Critics say EU risks ceding control of its tech laws under U.S. pressure

https://www.politico.eu/article/fatal-decision-eu-slammed-for-caving-to-us-pressure-on-digital-rules/

242 87 4 months ago

pjc502• 4 months ago

Specifically, this is another Parliament vs Commission issue. The Commission loves to have little deals away from the public where everything is quietly smoothed over, while the Parliament is trying to build popular legitimacy.

vintermann• 4 months ago

Also, I'm not sure there's much pressure involved. Mass surveillance is a thing "centrist" EU politicians very much want themselves.

mc32• 4 months ago

It’s the public/private dichotomy you see everywhere.

Publicly pols say one thing or stand for one thing and privately they hold different views.

benoau6• 4 months ago

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly voiced his dissatisfaction and sought support from Trump, while Apple’s Tim Cook reportedly asked the White House to directly intervene against EU fines imposed on his company.

https://www.euractiv.com/news/widespread-alarm-over-commissi...

Apple even went so far as to demand the EU repeal these laws, and is likely still non-compliant in several ways; for which they should have been fined tens of billions of dollars by now!

https://www.reuters.com/business/apple-urges-eu-regulators-t...

Trump has delivered for them, made it a point of contention for trade deals and threatened sanctions on anyone enforcing them.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-weighs...

rayiner3• 4 months ago

The EU should abandon the stupid Commission structure and have a real Parliament that can actually draft legislation. The current one can just vote down legislation drafted by the Commission.

AnthonyMouse3• 4 months ago

What they ought to do is have a process for passing EU-wide laws where they get introduced by a popularly elected legislature but to be enacted they also have to be approved by the majority of the legislatures of the member states. That gives you a good check on centralized power grabs because the member states have to approve anything that could usurp their role, but you can still pass things that make sense at that level like a common set of antitrust rules.

M95D3• 4 months ago

NO! Laws should be drafted by lawyers and professionals in those fields. An election would select lawmakers by popularity contest. Can't expect good laws from tht kind of people.

What's needed is accountability for drafted laws and removal of those who repeatedly draft laws rejected by parliament.

TacticalCoder• 4 months ago

The Commission loves to have little deals away from the public where everything is quietly smoothed over ...

And there's money spent lobbying in Brussels (where the EU Commission is) than lobbying in the entire US.

And corrupt eurocrats are known to be very cheap whores.

shevy-java• 4 months ago

Isn't it strange how Washington makes laws in the EU?

I wonder if these lobbyists get paid a lot.

skrebbel2• 4 months ago

Meh, you're right but the EU also makes laws in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect). In the end it's not about who makes the law but whether it's a good law. Ecodesign laws making US vacuum cleaners more economical is good. Trade pressures undermining EU privacy protections maybe not so good.

MarcelOlsz• 4 months ago

I like how out of all examples to pit up against eroding privacy protections was consumer vacuum stuff from ages ago.

malicka• 4 months ago

Money is the international language, after all. Why would oligarchs limit their influence to their own country?

benoau6• 4 months ago

All this so Meta and X can sell politically divisive and hateful advertising with zero transparency.

m-s-y• 4 months ago

Is it just me or is there not actual meat to this article? Like what specifically are the rules at issue here?

benoau6• 4 months ago

The "Digital Services Act" effectively takes the divisive dark money out of advertising and requires more than minimum-effort moderation, affecting Meta and X:

- bans targeted advertising based on a person’s sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or political beliefs and puts restrictions on targeting ads to children

- requires transparency on content algorithms and advertising

- requires online platforms prevent and remove posts containing illegal goods, services, or content in a timely fashion

The "Digital Markets Act" requires interoperability and competition:

- requires Apple to allow competing app stores, very contentious for Apple who invented a stack of fees for this

- requires Apple and Google to allow apps to freely use 3rd party payments, this is very contentious for Apple and they still charge for doing so

- allow 3rd parties interoperability, eg headphones and smartwatches for Apple and messaging clients for Meta, this is starting to improve

- allow removal of preinstalled apps, settings of new defaults, this is largely done although malicious compliance has kept rival browsers at bay on iPhone

input_sh• 4 months ago

Digital Services Act / Digital Markets Act (similar in spirit, but one targets online stores like Google Play, another one online services like Instagram more generally)

More specifically, both are already in effect, outlawing certain things, and designating certain companies as "digital gatekeepers" when they reach a certain threshold of users within the EU.

