Break Up Big Tech: Civil Society Declaration

https://peoplevsbig.tech/break-up-big-tech-civil-society-declaration/

by janandonly • 1 year ago

198 174 1 year ago

fooker• 1 year ago

Yeah great way to become dependent on tech stacks backdoored by different big tech companies from another country, or the same ones who move to different countries.

looperhacks• 1 year ago

This is a European initiative, we are already backdoored by other companies from other countries. I'd rather work with a company I can take to court/that is governed by policies I can vote for or against.

blackqueeriroh3• 1 year ago

Yes, the European Union, who so earnestly considered writing a law that forces tech companies to build in backdoors to E2EE because they think only they could get in.

You want the European Parliament and every European country to have direct access to everything you type and say? Because that’s where this ends.

fastball3• 1 year ago

How would Europe break up American tech companies, in practice?

tacker20002• 1 year ago

They can fine them or forbid them to do business until it happens. Big tech does a lot of revenue there, i’m sure they wont abandon europe just because of this.

See the Apple USB-C case.

dgfitz• 1 year ago

Europe has been basically begging the US to abandon them for the past few months. Why wouldn’t the US oblige?

marginalia_nu3• 1 year ago

If Europe wants their own tech companies on par with the American ones, it should first and foremost fix a business climate that caters to such companies emerging. If we drive the American businesses out of Europe without doing so first, we'll more than likely end up even further in the direction of turning the EU into the second coming of the DDR.

fastball3• 1 year ago

The Apple USB-C case is requiring a corporation to comply with regulations.

Breaking up a company means a subset is being separated from the parent company, in a way where the parent company is no longer deriving value from the (former) subsidiary.

In that context, why would Apple say "sure we will sever part of our business to be fully independent" rather than "ok we will no longer operate in Europe"? They lose the business either way, but the first scenario sets a bad precedent for them and encourages other countries/leagues/unions to try the same.

pmdr• 1 year ago

It's not a monopoly if it's at least 5 companies /s

bilbo0s3• 1 year ago

Let's be honest about what they're targeting..

the problem is US tech dominance.

So Europe sees a need to break that sooner or Later.

So yes, the list of companies to rein in has as many companies as they need to affect the security and economic changes the Europeans would like to see.

I would say we (the US) should negotiate with them, but considering the negotiating prowess of the current admin, maybe now is not the right time for that?

voxlax• 1 year ago

It´s in the best interest of the people in the US to have the dominance of those corporations broken, before those companies eliminate democracy.

socalgal23• 1 year ago

They only mention google which of the big tech companies is the one closest to losing their dominant position to AI. Even their own AI is gutting their own business.

Apple, the company that truly wants to control everything, isn't even mentioned

neepi• 1 year ago

I don’t get the Apple side of this. Yeah they are assholes but only hardware assholes. You can easily leave if you want without consequence.

Social media big tech is where everyone communicates which is a much bigger and much more damaging problem. Literally some people only communicate via one vendor with no interoperability.

gameman144• 1 year ago

Literally some people only communicate via one vendor with no interoperability.

Doesn't iMessage fit this bill to a tee? (Where the vendor in question also locks you into the hardware, not just the software?)

Turskarama4• 1 year ago

What are you talking about, the internet basically is google at this point. Apple mostly just sells consumer hardware and the software to go with it, they're huge but they don't have half of all tech companies relying on them.

socalgal23• 1 year ago

Apps are bigger than the internet (the web). Apple want to control who can and can't make them and they wamt to control the payment method that yor're allowed to use. if they don't like you you're out. Those are far stronger controls over the world than anything google is doing

noobermin• 1 year ago

It isn't mentioned in the text but the image at the top includes the apple logo.

swiftcoder6• 1 year ago

For all that Apple exerts an unreasonable level of control over their own hardware/software ecosystem, they've never really given a shit about users on other platforms?

zoobab• 1 year ago

Antitrust barely works, when it's not a monopoly it's an oligopoly.

And remedies are often pocket money.

For Microsoft Windows, antitrust authorities and courts did not do anything.

__loam• 1 year ago

We slap these people on the wrist and you declare nothing we do works. No wonder.

FranzFerdiNaN2• 1 year ago

We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. Guess we should just let companies go hogwild and create a cyberpunk dystopia.

benchly• 1 year ago

Or worse, destabilize society to the point of catastrophic collapse like the Accelerationists depicted in Mountainhead, though that film was pulling punches.

fifticon3• 1 year ago

It partially used to work, but a lot of the legal underpinnings were dismantled in the late 90's, and parts of it possibly also in the reagan era. Right now, MS is doing again with Edge, what they were already slapped rather harshly for, back in the 90's.

swiftcoder6• 1 year ago

MS is doing again with Edge, what they were already slapped rather harshly for, back in the 90's

The situation feels a little bit different, given that they in this case the ones going up against a deeply-entrenched web monopoly, with a fork of that monopoly's own codebase...

accurrent• 1 year ago

I feel like we bolt anti-trust after a market has developed. For instance, we go after big tech once it has entrenched itself. Whatabout taking pro-active action. For instance, in the ML market we should be sponsoring a gajillion companies to take on chip design so that we don't end up with a future where NVidia is the sole provider of AI chips. We should foster open standards and penalize companies for not adopting/hijacking them where possible. Similarly we need to make sure the zoo of ML model providers survives rather than consolidateing to a few. I think there may be ways to do this without being adverserial about it.

davemp• 1 year ago

NIST is supposed to serve this purpose but is very underfunded

intended2• 1 year ago

Anti trust forced a different behavior on the MSFT borg of that era. Threats with teeth force firms to treat them seriously.

int_19h• 1 year ago

This is very much not true. Microsoft was forced into publishing a lot of documentation through anti-trust, which is why e.g. Office document formats or SMB protocol are published (and used for interop by projects such as Samba).

