8 ms·

EU's Tusk warns of risks in rise of U.S. tech giants

76 points by kerng 8y ago

0000000 8y ago
Showing some geopolitical sense, in that Europe, EU and U.S. interests are not given to be the same.
panpanna 8y ago
"The European Union has been in the forefront of efforts to tighten control on how social media companies handle the personal data of consumers" Yeah, that's why.
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  That is really total rubbish. How could 1-2 year old regulations go back 30+ years to stifle the European "tech scene"? By the way, there is other technology than that which is used to sell advertising on the internet.
  - sadris 8y ago
    European hostility to business rights in general is a much larger elephant in the room.
    - dmix 8y ago
      Indeed anyone who has started a potentially global business quickly learns to avoid European markets for as long as possible. Paying for lawyers, exploring utilizing local business networks to avoid headaches, and countless special edge cases is a great deterannce from offering services/products there... Let alone building actual companies and teams from there.
  - repolfx 8y ago
    It's a long standing and complex trend. It's worth remembering that Silicon Valley got started way back in the 50s with Shockley's transistors. Then Microsoft in the 80s and Amazon, Google in the 1990s. What was going on in Europe during these times? For most of the 20th century continental Europe was a hotbed of dictators and extremists. The first half was dominated by two world wars that flattened everything. The second half saw dictatorships across all of eastern Europe that kept it impoverished, there were dictatorships in Spain and Greece and significant political instability and corruption for decades in Italy. Britain, which came out of WW2 the strongest having been on the winning side, was nonetheless totally wrecked and worse still, the population concluded that the government must be pretty good at things due both to the victory and years of news suppression which prevented people learning about government errors (e.g. Exercise Tiger). So Britain became strongly socialist and remained that way until Thatcher in the 80s. The economic destruction this socialist environment wrecked was extreme enough that the UK had to go to the IMF for a bailout and was suffering things like electricity shortages during the worst periods of the 1970s. It was a place where even established businesses struggled to survive, so the idea of a startup culture or creating advanced tech firms was totally absurd - the government had given up even attempting to fix things and unions under the control of Marxists were practically shadow governments in and of themselves. In other words, if you look at the time that the USA was establishing startups like Intel that'd become huge tech firms, which then spawned generations of technically skilled VCs, Europe was mostly either actual communist dictatorships or so hard left that the idea of creating dynamic new businesses was a pipe dream. There was no environment in which to create the generations of successful entrepreneurs that America benefits from. Interestingly, Germany did much better than Britain during this time because - having had their faith in government wisdom destroyed by the Nazis - Germany deregulated and experienced much better economic growth, despite having been cleaved in half by the Soviets. This sowed the seeds of German economic strength dominating the Euro today. Things only really changed for most of Europe in the 1990s with the fall of the USSR, reunification of Germany and Thatcher's reforms having turned around the UK. But then Europe collectively decided that the right path into the future was to slowly merge together under a vast centralised bureaucracy centred in Brussels, one which had its roots in the Ventotene Manifesto, a document written by communists in the 40s. Remarkably, the EU to this day still has never really shaken a vague sense that communism was roughly in the right area. Its ultra-powerful unaccountable Commission President (Juncker) routinely makes statements like "when it gets serious, you have to lie" and he travelled to the birthplace of Karl Marx where he defended Marx's legacy: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/karl-marx-jean-claude-juncker-defends-legacy-a8337176.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/karl-marx-jea... The EU has historically often had former communists in its most senior positions and does things in ways that are reminiscent of the USSR (e.g. a Parliament that can't actually overrule the unelected parts of the government). No surprise that it takes an ambivalent view of business, especially successful American business, and largely defines itself as a defender of The People against Capital. Combined with no culture of granting equity and we have today's situation.
    - ThrowawayR2 8y ago
      > The first half was dominated by two world wars that flattened everything [in Europe]. What about Japan's rise from a bombed out, defeated nation to a G7 economic power and world leader in electronics and automotives in the same time period?
