For all its warts and flaws, I have to say I'm pretty happy with where the EU is currently headed in a very broad sense. Sure, there's a lot of bureaucracy and fancy slogans without getting much done, but between all of that, there's also policies and regulations that do clearly improve the lives of people, not corporations, for a better tomorrow. With the world being pretty chaotic in its current ways, this is a nice thing to see.
iOS in particular is undoubtedly much better after the EU's required changes.
I wanted the UK to stay in, or at least drop back to EEA membership, but seems we get some of the benefits without membership anyway, just because we're too small to bother doing anything special for.
Until the cookie banners go away there is zero ground to stand on.
This is a common trope, but it's based on a false premise. You don't have to show a cookie banner so long as it's cookies that you need for the site to function. You need consent only if you want to track your users and gather their data. The problem here is the sites you visit want to track you, not anything else.
I like having the choice between cookies required for basic site function and extraneous track-you-everywhere cookies. You like having no choice in the matter by the sound of it.
Just enable ublock's `annoyances` filters for that.
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Websites could choose to not track you, to make tacking opt in and having opt out selected as default, could choose to follow do not track as rejecting cookies, they have multiple choices but chose to give you a worse user experience for their profit. I do not think it's fair to complain at Europeans for this, blame the websites
No, companies wanting to track everyone who uses their websites / sell user-behaviour data to advertisers made the Internet significantly worse.
The EU just made it visible.
[EDITED to add:] Actually, not even that. The companies doing the creepy tracking/spying/selling chose to make their compliance as objectionable as possible, I think deliberately in order to try to make anti-creeping measures look bad. The internet could be much less obnoxious and still perfectly compatible with EU regulations. Companies wanting to exploit you on the internet chose to comply in as obnoxious a way as possible.
I feel these statement are made out of anger. Because, yes it does.
Use adaway+firefox+ublock on Android
Use AdGuard+Hush on iPhone
What does adaway get rid of that ublock doesn't?
Ads in applications
Works with Firefox Mobile for me.
Sweeping generalizations, awesome.
ragebait or genuine stupidity?
As someone living in Europe, I’ve come to realize these comments typically come from two types of people:
1) Americans who don’t actually live here but fetishize the pop culture idea of Europeanism
2) Europeans who are so insecure they feel the need to loudly proclaim how “amazing” everything is in the hopes they’ll believe it themselves
Something I’ve learned; when someone feels the need to write internet comments telling you how happy they are, it’s a good indication they are not happy. Otherwise they would not be wasting time writing internet comments.
> Something I’ve learned; when someone feels the need to write internet comments telling you how happy they are, it’s a good indication they are not happy. Otherwise they would not be wasting time writing internet comments.
“The Internet is only for miserable people” sounds like projection.
I for one am also happy to live in one of the few places left on earth that focuses more on the betterment of people than the few ultra rich, and tries to prevent the ultra rich from abusing the people.
The EU has certainly been successful in preventing any of its citizens from becoming ultra rich.
Good. If you look at the people who are ultra rich they ultimately seem incredibly unhappy, the richest people in the world have more than they could ever use and still aren't satisfied. This incredible amount of wealth and power comes at a massive societal cost and it isn't even helping the lives of the handful of people who are getting it.
The EU/US dynamic is comparable to the US/China dynamic:
America's manufacturing jobs are Chinese today because China had a lower bar for working conditions and pay.
Bernard Arnault isn't too poor for a French man.
And there are others, but not ultra young ones actually. But why would it be bad if the goal of a country is to raise a little the wealth of everyone instead of a lot the wealth of very few ? A country is succesful not by the number of billionaires but by quite a lot of other criterias.
And yet from some of the HN comments I've seen on this topic it seems that quite a few of the Americans are stockholm syndromed to the point that if you do not want to benefit the ultra rich at the expense of regular people by removing their healthcare, vacations, employee safety and protection rights, ability to unionize, and basically by doing all you can to milk the average worker for your own gain, then you're stupid, and they demean EU by constantly bringing up the tired trope of us not having some mega billion valuation companies here because ... our people have rights ... and so no law-breaking/lobbying silicon valley god wants to come here.
