6 ms·

We are awake. We should decouple ourselves from the tech giants on the other side of the pond. They don't have our best interests in mind.

by mongol 2y ago

oliviergg 2y ago
I'm not sure that we are awake. As a dev for a long time, I realized only 6 months ago, that all the tools I use daily are directly from US. My job and my life would be very very different without this technology. We are loosing ground, or more, we are falling down more and more quickly.
- mongol 2y ago
  It is individual of course. But for example Emanuel Macron and Mario Draghi have sounded the bell quite clearly. As individual citizens we should try to buy European any time there is a European alternative.
  - sickofparadox 2y ago
    >try to buy European any time there is a European alternative Good luck with that considering: >"Europe has an ever increasing number of laws,institutionalizing censorship and making difficult to build something innovative."
    - mongol 2y ago
      I don't take that for gospel. It is just Marc's poor take.
      - mike_hearn 2y ago
        It's pretty much right. Dig into what it takes to run a social network in most European countries and you'll hit at minimum the following problems: • Lack of a DMCA equivalent. DMCA lays out a lightweight process for platforms to process copyright disputes which if they follow it will avoid legal liability, which is needed on any platform that hosts user generated content. The EU Copyright acts require platforms themselves to enforce copyright and prevent users violating it. This is a gigantic technical implementation problem all by itself. Also, the US has the legal concept of fair use but that's not a concept in much of Europe, so people posting parodies etc thinking it's OK can still create liability problems. • No equivalent of Section 230. Many new laws that specifically criminalize the hosting of illegal speech, and which don't give any credit for effort. As what's illegal is vague and political in nature you can't make automated systems or even human-driven systems that reliably handle it, so the legal risks are large even with a good faith effort to comply. • GDPR, "right to be forgotten" and NetzDG style laws have large fixed costs associated with compliance which established companies can absorb but startups can't. For instance it's common for EU lawmakers to demand 24 hour turnaround times, which you can't reliably comply with if you're a one man startup. • Algorithmic transparency laws, which mean you can't obtain any competitive advantage by better ranking (being good at this is how TikTok got so big), and which can threaten your ability to clear spam or use ML. • Laws around targeted advertising mean you can't generate revenue comparable to what the US based firms can do, so you can't be competitive and your users will be annoyed by low quality barrel scraping ads for casinos after they click "No" on a consent screen without reading it. There's probably more. For example, running a commercial search engine or training AI models on the internet is illegal in the UK, because UK copyright law only allows "data mining" for research purposes. There's no way to argue it's fair use like they do in the US. Just one of many such problems off the top of my head.
        coldpepper 2y ago
        We don't need social networks that are not compatible with the laws and rights you listed.
        ceejayoz 2y ago
        > Lack of a DMCA equivalent. Good. It's heavily misused here. > No equivalent of Section 230. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Commerce_Directive_2000#Knowledge_or_awareness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Commerce_Directive_... > Laws around targeted advertising mean you can't generate revenue comparable to what the US based firms can do... Good! Agriculture is cheaper with slavery, but that isn't a great argument for permitting it.
        bryancoxwell 2y ago
        It should be hard to run a social network.
        nradov 2y ago
        Why?
- LtWorf 2y ago
  What tools? The ones I use are done from people all over the world, certainly not predominantly in USA. https://map.debian.net/ https://map.debian.net/
  - oliviergg 2y ago
    Yes I somewhat agree on FOSS and I agree for the people. But I think that for the capital, it is massively US controlled (though is international too). Think of the seven first companies of the S&P500. (GAFAM, Nvidia, ...) If you look at the cac40 (france) or EUROSTOXX50 : I dont use directly any products of the tech company. But I'm sure that these companies use at least one the seven. Tech company in Europe are not ridiculous, but they are not leading the change. They optimize, they improve, but the lead is us centric. We have ASML, but for how long. ?
    - LtWorf 2y ago
      Yeah I'd agree that we should just forbid selling our software companies to not so friendly superpowers.
  - dijit 2y ago
    I know of exactly 0 European businesses they use free open source software for their office suites. Z-E-R-O. I don’t even think companies have their own mailservers anymore, its mostly gsuite and microsoft office 365; people aren’t even hosting business critical applications in Europe unless compliance forces them- let alone using European made tools to do it.
    - LtWorf 2y ago
      I'm sure there is more to life than using "open source office suite"
      - dijit 2y ago
        I'm not sure I understood your point. There's a lot more to life than a lot of things, I'm not really trying to discuss personal fulfilment, moreso mentioning that there's no reality where we can get by with European technology right now, and if the US decided to sanction a european country that country would suffer a pretty significant (trillion-euro most likely) shock to productivity, as not only would they need to find new tools and retrain, but they would also lose all their mail and documents.
- Toutouxc 2y ago
  Looking around my apartment and my life, I see a Japanese game console, Japanese camera, US speakers, US laptop, Czech/German car, French photo software, Czech IDE, Swedish furniture, Swiss/US computer accessories, Chinese IoT devices, and a lot of the stuff was manufactured in China. If anything, my life would be very different without China (whether I like it or not). I don't know how to say this inoffensively, but a lot of US people seem to mistake the slightly higher chance (from 1/inf to 2/inf) of becoming a billionaire with a higher quality of life, and the ability of the select few to hoard capital for a rich society.
pityJuke 2y ago
The problem is that these platforms have to be built, and people have to willingly use them... which is hard, given Meta have built brilliant addiction machines. The whole threat here is you can't regulate Meta away, because they'll use the US Government to bully you into not doing so. I'd imagine if the EU tried to publicly prop up a platform not making any profit, they'd do the same. But yes, the only way is for this to happen. But either way, this was the scariest statement of the announcement(s).

