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Here in Europe, we are in a paradoxical downward spiral. And unfortunately, I see no end to it. Understandably, we don't want our citizens to be spied upon by

by TekMol 3y ago

Here in Europe, we are in a paradoxical downward spiral. And unfortunately, I see no end to it. Understandably, we don't want our citizens to be spied upon by the US and have all that data stored in the US. Unfortunately, our "solution" is to create regulations which cause so much disadvantage to European tech companies, that we will see our citizens use even more US built tools in the future. We already live in a mostly US-built internet. Throwing more and more regulations at it only cements this situation. It seems there is nothing to get out of this rut. Looks like we will keep feeding the patient a treatment that worsens their condition.

autoexec 3y ago
> Unfortunately, our "solution" is to create regulations which cause so much disadvantage to European tech companies, that we will see our citizens use even more US built tools in the future. What is the "disadvantage" to European tech companies who don't want to spy on anyone? What advantage do Europeans who don't want to be spied on gain by using US services that will spy on them instead of using European ones that couldn't spy on them as easily/completely due to pro-privacy laws?
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  The US business model has established "free" for services on the net, paid for by others using behavioral data for advertising. That has its advantages (access for all, no matter the socioeconomic background!) but no "paid for by others" scheme that is less intrusive has popped up yet and "free" is very hard to compete with. There's also less of a culture of "pour billions into tons of startups and see what sticks", which is a market distortion of its own. That aspect is drying up in the US though, thankfully.
  - kergonath 3y ago
    > paid for by others using behavioral data for advertising And some generous VC funding sloshing around in the Silicon Valley, and the associated global brain drain. This is proving to get harder to reproduce elsewhere.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    Europeans can use ad supported models without resorting to surveillance capitalism. They can even use targeted advertising without it. You don't need to have people's entire internet history, a full list of their past sexual partners, and their GPS coordinates to push ads relevant to a person's interests. The spying is entirely unnecessary, and there's a history going back long before the internet even existed proving that ads without the spying are effective. Privacy laws don't prevent Europeans from offering ad based services on the net, and being limited to providing more privacy friendly services will make those services more attractive to consumers outside of the EU as well. There's a lot of opportunity created when you can't simply fall back on the most exploitative practices the US allows for.
Garvi 3y ago
EU regulations are not a monolith of good or bad. The cookie law is dumb beyond comprehension. On the other side GDPR is just great and I have yet to hear a good argument against it. The criticisms usually sound like listening to creationists talk about how silly evolution is (by that I mean they don't understand it). The only way I see Europe develop it's own internet tech and big businesses, is to copy what China did by simply blocking the foreign competition. Today there would be no Weibo, Baidu, Alibaba or Aliexpress without it. And I don't see a problem in that approach, but wouldn't mind being educated otherwise. Edit: I wish at least some of the people downvoting would have the intellect to form a paragraph of counter arguments, so I could understand why. It's like a sports event in here.
- jkaplowitz 3y ago
  The cookie law is partly dumb, but also frequently implemented in a way that violates the law and rarely subject to meaningful enforcement or significant penalties. So mostly the same practical problem as the GDPR.
  - Garvi 3y ago
    Blaming cookies for tracking people is like blaming a bullet for a murder. It's the trackers installed on pretty much every single website that are the thing that tracks people, using cookies of course. The Google analytics or Facebook pixels, to name the top two offenders. I don't see how this relates to GDPR. Please explain.
    - jkaplowitz 3y ago
      > Blaming cookies for tracking people is like blaming a bullet for a murder. It's the trackers installed on pretty much every single website that are the thing that tracks people, using cookies of course. The Google analytics or Facebook pixels, to name the top two offenders. Yes. I agreed that the cookie law is partly dumb. The part of the cookie law that’s dumb is that it’s too narrowly scoped and should apply to all tracking technologies and techniques, for whichever purposes and vendors are or aren’t okay with the user. And it needs a systematic way for user-specified defaults across all websites, instead of leaving that to browser extensions. Ideally this would be opt-in rather than opt-out for privacy reasons, but I do understand the valid argument that the subset of people who would explicitly opt in to tracking are not representative of the whole user population. Probably the best balance of hassle vs privacy vs statistical validity is to require the major browsers to force a one-time explicit choice per purpose and/or per vendor without dark patterns involved, save those as defaults that get sent to the sites in a way that is legally mandatory for sites to respect, and allow per-site overrides using the same mechanism - instead of the current mess of shady consent pop-ups. > I don’t see how this relates to GDPR. Please explain. Both have more user-friendly requirements than people expect, both are widely violated in user-hostile ways, both are rarely enforced by regulators, and what rare enforcement does exist is slow, often reluctant, and with inadequate fines to change industry norms and sometimes not even much of the behavior of the fined company. They’re separate laws but with the same practical enforcement / incentive problems.
jcfrei 3y ago
It's not like having fewer regulations in tech would be an instant panacea. The bigger reasons for US dominance are the larger capital and consumer market - both still fragmented in the EU. Add on top of that a more flexible labour market in the US (someone from California is more likely to work in New York than someone from Lithuania to work in Portugal). Regulations do matter but there's so many other things that make it harder in Europe.
camgunz 3y ago
I think it's more EU tech protectionism. Basically the law is saying, "you can't use US tech services." So this creates a local market for EU tech services. There's probably an argument between capitalists in the EU who want to develop that market (while complying with EU privacy regulations) and security people in the EU/US who want to continue to use tech to facilitate mass surveillance. Trying to guess who will win out is interesting. The privacy vs. surveillance discussion always feels one crisis away from tipping to surveillance (see: 9/11), but the EU privacy lobby is remarkably strong. I also think a market for tech services that don't spy on you is probably pretty huge; by itself it's not a big selling point, but contrasted against services that definitely spy on you (not to mention net neutrality concerns) they look pretty good, plus being able to tap the EU market is a huge incentive. So--no jinx--I think I'm bullish on privacy here, because it seems likely an unholy alliance of capitalists and privacy advocates would be decisive.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  GDPR dramatically reduced venture investments in europe, compared to the US[1]. Protectionism is not something you can do indirectly. It requires certainty and clarity. [1]: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/short-run-effects-gdpr-technology-venture-investment https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/short-run-effects-gdpr-techno...
  - camgunz 3y ago
    I'm not really talking about GDPR here; it's not US-specific and doesn't have the effect of walling off the EU market from the US. I'm not a huge fan of GDPR FWIW; in particular I think the requirement to have representatives and data protection officers is way too burdensome for smaller companies. They probably thought they'd create a cottage industry of EU representative/DPO service companies, but that's so little of a business it just feels like an invitation to set one up as a front for money laundering. I like the thought of GDPR, but the law as written is actually pretty weird IMO.
WeylandYutani 3y ago
The Chinese succesfully kept the Americans out so it's totally doable.
- SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
  They kept the Americans out with homegrown competitors which are openly government-affiliated spyware, and even so it was routine for technically savvy people to use American social media through VPN until they cracked down. I’m not sure this points towards a workable strategy that’s compatible with the EU’s goals and principles.
- kergonath 3y ago
  I am pretty sure Europeans are not ready for the compromises that come with this approach. It’s also easy to misunderstand the sentiments, from the comments here. We Europeans do not hate the US or American companies in general (though some are evil, of course, just like some European ones). OTOH we are seeing the privacy nightmare they are building for themselves and really don’t want that, thank you very much. “Buy European” is limited to nationalist loonies and privacy-conscious nerds, mostly, and in the latter case it’s not because of anti-Americanism. Fix US laws and 1) Americans will live better lives and 2) these sort of issues will disappear.

