ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝

Please.

DMA specifically targets six big companies. DSA has most of the regs on VLOPs, which startups are not. The GDPR is not that hard to comply with, we managed with our underfunded 10 person company.

And every company needs at least one person on legal anyway, inside and outside the EU.

This article is so beyond unhinged. Still upvoted because a supposedly reputable US paper putting something like this out is news in itself. It feels like reading the Soviet Pravda.

Silicon Valley and the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, have a strained relationship. Regulators in Brussels blame American tech giants for everything from the struggles of European startups to teenage depression. American tech firms whinge that they are targeted by jealous Europeans.

So mocking the point of one side while regurgitating the other verbatim is what passes for journalism in the US now? No, dear author, the EU does not blame tech giants “for everything”, they blame them for blatantly breaking the law.

The previous commission policed America’s tech giants in various ways. It blocked takeovers it saw as anti-competitive, such as Amazon’s attempt to buy iRobot, a maker of robo-vacuums. And it introduced a thicket of new laws, including the Digital Services Act (DSA), to regulate social media, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), to keep tech firms from competing unfairly, and the Artificial Intelligence Act, to govern the use of the emerging technology. Rule-breakers can be hit with fines which, in the case of the DMA, can reach a tenth or more of the firm’s global revenue.

So having actual fines and laws that apply to everyone is discriminatory to US companies. I guess having a functional justice system is foreign to them.

The new commission may do more of the same. Henna Virkkunen, a Finn, has been put in charge of tech. People in her team say they expect continuity, though the emphasis may shift from writing new laws to enforcing existing ones. Reining in big tech still seems popular with voters.

So admittedly, nothing will change. But!

Yet changing circumstances may require a new approach. One difference is that economic growth is back in focus. Last year Ursula von der Leyen, the commission’s returning president, asked Mario Draghi, a former head of the European Central Bank, to write a report on the continent’s waning competitiveness. The resulting tome pointed to Europe’s weakness in tech as a cause of its woes. Some recommendations that could also benefit American tech giants, including cutting red tape and boosting access to cloud infrastructure for Europe’s startups, were mentioned in the instructions Mrs von der Leyen issued to the new commissioners.

Some wishful thinking where if von der Leyen says “please make it easier to comply for European startups” means you don’t have to follow the laws any more if you are a big US company.

Even more important is the re-election of Donald Trump

Cat’s out of the bag. BTW, it’s not a re-election, it’s an election, the incumbent was Biden. But keep celebrating, ghouls.

X allegedly failed to comply with a number of DSA rules, such as providing data access for researchers. A decision will probably be made in the new year and could result in a fine of up to 6% of the firm’s global revenue. In September J.D. Vance, the incoming vice-president, seemed to suggest that America should withdraw support for nato in retaliation for European action against X.

This is so brain-dead that it’s laughable. Europe is very well able to defend its territory by itself. What it is not able to do is defend the Western world’s interests across the world by itself. If Trump crashes NATO because of X, Americans will indeed get transported back to the “great 50s”, except not the American 50s, but the German 50s. The US is built on global trade, and crashing that would only hurt the US.

You mean Bluesky, the US VC funded company?

And by struggling, you mean this? 15 million should be enough to hire a part-time consultant for like 40k a year to tell you what pages you have to have and where. Especially if you have already founded Twitter, this should be straightforward. The EU is allergic to companies not giving a fuck, and this was Bluesky not giving a fuck. And this was not an EU fine, this was a public statement of “please”.

And EU regulations usually strongly favour the consumer. GDPR compliance is easy, I know, I’ve done it personally for an adtech company of all, actually. As long as you have consent, it’s all fine, the “oh it’s so strict we can’t even do anything” crowd usually wants to do something without consent which is clearly illegal, and thus “hard to do”.

DMA does not apply to anything other than 6 big tech companies, so nothing to talk about there. The DSA only requires Bluesky to be transparent about moderation and offer a way to report illegal content. That’s it. All the strict stuff only applies once you become a VLOP, so again, only the big ones.

Where are the scary regulations killing small businesses and stifling innovation, exactly?

