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

Comments

• Eggyhead@kbin.run ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s been a painful few decades for consumers having the teeth of unregulated tech titans sunk into them.

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I think that we can expect more propaganda from big tech, including political pressure from the USA. Fighting capitalism is going to be a long battle!

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• homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The act doesn’t apply to all tech companies, only to those with either a market capitalisation of more than €75bn (£64bn), or having at least 45 million users and €7.5bn annual turnover in the EU.

  In effect, this means just Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and ByteDance (owner of TikTok). The fact that five of the six are US companies has, of course, led to complaints that the pesky Europeans have it in for poor defenceless American giants. Cue violins.

  The act imposes serious obligations: companies will have to allow third-party apps and app stores on their platforms; provide transparent advertising data; allow users to easily uninstall pre-installed software or apps; enable interoperability between different messaging services, social networks, and other services, allowing users to communicate seamlessly across platforms; and be more transparent about how their algorithms rank and recommend content, products and services.

  It also prohibits certain practices by gatekeepers: favouring their own services over third-party ones, for example; engaging in self-preferential activities; and using private data from business users to compete against them. In other words, an end to tech business as usual.

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

  Member that time micro$quash was in court for a decade to prove they weren’t a monopoly despite being a monopoly, and then after all that the court declared they were a monopoly? Member? And then absolutely sweet fuck-all happened and they’re still out there monoply-ing without any care or hindrance? Yeah.

  US, you fucked that up royal. As usual.

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  • redfox@infosec.pub ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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 🤷

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    • dohpaz42@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      This right here. It is so far gone, and deeply entrenched into how society works at fundamental levels, that it is impossible to avoid any mega corporations and their influence on how we live (not just tech companies too).

      I know that pointing fingers does nothing to help, but this really is Reagan’s fault with his so-called trickle down economics.

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    • Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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

      That’s a minority of US politicians and you know it. Not to mention it’s a minority of a minority of those politicians that get elected.

      We got exactly what we voted for and that’s the truly maddening thing.

      Part of that is definitely manipulation of representation (i.e. gerrymandering) but not all of it.

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    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      but that means you have to replace windows with some other os

      Any problems with installing Linux? Try openSUSE if you don’t like Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian, which are the most often recommended ones. It’s the distribution most polished for that abstract “average user” that I’ve seen. And it’s one of the traditional mainstream ones and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. (Btw all those Arch-based schoolboy distributions are trash and I don’t use them, I also don’t use Arch btw. I use Void.)

      not buy a major manufacturer cell phone,|

      BQ is nice. It is a major manufacturer though.

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  • Tja@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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    • FaceDeer@fedia.io ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It actually did, solve it, unironically. The concern was that Microsoft was going to de facto take over the HTML standard and make it so that you had to use Internet Explorer and proprietary Microsoft extensions if you wanted to browse the web, eliminating all competition.

      Now, more than 20 years later, Internet Explorer is defunct. Microsoft's current browser is built on Chromium, an open source engine that was created by one of its competitors. If anything it's Google that's now the problematic one.

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Lol sure. First of all “lobby” is a very transparent euphemism for “bribe”. In second place the lack of proper rules in the US is creating behemoths that are very difficult to deal wIth. These companies are becoming richer than nations will be impossible to contain.

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  • abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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 about the departments - it’s just the budget is too low. The only fix is to raise taxes and fund them better.

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  • sorghum@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Vipsu@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Did Nokia even have official digital markpetplace for their phones? I only remember silly 3rd party stores selling ringtones and backgrounds through text messages. Maybe when smartphones became a thing and when iOS and Android phones were already dominating the industry. If I recall correctly some Nokia phones even supported sideloading with data cable.

      Their phones where also generally fairly durable with replacable batteries and chargers (3rd party options being available for both) and from what I gather fairly easy to open and repair.

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• Aopen@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This headline implies that EUs moves are agressive and brutal while they arent. Breaking up monopolies is an ordinary step of keeping the market competitive.

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  • jabjoe@feddit.uk ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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• JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Good. Get rid of proprietary messaging apps and unfettered access to our data. Bring back standards.

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  • ziixe@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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

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• TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It would be amazing if even a small portion of EU fines for big abusive tech companies went to supporting open source alternatives.

  In the Linux world, we are seeing right now how much things like Valve putting a bit of money into Linux, Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund giving €1m to the Gnome foundation, etc, is improving things.

  Imagine if even 1% of these big tech fines went into a pot that an independent body chooses to invest in various open projects. It’d be huge.

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  • barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Probably because Gnome is used in more businesses and Gnome is pretty good at implementing accessibility features, which was one of the main conditions of the grant.

      And it’s not a big deal, KDE is already getting a lot of support, and the work Gnome is doing is going to be an open, cross-desktop framework. It benefits KDE too.

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  • Hadriscus@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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

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  • AVengefulAxolotl@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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• frosty@pawb.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Won’t someone think of the poor shareholders /s

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  • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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• RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  By default big business is narcissistic. They abuse the hell out of everything (see what you made me do to be profitable?) then play the victim when the government hits back.

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  • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      And not just businesses. I am always horrified by how many people are obsessed with protecting the precious intellectual property of their posts on the Fediverse from “scraping”. It’s exactly the kind of “Private Property! Keep out!” thinking that gives the tech monopolies the stranglehold over their users.

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    • jabjoe@feddit.uk ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yes, which is why we have anticompetition laws. It’s just for some reason, people can’t always see competition problem when it’s technology.

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    • Silentiea@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s called “capitalism”. You should avoid it if you can.

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    • 0x0@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Power corrupts.

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• swordgeek@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This isn’t a ‘painful day for tech titans.’

  Corporations don’t feel pain. C*Os insulate themselves from it. They’re getting steadily richer, probably making more money than you’ll ever see in your life.

  This is a good day for tech comsumers. That should have been the headline.

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  • neutron@thelemmy.club ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Life those people have is enriched with power, which I’m grateful I don’t have.

      Most people to have power are very different from Marcus Aurelius or king Canute, and very unhappy.

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  • ziixe@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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))

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• CosmicCleric@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Thank you EU.

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  • HowManyNimons@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    *cries in British

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    • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      *cries in American

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• hahattpro@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  yeah, interoperability should work to encourage development

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  • Neon@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • neutron@thelemmy.club ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Speaking of email, spam becomes an inevitable problem. Anyone in theory can spin up a federated bot instance to spam the hell out of everyone.

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    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      XMPP actually started becoming better fast after those authorities (like Google) dropped it.

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    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What do you need in email that isn’t already there?

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    • 0x0@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Interesting how the companies mentioned in the article came up with DKIM and others, a Think of the Children™ argument but for spam, only to consolidate their own services as monopolies and walling-out anyone not using @them.

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• Fedizen@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Title should be adjusted to “Tech giants no longer treated like coddled babies by EU”

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• sbv@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA PAX EUROPA

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• rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The headline is yummy

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• lustyargonian@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I wonder why it isn’t titled from consumer’s perspective.

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  • HowManyNimons@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Schadenfreude gets clicks.

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• Benchamoneh@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is great news but how long are we talking for this to go live? Shouldn’t they already be DMA compliant?

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  • dustyData@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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• noodlejetski@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  oh no

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