The problem was not enough anti-trust, not that it doesn't work.

untitled22• 1 year ago

How about just don't use their services and boycott their tech stacks at work? I know, it requires some brain use and more than just shouting at the cloud, but it's doable.

Turskarama4• 1 year ago

A few individuals doing that is meaningless. Individual action only matters if you can get a critical mass of people on board.

It also ignores the reality of the prisoners dilemma, in that a service can be bad for society over all but within that society it is better to use it than to not. Everyone driving around huge cars is a clear example of this. When a scenario like this is identified the correct thing to do is regulate it with law.

jamesblonde• 1 year ago

Great points. No idea why you are being downvoted.

YetAnotherNick• 1 year ago

Why do you want to be not "meaningless"? If they don't like something that they don't have to use, they are free to do that. How is breaking up big tech going to solve anything.

Also big companies are easiest to regulate and all the countries regulate them all the time. If you have 100 different TikToks, they threaten democracy even more as the profit incentive push towards extremism in any case.

untitled22• 1 year ago

Be the change you want to see in the world. And lead by example. And forget the lemmings - you can help only these who want to get helped.

Frankly, your call to 'critical mass' reminds me of sjw and leftist propaganda.

JoshTriplett• 1 year ago

A few individuals doing that is meaningless. Individual action only matters if you can get a critical mass of people on board.

The same should be true of democracy, but unfortunately, in representative democracy, you only need to convince a few representatives, which does not actually require a critical mass of people agreeing.

bilbo0s3• 1 year ago

This is the way.

Boycotts are the one democratic practice that hits a company's bottom line. Just ask Target.

heikkilevanto• 1 year ago

I have been using Linux both home and at work for the last couple of decades. I am thinking of degoogling my life, it is a bit harder, but I think I will get it done some day soon.

And meanwhile, at least one Danish ministry has decided to drop Microsoft Office, and more are likely to follow if that goes well.

So, there is some movement to the right direction, but big changes take a long time...

aklemm• 1 year ago

This story is exactly where it was 20 years ago, I’m afraid.

fergie• 1 year ago

Europe has a number of loopholes for the accumulation of wealth that have traditionally been used by the aristocracy. These apparently only become problematic to the signatories when members of the bourgeoisie, for example tech entrepreneurs, start using them as well.

There is a general need for taxation on wealth rather than labor in western societies. Its silly to single out big tech companies, which are actually an example of capitalism and free markets doing good: creating and rewarding the best products.

addcommitpush2• 1 year ago

What is the split between aristocrats and bourgeois among the wealthiest Europeans?

Looking at the richest Europeans [0], they all seem to be bourgeois.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Europeans_by_net_worth

seydor2• 1 year ago

Fighting insanity with more insanity: Asking the EU to force break up american corporations.

There is a simple path to EU sovereignity, china has already done it: Ban US services in order to spring up local alternatives. Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling. then you won't have to bother with "big tech".

But all of that would require doing actual work, and judging by the list of signatories, they don't want to do it.

sofixa4• 1 year ago

Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling

Social media, yes. There are no network effects on most other "big tech" mono/oligopolies - using Google vs Bing vs Kagi or Claude.ai vs ChatGPT vs Gemini or Android vs iOS (other than in the US) or BackMarket vs Amazon vs AliExpress, etc.

gpt5• 1 year ago

Economies of scale are essentially a form of network effect (which is defined as a phenomenon where product gains value as more people use it).

In addition, every example you had benefits from traditional network effects: Amazon is a two sided marketplace with sellers and buyers.

Google connect searchers to websites, who in return allow Googlebot to scrape them freely (unlike your IP) - and also rank results by the way other users clicked.

harvey9• 1 year ago

There are product ecosystems for b2b, and availability of skilled staff is often greater for big brand tools. I would like to see more use of and contribution to foss in Europe.

npteljes2• 1 year ago

I agree with you. Amazon and Ali are not good examples though, as they are subject of the network effect still: the more people are on there, the more desirable they are. But the rest are not subject to it, almost at all. Other different synergies, yes, but not the network effect specifically.

victorbjorklund• 1 year ago

Google vs Bing vs Kagi

The business of Google and Bing is not providing searches in exchange for fees (that is a tiny tiny part of their business) but rather advertising. And there is for sure network effects for ad networks. Advertisers wanna advertise on the platform that has more eyeballs. Why are Google ads selling at a premium vs Bing Ads? Because more advertisers wanna use Google Ads because that is where 90% of search traffic is. If I start my own search engine with a 1000 users per day no one is going to buy ads for that search engine.

