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Europe, where the largest business is a luxury handbag company, has now essentially declared acquisitions illegal, and is eagerly regulating American tech compa
by encoderer 3y ago
Europe, where the largest business is a luxury handbag company, has now essentially declared acquisitions illegal, and is eagerly regulating American tech companies after completely failing in developing their own tech sector.
- ravetcofx 3y agoMonopolization is generally bad. Smaller independent businesses foster healthier markets and competition. That's what the EU is regulating.
- dymk 3y agoThere is no company that has a monopoly on robot vacuum cleaners though, and it's unclear how Amazon would use their positions in other markets to unfairly leverage themselves in the robot vacuum market. How are the EU's actions here protective of the market/consumers?
- pyvpx 3y ago[flagged]
- dymk 3y agoThere's plenty of competition in this space, and there's no need to be snarky.
- pyvpx 3y agomy snark compensates for the absolute lack of depth of thought in your position. nothing personal — I am simply incredulous at your stance in the face of well…how data and capitalism works, historically.
- BlackjackCF 3y agoSeriously horrifying. If the acquisition went through, Amazon would know exactly what was going on outside AND inside your house since they also own Ring.
- crote 3y ago> you have no idea what amazon would do with a spatial and/or topographical map of your living space updated almost daily? Well of course, but the EU already has plenty of privacy laws to deal with that. That's no reason for the EU to object to this acquisition on those grounds. It seems the primary issue here is that Amazon might be incentivized to disadvantage competing robo-vacuums on their marketplace. Which is not an unfair observation, but a bit strange given how many other Amazon-brand products it is already selling.
- tqi 3y ago> you have no idea what amazon would do with a spatial and/or topographical map of your living space updated almost daily? you cant? damn. you might wanna do some creativity exercises instead of crapping on your keyboard for everyone to see. embarrassing for you. truly. Why do you care what data Amazon has about my living space? If you don't like it don't by a Roomba. Why do you always assume that people are rubes who are being duped by corporations, as opposed to people who are making a conscious tradeoff?
- Timon3 3y ago> Why do you care what data Amazon has about my living space? If you don't like it don't by a Roomba. How many people have bought Roombas without knowing they would be sold to Amazon in the future? A quick search came up with 40 million units sold so far. Will Amazon offer a full refund to every person who doesn't want their data with Amazon? Or will they offer the option to completely stay off of Amazons systems, keeping the existing Roomba systems running? If not, do you expect people to somehow accurately predict the future when making purchasing decisions?
- tqi 3y agoI don't think people can predict what will happen to the products they buy in the future. But I do think people can choose to use or not use the products they buy based on new information. And my point is not that this is a good or bad thing (for the record I think it's bad but so is the company going out of business), just that more often than not the loudest consumer advocates seem to have incredibly dim views of consumers themselves. It must be the case that consumers don't know or don't understand the tradeoffs they are making, rather than that consumers simply place a lower value on "privacy".
- Timon3 3y agoIs you having the option to choose lower privacy worth 40 million people having lower privacy? That seems to be the dichotomy here - consumer advocates don't just care about new buyers.
- mistrial9 3y agoaren't "robot vacuum cleaners" a laughably obvious spy vector? They literally transcribe the floor plan and send it to a mothership "somewhere" ..
- murderfs 3y agoI'll grant that the ones using RGB cameras for SLAM have potential for exfiltrating information, but floor plans are literally public record. What value could that possibly have?
- abdullahkhalids 3y agoYou can probably tell roughly number (and size) of sofa, chairs, tables, shelving units in each unit. Amount of carpet vs floor space. Total floor space. That lets you build a dataset of these numbers correlated with all the other things Amazon knows about you. Then target you for ads. Maybe, it notices that your coffee table is smaller than average than other similar people/apartments. They also know you have previously bought dark colored fake wood furniture before. So they advertise dark colored coffee tables to you, in the price range you would be able to afford.
- kaibee 3y agoI would be more concerned about this scenario if Amazon was also capable of discovering that because I purchased 1 door mat, does not mean that I want acquire a hoard of door mats, for my house made entirely of exterior doors.
- nothead 3y agoFloor plans aren't public record, only a rough outline of building size. Go pull up your county's record of your house. At most, you'll get a box diagram showing sizes of different sections of your house, but nothing to indicate the actual layout of anything. These robot vacuums collect much more detailed information than that on millions of houses.
- freddie_mercury 3y ago
- nottorp 3y ago> and it's unclear how Amazon would use their positions in other markets to unfairly leverage themselves in the robot vacuum market I see people complaining that Amazon stuffs their face with noname amazon brand clones of anything when they search for it. So what the EU worries about is that you won't be able to find any other vacuum cleaner except Roomba on Amazon.
- kelnos 3y agoIt's blatantly and obviously clear, and the article addresses this: Amazon will give their own brand of cleaning robot preferential treatment in Amazon product searches.
