it has American origins. At it's core, the model provides flat rate access to anyone of any class at no upfront cost. High value users with high ad conversion rates subsiding the platforms for low income low consumer spending users. That's something that is particularly European, and not very American.
> ... a degraded culture
Do matters of personal injury liability not apply in Europe?
It's also assumed that people have at least a little common sense and that your average adult knows more than a toddler.
But no you don't have ambulance chasers or personal injury lawyers trying to get millions out of someone who had a car crash and now their neck feels funny
No idea if this claim is true. How do Americans transfer money? Don't your banking apps allow that?
> How do Americans transfer money? Don't your banking apps allow that?
If the exchange isn't online and is a fairly large amount of money, something like buying a car, checks (cheques) or even envelopes of cash are a lot more common than PayPal. Online, those aren't easy so that's where Paypal and their competitors shine. Americans also now use other apps for small money exchanges, like paying somebody for mowing your lawn, although refusing the app and offering/demanding cash is still relatively normal.
"They hate our freedom!"
"They want to destroy our culture!"
Since every accusation is a confession with these people, I guess this is what they want to do to others.
Over the years the control has grown ever-more pervasive, such as with the control over banking and international payments. One anecdote of the extent of this influence is that if one European Venmos another European and puts "Cuba" or "Syria" in the memo field, they can have their account flagged or permanently banned [1]. The US gets to decide who can use credit cards and what for, which is something the EU has finally picked up on as an issue [2].
What's clear in all this is that China was completely correct to maintain sovereignty over their tech companies, platforms and data. What the US risks is that the EU is going to follow the China model. That means EU versions of cloud platforms, computing platforms, networking infrastructure and so on. And they'll do it similar to how China did by creating demand. Specifically, the EU will mandate the use of European platforms with all their contracts, the European parliament will pass laws as such for national governments and generally the pressure will increase to wean off of US tech companies.
IMHO this shift is as big a change as the post-1945 world order.
[1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/venmo-cuba-sanctions_n_571f80...
[2]:https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/business/europes-24-tri...
The most amazing thing is with everything I did in the last decade, the consulting of lawyers, member of internet/IT/software specialized user groups, I still don't know how I have managed to be aware _NOT_ for years that those very web technical directives are actually... law.
Only the prime minister, then also the president, have the power to modify/fix those technical directives. The parliaments, or any technical authorities have ZERO power over them.
The EU, via a directive, only requires for the member states to publish those technical directives to the other member states for "discussion" before final approval.
In other words, deciding on those technical directives requires the same power than to decide to build an ICBM submarine or an aircraft carrier, not less. Maybe because they are not that un-important...
The irony, the gov of 2015/2016 which approved those technical directives which would, without any doubt, end up with everything web being big tech exclusive (and this is what actually happened) was... a left-ist gov(!!). I suspect corruption or brain washing grade lobbying (maybe with fraud while consulting experts, or those experts were mostly from big tech).
The bright side, if those technical directives are fixed in order to restore the classic web, the whole gov with its dependencies have 3 years to comply. Just need to tell the president or the prime minister... baw...
- bans targeted advertising based on a person’s sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or political beliefs and puts restrictions on targeting ads to children
- requires transparency on content algorithms and advertising
- requires online platforms prevent and remove posts containing illegal goods, services, or content in a timely fashion
The "Digital Markets Act" requires interoperability and competition:
- requires Apple to allow competing app stores, very contentious for Apple who invented a stack of fees for this
- requires Apple and Google to allow apps to freely use 3rd party payments, this is very contentious for Apple and they still charge for doing so
- allow 3rd parties interoperability, eg headphones and smartwatches for Apple and messaging clients for Meta, this is starting to improve
- allow removal of preinstalled apps, settings of new defaults, this is largely done although malicious compliance has kept rival browsers at bay on iPhone
More specifically, both are already in effect, outlawing certain things, and designating certain companies as "digital gatekeepers" when they reach a certain threshold of users within the EU.
These regulations don't really specify what every gatekeeper needs to actually do (above the bare minimum), but say that once a company is designated as a gatekeeper, corrective action to prevent their monopolistic behaviour are going to be decided on a case-by-case basis. In practice this means that corrective actions can be something very significant (like iOS having to ask EU users to set a default browser during device setup instead of defaulting to Safari) or nothing, which is why this direct line of conversation shows spinelessness.
It's pretty much an equivalent of a judge having open discussions with a criminal about how the court should interpret the law to suit the criminal better.
And no, the USAans are not in it for the 'free speech' either.