Of course one could say that search should not be a free service (paid by ads) and instead everyone should just pay for a search engine like Kagi. But that is not the reality we live in.

raz32dust• 1 year ago

This is vastly oversimplifying things. US would put tremendous diplomatic and other means of pressure if EU does serious harm to tech companies. US-EU and US-China relation is very different.

swiftcoder6• 1 year ago

US-EU and US-China relation is very different

It certainly was very different - maybe less clear that it will remain so.

The whole tariffs debacle, the threat that the US won't back NATO allies in the event of Russian aggression, wavering US support for Ukraine... The EU is starting to see a need to pivot away from reliance on the US.

Without that relationship, a lot of US tech firm offerings are going to look much worse (i.e. we might quickly see an end to overlooking blatant tax evasion and GDPR violations)

FranzFerdiNaN2• 1 year ago

US would put tremendous diplomatic and other means of pressure if EU does serious harm to tech companies.

Even more reason that the EU should work as hard as possible to get rid of their reliance on American companies. America is no longer a trusted partner.

mrtksn• 1 year ago

Europe can just ignore that, in a week or two the US leadership will have another agenda. If things get too intense EU can buy some trump coins.

Nobody cares about company fundamentals anymore, so for most Americans this would be a trading opportunity. Many will buy the dip and the stocks with rise back even if half of their revenue streams are gone.

npteljes2• 1 year ago

There is one even simpler: ban foreign services, or even software products outright, from govt operations. It would change the landscape instantly, and dramatically. And it would provide a much greater independence in tech, and also help foster independence as a culture.

Havoc• 1 year ago

Don't think EU could do an outright ban. Would need to be a decade+ transition.

They really should aggressively push this though

PartiallyTyped• 1 year ago

Unless European companies start paying higher salaries it won’t happen, and unless we come up with ways to get more funding in startups that won’t happen either.

The former is to some extend a consequence of the latter, which is a consequence of EU being a confederation and not a federation, we have N smaller markets all competing with each other. Who do we kid other than ourselves by expressing that we can compete?

We are fundamentally and structurally crippled and as long as we think ourselves $Nationalify first and Europeans second, we are doomed to stay second if not third.

whacko_quacko3• 1 year ago

I agree, that the EU breaking up the tech giants is insane, but I don't think that banning them is much better. How would you enforce this? I don't want a big firewall like china has.

I'd argue for open protocols that allow exporting your data and switching services instead. Make export capabilities a requirement akin to data protection laws, and you have defanged the monopolistic nature of tech. Ideally also force interoperability between services, but that's a whole other can of worms.

This is on paper obviously much harder than just banning something, because you would have to define such exchange protocols, but it has a chance of success. One could start with certain industries, like social media, and in some cases build on existing work, like the AT or ActivityPub protocols.

DSingularity• 1 year ago

You can enforce it if you provide alternatives. The problem is they don’t want to do that part.

harimau7774• 1 year ago

I don't know if this is a good idea, but could you enforce it at the level of corporations? Similar to how, at various times, pirating software like Photoshop was endemic for non-professional use, but Adobe mostly didn't worry about it as long as they could make sure that companies were buying licenses.

imiric7• 1 year ago

Fighting insanity with more insanity: Asking the EU to force break up american corporations.

If the corporations conduct business in the EU, they must abide by EU regulation. How this impacts the corporations in practice is not EU's concern. Requiring a break up seems sensible given the situation.

Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling

No, tech itself isn't inherently monopolistic. Companies that operate with centralized resources are. The solution is technology that operates in a decentralized way, which has existed since the dawn of the internet. The main reason companies don't like it is precisely because it doesn't allow them to control resources and hoard capital.

intended2• 1 year ago

I raise the counter that all decentralized systems eventually become centralized once they reach mass appeal.

At a mass scale, the users on the network are not sophisticated or trained, and end up having very common failures that result in a move to a trusted central authority.

Your account got taken over? Need to reverse transactions? Need recourse if someone defrauded you? Don’t want to check each factoid you read? Need to ensure that users are not spreading actual terror content?

Bad actors alone, are a sufficient force that generates social pressure that drives centralization through regulation.

But thats an easy example, the other force is the unsophistication of the average person - as a result they gravitate towards tools that simplify their lives, and do a lot of the work they are not interested in doing.

When network effects come into play, this creates a pressure where firms with more resources buy smaller players and consolidate, once again creating a small network.

People don’t want to deal with the over head of creating new accounts for example, or the overhead of moving their content from X service to Y.

hopelite• 1 year ago

No, tech itself isn't inherently monopolistic. Companies that operate with centralized resources are. The solution is technology that operates in a decentralized way

To emphasize that a bit; I argue what we need is public, open standards that, e.g., prevent social media lock-in or make government computer and networking contracts open to real competition, not just Microsoft licensed resellers competing on who adds less middleman markup.

veunes5• 1 year ago

That's one way to look at it, though an outright ban might cause a lot of collateral damage for users and businesses

oezi• 1 year ago

I think the EU is fighting a hard fight with the tech companies and is doing so within a framework which doesn't seek to alienate the US. Alternate app stores, global minimum taxation, etc. are really hard fights.

znpy• 1 year ago

Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling.

