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The Internet is a perfect example of why we can’t have nice things, or rather, why anarchy could never work.
That’s what the Internet used to be, and what it largely is. And it worked quite well, until people realized the Internet could be monetized beyond just being an extension of your brand.
Now it’s quite obvious that regulation is necessary. People are idiots and they can’t be trusted with a dopamine-injection-button run by greedy corporations. That gives those companies really unprecedented power.
I’m swiss and not a EU fan, but I’m really proud of how they are standing up and facing these huge companies.
We’ve clearly reached a point where these companies need to see that they can’t do everything they want.
Let’s fight for reparability, interoperability and privacy!
Please, remember to vote on the European elections! We do need the EU to keep taking actions like this
What parties should we vote for to make sure they keep protecting consumers?
Discard the Brownshirts, their collaborators, and the Putin fluffers, and you probably won’t have many choices left.
anything but the right-wing ones.
Volt wants:
To make digital rights binding. They call for a “Declaration on European Digital Rights and Principles”.
Tax revenues from digital technologies where they are generated.
Guarantee net neutrality and reject contradictory laws.
Enact laws against the unethical use of AI.
How does taxing revenue from digital technology where it’s generated work?
Can you explain what that means for me.
When you buy something, the seller pays a VAT tax (something about 17% to 23% of your purchase, depending on the country).
If I’m a French company and I sell something to a customer in Finland (we would be both in the EU) taxes would be paid in either France or Finland (it depends on the kind of thing I’m selling and the kind of customer).
If I understand correctly, they want to tax digital services in the place where the work is actually generated. So, in France.
Correct. Amazon for example: everything that is sold via Amazon in Europe is taxed in Ireland. Even if a product which is available on Amazon is produced in France, stored in a French Amazon warehouse and shipped to a French customer. Just because it’s possible, they pay the reduced taxes in Ireland for such a deal. That needs to be fixed.
As left as you can. I’d recommend something less extreme if proto-fascists aka liberals had not lied to us for decades.
European elections have this advantage that the morons don’t even go to vote nor know what is going on.
It’s the sole reason why is it going so good, obfuscation. Anything outside of the country is too much too grasp for the rightists.There’s some kind of deep moral to this and I am not sure it is a good one
:`-( I miss voting in the European elections! 🏴🇪🇺💪
Big tech can go F itself.
All big tech has done is stolen our data and lied to us for their own needs.
Make all software FOSS
That’s not true. Try also destroyed really good things, like the internet as a whole.
Make all software FOSS
That would require extreme socialism
that makes it even better then
wake me up when someone figures that out. so far I haven’t seen any large scale implementation that could last and/or keep everyone happy.
Happy? I’ll settle for dignity.
good
This smells like sour grapes to me, just like when people say to boycott Starbucks and then in the same breath say their coffee sucks. These companies became behemoths because people find a lot of value in the products and services they offer. Failing to acknowledge that truth just makes you sound out of touch.
I mean you SHOULD boycott starbucks for their business practices. But you can’t say their coffee sucks. They don’t have coffee. They have “diabetic inducing coffee flavored sugarwater”
But it’s not coffee
I think the point being made here is that many people clearly enjoy what Starbucks offers. So, saying they suck is preaching to the choir. The only people listening to that are the people you aren’t trying to convince. If you want an impact, suggest an alternative that will make those people happy. To do that, start with an understanding of the value Starbucks brings them. Failing that, you are just signaling that your thinking isn’t for them. They’ll just ignore you and continue to happily give Starbucks their money.
Many people enjoy Starbucks.
Many more go because it is convenient due to the drive-through and also because it has probably driven the local coffee shops out of business, but would definitely take another, better option if it presented itself.
Which they are. A smaller (but still pretty big) chain called Scooter’s opened up here and Starbucks has taken a huge hit.
So it’s a bit more complicated than you make it out to be.
Yeah! That’s precisely what I mean. Scooters is making an impact because they understand what people want and are providing a reasonable alternative that makes those kinds of people happy. They’re not just saying: Starbucks is bad, don’t go there.