And they say this seemingly without realizing that yes, that is exactly by design. This is what we want. Keep your mega wealthy and 3rd world life quality, and we'll here be poor, but can at least attend our children being born without getting fired for it, and giving our mothers a year or more of paid maternity leave, among many many other things we value a hell of a lot more than making our billionaires richer.
As of 2023, eu citizens report higher satisfaction than us, although by 0.3 which is not that much https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/
EU citizens lifespan is also (very roughly) a few years more than us citizens.
Is the purpose of life living a happier, fuller life or being richer? I'd rather take the former than the latter.
On a more serious approach, I guess millionaires in usa will fare better than poor Americans, but at least in Europe you will still have access to some sort of safety net when things get rough. As imperfect as eu might be, I do not get why the hatred is so strong (especially for some libertarian or similar breeds here on hackernews, the thread on eurollm had quite strong opinions on both sides)
Noone needs to be so rich they can casually biy whole governments. Rich enough to never work another day if they don't want to is plenty. Producing multibillionares is not a good thing
Nobody needs a computer in their pocket either.
> Rich enough to never work another day if they don't want to is plenty.
I'm that rich. I'd have to move to an impoverished country but I could do it.
> Producing multibillionares is not a good thing
What about producing people who create products so loved that the people give them billions of dollars?
The "nobody needs..." way of thinking is very Soviet.
> What about producing people who create products so loved that the people give them billions of dollars?
Billionaires don't create shit.
Au contraire, one thing that we can be absolutely certain about is that billionaires, being human, create shit.
Creating value, now, that's a whole different story...
This is easy enough to refute since it only requires one example.
Bill Gates created Microsoft Windows.
Well, he sure wasn't a billionaire when he did it.
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That data sharing thing goes pretty far. Am I reading that correctly? Anything that is hosted in the EU, or sells to EU citizens, has to share _all (generated by activity, personal and non-personal, including meta-) data_ that the service itself can use (i.e. backup tapes are excluded), upon request, free of charge, without any obfuscation, and without much of a delay. For B2B and B2C.
Almost sounds too good to be true. As far as I can tell:
* There is no clause for restricting this if it's hard to do. If it's _a lot_ of data, you still have to provide it.
* There is no clause indicating you can charge a fee for the sharing of the data (this seems fair to me; the prep and transfer costs, assuming you automate the process, are incredibly low unless it's, I dunno, some 'permanently live stream my entire life in 4k' service). Easier to just eliminate any attempt at malicious compliance by interpreting 'reasonable' unreasonably.
> Easier to just eliminate any attempt at malicious compliance by interpreting 'reasonable' unreasonably.
Smart. Telcos in The Netherlands in the past did something where, for unlimited cellular data service, they used a "Fair Use Policy". Which they took at 10x the 'average' (mean not median) data use.
Only problem was, this was early 2010's and there were still a lot of old people who weren't using data. They had 0MB subscriptions on their mobile subscription, which meant they technically had a data subscription although with gigantic costs per MB.
You can already see where this is going. All these subscriptions were added along in the calculation, which meant their mean fantasyland data usage came out at 1500MB and '''unlimited''' data usage was capped at 15GB, after which speeds would plummet to 64Kbps.
These days unlimited does mean unlimited, although you get a 20GB daily allotment, after which you have to send a refill text for every 2GB of data. Which of course can be scripted :). Although I don't see why you'd need north of 600GB of mobile data per month.
Here in Germany, unlimited means unlimited. Or else.
My high score is 14000GB.
14TB of mobile data usage sounds fun, how did you do that?
(1) buy a true unlimited data plan (2) download and upload as much as you can for a whole month? Make sure it's something useful though - iperf is cheating.
Since it's true unlimited, they don't track usage. You can set your phone to a 1GB warning so the counter will always be displayed in your notifications.
> Almost sounds too good to be true.
Note that this is essentially already the case under the GDPR for anything that's tied to a natural person.
> * There is no clause indicating you can charge a fee for the sharing of the data
Quite the opposite; There's a clause mandating it be free of charge. Chapter II, Article 4:
> Where data cannot be directly accessed by the user from the connected product or related service, data holders shall make readily available data, as well as the relevant metadata necessary to interpret and use those data, accessible to the user without undue delay, of the same quality as is available to the data holder, easily, securely, free of charge, in a comprehensive, structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and, where relevant and technically feasible, continuously and in real-time. This shall be done on the basis of a simple request through electronic means where technically feasible.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/2854/oj/eng
There are rules pertaining to B2B relations, where there's some restrictions on how fees may be charged. (Article 9, where fees may cover costs but must not discriminate and must be "reasonable")
> Easier to just eliminate any attempt at malicious compliance by interpreting 'reasonable' unreasonably.
