Painful day for tech titans as EU finally sinks its regulatory teeth into them

It's not over with this bill, at least until pluralism returns in operating systems, hardware and internet protocols.

I just hope they don't stop the pressure with this.

You remember how all the US politicians are funded by the same huge corporations and rich people who all benefit from the regulators doing nothing but pretending to care?

Remember how the politicians pander to Americans by blaming rich people for all of life's problems and saying they'll make them pay their fair share, but those politicians have multiple houses and blatantly conduct insider trading every day, but Americans still vote for them time after time?

I'd like to say you could just not use their products, but that means you have to replace windows with some other os, not buy a major manufacturer cell phone, or do much else 🤷

I mean, we got this "choose your default browser" screen for a few years. That solved it, right?

Well, in some sense this is architecturally correct. That corps from one country may lobby its politicians, but the network effect would be broken by other important countries' politicians not going along with that.

Looking like that - there's nothing US institutions could do in the context of human nature, and for EU we can say "about goddamn time".

Just a weird thought.

What the corrupt US departments couldn’t - and refused to - do.

I heard an interesting podcast interview with someone from one of those departments.

It sounds like they just genuinely don’t have enough funding, as in enough staff, to do their job properly.

Nothing corrupt within the departments - they’re doing the best they can with what they’ve been given . Congress needs to raise taxes and fund the departments better and then there will be proper regulation in the USA.

If course, congress can’t do hardly anything at all so that’s never going to happen. At least not at a federal level.

At a state level though? Maybe that could work.

Remember when Nokia was king? Yup, lack of regulations then. I'm not saying it's not a coincidence, but it certainly could be. I am glad to see Nokia's resurgence in the infrastructure area in tech though.

It should be ordinary. But it isn't. Which means the market stagnants as competition basically stops. Like how Microsoft basically closed IE development when IE "won" the browser market by achieving monopoly.

There is the laissez-faire approach of abolishing patents and copyright so that these monopolies at least couldn't squash competitors on that basis, and then they'd slowly die without breaking them up by force.

But that's not plausible now.

Sad iMessage didn't get categorised as a gatekeeper, even though in here, the absolute ass of Europe called Czechia the iPhone market share is just above 1/3 of all phones active (which if I remember is way higher than it used to be) I completely expect for this number to rise, since people buy for the brand, and these brain-dead people are the ones to use the default messaging service, thus I can't wait to get shamed in 10 years for using my android phone and not being able to use iMessage

The EU spends plenty of grant money on FLOSS. It's part of the general Horizon grants, there's a bug bounty programme (as replacement for the hackatons which didn't work as well as imagined), and last but not least the EU publishes lots of software as FLOSS.

You don't want to make that stuff contingent on big tech misbehaving. The fines go into the general EU budget but the EU doesn't get to keep it, membership fees are lowered in the next year by the same amount thus the windfall goes to member state's budgets.

Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund giving €1m to the Gnome foundation

Why, in Germany of all countries they should have supported KDE. Granted, it's already doing fine, but then Gnome's problem is not with lack of money.

I apologize, but I initially read "imagine if just 1% of these fines went into pot" and I was 100% on board for a brief time

Yeah, but until then we can support these projects. Even a one-time 10€ donation can go a huge distance, or monthly 1€ even. These add up.

P.S. To any open source devs, please allow us to donate yearly recurring 10-15€! There are so many projects to support, but i have to live from something as well.

You are right, we should tax capital gains drastically so to disincentivise speculation, and force investor to rely on dividends. This would put a stop on the crazy run for growth we are experiencing as companies try to make their market valuation go up in this unsustainable eternal race to the top.

I was around during the IE/ Netscape war. It occurred to me back then that given the same set of opportunities, any business would likely do the same. It sucks.

I get depressed whenever I read about those salaries. I get paid the bare minimum to pay the bills. I will never have the life those people have - not that I care about luxury, but simply not having to worry about basic necessities.

This, spez for example with his almighty great ideas paid himself $193 million last year, that's more than I'll ever see my whole life (thanks to me being born in this fuckhole called "Eastern Europe" (technically Central but who cares, it's just as shitty in the countries more east))

*cries in British

I'm sorry to break it to you, but look at how much E-Mail, the biggest open Standard has developed.

Without a central Authority behind it, Developement doesn't work.

Heck, even with a central authority it's difficult. Just look how many Businesses still use Java 8.

Schadenfreude gets clicks.

Today. The orders and regulations were laid out years ago. This is the deadline. Most mandated changes are already in place or have been worked to go online today. This is the reason the latest iOS update dropped one or two days ago, for example. It introduces some of the mandatory changes for the EU market.