One gossamer-thin silver lining in this current geopolitical lunacy is that it's likely to show the current Commission's pro-corpo anti-citizen endeavors like this, to bend the knee to US corporate interests, in an increasingly bad light. Particularly given that activating anti-coercion measures that target those very corporate interests is now being seriously discussed.
EU and the rest of the world needs to ditch their anti circumvention laws that they put in place to appease the US demands on trade deals historically. They're getting tarrif'd anyways so YOLO. I think you'd see a lot of pressures ease up that are probably putting a lot of politicians around the world in compromised or blackmail-able positions. US Tech really needs to lose this massive leverage they have over the world right now.
Is it a silver lining? I think it's clear that whoever runs any government is free to do whatever they want with total impunity. Dissatisfied citizens complaining on Twitter is not gonna remove any "pro-corpo anti-citizen" politician from power. And if they take it to the streets, they'll just copy the UK's playbook.
Power corrupts, and the more steps removed politicians are from whomever put them in power, the safer they are.
There's a fair chance that discordant voices in the Parliament will grow increasingly stronger, party affiliations notwithstanding. It wouldn't be the first time that the Parliament has asserted its power over the Commission.
Masks have been of for a while, but as long as the EU people can't vote the EU presidency out of office, it's to no avail.
It was a (steel and coal) corp affordances union to begin with, so it's no wonder it's pandering to business rather than civic interests after all.
Von der Leyen is corrupt yet shapes EU policy without backlash, and the citizenry is left to pay the price, precisely because the EU pretends to speak for the people.
When my country and China had border clashes, there was a nation-wide grassroot level movement to boycott Chinese goods and services where possible. It worked to an extent but it fizzled out in few weeks/months. Some of the reasons were the impracticality of total boycott so you start from a position of compromise, difficulty to sustain a movement born out of anger and some inter-govt agreements to avoid escalations etc.
Do you have plans to overcome those sort of challenges and sustain this initiative ?
Yeah, EU is super fucked too since it outsourced its energy dependence to Russia, consumer manufacturing to China, defence and tech services to US, and only just woke up in the last 3 or so years that it was all a huge mistake that's now costing us dearly since we're at the whims of all 3 belligerents who know that now is the time they can squeeze us.
Trying to undo just one dependency is a slow and painful process, but fighting all 3 at the same time is a suicide mission.
The US outsourced its manufacturing too, but unlike EU, it has a strong enough economy and military that they can just snap their fingers and the likes of Taiwan and Korea will immediately onshore manufacturing of their high end chips and ships to the US, but EU doesn't have this kind leverage.
Boycotting US tech is magnitudes easier than boycotting Chinese-made products. They're in whole different universes. Especially on a country level, let alone a EU level.
Is removing the dependence on US tech easy for the EU? No, it's tough and takes a lot of work and time. It's still a piece of cake compared to the dependence on Chinese manufacturing. They're incomparable.
The government has to mandate it on some level with purchasing power.
If the government switched away from Microsft and refused to accept MS document formats for any legal reason - then things might shift.
Most businesses just don't care, they want they easy button.
A law firm does not want to screw around, they just click 'buy' on Word, Outlook, Teams.
There's a deep psychology to it.
I remember a developer telling me that Oracle 'was the only real database'.
It's not so much propaganda, just the propagandistic power of incumbency. People who only know one thing are hard pressed to believe there could be something else.
This is more than 50% brand, narrative etc.
We techies tend to underestimate the power of perception, even when it's of our own creation etc. i.e. people fighting over Linux and it's various distros.
It is understanably hard to stay vigilant with respect to individual everyday purchases, but services and subscriptions are an easy and continuous win.
to be honest I don't expect a effective long term consumer boycott
but any companies which have their brand closely tied to the US image (e.g. Coca Cola) will most likely have bug issues
and if people have a choice between a product from a company they now is EU or better local and one where they don't know about it the choice will be influenced by it
and maybe we can finally take tear down some of the absurd misinformation companies and corruption originating from MS and similar. (E.g. systematic malicious misinformation often supplemented with non fair competition/subsidization and outright bribery (no joke, MS has (through middle mans) wide spread bribed public, research and school organizations in Germany, like actual bribes, not just things which should count as bribes but do not(1)))
(1): I knew some people which had been involved in it. But any case where legal actions where taken ended without relevant outcome because all the blame always feel to the sales middle man AFIK and supposedly MS didn't know. Also the bribes mostly ended up as additional founding for the research institute and only in small parts in personal pockets from what I have heard. At the same time politics have caused so massive issues due to incompetently made laws and regulations for many public organizations that accepting this bribes and using them as additional founds often looked as a necessary evil... :sob: (yes I know there are not emotes on HN)
>The EU leaders falsely assume that US cloud services are essential and let themselves be blackmailed over and over again.
I for one seriously doubt they assume such a thing. They are most likely given something in return that they think somehow makes such a trade worth it. Whether it's access to some fancy US intel/survelliance tech, "discounts" on US defense purchases or what have you, until you get transparency or clarity on the very specific items included in all these deals it's hard to determine the scale of their stupidity. It's either that or personal bribes, blackmail, and kickbacks to key EU politicians depending on the EU country in question.
