The EU Goes Too Far

https://stratechery.com/2024/the-e-u-goes-too-far/

by jdminhbg • 2 years ago

30 74 2 years ago

talldayo3• 2 years ago

First Daring Fireball, now Stratechery! At this rate I'm worried Eclectic Light will have an opinion to share.

How many completely impartial and well-respected tech journalists have to call out the EU before they finally leave poor Apple alone!

akmarinov7• 2 years ago

If i was a bit cynical, I might suspect that all these journalists are in the pocket of these big companies and these are the “Apple is so good and gives so much money to developers and the environment, that they deserve your data and everything in your digital life” takes, meant to rile up the public

cynicalsecurity2• 2 years ago

Nice try, Apple, but nope.

ceejayoz3• 2 years ago

every website has a bunch of regulatory-required pop-ups asking for permission to simply operate as normal websites, which means collecting the data necessary to provide whatever experience you are trying to access

No, these popups are only regulatory-required when you're collecting data unnecessary to provide the experience.

iamkonstantin2• 2 years ago

I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that supposedly tech-savvy people would completely miss the point of the _tracking_ (not cookie) prompts. It’s the industry that’s going too far, not the EU.

baseballdork• 2 years ago

Frankly, the EU didn't go far enough. Instead of allowing this popup bullshit, they really ought to have enforced do not track.

cynicalsecurity2• 2 years ago

Tobacco manufacturers have to provide warning labels on cigarettes, so unfair!

betaby8• 2 years ago

Indeed unfair. Vine producers are not required to put cancer warning labels in EU.

isodev6• 2 years ago

The EU regulation states that tobacco health warnings must use an image from the EU approved gallery. Come to think of it, the next iteration of the ePrivacy Directive should force vendors to use only pre-approved designs for the consent prompt. No more "legitimate interest" bs.

oezi• 2 years ago

Absolutely right and seems to be wishfully unaware that visiting US sites will trigger the same insane data collection as in the EU (but you can object as a EU citizen). A typical site might integrate 100 to 1000 trackers. Neither Google nor Meta have solved any of that.

spacebanana7• 2 years ago

My understanding is that permission is required for nonessential usage of data in addition to nonessential collection.

So it’s okay to collect IP addresses for load balancing but not targeting adverts.

This “essential usage” is where things get dicey with whether it’s okay to collect info for logs, customer support, fraud prevention, law enforcement cooperations etc

legitster8• 2 years ago

This is marginally true but misleading. There is not a consistent definition of what data is considered "essential" so the current consensus is that for all cookies - whether it be a first-party non-tracking or not - you are safest to just have the consent banner.

I've worked with four separate GDPR legal teams over my career and none have ever agreed that there is was any such use case as "essential-only" data.

orwin2• 2 years ago

Then they're bad legal teams.

Github.com, free.fr, 42.fr probably a lot of others as those are 3 of the first 4 fqdn I thought about when asking myself 'which website does not need advertising or tracking)'.

skrause• 2 years ago

The EU hasn't gone far enough until I can install Firefox with its native engine and uBlock Origin on an iPhone without Apple collecting fees that prevent Mozilla from shipping it to me for free.

iamsaitam• 2 years ago

This reads like "American goes to Europe and is upset to find out that things are done differently than in America"

betaby8• 2 years ago

Not quite. From the article "This makes absolutely no sense: Apple not deploying AI in fact opens them up to competition, because their phones will be less fully featured than they might be otherwise! Vestager should be taking a victory lap, if her position made a shred of sense. "

isodev6• 2 years ago

It's a tiny nuance, but what would really open Apple to competition is allowing 3rd party developers to offer replacement experiences for "Intelligence" and other functions, like the OpenAI integration.

The DMA seems vague only if you have bad intentions and want to get away with it. Perfectly fine if you want to do the right thing.

betaby8• 2 years ago

So did EU regulation open IPhones or not? Can I run my own binaries or python scripts on IPHones in EU? If not, all those regulations are just noise and power grab with no benefits for the general computing.

ceejayoz3• 2 years ago

So did EU regulation open IPhones or not?

