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!
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.
The DMA and DSA already allow fines up to 10 - 20% of global turnover (effectively 30 - 40% of annual profit) and breaking up noncompliant companies.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
and yet there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they've done this. The fines that have been levied are easy to pay.
> 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].
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).
Americans don't either, but the "free" (with ads*) model is so wildly popular with humans that it is unavoidable.
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.
Suing for damages here isn't profitable enough for attorneys, because "damages" with free healthcare means "missed a week of work", instead of "got a $200k bill".
It does happen, but it's way less lucrative. Tends to be limited to actual damages rather than punitive damages. There have been some scam-ish sub-industries (fake whiplash claims, suing councils for tripping over cracks in the pavement). It's very rare to see advertising for lawyers.
It's also rare because advertising for lawyers (and doctors) is strictly regulated in some member states. A sign in front of the office saying "S. Goodman, attorney, specialized in drugs, organized crime and whiplash" is OK, billboards, TV spots, newspaper ads and any kind of claims beyond "I'm an attorney and this is my office and specialty" are verboten.
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
I once read that PayPal was not successful outside the US because people outside the US couldn't understand why not just do a normal bank transfer. PayPal realized this and tried lobbying governments outside the US to make bank transfers harder.
No idea if this claim is true. How do Americans transfer money? Don't your banking apps allow that?
I don't know if that Paypal story is true, but that definitely is the situation with Intuit/TurboTax in America.
> 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.
As far as I can remember, Paypal was successful in Europe because of the tie-in with Ebay and because bank transfers at time were slow thanks to asynchronous settlement. SEPA fixed that, I don't know how much lobbying in the EU was involved but I'm certain payment processors eschewing banking regulation hastened it (the same way the push for WERO and the Digital Euro is coming from the problematic VISA/MasterCard duopoly).
Meh, you're right but the EU also makes laws in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect). In the end it's not about who makes the law but whether it's a good law. Ecodesign laws making US vacuum cleaners more economical is good. Trade pressures undermining EU privacy protections maybe not so good.
The "Digital Services Act" effectively takes the divisive dark money out of advertising and requires more than minimum-effort moderation, affecting Meta and X:
- 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
Digital Services Act / Digital Markets Act (similar in spirit, but one targets online stores like Google Play, another one online services like Instagram more generally)
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.
it's not the consistent opinion that's the problem, it's the single issue (EU is bad) they are purportedly (i didn't check) focused on.
also, "EU is bad" is suspicious in itself because it can't possibly be that everything about the EU is bad. a good faith opinion will find some good things about the EU and be specific in what they are criticizing.
They really should end fuel subsidies. We're paying taxes to promote fuel use. That's a really bad use of our taxes. (Some are apparently already being phased out, but others are not, from what I understand, and they've gone up dramatically in the past couple of years.)
As for digital rules, the EU should definitely stand firm and invest in its own tech sector, instead of caving to the US. Same with everything else where our standards are higher than theirs (food, human rights).
There are no subsidies, gas and diesel are the most expensive in the world, and most of the cost is taxes. But apparently, for the EU politicians, that is still too cheap, so they want even more taxes on top of that.
> Notably, more than 60% of all fossil fuel subsidies granted in 2023 were spent in three countries: Germany (EUR 41 billion), Poland (EUR 16 billion), and France (EUR 15 billion).
This is another one of those cases where people say "Europe" when meaning something much more country specific.
I can't find any detailed breakdown of this; I'm guessing it's something to do with coal mining in Germany?
France has absolutely no excuse, though. Largest nuclear power generation in Europe and subsidizing fossil fuels? I bet it's something to do with farming.
Your bet is right, but it's based on a misunderstanding. Those are not real subsidies, those are tax exemption on farmers, fishermen, trucker and traveling nurses.
You are thinking too logically. In EU fuel is expensive because it’s heavily taxed AND there are a lot of fuel subsidies.
Or to quote an old TV show:
Hacker: One of your officials pays farmers to produce surplus food, while on the same floor, the next office is paying them to destroy the surpluses.
Maurice: That is not true!
Hacker: No?
Maurice: He is not in the next office, not even on the same floor!
At least in France, the fuel 'subsidies' are not real subsidies, but tax exemption for different kind of people: farmers, truckers, fishermen and private nurses (I don't have a good translation, basically health workers who go directly to patients homes instead of working at a clinic or hospital). There was also a one time relief for people with fuel heating who earn less than 40k (I'm simplifying) in 2022 because of the Russian war, but it was extremely limited.