The "reasonable" clauses exist to pre-empt this. EU courts generally aren't very amused by companies pulling stunts like setting fees to 'Math.infinity'.
A good case study for this has been Apple's legal fights around the DMA & App Store monopoly. Which mostly consists of Apple trying to be "clever" and the European Commission telling them that no, their clearly unreasonable fees are unreasonable.
This is classic regulation by technocrats as opposed to technologists.
Flawed reasoning among technocrats is that software can simply be made interoperable.
What they fail to understand is that interoperability is a two-sided process, requiring cooperation and collaboration between two (or more) parties.
And yes - it’s a process, with a cost.
Software cannot simply be made “interoperable” with all possible future permutations of other (often competing) software.
To imagine that you can demand all software is “interoperable” is literally to impose unbounded cost on all participants, because they cannot know how many other parties they will be forced to cooperate and collaborate with.
This is the kind of financial calculus that only exists in the world of bureaucrats (with their endless supply of public funding, and their never-ending remit).
To businesses, on the other hand, cost is existential.
> Flawed reasoning among technocrats is that software can simply be made interoperable. What they fail to understand is that interoperability is a two-sided process
1. Data that software operates on can easily be made interoperable. Even trivially. There's no end to standards around that
2. Yes, it's a "two-sided process" in the sense that companies go out of their way to make any and all data as inaccessible as possible
What if I claim need your data in a particular form in order to “interoperate” with you?
Will the EU legally compel you to give me the data in the form I want?
Or perhaps you’ll explain that raw data is raw data. In which case, is the EU legally compelling you to give away all your raw data to anyone that might want to cooperate / compete / sabotage / spy on you? If not anyone, what’s the minimum bar that a counterparty has to satisfy to get access to all your data? Who judges when they meet this bar? The European Commission? Judges in the ECJ? For every interop in the cross-product of all software on the market?
Are the flaws in this regulation not blindingly obvious to everyone in this community? Am I going mad here?
> What if I claim need your data in a particular form in order to “interoperate” with you?
Oh. Malicious compliance is an art form. Just look at GDPR.
Doesn't mean that interoperability is somehow hard.
> Are the flaws in this regulation not blindingly obvious to everyone in this community? Am I going mad here?
You'd go much less mad if you read the regulation in question which I doubt you have. As a rule, the madder a person is about some EU regulation, the less likely they are to have read it.
Or you could read "A comprehensive overview of the Data Act, including its objectives and how it works in practice." https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/factpages/data-act-...
Instead you rely on media headlines and misinterpretations.
(Note: I haven't read the act yet, but I've yet to see an act people are in arms about that doesn't actually answer most questions in the text of the act itself or in the accompanying documents)
AI regulation before we even know what AI is or will do?
Is this smart? AI service provider may choose to simply not offer services in the EU, because compliance is complicated.
Given the rampant thievery going on in the US, I think we know enough about what AI should not do to make a few safeguards.
>AI service provider may choose to simply not offer services in the EU, because compliance is complicated.
well, good. Why is the argument "but if they make laws we can't steal" some sort of sympathetic point in 2025?
I think we should be careful labelling everything an LLM does as stealing.
And I'm not saying there might not be things worth regulating.
Just that 2025 is way too early. The technology is still evolving, we barely know what it can do.
We've not hit the limits yet.
We may end up with another cookie law, or DSA nightmare.
Why should AI regulation apply to small companies with less than X customers or Y revenue.
Does it affect what you can play around with at home?
>I think we should be careful labelling everything an LLM does as stealing.
I agree. You can ethically train an LLM.
But there's been such utterly blatant breaches of law that's in court as we speak, and commentary from leaders that I'm inclined to say it's poisoned the well. No differently from cryptocurrency and nfts. It's pretty much the default.
>Just that 2025 is way too early.
never too early to stop nor prevent theft. if you want to grab stuff with reckless abandon, address copyright law first. They also made and reinforced those laws decades ago, after all.