The so called "network effect" is entirely artificial.

When the FAANG-level companies did not exist yet, services were designed to be interoperable, and those system stood the test of time.

Trivial example: e-mail/SMTP and BGP.

seydor2• 1 year ago

Gmail and few other email providers have largely taken over. If you are not on good terms with them , email does not get delivered. Hence why every professional uses a cloud mailers. And BGP ... the reason why everyone uses cloudflare.

In an ideal world we d all be decentralized but the world is not ideal. The world has gravitated towards centralization in all the networking levels

mindslight• 1 year ago

The so called "network effect" is entirely artificial.

Your framing is wrong - network effects exist. Before the surveillance industry took over, the network effects accrued to protocols. Hence the popularity of SMTP (et al).

Competitive regulation, on either side of the pond, wouldn't focused on blindly "breaking up" tech companies. Rather it starts with declaring that hosted services and client software are separate products/markets, and that tying the two types of products together is anti-competitive. Thus any hosted server functionality that a proprietary webapp or mobileapp front end uses, must be through a openly published API for other competing apps to also access.

Users can then choose competing apps, and services have an incentive to make their APIs match existing apps (to facilitate easy switching to them). And with that same API, competing hosted services can access content published on the original hosted service - federation naturally falls out. In other words, preventing companies from creating friction so that network effects accrue to themselves will make the network effects accrue to protocols/interfaces again.

benoau• 1 year ago

Fighting insanity with more insanity: Asking the EU to force break up american corporations.

The DOJ is literally asking Google be broken up...

hintymad• 1 year ago

Fighting insanity with more insanity

Yeah. Big tech bad, but big non-elected government (EU) good?

awongh3• 1 year ago

I'm not against this in principle but I am a little skeptical that it would actually work in this case- I think search could be a good case for this (Google) but it's also in the process of being disrupted by LLMs so I feel like it's becoming less relevant.

One thing that I do believe could be relevant is regulation that forces open the platforms- social media and messaging as an open standard. Now that the technical underpinnings of it are well understood I don't know why we couldn't have an open standard for making posts that my real friends could see and rich-media standard for me sending messages and being in group messages. It's ridiculous that we're locked into these messaging platforms that want to show us ads when the tech to run these things is well understood and should be commodified in a more open market. The cost of switching should be near zero.

fifticon3• 1 year ago

These communication platforms are a source of power and control, there are big interests involved who do not want to let this opportunity for power slip between their fingers.

blackqueeriroh3• 1 year ago

And you think OpenAI (long rumored to be an interested buyer of Chrome) is less of an interest?

dgellow5• 1 year ago

You’re not actually locked, and the open protocols exist

awongh3• 1 year ago

You're locked in because everyone else is already on the closed one and the switching costs are too high.

If the big companies were legally required to allow you to migrate your group texts onto another platform with a push of a button then I would say you're not locked in anymore.

Companies would complain that "it's not technically possible"- but of course we all know it's completely doable.

logicchains• 1 year ago

Europe can't even build its own tech companies and now it's trying to destroy foreign ones. Fundamentally the European cultural hostility to business and change is not compatible with a modern tech economy, and it'll continue to fall further and further behind the US and Asia, as GDP per capita in western Europe remains stagnant.

A question to Europeans here, why do you believe that the bureaucracy that's been so completely ineffective at facilitating the growth of modern tech companies in Europe, should be given even more power and control?

TheOtherHobbes• 1 year ago

I didn't realise Spotify, Revolut, Wise, Nokia, and Mistral weren't tech companies.

Of course you haven't heard of some of them because you're in the US, which is still struggling with the concept of instant bank payments, paid leave, and non-lethal health care. And the gloriously unbureaucratic IRS still expects some communications to arrive by fax.

abc123abc1232• 1 year ago

Revolut has ties to russia, and nokia wasted a lead in cellphones and is now a shadow of its former self. Spotify, yeah, you can count the nr of jobs Spotify has created and compare it with the nr of jobs google has created. Then you can count how manny spotifys are needed to make up the difference. Wake up, europe is dying and its the fault of socialism.

pron• 1 year ago

Because fostering the growth of tech companies isn't the most important thing, and the European bureaucracy has been more effective than the American one at more important things, including reducing the harm of Big Tech.

I'm not opposed to more robust growth, but not at the cost of becoming America. Of course, the slower growth was caused in great part by wars and the mass killing and/or expulsion of a significant portion of the population, while America prospered thanks to mass immigration. These things are changing.

That's not to say that an elaborate bureaucracy isn't built into Europe's DNA. After all, this is a continent that was largely shaped and governed by the Catholic church for a long, long time. At least in some respects, the European civilisation is more similar to the Chinese civilisation than to the American one.

abc123abc1232• 1 year ago

Amen! Europe will be a future tourist paradise for wealthy foreigners, and it will be the king of low wage service industries. I always encourage smart people to move to the US or Asia, where there is a bright future waiting for them. Europe is dying as long as people and politicians keep pushing socialism.

microtonal2• 1 year ago

It is not given that regulation leads to worse outcomes. For example, healthcare is regulated in most Western European countries, but we have better healthcare at lower cost (emphasizing the latter part, because people often come in with some story that the US is subsidizing Europe).