Apple's currently trying to see how much open defiance and disdain for the rules they can get away with. We'll see how it pans out.

akmarinov7• 2 years ago

You can’t. Apple is doing some malicious compliance and will only start complying after it gets hit with a 10% of world revenue fine

betaby8• 2 years ago

Euro bureaucrats spend day and night regulating everything and in the end there is nothing to show with regard of Apple Inc.

tpush• 2 years ago

This has to be one of the most corporate-simping bloated think pieces I have ever seen.

I didn't even know one could be so in love with the biggest corporations on earth and get enraged at the thought of them not being able to make the largest profit they possibly can.

janice1999• 2 years ago

the E.U. identifies an issue (excessive data collection) and reaches for a regulatory solution, locking in a terrible status quo, while the U.S.’s more market-oriented approach results in a better experience for users and better business outcomes for businesses.

I would ask the author to ask average Americans how they feel about their lightly regulated internet providers, airline operators and health care providers.

betaby8• 2 years ago

All those three areas are heavily regulated in USA. How they feel about that varies greatly from state to sate and from one income band to another.

legitster8• 2 years ago

An average American? Generally pretty good. Especially from the user experience/technological point of view that he is making in his article.

You can book a cheap flight directly through Google without having to set up an account and never have to deal with popups or consent forms.

idle_zealot2• 2 years ago

never have to deal with popups or consent forms.

What? Google won't pop up a form, but the airline site it directs you to in order to purchase your tickets absolutely will. Most sites do. Americans complain about cookie consent forms all the time, this isn't an EU-specific problem, though it does stem from EU and California regulations.

cjblomqvist• 2 years ago

To be fair, I've only been skimmed through the article, but nowhere do I see any research, or even clear arguments/fair reasoning, about monopolistic behavior in free markets. Only false comparisons (Apple when it was close to bankruptcy and Apple today - yes there's a huge difference!) and jumping to conclusions (Apple was the one restoring faith and rescued third-party development - before App Store no businesses developing third party software existed, or?).

Yes, when you're vertically integrated and dominate a market (in practice have some kind of monopoly) it's fair you need to open up certain things to everyone. Unless you believe in a completely free market without any regulation.

A fair bit of research supports that stance btw. (That free markets needs to be regulated)

betaby8• 2 years ago

Why this article is flagged? It's technical and mostly accurate.

isodev6• 2 years ago

It's false and clickbaity.

returningfory28• 2 years ago

What is false about the article? (This is not a rhetorical question - I'm curious.)

TiredOfLife2• 2 years ago

It's neither of those things.

cbeach2• 2 years ago

This kind of tactical suppression of news happened a lot in the run-up to the UK's Brexit referendum.

The EU is a very polarising institution. Unfortunately, loyal supporters of the EU will do anything to protect it from criticism.

Which is one of the reasons it has become such an awful, yet powerful, political experiment. We're not able to openly criticise it.

(watch as my comment gets downvoted / flagged!)

returningfory28• 2 years ago

My feeling is that when European policy is discussed on Hacker News, many Europeans reflexively become defensive and defend the European government's perspective irrespective of the merits. There is this sense that Europe can never be wrong, and is always better than the US. I would strongly encourage Europeans to reconsider this approach. It is not in your interest or in the interest of Europe.

For context, I grew up in Europe and now live in the US. One major difference in the US is that people are often very critical of the general direction of the country. In many cases this is the key mechanism by which positive change is made. For example, in the US many of us are critical of the healthcare system's poor accessibility for lower income people. That criticism has been channeled towards some non-trivial positive change (Obamacare on the federal level, many other thing locally).

Imagine instead that Americans took the European attitude towards this issue. As soon as anyone criticized American healthcare they would get defensive, dig their heals in, refuse to listen, and insist that the American healthcare system is fine. This would be really bad for the US! We would never have made any positive change because we would have been in denial about there being a problem in the first place.

