Google has told the EU that it will not comply with a forthcoming fact-checking law.
Perfect time to implement sky-high fines for non-compliance.
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Ah, but that's why US Big Tech is splooshing cash all over President Felon and hoping he saves them from evil communist European consumer protections.
Yep, they're hoping Trump will pressure the EU to get rid of their pesky consumer protections. They don't even make any profits for billionaires!
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Time for EU to simply ban Google then for non compliance.
In other words, a company, acting on behalf of its own shareholders, tells a government, which represents 100% of the citizens in a given territory, to shove its legislation where the sun doesn’t shine. And not only is this not inherently absurd, but it also stands a significant chance of succeeding in getting the government to comply.
They probably wouldn't have had to if the school system hadn't dropped language arts from most curriculums ages ago. Students now are getting a markedly shitter education and don't even know they're being fucked over.
It's by design, the politicians only need 28% to win, easier to scrape those votes off the bottom of the barrel of knowledge
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It felt miraculous for me that, for a while, tech companies appeared to comply to regulation (doing the bare minimum, as slowly as possible, but it kinda worked).
My hypothesis is that they now except political support from Trump administration and to pressure the EU?
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Damn.
Wish the rest of us could just ignore all laws & not face any consequences.
What a fucking joke this entire system is.
They don't have a problem giving someone 100 years for a quarter bag of weed though. For a first time offense.
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That's pretty bold for a really fucking useless search engine. The EU could just block it and redirect google.com to a gov run searxng instange and everyone in europe would be better off overniggt
They could even make it look exactly like Google. What's Google going to do about it? Get wrecked is what.
It would likely be impossible to redirect google.com without either sparking a cyberwar or building something like the great firewall of China, quite possibly both.
Blocking is somewhat possible, but to redirect, they would have to forge google certificates and possibly also fork Chrome and convince users to replace their browser, since last I checked, google hard-coded it's own public keys into Chrome.
Technical details
I say blocking in somewhat possible, because governments can usually just ask DNS providers to not resolve a domain or internet providers to block IPs.
The issue is, google runs one of the largest DNS services in the world, so what happens if google says no? The block would at best be partial, at worst it could cause instability in the DNS system itself.
What about blocking IPs? Well, google data centers run a good portion of the internet, likely including critical services. Companies use google services for important systems. Block google data centers and you will have outages that will make crowd-strike look like a tiny glitch and last for months.
Could we redirect the google DNS IPs to a different, EU controlled server? Yes, but such attempts has cause issues beyond the borders of the country attempting it in the past. It would at least require careful preparations.
As for forging certificates, EU does control multiple Certificate authorities. But forging a certificate breaks the cardinal rule for being a trusted CA. Such CA would likely be immediately distrusted by all browsers. And foreig governments couldn't ignore this either. After all, googles domains are not just used for search. Countless google services that need to remain secure could potentially be compromised by the forged certificate. In addition, as I mentioned, google added hard-coded checks into Chrome to prevent a forged certificate from working for it's domains.
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Good, hope they get banned in the EU so people will switch to competitors
I could see the EU backing down a few years ago, but these days they have watered down any actual advantage in search by filling their results with ads and low quality content. Not that I use Reddit any more, but a good Reddit search engine would probably be better for a lot of use cases.
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I hate community notes, it's a cost free way of fact checking with no accountability.
I also hate these big international tech companies. Forget too big to fail, these are too big to change. We are all techno peasants and they are our tech lords
I hate community notes, it's a cost free way of fact checking with no accountability
And it lets certain communities brigade the notes with misinformation/disinformation to try and control the narrative.
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Fuck Google
Google, this is t he EU, not America, they're not going to suck up to you.
Given that we are going full authoritarian fascist now, perhaps the EU should ban Google, given the US tik tok precedent.
What a twist. In the 90s, the internet forced countries to wake up to the new modern era. It was a combination of American companies wanting both to expand and provide goodwill.
And now, this new era is going to tell American companies to fuck off.
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Unbelievable 2025 is turning out to be a stellar year
I get the sentiment, who doesn’t want to dunk on Google?
But the headline is needlessly inflammatory. There is no law yet; and google essentially is saying please please don’t implement it, it totally doesn’t make sense.
Don’t get me wrong, the EU should still implement it. And once it is law; Google will also comply.
Fine the heck out of them then. If they don't pay the fine ban em. Plenty of alternatives out there. More competition in the search engine market would be better anyways.
Not too big of a fan of banning companies as the hurdles should be decently high... Especially if many people rely on their service but if they won't comply with our jurisdiction long term I see this as the only option as fees can not be order of business to pay
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Google is basically saying the EU couldn't do its own subpar search and they're not brave enough to try.
Didn't a year ago or so, Some European lawmaker made a vague hint in support of something that involved regulations on social media, and Elon replied "go fuck yourself" verbatem?
Play hardball, or surrender and give them what they want. there's no compromise or middle ground with these techbro fascists
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