Comment by WhyNotHugo
5 days ago
US officials and businessmen keep on repeating the same thing:
> The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards.
But this is wildly untrue. The EU isn't hand-picking individual organisations and fining them because they're American, they're fining them because they're in breach of existing legislation. The same legislation applies to local companies.
Ironically, it's the US who takes stances like the one they claim the EU is taken. E.g.: The US required that TikTok be sold, without actually proving that TikTok was in breach of any actual law.
But repeating the same claims gets those claims out into the media, and that's what people hear. So we see a dissonance between what the media says (and many people believe) and what's really happening.
Agreed with your first point. Regarding TikTok though the argument was never (AFAIK) that they were actively breaking the law but rather that their structure and ownership posed a threat to US interests. That's pretty reasonable and largely mirrors China's stance against the US.
If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations. They seem to prioritize free trade above all else.
The US is lying about tiktok, the only reason is to mirror China's strategy towards American app. After watching the tit-for-tat video of Veritasum[1] I agree with America's strategy of banning Chinese apps until China allows American apps. That being said, I wish the US was more transparent about why they're doing this instead of lying.
I'm guessing the reason why they're lying is that they don't want to scare ALL Chinese companies.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
The reason they’re lying is because they’ve been lying for so long it just happens reflexively. It’s all they know anymore.
> that their structure and ownership posed a threat to US interests.
This is pretty much as vague as it gets "they're doing _something_ wrong".
The exact behaviour that is prohibited needs to be codified into law. Then you can go after organisations what break such law.
In this case, they've just been found guilty of an unwritten crime.
> If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations
Corporations in general rather. I do agree that we should be stricter of foreign corporations, and on non-foreign ones equally so.
I find this so confusing. Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk are foreigners who are both demonstrably influencing American politics through media they control. What makes Tiktok different?
The same thing that would make a platform with ties to Russia different. It falls under the influence of a sophisticated geopolitical adversary.
Tesla is headquartered and has most operations based in the US. Murdoch's ventures are similar AFAIK.
Given how much surveillance modern vehicles do I wouldn't be surprised if imports start being subjected to additional scrutiny at some point. But at least most vehicles can't be used to subtly and intentionally manipulate the owner's perception of the world so I guess the stakes are a bit lower.
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TikTok probably didn’t make friends and pay bribes to the right people.
Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk are both American citizens. In fact, one of Murdoch's primary reasons for becoming an American citizen in 1985 was to comply with the Communications Act of 1934, which prevented him (or any non-citizen) from owning more than 25% of a broadcasting company.
Here's a piece of history from 1985 that talks about it: https://archive.ph/HlHrx
Rupert Murdoch has exclusively been a US citizen for 40 years.
But really, what makes Tiktok different is China.
The idea that Murdoch and Musk are not really American and are instead foreigners is a disgusting anti-immigrant sentiment.
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Well... Though I agree with you in principle, the DMA does target specific gatekeeper companies and the criteria for these were set conveniently to ensure no EU company is regulated by it. So I can see their point a little
Isn't the question whether they were set because they were US companies, or because they are dominant gatekeepers on the Internet?
5/7 designated gatekeepers are US companies: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
I thought Booking Holdings Inc was also American.
There are zero European companies, including Spotify - the #1 music streaming marketplace in the world.
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I'd argue this style of concentrating power under a single giant company is mostly American style.
EU companies tend to keep group entities separate instead of running for absolute synergies. For instance the AOL-Time-Warner-Direct-Dish kind of merger is pretty much unheard of.
thats only kinda right. The DMA does include booking.com as a gatekeeper, which is european. But most gatekeepers (except booking and tiktok) are US-based
Booking Holdings is American. They bought booking.com in 2005.
Booking.com was European, is not any more. It is now a subsidiary of Booking Holding (formerly Priceline), based in Connecticut.
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US corporations are too used to breaking laws as they see fit and getting away with a slap on the wrist, so being asked to follow the rules feels like an attack to them.
They're also very used to lobbying to get what they want, as soon as that's not possible, they have a tantrum.
That is not my experience. Every US company I have worked in spent a lot of time training employees to follow the relevant laws. I have even been on teams which had to do work to comply with the European GDPR. The message I have always received is follow the law and don’t break it.
I think you make many good points. Slight tangent: Why isn't EU more concerned about TikTok? While it is very difficult to prove, various studies have demonstrated that TikTok pushes more content favoring the Chinese Government (CCP).
In my anecdotal experience of one, American platforms are way faster in pushing far-right content on me even though it has to be clear to the algorithm that I don't want such content.
