HN

Comments (123)

• tracker1
  I'm mixed on this... the article itself is relatively one-sided... of course you negotiate among concerned parties when it comes down to laws regarding anything largely produced outside your nation's purview.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.
• Menu

  pjc50
  Specifically, this is another Parliament vs Commission issue. The Commission loves to have little deals away from the public where everything is quietly smoothed over, while the Parliament is trying to build popular legitimacy.
• Menu

  elric
  The European Commission and Council are becoming increasingly unpopular among my peers. Sentiment towards the Parliament is generally still positive. But it's clear that two thirds of the Trilogue essentially don't give a shit about European people, their rights, their freedoms or their wellbeing. Things like Age Verification and Chat Control are going to blow up in their faces.I don't get how blind these institutions are.
• Menu

  mikkupikku
  After decades of trying and broadly failing to regulate American tech corps, at what point does the EU admit that leveling fines against Meta will never stop Meta from being Meta, that American megacorps are essentially ungovernable in Europe (or elsewhere for that matter) and the best course of action is to ban and block them in Europe?Just more fines. Bigger fines, surely this will work eventually... It's been 20 years, its not working. A new approach is needed.
• Menu

  Gareth321
  As a European I have been deeply disappointed with how toothless the EC has been on enforcing the Digital Markets Act. I have exactly one submission to Hacker News from 20 July 2022 when the DMA was approved (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163704). I was incredibly hopeful, given the indicated timelines, that Apple would be forced to open up iOS and iPadOS. Meaning install an application from the internet without restriction, like with any other operating system. The wording clearly requires this (with some wiggle room for security). Apple has dragged this legal process out longer than even my most cynical prediction. I can only surmise that someone in the Commission or senior leadership has decided that enforcing the DMA is not politically expedient right now.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.
• benoau
  All this so Meta and X can sell politically divisive and hateful advertising with zero transparency.
• Arubis
  Ceding? Any legal control the EU has over tech has been slowly drawn out of the US’s grasp. It was just that the US dominance over legal control of all these networked interconnections wasn’t so actively and visibly utilized until more recently.
• Menu

  shevy-java
  Isn't it strange how Washington makes laws in the EU?I wonder if these lobbyists get paid a lot.
• amazingamazing
  Why no ban like china? Weak
• Menu

  picafrost
  I continue to find it bizarre that some Americans are offended that Europeans do not want to be dragged into the American corporate surveillance, advertising, and consumption cult. Will nothing be sovereign until Europe is also littered with personal injury attorney billboards, broadcasting pharmaceutical ads, and other pox marks of a degraded culture? Why search for a better way when you can normalize awful (because it's more profitable).
• sylware
  In my country, I discovered a few days ago that my gov (EU country), had its web technical directives line-up with big tech web (in 2015/2016): during the last decade I have been suffering the breakage of the classic web interop of the gouv admnistration web replaced using a lot of bucks by "exclusive big tech" web apps, aka requiring only those massive bloat and kludge web engines from the "whatng" cartel (mozilla/apple/google): no more small, alternative and reasonably sized (SDK included) web browsers anymore.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...
• PeterStuer
  Those same Europeans so fond of their DSA would scream bloody murder if a Trump like administration would do the same. They have created this monster, and there will be tears and the gnashing of theeth should their factions ever lose control and their opponents get to wield those same weapons.And no, the USAans are not in it for the 'free speech' either.
• Menu

  jmyeet
  What are we witnessesing is the beginning of the end of the post-WW2 rules-based international order. What's truly bizarre is that the US designed this order to benefit themselves and they're the ones destroying it now. NATO is a protection racket to outsource European security but really to sell arms to Europe and give the US effetive control over the European militaries.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...
• FpUser
  European countries should try to get off those training wheels and learn to live their own lives.
• Menu

  m-s-y
  Is it just me or is there not actual meat to this article? Like what specifically are the rules at issue here?
• picsao
  [dead]
• Menu

  agrishin
  [flagged]
• Menu

  mono442
  [flagged]