      - repolfx 8y ago
        Good question. I suspect it's like Germany and precision machinery/automotives. Japan lost comprehensively enough to destroy any notion that their government was good, and had a huge US involvement in the rebuild. IOW they were rebuilt along US lines and, like Germany, benefited from the "loser's victory" in which they avoided a sharp turn towards big government. During the same era the UK lost its own car manufacturing industry, with aggressive unions and general industrial malaise being the prime culprits.
    - dfrage 8y ago
      Exiting WWII Britain was fully competitive in computer technology, look particularly at the University of Manchester, home of the Williams Tube and many pioneering computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_computers which Ferranti was barely able to move the needle in commercializing.
      - AtomicOrbital 8y ago
        yes however Britain squeltched its own computer scientists and engineers, Tommy Flowers in particular, immediately after WWII due to false concerns of military secrecy
        dfrage 8y ago
        That's not reflected by the historical record of the U.K.'s post war pioneering computers, which I provided just one link to. Per Wikipedia Tommy Flowers couldn't get a bank loan because he couldn't cite his cryptoanalysis machines as proof he could do what he claimed he could do. "False concerns of military secrecy" when we were in an existential cold war with international socialism? That put so much of Europe under Soviet occupation? Or the cited severe lack of funding mechanisms and other things necessary for commercial success, going all the way to the concept of doing stuff outside the aegis of the government which included the public University of Manchester? The latter could and did make numerous record breaking computers, going at least as far as the early 1960s Atlas, a competitive microsecond cycle supercomputer that was the first to page. But this didn't translate into commercial success.
Mirioron 8y ago
Maybe the EU and European countries could've fostered an environment where tech companies could've been successful as well?
- mtgx 8y ago
  Maybe if the EU adopted China's model of tricking U.S. giants to come there for the "huge market," then steal/coerce giving away their tech to the local small companies that can become billion-dollar giants a few years later, and then kicking the big U.S. companies out of the country or making it almost impossible for them to compete locally would've been a better strategy for the EU, too. Instead, the EU has allowed the U.S. tech giants to come and take over the local markets, and then crush or buy out all the smaller competition (UK's DeepMind anyone?!), and then wonder "where are the European competitors?!"
  - outlace 8y ago
    But it also seems that the US produces new big tech companies in new sectors whereas Europe appears not to. Sure maybe there aren’t any viable Google or Facebook competitors, but the US produces Stripe, Airbnb, uber, etc.
    - JeremyBanks 8y ago
      Those examples seem to highlight America's weaknesses, not strength. Uber and Airbnb are both mostly-criminal enterprises that could only succeed at the level they did because of corrupt or impotent law enforcement and legislators, and Stripe's success is facilitated by the inaccessible mess of America's underlying banking system.
      - askafriend 8y ago
        I'm sorry but Taxis were a criminally poor, inefficient, and dangerous product before Uber came along. I'd like to see you argue in favor of Taxis, because there really aren't many good arguments or excuses for how they operated and really just squandered their own opportunity. Uber is better on literally every single dimension. Stripe is an international company that's facilitated by the internet.
shmerl 8y ago
EU officials are totally helping things with Article 13 and Co.
- rasz 8y ago
  For reference, _his party_ was pushing Article 13 in EU Parliament. September 12 everyone from PO voted for censorship: Michał Boni (PO) Jerzy Buzek (PO) Danuta Hübner (PO) Danuta Jazłowiecka (PO) Agnieszka Kozłowska-Rajewicz (PO) Barbara Kudrycka (PO) Janusz Lewandowski (PO) Elżbieta Łukacjiewska (PO) Jan Olbrycht (PO) Julia Pitera (PO) Marek Plura (PO) Dariusz Rosati (PO) Adam Szejnfeld (PO) Róża Thun Und Hohenstein (PO) Jarosław Wałęsa (PO) Bogdan Wenta (PO) Bogdan Zdrojewski (PO) Tadeusz Zwiefka (PO) Final April vote pro censorship: Danuta Hübner (PO) Agnieszka Kozłowska-Rajewicz (PO) Barbara Kudrycka (PO) Julia Pitera (PO) Bogdan Zdrojewski (PO) Tadeusz Zwiefka (PO)
  - d33 8y ago
    I found it quite surprising and decided to double-check. This source doesn't seem to agree if I'm reading it right: https://saveyourinternet.eu/pl/ https://saveyourinternet.eu/pl/ Could you let me know where you have this information from?
    - rasz 8y ago
      you are right, I was missing Danuta Jazłowiecka (PO) so the final list is 7 for Article 13
      - d33 8y ago
