Europe Triples Down on Tough Rules for Tech (axios.com) 54
The European Union Tuesday unveiled sweeping new proposals to control tech industry giants as "gatekeepers" who could be fined up to 10% of their revenue for breaking EU rules on competition. From a report: In the EU, "proposals," once introduced, are likely to become law in some form, even if details change dramatically through a slow feedback process. The EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) would set standards for treating large online platforms as "gatekeepers," based chiefly on how many users they have. Gatekeepers would be barred from favoring their own products over those of rivals -- think Google steering users to its own restaurant reviews over Yelp's, for instance -- or from using data in an exclusionary way that they've collected to develop their own products. They'd either have to avoid using such data or make it available to competitors to tap as well.
Gatekeepers that break the rules could be subject to fines as high as 10% of annual global revenue. The Digital Services Act (DSA) is aimed at making big platforms more accountable for user posts that break EU member nations' laws around illicit materials, such as Germany's prohibition on speech that glorifies Nazism. Large platforms that don't remove illegal posts following a government order could face fines of up to 6% of annual revenue.
Gatekeepers that break the rules could be subject to fines as high as 10% of annual global revenue. The Digital Services Act (DSA) is aimed at making big platforms more accountable for user posts that break EU member nations' laws around illicit materials, such as Germany's prohibition on speech that glorifies Nazism. Large platforms that don't remove illegal posts following a government order could face fines of up to 6% of annual revenue.
Re: That's why Europe has such a great tech indust (Score:2)
Even if you like European programmers and canâ(TM)t live without them (doubtful), it would be easy to hire them through a contractor. I just donâ(TM)t get it. They aren
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Tax avoidance. They do not want to pay the higher US tax rates.
Instead they are going to pay EU fines.
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How are tech businesses supposed to get off the ground without millions of rules to help them? That's where the EU comes in.
All those rules have helped Europe become a powerhouse for their smartphones, software, social media, film and tv industry ...
Fortunately, as can be read in TFS if one was so inclined, the proposal would only apply to "gatekeepers", and start-up tech companies can still "get off the ground" as you say. In fact, just by clicking that underlined text thingy in TFS, you can see that three criteria define these "gatekeeper" platforms:
1. A size that impacts the internal market: this is presumed to be the case if the company achieves an annual turnover in the European Economic Area (EEA) equal to or above € 6.5 billion in the last three financial years, or where its average market capitalisation or equivalent fair market value amounted to at least € 65 billion in the last financial year, and it provides a core platform service in at least three Member States;
2. The control of an important gateway for business users towards final consumers: this is presumed to be the case if the company operates a core platform service with more than 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the EU and more than 10 000 yearly active business users established in the EU in the last financial year;
3. An (expected) entrenched and durable position: this is presumed to be the case if the company met the other two criteria in each of the last three financial years.
I'm not sure what standards you set for start-up tech, but I don't think they generally have a market value of €65 billion (approx $79 billion) or more than 45 million monthly users or an entrenched
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three criteria define these "gatekeeper" platforms:
There are three complex criteria to avoid explicitly stating the one simple real criteria:
1. They are American.
These rules are intended to *help* the start up
Why start small if you will be punished for growing big? VCs depend on a few winners to fund all the failures. That doesn't work with winning isn't allowed.
An aspirational European with a bright idea is well advised to move to America and start their business here. I live in Silicon Valley, and already have plenty of European expats in my neighborhood. I now expect that to increase even more.
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If "winning" means damaging the society that lets you flourish (as in Facebook; you can search online for the many harms Facebook has inflicted such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, promotion of conspiracy theories, etc, or just read what a former Facebook VP had to say [washingtonpost.com]) or killing competitors or even clients with unfair business practices (hello, Amazon) or wielding immense power to make or break a business's Internet presence (hi, Google), or driving down wages and benefits and forcing people into subs
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If "winning" means damaging the society that lets you flourish (as in Facebook
Facebook is used as much in Europe as it is in America.
So America gets the home-field-advantage of high-paying jobs while Europe shares equally in the downside.
That doesn't seem like a winning strategy.
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I'm not sure what your point is? Are you saying that Europe should forget about privacy, decent employment standards, etc. so that a few hundred or a few thousand people can get rich damaging their society?
I think Europe's approach to mitigate the downside is very sound; the upside of companies like Facebook etc. for the larger society is minimal. Sure, Facebook has around 55,000 employees, but a lot of them are in low-paying jobs like customer care or administration. Not everyone's a hotshot programmer
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Re: That's why Europe has such a great tech indust (Score:2)
Yes why would anyone start a business knowing that they may eventually need to comply with rules when they achieve more than 45 million monthly active EU end users or an annual turnover in the EU equal to or above â 6.5 billion?
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Because VCs fund these companies, and the "big wins" make up for all the small losses. If winning isn't allowed, then no one plays the game. Europe's VC funding is a tiny fraction of America's.
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Right. Imagine if companies like Siemens, Zeiss, ARM, NXP, Ericsson, Skype, SAP, and ST Microelectronics had tried starting out in Europe of all places.