by TekMol 3y ago

autoexec 3y ago

> Unfortunately, our "solution" is to create regulations which cause so much disadvantage to European tech companies, that we will see our citizens use even more US built tools in the future. What is the "disadvantage" to European tech companies who don't want to spy on anyone? What advantage do Europeans who don't want to be spied on gain by using US services that will spy on them instead of using European ones that couldn't spy on them as easily/completely due to pro-privacy laws?

pgeorgi 3y ago
The US business model has established "free" for services on the net, paid for by others using behavioral data for advertising. That has its advantages (access for all, no matter the socioeconomic background!) but no "paid for by others" scheme that is less intrusive has popped up yet and "free" is very hard to compete with. There's also less of a culture of "pour billions into tons of startups and see what sticks", which is a market distortion of its own. That aspect is drying up in the US though, thankfully.
- kergonath 3y ago
  > paid for by others using behavioral data for advertising And some generous VC funding sloshing around in the Silicon Valley, and the associated global brain drain. This is proving to get harder to reproduce elsewhere.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Europeans can use ad supported models without resorting to surveillance capitalism. They can even use targeted advertising without it. You don't need to have people's entire internet history, a full list of their past sexual partners, and their GPS coordinates to push ads relevant to a person's interests. The spying is entirely unnecessary, and there's a history going back long before the internet even existed proving that ads without the spying are effective. Privacy laws don't prevent Europeans from offering ad based services on the net, and being limited to providing more privacy friendly services will make those services more attractive to consumers outside of the EU as well. There's a lot of opportunity created when you can't simply fall back on the most exploitative practices the US allows for.