>We may end up with another cookie law, or DSA nightmare.
Okay. Me not clicking an extra pop up (because extensions take care of it for me) because companies want loopholes isn't the deterrent that makes me not want to slow down this theft.
>Why should AI regulation apply to small companies with less than X customers or Y revenue.
Why should copyright law apply to me torrenting Moana 2? When we can align on this we can move on to AI.
>Does it affect what you can play around with at home?
Roommate is an artist, so it affects him, yes. I work in games and want to go indie, so it will affect me one day. I'm not altruistic here; I'm just another future entrepreneur protecting my assets.
The 28th regime will provide interesting insights on whether or not EU members are willing to move on fiscal harmonization.
I live in Martinique, a French outermost region and although we are in the Caribbean, we are also in the EU. This creates some friction as the standard CE norm is usually not available in neighbouring countries, therefore : 1. goods mostly come from EU (specifically France) 2. because goods have to travel across the ocean, prices are higher 3. because prices are higher, specific tax laws are maintained and new ones are introduced with the aim to make prices lower 4. specific tax law introduces another barrier and limit competition 5. because competition is low, prices are high(er)
Harmonization vs the use of specific tax law/rules is a never ending discussion in Martinique.
In the US mad king context, I'm looking forward to it.
A bit surprised to not see the cybersecurity regulation that's now a part of the radio equipment directive. It'll have a huge effect on everyone who sells hardware, with strict requirements wrt cybersecurity for IoT devices, and is slated to take effect this summer.
If anyone is struggling with keeping up with EU regulations, we built an AI powered platform that helps companies navigate this complex world. You can find it at: https://fx-lex.com
This needing to exist is sad, but keep it up.
Thanks, I really appreciate it.
I do think that the amount of regulation is proportional to the complexity of the society. While you can over or under regulate, the general future trend will be more regulations.
I don't _necessarily_ have a problem with quantity, it's more about accessibility.
Rules are only fair if the people supposed to follow them can make sense of them.
> European Commissioner for Startups Ekaterina Zaharieva emphasised the importance of implementing this strategy quickly. She also pledged to propose a European Innovation Act to push member states to meet the 3% target for research and innovation (R&I), combat brain drain, defend research freedom, invest in infrastructure and expand the European Research Council.
Tragicomic hubris among bureaucrats, to think innovation would improve if they added more bureaucrats.
The EU is a political experiment that will always be doomed to repeat its own mistakes, because it completely lacks self-awareness.
Too many ideologues, too few pragmatists.
A bureaucracy as supra-national and politically ambitious as the European Union will attract the kind of staff who are far, far removed from people who want to create startups.
My thoughts exactly.
restore noscript/basic (x)html interop on all critical/dominant sites where it did a good enough job already years ago?
“eu regulations to look out for in 2025” as if regulations are product launches. keep building europe! eagerly awaiting the next drop.
It doesn't say "EU regulations to look forward to", this isn't a hype article. Us who actually work in tech in relation to EU markets need to stay up to date on what regulations are introduced so that we can make sure to be in compliance.
> as if regulations are product launches.
The iPhone 15's main selling point was compliance with EU regulations. ;)
Like, unironically, that is how the general public has responded to a lot of recent years' EU regulations.
Those of us in Europe who disagree with what the EU are doing? We quietly move to other more dynamic economies.
We are not the kind of people who stand on ideological soapboxes and discuss the state of regulation.
Those who remain in EU nations and put the EU on a pedestal? They merely manifest the survivorship bias of this political regime.
>Those who remain in EU nations and put the EU on a pedestal?
so... the majority of EU? I haven't heard of emmigration rates rising in EU. They have in the US, though.
> We are not the kind of people who stand on ideological soapboxes and discuss the state of regulation.
You're soapboxing right now.
My point was about public perception of regulation. And that people do view EU regulation as impacting their tech products in ways similar to product announcements. Not the merits or lack thereof of the EU.
Fine? Are we supposed to be mad that those who want to siphon up personal data are going to US and doing it to US citizens instead?
Anytime the EU comes up, I'm reminded that this is still a forum on a very ambitious US startup accelerator who sees public safeguards as obstructions to their own million dollar idea.
If your idea can't success without being a parasite to your customers, maybe the business doesn't deserve to exist.