Besides that we have a lot more protection against big tech through better privacy laws. Enforcement has not been perfect yet, but we see a lot of day-to-day improvements (like in Europe you can use Facebook without ad tracking, currently it's paid, but the EU found that not to be legal).

I think one thing to keep in mind is that a lot of tech companies make a lot of money by externalizing cost and exploiting societies. Like Uber took the market by ignoring local labor laws. Meal delivery companies replaced regular wage (with benefits) workers by contract workers (luckily found to be illegal here now). Closed AI companies are taking all the creative work by millions of people to make their money-generating models without giving anything back. Amazon operated at cut-throat margins to destroy local (mom and pop) shops and raised prices once pretty much all competition was destroyed. Klarna earns money by preying on people who do not have the money to buy something, but are algorithmically tricked into buying stuff they probably don't need.

A subset of tech is just transferring monetary/cultural/etc. wealth from society to a small group of billionaires and it's ripping apart society.

addcommitpush2• 1 year ago

workers by contract workers (luckily found to be illegal here now).

Note that, at least for France, it was not found to be illegal to use contract workers; rather the jobs-as-they-existed were really employment contracts according to the reality of the arrangement and not procurement contracts; merely not calling them "employment contract" does not absolve the parties of the obligation of a work contract.

throwaway188752• 1 year ago

Europe can't even build its own tech companies

I'm not sure where this notion comes from. First, Europe does build its own tech companies — Bolt, Bol, SoundCloud, and Spotify, which started in Sweden. Second, do we really consider companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, and Twitter as pure progress?

I think the case is that the US has been really good at promoting its domestic products. Another reason why the US has more tech companies, and why more companies move to the US, is the lack of legislation for worker protection. However, this is the same argument as to why most products are manufactured in China.

GDP per capita in western Europe remains stagnant

First, this is clearly not true [1]. Second, GDP per capita is a poor metric for assessing wealth and quality of life [2].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?.... [2]: https://time.com/5118026/gdp-metric-success-wealth/

dgellow5• 1 year ago

Startups move to the us because of the ease of access to VCs (or capital in general)

I'm not sure where this notion comes from.

From the outside the EU sounds like on large unit. Where in facts it is a fragmented group. The EU has plenty of tech companies but it is pretty competitive when you have that many countries to cater to, each with their own culture, language, and laws. So you will target a specific market - like France, with marketing in french, adapted to the French context. Expanding to anew place is expensive and difficult. So you end up with lots of local, small/medium size businesses instead of one unified large business.

Just my personal opinion living here. And not saying it’s bad, it’s just a different dynamic

intelVISA• 1 year ago

It must be tough running a Euro company, your own taxes end up funding your competitors!

European cultural hostility to business

Is that the real issue? I thought it was that trying to compete in such a stacked market, against the incumbent Usual Suspects who are gorged on "R&D investment" packages makes SF VC look a cakewalk so you just move to the US instead.

swiftcoder6• 1 year ago

why do you believe that the bureaucracy that's been so completely ineffective at facilitating the growth of modern tech companies in Europe

I don't think anyone believes that European-based BigTech monopolies would be particularly more beneficial than the current US-based ones. Pretty much the whole point is not to facilitate massive tech monopolies in the first place (and to break them up whenever they do emerge, a la the US breakup of Ma Bell)

jillesvangurp• 1 year ago

You seem to be under the impression that things are inherently better in the US. They really aren't. California easily rivals the worst corners of German bureaucracy. The only positive thing you can say about it is that you can do things in English there. And California easily matches its tax pressure. It's an expensive place.

I'm singling out that state because that's where most of the software innovation comes from and it's GDP is a bit of an outlier. Outside of California, the US is a bit of a mixed bag of states that is actually not that dissimilar to much of western Europe for things like growth, prosperity, and indeed GDP/capita. Some states like Texas have natural resources (and a relaxed attitude towards planetary destruction) that explains much of its economics.

Most of the wealth in the US is concentrated in a relatively small number of states where it is concentrated with small groups of people (the rest isn't that wealthy). If you take Germany and compare it to each of the states in the US, it probably comes out on top of many of them for metrics as GDP per capita, happiness, innovation, etc. Sure, it's maybe not a power house like California when it comes to software. But it's not like most of the US is doing that well on that front.

And if you start looking at healthcare, the alarmingly large prison population, and general levels of misery among the population, it's really not that amazing of a place any more. You might have more dollars. But they are worth a lot more in Europe than they are in the US. The same money buys you a lot more goods, services, housing, and quality of life over here. There are a lot of things that are kind of broken in the US. And that has a lot to do with its policies.

And there's more to technology than just software. Tesla definitely buys German machines when they want the best. And a lot of those wind mills popping up on in coastal waters, made in Europe too. The US automotive sector kind of imploded in recent years. If it weren't for the import tariffs, there would be a lot more European and Chinese cars on the roads there. Machines to make chips come from ASML, which is based in the Netherlands. There's nano tech, nuclear fusion (several companies active in the EU breaking records), etc.

