Comment by 0xy
15 days ago
You're trying to claim a law that is exclusively used to fleece U.S. companies and never EU competitors is 'not bad faith'?
When has the DMA been used against EU tech companies? Never.
Your comment also shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the DMA and GDPR laws. Neither of them are objective laws, and they are applied subjectively without guidance.
Let me be very clear: the EU does not tell you how to comply with either the DMA or the GDPR, period. The law is extremely vague and does not prescribe how to comply in any way, shape or form.
DMA has not been used against EU tech companies because US tech companies are clearly the market leaders in the area the DMA is concerned with. The DMA exists to make sure that companies (from the EU, US, or elsewhere) comply with EU regulations regarding privacy, tracking, and consumer rights.
It's not a "tax" on US companies, it's just that US companies don't bother to comply with the regulations that apply in the EU, and thus get fined.
>US tech companies are clearly the market leaders in the area the DMA is concerned with.
There's a good argument that this is targeted. Why didn't this regulation affect SAP? Their market position gives them leverage over a massive number of companies.
>it's just that US companies don't bother to comply with the regulations that apply in the EU, and thus get fined.
It's not that they "don't bother", it's that they understand complying with the regulation to cost them more than the fine. In other words, the regulation itself is a sort of fine, or tax imposed by the EU, with a magnitude of roughly equal proportion to the fines it imposes.
No offense, but this is a silly argument. Companies in country X tend to develop their products in conformance with country X. Of course, products developed in the EU will conform with EU law. By the same token, I would be surprised if US companies habitually developed products that don't conform with US law.
> It's not that they "don't bother", it's that they understand complying with the regulation to cost them more than the fine.
This means that the fines are not high enough and don't fulfill their purpose. That's an argument for the thesis that the EU is handling fines of violators in a too lax fashion, not the opposite. This has also been the impression of many EU citizens, and it seems to be the reason why so many huge US corporations keep violating EU customer protection rules again and again.
But the reality is also that US companies that violated those rules basically have no EU competition because the EU has an abysmal market in certain tech domains. There simply are no viable EU equivalents to Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
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Explain why Spotify got a carve-out from the DMA despite being an effective monopoly gatekeeper.
Is it because it's an EU company and the DMA is a tax on the United States?
'The law that applies only to US companies is applied equally and fair!'
This argument would be just as valid if the US was the world leader in assassination markets: shitty and illegal practices are shitty and illegal, regardless of whether they were firmly established with significant markets in other countries first.
Unless you're EU company Spotify, who got a carve-out from the DMA despite being a monopoly gatekeeper :)