EU to unveil landmark law curbing power of tech giants

Firefox has been viable as a standalone product for over a decade because Google pays for being the default search engine. This is roughly viable with Chrome being around, it would be even more viable if Chrome was not around.

You can't compete with Chrome when your primary merit is simply not being Google. Forcing Google to spin-off Chrome should have been done earlier though, before Microsoft had a stake on the engine. Now additional steps need to be taken to ensure that spinning off Chrome will not actually kill competition; with an independent Chrome, we can count on Google cutting down on Mozilla's funding since Google wouldn't be any longer in danger of being ruled as a browser monopoly.

I wonder if this means that we should all start starting dating app companies, given that apparently it's a guaranteed sale if you can attract enough users. We could start the "match group group," stamping out standardized dating apps and putting proven amounts of brand-building effort into each one, and selling them to Match Group at a repeatable price.

Doesn't seem terribly monopolized to me, especially if you factor in that one person often uses multiple of those apps.

...so duopoly??

While Microsoft bundles, it's not problematic like Google or Apple. Their way of doing things is different.

The problem with the smart phone world is that apps are distributed through stores not websites. There isn't any worthy exclusive Windows Store app I can find. Every useful software is available from the websites.

In the smart phone world, as a device manufacturer you have to get Google's blessings. They control the play store. And as a device manufacturer, no play store = no sales.

The app store parasite model needs to end. I get no viruses in years, and I download software from websites all the time on Windows 10.

The harder problem is what you do with the result of the crawl once you have it. You need to index it. This is one of Google's deepest moats. Being able to serve any of hundreds of billions of documents in milliseconds requires an enormous amount of infrastructure and hundreds of careers worth of difficult software engineering.

I don't see a good way to split indexing out as a separate company from the rest of the search engine. It's tightly integrated with ranking. Generally a new ranking technique requires some new information to be associated with each document in the index, e.g. some precomputed scores that describe the document's quality or fitness for different kinds of queries. At query time, you're often just weighting and comparing these scores across documents.

If you had Google's index, you'd be a long way towards being able to replicate Google's results, but I don't think that would lead to the kind of innovation you're hoping for.

For site owners, it may prove to be lower maintenance to simply whitelist such a bot for crawling, though on the downside they may want to pick and choose which search engines can index it, and since the crawl (assumedly) would use one UA it would complicate how site owners can tell respective search engines what they're allowed to do with the crawl data.

Android was motivated to compete with Apple. The Play Store and Chrome Web Store required platform ownership for integration and optimization. Intertwined services demand mutual optimization. Many other Google products would likely struggle as startups, requiring massive scale to become profitable, if even possible. Most only exist because ads pay for them and they may contribute to improving ads.

They might be the ones who finally push it for mainstream adoption, then PayPal can go kick rocks.

If it fails, then maaaybe we could think about it. Still not as bad as these 4 major offenders.

Both of these are already the status quo even before this law

I don't think it's shocking at all. Every market is free to regulate itself however it sees fit, regardless of what "nationality" players on it have. It's interesting hardly anyone blinks an eye when that regulation allows "American" companies to save costs in developing countries but there are complaints when it disadvantages those companies, often for the same kinds of regulation: labour and environmental.

If you agree that Apple should be on the list, then Match Group should without question be on the list.

I'm just a realist. Spotify is not big by comparison. I just looked up a list of the 30 most highly valuated America, and the least valuable was bigger than Spotify.

> European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate

I've lived in both and it's just no comparison. What differences you find within the US you find within single European countries. The fact is that an American startup can target a huge, homogeneous and rich country with barely any extra work.

It's also a lot different than American culture -- I've long maintained that as far as cultural attitudes and preferences go, a person from New York has more in common with someone from Mexico City or Sao Paolo than someone from Paris or London.

Jury's still out on that one, Apple Music is making very large in roads, and Spotify is starting to struggle.