And the thing with software is that it's easily copied and imitated. A lot of what MS, Meta, and others do isn't exactly rocket science. Whatever moat the US has there, it isn't geographic.

m000• 1 year ago

A question to Europeans here, why do you believe that the bureaucracy that's been so completely ineffective at facilitating the growth of modern tech companies in Europe, should be given even more power and control?

US-style "supergrowth" of modern tech companies is arguably at the expense of public interest. If anything else, I'm glad the EU has the bureucracy in place to contain it.

veunes5• 1 year ago

There's definitely truth to the argument that EU bureaucracy often stifles innovation, but it's not quite so black and white. The aim here isn't just to "destroy foreign companies," it's to enforce competition and curb abuses of dominance

immibis3• 1 year ago

Maybe they want the bureaucracy that halts growth of tech companies to have more power and control because they want growth of tech companies to be halted?

Europe runs on real freedom of choice, not 5 nationwide chains that do everything. MNT runs out of someone's apartment in Berlin.

Mistletoe• 1 year ago

I would put forth the assertion that Big Tech is more damaging than Standard Oil or US steel ever were. Altering the human mind at will is so much more dangerous than higher oil or steel prices ever could be.

fifticon3• 1 year ago

I'm willing to call them equally bad. Making the world inhospitable through global warning, is pretty high on the list in my view..

kortilla• 1 year ago

Neither of those were concerns for US steel or standard oil breakups.

blibble• 1 year ago

big tech on their way to speedrunning that too, with the AI data centre buildout

https://esgnews.com/ai-boom-drives-150-surge-in-indirect-emi...

hosteur• 1 year ago

You don’t think global warming would happen regardless of oil being sold by a monopoly or not?

blackqueeriroh3• 1 year ago

lol, “altering the human mind at will” is a pretty wild claim. Without people choosing to open phones? Computers? Spending hours on the internet a day?

sofixa4• 1 year ago

Without people choosing to open phones? Computers? Spending hours on the internet a day?

Exploiting basic human psychology to incite people to come back to consume whatever you're giving them (small dopamine hits) doesn't absolve the people doing it, but it doesn't absolve the people exploiting it either.

“altering the human mind at will” is a pretty wild claim

How is it wild? Humans are social animals, and there have been numerous studies on the effect of social media on teenagers (up to and including body dysmorphia and suicides) or politics, including influencing the results of referenda or elections, or even starting riots.

swiftcoder6• 1 year ago

People don't really choose those things anymore. A generation of us got to choose it a long while back, but the last few decades of everyone making that same choice has made it pretty inevitable - you can't bank without a smartphone, you can't do shit without access to email and/or SMS, you can't stay in contact with friends without a popular instant messaging platform...

Short of moving to a cabin in the woods, network effects hold us all hostage to the mind-altering, ad-delivering, capitalism machine

veunes5• 1 year ago

It's not just about market dominance or pricing anymore; it's about shaping public discourse

keiferski2• 1 year ago

As an American living in Europe for the last decade: there are actually quite a few small tech companies that are quite strong in their regions. I’m thinking of companies like Allegro.pl, which IMO is better than Amazon.

The problem seems to be that there is no real coherence to expanding local companies beyond their origin countries. Partially because of other competitors, which each country wants to promote their own, and partially because the whole infrastructure for serving ~30 states is a headache.

IMO major benefits would come from investing heavily into translation AI tech. Europe will never have one main language, and so it won’t have the single unified cultural market that China or the US have. But that can be reduced dramatically to make it as seamless as possible.

soco• 1 year ago

Now if there was some kind of interoperability standard... but anyway yes I can confirm: most "local" cloud providers are much too local for the taste of big consumers, and those big consumers (banks, insurances...) usually dictate the market direction. What is also helping is the amount of paperwork the big tech can provide to cya reasons - apparently the smaller folks aren't trusted to compete on the legal fronts.

yu3zhou4• 1 year ago

Allegro is really a top notch service, they already scaled to other EU countries, I hope they will go global one day. Same for BLIK (instant payments with a numeric code) and InPost (very quick packages delivery to package machines all over the country)

keiferski2• 1 year ago

BLIK is awesome and really makes American payment systems seem like a generation behind.

veunes5• 1 year ago

Even basic things like payment systems, logistics, and consumer protection rules vary a lot

sylware• 1 year ago

In order to do that, you have to consider the technical plane, or big tech will work around everything, maliciously: we need _lean_ open source software (including the SDK) and protocols, stable in time. This will foster real-life citizen/local/commercial alternatives. This is actually hard and dynamic to do, people in charge will face acute lobbying and pressure, and they have to bath in technical sauce all the time.

For instance the web: noscript/basic (x)html for all dominant/critical online services, where reasonable. Or you will be jailed into the 2.5 engines of the whatng cartel. A few years back I could buy thingies with wallet codes using lynx/links/elinks/netsurf/w3m/etc web browsers on amazon.fr... now you MUST have a whatng web engine... how convenient... and recently, noscript browsers (which have a "non famous" user agent string), won't be able to perform a search on google anymore...

Video streaming sites can put text ads (clearly identified) into a 2D HTML document and can provide HLS/dash/etc <video>&|<audio> URLs (and can inject ads into the video stream if they want to) which the browser will send to a media player.