If there was a "false assumption" above all others it was most likely the assumption that the post-WWII US foreign policy towards Europe would continue to the end of their lifetimes.
Since "Cola" is listed in the "popular alternatives" box, I think it's important to mention that most European Coca-Cola bottlers operate as franchises, i.e. they license the Coca-Cola brand and get the syrup for the drinks they bottle from the Atlanta-based HQ, but other than that they are locally-owned companies. So if you boycott Coca-Cola brands, maybe 20% of the impact goes to Coca-Cola US, while 80% is felt by the local company and its employees.
That just means they have all the infrastructure they need to bottle syrup from another source and start selling that instead - no capex needed, just maybe need to get together with other franchisees and figure out how to spend some opex on marketing and getting it onto store shelves. Coca-cola has a moat, but it's hardly protective of franchisees here.
> So if you boycott Coca-Cola brands, maybe 20% of the impact goes to Coca-Cola US, while 80% is felt by the local company and its employees.
Assuming the person burns the money they would've spent on Cola in the first place. But they aren't, they'll probably just redirect that money to an alternative soft drink, probably a more local one.
It was also very smart of them to send their citizens to US universities and companies and exfiltrate research and IP to grow their own tech industry...
Luckily, the orange idiot in charge is doing us (the Europeans) a favor showing us that America (and its companies) are no longer a trustworthy partner. In a way i really hope he goes through with the Greenland stuff... this would be the final nail in the coffin.
Brexit didn’t do anything to correct the UK’s current trajectory. I guarantee you even destroying the relationship with NATO would not shift the course the US is on. Every time something extreme happens, people gasp for a second then accept it and move on. I don’t think the situation in the US is hopeless by any means, but Greenland is not going to suddenly be some magical moment that wakes everybody up. We’ve done this song and dance for a decade with Trump. After the attack on the capitol it be became very clear that it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than we thought.
Brexit wasn't an exercise in Imperialism and power-projection though, it was a dissolution of federated oversight and grant conditions to facilitate a transfer of wealth from the working classes to a select group of oligarchs.
They, in essence, traded 10% of their GDP for Regulatory Independence and UK’s accession to the trans-pacific partnership, estimated by the government to be worth only 0.06% of GDP by 2040.
If the Falklands represented a major turning point, then imo Greenland does too. The simple mustering of an international task-force of troops for defense is a move unprecedented in the 21st Century. The recent Spectator article correctly identifies Trump as “playing geopolitical Monopoly with Greenland”, which holds substantial mineral as well as strategic value in the president’s eyes.
The author identified presidential “ego-politics” as a plausible top reason, along with a US quest for hemispheric power and sending a message to rival powers - concluding by noting that both Britain and France hold territories in the western hemisphere and asking if they could be next on Trump’s list.
I suppose you're not one of the conscripted (or even professional) soldiers that would be called to duty to protect the region in case of an armed conflict?
Europe is desperately trying to find some way to let US have "control" without destroying the Danish kingdom; A Minsk Agreement for Greenland if you will.
The US already has bases on Greenland. It is part of the Kingdom of Denmark and therefore is already a NATO ally territory. They already have all the "control" they need to keep it out of the hands of Russia and China. There is no need to "let" the US have "control". If the US were being run by people who understood the basis on which they have a base there, they would realise they already have all the control they need from a strategic perspective.
Greenland invasion is just a distraction by Trump from the Epstein files. The US already have massive military presence in Greenland with permission from Denmark since the 1950s, they can already do whatever illegal things they want there (and they have, like installing a portable nuclear reactor), without the downsides that come with actual ownership of the island. They already have a really sweet deal.
Trump keeps talking about taking it because he knows the media will bite the bait and talk about that instead and forget about the epstein list and other illegal shit his administration did.
Remember how he was also talking about annexing Canada in his election? Trump just loves to bait the media by saying crazy stuff since the media feeds on sensationalist stuff like that.
Just as with most parts of the EU (imo both it's strength and it's weakness) there is some complexity and bureaucracy involved with founding out the political spectrum of MEPs. You can research the EU political groups and the political alliances and the corresponding positions on these Wikipedia pages.
One thing bothers me a lot is, if government organizations can be influenced by lobby groups, which primarily owned by corporations, then why do we need government?
Corporations and governments should be considered as balancing forces, one works to increase its profits by any means, other works to protect humans living in that area by any means.
You might say, corporations benefit its employees, true, but it is a small subset of people living in the country. If you allow everything to corporations, they will set up a slavery system from the birth of a baby
Lobbying having undue influence is entirely a government problem that it needs to fix. It will never be fixed while people have the attitude that lobbyists are the problem. (I'm not saying you're saying this; just making a statement.)
As a European founder building startups since 2015, I’ve spent a massive chunk of my career navigating the "alphabet soup" of EU regulation: GDPR, DSA, DMA, AI Act, CSRD, SFDR, CBAM... the list is exhausting.
While the goals are usually noble, I’m increasingly convinced we’re regulating ourselves into irrelevance. I’m not a Big Tech company yet my interests align with theirs. We desperately need an EU that prioritizes actual growth over well-intentioned paperwork. To me, the AI Act and the GDPR are the worst offenders here, representing the largest possible gap between "good intentions" and the actual effect they have on the ground.