These regulations don't really specify what every gatekeeper needs to actually do (above the bare minimum), but say that once a company is designated as a gatekeeper, corrective action to prevent their monopolistic behaviour are going to be decided on a case-by-case basis. In practice this means that corrective actions can be something very significant (like iOS having to ask EU users to set a default browser during device setup instead of defaulting to Safari) or nothing, which is why this direct line of conversation shows spinelessness.

It's pretty much an equivalent of a judge having open discussions with a criminal about how the court should interpret the law to suit the criminal better.

mikkupikku4• 4 months ago

After decades of trying and broadly failing to regulate American tech corps, at what point does the EU admit that leveling fines against Meta will never stop Meta from being Meta, that American megacorps are essentially ungovernable in Europe (or elsewhere for that matter) and the best course of action is to ban and block them in Europe?

Just more fines. Bigger fines, surely this will work eventually... It's been 20 years, its not working. A new approach is needed.

Gud• 4 months ago

Levy harder fines until they go away? At least some money goes into the union

alephnerd• 4 months ago

After decades of trying and broadly failing to regulate American tech corps, at what point does the EU...

The crux of the matter is it's a subset of the European Parliament versus a subset of EU member states.

When push comes to shove, EU member states can and already do ignore the EP for anything tangentially related to national security, and national politicans don't and won't give up sovereign power to the EU.

Additonally, the incentives of individual EU states with strong US FDI ties and not as strong domestic champions such as Poland, Ireland, Czechia, Luxembourg, and Romania means they fight tooth and nail to ensure American FDI continues. Member states like Hungary and Spain do this for China and Hungary and Austria for Russia.

There's also the added issue of perception - the EP was historically (and for larger states like France and Germany still is) used as a way to sideline unpopular domestic politicans or as a cushy retirement posting. There's a reason VdL is in Bruxelles and not the Bundeskanzleramt.

Plus, European companies have massive fixed capital investments in the US, especially after the IRA [0], so they don't want to face retaliation from American regulators, and are especially cozy with the Trump admin [1].

Also, European politicos also heavy leverage the revolving door of lobbying like their American peers. The "spend a couple years in Bundestag or Bruxelles and then take a cushy gig at Harvard [2][3]" remains strong. Heck, we'd always organize a fest where the wine would flow and European leaders would network with American and European policymakers studying and working in the US or in Europe [4].

[0] https://flow.db.com/topics/macro-and-markets/us-german-trade...

[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/trump-bernard-arnault-lv...

[2] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/leo-varadkar

[3] https://ces.fas.harvard.edu/people/ces-alumni/past-policy-fe...

[4] https://euroconf.eu/speakers/

szszrk2• 4 months ago

My monkey brain would love to see if corporate strategy would work here:

For repeating offenses fines should rise much faster, multiplied by 10x-100x every time, until we find fines so big they are physically unable to pay even if corps would consider liquidating their all global assets. Then lower it just slightly, so that being operational in Europe would produce no financial benefits and see if they'll comply, or just quit themselves.

Recent political and technical events makes me question why do we even attempt to keep such strong relations with megacorp businesses (and, by extension, US gov). We would still be here even if multiple megacorps would die. It would take us decades to build up capacity to have complex tech of our own (fully local). But meanwhile we'd be just fine, just less trendy.

benoau6• 4 months ago

The DMA and DSA already allow fines up to 10 - 20% of global turnover (effectively 30 - 40% of annual profit) and breaking up noncompliant companies.

The issue is nobody wants to pull the trigger because the companies that would get fined or broken up have curried favour with Trump to circumvent these consequences.

anthk2• 4 months ago

Block FB at IP level. Every domain, from FB to WA to IG and whatnot. No access from Europe unless you comply with privacy laws.

Isamu• 4 months ago

Well you have to ask why fines aren’t working. In Meta’s case, recent revelations show that they make choices based on how much they stand to make by refusing compliance and just paying the fine. They decided the fine was small relative to the billions they made. A fine could still work but it needs to reach maybe unprecedented punitive levels.

dzink• 4 months ago

Per the book “Careless People” Meta started “backing” right wing candidates everywhere (via algorithms, not money) to avoid regulation and taxes as soon as the EU tried to tax and regulate it more - thus leading to a surge of that sentiment all over the EU.