Chatting? One-time-usage IRC bridge URL with optional custom IRC commands which the browser will send to a IRC client?

Namely, you can augment this noscript/basic (x)html portal with some "web APIs" or even leaner(simpler?) protocols, with proper online publication and definition ofc.

The same attention should be given to the usage of PDF too. Generating a PDF with only utf-8 text should be "easy" and it is actually not really the case.

And the list goes on.

And you cannot 'break up' US companies, but you can make them "behave" if they want to do business in EU, and don't forget they have the backing of funds with thousands of billions of $ and they already have their own billions, in other words: there is ZERO, Z-E-R-O, economic competition here as they can spend out of business everybody (what they usually do over cycles of ~5-10 years or even longer) or "buy" anybody (until properly "disabled", then they are thrown away).

Don't forget about EU companies and gov administrations too... those can be straighten with much more convincing.

Basically the benchmark is the following: where appropriate, it should be "reasonable" for a few average devs/one average dev, with a lean SDK (including the programming language), to write real-life alternatives (citizen/local/commercial).

maizeq• 1 year ago

I would encourage everyone to check out the other two major priorities of this movement. Of particular importance I think is the removal of recommender systems and opaque algorithms from feeds, which can and have been powerful instigators of misinformation, propaganda and discord.

veunes5• 1 year ago

While monopoly power is an issue, fragmentation could also lead to unintended consequences (think privacy/security fragmentation or entrenching local gatekeepers). I'm skeptical this kind of structural breakup would magically “fix” the internet, but stronger and more consistent enforcement of existing competition and privacy laws seems like a good starting point

zetsurin• 1 year ago

privacy/security fragmentation

giant big tech data leak:https://www.yahoo.com/news/16-billion-passwords-apple-facebo... yesterday?

bluecalm6• 1 year ago

They keep mentioning Google ad monopoly and how it "unfairly sucks revenue from publishers, killing journalism and the news media, while forcing consumers to pay more through an “adtech tax” to industry middlemen.".

Those publishers don't have to be listed by Google, they can opt out, right? Let's assume Google disappears, how are publishers getting more money that they are getting now? Do they envision some publishers' owned search engine more efficient than Google which people flock to once other options are removed? Can someone convince me that Google is actually bad for traditional publishers/journalists?

crest• 1 year ago

If the Google and their ad + search monopoly went away tomorrow all the publishers would start on equal footing. Opting out while Google still runs its monopoly just kills your medium.

bluecalm6• 1 year ago

Ok, so they start on equal footing but how is that good for them? People will just watch their favorite influencers on Youtube/Insta/TikTok. They know how to find those already. I mean, how do you envision those businesses (traditional publishers) getting money in a world without Google? I mean specific steps. Are they going to code their own search engine? Advertise on radio and tv so people can find them? I just don't see a scenario that is better for them than the current situation materializing.

lodovic• 1 year ago

To start with, Google is now a mandatory expense for many companies. Because 90% of users have Google as their default search engine, either through Chrome or Safari. And Google pays a lot of money for that. You can say goodbye to Google, but that also means goodbye to 90% of users.

Second, the lack of proper competition in the ad market cannot be healthy for the cost of advertising. It's impossible to become a competitor to Google without sinking billions in costs. There is no pressure on the price so traditional publishers pay way too much for the ads. That ad may never be served, because Google renders a summary of your content next to the search results; and if a user would visit the site regardless, there is AMP - Google sells you ads and then deploys middleware to prevent you from serving them.

owebmaster4• 1 year ago

The same old excuses from Google apologists.

talkingtab• 1 year ago

An accurate diagnosis of a problem is crucial. The problem addressed here is real. The diagnosis is wrong. Big Tech enables the problem and certainly is associated with it. Societies rely on "messaging" to adapt. When messaging is broken, so is the society. The messaging in our social societies is now driven by targeted "advertising". Or more accurately propaganda: "communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade".

And certainly the big tech (here's looking at you Google and FaceBook et al) business model is propaganda. As is the business model of the Washington Post (here's looking at you Jeff Bezos) and the New York Times.

If the messaging in a society is used to persuade rather than listen things break. A simplistic model of is social insects. If ants can't leave a pheromone trail, or if some ants lead misleading trails, the colony will die. It will not be able to adapt.

Breaking up big tech is appealing, but it does not change the fact that we now "live" in the internet and that the current internet is a gigantic propaganda machine.

ethbr15• 1 year ago

Consolidated tech definitely contributes to the phenomenon though, given platforms with substantial market share mandate revenue spend on them.

If there were 100 equal market share ad space providers, what Google does wouldn't have the same impact it does now.

I mean, look at the lobotomized hellscape YouTube's engagement-optimized algorithm has turned its monetized content into, to say nothing of the broader internet, as proof its monopoly hasn't been for the greater good.

bluecalm6• 1 year ago

I considered coming to Mr. Pedro Sanchez' country to do business there. I would even come to one of the poorest regions not to contribute to the housing crisis as I like the weather, fresh food and emptiness of it.