Consider frontier LLM labs. We have the talent, the Nordic data centers, and access to the GPUs. But why would any investor drop $100B on a frontier LLM lab here when the legislative environment is fundamentally more hostile than the US? It feels like we’ve already watched Mistral and Aleph Alpha get left in the dust.
To give you an idea of the "compliance vs. reality" GDPR gap: I worked on a project processing healthcare data for millions of people. We had a clear, easy-to-find privacy policy and a responsive DPO. Total GDPR requests for info or deletion? Exactly 53. Out of millions. We spent thousands of hours building systems for rights that only 0.001% of our users cared to use.
If you look at the courts, the "damage" being prevented is equally vague. Since EU courts don't really do punitive damages, most awards are tiny unless there’s actual identity theft. Most of what GDPR protects is "mental distress" or "loss of control"-concepts so ambiguous that courts rarely award anything for them unless something else went wrong.
The result of all this "protection"? No FAANG-equivalent, no frontier AI leader, and no homegrown ad-tech. It turns out the most perfectly regulated company is the one that never exists in the first place.
I cannot stand reading these comments left by people clearly detached from reality.
I used to work in a medical AI company myself, over the years we had a few requests for deletion, all from some crazy old German people. Moreover, we couldn't train our models on European data, which is absurd.
This is a great comment. At the same time GDPR and other standards do not address practical issues that (arguably) cause real harm like including features to generate undressed images of women and children.
It's the same dynamic that has warped the California housing market by adding a forest of regulations that make it almost impossible to build new housing. Those regulations for the most part add nothing but cost and time to projects. Meanwhile housing prices go through the roof.
i'd argue that, at least in my european country, there already more severe laws regulating such thing that might earn you jail time, while gdpr wasn't made with that in mind
Thanks for the comment. It actually perfectly illustrates my point. Most people equate GDPR with a "Delete My Account" button, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We didn't spend thousands of hours on a deletion feature (or just development time). We spent them in total to be compliant in a healthcare environment. That time goes into:
Documenting the entire lifecycle (how, why, and where) of every single data point we process. Conducting and documenting formal risk assessments for every major processing activity (Privacy Impact Assessments (DPIA)). Drafting and negotiating data processing agreements (DPAs) with every single partner and vendor we use. Building strict role-based access and logging systems to track exactly who views and edits data and why. Implementing pseudonymization and logical data separation to ensure we meet "privacy by design" standards. Constantly coordinating between the product and dev team and the DPO to update policies and communicate changes to users.
The point I’m making is that the EU has built an incredibly expensive regulatory environment to support rights that, in practice, the vast majority of users don't seem to care about. We’re over-engineering for a "loss of control" that the average user hasn't shown much interest in reclaiming.
The EU must fix itself, and that means ignoring those NGOs. The EU's current tech laws penalize EU startups vs. US Big Tech. It should be reversed. Remove these worthless regulations (except DMA), and explicitly start discriminating against US Big Tech vs. domestic firms, like China.
Then the low-hanging fruits: mandate exclusive data storage in the EU, encryption keys in the EU, ban AWS/Azure/GCP and Windows/Office from government procurement, force JV's or GTFO, force Linux government use.
These NGOs are saboteurs in disguise that will never lead you to the promised land of EU tech sovereignty. China's playbook was: deregulate to build a domestic ecosystem, then regulate to protect society once the ecosystem is mature. Flipping that playbook around is insidious wrecker shit.
Article by article: how lawyers created impractical regulations that made sure big tech monopolized Europe and made sure small players had more trouble participating, and how the legal-industrial complex is fighting to keep milking that cow
I don’t see/share the HN outrage. If the EU wants to stay in the game, it has to be realistic about how regulation affects scaling and investment ... tweaking or rolling back parts of digital rules to compete with US/China tech isn’t “evil” .. it’s just how global competition works tbh.
Becoming like your opponent must be for sure not the only way to compete with them... China and the US are not the same, why should the EU become like either?
Seriously, the EU needs to actually make it possible to build successful businesses in the EU. Starting any business there is such a nightmare, it's no wonder everyone takes their ideas to the US.
This has been my prediction for the last year: the EU is going to be forced to take the China approach of creating their own version of all US tech companies.
The current US administration has done more to destroy US soft power on the world stage than any other in the country's history. The administration seems intent on destroying NATO. Personally I'm fine with that because it's a protection racket and a tool of imperialism. But this is going to materially hurt the US defense contractors who profit off of arms sales. That's really the turning point for any fascist regime: when you start screwing up the bag.
US tech companies are also a tool of American foreign policy in pretty much the exact same way the administration accuses China of doing.
So the EU needs to be responsible for its own security. And it's own platforms. But it may be too late for that as the EU itself may well splinter under the rise of far-right governments that are currently in place (eg Hungary) and only one election away from taking place (eg UK, Geermany maybe even France; even though the UK isn't in the EU I'm still counting it as part of Europe).
Unfortunately the EU (and the UK) is too committed to the US imperial project, such as in the Middle East. People don't seem to realize just how connected things like imperialism and the erosion of your own rights at home are inextricably intertwined.
Ironic if Trump's Greenland stunt ends up killing the Digital Omnibus. Hard to gift-wrap GDPR rollbacks for US tech giants while they're simultaneously being tariffed.
