Comment by op00to
7 months ago
Holy cow, they’re serious:
Penalties:
• Up to €15 million or 2.5 % of global turnover for essential requirement failures.
• €10 million or 2 % turnover for other obligations.
• €5 million or 1 % turnover for misleading or incomplete documents
On the one hand, these are important standards. On the other, it seems impossible for small shops to adhere to a lot of this.
Watch them not enforce this at all whenever they need something from the US, like how they delayed (and afaik still do) heavy Google/Meta/Apple fines for DMA. Laws don't matter, only enforcement. See TikTok ban.
This is the biggeest issue that techies on HN don't understand.
These tech giants are essentially extensions of the United State's government now and fining them or imposing restrictions isn't as simple as fining any corporation due to the geopolitics at play.
The long term solution is for EU to decouple its reliance on American technology. Anything else is a bandaid IMO.
The problem is not the technical reliance, EU is relying on the US, full stop. This isn't a question of making a new EU cloud hosting provider (already hard). This turn of events was completely unexpected and decades of strategizing crumbled.
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Hear me out, I have a tinfoil hat theory. What if, those requirements weren't put to help small shops making a new browser, but to guarantee the big shops who already have a browser are getting fined? *hits bong*
And this is why the EU's GDP versus the US is now only 65% and shrinking. The regulations are about beating US companies into compliance, sometimes with righteous motives; but there's no forethought on how a domestic EU startup might be able to comply, or how a startup would convince investors to take the gamble.
Yeah, because EU software companies were totally destroying the American software industry before the last decade…
The EU’s relatively shrinking GDP has much more to do with their populations growing older and their population size stabilizing, and the relatively tiny amount of migration, than EU digital laws, most of which have been replicated throughout the world.
Additionally, the EU has always had weak financial markets, and the only strong financial center, the city of London, quit the EU and both the EU and the city of London have suffered because of that, with a whole bunch of LSE listed companies moving to New York (including possibly Shell, which would be devastating for London as a financial center).
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> US is now only 65% and shrinking.
It's a fake news that just don't take into account on currency value change (euro has lost some value between 2019 and 2024). But if you look really want to look at it this way, I have a bad news for new: USA has shrink 15% since January compared to Europe as EUR go from 1$ to 1.15$.
If we look at GDP at purchasing power parity from 2007 to 2023 we have this:
- European Union: 31,162 => 61,217, +96% (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...)
- USA: 48,050 => 82,769, +72% (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...)
Which shows a slight catching-up by the European Union over the period.
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No they are about improving the lives of EU citizens.
America doesn't give a flying fuck about it's people it puts corporations first.
Now I don't judge every nation has it's own culture.
Actually, that's because the USA has the world reserve currency as a result of the former Bretton Woods system, itself a result of World War 2. This allows it to command a large exchange rate premium without having to actually work for it. This is the reason the USA has a larger GDP per capita than every other country except for a bunch of tax havens (which have artificially inflated total GDP).
you mean the US GDP is bigger because the US lacks consumer and environmental protection?
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Probably the case!