Xelbair• 4 months ago

the issue isn't fines themselves

it's the fact that fines are part of agency's income and it is their best interest(as a bureaucratic agency) to keep them at highest level where companies will still pay them.

Effectively this makes this a tax, enshittifying everything even worse.

if fines were decoupled from agencies, and had exponentially rising curve for repeat offenses, i think that would work better than ban, as much i would prefer for them to get banned.

PaulDavisThe1st• 4 months ago

it's the fact that fines are part of agency's income and it is their best interest(as a bureaucratic agency) to keep them at highest level where companies will still pay them.

and yet there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they've done this. The fines that have been levied are easy to pay.

troyvit3• 4 months ago

This talk from Cory Doctorow made the rounds on HN when it happened:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

In it he espouses going a little further. He posits that other countries should repeal their versions of the DMCA and just start jailbreaking American megacorps' app stores, hardware, software, etc. and providing their own, much cheaper (or free) versions. Free trade has already broken down, what do they have to lose?

As you might guess he puts it a lot better than I do.

mikkupikku4• 4 months ago

Brilliant idea, my appreciation for Doctorow has grown even more than before.

dehrmann• 4 months ago

Except it's already possible to install a third-party app store or OS on Android devices. The process isn't trivial, but it's officially supported.

SllX2• 4 months ago

Or: a guy who is anti-copyright is performing an angle shoot to see if he can get some legislators to bite.

The EU taking staunchly anti-American positions and targeting American businesses looking for a way to “legally” rob them blind is probably not going to work out for them in the long run.

rescbr• 4 months ago

Free trade has already broken down, what do they have to lose?

The US parking an aircraft carrier nearby so the crew can enjoy a sunny vacation.

Or meddling with elections.

Or both.

SunshineTheCat2• 4 months ago

What you're seeing here is why the US has such a massive amount of leverage over the EU.

The US has for some time fostered an environment where people build and grow businesses. I've started many myself, some totally for fun.

And as it happens some of those US businesses have grown into massive corporations, and yes, some not so great ones too.

I think the EU in general (not everyone of course) leans more in the realm of letting the government take care of everything.

This of course creates dependency, not just on that government, but upon companies who create things that government can't provide.

Because of that dependency upon the government, there isn't any recourse against a business' practices because at some point, the fines and penalties will fall flat.

In the US, a pretty normal response to a bad/annoying/corrupt business is: "ok cool, I'll build a competitor."

If instead of creating a culture of dependency in the EU, one of innovation and creativity was fostered instead, this point in time could be very different.

tokai• 4 months ago

I think the EU in general (not everyone of course) leans more in the realm of letting the government take care of everything.

Your understanding of business in EU countries seems to be make-believe and personal fantasy.

whateverboat3• 4 months ago

At some point, EU needs to build an alternative to those corps and that will never happen as long as they keep holding on to their precious pearl clutching regional and linguistic issues. EU needed to be a single country like 10 years ago.

vincnetas3• 4 months ago

what do you mean by single country? All the cultures in these countries can not disappear in 10, hell even 100 years. And i would prefer that they would not.

mikkupikku4• 4 months ago

Or, they should not globo-homogenize themselves, wiping out their cultures in the process (are you even human? How can you so casually recommend the eradication of Europe's varied cultures?), but should instead ban a handful of American corps which would then create market space for small local competitors.

SpicyLemonZest• 4 months ago

It's very hard to imagine the EU enacting a ban on products that over half of Europeans use, regardless of the theoretical benefits of doing so. It doesn't seem like a practical option.

abletonlive• 4 months ago

Hint: the reason why your observations about reality doesn’t match up to your expectations is because the premise you’ve built for yourself is wrong.

This is obvious to the outsider. The premise that you made up for yourself is that Europe wants to change Meta and how it works to protect its citizens. It’s obvious to me that this is not the goal. The goal is to extract wealth from those companies under the guise of consumer protection.

The EU makes more from regulating and taxing US tech companies than it makes from its own quaint tech sector. Ban and blocking those companies is never going to happen for this reason. Why destroy your cash cow?

vincnetas3• 4 months ago

Do you have any numbers for this? I somehow have doubts that US tech companies pay more taxes in EU.

amazingamazing• 4 months ago

Why no ban like china? Weak

elric2• 4 months ago

The European Commission and Council are becoming increasingly unpopular among my peers. Sentiment towards the Parliament is generally still positive. But it's clear that two thirds of the Trilogue essentially don't give a shit about European people, their rights, their freedoms or their wellbeing. Things like Age Verification and Chat Control are going to blow up in their faces.

