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.
> Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly voiced his dissatisfaction and sought support from Trump, while Apple’s Tim Cook reportedly asked the White House to directly intervene against EU fines imposed on his company.
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!
> they should have been fined tens of billions of dollars by now!
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.
>Maybe cartoonishly large fines levied against powerful entities
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!!?
I don't think there is an incentive lawmakers could offer that is worth more to Apple than monopolizing fees and subverting competition, there is practically no limits they will go to to preserve that status quo around the world.
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:
That seems like a better model than stupefying fines against the corporate entity then. Forget about billion dollar fines, just give them a slap on the wrist while telling them explicitly what they have to stop doing, but then if they keep doing it the executives are personally held in contempt.
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.
Nope. All that does is create a rash of execs/decisionmakers who become sacrificial fixtures who absolutely do not travel to the jurisdiction in question, thusly handily sidestepping the accountability. It has to be fines. At the end of the day, it's going to become a political sticking point one way or another if we're going to share and coexist on the same planet.
The EU should abandon the stupid Commission structure and have a real Parliament that can actually draft legislation. The current one can just vote down legislation drafted by the Commission.
What they ought to do is have a process for passing EU-wide laws where they get introduced by a popularly elected legislature but to be enacted they also have to be approved by the majority of the legislatures of the member states. That gives you a good check on centralized power grabs because the member states have to approve anything that could usurp their role, but you can still pass things that make sense at that level like a common set of antitrust rules.
That’s similar to the original US model, except instead of the member state legislatures directly approving legislation, they appointed two proxies to the federal Senate. It’s a good system.
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.)
The current system is new legislation has to be drafted by the Commission, which is the indirectly elected executive branch. That allows what would otherwise be popular proposals to never even be introduced. Whereas if you have legislation introduced by the directly elected body, popular proposals at least get a public debate and people get to see what they are and who is blocking them, but you still ultimately want the check on power grabs and populist nonsense before it actually gets enacted.
NO! Laws should be drafted by lawyers and professionals in those fields. An election would select lawmakers by popularity contest. Can't expect good laws from tht kind of people.
What's needed is accountability for drafted laws and removal of those who repeatedly draft laws rejected by parliament.
> 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?
Limits should not be placed on laws, but on law authors. Each one with his own count of rejected laws. Like this: author signs some drafts, drafts go to parliament, N drafts rejected -> author dismissed from Eu commision. It could even be a ratio of adopted laws vs. rejected laws. Drop below threshold -> dismissed.
And that's one of the main disadvantages of it. EU is trying to avoid those if possible, while still maintaining democracy's advantages. So far, this Commision / Parliament setup seems to be working just fine.
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.
The EU overall either will start acknowledging that there are problems and serious reforms are needed or history will repeat once again and we'll have another fallen empire situation.
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.
Oh there are definitely fuckups beyond the IT sector. But I think the two examples I listed are particularly egregious. In part because the Chat Control proposal had explicit exemptions for politicians (who's watching the watchmen? no one, obviously!), and because the chilling effect widespread surveillance has.
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.
Of course - this is all the classic thirst for power and control over little people, served in digital sauce with "think of the children" crumble.
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.
>"two thirds of the Trilogue essentially don't give a shit about European people, their rights, their freedoms or their wellbeing"
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.
I don't buy the superstate argument, since the EC consistently avoids or waters down attempts towards federalisation (full fiscal union, directly elected Commission, Parliament with legislative initiative, yada yada). Making a superstate would constrain the Commission, not empower it. The current ambiguity of having enough integration to override member states, but not enough to be democratically challenged and kept in check is the sweet spot for unaccountable technocratic capture.
Don't get me wrong, I'm completely against the EC, but I wish they were actually trying to create a superstate
Because the commission is proposed by the national governments through the European council.
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.
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.
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.
My monkey brain would love to see if corporate strategy would work here:
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.
Well you have to ask why fines aren’t working. In Meta’s case, recent revelations show that they make choices based on how much they stand to make by refusing compliance and just paying the fine. They decided the fine was small relative to the billions they made. A fine could still work but it needs to reach maybe unprecedented punitive levels.
Per the book “Careless People” Meta started “backing” right wing candidates everywhere (via algorithms, not money) to avoid regulation and taxes as soon as the EU tried to tax and regulate it more - thus leading to a surge of that sentiment all over the EU.
> After decades of trying and broadly failing to regulate American tech corps, at what point does the EU...
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].
It's very hard to imagine the EU enacting a ban on products that over half of Europeans use, regardless of the theoretical benefits of doing so. It doesn't seem like a practical option.
At some point, EU needs to build an alternative to those corps and that will never happen as long as they keep holding on to their precious pearl clutching regional and linguistic issues. EU needed to be a single country like 10 years ago.
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.
Hint: the reason why your observations about reality doesn’t match up to your expectations is because the premise you’ve built for yourself is wrong.
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?
What you're seeing here is why the US has such a massive amount of leverage over the EU.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
BigControl, BigAddiction... I mean BigTech cannot be trusted on every level, including the personal of the people involved as we can see in the Epstein Files!
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.
142 comments
> Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly voiced his dissatisfaction and sought support from Trump, while Apple’s Tim Cook reportedly asked the White House to directly intervene against EU fines imposed on his company.
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...
> they should have been fined tens of billions of dollars by now!
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.
>Maybe cartoonishly large fines levied against powerful entities
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.
> 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?
> An election would select lawmakers by popularity contest
That’s democracy.
> The Commission loves to have little deals away from the public where everything is quietly smoothed over ...
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.
>"two thirds of the Trilogue essentially don't give a shit about European people, their rights, their freedoms or their wellbeing"
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.
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.
> After decades of trying and broadly failing to regulate American tech corps, at what point does the EU...
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...
[4] - https://euroconf.eu/speakers/
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I wonder if these lobbyists get paid a lot.
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...
And no, the USAans are not in it for the 'free speech' either.