Comment by VWWHFSfQ
1 month ago
It sounds to me like Denmark's media and news isn't very valuable from an ad sales perspective. So Google has set their price reflecting what they think that value is: not much. And Denmark is now getting their lawmakers involved because they think it's worth a lot more and they want to force Google to buy it for a lot more.
Honestly, it doesn't sound like a lot of these EU countries are interested in digital sovereignty or developing their own services. They just want to force the American companies to sell their services at rates favorable to them by getting their regulators involved.
Yeah it seems like if they were really struggling to break up then they wouldn't be trying to force Google or Meta to the negotiating table. They would be simply kicking them out and not utilizing their services at all.
But it's actually the opposite. They are trying to get their lawmakers to force Google and Meta to provide them their services at below market value!
It seems like Google and Meta are using their dominant position to take as big a part of ad revenue as they possibly can, and if that means independent news companies where actual journalism is conducted can’t survive, then they don’t really care.
Danish media are trying to survive, as high quality journalism is necessary for democracy to function. They can’t avoid being on the big platforms, as Google and Meta have this dominant gatekeeper position in the market - this is where the media pull new users into their sites.
People who are capable of building things don't go into government. "Bureaucracy" has a connotation of where creativity and innovation goes to die for a reason. The personality type that goes into bureaucracy thinks about this like "why would I put in the effort to build something when I could just use the state monopoly on violence to shake down the suckers who already did all that hard work for me?" Of course they lie to the public, and most importantly to themselves, that they have higher motives, but that is the underlying logic.
At it's worse yes, at it's best absolutely not.
The role of government, at it's best, is to ensure the system as a whole benefits the democratic majority as a whole.
The argument that unregulated free markets will deliver has a key flaw - people who work in private companies don't want endless free and fair competition, especially if they are currently in the lead, they are also incentized to dump as much of the true cost of what they are doing on to other people.
So companies will chose cartels and monopolies over competition, choose pollution over responsibility, offload infrastructure and people costs onto others etc, minimise tax rates ( avoid paying for stuff they use ) etc.
Assuming an unregulated market is best is like assuming a football game is better if there are no rules. Turns out cheating is easier than competing almost everytime - and without government to set and enforce the rules you end up with pollution, crime ( people decided the rules don't work for them ), stagnation, and a feudal society.
Take something as simple as rule of law. A free market approach to that is there is no law, everyone negotiates each interaction and enforces their will with personal force. Turns out that's both exhausting and chaotic - much better to collectively agree what is legal or not and then have collective enforcement.
Sure it's slower to change, sometimes unfair, but pretty much every group of people in every country in the world has evolved a system of government rather than go with anarchy.
So good government is all about building - building complex systems - constantly adjusting them as people try and game them - that result in optimal outcomes for the majority of people.
> People who are capable of building things don't go into government.
Spoken like an American who doesn't know what government actually does.
Well in our case what it does is mostly get in the way of building things