Of course some people in the US do this. But I feel for Europe the standard response to any criticism of Europe is to dismiss it out of hand and retreat to this attitude that Europe is superior to everywhere else.

akmarinov7• 2 years ago

But I want to be able to run any app i want to on my $999+ phone. Why am I not allowed to?

returningfory28• 2 years ago

My comment is not about the specifics of this case...

dnissley• 2 years ago

You knowingly bought the phone that had that limitation, so presumably you had some other priorities

cbeach2• 2 years ago

If you want to do that you're free to buy a phone (i.e. Android) that is has fewer safeguards and lacks vertical integration.

For those of us who value Apple's approach, please let us choose the phone that works best for us, and stop supporting bad politicians who want to regulate our choices away.

returningfory28• 2 years ago

I would be interested in hearing why my comment is being downvoted.

MattPalmer10862• 2 years ago

I am not one of the downvoters, but I assume it is because you make unsusbtantiated accusations of defensive behaviour about most of the Europeans on HN. It's flame bait.

ceejayoz3• 2 years ago

I have the complete opposite impression of European vs. American attitudes in this regard. It's a common belief here in the States that the Constitution was genius, that the healthcare system is "best in the world", that it's the "shining city on the hill" for the rest of the world. "If you don't like it, leave" is a fairly common response to criticism of US governance.

In EU GDPR vs. Google/Facebook/Apple, I'm very comfortable with the concept that the EU is at least trying to protect consumers from what has been decades of clear overreach by the ad industry.

returningfory28• 2 years ago

Yeah that's interesting - maybe I have some selection bias that leads me to a different sense.

I do think though that there's a relation between attitudes and policy that gets enacted. So I agree many people do think that the US healthcare system is the "best in the world" - but if everyone thought that, we would never have had Obamacare, and Medicare for All wouldn't be a thing. I think these policies being enacted/seriously discussed is evidence that there's a non-trivial number of people questioning the status quo.

Anyway, my overall point was that questioning the status quo is good for your country and reflexively defending it is bad, because then you don't find ways to improve it.

pembrook• 2 years ago

The fact you got downvoted is very amusing and, ironically, perfect evidence of what you're describing.

The problem is there's no HN equivalent for tech people in Europe. So they're stuck here, hanging out with a bunch of Americans bragging about how big their salaries are and how Americans in tech are all getting fabulously rich (and they actually are).

Imagine the level of resentment that creates! You're just as competent an engineer, yet instead of financial freedom in <10 years, you get stuck making 1/5th as much in a lifer "IT" job at some lame industrial company running on autopilot just because you were born in the wrong country.

So what do you do? Take a risk and build something of your own? Nahhh. Too much work.

It's much easier to rationalize the discomfort away by recasting yourself as the hero of the story.

"Sure, I have to ask my government for permission to retire at 70 (hopefully), but that's because I'm actually the morally superior one! Those American tech innovations are all evil, and the people who use them are getting duped by a bunch of conmen! LLMs are worthless, I don't need their latest tech fads anyways!" ...And so on, and so on.

thefz• 2 years ago

the Internet experience in America is better because the market was allowed to work

So you are ok with websites sharing your data wih 800+ others that you don't know how are going to use it, all for the annoyance of the pop-up alert? I think this might be the dumbest thing I have read in the last six months.

legitster8• 2 years ago

The "market being allowed to work" was referencing the lack of Oauth options on European sites, not the pop-up banners.

legitster8• 2 years ago

A lot of people are skimming the article or taking some of the points in bad faith - I'll jump to this point near the end.

It is the cases above, though, that are thieving like the German publishers: it is one thing to regulate a market; it is another to straight up take a product or service on your terms, enabled by a company’s loyalty to its existing userbase. I might disagree with a lot of E.U. regulations, but I respect them and their right to make them; dictating business models or forcing a company to provide services for free, though, crosses the line from regulation to theft.

His broader point isn't that these regulations are bad - but that regulators are using "privacy" to sell generally anti-tech regulations to rent seek or enrich their own local special interest groups. Actual consumers are being treated as a bargaining chip.

isodev6• 2 years ago

to sell generally anti-tech regulations to rent seek or enrich their own local special interest groups. Actual consumers are being treated as a bargaining chip.

