Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
Just old people being old people.
I live in Hungary where this is common but it's more like a "you pay tax for storage which goes to the labels, in turn we don't prosecute piracy" https://www.artisjus.hu/english/copyright-in-hungary/
Mind you we have a hungarian private torrent tracker with 400k users and 2.7 petabyte of data running since 2005. Virtually everyone is using it in the country but no one really wants to shut it down because at this point it's also a cultural archive.
Prosecuting “piracy” is sold in as a free trade deal requirement with the US
Yes, France is in the EU. However, the actions of France do not equate to the actions of the EU.
Despite what pro-Brexit type people will tell you, there is a lot of sovereignty in local laws within the EU. And the ability to set your own taxes is one of them.
Btw, the EU is a tech powerhouse, you just don't know that. ASML, Zeiss, TRUMPF, etc. have full monopoly on eUV lithography and majority of the market on any other nodes. Just one example.
Airbus leads with about 55%–60% of the active narrow and wide-body commercial aircraft market. Airbus has much better track record and doesn't collide with FAA and doesn't "skimp" on development and QA (I'm looking at you MCAS!).
The culture is right there, we are taking our sweet time.
ASML is an important company but it is mostly just an integrator of technology from many different countries.
Any references? As far as I know, ASML is as Dutch as it gets.
> ASML is an important company but it is mostly just an integrator of technology from many different countries
yes and no, outside of Cymer, wholly owned subsidiary of ASML, it's mostly European countries:
Core Technology & Mechatronics:
• Netherlands: Houses VDL Groep, Neways Electronics, and Prodrive Technologies
• Germany: ZEISS (precision optics, lenses, and mirrors) and TRUMPF (high-powered CO₂ lasers)
• Belgium
Dunno where your US government department of energy claim comes from...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUV_lithography
Basically, US DoE invented the core tech and formed a consortium called EUV LLC to further develop the technology. ASML came along much later to acquire SVG in order to gain commercial access to the technology and research. The Dutch company "ASML" didn't actually invent most of it. They are just the integrator.
This is how ASML even describes itself:
> Board member Wayne Allan in 2023: “We're an integrator – we build some of the modules in our machines, but we procure a huge amount of materials and critical components from suppliers, nearly 80% of the components.”
Most of the valuable tech comes from American, German, and Japanese companies.
Second of all, EUV isn't everything. There is a lot of "legacy" node demand.
> Most of the valuable tech comes from American, German, and Japanese companies.
"Some" of the American. It's funny how you name it first despite it's being the minority.
> As of 2025, ASML is the only company that produces and sells EUV systems for chip production.
This is pretty much everything we need to know.
You could say the same about lots of software. You didn't write the programming language, same for libraries and so forth...
ASML has its headquarters in Veldhoven, Netherlands, around 60% of workforce is based around that area. It's a spin-off from Philips, another iconic Dutch electronics company.
How is it not Dutch?
In America it comes largely from California, New York, and Connecticut, as well as Germany, Japan, and elsewhere.
If you are trying to say EUV is not Dutch, I don't think anyone is disagreeing with that.
But I especially think your last point about old people is really both false and irrelevant. If I wanted to troll, I could say it's really dumb, just americans being americans.
Yes, but... isn't their assumption mostly correct? Spotify and Co have changed the equation in the sense that one doesn't have files anymore but when those laws came out they targeted MP3 players and DVDs who were, indeed, full of pirated media.
I don't like the result for other reasons, but the assumption seemed always relatively accurate.
The motivation is even more stupid than that, it is to compensate authors for "lost" income due to buyers making private copies of their media, which is thankfully legal. For example, if I accidentally scratch a CD and it doesn't play anymore, I won't buy a new one if I had made a backup.
Counterpoint: I am behind the gfw.. and seriously dont understand how anyone can get anything done… but it still seems to work… i pay like 2 euros for 500MBit fiber
Judging by the comments here, every single French person runs a CDN at home? What am I missing, or are people completely misunderstanding what this tax is targeting?
There are people who consider this a good thing. I don’t have a strong opinion on it, but it’s certainly not obvious to me that this isn’t a good thing.
Because its not a problem for Big-corp, but Opensource-Projects/Tor-Nodes, for example i would have to pay ~10$ a day just for my Tor-Relay. It's deeply Anti-Democratic and the opposite what the Internet should be.
The objective seems to be to target fournisseurs de contenu (content providers), and the mentioned collection mechanism identifies a entreprise émettrice (sending company). Also, they talk about "turnover" mattering as well, so if you don't charger people, another reason this might not affect you at all. If neither of those apply, like you hosting a website for a FOSS project, it's unlikely you'd have to pay this tax.
But, this is based on reading the session notes themselves, not news article. I'm happy to be corrected if I misunderstood anything.
The US is a failing democracy ruled by ruthless liars and capitalists. China's surveillance and lack of freedom is beyond discussion. So EU not being a tech powerhouse still does not look too bad.
It's not obvious that housing "tech powerhouses" is a good thing. I mean look at the US, and how much problems all these companies bring to society. I'm also not sure we'd want anything like that in Europe or EU, if we also need to accept the same consequences as the US did.
American billionaires are self-made (70% became billionaires during their life) where in Europe 70% inherited it. The powerhouse companies of the European economy are stagnant and the families which held them 100 years ago have a great chance of still holding them.
Are tech billionaires obnoxious? Yes, undoubtedly. I'd take them in a heartbeat over having a more permanent aristocracy.
Given the class inequality differences between the two places, and how one seems to basically be "survival of the fittest, if "the fittest" is ~1K people", arguably "tech billionaires" seems way worse than "a dying aristocracy", but maybe I'm too socialist to understand properly.
The median income of a French household puts it in Alabama (Alabama is wealthier). If you truly believe that the US is a capitalist hellscape where only the fittest survive, Americans are more than fit enough. It's not even like rent is affordable in Europe; young people feel the same squeeze but with far less opportunity.
Europe regulates itself out of the competition. If you're OK with living in a stagnating economy while youth unemployment stays above 15%, sure - but let's be clear that you've still got billionaires and unlike in the US they actually succeed in using the government to protect their monopolies.
Europe is great to live in if you have a home and a job. It's much, much worse if you're an ambitious young person looking to make a mark on the world, and reducing that to "salary is everything" is imo very sad.
What french public conveniently fails to grasp and loses 100% of my support is the naive expectation that in struggling economy they should be rich, while having social system actually dialed to 12 since that 11 is never enough for them. And have 0 doubt, all the protesters now and also before are at the end after money. Money will magically appear in government budget and in all salaries, prices of petrol/diesel will be magically ultra low regardless of yet another failed war being waged by US causing massive rise in prices globally. If one doesn't travel around the world and just lives there it may feel like a normal default system, but given reality of the world out there its anything but.
Lets talk like adults what is achievable or not and manage expectations accordingly. Not very french way, is it. Any attempt to reform even a bit is met with extreme violence, blocking of economy and other self-harm behavior that ruins the economy further and solves 0 of underlying issues, so most cave in and problems fester. I predict it will get much worse in France before there is chance to get things better again, and how much depends on their ultra comfy, some would even say spoiled population.
You shouldn't. Nor should you conclude anything general about the EU from something French politicans do. It's disingenuous.
Tax their bloody real estate into poverty because that's the only message they'll understand.