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Fighting insanity with more insanity: Asking the EU to force break up american corporations. There is a simple path to EU sovereignity, china has already done

• unknownaxioms 1y ago
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• sofixa 1y ago
  > Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling Social media, yes. There are no network effects on most other "big tech" mono/oligopolies - using Google vs Bing vs Kagi or Claude.ai vs ChatGPT vs Gemini or Android vs iOS (other than in the US) or BackMarket vs Amazon vs AliExpress, etc.
  • gpt5 1y ago
    Economies of scale are essentially a form of network effect (which is defined as a phenomenon where product gains value as more people use it). In addition, every example you had benefits from traditional network effects: Amazon is a two sided marketplace with sellers and buyers. Google connect searchers to websites, who in return allow Googlebot to scrape them freely (unlike your IP) - and also rank results by the way other users clicked.
  • harvey9 1y ago
    There are product ecosystems for b2b, and availability of skilled staff is often greater for big brand tools. I would like to see more use of and contribution to foss in Europe.
  • npteljes 1y ago
    I agree with you. Amazon and Ali are not good examples though, as they are subject of the network effect still: the more people are on there, the more desirable they are. But the rest are not subject to it, almost at all. Other different synergies, yes, but not the network effect specifically.
  • victorbjorklund 1y ago
    > Google vs Bing vs Kagi The business of Google and Bing is not providing searches in exchange for fees (that is a tiny tiny part of their business) but rather advertising. And there is for sure network effects for ad networks. Advertisers wanna advertise on the platform that has more eyeballs. Why are Google ads selling at a premium vs Bing Ads? Because more advertisers wanna use Google Ads because that is where 90% of search traffic is. If I start my own search engine with a 1000 users per day no one is going to buy ads for that search engine. Of course one could say that search should not be a free service (paid by ads) and instead everyone should just pay for a search engine like Kagi. But that is not the reality we live in.
• raz32dust 1y ago
  This is vastly oversimplifying things. US would put tremendous diplomatic and other means of pressure if EU does serious harm to tech companies. US-EU and US-China relation is very different.
  • swiftcoder 1y ago
    > US-EU and US-China relation is very different It certainly was very different - maybe less clear that it will remain so. The whole tariffs debacle, the threat that the US won't back NATO allies in the event of Russian aggression, wavering US support for Ukraine... The EU is starting to see a need to pivot away from reliance on the US. Without that relationship, a lot of US tech firm offerings are going to look much worse (i.e. we might quickly see an end to overlooking blatant tax evasion and GDPR violations)
  • Creator71 1y ago
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  • FranzFerdiNaN 1y ago
    > US would put tremendous diplomatic and other means of pressure if EU does serious harm to tech companies. Even more reason that the EU should work as hard as possible to get rid of their reliance on American companies. America is no longer a trusted partner.
    • pyman 1y ago
      I agree. Breaking up Big Tech might seem like going after windmills but maybe it's time to protect our local industries before we're all stuck buying abroad from monopolies that dictate what we see, buy and even think. A bit of protectionism now could mean healthier markets later. Less tech oligopoly, more tech diversity. +1
  • computerthings 1y ago
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  • mrtksn 1y ago
• deleted 1y ago
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• npteljes 1y ago
  There is one even simpler: ban foreign services, or even software products outright, from govt operations. It would change the landscape instantly, and dramatically. And it would provide a much greater independence in tech, and also help foster independence as a culture.
• Havoc 1y ago
  Don't think EU could do an outright ban. Would need to be a decade+ transition. They really should aggressively push this though
  • PartiallyTyped 1y ago
    Unless European companies start paying higher salaries it won’t happen, and unless we come up with ways to get more funding in startups that won’t happen either. The former is to some extend a consequence of the latter, which is a consequence of EU being a confederation and not a federation, we have N smaller markets all competing with each other. Who do we kid other than ourselves by expressing that we can compete? We are fundamentally and structurally crippled and as long as we think ourselves $Nationalify first and Europeans second, we are doomed to stay second if not third.
• whacko_quacko 1y ago
  I agree, that the EU breaking up the tech giants is insane, but I don't think that banning them is much better. How would you enforce this? I don't want a big firewall like china has. I'd argue for open protocols that allow exporting your data and switching services instead. Make export capabilities a requirement akin to data protection laws, and you have defanged the monopolistic nature of tech. Ideally also force interoperability between services, but that's a whole other can of worms. This is on paper obviously much harder than just banning something, because you would have to define such exchange protocols, but it has a chance of success. One could start with certain industries, like social media, and in some cases build on existing work, like the AT or ActivityPub protocols.
  • DSingularity 1y ago
    You can enforce it if you provide alternatives. The problem is they don’t want to do that part.