Re: That's why Europe has such a great tech indust (Score:4, Informative)
How many of them are in the fortune 100?
Not many. Because...
The Fortune 100 is a list of the top 100 companies in the United States. It is a subset of the Fortune 500, a list of the 500 largest U.S. public and privately held companies published by Fortune magazine.
- https://www.investopedia.com/t... [investopedia.com]
At least he googled. You fuckin retard.
Re: That's why Europe has such a great tech indus (Score:2)
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Because Europe is not a nation, but almost 50 of them with different languages, rules, standards and currencies. It doesn't have the economy of scale the USA has.
And no, the US states are not even remotely similar.
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Siemens has a market cap of $111 billion, dolt, and annual revenue around 57 billion Euros. Certainly enough to put it in the Fortune 100 were it based in the US, somewhere around the same ballpark as Facebook, Disney or Intel.
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"You don't become a tech company by manufacturing products that use electricity."
How about manufacturing products that MAKE electricity?
I have to say I've still not gotten over this idea that hardware isn't "tech", but losers in their mom's basement writing little scripties by themselves is.
But even if that's so, Siemens does not only make trains and circuit breakers but also EDA software.
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Man, you had to Google HARD (irony intended) to get that shitty list.
With the exception of NXP, I know all those companies. Siemens is (among other things) a major manufacturer of CT and MRI scanners. Zeiss builds some of the best camera lenses out there. Ericsson used to build cell phones with Sony, and IIRC they still build a bunch of equipment used in mobile phone towers. Skype is Skype. SAP is a CRM provider used by a large number of U.S. companies. ST microelectronics builds various chips that are in every iPhone (I think) since the very first model.
Oh, and I just
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Eh? I didn't Google. Those were all off the top of my head. They're large, multinational companies, and I've either worked with them or used their products. Sheesh.
The EU in 1846? (Score:2)
I don't think the EU was making a million rules in 1846.
Zeiss didn't start in the EU. It started in Thuringia, which later became part of the German Empire (2nd Reich), a monarchy. That land became part of Weimar Republic.
Then there was the 3rd Reich, then the allies controlled the area, then it was part of East Germany ...
Equating 1846 Thuringia, a monarchy, with the EU is pretty silly.
Seimens was founded in Prussia in 1847. Another monarchy, well over a century before the EU existed.
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Imagine if companies like Siemens, Zeiss, ARM, NXP, Ericsson, Skype, SAP, and ST Microelectronics had tried starting out in Europe of all places.
Siemens, Zeiss, and Ericsson have existed for more than a century.
NXP and ST Micro were subsidiaries of companies that have existed for more than a century.
ARM and SAP have both existed for more than 40 years. They did not start in the Internet age.
Skype, the only entry on your list started after most Europeans were born, experienced most of its growth and all of its profit while under American management.
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OK, sure. How many enormous American companies (annual revenue > $50B) started in the Internet age?
Amazon. Facebook. Google. That's about it. (MSFT was founded in 1975, so although the Internet existed then, it wasn't a force in business until the 90s.)
And (not) coincidentally, they are regarded as really shitty companies wrt at least one of how they treat their workers, how their business model works, and/or how they abuse monopoly power. Hence the EU's push for regulation.
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How many enormous American companies (annual revenue > $50B) started in the Internet age?
Very few companies in the entire world have revenue greater than $50B. Of the European companies you listed above, only Siemens reaches that threshold.
If we lower the bar to $10B, there are many American companies (Facebook, Netflix, Uber, Tesla, etc.) while Europe has nothing.
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Nothing... other than these 159+ companies [wikipedia.org].
Even if you filter out only "high-tech" companies, it's still a decent list.
There are not that many large European companies whose business model is bullshit (as in Uber and Twitter, for example) but I think that speaks more about the relative gullibility of investors.
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Nothing... other than these 159+ companies [wikipedia.org].
What happened to "started in the internet age"?
Nobody is claiming that Europe was always inept at starting successful businesses. Only that they are now.
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Who cares if the alternative is being like the US where the country are run and controlled by these companies, the people are abused and sucked dry of life and resources for a select few people can live stupidly rich.
Good riddance.
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the people are abused and sucked dry of life and resources for a select few people can live stupidly rich.
Europeans use Facebook and Google as much as Americans do. So their lives are also being sucked dry.
Meanwhile, all the stupidly rich are American.
Europe's knee-jerk anti-business attitudes are not helping them.
Good riddance.
None of these companies are leaving Europe.
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The problem with the EU tech industry has always been capital.
We have no problem creating companies like Skype, Opera, or MySQL. But then they get acquired by US companies and ground into the dust.
$$$.
This is a good thing (Score:3)
This is a good move. Companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon need to be reined in.
Same old same old (Score:4, Funny)
Europe: *does something*
America: WAHHH YUROP HATES FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY!! LEAVE R GUY ALONE. COMUNISM!!!!
Wow, just wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
What do you do with this?