It’s a bit more complicated: In your example, if someone from the outgroup (e.g. a liberal person or in general someone who isn’t as mindless and as purely driven by hedonism) suggests that “they” should prefer a different coffee chain, they’ll dig in and go to Starbucks even more because by doing that, you gave them another tool to feel like they’re rebelling against the “elites”, i.e. going to Starbucks went from something they did because they were uneducated to a new source of their personal and group identity. There’s no easy solution to bring people to live in their own best interest when they are so adamant to make every little aspect of their lifestyle into a culture war battleground. It’s exactly as hard and prone to fail, as getting people out of a cult.
Yeah, put another way, make something controversial and people will pick sides and stop their thinking then and there. If anyone, including themselves, thinks “Starbucks sucks” then they’re the enemy and should be disproven.
I’d argue there’s a great solution. Respect the people that go to Starbucks and their opinion. Understand it. And then, from a place of compassion and understanding see how you can help them. People respond a lot better to that. But I’ll admit that in this climate everyone is making things an us vs them controversy. So it’ll be hard when others are trying to create that divide and you are trying to bridge it.
I recommend the latest book by Peter Pomerantsev about the English guy who was in charge of counter-propaganda against Nazi Germany in WW2. I’m not through with it yet but it’s crazy what methods he used to get through to the German soldiers and general public. Basically he found out the reason why people follow obvious evil guys like Hitler, Trump, and Putin is because their showy evilness allows their followers to live out their own worst tendencies without feeling guilt. The only way to tackle that was to clandestinely give them a way to live out their best tendencies and reward them for it, because he thought that people enjoy being good even more than being evil. Although in the case of MAGA I guess it’s harder to find such a thing than with Nazi foot soldiers back in the days.
Oh thanks! That sounds fascinating.
They have regular coffee at Starbucks.
It’s a timeline. tech companies have become much worse, and people warning about them more vocal, so the lower educated classes who mindlessly use their products have (partially) woken up to the real motives of companies who create “free to use” products, i.e. data mining. In the EU, we have a lot of dummies who we call “remote controlled”, who want to simulate a version of the US lifestyle (huge cars, celebrity adulation, eating like shit, single-issue voting, vapidness). These mainly teenagers but regrettably also low-class adults. Those are also the people who still use social networks because they have nothing else going on and are too lazy to invest their free time in worthwhile activities. So it’s a class issue, the social underbelly of the EU is remote controlled by US culture and corporations almost like the social underbelly of the US is.
people find a lot of value in the products and services they offer
This is definitely true to some degree, but there imo is also another side to this.
Yes, they there are underlying problems/demands that they solve, but they definitely also create and shape those since psychology sadly works extremely effective. And they really try their hardest to manipulate customers.
Another aspect is that they might have originally created that value and given the users what they wanted, which got them in the position they are in now. Sometimes even operating at a loss to bully competition out of the market. But once they achieved this dominant position enshittification commences. Which wouldn’t be that much of an issue, if they wouldn’t also often prevent competition from growing enough to be able to compete.
Example Google search: The demand for a way to navigate the web is real and google fulfilled it best, which made them huge. Timejump to the present: the demand is still the same, but now google shows you what they want you to see and pay billions to be the default search engine to hinder any competition from gaining any traction.
I hope the EU retaliates in an incredible show of force
On meta’s while it is flagrant screw you, they may have a valid argument. Human beings don’t actually need any kind of social media to survive, ergo it is a convenience or luxury that could be charged for.
I’m certainly not agreeing with them, but they may be banking on that style argument and their ungodly amount of money to fight it.
Really the regulation should be about requiring social media companies to interoperate similar to regulation on the phone companies. You should be able to switch to another social media platform without losing your ability to communicate with your friends on the old platform similar to how you can still call your friends after you change phone companies.
Then is if the social media companies want to charge money people could change to another platform without losing their contacts.
Basically the only reason I still have facebook is to talk to chat with people on there that I can’t contact through other means.
You should be able to switch to another social media platform without losing your ability to communicate with your friends on the old platform similar to how you can still call your friends after you change phone companies.
Boy have I got some news for you about something called “the fediverse…”
Where they lose totally though is the off service data harvesting that isn’t even remotely “implied okay”
You absolutely can charge for social media, just not the way Facebook does. They’re not charging for the service, just for not spying on you, which is illegal under GDPR.
To some people in some places Facebook is actually necessary in order to have a social life or run a business.
We all know Facebook would die if it charged for access, because it would lose its ubiquity that makes it necessary for some people.