        Either of us is reading it backwards - for example, Michał Boni is "green" in both "Vote on Possibility to Change the Final Text" and "Final Vote on Copyright Directive". Doesn't it mean he opposed it? Or is the first list of yours referring to a third voting, not mentioned on the website?
        8y ago
otvsh 8y ago
Donald Tusk, the evil (or the good) counterpart to Donald Trump. I want to see a movie about that.
lazyjones 8y ago
I'm sure the bureaucrats in charge of the EU will have great success with their "EU last" policy. (apologies for cynicism by a disappointed European)
ComputerGuru 8y ago
I'm not sure why the comments here are unusually toxic, but I think it is good to hear this. The EU tech sector has an opportunity to create customer-first text services with a strong focus on privacy and data portability, but it'll need some concessions and some support. There's no reason why the EU cannot replicate at least some of the success the US has had in the tech market, and even internally it has a large enough market to give rise to some healthy entities. Of course these might be actually sustainable businesses and not startups playing the unicorn game with VCs, trading at impossible sky-high valuations instead of what they're really worth and without a vision for profitability, so whatever metric you use to calculate success should definitely take that into account.
- tootahe45 8y ago
  There's no reason Europeans can't just do it from a place where they get better access capital and a more business-friendly environment (unless the EU tries to stop this by creating a 'safe' website list like China, or penalizing US companies in other ways). One problem with firewalling Google, Facebook, is that the fines bring in more money than European tech.
- akersten 8y ago
  I don't think it's toxic to criticize the regulatory practices that have created the business environment that the article laments. Actually I think it's more than fair to do so. "Blunt" may be a better word to describe the comments here.
  - ajuc 8y ago
    In which way does regulation create the business environment that the article laments? EU was always behind in internet stuff, even when there was no regulation.
    - adventured 8y ago
      Indeed, Europe has been behind the US in tech since WW2. The lead the US acquired in the following ~20 years has proven impossible to overcome. It spawned so many various advantages that compound and build on each other (to say nothing of the single market of enormous size). If they knew what they were doing, they'd start by massively increasing the pay for software developers across Western Europe. Software is why the US dominates global tech. 1.25 million software developers earning a median of $105,000 in salary. Software is why Japan wasn't able to dominate tech, despite that being the near universal thought - that it was the inevitable outcome - in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They couldn't do software well, it's the difference between Apple doing the iPod and Sony flailing after the Walkman. It's also why Apple murdered Nokia, it's the software: the smartphone is about the software, not the hardware (which always drifts towards commodity, low value, low margin; Apple was focused on building a device that could effectively run serious software programs). The rise of Microsoft from 1975 to its eventual position as global tech titan by the time Win95 came out, charts the course of the US solidifying its position in tech via software margins. Most of the value gradually shifted from hardware to software, from the 1970s to the 1990s. The immensely profitable nature of most software pours an endless deluge of profit into the US tech machine (which is then used to keep expanding it and buying up global competition). US cloud dominance is similarly all about the software, rather than hardware in the cloud (again, low margin, low value). It's why Europe can't compete with AWS. Imagine if the US tech dominance were dependent on competing in server hardware, black rectangle smartphones or PC boxes. The US would have entirely gotten its brains stomped in by now. Instead, the US moved upstream and got all the profit in the tech industry: it's all in the software margins. It's the software, Europe. Pay your software developers a lot more if you want to compete.
ycombonator 8y ago
Tusk stuck between a rock (America FANG) and a hard place (China/ Huawei).
wazoox 8y ago
EU officials don't understand the current trade war. The US keeps coercing EU companies, buying them out by force (Alstom), pushing them out of markets (Iran), using extortion against EU banks, generally pressuring the EU in the position of an obedient vassal; but the EU doesn't get it, at all. That's a tragedy (for us Europeans). Eu officials are completely bought into the free market ideology and "gentle commerce". Nowadays strategic companies are even sold to the Chinese, because "free markets". Morons. EU is inept, useless. It's quite saying that Russia, with its limited means, limited population and GDP inferior to Italy, successfully kept its digital independence (mostly).
- temp-dude-87844 8y ago