" or from using data in an exclusionary way that they've collected to develop their own products. They'd either have to avoid using such data or make it available to competitors to tap as well."
So tell me how ANY advertising firm will ever be able to do business in the EU. What do you think it's for? You have people who collect data on find the target audience. So for the "Gatekeepers" (translation: anyone the EU can just fine to get some more money) can't use any of the data they collect and use it unless they give it out free to anyone? Seems like someone is trying to discourage someone from collecting the data in the first place, which brings me back to ANY advertisement out there. They are not random. Costs too much.
Now the moral of the story will still be Google, etc, will be way ahead of the EU. I see the plan already. You want the data? Fine, here is the data. Now you make heads or tails of it. Good luck.
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"Seems like someone is trying to discourage someone from collecting the data in the first place, which brings me back to ANY advertisement out there. They are not random. Costs too much."
Boo fuckity hoo. Advertisers can go back to the old model of advertising more broadly and hoping to hit their target audience, or just freaking PERISH. As long as they quit getting into my personal business and collecting my data in order to target me, I'm fine with either outcome.
Re:Wow, just wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like someone is trying to discourage someone from collecting the data in the first place, which brings me back to ANY advertisement out there.
I fail to see the problem with this. Make sure the government can't collect it either and the world (or at least the World Wide Web) would be a much better place.
Re: Wow, just wow. (Score:2)
We can go back to non-personalized non-microtargeted ads. Just sponsors for websites that display static ads. An IP address based click counter doesn't invade privacy.
Where did this idea come from that if I searched for something once that it'd be useful to bombard me with ads for that same thing I already found?
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So tell me how ANY advertising firm will ever be able to do business in the EU. What do you think it's for? You have people who collect data on find the target audience. So for the "Gatekeepers" (translation: anyone the EU can just fine to get some more money) can't use any of the data they collect and use it unless they give it out free to anyone?
I know you didn't read this proposal before giving your opinion on it, so here's a digest. A gatekeeper is any company which satisfies both the following consistently for the past three years: (1) annual turnover in Europe is 6.5 billion euros or market cap is 65 billion euros, (2) it has more than 45 million monthly active users in the EU and more than 10 thousand yearly active business users in the EU.
A normal advertising firm doesn't have 45 million monthly active users. I don't know why you even brought
Re:Wow, just wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
Complete sentence is:
Gatekeepers would be barred from favoring their own products over those of rivals — think Google steering users to its own restaurant reviews over Yelp's, for instance — or from using data in an exclusionary way that they've collected to develop their own products. They'd either have to avoid using such data or make it available to competitors to tap as well.
If you are a gatekeeper, you can't create products based on other's product sales data, unless you share this data. Think of amazon creating products based on what sales best via marketplace vendors.
Sounds fair to me.
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What do you do with this?
" or from using data in an exclusionary way that they've collected to develop their own products. They'd either have to avoid using such data or make it available to competitors to tap as well."
What do I do with that? Well, for starters I'd put it back in context by restoring the start of the sentence that you omitted for some reason:
Gatekeepers would be barred from favoring their own products over those of rivals -- think Google steering users to its own restaurant reviews over Yelp's, for instance -- or from using data in an exclusionary way that they've collected to develop their own products. They'd either have to avoid using such data or make it available to competitors to tap as well.
Once you stop pulling the quote out of context, it becomes clear that they're talking specifically about gatekeepers, that is, the companies that act as the means by which consumers reach some other place. Advertisers don't fit that description. Not even close. I don't go through an advertiser to reach some other service. I don't go through an advertiser to reach some
10% fine (TAX) (Score:2)
Hmmm,
good way to make them pay tax
every year
EU Definition of Innovation = "Nerf Competition" (Score:2)
This is why Brexit is moving forward - Britain got tired of Brussels-bound chumps dictating policy that they had to follow, most of which seems to follow some made-up set of random rules. The proverbial straw for Britain was the EU forced-acceptance of economic-refugees from everywhere and fairly enough they said "actually,
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In the USA it is the opposite.
Yet even with Europe prioritizing people there are still wildly successful European companies earning billions.
Meanwhile, I guarantee no one standing in a miles-long food line in the USA right now gives a damn about the stock market.
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I see this with the EU often, instead of being the "free market" they espouse to be, they are the opposite: protectionist, regulatory overload, and stifle anything that is successful.
You mean, exactly like how the US sanctioned ZTE, Huawei and recently Tiktok because they were more successful than US companies? Perhaps the EU learned something from that.
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Then Europe replaces them with its own home-grown companies which can they compete with the US tech companies globally. That's what China did: kept out the yanks, built their own giants, and now those giants are making moves elsewhere. Allowing US tech companies into your country is a losing move.
EU better then USA with healthcare, workers rights (Score:2)
EU better then USA with healthcare, workers rights, other rights, rules to stop false advertising, warranties. Even the prisons are an lot better.
It's protectionism and trade barriers (Score:1)
Nobody is forcing a French guy to use Google or Facebook. Their government is restricting their access and it's their citizens who lose in the end.
Once again (Score:2)