I don't get how blind these institutions are.

FpUser2• 4 months ago

"two thirds of the Trilogue essentially don't give a shit about European people, their rights, their freedoms or their wellbeing"

Every bureaucracy works for themselves eventually. The EU's main task is to make superstate they can control. Since they are trying to eliminate / reduce rights of member countries one can imagine what kind of concerns they have towards individual people and their freedom.

budududuroiu• 4 months ago

I don't buy the superstate argument, since the EC consistently avoids or waters down attempts towards federalisation (full fiscal union, directly elected Commission, Parliament with legislative initiative, yada yada). Making a superstate would constrain the Commission, not empower it. The current ambiguity of having enough integration to override member states, but not enough to be democratically challenged and kept in check is the sweet spot for unaccountable technocratic capture.

Don't get me wrong, I'm completely against the EC, but I wish they were actually trying to create a superstate

pndy2• 4 months ago

The EU overall either will start acknowledging that there are problems and serious reforms are needed or history will repeat once again and we'll have another fallen empire situation.

It's not just the age verification and chat control - the list crimes is much longer and doesn't revolve solely around IT sector. The recent Mercosur agreement that just showed how the heads of EU pissed over its own agricultural sector.

Somehow, I'm afraid that we're already for at least 15 years on a path of slow fall - we're once again in the history the peasants and EU politicians has become king and queens, again not listening to vox populi at all.

elric2• 4 months ago

Oh there are definitely fuckups beyond the IT sector. But I think the two examples I listed are particularly egregious. In part because the Chat Control proposal had explicit exemptions for politicians (who's watching the watchmen? no one, obviously!), and because the chilling effect widespread surveillance has.

The EU has definitely done a lot of good over the years as well, but the system is beginning to lean away from democracy and towards a weirdly inscrutible authoritarianism.

jmyeet• 4 months ago

What are we witnessesing is the beginning of the end of the post-WW2 rules-based international order. What's truly bizarre is that the US designed this order to benefit themselves and they're the ones destroying it now. NATO is a protection racket to outsource European security but really to sell arms to Europe and give the US effetive control over the European militaries.

Over the years the control has grown ever-more pervasive, such as with the control over banking and international payments. One anecdote of the extent of this influence is that if one European Venmos another European and puts "Cuba" or "Syria" in the memo field, they can have their account flagged or permanently banned [1]. The US gets to decide who can use credit cards and what for, which is something the EU has finally picked up on as an issue [2].

What's clear in all this is that China was completely correct to maintain sovereignty over their tech companies, platforms and data. What the US risks is that the EU is going to follow the China model. That means EU versions of cloud platforms, computing platforms, networking infrastructure and so on. And they'll do it similar to how China did by creating demand. Specifically, the EU will mandate the use of European platforms with all their contracts, the European parliament will pass laws as such for national governments and generally the pressure will increase to wean off of US tech companies.

IMHO this shift is as big a change as the post-1945 world order.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/venmo-cuba-sanctions_n_571f80...

[2] https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/business/europes-24-tri...

lioeters• 4 months ago

It will be messy, but if the EU can make political and economic decisions for the benefit of their own people, instead of subservient to the US, this paradigm shift could turn out to be very healthy and productive for the region and future generations. China's prosperity is undeniable, and it's due to their willingness to question the unipolar dominance of the US in the decades since WWII. In terms of economic and geopolitical strategy, they've been ahead of the game and prepared for the disintegration of the "rules-based" order. Is the EU ready?

klooney• 4 months ago

The EU has been a huge free rider on defense and pharma spending from the US, they're going to have a rough time reorganizing their economies.

Gareth321• 4 months ago

As a European I have been deeply disappointed with how toothless the EC has been on enforcing the Digital Markets Act. I have exactly one submission to Hacker News from 20 July 2022 when the DMA was approved (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163704). I was incredibly hopeful, given the indicated timelines, that Apple would be forced to open up iOS and iPadOS. Meaning install an application from the internet without restriction, like with any other operating system. The wording clearly requires this (with some wiggle room for security). Apple has dragged this legal process out longer than even my most cynical prediction. I can only surmise that someone in the Commission or senior leadership has decided that enforcing the DMA is not politically expedient right now.