Sadly, I fear the opposite might be true. Trump acts by creating leverage and then asking for something in return to renounce that leverage (in other contexts this could be described as blackmail or racketeering - "nice Greenland you have there...").
Luckily, his reign of terror is not infinite. In November he'll be cut to size.
"Oxfam, the world-renowned advocacy group, issued a report ahead of the Davos event which showed that billionaire wealth rose by more than 16% last year, three times faster than the past five-year average, to more than $18 trillion. It drew on Forbes magazine data on the world’s richest people.
Oxfam said the $2.5 trillion rise in the wealth of billionaires last year would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over. Their wealth has risen by more than four-fifths since 2020, while nearly half the world’s population lives in poverty, the group said.
The Trump administration has led a “pro-billionaire agenda,” the group said, through actions such as slashing taxes for the wealthiest, fostering the growth of AI-related stocks that help rich investors get richer, and thwarting efforts to tax giant companies."
The article paints a situation where the EU is caving in to US pressure and completely ignores the very real criticisms of the current regulatory push coming from the EU itself.
A significant part of the Draghi report on European competitiveness is about how the Parliament has been stifling the ability of EU companies to efficiently compete under the weight of more and more complex laws.
It's not very useful being the first to put in place complex regulations if nothing remains to regulate because every company has moved somewhere else.
It is interesting how downvoted you are for stating simple facts. Many people in the EU will just willfully bury their head in the sand when it comes to the impact of regulation on the economy.
It's a night and day difference trying to get something built in the EU vs the US.
It's always easier to focus on a shared ennemy than to look inward. Talking about the Draghi report forces people to confront that the EU is actually extremely disunited at the moment and the political landscape is very messy. The report was buried by Germany and the Netherlands after all.
It's easy to rally behind the idea that bad foreign actors conspire to torpedo customers protecting laws because it provides a theorically easy solution: just stop allowing foreigners to interfer. Meanwhile, considering how these laws might be impacting companies in a fairly cut throat international environment and if we have put the cursor at the right place between protections and economic growth is a far more complex debate. It involves a lot of trade off and shades of gray and it puts the onus of decision strictly on us.
It's complex and as with everything involving trade offs, it's very easy to rattle purists of both sides. I rarely expect a rave welcome when I start discussing these topics on the internet.
Almost nobody in europe cares about these things. Nobody has gone out demonstrating for digital rights vs american companies. If we did we we would have already firewalled europe outside big tech.
Why are these articles finding their way here? In europe , this is not news, never.
Conveniently sidestepping the discussion of "should we care". I don't know how many people care or not, but I think more would care if the situation and implications were better known. It's good that this is brought to attention, and to say "people don't know so let's not talk about it" is absurd.
People have been caring about this for 20+ years. I'll admit that it's a minority position, but Germans in particular get very upset about mass surveillance.
I've been actively moving away from USA originated products. I'm happy to see alternatives being discussed. I really don't think it's moral to fund fascist states in this way, sorry.
Yes, I'm still here, despite being told (paraphrasing) 'fuck off we don't want anyone from outside USA here'.
Fascism: 'A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.'
Interesting because doesn't every sort of democratic state try to be 'a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls'? Depends how stringent and usually not stringent enough for many on the Left and on the Right.
When tempted to use the word 'fascism', is it not better to describe the issue with which one's concerned (maybe deeply) rather than using a fit-all word and take care not to devalue the significance of the word as it was, for instance, applied in WW2 to some of the appalling atrocities that occurred in that period and those we've seen reports of recently?
One gossamer-thin silver lining in this current geopolitical lunacy is that it's likely to show the current Commission's pro-corpo anti-citizen endeavors like this, to bend the knee to US corporate interests, in an increasingly bad light. Particularly given that activating anti-coercion measures that target those very corporate interests is now being seriously discussed.
EU and the rest of the world needs to ditch their anti circumvention laws that they put in place to appease the US demands on trade deals historically. They're getting tarrif'd anyways so YOLO. I think you'd see a lot of pressures ease up that are probably putting a lot of politicians around the world in compromised or blackmail-able positions. US Tech really needs to lose this massive leverage they have over the world right now.
Cory Doctorow's talk on this: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification...
Is it a silver lining? I think it's clear that whoever runs any government is free to do whatever they want with total impunity. Dissatisfied citizens complaining on Twitter is not gonna remove any "pro-corpo anti-citizen" politician from power. And if they take it to the streets, they'll just copy the UK's playbook.
Power corrupts, and the more steps removed politicians are from whomever put them in power, the safer they are.
There's a fair chance that discordant voices in the Parliament will grow increasingly stronger, party affiliations notwithstanding. It wouldn't be the first time that the Parliament has asserted its power over the Commission.
> And if they take it to the streets, they'll just copy the UK's playbook.
What is the UK's playbook in this case?
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Yes. Masks are off. And Musks.
Masks have been of for a while, but as long as the EU people can't vote the EU presidency out of office, it's to no avail.
It was a (steel and coal) corp affordances union to begin with, so it's no wonder it's pandering to business rather than civic interests after all.
Von der Leyen is corrupt yet shapes EU policy without backlash, and the citizenry is left to pay the price, precisely because the EU pretends to speak for the people.