It quite possible for the statement "the US have greater cultural homogeneity than the EU" to true alongside the statement:

> European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate.

And I would argue that's exactly the case. Having been in startup that seriously looked at expanding in the US vs expanding in the rest of the EU (it expanded into the US), I'm confident to say the US is far more homogenous. Interestingly that doesn't necessarily mean that it's easier for an EU company to expand the US rather than the EU. But it does mean that EU startups have a much larger bump in the road than US companies when they're expanding.

For example it's difficult to create a startup in France because it's very difficult to discipline or fire anyone, and tech workers are used to clocking off at 5pm and having 35+ holiday days per year.

This means that no one's creating these epic billion dollar companies in a hurry, but at the same time the populous is defended, healthy, and not overworked. As opposed to the US where often a company's rise comes at the cost of a wealth of underpaid and mistreated workers (Amazon, Uber, we could go on).

To use an intentionally extreme analogy, your argument feels like sitting around watching the US build lovely tall pyramids with slave labour, saying that Europe's regulations get in the way of it building such tall pyramids. Well, yes, of course, the US is better, if all you're measuring is the height of the pyramids. (nevermind that the US is the easily the biggest user of slave (penal) labour outside of China)

It seems like US workers and the US public lose out on almost every other measurement.

There's two things the EU could do here: force big companies to split up (so they can't favour their own services) and require social networks to be interoperable (using ActivityPub or similar).

Why would smaller companies be better positioned for those things?

Try convincing tens of thousands of engineers to learn Polish, Estonian or Dutch. Some will do it, or are fine living in a country without speaking the language, but surely it puts a wet blanket on job market mobility. It's a hard sell: "Come to Stockholm to work with us, learn a new language that is useless anywhere else, and adapt to our culture or be forever an outsider. Oh, and your next job might be in Denmark, so do it all over again."

Google has 120,000 employees today. You may find half of that in Germany, France or the UK, but not in the rest of the 40-ish countries scattered throughout the continent.

> Yes. This needs to be done not just for web services and social networks, but for the whole technology stack including chips and operating systems.

Totally agree, especially chips. This one is the hardest though.

ARM was until recently a European company. This is part of the dynamic - some companies in the US have huge piles of cash. If a European company gets successful enough, there'll be interest from a large US company in acquiring it.

In the US it is taken for granted that there has been a virtuous cycle between public research money, research universities, venture capital and tech companies. My impression is that most of the tech originates in this ecosystem.

That being said, of course Google and FB are never going to be banned in the EU. They'll lobby to death to get the regulation to be "reasonable", and they'll mostly comply because they want their part of the advertising market, and they'll pay the fines when they get caught.

More likely the EU would negotiate with the companies rather than outright ban them.

(they were still rioting over other issues, just not Amazon)

As far as I can tell, this had no noticable effect on the political parties. I think you are overestimating the power of large tech companies to influence foreign EU democracies.

There are other examples, including one involving google, where they tried to block access to certain services and expected the population to blame their government.

Unless you can give me a counter example, I think it's more likely people will blame the tech company.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/9c9bf084-994f-11e5-95c7-d47aa298f...

The risk is that too large fines are bankruptcy events so companies gamble on polluting and then shut down after making a few years of profit. Companies that get environmental permits such as mines or chemical industry, should have to deposit the money required to restore the environment - even after bankruptcy.

It's common for a pragmatic 'Cassandra' to point to the newest evidence as permission for people to finally wake up to the problem rather than berating them for not paying attention any earlier.

Surely the pandemic forced them to use some more tech.

I would add that despite the funding coming from the government,

> The work of DW is regulated by the Deutsche Welle Act, meaning that content is intended to be independent of government influence [0]

Specifically, the supervisory board of Deutsche Welle consists of 7 members that get elected by the parliament and the acting federal government and another 10 members that come from non-profit organizations like labor unions, religious groups, cultural and sports organizations, among others.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle#Aufsichtsgremie...