  A lot of core EU policies are based the neoliberal "gentle free markets" model of the world, like the rules to privatize infrastructure, transport, and telecom. They're largely to allow an EU-wide market where protectionism applies at the level of the entire bloc and not at the level of individual countries, but they are easily taken advantage in an asymmetric setting. It's not unlike how US companies go into China to show growth, yet complain about the coercion and theft of their IP, as if these happenings weren't an open secret. The US takes advantage of EU's tech landscape being worse paid, more regulated, and less nimble, and takes advantage of the difficulties of policing the interaction between users and Internet-delivered services. China takes advantage of the naivete of the EU and the greed of the US. Other players, like Russia, UAE, and Qatar play a similar game, but unlike China they don't use hardware and software, but stick to property ownership and influencing hearts and minds.
  - wazoox 8y ago
    Except that no protectionism at all happens at the EU level, because officials are completely clueless. Or bought-out, I don't really know. that's my point when I say that they're useless, toothless really.
- katanaman 8y ago
  Had the chance to live a few years in western Europe and I was shocked at the servility of the European institutions to the American interests. In Europe nobody dares to criticize clearly and openly the ways of the US, not even the communists. No wonder Obama was a huge hit in Europe. Perhaps this explains why most Americans think of Europeans as a spineless and weak I'm not leftist at all but I have to admit that Chavez had more balls than the whole western Europe
andreilys 8y ago
A similar case can be made for Chinese tech companies, many of whom are actively complicit in human rights violations [1] [2]. Yet EU countries like Italy have no qualms about supporting the geopolitical aims of China, inevitably strengthening the position of the Chinese tech companies. Which should come to no surprise given their close ties to the communist party [3] [4]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/alibaba-backed-face-scans-show-big-tech-ties-to-china-s-xinjiang https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/alibaba-b... [2] https://www.thestar.com/news/huawei/2019/03/27/canadas-partnership-with-huawei-immoral-as-well-as-risky-researcher-suggests-as-report-calls-out-human-rights-abuses.html https://www.thestar.com/news/huawei/2019/03/27/canadas-partn... [3] https://www.ft.com/content/5d0af3c4-846c-11e8-a29d-73e3d454535d https://www.ft.com/content/5d0af3c4-846c-11e8-a29d-73e3d4545... [4] https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/02/tech/china-tech-communist-party/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/02/tech/china-tech-communist-par...
- markdown 8y ago
  > A similar case can be made for Chinese companies, many of whom are actively complicit in human rights violations Snowden showed us that US companies routinely do this, with FISA forcing them to participate just like the Chinese Govt does to Chinese companies. Also, US law only protects the human rights of US citizens, while non-citizens get their privacy invaded routinely (in contravention of Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
  - andreilys 8y ago
    US tech companies routinely aid the government in systematic ethnic cleansing [1]? Also last time I remember there being a showdown on privacy between Apple and the FBI, Apple refused their request to side-load software that would allow them to crack a terrorists phone. I can't imagine Huawei being able to refuse such a request from the Communist party. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/ethnic-cleansing-makes-a-comeback--in-china/2018/08/02/55f73fa2-9691-11e8-810c-5fa705927d54_story.html?utm_term=.658166352bf7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/ethn...
ga-vu 8y ago
I'd be worried more by Chinese companies. At least you can sue US companies. You can't do the same with Chinese ones.
- qnsi 8y ago
  how often do you use apps created by Chinese companies?
plandis 8y ago
Of course he is, US is in a much stronger position than the EU in the technology sector. You think he'd be saying the same thing if Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc... acted the exact same but were EU companies? I doubt it.
vfclists 8y ago
Is that measly article worthy of posting to HN, or was it crafted especially for HN?
fithisux 8y ago
EU failed to gather participating countries in an equalizing force of progress freedom and wisdom. It transform to a hegemony like the first Athenean alliance. We failed to our targets and in the meantime,, the external empires got stronger and lesser democratic. We failed miserably. I believe in the European dream, but not with these European politicians. We have no relation to the universal human, we have transformed to consumer/money junkies a new generation of cyber aboriginals ta satisfy our inner appetite for quality with beads like 500 years ago. Shame on the homo universalis, shame on the European christians.

