Comment by jordemort
15 days ago
I'm pretty resentful that people in the US are stuck using worse/less featureful versions of products from US companies, while the government in Europe can get these kinds of concessions for their people. If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well, since we can't be bothered otherwise to pass any of these nice laws for ourselves. See also: choice in app stores
It can go both ways: for example in the EU Apple disallows mirroring of iPhones on Macs because of its interpretation of EU statutes, though it occurred at the same time as they were required to support third-party app stores, so I strongly suspect it was a bit of ‘FU’ to the EU.
But yeah broadly speaking I’m very content about the greater legal protections this continent affords. (And it only works because the EU makes rules for such a large and valuable market, why is why breaking away à la Brexit amounts to such a loss of leverage: you have to reach consensus, but you also become a behemoth. Useful tradeoff.)
And Apple does this while also ignoring the rule about third–party app stores — they are not supported.
Sometimes it happens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
That’s because your government aligns itself with businesses, not consumers.
> If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well
This is a pretty typical self -entitled attitude that Americans have. You chose your government, not the rest of the world.
> If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well
The obvious implication of the above statement is that the US government should force the company to do this.
>This is a pretty typical self -entitled attitude that Americans have.
When Americans ask their government for the exact same thing that Europeans asked their government for, suddenly Europeans think Americans are "entitled". There's no content to your ideology beyond just "America Bad".
No, their statement was ‘if another country gets it, I should get it too’. That’s not the same as ‘I long for the privacy benefits offered to Europeans and actively write to my government representatives to request it’. It’s more like expecting a privilege your parents gave your sibling just because they got it as a result of doing well in school while your grades were so-so.
At let’s not forget, most of the egregious privacy violations like faang and adtech come from American companies.
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And you don't have to use any of it, feel free to stop tomorrow.
Surely you are aware that WhatsApp is a product of a tiny US co. Meta? Funny how the world sans the US is so in love with it. Shouldn’t the EU be out on the streets boycotting it?
What is "the government in Europe"..?
The bodies in charge of the EU governance, probably. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutions_of_the_European_U...
Commision [executive], Council (of Ministers/of the EU) [legislative] and Parliament [legislative] are the three most significant in terms of doing/looking like what any sovereign country government would.
Not sure, Europe isn't a country.
There's the EU, but members of the EU have their own governments.
I can't figure out why people keep getting confused. Turkey and Russia are in Europe, but not in the EU, for instance.
Let's not pretend they would do this if the tech monopolies were european.
Yes, the EU would never dare to regulate European companies, for example require banks to offer free and instant person-to-person money transfers or mobile phone operators to offer data roaming at domestic rates.
The only reason we have that is because fintech is eating the meal of traditional banks. They came up with ways to transfer with just a card (which benefits Visa and Mastercard, US companies) and do inter-account instant transfers for free.
SEPA normalization took forever, and even now instant transfers are still very often paid past the limit in your card bundle (probably around 3 if you don't have an expensive card).
Brussels rarely works for the little people; they just support whatever the big players at the moment want, unless they are foreign and can come up with a reason to tax them.
It is delusional to think politicians in Brussels care about the little guys; it is always about maintaining or gaining power, otherwise they wouldn't come up with absurd regulations that hit the small players much harder than any of the big ones.
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Let's not pretend you ever bothered to check if that's actually true