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The EU leaders falsely assume that US cloud services are essential and let themselves be blackmailed over and over again.
If you want to do your part as a consumer, boycott all American products:
https://www.goeuropean.org/
https://di.day/
When my country and China had border clashes, there was a nation-wide grassroot level movement to boycott Chinese goods and services where possible. It worked to an extent but it fizzled out in few weeks/months. Some of the reasons were the impracticality of total boycott so you start from a position of compromise, difficulty to sustain a movement born out of anger and some inter-govt agreements to avoid escalations etc.
Do you have plans to overcome those sort of challenges and sustain this initiative ?
You speak about India?
Yeah, EU is super fucked too since it outsourced its energy dependence to Russia, consumer manufacturing to China, defence and tech services to US, and only just woke up in the last 3 or so years that it was all a huge mistake that's now costing us dearly since we're at the whims of all 3 belligerents who know that now is the time they can squeeze us.
Trying to undo just one dependency is a slow and painful process, but fighting all 3 at the same time is a suicide mission.
The US outsourced its manufacturing too, but unlike EU, it has a strong enough economy and military that they can just snap their fingers and the likes of Taiwan and Korea will immediately onshore manufacturing of their high end chips and ships to the US, but EU doesn't have this kind leverage.
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Boycotting US tech is magnitudes easier than boycotting Chinese-made products. They're in whole different universes. Especially on a country level, let alone a EU level.
Is removing the dependence on US tech easy for the EU? No, it's tough and takes a lot of work and time. It's still a piece of cake compared to the dependence on Chinese manufacturing. They're incomparable.
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The government has to mandate it on some level with purchasing power.
If the government switched away from Microsft and refused to accept MS document formats for any legal reason - then things might shift.
Most businesses just don't care, they want they easy button.
A law firm does not want to screw around, they just click 'buy' on Word, Outlook, Teams.
There's a deep psychology to it.
I remember a developer telling me that Oracle 'was the only real database'.
It's not so much propaganda, just the propagandistic power of incumbency. People who only know one thing are hard pressed to believe there could be something else.
This is more than 50% brand, narrative etc.
We techies tend to underestimate the power of perception, even when it's of our own creation etc. i.e. people fighting over Linux and it's various distros.
It is understanably hard to stay vigilant with respect to individual everyday purchases, but services and subscriptions are an easy and continuous win.
to be honest I don't expect a effective long term consumer boycott
but any companies which have their brand closely tied to the US image (e.g. Coca Cola) will most likely have bug issues
and if people have a choice between a product from a company they now is EU or better local and one where they don't know about it the choice will be influenced by it
and maybe we can finally take tear down some of the absurd misinformation companies and corruption originating from MS and similar. (E.g. systematic malicious misinformation often supplemented with non fair competition/subsidization and outright bribery (no joke, MS has (through middle mans) wide spread bribed public, research and school organizations in Germany, like actual bribes, not just things which should count as bribes but do not(1)))
(1): I knew some people which had been involved in it. But any case where legal actions where taken ended without relevant outcome because all the blame always feel to the sales middle man AFIK and supposedly MS didn't know. Also the bribes mostly ended up as additional founding for the research institute and only in small parts in personal pockets from what I have heard. At the same time politics have caused so massive issues due to incompetently made laws and regulations for many public organizations that accepting this bribes and using them as additional founds often looked as a necessary evil... :sob: (yes I know there are not emotes on HN)
>The EU leaders falsely assume that US cloud services are essential and let themselves be blackmailed over and over again.
I for one seriously doubt they assume such a thing. They are most likely given something in return that they think somehow makes such a trade worth it. Whether it's access to some fancy US intel/survelliance tech, "discounts" on US defense purchases or what have you, until you get transparency or clarity on the very specific items included in all these deals it's hard to determine the scale of their stupidity. It's either that or personal bribes, blackmail, and kickbacks to key EU politicians depending on the EU country in question.
If there was a "false assumption" above all others it was most likely the assumption that the post-WWII US foreign policy towards Europe would continue to the end of their lifetimes.
Since "Cola" is listed in the "popular alternatives" box, I think it's important to mention that most European Coca-Cola bottlers operate as franchises, i.e. they license the Coca-Cola brand and get the syrup for the drinks they bottle from the Atlanta-based HQ, but other than that they are locally-owned companies. So if you boycott Coca-Cola brands, maybe 20% of the impact goes to Coca-Cola US, while 80% is felt by the local company and its employees.
That just means they have all the infrastructure they need to bottle syrup from another source and start selling that instead - no capex needed, just maybe need to get together with other franchisees and figure out how to spend some opex on marketing and getting it onto store shelves. Coca-cola has a moat, but it's hardly protective of franchisees here.
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It's arguably unhealthy that one company has such global dominance over any market, even a trivial one like soft drinks.
> So if you boycott Coca-Cola brands, maybe 20% of the impact goes to Coca-Cola US, while 80% is felt by the local company and its employees.
Assuming the person burns the money they would've spent on Cola in the first place. But they aren't, they'll probably just redirect that money to an alternative soft drink, probably a more local one.
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Good thing that locally we produce other sugary drinks that we can buy instead!