76 points by kerng 8y ago

Showing some geopolitical sense, in that Europe, EU and U.S. interests are not given to be the same.

"The European Union has been in the forefront of efforts to tighten control on how social media companies handle the personal data of consumers" Yeah, that's why.

ahartmetz 8y ago
That is really total rubbish. How could 1-2 year old regulations go back 30+ years to stifle the European "tech scene"? By the way, there is other technology than that which is used to sell advertising on the internet.
- sadris 8y ago
  European hostility to business rights in general is a much larger elephant in the room.
  - dmix 8y ago
    Indeed anyone who has started a potentially global business quickly learns to avoid European markets for as long as possible. Paying for lawyers, exploring utilizing local business networks to avoid headaches, and countless special edge cases is a great deterannce from offering services/products there... Let alone building actual companies and teams from there.
- repolfx 8y ago
  It's a long standing and complex trend. It's worth remembering that Silicon Valley got started way back in the 50s with Shockley's transistors. Then Microsoft in the 80s and Amazon, Google in the 1990s. What was going on in Europe during these times? For most of the 20th century continental Europe was a hotbed of dictators and extremists. The first half was dominated by two world wars that flattened everything. The second half saw dictatorships across all of eastern Europe that kept it impoverished, there were dictatorships in Spain and Greece and significant political instability and corruption for decades in Italy. Britain, which came out of WW2 the strongest having been on the winning side, was nonetheless totally wrecked and worse still, the population concluded that the government must be pretty good at things due both to the victory and years of news suppression which prevented people learning about government errors (e.g. Exercise Tiger). So Britain became strongly socialist and remained that way until Thatcher in the 80s. The economic destruction this socialist environment wrecked was extreme enough that the UK had to go to the IMF for a bailout and was suffering things like electricity shortages during the worst periods of the 1970s. It was a place where even established businesses struggled to survive, so the idea of a startup culture or creating advanced tech firms was totally absurd - the government had given up even attempting to fix things and unions under the control of Marxists were practically shadow governments in and of themselves. In other words, if you look at the time that the USA was establishing startups like Intel that'd become huge tech firms, which then spawned generations of technically skilled VCs, Europe was mostly either actual communist dictatorships or so hard left that the idea of creating dynamic new businesses was a pipe dream. There was no environment in which to create the generations of successful entrepreneurs that America benefits from. Interestingly, Germany did much better than Britain during this time because - having had their faith in government wisdom destroyed by the Nazis - Germany deregulated and experienced much better economic growth, despite having been cleaved in half by the Soviets. This sowed the seeds of German economic strength dominating the Euro today. Things only really changed for most of Europe in the 1990s with the fall of the USSR, reunification of Germany and Thatcher's reforms having turned around the UK. But then Europe collectively decided that the right path into the future was to slowly merge together under a vast centralised bureaucracy centred in Brussels, one which had its roots in the Ventotene Manifesto, a document written by communists in the 40s. Remarkably, the EU to this day still has never really shaken a vague sense that communism was roughly in the right area. Its ultra-powerful unaccountable Commission President (Juncker) routinely makes statements like "when it gets serious, you have to lie" and he travelled to the birthplace of Karl Marx where he defended Marx's legacy: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/karl-marx-jean-claude-juncker-defends-legacy-a8337176.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/karl-marx-jea... The EU has historically often had former communists in its most senior positions and does things in ways that are reminiscent of the USSR (e.g. a Parliament that can't actually overrule the unelected parts of the government). No surprise that it takes an ambivalent view of business, especially successful American business, and largely defines itself as a defender of The People against Capital. Combined with no culture of granting equity and we have today's situation.
  - ThrowawayR2 8y ago
    > The first half was dominated by two world wars that flattened everything [in Europe]. What about Japan's rise from a bombed out, defeated nation to a G7 economic power and world leader in electronics and automotives in the same time period?
    - repolfx 8y ago
      Good question. I suspect it's like Germany and precision machinery/automotives. Japan lost comprehensively enough to destroy any notion that their government was good, and had a huge US involvement in the rebuild. IOW they were rebuilt along US lines and, like Germany, benefited from the "loser's victory" in which they avoided a sharp turn towards big government. During the same era the UK lost its own car manufacturing industry, with aggressive unions and general industrial malaise being the prime culprits.
  - dfrage 8y ago
    Exiting WWII Britain was fully competitive in computer technology, look particularly at the University of Manchester, home of the Williams Tube and many pioneering computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_computers which Ferranti was barely able to move the needle in commercializing.
    - AtomicOrbital 8y ago
      yes however Britain squeltched its own computer scientists and engineers, Tommy Flowers in particular, immediately after WWII due to false concerns of military secrecy
      - dfrage 8y ago
        That's not reflected by the historical record of the U.K.'s post war pioneering computers, which I provided just one link to. Per Wikipedia Tommy Flowers couldn't get a bank loan because he couldn't cite his cryptoanalysis machines as proof he could do what he claimed he could do. "False concerns of military secrecy" when we were in an existential cold war with international socialism? That put so much of Europe under Soviet occupation? Or the cited severe lack of funding mechanisms and other things necessary for commercial success, going all the way to the concept of doing stuff outside the aegis of the government which included the public University of Manchester? The latter could and did make numerous record breaking computers, going at least as far as the early 1960s Atlas, a competitive microsecond cycle supercomputer that was the first to page. But this didn't translate into commercial success.

