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Most of these rules apply only to companies above a certain size, both in number of users and revenue. Those get classified as "digital gatekeepers" and they ar

• buscoquadnary 4y ago
  It also starts to bother me quite a bit when we go from treating everyone equal before the law to creating certain requirements based on other factors. Further it seems more like a moat to keep anyone else from getting as big as these "digital gatekeepers" are as suddenly when you get to a certain size you have an enormous expense. If these companies really are that large that they have to get special laws for them isnt the solution to dissolve their monopoly and split the company up instead of starting to create separate classes of laws.
  • mk89 4y ago
    Did you ever read Thinking in Systems (D. Meadows)? It's quite a nice read and there are some nice paragraphs about why we need rules to prevent or reduce monopolies.
    • trh0awayman 4y ago
      There are very real, very scary monopolies in Europe that are actually an issue that will never be dealt with. Whether or not iMessage can talk to Whatsapp has almost zero effect on my life.
  • MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > It also starts to bother me quite a bit when we go from treating everyone equal before the law to creating certain requirements based on other factors. Like tax brackets? Treating big things exactly the same as small things seems ideological, not rational.
    • danuker 4y ago
      This is the core of the issue. I have no recourse against Big Tech scamming me. They are an oligopoly sharing the same anti-consumer practices. But if I regularly buy something from a friend, maybe I'm a 10th of their customer base.
      • mgraczyk 4y ago
        This doesn't work online, and is the opposite of how fraud works in practice though. Larger sellers have a reputation that they care about and invest in. Small sellers with 10 sales don't care at all, they will make 10 good sales and steal from the 11th for a 10% profit.
        • kjaa 4y ago
          Created an account to say: citation needed. Giants can afford to skimp on any single customer relationship. Go read Amazon reviews, etc... The one-person show with only continental shipping taking PayPal payments for their hobby business absolutely cannot afford to screw over 10% of their customer base. PayPal (or any other provider) has no patience, and anecdotally will always side with the customer. And sure, citation needed, I know :)
        • ROTMetro 4y ago
          Have you used Amazon lately? They not only don't care, they push garbage that is obviously fake in their advertised/recommend blocks. Go search for an SD card on Amazon, and they will recommend a 5000 terabyte SD card that costs $9. I've switched to Best Buy because in this weird dystopian future they are more worthy of my business than Amazon now and I'm not doing business with garbage companies any more.
          • mgraczyk 4y ago
            My personal experience with Amazon in particular has been the opposite of yours. Amazon has completely refunded every defective or damaged products I have ever received. I've done two returns of $100+ items in the past month, in one case the seller disagreed with me and Amazon took my side. In total I've probably had 30 refunds over the past 10 years of which at least 5 were Amazon intervening to prevent the seller from screwing me.
  • yulaow 4y ago
    Exactly, and this is why the rest of the world is wishing and waiting since years that US lawmakers start implementing serious anti-trust laws and entities which work in that direction. I mean, after the facebook-whatsapp merge (and the whole aftermath) we mostly lost all hopes.
  • glogla 4y ago
    > It also starts to bother me quite a bit when we go from treating everyone equal before the law to creating certain requirements based on other factors. This is completely normal for laws. Your kitchen at home doesn't have to follow the same rules as restaurant kitchen, for example. You as a driver of your personal car don't have to go through the same process and registration as truck drivers do. Small stalls selling things have different rules than big stores. And so on.
    • toyg 4y ago
      I reckon this particular objection actually shows the forma mentis of developers. It seems like a lot of them feel like they are temporarily-embarrassed megacorps, worrying about things that will never really apply to them.
      • MichaelCollins 4y ago
        Exactly. Worrying about your company "suddenly" crossing the €75 billion market cap threshold... that's the sort of problem most people would give an arm and a leg to have.
      • charcircuit 4y ago
        It's possible to have an opinion on laws that you don't effect oneself. If a country had a law that if a company reaches $1 billion lifetime revenue that it gets repossessed by the state I can apply my belief that stealing is bad and be against that law despite it likely never affecting me.
        • fabianhjr 4y ago
          Requiring monopolistic platform megacorps to compete is similar to expropriating them. Got it.
          • charcircuit 4y ago
            I was using an extreme example to illustrate my point more clearly.
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    I don’t think the EU has the ability to break up American companies. I guess they could try to ban them from operating in the EU, but that would pretty much nuke diplomatic relations with the US so it’s hard for me to see it happening.
    • mschuster91 4y ago
      Oh we absolutely can do that. Microsoft barely avoided that fate over their antics with Internet Explorer back in the days. Anti-American company sentiments are high across Europe, especially when it comes to big tech companies. Our people are sick of US companies playing wild west and stomping all over regulations - AirBnB and Uber caused the most public backlash here (AirBnB because of people complaining that they were priced out of their homes and illegal hotel-style operations disrupting their lives, Uber because taxi drivers have pretty good lobby connections), followed by Facebook (which was mostly a topic for privacy nerds). Also, we have not forgotten who caused the 2008 financial crisis and who keeps dodging tax and labor laws while the taxpayers are left to deal with the followup costs. Pay up and behave or get kicked out, GDPR was just the beginning (and once we get the Irish authorities to behave, your companies are done). The EU bureaucracy is like a big tanker ship, slow as molasses, but once it is moving it is not stoppable other than by going out of its way.
      • colinmhayes 4y ago
        Obviously the EU can institute rules and fine companies that break them. But forcing companies to break up or kicking them out of Europe might be a step too far for the American government. Is the EU really willing to enter a Cold War with the us? Especially with the Russia situation I’m not sure they’re even able to without mass protests because the lng pipeline from the us will immediately dry up.