Yes EU unifies a lot of things, but also leaves a lot of details up to the individual nations which means things aren't quite as similar as one might imagine.

Seems that language and regulations are not the barriers here.

Even US companies aren't that "unified", they're hailing from a specific state (often California) and have nothing to do with the other 49. You could easily swap "California" with "Germany".

Looks to me like access to capital and risk aversion are the biggest problems. Always have been.

The UK is by far the best place for a startup in Europe, and I'd wager that will stay the same even after Brexit, as long as every other country has this obsession with saving cash and not investing in risky business, or any business at all.

Localization is easy, getting millions for a startup is hard. And God forbid you fail, you will very likely never get any funding from anyone in the EU and will have to move to the US. Such a waste of entrepreneurs.

We need a degree of fiscal integration at the federal level, similar to what the US have. At that point, smart people running smart companies will be free enough to deal with the cultural-border problems just fine.

Could be, but another explanation is that the newspapers have heard of GDPR and don’t understand it (detailed legalese that they can skip by not serving EU citizens, I can’t really blame them), while Four Seasons Total Landscaping hasn’t even heard of it (weird foreign thing about tech — who cares? We sell spades, not computers!)

As a European citizen, I don't want this.

It also costs money to implement GDPR

I just imagine billions of dollars burnt to no avail.

Spotify's side: https://www.timetoplayfair.com/facts/ (this page is theirs)

Apple's side: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/addressing-spotifys-c...

To pass the Council a Regulation like this only requires a Qualified Majority,[0] that's votes in favour from at least 14 countries representing at least 65% of the EU's population.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_the_Council_of_the_E...

The EU can empower citizens with anti tech corporate action while also dropping the ball whean dealing with European car manufacturers. It's not either/or.

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

It will cost < 1000 € to go after a big tech company that doesn't respect GDPR ( Cfr. If you start it in the Netherlands)

The EU consistently puts down very strict regulations regarding emissions and with the new 2021 laws it's predicted VW alone will have to pay 4.5 billion euro fines to the EU for not reaching the emission targets. It's one of the reasons they started selling the ID.3 when it was only half-finished.

Data protection in the EU goes back to before Facebook was even founded. Google was still a small startup. The GDPR was just the next iteration of it.

In any case, even if that were the case, then recognizing the right to one's own data as a fundamental right would just be an empty pretext.

> See how little resistance from the EU, VW and other EU major car manufacturers faced with emission cheating/scandals and the amount of lobbying they do.

It's possible for someone to do well in one area, and to perform badly in another.

As a counterpoint, the GDPR has been enforced just as strongly against European banks, for example.

Edit: here you go, the first EU incarnation that recognizes the rights of individual to their data, published in October 1995 (when none of these tech giants even existed):

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...

These laws are not designed to hit only Google and Facebook they are hitting tech in general, including local companies. If the EU were to have any locally home grown tech companies to speak of, it would be safe to assume the EU would let many of the current things slide.

I can only assume the EU gave up completely on its own businesses to ever be able to compete with any US tech company. These regulations upon regulations increasing the bar of entry continuously practically guarantee that there won't ever be a competitor to any US tech company coming out of the EU.

Weird, I manually opt out of everything on most websites I visit and I find it pretty straightforward. There's only a handful of flows that most websites use, so it's not that difficult. There are some egregious exceptions (Yahoo being a particularly annoying one), but that's a small number of cases and, in most cases, it makes me realise I didn't actually care that much about reading their content, so I just move on.

Also, the dark patterns are not a result of the law, but a result of insufficient law enforcement. If the EU comissions starts going after a few websites that employ particularly dark patterns for consent, you'll see everyone fall in line.

> Is this freedom?

Yup, it's that website's freedom to block EU traffic.

The dark patterns are straight up non-compliant with the law. The GDPR mandates about 0 of those popups, it's the shitty companies that "comply" because they want to abuse your data that make those popups.