Mirioron 8y ago

Maybe the EU and European countries could've fostered an environment where tech companies could've been successful as well?

mtgx 8y ago
Maybe if the EU adopted China's model of tricking U.S. giants to come there for the "huge market," then steal/coerce giving away their tech to the local small companies that can become billion-dollar giants a few years later, and then kicking the big U.S. companies out of the country or making it almost impossible for them to compete locally would've been a better strategy for the EU, too. Instead, the EU has allowed the U.S. tech giants to come and take over the local markets, and then crush or buy out all the smaller competition (UK's DeepMind anyone?!), and then wonder "where are the European competitors?!"
- outlace 8y ago
  But it also seems that the US produces new big tech companies in new sectors whereas Europe appears not to. Sure maybe there aren’t any viable Google or Facebook competitors, but the US produces Stripe, Airbnb, uber, etc.
  - JeremyBanks 8y ago
    Those examples seem to highlight America's weaknesses, not strength. Uber and Airbnb are both mostly-criminal enterprises that could only succeed at the level they did because of corrupt or impotent law enforcement and legislators, and Stripe's success is facilitated by the inaccessible mess of America's underlying banking system.
    - askafriend 8y ago
      I'm sorry but Taxis were a criminally poor, inefficient, and dangerous product before Uber came along. I'd like to see you argue in favor of Taxis, because there really aren't many good arguments or excuses for how they operated and really just squandered their own opportunity. Uber is better on literally every single dimension. Stripe is an international company that's facilitated by the internet.

shmerl 8y ago

EU officials are totally helping things with Article 13 and Co.

rasz 8y ago
For reference, _his party_ was pushing Article 13 in EU Parliament. September 12 everyone from PO voted for censorship: Michał Boni (PO) Jerzy Buzek (PO) Danuta Hübner (PO) Danuta Jazłowiecka (PO) Agnieszka Kozłowska-Rajewicz (PO) Barbara Kudrycka (PO) Janusz Lewandowski (PO) Elżbieta Łukacjiewska (PO) Jan Olbrycht (PO) Julia Pitera (PO) Marek Plura (PO) Dariusz Rosati (PO) Adam Szejnfeld (PO) Róża Thun Und Hohenstein (PO) Jarosław Wałęsa (PO) Bogdan Wenta (PO) Bogdan Zdrojewski (PO) Tadeusz Zwiefka (PO) Final April vote pro censorship: Danuta Hübner (PO) Agnieszka Kozłowska-Rajewicz (PO) Barbara Kudrycka (PO) Julia Pitera (PO) Bogdan Zdrojewski (PO) Tadeusz Zwiefka (PO)
- d33 8y ago
  I found it quite surprising and decided to double-check. This source doesn't seem to agree if I'm reading it right: https://saveyourinternet.eu/pl/ https://saveyourinternet.eu/pl/ Could you let me know where you have this information from?
  - rasz 8y ago
    you are right, I was missing Danuta Jazłowiecka (PO) so the final list is 7 for Article 13
    - d33 8y ago
      Either of us is reading it backwards - for example, Michał Boni is "green" in both "Vote on Possibility to Change the Final Text" and "Final Vote on Copyright Directive". Doesn't it mean he opposed it? Or is the first list of yours referring to a third voting, not mentioned on the website?
      - 8y ago

otvsh 8y ago

Donald Tusk, the evil (or the good) counterpart to Donald Trump. I want to see a movie about that.