        • theplumber 4y ago
          EU could break up the EU operations of the said company and it leaves it up to the company whether to break up in other parts of the world or just in Europe. Just think how many shell companies are created to dodge taxes. Same can be done here.
  • cm2187 4y ago
    How do you break up the iphone? You create one company with a separate model of iphone for each country?
    • gattilorenz 4y ago
      Hardware and software? But of course it's not an EU company
      • bpye 4y ago
        I'm not sure how much that matters? Apple still have to abide by EU legislation to sell their products there.
    • colechristensen 4y ago
      Make the App Store a separate company from the one that sells you the phone and OS.
  • jszymborski 4y ago
    It's the difference between equality and equity.
    • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      there are two kinds of people in the world - those that think corporatuon are people, and those who haven't lost their mind. I can't understand why would anyone apply narrative of systemic opression and social issues to corporations.
      • jszymborski 4y ago
        I was responding to the claim that companies were treated unequally, which OP claimed was unjust. I'm simply stating that treating companies equitably, not equally, is just. I understand that awareness of the importance of treating individuals equitably rather than equally has been increased in light of the increasingly public discourse on civil inequity, but these words have always existed outside that context to mean what they do. The meaning of "equity" in a legal context according to the american heritage dictionary [0]: Justice achieved not simply according to the strict letter of the law but in accordance with principles of substantial justice and the unique facts of the case. Not seeing how that requires me to anthropomorphise corporations. Also, I kindly ask you to extend a bit of respect my way and not imply that I suffer from a mental illness because you disagree with me. It's not very civil. [0] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/equity https://www.thefreedictionary.com/equity
  • naasking 4y ago
    > Further it seems more like a moat to keep anyone else from getting as big as these "digital gatekeepers" are as suddenly when you get to a certain size you have an enormous expense. Yes, and that's a good thing. It suppresses monopolistic tendencies before they can take hold, rather than trying to prove they are a monopoly and trying to figure out after the fact how to break them in a sensible way. > If these companies really are that large that they have to get special laws for them isnt the solution to dissolve their monopoly and split the company up instead of starting to create separate classes of laws. Why? All you're doing is letting that monopoly create the great device/service/whatever that lots of people seem to be enjoying, but levelling the playing field so they are still forced to compete for users instead of exploiting their monopoly power to kill any competition. Encouraging competition is the ultimate goal because that's where the progress from capitalism comes from. If we can continue to encourage competition without going about the messy business of directly interfering with how a company is structured or how it operates, that seems like a win.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > treating everyone equal before the law to creating certain requirements we are not treated the same, If I killed 300 people the way boeing did with its Max debacle, I would be serving 15 consecutive life sentences. for all the times a corporation kills people, almost never does anyone go to jail > isnt the solution to dissolve their monopoly Why is that the preffered solution? If you are arguing for that, you need to provide some reasoning or benefits. I am sure they would prefer not to be split up.
  • SiempreViernes 4y ago
    > It also starts to bother me quite a bit when we go from treating everyone equal before the law to creating certain requirements based on other factors. Uh, are you secretly longing for filing the paperwork required to obtain Title V Operating Permit for a major air emission source, or is there some other reason you oppose the idea that different things will have to follow different laws? Personally I think most people will agree that a company with 150000 employees (Google) is not the same thing as one with 750 (tinder).
  • larsonnn 4y ago
    > It also starts to bother me quite a bit when we go from treating everyone equal before the law to creating certain requirements based on other factors. They are literally the internet. That’s not about some companies to get some of there dollars. They literally gatekeeping. Amazon just shut down a whole social media platform. You can’t sell apps to iOS without paying Apple a big part of it (15 % - 30 %). Yeah you could say just create your own phone that would be fine right? How realistic is this. You can’t even build a good one because the bigger companies have so many patents you can’t go out. Then you write your own OS because you don’t want to pay and global company for using there OS. So give me my 200billion $ to get in the market. You can’t even advertise your product because they wouldn’t show your ad at all. That’s equal? Also the EU can’t just split up companies. It’s a step to get some freedom back.
  • unity1001 4y ago
    > It also starts to bother me quite a bit when we go from treating everyone equal before the law to creating certain requirements based on other factors. We already do that. We always did that. We regard things that are used larger than a certain scale as infrastructure. Roads. Justice system. Military. Power network. We always heavily regulated these. Entire world except the US also regulated the Internet backbone as a utility. So nowhere in the world do people and companies have to still pay mid-2000s prices for bandwidth like they have to in the US after 1990s regulations expired and major ISPs started to consolidate entire backbone. They even tried to declare the Internet backbone, therefore the Internet, their 'private property' to be able to do whatever they wanted. When tech monopolies go over a certain size and become literal infrastructures that everyone HAS to use one way or the other, they should get the same treatment.
• rch 4y ago
  Is being a gatekeeper a function of overall size, or market share in a given sector? I may have missed the definition in the article, but my cynical take is that it seems geared towards getting companies that enjoyed dominance in the 90s back into the game now.
  • cteiosanu 4y ago
    Check the infographic[1]. Gatekeepers are digital platforms : • with over 45 mil active users • more than €7.5 billion turnover for the past 3 years [1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/digital-markets-act/ https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/digital-mark...
    • rch 4y ago
      I see now, thanks! I'm getting more optimistic as I look into the details. Open messaging could be interesting, for instance.
• bluesign 4y ago
  It will limit startup’s valuation for sure. Valuation will limit startups chance to raise investment. Less investment in general will limit startups runway.