- dymk 3y agoAnd Apple puts Apple products front and center on their storefront as well, but we don't call that a monopoly
- zopa 3y agoI’m not sure Apple’s the best example for you. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/technology/antitrust-apple-lawsuit-us.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/technology/antitrust-appl...
- tekla 3y agoIt doesn't really seem like its working. Incredibly bad growth numbers, almost no companies that are growing at a good pace, mediocre performance in aerospace, rise of far right groups everywhere who seem to be winning actual power.
- Eisenstein 3y agoWhy does everything have to grow all the time? Isn't there some version of 'we are making enough money and our customers are happy' that can exist? Is it possible to be fine with having enough to live decently, or do we we have to classify everything that doesn't grow constantly a failure?
- ponector 3y agoIt is a false narrative. Far right groups are getting some support, but not winning any actual power.
- encoderer 3y agoWell since the business is now laying off 1/3 of the workforce they have achieved a smaller business. This is a win? Regular people are losing their jobs because European bureaucrats decided they didn’t want to allow a deal the management team called essential.
- arrosenberg 3y agoWilling to bet Amazon would have laid off the same amount or more if the acquisition went through. Source: every corporate merger in history.
- notaustinpowers 3y agoIf a business cannot survive without an acquisition, then that business should not survive. An acquisition should be an avenue for success for the owners, but it should never be the endgame of a business (in my opinion). Also, I bet $20 Amazon would have laid off a sizable portion of the iRobot workforce anyway just like Activision/Blizzard and Microsoft.
- ApolloFortyNine 3y ago>If a business cannot survive without an acquisition, then that business should not survive. This is exactly what was happening here, the business was being acquired. Now what I would assume is next is a slow death and then their tech being picked up for cheap after bankruptcy proceedings.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Bayart 3y agoAmericans are seemingly happy to outsource regulation.
- infecto 3y agoAnd Europeans are seemingly happy lagging behind the world in most areas of manufacturing, technology, research etc. Generalized statements are dumb.
- dukeyukey 3y agoEurope outdoes basically everywhere on the planet on those things outside the US and China, and outdoes them in several fields too.
- gcnnbdff 3y ago[dead]
- Moldoteck 3y agoAren't most precision manufacturing tools made in... europe and imported in china?
- infecto 3y agoI don't have a citation for those being imported to China but the last decade has been a massive change and many of those precision tools have been copied in excellent quality in China now. It is only a matter of time.
- Moldoteck 3y agohttps://www.volza.com/p/precision-machine-tool/import/import-in-china/ https://www.volza.com/p/precision-machine-tool/import/import... Looks like they still haven't figured out this)
- mschuster91 3y ago> And Europeans are seemingly happy lagging behind the world in most areas of manufacturing, technology, research etc. Huh what? Biontech is a German company. The German Mittelstand literally runs half of the "hidden champions" worldwide - companies that everyone else depends on, that have utter dominance in their niche market. German cars are of a hardware build quality that makes anyone else - particularly Tesla - be dead in the water (although the software side of German cars is just the other way around, I'll admit that). Germany literally created the market for cheap solar panels by massively subsidizing them during the Schröder years. MP3? A standard developed by Fraunhofer in Germany. CERN and ITER? European based. Europe as a whole has an actually working high-speed train network. The maglev train? A German invention. Brutal and effective collective worker action (aka strikes)? A French patent. Chip-and-PIN? Introduced in Europe. A ton of ISO standards? They are actually extensions or adoption of German DIN, including the paper size that almost everyone but the US uses. Metric/SI system? An European invention. MySQL? A Swedish invention. Linux? Invented by a Finn. Half of mobile communications dates back to stuff from Nokia and Ericsson. The only area where Europe lags behind is providing insane amounts of insanely dumb capital to startups.
- 0xffff2 3y agoI have been wondering for a while now, what benefit to the general public do acquisitions actually offer? I'm increasingly convinced that actually making acquisitions illegal is good policy.
- encoderer 3y agoLiquidity to investors which frees capital, demanding that the capital owners find new productive uses of the funds, spurring economic growth. In other words, capitalism.
- tomtheelder 3y agoI'm firmly of the belief that they are negative value in most cases. Consolidation is an economic and social disaster. It's slowly been choking us out for decades. Certainly I think a corporation the size of Amazon making an acquisition is always negative value. I think they should be assumed harmful, and burden of proof should be on the acquirer to demonstrate public good.
- nothead 3y agoI agree, but the challenge is defining when a company is big enough to be a problem. Intuitively, Amazon, Google, and MS are all too big for their acquisitions to be considered anything other than anti-consumer. But if you want to regulate it, how do you draw the line? What metrics, what limits, etc.