I don't know how to force this issue as a European. There are just too many levels of abstraction between me and Brussels. It looks like many layers of bureaucracy and a lot of opaque backroom deals and discussions. I don't like it at all. Especially given that the EU moves so much faster when it comes to regulations like forcing all of us in Denmark to use timesheets, annoying lids on our bottles, and invasive surveillance laws. All I see is my life getting worse with their actions. I am not alone. Sentiment towards the EU internally is not good right now. Either they start creating regulations which benefit ordinary people, or we're going to get a pretty radical rightward shift in leadership soon, and there are many risks associated with this.

kpw94• 4 months ago

I don't know how to force this issue as a European. There are just too many levels of abstraction between me and Brussels.
EU moves so much faster when it comes to regulations like forcing all of us in Denmark to use timesheets, annoying lids on our bottles, and invasive surveillance laws.

Rediscovering the principle of subsidiarity from first principles...

Arubis• 4 months ago

Ceding? Any legal control the EU has over tech has been slowly drawn out of the US’s grasp. It was just that the US dominance over legal control of all these networked interconnections wasn’t so actively and visibly utilized until more recently.

FpUser2• 4 months ago

European countries should try to get off those training wheels and learn to live their own lives.

PeterStuer• 4 months ago

Those same Europeans so fond of their DSA would scream bloody murder if a Trump like administration would do the same. They have created this monster, and there will be tears and the gnashing of theeth should their factions ever lose control and their opponents get to wield those same weapons.

And no, the USAans are not in it for the 'free speech' either.

sylware• 4 months ago

In my country, I discovered a few days ago that my gov (EU country), had its web technical directives line-up with big tech web (in 2015/2016): during the last decade I have been suffering the breakage of the classic web interop of the gouv admnistration web replaced using a lot of bucks by "exclusive big tech" web apps, aka requiring only those massive bloat and kludge web engines from the "whatng" cartel (mozilla/apple/google): no more small, alternative and reasonably sized (SDK included) web browsers anymore.

The most amazing thing is with everything I did in the last decade, the consulting of lawyers, member of internet/IT/software specialized user groups, I still don't know how I have managed to be aware _NOT_ for years that those very web technical directives are actually... law.

Only the prime minister, then also the president, have the power to modify/fix those technical directives. The parliaments, or any technical authorities have ZERO power over them.

The EU, via a directive, only requires for the member states to publish those technical directives to the other member states for "discussion" before final approval.

In other words, deciding on those technical directives requires the same power than to decide to build an ICBM submarine or an aircraft carrier, not less. Maybe because they are not that un-important...

The irony, the gov of 2015/2016 which approved those technical directives which would, without any doubt, end up with everything web being big tech exclusive (and this is what actually happened) was... a left-ist gov(!!). I suspect corruption or brain washing grade lobbying (maybe with fraud while consulting experts, or those experts were mostly from big tech).

The bright side, if those technical directives are fixed in order to restore the classic web, the whole gov with its dependencies have 3 years to comply. Just need to tell the president or the prime minister... baw...

tracker1• 4 months ago

I'm mixed on this... the article itself is relatively one-sided... of course you negotiate among concerned parties when it comes down to laws regarding anything largely produced outside your nation's purview.

The EU can absolutely make all the invasive laws they want, the US has been happily doing the same... the individual EU nations and US states with more variations than practical on top of that. Age verification as a prominent example.

Concerned parties will of course try to leverage what they are able to.. if that is a prominent political figure, foreign or domestic, it happens. This can be good, bad or even very bad. While I can totally understand criticism at any level... US in EU politics, or UK trying to coerce entirely US companies with fines that don't apply to them.

The reality is negotiations happen all the time... you an accept/reject/renegotiate on every aspect of every topic.. and to some extent, make take it or leave it laws, where you are simply no longer a customer.

For example, really curious to see how the foreign router ban (US) is going to shake out. As long as my OpnSense box and commercial AP continue to work, I should be okay for now... but who knows.

trolleski• 4 months ago

BigControl, BigAddiction... I mean BigTech cannot be trusted on every level, including the personal of the people involved as we can see in the Epstein Files!

Critics say EU risks ceding control of its tech laws under U.S. pressure

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