Garvi 3y ago

EU regulations are not a monolith of good or bad. The cookie law is dumb beyond comprehension. On the other side GDPR is just great and I have yet to hear a good argument against it. The criticisms usually sound like listening to creationists talk about how silly evolution is (by that I mean they don't understand it). The only way I see Europe develop it's own internet tech and big businesses, is to copy what China did by simply blocking the foreign competition. Today there would be no Weibo, Baidu, Alibaba or Aliexpress without it. And I don't see a problem in that approach, but wouldn't mind being educated otherwise. Edit: I wish at least some of the people downvoting would have the intellect to form a paragraph of counter arguments, so I could understand why. It's like a sports event in here.

jkaplowitz 3y ago
The cookie law is partly dumb, but also frequently implemented in a way that violates the law and rarely subject to meaningful enforcement or significant penalties. So mostly the same practical problem as the GDPR.
- Garvi 3y ago
  Blaming cookies for tracking people is like blaming a bullet for a murder. It's the trackers installed on pretty much every single website that are the thing that tracks people, using cookies of course. The Google analytics or Facebook pixels, to name the top two offenders. I don't see how this relates to GDPR. Please explain.
  - jkaplowitz 3y ago
    > Blaming cookies for tracking people is like blaming a bullet for a murder. It's the trackers installed on pretty much every single website that are the thing that tracks people, using cookies of course. The Google analytics or Facebook pixels, to name the top two offenders. Yes. I agreed that the cookie law is partly dumb. The part of the cookie law that’s dumb is that it’s too narrowly scoped and should apply to all tracking technologies and techniques, for whichever purposes and vendors are or aren’t okay with the user. And it needs a systematic way for user-specified defaults across all websites, instead of leaving that to browser extensions. Ideally this would be opt-in rather than opt-out for privacy reasons, but I do understand the valid argument that the subset of people who would explicitly opt in to tracking are not representative of the whole user population. Probably the best balance of hassle vs privacy vs statistical validity is to require the major browsers to force a one-time explicit choice per purpose and/or per vendor without dark patterns involved, save those as defaults that get sent to the sites in a way that is legally mandatory for sites to respect, and allow per-site overrides using the same mechanism - instead of the current mess of shady consent pop-ups. > I don’t see how this relates to GDPR. Please explain. Both have more user-friendly requirements than people expect, both are widely violated in user-hostile ways, both are rarely enforced by regulators, and what rare enforcement does exist is slow, often reluctant, and with inadequate fines to change industry norms and sometimes not even much of the behavior of the fined company. They’re separate laws but with the same practical enforcement / incentive problems.

jcfrei 3y ago

It's not like having fewer regulations in tech would be an instant panacea. The bigger reasons for US dominance are the larger capital and consumer market - both still fragmented in the EU. Add on top of that a more flexible labour market in the US (someone from California is more likely to work in New York than someone from Lithuania to work in Portugal). Regulations do matter but there's so many other things that make it harder in Europe.

camgunz 3y ago

I think it's more EU tech protectionism. Basically the law is saying, "you can't use US tech services." So this creates a local market for EU tech services. There's probably an argument between capitalists in the EU who want to develop that market (while complying with EU privacy regulations) and security people in the EU/US who want to continue to use tech to facilitate mass surveillance. Trying to guess who will win out is interesting. The privacy vs. surveillance discussion always feels one crisis away from tipping to surveillance (see: 9/11), but the EU privacy lobby is remarkably strong. I also think a market for tech services that don't spy on you is probably pretty huge; by itself it's not a big selling point, but contrasted against services that definitely spy on you (not to mention net neutrality concerns) they look pretty good, plus being able to tap the EU market is a huge incentive. So--no jinx--I think I'm bullish on privacy here, because it seems likely an unholy alliance of capitalists and privacy advocates would be decisive.

amadeuspagel 3y ago
GDPR dramatically reduced venture investments in europe, compared to the US[1]. Protectionism is not something you can do indirectly. It requires certainty and clarity. [1]: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/short-run-effects-gdpr-technology-venture-investment https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/short-run-effects-gdpr-techno...
- camgunz 3y ago
  I'm not really talking about GDPR here; it's not US-specific and doesn't have the effect of walling off the EU market from the US. I'm not a huge fan of GDPR FWIW; in particular I think the requirement to have representatives and data protection officers is way too burdensome for smaller companies. They probably thought they'd create a cottage industry of EU representative/DPO service companies, but that's so little of a business it just feels like an invitation to set one up as a front for money laundering. I like the thought of GDPR, but the law as written is actually pretty weird IMO.

WeylandYutani 3y ago

The Chinese succesfully kept the Americans out so it's totally doable.

SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
They kept the Americans out with homegrown competitors which are openly government-affiliated spyware, and even so it was routine for technically savvy people to use American social media through VPN until they cracked down. I’m not sure this points towards a workable strategy that’s compatible with the EU’s goals and principles.
kergonath 3y ago
I am pretty sure Europeans are not ready for the compromises that come with this approach. It’s also easy to misunderstand the sentiments, from the comments here. We Europeans do not hate the US or American companies in general (though some are evil, of course, just like some European ones). OTOH we are seeing the privacy nightmare they are building for themselves and really don’t want that, thank you very much. “Buy European” is limited to nationalist loonies and privacy-conscious nerds, mostly, and in the latter case it’s not because of anti-Americanism. Fix US laws and 1) Americans will live better lives and 2) these sort of issues will disappear.