lazyjones 8y ago

I'm sure the bureaucrats in charge of the EU will have great success with their "EU last" policy. (apologies for cynicism by a disappointed European)

ComputerGuru 8y ago

I'm not sure why the comments here are unusually toxic, but I think it is good to hear this. The EU tech sector has an opportunity to create customer-first text services with a strong focus on privacy and data portability, but it'll need some concessions and some support. There's no reason why the EU cannot replicate at least some of the success the US has had in the tech market, and even internally it has a large enough market to give rise to some healthy entities. Of course these might be actually sustainable businesses and not startups playing the unicorn game with VCs, trading at impossible sky-high valuations instead of what they're really worth and without a vision for profitability, so whatever metric you use to calculate success should definitely take that into account.

tootahe45 8y ago
There's no reason Europeans can't just do it from a place where they get better access capital and a more business-friendly environment (unless the EU tries to stop this by creating a 'safe' website list like China, or penalizing US companies in other ways). One problem with firewalling Google, Facebook, is that the fines bring in more money than European tech.
akersten 8y ago
I don't think it's toxic to criticize the regulatory practices that have created the business environment that the article laments. Actually I think it's more than fair to do so. "Blunt" may be a better word to describe the comments here.
- ajuc 8y ago
  In which way does regulation create the business environment that the article laments? EU was always behind in internet stuff, even when there was no regulation.
  - adventured 8y ago
    Indeed, Europe has been behind the US in tech since WW2. The lead the US acquired in the following ~20 years has proven impossible to overcome. It spawned so many various advantages that compound and build on each other (to say nothing of the single market of enormous size). If they knew what they were doing, they'd start by massively increasing the pay for software developers across Western Europe. Software is why the US dominates global tech. 1.25 million software developers earning a median of $105,000 in salary. Software is why Japan wasn't able to dominate tech, despite that being the near universal thought - that it was the inevitable outcome - in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They couldn't do software well, it's the difference between Apple doing the iPod and Sony flailing after the Walkman. It's also why Apple murdered Nokia, it's the software: the smartphone is about the software, not the hardware (which always drifts towards commodity, low value, low margin; Apple was focused on building a device that could effectively run serious software programs). The rise of Microsoft from 1975 to its eventual position as global tech titan by the time Win95 came out, charts the course of the US solidifying its position in tech via software margins. Most of the value gradually shifted from hardware to software, from the 1970s to the 1990s. The immensely profitable nature of most software pours an endless deluge of profit into the US tech machine (which is then used to keep expanding it and buying up global competition). US cloud dominance is similarly all about the software, rather than hardware in the cloud (again, low margin, low value). It's why Europe can't compete with AWS. Imagine if the US tech dominance were dependent on competing in server hardware, black rectangle smartphones or PC boxes. The US would have entirely gotten its brains stomped in by now. Instead, the US moved upstream and got all the profit in the tech industry: it's all in the software margins. It's the software, Europe. Pay your software developers a lot more if you want to compete.

ycombonator 8y ago

Tusk stuck between a rock (America FANG) and a hard place (China/ Huawei).

wazoox 8y ago

EU officials don't understand the current trade war. The US keeps coercing EU companies, buying them out by force (Alstom), pushing them out of markets (Iran), using extortion against EU banks, generally pressuring the EU in the position of an obedient vassal; but the EU doesn't get it, at all. That's a tragedy (for us Europeans). Eu officials are completely bought into the free market ideology and "gentle commerce". Nowadays strategic companies are even sold to the Chinese, because "free markets". Morons. EU is inept, useless. It's quite saying that Russia, with its limited means, limited population and GDP inferior to Italy, successfully kept its digital independence (mostly).