Maybe next time you imply my government is incompetent on a specific subject, do your research first. It is incompetent on a lot, don't get me wrong, but no one here need more disinformation hidden as a quip.
There is no point fighting against global warming if you're the only one doing it. If China, USA and India are not on the same page, the result will be that production will move even more to those countries, global warming will continue and European will just be poorer.
Do you have anything to support that claim? Carbon taxes are a theoretically effective mechanism to tilt the markets towards more sustainable means of production, that is something most economists agree on; alas, practically they are often thwarted by caving out exceptions or delays for short-term political gain.
It's an ugly and wasteful system set up instead of other, simpler measure that were politically unacceptable at the time, like higher VAT, excise duties on all fossil fuels across all industries without exception, including fuel oil for heating and aviation fuel.
Mmm. The language is not precise enough - if most economists agree on something it probably is true. If the corporate media gives the impression all economists agree on something, it is probably not true.
Economists as a profession understand extremely well that they have no ability predict the economic future beyond what the futures markets say.
Nope. It gets undue hate on Reddit (and by extension HN) but most people who matter in Bruxelles are heavy Politico consumers and leak to them all the time.
Them, Table Media, and Indigo Publications will give you the best pulse on what's happening in Bruxelles.
Nope. The simple fact that a politician gives any kind of quote, let alone an interview, to politico is a clear sign he/she is on the declining part of a political career. A bit like how using "Bruxelles" in a comment about the EU is a giveaway that your British and/or a (former?) brexiteer.
> like how using "Bruxelles" in a comment about the EU is a giveaway that your British and/or a (former?) brexiteer
It's a very common metonym for the EU - like how I'd use "Berlin" or "Paris" as a metonym for political leadership in Germany and France respectively.
Also, I ain't a Brit and have made that clear in my history on HN.
> The simple fact that a politician gives any kind of quote, let alone an interview, to politico is a clear sign he/she is on the declining part of a political career
In what way? You only give an assertion and no actual reasoning, and appear to be a long-living throwaway account. Meanwhile, I've been very open on HN about my past career in the policy space.
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...
Publicly pols say one thing or stand for one thing and privately they hold different views.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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?
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.
I wonder if these lobbyists get paid a lot.
- 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.
also, "EU is bad" is suspicious in itself because it can't possibly be that everything about the EU is bad. a good faith opinion will find some good things about the EU and be specific in what they are criticizing.
As for digital rules, the EU should definitely stand firm and invest in its own tech sector, instead of caving to the US. Same with everything else where our standards are higher than theirs (food, human rights).
This is another one of those cases where people say "Europe" when meaning something much more country specific.
I can't find any detailed breakdown of this; I'm guessing it's something to do with coal mining in Germany?
France has absolutely no excuse, though. Largest nuclear power generation in Europe and subsidizing fossil fuels? I bet it's something to do with farming.
Or to quote an old TV show: Hacker: One of your officials pays farmers to produce surplus food, while on the same floor, the next office is paying them to destroy the surpluses. Maurice: That is not true! Hacker: No? Maurice: He is not in the next office, not even on the same floor!
Maybe next time you imply my government is incompetent on a specific subject, do your research first. It is incompetent on a lot, don't get me wrong, but no one here need more disinformation hidden as a quip.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuel-subsidies-per...
It's an ugly and wasteful system set up instead of other, simpler measure that were politically unacceptable at the time, like higher VAT, excise duties on all fossil fuels across all industries without exception, including fuel oil for heating and aviation fuel.
Economists as a profession understand extremely well that they have no ability predict the economic future beyond what the futures markets say.
- decade of money printing (quantitive easing, covid, petro-dollar)
- decade of low interest rate free (created bubbles in stocks and assets)
- oil price increase (war in ukraine, war in iran)
as for EU climate rules this is IMHO still more a smoke screen - otherwise they wouldn't put tarriffs on chinese solar panels and EVs.
/s
Them, Table Media, and Indigo Publications will give you the best pulse on what's happening in Bruxelles.
It's a very common metonym for the EU - like how I'd use "Berlin" or "Paris" as a metonym for political leadership in Germany and France respectively.
Also, I ain't a Brit and have made that clear in my history on HN.
> The simple fact that a politician gives any kind of quote, let alone an interview, to politico is a clear sign he/she is on the declining part of a political career
In what way? You only give an assertion and no actual reasoning, and appear to be a long-living throwaway account. Meanwhile, I've been very open on HN about my past career in the policy space.
"Bruxelles" is the official French spelling, and French is the city's most spoken language, so maybe they just, you know, live there.