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You didn't actually read the announcement. The EU is only regulating "high risk" uses of AI - i.e. facial recognition as used by law enforcement. Your spicy aut

You didn't actually read the announcement. The EU is only regulating "high risk" uses of AI - i.e. facial recognition as used by law enforcement. Your spicy autocomplete and image generators should be safe. Also, the EU didn't "miss the Internet", it got muscled out of the Internet by American tech monopolies.

chatmasta 3y ago
> the EU didn't "miss the Internet", it got muscled out of the Internet by American tech monopolies This sounds like a distinction without a difference. The American tech monopolies only became monopolies because of their first mover advantage. The EU had no Internet companies with first mover advantage... in other words, they missed the Internet.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Monopoly building is not a function of first-mover advantage. In fact, being the first mover is usually a disadvantage, because you have to figure out how your business model is going to work. Late movers can just copy it but better. Going down the list of US tech companies: Google did not have first-mover advantage. They were actually very late in search. They won search by having a superior algorithm and, more importantly, enough business discipline to not deliberately ruin it. More importantly, with the exception of Gmail, every other successful arm of Google has been a startup that they bought and scaled up. In some cases, notably YouTube, they were even competing with the company they'd later buy because they couldn't build the business themselves. Apple did technically have first-mover advantage, given that they've been around in personal computing since the late 70s, but they blew it so hard they nearly went bankrupt. The Apple we know about today was destroyed and rebuilt by NeXT and Steve Jobs buying Apple with Apple's money. Even then, a good chunk of their success has been due to their purchase of several chip and core design firms that give the iPhone an edge that competing phone manufacturers can't buy. Even the first iPod was designed by someone else and bought by Apple. Microsoft... also wasn't a first-mover. OK, they were there at the start of PCs selling BASIC interpreters, but the IBM PC DOS you probably are thinking of as their "first OS" was SCP[0] QDOS, which they bought and customized for late-moving IBM. The same story goes for the Internet - they saw Netscape Navigator, got scared, bought NCSA Mosaic, rebranded it to Internet Explorer, added a bunch of nonstandard extensions, and integrated it deeply into Windows to kill Netscape dead. Is there a pattern here? Yes - that monopolies form because companies can buy instead of build. Why this happened in the US and not the EU is simple: the US stopped enforcing its antitrust laws and gave tech companies a regulatory pass in the name of the "future". This is not the EU missing the Internet, this is the EU being the victim of cheating. [0] Seattle Computer Products, which I'm assured is not a front of the SCP Foundation
  - chatmasta 3y ago
    Of the companies you claim weren't first-movers, your counterexamples of the "real" first-movers were also US companies. This would be a more relevant argument if some EU companies were first-movers but then got "muscled out" by US late-movers that became monopolies (and an even better argument if the EU companies were impeded by EU anti-trust rulings against them). But that's not what happened, because there were no EU first-movers, nor were there any anti-trust enforcements against any would-be EU first-movers... It's like saying you lost a race because your opponents cheated, when you weren't even at the starting line. > the US stopped enforcing its antitrust laws and gave tech companies a regulatory pass So the EU did enforce its antitrust laws during that time, and thus stopped any EU tech companies emerging as monopolies? Can you provide an example? (In fact the only anti-trust ruling I remember from early Internet era was from the US, against Microsoft.) Besides, has US ever considered anti-trust law in the context of the international market? Do they even have an obligation to do that? The government has a responsibility to its own citizens. And if what you say is true, that US neglecting to enforce anti-trust law facilitated US tech monopolies, then perhaps US citizens benefitted in the long term. Certainly I'd rather be a citizen of the country that's the dominant economic power than the subjugated one in decline... and it's not like those tech monopolies halted innovation in the US; on the contrary, it's thriving. The US has the highest levels of high-tech investment, the highest salaries, the latest tech...
  - Slartie 3y ago
    I would agree with this comment, except for the last part. Antitrust law enforcement is not the critical part. Uniform market size is. The US has a lead on software mostly due to an inherent advantage of having a large domestic market with mostly the same language, rules and expectations everywhere, whereas the European market is about as big in total, but unfortunately is divided into many smaller markets with fairly large differences which cannot be captured as quickly as the US market. This gives companies which scale nearly effortlessly from a tech perspective (modern software based startups) a huge advantage in terms of the available headroom for quick, initial growth. This advantage is largely irrelevant in industries where physical stuff must be produced and which are therefore hard to scale anyway, but it is almost a guarantee for a dominant role in the realm of SAAS. The remaining conclusion of yours is true: if you grow faster, you can buy. If you grow slower, you are being bought.