China making a firewall so that it would grow its own tech industry instead of relying on the US was, in retrospect, a really smart move.
It was also very smart of them to send their citizens to US universities and companies and exfiltrate research and IP to grow their own tech industry...
Luckily, the orange idiot in charge is doing us (the Europeans) a favor showing us that America (and its companies) are no longer a trustworthy partner. In a way i really hope he goes through with the Greenland stuff... this would be the final nail in the coffin.
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Regarding the "sane countries" i can only say: Please, for the love of the deity you may worship, please distance yourself faster and farther...
Brexit didn’t do anything to correct the UK’s current trajectory. I guarantee you even destroying the relationship with NATO would not shift the course the US is on. Every time something extreme happens, people gasp for a second then accept it and move on. I don’t think the situation in the US is hopeless by any means, but Greenland is not going to suddenly be some magical moment that wakes everybody up. We’ve done this song and dance for a decade with Trump. After the attack on the capitol it be became very clear that it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than we thought.
GP was not about America changing but about Europe.
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Brexit wasn't an exercise in Imperialism and power-projection though, it was a dissolution of federated oversight and grant conditions to facilitate a transfer of wealth from the working classes to a select group of oligarchs.
They, in essence, traded 10% of their GDP for Regulatory Independence and UK’s accession to the trans-pacific partnership, estimated by the government to be worth only 0.06% of GDP by 2040.
If the Falklands represented a major turning point, then imo Greenland does too. The simple mustering of an international task-force of troops for defense is a move unprecedented in the 21st Century. The recent Spectator article correctly identifies Trump as “playing geopolitical Monopoly with Greenland”, which holds substantial mineral as well as strategic value in the president’s eyes.
The author identified presidential “ego-politics” as a plausible top reason, along with a US quest for hemispheric power and sending a message to rival powers - concluding by noting that both Britain and France hold territories in the western hemisphere and asking if they could be next on Trump’s list.
https://spectator.com/article/trump-is-playing-geopolitical-...
I suppose you're not one of the conscripted (or even professional) soldiers that would be called to duty to protect the region in case of an armed conflict?
I am in the reserve of the german army, so i can be called up if things escalate beyond a certain point (the so called "Verteidigungsfall").
Europe is desperately trying to find some way to let US have "control" without destroying the Danish kingdom; A Minsk Agreement for Greenland if you will.
They don't have the stomach for a fight.
The US already has bases on Greenland. It is part of the Kingdom of Denmark and therefore is already a NATO ally territory. They already have all the "control" they need to keep it out of the hands of Russia and China. There is no need to "let" the US have "control". If the US were being run by people who understood the basis on which they have a base there, they would realise they already have all the control they need from a strategic perspective.
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Very bold claim to make unsourced from an account with a very _interesting_ posting history.
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Greenland invasion is just a distraction by Trump from the Epstein files. The US already have massive military presence in Greenland with permission from Denmark since the 1950s, they can already do whatever illegal things they want there (and they have, like installing a portable nuclear reactor), without the downsides that come with actual ownership of the island. They already have a really sweet deal.
Trump keeps talking about taking it because he knows the media will bite the bait and talk about that instead and forget about the epstein list and other illegal shit his administration did.
Remember how he was also talking about annexing Canada in his election? Trump just loves to bait the media by saying crazy stuff since the media feeds on sensationalist stuff like that.
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“Since the start of the parliamentary mandate, Meta has met 38 times with far-right MEPs”
Hmmmm
Far left EU MEPs complain about what far right are doing. So what else is new in politics?
Do they also complain when they themselves meet with Meta, or is it an issue only when their growing opposition do it?
You know the saying "For my friends everything, for my enemies, the law"?
The fight against “left” and “right” is just a narrative to gin up allegiance with certain groups.
The only relevance to the article is that it indicates which parties have sided with the US administration to fight consumer’s digital rights.
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> Do they also complain when they themselves meet with Meta, or is it an issue only when their growing opposition do it?
Are you referring to anything specific or you have just emotional urge to defend far right? (PfE in this case).
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Is there a list of MEPs who are just right, without the far prefix?
Just as with most parts of the EU (imo both it's strength and it's weakness) there is some complexity and bureaucracy involved with founding out the political spectrum of MEPs. You can research the EU political groups and the political alliances and the corresponding positions on these Wikipedia pages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_groups_of_the_Europe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_political_alliances
Yes. But if you look into the policies they push, they are all progressive for some reason.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_groups_of_the_Europe...
Yes ?
One thing bothers me a lot is, if government organizations can be influenced by lobby groups, which primarily owned by corporations, then why do we need government?
Corporations and governments should be considered as balancing forces, one works to increase its profits by any means, other works to protect humans living in that area by any means.
You might say, corporations benefit its employees, true, but it is a small subset of people living in the country. If you allow everything to corporations, they will set up a slavery system from the birth of a baby
Lobbying having undue influence is entirely a government problem that it needs to fix. It will never be fixed while people have the attitude that lobbyists are the problem. (I'm not saying you're saying this; just making a statement.)
As a European founder building startups since 2015, I’ve spent a massive chunk of my career navigating the "alphabet soup" of EU regulation: GDPR, DSA, DMA, AI Act, CSRD, SFDR, CBAM... the list is exhausting.