TikTok never does that.
If the EU were to worry about foreign propaganda then that would hit the US far harder than China
> TikTok pushes more content favoring the Chinese Government (CCP).
Does that violate EU law? (Serious question, I really don't know)
no, and as far I know it doesn't violate any US law either. the thing against tiktok is not based on law, but based on suspicions.
Actually, the problem the US had with Tiktok that was it did not censor people from talking about Palestine
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-tiktok-ban-linked-isra...
The timeline doesn't align for that at all. National security concerns were raised before the Pentagon banned in in 2019, then Trump ordered it to divest in 2020.
No doubt that it became an argument by some more recently, but it was just another straw on the already broken camel's back.
it's not difficult to prove. In the wake of the tarrifs, everyone in the US got Chinese manufacturing videos pushed to their feed so customers can buy direct from factories and avoid huge markups by a middleman.
Or, you know, Chinese businesses acted like businesses and capitalized on the orange man's stupidity and naturally went viral.
The tinfoil hats come out pretty quickly when China is mentioned but Occam's razor still applies here.
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> But this is wildly untrue. The EU isn't hand-picking individual organisations and fining them because they're American, they're fining them because they're in breach of existing legislation. The same legislation applies to local companies.
The iPhone App store existed before this legislation, and I suspect the rest of the targetted things did too.
This legislation only applies to companies that have a certain marketshare, which includes no European companies unless you count one that's a subsidiary of a US company.
Maybe it's the case that it is reasonable to handicap successful businesses, but this is a handicap that only applies to some businesses, most of which are US (but one is Chinese).
Which EU company do you feel should be included in the list? Considering that one of the main criteria is the ability to abuse monopolies.
Another irony is that the biggest (business) beneficiaries of applied DMA would be other US-based digital services companies like Netflix or Epic.
> The same legislation applies to local companies.
It doesn't matter what applies, only what's enforced matters.
Laws being selectively enforced for an agenda is a tale as old as the existence of laws.
This is a side note but I don't understand why you called out the media when your quote wasn't from them but reporting a person's opinion
That's called gaslighting, and it's a hostile act. Truth is the first casualty of war. If someone is trying to deceive you (or deceive others and ruin your reputation), they are actively exposing you to some kind of risk, usually for their own benefit, which is a hostile act. Recommend you act accordingly.
There is no irony. The EU is targeting US companies. The US is targeting Chinese companies. The US is or soon will be targeting EU companies. China is targeting US companies. China will probably soon be targeting EU companies if they aren't already, which is probably already debatable. And this is not a complete list, it's not even a complete list of the highlights.
If they're doing it by legislation, well, the EU has been passing "legislation clearly designed for US companies to be in infringement of" for a while. Maybe you like that. Maybe it's a good thing; after all, the things they're passing laws about are basically just actions only US companies are capable of taking right now. Nevertheless it is clearly targeting. It's just targeting you like. The US has passed such legislation. China does it both with formal legislation and with de facto rules.
Free trade is a dead letter. Whether you like that or not is not very relevant to whether or not it is dead. It's dead. Maybe it'll swing back around in a few decades but right now even that is a distant prospect, we're not even done accelerating into the current merchantalist phase of the cycle, let alone decelerating, let alone heading back.
(Note "whataboutism" would be an inappropriate response to my point here; that's about "it's ok for us because they do it". My observation is not normative, merely descriptive... everyone is doing it, and they're doing it more rather than less right now.)
>The US is or soon will be targeting EU companies.
They already do, lookup how many European banks have been fined by the US and by how much then compare that to US banks.
Everybody plays these games.
I mean I understand they are doing, but also why aren't they fining European and Chinese companies for the same thing?
Because the only non-US app/marketplace big enough to be affected by the DMA is tiktok.
>So we see a dissonance between what the media says (and many people believe) and what's really happening.
This thing right here terrifies me. The entertainment-information media oligopoly has a tight grasp on public conversations. It feels like a hydra that can't be defeated.
It can be defeated by talking to people about things. If you are known to be an expert in topic X, and you are saying something different to what the media says about topic X (and which makes more sense), people (who know you and your reputation) are inclined to believe you over the media.
This only has a local impact, but global is made of local.
I do this as much as I can. Between chatrooms and local meets, I spend a significant portion of my time attempting to politely dispel misinformation.
It's exhausting, but it's worth it.
I want to organise with other people that do this, but I'm not sure how to do that. It feels like our efforts would be multiplied if we started to publish or otherwise spread information.