>3% tax on my global wealth every year (in effect it's more like 4.5% because there is also significant capital gain tax)
>60% tax on a semi-decent tech salary
>25%+ capital gain tax for my investors (if I find any)
>people don't speak English, many of them are proud of it
>scheduling anything with anybody is impossible, the concept of being on time doesn't exist
>Bureaucracy is slow, full of paperwork, can't be done online, can't be done in English, the result depends on clerk's mood on a given day
>if someone comes to my house when I am away I can't kick them out, need to find another house and keep paying bills for the new occupa(s)nts

I am sure that once they kick Google out they will make some innovation fund where many government officials find work. Then the money is going to be transferred to the newly sprung industry of innovation grant appliers. It will be a lot of money for a lot of people. In the middle of it a new search engine arises - made by a disgruntled European in Singapore.

Garcia98• 1 year ago

As a Spaniard who was about to take a well-deserved siesta, I found these points so blatantly inaccurate that I had to get up and address them.

>3% tax on my global wealth every year (in effect it's more like 4.5% because there is also significant capital gain tax)

This only affects multi-millionaires, and even then, your numbers are wrong. The national wealth tax only applies to net worth over €3M. The top rate of 3.5% is only for assets over €10.7M. And some regions like Madrid and Andalusia offer a 100% exemption from the regional tax.

>60% tax on a semi-decent tech salary

False. The top income tax bracket is ~47% on earnings over €300K, which is far beyond a "semi-decent" salary here. More importantly, as a foreigner, you can use the "Beckham Law" to pay a flat tax of 24% on your first €600K of income for six years.

>25%+ capital gain tax for my investors (if I find any)

You're cherry-picking the highest rate again. It's a progressive tax starting at 19%. It only exceeds 25% on gains over €200K. Besides, if your investors are not in Spain, they are taxed in their country of residence under its tax treaties with Spain.

>people don't speak English, many of them are proud of it

We are not French, we won't scold you for trying to speak English. While not everyone is fluent in rural areas, people will genuinely try their best to help you, even if it's through Google Translate.

>scheduling anything with anybody is impossible, the concept of being on time doesn't exist

You're confusing social life with professional life. Yes, we might be 15 minutes late for a beer, but in a business context, being late is just as unprofessional here as it is in London or New York.

>Bureaucracy is slow, full of paperwork, can't be done online, can't be done in English, the result depends on clerk's mood on a given day

Spanish bureaucracy is as slow as in anywhere else, but it is indeed digitized. You are required to file your tax forms (available in English btw) digitally, and you can register a business, get your SSN, etc., with a digital certificate from your computer. I've only had to show up in person once in the last five years to register my address after moving to a new city.

>if someone comes to my house when I am away I can't kick them out, need to find another house and keep paying bills for the new occupa(s)nts

This is just rage bait. What you are describing, someone entering your primary home, is trespassing, a criminal offense. The police will have them evicted within 48 hours. The infamous "okupa" issue applies to properties that are clearly abandoned or second homes left empty for years, not your actual residence.

bluecalm6• 1 year ago

>This only affects multi-millionaires, and even then, your numbers are wrong. The national wealth tax only applies to net worth over €3M. The top rate of 3.5% is only for assets over €10.7M. And some regions like Madrid and Andalusia offer a 100% exemption from the regional tax.

Who do you think is going to build/finance businesses if not people with significant NW? Also central government removed Andalucia's and Madrid's exemptions lately.

>False. The top income tax bracket is ~47% on earnings over €300K, which is far beyond a "semi-decent" salary here. More importantly, as a foreigner, you can use the "Beckham Law" to pay a flat tax of 24% on your first €600K of income for six years.

Add health care and employer contributions.

>You're cherry-picking the highest rate again. It's a progressive tax starting at 19%. It only exceeds 25% on gains over €200K. Besides, if your investors are not in Spain, they are taxed in their country of residence under its tax treaties with Spain.

I am "cherry picking" the case that applies to me. If I live in Spain they would take around 4% of my net worth every year just for me being there. That's an expensive proposition.

>We are not French, we won't scold you for trying to speak English. While not everyone is fluent in rural areas, people will genuinely try their best to help you, even if it's through Google Translate.

Major problem in EU is that we don't have a common language. Teaching English and making it 2nd official language everywhere should be a top priority. Otherwise we will never have the start American companies have. You will not built a big company if you can't hire and work in English. Tech sector won't happen if tech people don't speak a common language. It will not be Spanish/French/German or Polish (my own).

>You're confusing social life with professional life. Yes, we might be 15 minutes late for a beer, but in a business context, being late is just as unprofessional here as it is in London or New York.

Not my experience sadly.

>This is just rage bait. What you are describing, someone entering your primary home, is trespassing, a criminal offense. The police will have them evicted within 48 hours. The infamous "okupa" issue applies to properties that are clearly abandoned or second homes left empty for years, not your actual residence.

There are multiple reports of foreigners living in Spain living for vacation and having their house taken away by ocupas.

DanAtC• 1 year ago

[flagged]

oldjim798• 1 year ago

Can't come soon enough. Anything that is bad for big tech's business models is good for society. Break'em up, regulate them, ban algorithmic feeds, anything to reduce the impact these firms have on our world.

Break Up Big Tech: Civil Society Declaration

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