We are awake. We should decouple ourselves from the tech giants on the other side of the pond. They don't have our best interests in mind.

by mongol 2y ago

We are awake. We should decouple ourselves from the tech giants on the other side of the pond. They don't have our best interests in mind.

oliviergg 2y ago

I'm not sure that we are awake. As a dev for a long time, I realized only 6 months ago, that all the tools I use daily are directly from US. My job and my life would be very very different without this technology. We are loosing ground, or more, we are falling down more and more quickly.

mongol 2y ago
It is individual of course. But for example Emanuel Macron and Mario Draghi have sounded the bell quite clearly. As individual citizens we should try to buy European any time there is a European alternative.
- sickofparadox 2y ago
  >try to buy European any time there is a European alternative Good luck with that considering: >"Europe has an ever increasing number of laws,institutionalizing censorship and making difficult to build something innovative."
  - mongol 2y ago
    I don't take that for gospel. It is just Marc's poor take.
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      It's pretty much right. Dig into what it takes to run a social network in most European countries and you'll hit at minimum the following problems: • Lack of a DMCA equivalent. DMCA lays out a lightweight process for platforms to process copyright disputes which if they follow it will avoid legal liability, which is needed on any platform that hosts user generated content. The EU Copyright acts require platforms themselves to enforce copyright and prevent users violating it. This is a gigantic technical implementation problem all by itself. Also, the US has the legal concept of fair use but that's not a concept in much of Europe, so people posting parodies etc thinking it's OK can still create liability problems. • No equivalent of Section 230. Many new laws that specifically criminalize the hosting of illegal speech, and which don't give any credit for effort. As what's illegal is vague and political in nature you can't make automated systems or even human-driven systems that reliably handle it, so the legal risks are large even with a good faith effort to comply. • GDPR, "right to be forgotten" and NetzDG style laws have large fixed costs associated with compliance which established companies can absorb but startups can't. For instance it's common for EU lawmakers to demand 24 hour turnaround times, which you can't reliably comply with if you're a one man startup. • Algorithmic transparency laws, which mean you can't obtain any competitive advantage by better ranking (being good at this is how TikTok got so big), and which can threaten your ability to clear spam or use ML. • Laws around targeted advertising mean you can't generate revenue comparable to what the US based firms can do, so you can't be competitive and your users will be annoyed by low quality barrel scraping ads for casinos after they click "No" on a consent screen without reading it. There's probably more. For example, running a commercial search engine or training AI models on the internet is illegal in the UK, because UK copyright law only allows "data mining" for research purposes. There's no way to argue it's fair use like they do in the US. Just one of many such problems off the top of my head.
      - coldpepper 2y ago
        We don't need social networks that are not compatible with the laws and rights you listed.
      - ceejayoz 2y ago
        > Lack of a DMCA equivalent. Good. It's heavily misused here. > No equivalent of Section 230. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Commerce_Directive_2000#Knowledge_or_awareness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Commerce_Directive_... > Laws around targeted advertising mean you can't generate revenue comparable to what the US based firms can do... Good! Agriculture is cheaper with slavery, but that isn't a great argument for permitting it.
      - bryancoxwell 2y ago
        It should be hard to run a social network.
        nradov 2y ago
        Why?
LtWorf 2y ago
What tools? The ones I use are done from people all over the world, certainly not predominantly in USA. https://map.debian.net/ https://map.debian.net/
- oliviergg 2y ago
  Yes I somewhat agree on FOSS and I agree for the people. But I think that for the capital, it is massively US controlled (though is international too). Think of the seven first companies of the S&P500. (GAFAM, Nvidia, ...) If you look at the cac40 (france) or EUROSTOXX50 : I dont use directly any products of the tech company. But I'm sure that these companies use at least one the seven. Tech company in Europe are not ridiculous, but they are not leading the change. They optimize, they improve, but the lead is us centric. We have ASML, but for how long. ?
  - LtWorf 2y ago
    Yeah I'd agree that we should just forbid selling our software companies to not so friendly superpowers.
- dijit 2y ago
  I know of exactly 0 European businesses they use free open source software for their office suites. Z-E-R-O. I don’t even think companies have their own mailservers anymore, its mostly gsuite and microsoft office 365; people aren’t even hosting business critical applications in Europe unless compliance forces them- let alone using European made tools to do it.
  - LtWorf 2y ago
    I'm sure there is more to life than using "open source office suite"
    - dijit 2y ago
      I'm not sure I understood your point. There's a lot more to life than a lot of things, I'm not really trying to discuss personal fulfilment, moreso mentioning that there's no reality where we can get by with European technology right now, and if the US decided to sanction a european country that country would suffer a pretty significant (trillion-euro most likely) shock to productivity, as not only would they need to find new tools and retrain, but they would also lose all their mail and documents.
Toutouxc 2y ago
Looking around my apartment and my life, I see a Japanese game console, Japanese camera, US speakers, US laptop, Czech/German car, French photo software, Czech IDE, Swedish furniture, Swiss/US computer accessories, Chinese IoT devices, and a lot of the stuff was manufactured in China. If anything, my life would be very different without China (whether I like it or not). I don't know how to say this inoffensively, but a lot of US people seem to mistake the slightly higher chance (from 1/inf to 2/inf) of becoming a billionaire with a higher quality of life, and the ability of the select few to hoard capital for a rich society.

pityJuke 2y ago

The problem is that these platforms have to be built, and people have to willingly use them... which is hard, given Meta have built brilliant addiction machines. The whole threat here is you can't regulate Meta away, because they'll use the US Government to bully you into not doing so. I'd imagine if the EU tried to publicly prop up a platform not making any profit, they'd do the same. But yes, the only way is for this to happen. But either way, this was the scariest statement of the announcement(s).