It’s been a painful few decades for consumers having the teeth of unregulated tech titans sunk into them.
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.
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!
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.
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 🤷
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.
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.
The comment was meant to be syndical and sarcastic.
Of course it's not representative of the entirety.
But it does express my frustration with political hypocrisy and insider trading. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find me any politicians that haven't engaged in that at some point, to some degree. One of the famous ones that comes to mind is Nancy pelosi, but she is not alone, and this is not particular to one party or another, they both definitely engage in it, it's been well documented and is irrefutable.
If you look past one party or another, you'd see that it's a broken system. The fact that it's legal for our elected representatives to conduct in activities that would otherwise be illegal for the general population is outrageous, and the fact that we all know they do it and they are the only ones that can control it in police themselves is also outrageous. It's the only self-serving career that I can think of that is completely unchecked, has unlimited benefits for only 4 years of service, and the only ones that can control it or police it is themselves.
I mean, we got this "choose your default browser" screen for a few years. That solved it, right?
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.
This happened in 2009, when IE had a market share of 56% and declining. IE is (arguably) defunct because it sucked, not because of a one-time, court-mandated popup.
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.
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 richer than nations and will be impossible to contain.
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 within the departments - they’re doing the best they can with what they’ve been given . Congress needs to raise taxes and fund the departments better and then there will be proper regulation in the USA.
If course, congress can’t do hardly anything at all so that’s never going to happen. At least not at a federal level.
At a state level though? Maybe that could work.
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.
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.
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.
Good. Get rid of proprietary messaging apps and unfettered access to our data. Bring back standards.
It would be amazing if even a small portion of EU fines for big 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 massively. Funding helps. Developers/designers/etc like being paid.
Imagine if even 1% of these big tech fines went into a pot that an independent body chooses open projects to invest in. It'd be huge.
Open source has a sustainability problem in terms of funding, developers, and burnout. To me it seems we have a relatively easy and politically palatable solution.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Won't someone think of the poor shareholders /s
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe they're just worried about meeting an AI trained on cat memes and inflammatory racist rants from socially awkward incoherent individuals with anger and self love issues.
I kid! I kid!
Maybe...
Power corrupts.
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 consumers. That should have been the headline.
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.
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.
Thank you EU.
yeah, interoperability should work to encourage development
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.
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.
XMPP actually started becoming better fast after those authorities (like Google) dropped it.
Title should be adjusted to "Tech giants no longer treated like coddled babies by EU"
The headline is yummy
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I wonder why it isn't titled from consumer's perspective.
This is great news but how long are we talking for this to go live? Shouldn't they already be DMA compliant?
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.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