Most successful start up in Europe still decide to get listen on american exchanges (see the recent klarna case) This is purely because of favorable environment lol

It’s purely because the USD is the biggest trade and reserve currency of the world, so most investment also comes in the form of USD, as most investors primarily operate in USD and thus don’t have to factor in currency conversion risks. Wall Street sucks, and regulatory capture has risks of its own, but as long as the US military shoots anyone not trading in USD, we all go there to beg billionaires for money.

And no, Volkswagen is the 10th company in the world by revenues, it’s not dumping

Who’s talking about Volkswagen? I meant BYD.

The most sold EV in Europe right now is Tesla lol

The car manufacturer several times smaller than the local incumbents, thriving in the EU because of a good product? Where are the scary regulations scaring them off?

Thanks a lot for the explainer!

This election is very interesting, viewing it from Hungary, and not just because AUR is what it is regarding Hungarian minorities.

Orbán has openly stated that the “forces on the side of peace” - read “the Russians” - will be making it a test run for a gambit that might save his own ass in our next election in 2026. He’s actually in the minority for the first time in forever.

Fingers crossed you guys get to avoid becoming another Russian puppet.

Except all the regs these leeches are whining about only apply to them, not small startups, not because they are foreign, but because they are big. Even if the law itself does not only explicitly apply to huge companies, like the DMA that Apple is whining about, enforcement heavily skews against the big ones breaking the most laws.

And the reason they got big was not an unregulated business landscape, but tons of VC money pumped into ventures that would never have been able to simultaneously attract customers and make money. It was literally the same as the current Chinese situation with BYD, foreign country is dumping the market, killing local competition because they can afford to have a better service, because they have unlimited money.

Every single EU country had their own small social media company that was akin to MySpace. Every one of them got outcompeted by Facebook, since they had unlimited VC money. And now Facebook is one of the two notable ad companies in Europe, the other being Google, extracting all the money from the continent they possibly can, while breaking all the laws they possibly can.

Fuck them, if they have to stay, follow our laws.

I feel like a lot of the conversation is either about the Russian interference or about USR being pissed about the eventuality of running against PSD instead of being a national unity front for the second run

Can you expand on that? I don’t know much about the political situation in Romani beyond this weirdness, and I’m interested.

A Western European family of four, or approximately one Eastern European.

Looks like around 130000 HUF to me, so around 320 EUR and falling steadily.

So what did you think unhoused meant? Did any meaning get lost?

Lemmy and the fediverse at large is barely governable in the current EU framework

Can you make an argument instead of doing random ad hominems?

Feet pics apparently

Like old times, our young men and their young men decimate each other, then they go murder and rape whoever they can on the other side. Make wars great again!

We are all playing a board game where the rules say billionaires win every time. You either keep pretending that our society is just and keeping to the rules the capitalist class wrote is good for society, or you can also realize that everyone does what they can get away with and the “lost profits” of Netflix et al. are just as much collateral damage as homeless people we refuse to house because REIT line go up.

I was supporter #2000! Now I feel special.

Undersea infrastructure was damaged in the past, so it’s not really a moot point. This is like the bobbies escorting a woman home who was being stalked after there was an uptick of rapes in the area.

No telling what might have happened if the Russians felt they weren’t being watched.

Or maybe, just maybe, fine companies that commit criminal acts.

There really is a fine line between turning into an authoritarian regime and doing basic police work, right?

Twitter is not the sole, or even the biggest social media company in Europe. It’s not even in the top 3.

The advertisement sector will be fine.

It’s in the Irish EEZ, which means it’s navigable waters for everyone, but the Irish can drill for oil or put down undersea cables. The “escorted away” thing legally looks like as when someone wants to break into a store and is walking around the storefront with a crowbar, and police come out and just observe and deter the likely perp until they go away.

They can’t tell the vessel to go away, but they can put a few proverbial spotlights on it so it doesn’t do things it shouldn’t be doing.

Oh, BTW, this is exactly the sort of situation that goes down again and again in China, except there the Chinese actively ram ships and endanger aircraft in their EEZ.

No, it’s simple, you only have to provide ID, and if enough people sign, the govt has to address it.