While the goals are usually noble, I’m increasingly convinced we’re regulating ourselves into irrelevance. I’m not a Big Tech company yet my interests align with theirs. We desperately need an EU that prioritizes actual growth over well-intentioned paperwork. To me, the AI Act and the GDPR are the worst offenders here, representing the largest possible gap between "good intentions" and the actual effect they have on the ground.
Consider frontier LLM labs. We have the talent, the Nordic data centers, and access to the GPUs. But why would any investor drop $100B on a frontier LLM lab here when the legislative environment is fundamentally more hostile than the US? It feels like we’ve already watched Mistral and Aleph Alpha get left in the dust.
To give you an idea of the "compliance vs. reality" GDPR gap: I worked on a project processing healthcare data for millions of people. We had a clear, easy-to-find privacy policy and a responsive DPO. Total GDPR requests for info or deletion? Exactly 53. Out of millions. We spent thousands of hours building systems for rights that only 0.001% of our users cared to use.
If you look at the courts, the "damage" being prevented is equally vague. Since EU courts don't really do punitive damages, most awards are tiny unless there’s actual identity theft. Most of what GDPR protects is "mental distress" or "loss of control"-concepts so ambiguous that courts rarely award anything for them unless something else went wrong.
The result of all this "protection"? No FAANG-equivalent, no frontier AI leader, and no homegrown ad-tech. It turns out the most perfectly regulated company is the one that never exists in the first place.
You're so right.
I cannot stand reading these comments left by people clearly detached from reality.
I used to work in a medical AI company myself, over the years we had a few requests for deletion, all from some crazy old German people. Moreover, we couldn't train our models on European data, which is absurd.
This is a great comment. At the same time GDPR and other standards do not address practical issues that (arguably) cause real harm like including features to generate undressed images of women and children.
It's the same dynamic that has warped the California housing market by adding a forest of regulations that make it almost impossible to build new housing. Those regulations for the most part add nothing but cost and time to projects. Meanwhile housing prices go through the roof.
i'd argue that, at least in my european country, there already more severe laws regulating such thing that might earn you jail time, while gdpr wasn't made with that in mind
So deletion of user accounts meant thousands of hours of development time?
Thanks for the comment. It actually perfectly illustrates my point. Most people equate GDPR with a "Delete My Account" button, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We didn't spend thousands of hours on a deletion feature (or just development time). We spent them in total to be compliant in a healthcare environment. That time goes into:
Documenting the entire lifecycle (how, why, and where) of every single data point we process. Conducting and documenting formal risk assessments for every major processing activity (Privacy Impact Assessments (DPIA)). Drafting and negotiating data processing agreements (DPAs) with every single partner and vendor we use. Building strict role-based access and logging systems to track exactly who views and edits data and why. Implementing pseudonymization and logical data separation to ensure we meet "privacy by design" standards. Constantly coordinating between the product and dev team and the DPO to update policies and communicate changes to users.
The point I’m making is that the EU has built an incredibly expensive regulatory environment to support rights that, in practice, the vast majority of users don't seem to care about. We’re over-engineering for a "loss of control" that the average user hasn't shown much interest in reclaiming.
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The EU must fix itself, and that means ignoring those NGOs. The EU's current tech laws penalize EU startups vs. US Big Tech. It should be reversed. Remove these worthless regulations (except DMA), and explicitly start discriminating against US Big Tech vs. domestic firms, like China.
Then the low-hanging fruits: mandate exclusive data storage in the EU, encryption keys in the EU, ban AWS/Azure/GCP and Windows/Office from government procurement, force JV's or GTFO, force Linux government use.
These NGOs are saboteurs in disguise that will never lead you to the promised land of EU tech sovereignty. China's playbook was: deregulate to build a domestic ecosystem, then regulate to protect society once the ecosystem is mature. Flipping that playbook around is insidious wrecker shit.
Somebody needs to investigate the EC for corruption.
Let me propose a different title:
Article by article: how lawyers created impractical regulations that made sure big tech monopolized Europe and made sure small players had more trouble participating, and how the legal-industrial complex is fighting to keep milking that cow
Close the 'legitimate interest' loophole that made the whole GDPR a farce in practice, and I'll take that as a sign you're actually serious.
I don’t see/share the HN outrage. If the EU wants to stay in the game, it has to be realistic about how regulation affects scaling and investment ... tweaking or rolling back parts of digital rules to compete with US/China tech isn’t “evil” .. it’s just how global competition works tbh.
Becoming like your opponent must be for sure not the only way to compete with them... China and the US are not the same, why should the EU become like either?
Seriously, the EU needs to actually make it possible to build successful businesses in the EU. Starting any business there is such a nightmare, it's no wonder everyone takes their ideas to the US.
Nobody takes their ideas to the US. The US prints money backing them with oil and purchases every single startup in EU.
what good are digital rights in countries where physical rights are being deteriorated
This has been my prediction for the last year: the EU is going to be forced to take the China approach of creating their own version of all US tech companies.
The current US administration has done more to destroy US soft power on the world stage than any other in the country's history. The administration seems intent on destroying NATO. Personally I'm fine with that because it's a protection racket and a tool of imperialism. But this is going to materially hurt the US defense contractors who profit off of arms sales. That's really the turning point for any fascist regime: when you start screwing up the bag.
