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Comment by levosmetalo | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, given how much power big foreign companies have in many countries, I started to realize that China and to some extent Russia was right from the beginning to not allow unloyal competition from the big tech giants. For example Germany have zero benefits for letting Google, Amazon, Facebook and co. to drain profit and suffocate local competition while not paying any taxes or creating any meaningful jobs here.

I wish Germany, France and the rest of EU would just push for more regulations and taxation of foreign digital companies, even if that would mean having a Great EU firewall.

Remember, even the USA would not be there where it is now if they agreed to the free trade agreement with the UK back in the time after gaining the independence. They would be just a source of cheep beef and wheat for UK overlords.

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>For example Germany have zero benefits for letting Google, Amazon, Facebook and co. to drain profit and suffocate local competition while not paying any taxes or creating any meaningful jobs here.

>I wish Germany, France and the rest of EU would just push for more regulations and taxation of foreign digital companies

See, this is the problem. You're looking at the big EU countries and stopping there. Smaller EU countries in many ways feel the same about larger EU countries. Foreign banks basically took over the banking sectors of former Soviet states and then you got things like the Danske Bank money laundering case. When Bulgarian truck drivers tried to use their competitive advantage of lower average incomes, rules were drafted to bar them from it. On top of all that brain drain is still ongoing. The EU as a whole is one of the most unequal economic zones in terms of income.

If those countries did things like you propose then there wouldn't be an EU or it would be significantly smaller.

>Great EU firewall

I know what the internet is like under the lead of the US. It's not amazing, but it's pretty good. I'm afraid that EU-net will be a far worse place judging by how regulated many things are in Germany or how if things are against French (and other western European) interests then EU-wide rules are drafted to stop that.

Large EU countries along with the EU work as a good counterbalance to the US when it comes to the internet. But I fear that if you remove the US from the equation then you end to with something worse.

> On top of all that brain drain is still ongoing.

I live in Spain and the brain drain that is occurring here is 100% deserved.

Brain drain usually occurs in countries with deep-seated cultural issues. That is not something you can solve with a couple of laws.

Regulating Facebook a bit doesn't mean to remove USA from internet.

> Germany have zero benefits for letting Google, Amazon, Facebook and co.

How are you defining Germany in a way that you are forgetting about Germans themselves? People are using these services largely because they derive benefit from them.

Value is an interesting question,

If I didn’t have access to Google during my scientific research in the country, I know my progress would have been much slower.

In an alternative universe, it would be interesting if the Internet was Balkanized and only the US had access to tools like Google scholar. How much would that affect the rate of research?

You're assuming local versions of such tools would not arise. This assumption has been repeatedly proven false, such as when alternatives to Uber and Lyft were made in cities where those services were banned.

I would have agreed with you prior to the success of alpha fold. Google has proven it is capable of identifying extremely talented teams that can rise above world competition where literally thousands are/were competing.

On the other hand, if local tools were 80% as effective, that definitely might be good enough for something as simple as searching for scientific literature.

Most of the surpluses from all of these companies go to the consumer. [1]

Google is immensely more valuable to people, than the profit it generates for it's investors.

Same for FB etc..

As a more acute example, consider that Amazon doesn't really make any money. They are a giant NGO in a way.

So when the consumer surplus is 100x the producer surplus, hurting the producer doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

There's literally no reason for the French people to use these services, it's fully their choice, and they are fully free.

[1] https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/188/concepts/definition-o...

> China and to some extent Russia

This is why there's so much propaganda blaming George Soros for everything; his funding of the anti-totalitarian Open Society Foundation has supported all sorts of opposition and human rights NGOs which threaten the power of the Russian one-party state.

The transition of the 90s succeeded in making Russia "capitalist", but not in making it democratic. Installing democracy from the outside has turned out to be a much more complicated and fraught project than first thought, partly because people can be surprisingly comfortable with totalitarianism so long as it's aimed at someone else.

I would be curious to know your top 5 list of most democratic countries.

Not OP, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

The only reason Facebook has never caught on in Russia was that by the time it noticed the fact that Russia exists, we've already had VKontakte growing explosively. It missed the market opportunity, and couldn't really compete.

I love what you are saying and I fully agree.

I fully support more regulation and draconian taxation of foreign digital companies. The only way to make profit should be linked to a free API to access data so a "facebook client" can be fully hosted and operated here in Europe.

They should open up the front-end for competition - UI, ads, filtering and ranking. We should have many approaches to search and social networks that actually compete on a even field.

As for the backend - I like the idea of pods - self hosted or cloud hosted personal information stores that would be under the control of the user instead of the social network (and portable between networks).

Completely agree. A few years back I was convinced that there should be one global Internet.

Nowadays I'm leaning towards balkanization in a sense that big economic powerhouses should have their own "tech giants". Don't block small websites, but if the big ones aren't being fully cooperative, fuck em. Block em, invest in local alternatives, build your own Linux distros for public administration, regain your sense of sovereignty.

In other words: Facebook forking itself into an EU version that actually takes local context into account, employing people in the EU, and keeping the data within the EU = okay. One global Facebook that follows little to no rules and doesn't give anything back to local communities = not okay.

This would only be possible if you make the fiber Balkanized, because we know that popular services happen and if you follow the logic there will be natural monopolies that form.

There will always be monopolies in a capitalist system with little to no oversight or loosely enforced antitrust regulation. Tech is no different than oil, glasses, or diamonds.

If we're forced to have monopolies, I'd rather have them within my jurisdiction and forced to give a shit about local context of their operation than one that's on the other side of the globe and managed by people that never even stepped foot within my jurisdiction.

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