Comment by t_mann
2 years ago
On the second point, you were replying while I was updating my comment, sorry about that. I know it's a controversial opinion, but from the perspective of the EU, I think having regulation that effectively only targets US Tech makes sense for the reasons mentioned above. It may not exactly be 'fair game', but to anyone who thinks the US isn't doing the exact same thing, I'm sure Airbus executives for one would have some enlightening stories.
On the first point, I think user rights trump developer convenience, so I stand by what I said.
> having regulation that effectively only targets US Tech makes sense
I agree, this may be good for Europe in the long term. However, one would expect to see the protectionist measures coupled with similar measures intended to generate competitive native alternatives. Limiting the expansion of Boeing is great, as long as you have Airbus. Without Airbus, you're starting to make some real compromises.
> to anyone who thinks the US isn't doing the exact same thing
US is currently playing both sides of this in the chip space in an attempt to wrestle some of the power back from China. Unlike the DMA, the US effort is putting a lot of money on the line to help build local alternatives.
IIRC Cliqz was an EU-financed search engine project that looked like it was going to be a contender, but I think Covid killed it. Projects like that could be the way.
Yeah, while I think some of the tech-related EU regulations like GDPR are a net benefit, the idea that you could become a leader in AI through regulation seems ludicrous to me.
In all fairness, there are some genuine European players in the AI space (eg Mistral), and they also produced one of the early global hits (StableDiffusion, which was largely developed in Munich afaik). But if you look at the overall footprint in AI (research output at top conferences, patents (which are basically impossible to get for anything software-related in the EU),...), Europe seems at risk of hopelessly falling behind. And in the face of that, it's concerning that policy makers' chief concern seems to be further curtailing it.