Which is false and not at all in line with the DMA and the bigger framework of legislation and policy it belongs to (which nobody talks about because it doesn't make for bombastic and reactionary titles).

idle_zealot2• 2 years ago

This is a headache-inducing read. Weird anecdotes about EU site having cookie consent forms while US sites don't (what US sites are you browsing?). Blaming the poor UX on regulators rather than site operators (if they only tracked the data they needed to operate the site they wouldn't need to ask). Implying that sites all tracking you as much as they want with no need for consent would be ideal and "the market working" to provide a good experience. Equating a regulator deeming a business model unethical and illegal to nationalizing private property (lol). The bizarre assertion that selling or providing an app for an operating system is using the OS maker's intellectual property without compensation. The rapid-fire procession of terrible takes is dizzying.

jaredcwhite• 2 years ago

I make it a point to safely ignore Stratechery, a veritable fountain of bad takes going back years.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

""I do not believe we should cancel those who want to regulate down prices on pharmaceuticals, even though likely they will kill millions over time, at least to the extent they succeed. (Supply is elastic!) But if we can like them, tolerate them, indeed welcome them into the intellectual community, we should be nice to others as well. Because the faults of the others probably are less bad than those who wish to regulate down the prices of U.S. pharmaceuticals."

Cowen's point is that while many countries aggressively regulate the price of pharmaceuticals, you ultimately need a profit motive to invest in the massive up-front cost in developing new drugs; that profit comes from the U.S. market. The reason this all works is that the actual production of drugs is similar to technology: once the drug is approved every marginal pill is effectively zero marginal cost; this means that it is worth selling drugs at highly regulated prices, but you still need a reason to develop new drugs as well.

So it is with technology; to take the Meta example above, the company may very well be brought to heel with regards to offering a non-personalized-ads business model: Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp are already developed, operations teams already exist, data centers are already built, so maybe a fraction of potential revenue will be worth continuing to offer those services in the E.U. Moreover, there is the matter of network effects: should Meta leave the E.U. it will make its services worse for non-E.U. users by reducing the size of the network on its services.

This comparison is a bridge too far. When person is in hospital fighting for life Zuckerberg's website is nothing more than a useless distraction. Whereas drugs can save life. There is no comparison. If Meta conducts "R&D" on their own cryptocurrency (Libra), the "Metaverse", surveillance glasses, "AI" nonsense or whatever it thinks is "the next big thing", it is not a matter of life or death. No lives depend on the success or failure of these projects. People invested in them will claim they will save lives and much more... someday. Please wait. It is speculation. Life-saving drugs are real, not speculation. In the pharmaceutucal industry it is too expensive to "move fast and break things". Failure costs too much money.

"That's not the only cost that is going up for Apple in particular: part of the implication of the "Core Technology Fee" model is that Apple has put forth a tremendous amount of engineering effort to accomodate its platform to the DMA specifically. Or, to put it another way, Apple has already forked iOS: there is one version for the E.U., and one version for the rest of the world. This too dramatically changes the calculus: yes, every E.U. user comes in at zero marginal cost, but not the E.U. as a whole: Apple isn't just paying the expected value of future fines, but actual real costs in terms of engineering time and overall complexity."

Comparing life-saving drugs to some feature of Apple's BSD-based privatised operating system. This is insane. Computer nerds are going to make computers do stuff whether someone is paying them or not. Computers are toys to these people and they will play for a lifetime; it is not work. Overhead costs for software development are extremely low. Free "features" are "shipped" with alarming frequency, for marketing purposes. Software development is almost entirely unregulated. Whereas development of therapeutics is a highly regulated, costly endeavor that can take a decade. Lab equipment, purpose-built facilities, clinical testing. Experimentation costs money. How much does it cost to play with software. Nothing. Time.

Another thing that costs nothing: Stratechery blog posts.

The EU Goes Too Far

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