Same with the foreign newspapers, they're _not_ required to block anything. They just chose to because it's somehow easier to block traffic than to not track them.

Yes. It is freedom. I'll take a few popups over the worst excesses of big tech privacy invasion, rent-seeking and monopolistic practices.

Well, this is exactly the thing that's illegal under GDPR. Don't blame the regulator if websites are blatantly not complying with the law.

The popups is the tiny, visible part of the GDPR. The rest of the iceberg that is the GDPR is that those sites already had to think about how they handle your data.

I hope the popups thing will be resolved by clarification and some stiff example-making fines. Hopefully those examples make it clear that no kind of "optional" tracking can be included via a prominent "Accept and continue" button and that all such default actions must lead to zero tracking/third party ad cookies being used. Once sites realize that almost no one will make an effort and actively enable tracking, these things will disapppear (as will a lot of the sites that can't find alternative revenue - this is a good thing)

I think GDPR, and the so-called "cookie law" before it, was done pretty competently. The principles are pretty clear: data policies/controllers/etc. have to be explicit and limited; personal data collection requires consent of the people involved; opting into a service implies consent for data required by that service (e.g. cookies for shopping carts, local storage for highscores, etc.); if consent isn't implied, it must be requested explicitly.

Explicit consent is a last resort, and only required when collecting personal data which (a) isn't directly required to provide a service or (b) comes from people who aren't users of your service (i.e. who haven't opted in). Advertising is a good example, since the "users" of an ad network (those opting to use it) are the people buying and selling ad space; people viewing those ads aren't users (they haven't opted in); and advertising isn't required to provide a service (e.g. a news site; it might be indirectly required, for raising revenue, but the site would work just the same with any revenue source).

The fact you're tired of popups shows that GDPR is working; the extent of data collection, surveillance, etc. has been brought to the surface. Your anger is misdirected though: it's not GDPR's fault that so many surveillance organisations are trying to track and target you; quite the opposite!

> make it easy to accept everything in one click

> Is this freedom?

Do you think it would be "freedom" to waive all of your waivable rights, to anyone and everyone who asks, without even knowing they asked? That's what an automated banner-clicker would be doing, since consent popups are not restricted to talking about cookies (just like GDPR isn't about cookies); they can ask for pretty much anything. In fact, I imagine many of them ask for more than they're legally allowed (this happens all the time, e.g. many privacy policies do this, many "warranty void if removed" stickers are not legally enforcable, etc.).

If you'd instead rather tell your browser to accept certain pre-selected terms which you're comfortable with, then you're in luck! There's a standard for that called P3P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P It's not supported by Chrome, but you can enable it in Firefox, as long as you're using version 2 (it was removed in Firefox 3). Then you just need to convince every Web site you visit to implement it. Good luck!

If a site wants me to do that all individually, I close the window. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Oh, and I probably should report them, because it's almost certainly illegal.

And yes, this is freedom. The freedom for me to choose. I can still click "accept all" if I want to. I couldn't before, and I didn't even know how much there was.

What you meant is "convenience". Freedom is not always convenient.

There's a terrific browser extension called Consent Manager [1] that automatizes it.

[1] https://github.com/privacycloud/consent-manager-web-ext

As for freedom, well, you're free to just consent and get your identity traded and become a digital slave.

By and large the law works just as it was meant to : showing in broad daylight the extent of what the data market has become.

As a small business, that is just an extra pile of regulations and pain I need to deal with that previous competitors didn't have.

and most of them use dark patterns to not let us disable analytics.

There are websites with hundreds of "partners" that you have to disable one by one if you don't want to get their cookies.

For once the EU is fighting the good fight, but they have no teeth. Look at the quagmire that is Google privacy options list.

And give it another 10 years and the same GDPR regulations will have entirely established and cemented the tech giants (the only ones with the army of lawyers on retainer) as the only players possible.