temp-dude-87844 8y ago
A lot of core EU policies are based the neoliberal "gentle free markets" model of the world, like the rules to privatize infrastructure, transport, and telecom. They're largely to allow an EU-wide market where protectionism applies at the level of the entire bloc and not at the level of individual countries, but they are easily taken advantage in an asymmetric setting. It's not unlike how US companies go into China to show growth, yet complain about the coercion and theft of their IP, as if these happenings weren't an open secret. The US takes advantage of EU's tech landscape being worse paid, more regulated, and less nimble, and takes advantage of the difficulties of policing the interaction between users and Internet-delivered services. China takes advantage of the naivete of the EU and the greed of the US. Other players, like Russia, UAE, and Qatar play a similar game, but unlike China they don't use hardware and software, but stick to property ownership and influencing hearts and minds.
- wazoox 8y ago
  Except that no protectionism at all happens at the EU level, because officials are completely clueless. Or bought-out, I don't really know. that's my point when I say that they're useless, toothless really.
katanaman 8y ago
Had the chance to live a few years in western Europe and I was shocked at the servility of the European institutions to the American interests. In Europe nobody dares to criticize clearly and openly the ways of the US, not even the communists. No wonder Obama was a huge hit in Europe. Perhaps this explains why most Americans think of Europeans as a spineless and weak I'm not leftist at all but I have to admit that Chavez had more balls than the whole western Europe

andreilys 8y ago

A similar case can be made for Chinese tech companies, many of whom are actively complicit in human rights violations [1] [2]. Yet EU countries like Italy have no qualms about supporting the geopolitical aims of China, inevitably strengthening the position of the Chinese tech companies. Which should come to no surprise given their close ties to the communist party [3] [4]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/alibaba-backed-face-scans-show-big-tech-ties-to-china-s-xinjiang https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/alibaba-b... [2] https://www.thestar.com/news/huawei/2019/03/27/canadas-partnership-with-huawei-immoral-as-well-as-risky-researcher-suggests-as-report-calls-out-human-rights-abuses.html https://www.thestar.com/news/huawei/2019/03/27/canadas-partn... [3] https://www.ft.com/content/5d0af3c4-846c-11e8-a29d-73e3d454535d https://www.ft.com/content/5d0af3c4-846c-11e8-a29d-73e3d4545... [4] https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/02/tech/china-tech-communist-party/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/02/tech/china-tech-communist-par...

markdown 8y ago
> A similar case can be made for Chinese companies, many of whom are actively complicit in human rights violations Snowden showed us that US companies routinely do this, with FISA forcing them to participate just like the Chinese Govt does to Chinese companies. Also, US law only protects the human rights of US citizens, while non-citizens get their privacy invaded routinely (in contravention of Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
- andreilys 8y ago
  US tech companies routinely aid the government in systematic ethnic cleansing [1]? Also last time I remember there being a showdown on privacy between Apple and the FBI, Apple refused their request to side-load software that would allow them to crack a terrorists phone. I can't imagine Huawei being able to refuse such a request from the Communist party. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/ethnic-cleansing-makes-a-comeback--in-china/2018/08/02/55f73fa2-9691-11e8-810c-5fa705927d54_story.html?utm_term=.658166352bf7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/ethn...

ga-vu 8y ago

I'd be worried more by Chinese companies. At least you can sue US companies. You can't do the same with Chinese ones.

qnsi 8y ago
how often do you use apps created by Chinese companies?

plandis 8y ago

Of course he is, US is in a much stronger position than the EU in the technology sector. You think he'd be saying the same thing if Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc... acted the exact same but were EU companies? I doubt it.

vfclists 8y ago

Is that measly article worthy of posting to HN, or was it crafted especially for HN?

fithisux 8y ago

EU failed to gather participating countries in an equalizing force of progress freedom and wisdom. It transform to a hegemony like the first Athenean alliance. We failed to our targets and in the meantime,, the external empires got stronger and lesser democratic. We failed miserably. I believe in the European dream, but not with these European politicians. We have no relation to the universal human, we have transformed to consumer/money junkies a new generation of cyber aboriginals ta satisfy our inner appetite for quality with beads like 500 years ago. Shame on the homo universalis, shame on the European christians.