US tech companies are also a tool of American foreign policy in pretty much the exact same way the administration accuses China of doing.
So the EU needs to be responsible for its own security. And it's own platforms. But it may be too late for that as the EU itself may well splinter under the rise of far-right governments that are currently in place (eg Hungary) and only one election away from taking place (eg UK, Geermany maybe even France; even though the UK isn't in the EU I'm still counting it as part of Europe).
Unfortunately the EU (and the UK) is too committed to the US imperial project, such as in the Middle East. People don't seem to realize just how connected things like imperialism and the erosion of your own rights at home are inextricably intertwined.
Ironic if Trump's Greenland stunt ends up killing the Digital Omnibus. Hard to gift-wrap GDPR rollbacks for US tech giants while they're simultaneously being tariffed.
Sadly, I fear the opposite might be true. Trump acts by creating leverage and then asking for something in return to renounce that leverage (in other contexts this could be described as blackmail or racketeering - "nice Greenland you have there...").
Luckily, his reign of terror is not infinite. In November he'll be cut to size.
"Oxfam, the world-renowned advocacy group, issued a report ahead of the Davos event which showed that billionaire wealth rose by more than 16% last year, three times faster than the past five-year average, to more than $18 trillion. It drew on Forbes magazine data on the world’s richest people.
Oxfam said the $2.5 trillion rise in the wealth of billionaires last year would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over. Their wealth has risen by more than four-fifths since 2020, while nearly half the world’s population lives in poverty, the group said.
The Trump administration has led a “pro-billionaire agenda,” the group said, through actions such as slashing taxes for the wealthiest, fostering the growth of AI-related stocks that help rich investors get richer, and thwarting efforts to tax giant companies."
AI is killing humanity
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The article paints a situation where the EU is caving in to US pressure and completely ignores the very real criticisms of the current regulatory push coming from the EU itself.
A significant part of the Draghi report on European competitiveness is about how the Parliament has been stifling the ability of EU companies to efficiently compete under the weight of more and more complex laws.
It's not very useful being the first to put in place complex regulations if nothing remains to regulate because every company has moved somewhere else.
It is interesting how downvoted you are for stating simple facts. Many people in the EU will just willfully bury their head in the sand when it comes to the impact of regulation on the economy.
It's a night and day difference trying to get something built in the EU vs the US.
It's always easier to focus on a shared ennemy than to look inward. Talking about the Draghi report forces people to confront that the EU is actually extremely disunited at the moment and the political landscape is very messy. The report was buried by Germany and the Netherlands after all.
It's easy to rally behind the idea that bad foreign actors conspire to torpedo customers protecting laws because it provides a theorically easy solution: just stop allowing foreigners to interfer. Meanwhile, considering how these laws might be impacting companies in a fairly cut throat international environment and if we have put the cursor at the right place between protections and economic growth is a far more complex debate. It involves a lot of trade off and shades of gray and it puts the onus of decision strictly on us.
It's complex and as with everything involving trade offs, it's very easy to rattle purists of both sides. I rarely expect a rave welcome when I start discussing these topics on the internet.
Almost nobody in europe cares about these things. Nobody has gone out demonstrating for digital rights vs american companies. If we did we we would have already firewalled europe outside big tech.
Why are these articles finding their way here? In europe , this is not news, never.
Conveniently sidestepping the discussion of "should we care". I don't know how many people care or not, but I think more would care if the situation and implications were better known. It's good that this is brought to attention, and to say "people don't know so let's not talk about it" is absurd.
People have been caring about this for 20+ years. I'll admit that it's a minority position, but Germans in particular get very upset about mass surveillance.
> In europe , this is not news, never.
That's just false. Example, here's a shitty tabloid in Croatia:
https://www.24sata.hr/news/vrh-europske-komisije-mijenja-pra...
>Why are these articles finding their way here? In europe , this is not news, never.
... Because this is hacker news and not euro news? This is pretty much on point both for tech topic and vague "hacker ethos" as a topic.
I've been actively moving away from USA originated products. I'm happy to see alternatives being discussed. I really don't think it's moral to fund fascist states in this way, sorry.
Yes, I'm still here, despite being told (paraphrasing) 'fuck off we don't want anyone from outside USA here'.
What does fascism mean to you, exactly?
Fascism: 'A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.'
Interesting because doesn't every sort of democratic state try to be 'a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls'? Depends how stringent and usually not stringent enough for many on the Left and on the Right.
When tempted to use the word 'fascism', is it not better to describe the issue with which one's concerned (maybe deeply) rather than using a fit-all word and take care not to devalue the significance of the word as it was, for instance, applied in WW2 to some of the appalling atrocities that occurred in that period and those we've seen reports of recently?
Speak for yourself.
> Why are these articles finding their way here? In europe , this is not news, never.
A provably untrue statement. Examples:
https://www.politico.eu/article/big-tech-lobbying-brussels-d...
https://www.brusselstimes.com/1916422/us-tech-giants-allying...
https://taz.de/Digitale-Rechte-in-Europa/!6130097/
https://fr.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/18/champ-de-batail...
This. Outside of an extremely small minority no-one cares.