What would actually be good is if instead of charging for privacy, they charged for enhanced features - similar to how discord charges for Nitro (I am not defending discord, just using their payment model as an example)
The problem with that payment model though is then you have to actually develop features people want to pay for. And we all know Facebook is creatively bankrupt.
Yes. But we have all gotten pretty used to things on the Internet not costing money. If they start costing money, many people will either not want to or be able to use them.
Right. But if things do start to cost money, should that be stopped by laws?
I feel like trying to make the big fish act in our interest and not theirs is fighting windmills.
Better kill the big fish.
Not directly on topic - note how all the socialist revolutionaries always start with killing the smallest fish and hate it the most. The big ones they try to convert.
Genuine question: how do we actually “kill the big fish” though? Majority are going to continue to use big tech out of convenience and because they dont care much.
No quick way. There are too many regulations which are enforced badly and abused to actually support that “big fish”. Make them fewer and make the punishment swift and unavoidable and hard. And split a few of the worst offenders into parts each in one specific area - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta are all good candidates.
I think in the end it all comes down to putting power back into the hands of regulators — power that corporate America has been slowly and steadily eroding for the last 40 years.
A more powerful regulatory state could start enforcing the anti-trust laws we already have on the books by breaking up the massive tech monopolies. Once that’s done, new regulations and new legislation against anti-consumer practices are needed, but those will only work if the punishments scale high enough to work as an actual deterrent against the multi-billion dollar tech giants.
Of course, we’d also need massive, MASSIVE campaign finance and lobbying reforms so that monied interested aren’t able to sabotage the system all over again.
Or we could just bring back the guillotine… that would probably do the trick too.
You forgot to say that regulatory apparatus should have much fewer points of failure. That is, it should be made stronger and more efficient, but it should be radically contracted. It’s bigger than needs be.
By points of failure I mean opportunities for strong entities to make regulations work for monopolies\oligopolies.
In general the article seems to be a summary of current legislative actions that are ongoing between big tech and EU. Though in the article it’s worded with the much more fitting ‘game of chicken between EU and Big Tech’ rather than something like the title, but I guess “drop dead has a better ring to it”…
I general the article has a lightly optimistic tone, which I very deeply hope holds true.
If you don’t like the products of Big Tech, don’t use it. Don’t like oil, don’t use it. The EU might as well ban Big Tech.
It’s not that simple. I don’t like Facebook & I don’t like Facebook. Still Facebook collects data about me. Tell me why shouldn’t Facebook be stopped? Here data is new oil. Facebook is mining for that Oil on my land. You wouldn’t allow oil company to mine oil on your land right.
free market and that’s a bad analogy
Lol, it’s funny how you cry free market. Free market doesn’t not mean violating someone’s privacy. No free market can exist without regulations & standards. Without regulations exploitation takes place.
To this articles question on why apple should care about EUs 500 million citizens when they have trillions of Dollars. Well given that the USA only has 333 millions I would say they should care a lot.
Apple needs to realize that the EU doesn’t care if they left. They barely pay any taxes in the EU and don’t even create much economic value. Since most Apple jobs in the EU are in retail, businesses administration and tax evasion. They don’t produce shit here.
But what about the blue chat bubbles?!
Nobody cares about that in EU
At least in germany, nobody cares. We are using WhatsApp over here most of the time
Its a regional thing. In europe whatsapp is more generally used then in the usa :)
Meta tried to do the same. The EU response was to ask when they’d leave to plan the going away party. Meta was a lot less confrontational after that.
I would have never expected the EFF to use a lame click-bait headline like this one.
The article is ok (summary of the current state of things) but the title is completely out of place.
Guess they had a visiting editor from The Daily Beast in charge of headlines for a day 🤷
Big Tech needs to knows its place. Yes especially you Apple. Make sideloading available globally.
And stop charging a “Core Technology Fee”. And allow JIT compiling for non-browsers so emulators for newer systems can perform well.
Wow. I have no idea what a “Core Technology Fee” is. Guess I’ll stick with Android.
Continue the good work, EU. You obviously hit a nerve, so you know you’re on the right track.
When the Parasite Class objects so vehemently to something that is impacting their obscene profits and sociopathic control, you know that something is being done correctly.
Me to Big Tech: “Drop Dead”