- crote 3y agoAs always, the devil is in the details. Larger companies can get better deals from their suppliers. It can be a nice alternative to bankruptcy for a company which is unprofitable on its own. It would allow for integrations which would be all but impossible with separate companies. Of course in practice it rarely works out like that. Megacorps usually do acquisitions to get rid of competition or to obtain technology. The smaller company is almost always completely gutted within a few years, to the detriment of their original customer base.
- 3y ago
- MisterBastahrd 3y agoI'm completely fine with this, because the US won't do it.
- encoderer 3y agoHope you’re enjoying the cookie banners.
- ryneandal 3y agoI'll gladly take cookie banners to have the ability to expect a company to nuke any data they've collected about me.
- dylan604 3y agoor just set up your browser to not allow those cookies. why default setting is not blocking all 3rd party anything from a site is ludicrous.
- Apocryphon 3y agoThere are browser extensions for that.
- dzikimarian 3y agoWell... Yes? There's visibly less targeted ads since they're a thing most of them finally have "reject all" button. They are far from perfect but ultimately better than push notification from ebay-like application after random googling some thing.
- skydhash 3y agoCookies banners are malicious compliance. Companies could refrain from doing drive-by data collection of the population, and everyone would be better for it. But now every website wants to know which fonts I'm using in order to fingerprint me. If they could take a screenshot of my display or record with the mic and the webcam, they'd try to do it too. These behaviors were in the realm of rootkits and other malware and now they're common practice in the industry.
- ljm 3y agoA bit dramatic. This is simply pushing back against the consolidation of markets into the hands of a small number of mega corporations that are more interested in acquiring the tech to use for other purposes. It’s hardly a good thing that Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. soak up so many businesses into their already vast portfolios.
- nottorp 3y agoThe US has a fetish for (cancerous) business growth instead of real competition :)
- Johnie 3y agoI do like my tech device ecosystems working seamlessly. What's nice about each of the Apple, Google, and Amazon ecosystems is that the devices all work seamlessly within the ecosystem. This is much harder to do across companies. Take for example, Beats headphones integrate seamlessly with the iPhone, MacBook Pro, and AppleTV. Or Nest integrating with Google Home Or Ring integrating with Amazon Echo. There are tradeoffs to be made that benefit the consumer.
- michaelt 3y agoIf it's truly difficult to use non-Apple headphones with the iPhone, some would say that proves we need more competition law enforcement, not less.
- crazygringo 3y agoBluetooth is famously finicky. Apple headphones "just work" with Apple devices. You can switch audio from your phone to your Apple TV with a single confirmation click. No need to unpair and then manually initiate a connection on your desired device. I don't know how competition law enforcement is going to make Bluetooth work better? But your solution would be to make Apple technology worse?
- mvdtnz 3y ago
- akira2501 3y agoPlenty of monopolies. Take your pick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_Europe_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...
- crote 3y agoWhich ones are monopolies? You'd have to go down to #22 (Nestlé) to find one without serious competition. Of the entire top-100, there are maaaybe 10 or 20 in a monopoly-like position, and that's mostly because they intentionally dug out a very specific niche.
- beAbU 3y agoYeah kinda funny that in the top 15 you have 5 oil and gas companies and 4 major auto manufacturers, all directly competing with each other. Monopolies abound! /s
- jorblumesea 3y agoOh no, how dare a regulatory agency prevent things like monopolies or concentration of power. It's almost like, these agencies are doing their job. I wish US regulators would do better.
- 0xcde4c3db 3y ago> Europe, where the largest business is a luxury handbag company I was confused by this because most rankings say Volkswagen is the biggest company in Europe, but it looks like LVMH is currently #2 by market cap (behind Novo Nordisk, which I assume is flying high thanks to the semaglutide craze). Considering that #3 is ASML, I'm not sure this ranking especially supports your narrative.
- redwall_hp 3y agoI was going to be snarky and say "Europe, where the largest airplane manufacturer isn't plagued by egregious safety failures," but that fact correction is probably better. That BioNTech is pretty cool too.
- mschuster91 3y agoVolkswagen is top for headcount, before "Compass Group" (whatever they do?), DHL and Accenture [1]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/973297/largest-european-companies-based-on-number-of-employees/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/973297/largest-european-...
- Moldoteck 3y agoEU just doesn't have a fetish for monopolies
- SmellTheGlove 3y agoI'm an American tech employee but I'm a consumer too. I'd rather have the competition in the market versus more consolidation into the tech majors.
- rconti 3y agoAnother way of reading this is that the regulatory apparatus is finally showing teeth after decades of rampant consolidation.
- croes 3y ago>The European Commission, the executive body of the EU, launched a probe in July, saying that the proposed deal could result in Amazon hindering iRobot rivals from competing on Amazon’s online marketplace. The commission argued that Amazon could delist or reduce rival products’ prominence in search results or elsewhere. Amazon more than once hindered competitors on their marketplace