    • whacko_quacko 1y ago
      Who is "they"? The government is generally not in the business of developing software But I have to agree that actual alternatives are a prerequisite for changing anything about the dominance of the US tech sector
  • harimau777 1y ago
    I don't know if this is a good idea, but could you enforce it at the level of corporations? Similar to how, at various times, pirating software like Photoshop was endemic for non-professional use, but Adobe mostly didn't worry about it as long as they could make sure that companies were buying licenses.
    • whacko_quacko 1y ago
      If you can find such a "choke point" that makes it relatively easy to enforce, then maybe. But I suspect that won't work for certain products especially if they're B2C, and still by only regulating the supply side without actually changing anything about the demand you don't really get good outcomes
• deleted 1y ago
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• imiric 1y ago
  > Fighting insanity with more insanity: Asking the EU to force break up american corporations. If the corporations conduct business in the EU, they must abide by EU regulation. How this impacts the corporations in practice is not EU's concern. Requiring a break up seems sensible given the situation. > Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling No, tech itself isn't inherently monopolistic. Companies that operate with centralized resources are. The solution is technology that operates in a decentralized way, which has existed since the dawn of the internet. The main reason companies don't like it is precisely because it doesn't allow them to control resources and hoard capital.
  • intended 1y ago
    I raise the counter that all decentralized systems eventually become centralized once they reach mass appeal. At a mass scale, the users on the network are not sophisticated or trained, and end up having very common failures that result in a move to a trusted central authority. Your account got taken over? Need to reverse transactions? Need recourse if someone defrauded you? Don’t want to check each factoid you read? Need to ensure that users are not spreading actual terror content? Bad actors alone, are a sufficient force that generates social pressure that drives centralization through regulation. But thats an easy example, the other force is the unsophistication of the average person - as a result they gravitate towards tools that simplify their lives, and do a lot of the work they are not interested in doing. When network effects come into play, this creates a pressure where firms with more resources buy smaller players and consolidate, once again creating a small network. People don’t want to deal with the over head of creating new accounts for example, or the overhead of moving their content from X service to Y.
    • harimau777 1y ago
      That's a very reasonable point. Could there perhaps be a middle ground by requiring interoperability and conformance with standards? By way of analogy, I'm sure that the vast majority of people purchase their appliances from a couple of big brands. However, because the various hookups are standardized, there is still a reasonably large market of alternatives. Similarly, early in the internet most people used, for example, AOL Instand Messenger; however, due to interopperability it wasn't unheard of for someone to use something like Trillian. I'm sure that wouldn't be enough to fully solve the problem of big tech having too much power, but it would probably significantly help.
• veunes 1y ago
  That's one way to look at it, though an outright ban might cause a lot of collateral damage for users and businesses
• oezi 1y ago
  I think the EU is fighting a hard fight with the tech companies and is doing so within a framework which doesn't seek to alienate the US. Alternate app stores, global minimum taxation, etc. are really hard fights.
• znpy 1y ago
  > Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling. The so called "network effect" is entirely artificial. When the FAANG-level companies did not exist yet, services were designed to be interoperable, and those system stood the test of time. Trivial example: e-mail/SMTP and BGP.
  • seydor 1y ago
    Gmail and few other email providers have largely taken over. If you are not on good terms with them , email does not get delivered. Hence why every professional uses a cloud mailers. And BGP ... the reason why everyone uses cloudflare. In an ideal world we d all be decentralized but the world is not ideal. The world has gravitated towards centralization in all the networking levels
    • imiric 1y ago
      > Gmail and few other email providers have largely taken over. That's not true. There are _many_ other, not few, email providers to choose from besides Gmail. > If you are not on good terms with them , email does not get delivered. It's not like all email goes through Gmail... If for some reason your mail server is flagged by Gmail's systems, then it only won't reach Gmail users. > Hence why every professional uses a cloud mailers. That's not true either. Many people self-host their email servers, and don't have any issues. Protocols like DKIM, DMARC, and SPF ensure the integrity of the sender, and all major providers obey them. These days with projects like Mox and Mail-in-a-Box it's also trivially easy to run your own server. So services built on decentralized protocols remain decentralized precisely because decentralization was a key design choice. This idea that the world gravitates towards centralization is false.
      • lenzm 1y ago
        > If for some reason your mail server is flagged by Gmail's systems, then it only won't reach Gmail users. This is a deal breaker for most people and organizations. Not being able to send email to the largest email provider is orders of magnitude more important than upholding some values about decentralization and independence.
• benoau 1y ago
  > Fighting insanity with more insanity: Asking the EU to force break up american corporations. The DOJ is literally asking Google be broken up...
• hintymad 1y ago
  > Fighting insanity with more insanity Yeah. Big tech bad, but big non-elected government (EU) good?