chatmasta 3y ago

> the EU didn't "miss the Internet", it got muscled out of the Internet by American tech monopolies This sounds like a distinction without a difference. The American tech monopolies only became monopolies because of their first mover advantage. The EU had no Internet companies with first mover advantage... in other words, they missed the Internet.

kmeisthax 3y ago
Monopoly building is not a function of first-mover advantage. In fact, being the first mover is usually a disadvantage, because you have to figure out how your business model is going to work. Late movers can just copy it but better. Going down the list of US tech companies: Google did not have first-mover advantage. They were actually very late in search. They won search by having a superior algorithm and, more importantly, enough business discipline to not deliberately ruin it. More importantly, with the exception of Gmail, every other successful arm of Google has been a startup that they bought and scaled up. In some cases, notably YouTube, they were even competing with the company they'd later buy because they couldn't build the business themselves. Apple did technically have first-mover advantage, given that they've been around in personal computing since the late 70s, but they blew it so hard they nearly went bankrupt. The Apple we know about today was destroyed and rebuilt by NeXT and Steve Jobs buying Apple with Apple's money. Even then, a good chunk of their success has been due to their purchase of several chip and core design firms that give the iPhone an edge that competing phone manufacturers can't buy. Even the first iPod was designed by someone else and bought by Apple. Microsoft... also wasn't a first-mover. OK, they were there at the start of PCs selling BASIC interpreters, but the IBM PC DOS you probably are thinking of as their "first OS" was SCP[0] QDOS, which they bought and customized for late-moving IBM. The same story goes for the Internet - they saw Netscape Navigator, got scared, bought NCSA Mosaic, rebranded it to Internet Explorer, added a bunch of nonstandard extensions, and integrated it deeply into Windows to kill Netscape dead. Is there a pattern here? Yes - that monopolies form because companies can buy instead of build. Why this happened in the US and not the EU is simple: the US stopped enforcing its antitrust laws and gave tech companies a regulatory pass in the name of the "future". This is not the EU missing the Internet, this is the EU being the victim of cheating. [0] Seattle Computer Products, which I'm assured is not a front of the SCP Foundation
- chatmasta 3y ago
  Of the companies you claim weren't first-movers, your counterexamples of the "real" first-movers were also US companies. This would be a more relevant argument if some EU companies were first-movers but then got "muscled out" by US late-movers that became monopolies (and an even better argument if the EU companies were impeded by EU anti-trust rulings against them). But that's not what happened, because there were no EU first-movers, nor were there any anti-trust enforcements against any would-be EU first-movers... It's like saying you lost a race because your opponents cheated, when you weren't even at the starting line. > the US stopped enforcing its antitrust laws and gave tech companies a regulatory pass So the EU did enforce its antitrust laws during that time, and thus stopped any EU tech companies emerging as monopolies? Can you provide an example? (In fact the only anti-trust ruling I remember from early Internet era was from the US, against Microsoft.) Besides, has US ever considered anti-trust law in the context of the international market? Do they even have an obligation to do that? The government has a responsibility to its own citizens. And if what you say is true, that US neglecting to enforce anti-trust law facilitated US tech monopolies, then perhaps US citizens benefitted in the long term. Certainly I'd rather be a citizen of the country that's the dominant economic power than the subjugated one in decline... and it's not like those tech monopolies halted innovation in the US; on the contrary, it's thriving. The US has the highest levels of high-tech investment, the highest salaries, the latest tech...
- Slartie 3y ago
  I would agree with this comment, except for the last part. Antitrust law enforcement is not the critical part. Uniform market size is. The US has a lead on software mostly due to an inherent advantage of having a large domestic market with mostly the same language, rules and expectations everywhere, whereas the European market is about as big in total, but unfortunately is divided into many smaller markets with fairly large differences which cannot be captured as quickly as the US market. This gives companies which scale nearly effortlessly from a tech perspective (modern software based startups) a huge advantage in terms of the available headroom for quick, initial growth. This advantage is largely irrelevant in industries where physical stuff must be produced and which are therefore hard to scale anyway, but it is almost a guarantee for a dominant role in the realm of SAAS. The remaining conclusion of yours is true: if you grow faster, you can buy. If you grow slower, you are being bought.