Comment by f33d5173
17 days ago
>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.
>Companies in country X tend to develop their products in conformance with country X
You have the order wrong. The companies came first, then came the laws. So we might reverse this statement to: "countries with company X in them tend to develop their laws so that company X is in conformance with those laws". This latter statement seems likely enough to be true, and is exactly the point of order in this discussion.
>By the same token, I would be surprised if US companies habitually developed products that don't conform with US law.
It's called "growth hacking". Uber was quite famous for it. The only time you'd benefit from breaking the law in a foreign country vs. your own country is if you intend to exit the market of that country; you don't have to worry about paying fines if the country can't reach you. If the intention is to continue doing business there, then any punishment will have to be borne just as if you were headquartered there.
>This means that the fines are not high enough and don't fulfill their purpose.
You're missing the point. The laws scale so that eventually they will be high enough that the company has to conform. The point I'm making is that a company's willingness to break a law shows that the law is costing them money, and we can even estimate how much money it costs them by the size of the fine. If we assume that all laws are fair and just then this just means that the company is evil. However, as we showed above, some laws are unjust, hence them costing a company money can be a way of unfairly extracting money from those companies.
At least as far as I'm concerned, there is no need to further discuss your "laws are made for companies" conjecture. I don't find it plausible for various reasons. Anyway, good luck in your future endeavors!