1y ago

EU unveils ‘revolutionary’ laws to curb big tech firms’ power - The Guardian

www.theguardian.com EU unveils ‘revolutionary’ laws to curb big tech firms’ power

Digital Markets Act aims to allow more competition and let consumers delete preloaded phone apps

New regulations will target six major tech companies to improve consumer experience and data privacy. These include Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft.
Pre-installed apps like weather and email that are difficult to delete will be disallowed, aiming to promote interoperability and reduce "gatekeeping" activities.
Companies will be prohibited from monetizing user data collected from phone apps for advertising purposes.
The regulations will encourage competition by allowing alternative payment systems, benefiting startups and consumers.
The European Commission aims to empower consumers and ensure tech giants adhere to European rules, providing immediate accountability for any issues.

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Once more, the EU being leader when it comes to users' rights and keeping the big companies accountable for their shady practices. 👍
Sometimes i wish i lived there :')
- As a Canadian, I appreciate a lot of what the EU does when it comes to consumer protections. Hopefully this one also ends up impacting the rest of us!
  
  Same, my American brother, same. (I'm from Chile btw) 🇨🇱✌️
  
  Excellent use of the word, my friend.
- I plan on moving there as soon as possible when I graduate high school. Real tired of America
  
  Come to Ireland, the weather is mostly shite but global failures on climate change are making it very Mediterranean
  
  Ireland is probably is a nice country to live in, but it's pretty ironic recommending it to someone wanting to come to the EU because of its regulations on big companies.
  Ireland costs other countries 16bn a year by allowing those companies to evade taxes in the EU.
  
  How is Ireland's tax rate any different to Delaware's. Opportunity cost isn't the same
  
  Jesus the heat at the moment.
  
  I was planning on Germany, and I’ve recently met a German friend online which has solidified my choice
  
  @Hikiru @Squizzy I live in Spain and I'm planning to move to Denmark or Norway in a few years. Heat is impossible to manage here, and the political system is almost beyond salvation.
  
  I think this is the first time I’ve seen a mastodon account on lemmy
  
  Where in Germany are you planning to go?
  
  I’m considering Hamburg, it’s where my friend lives and I’ve heard it’s a nice city
  
  Oh nice, than you'll be right in my neighbourhood. Hamburg is really nice and the northern Germans are the best ones (no bias of course :D).
  
  Your visas are hard to get without a job, and the only jobs hiring foreigners are... big tech companies. I tried Ireland for years before giving up and going elsewhere.
  
  Some countries in EU offer Americans free education and easy work permits after graduation. I think Germany has program like that.
  
  Germany is what I’m planning on but you need to have 11,208 euros (if I remember the number correctly) to prove you can support yourself for a visa to study there
  
  Theres plenty of places that need workers, in the EU!
  Depending on your education it will be easier or harder, of course (also which country you plan on going to)
- As a Brit, me too.
  
  You caught my attention.
  How has life changed for you since Brexit?
  
  Not the person you asked, but for me:
  In 2017 I lost my £70,000/yr dream job as the company I worked at decided they couldn't keep their EMEA campus in a country that hasn't decided how, when or even if they were going to allow foreigners in.
  I had to move to a shithole town in Nottinghamshire to live by myself in a cramped one-bedroom flat to do a job I hated for £22,000/yr.
  That company went under because we couldn't import the network equipment into the UK because of Brexit. Most vendors weren't bothering since there were shortages anyway, so why not just send all their stock to Germany where there's no nasty surprises and plenty of buyers waiting.
  Ended up doing minimum-wage shift work at an Amazon warehouse and Deliveroo deliveries to survive.
  Got another, similar job on £20,000/yr.
  Not had a holiday in six years. I used to have at least two a year.
  Can't get a CPAP machine for my apnoea because of difficulty importing them (ended up getting a friend in France to buy one for me).
  Local supermarkets still can't get a lot of fresh fruit that they used to stock. Empty shelves common.
  My savings went from £50,000 to zero.
  Government is pissing money away on detention centres and hotels for immigrants because they refuse to cooperate with the EU.
  Government is also planning on ripping up our Human Rights (ostensibly to deal with the immigrants) and has even indicated they would like to abolish GDPR, bringing it full circle to OP's comment.
  So, yeah. Not everyone has had as bad a time as me, but everyone I know has encountered some negative fallout. I've yet to encounter anyone who has actually benefitted, even indirectly.
  
  So err, do you think the country has any chance of fixing stuff up, considering Poland is on track to overtake the UK at this rate, within a decade? And have perhaps some of your political ideas/values or strongly held beliefs changed at all?
  
  Different brit here. I suspect the plan is to reduce immigration by making the UK a place no one would want to migrate too.
  
  On a related note, I believe Indians are emigrating to other EU countries too - it wouldn't surprise me if India's rise was a consideration for brexit. Naturally Indians (as with most people who wish to immigrate tbh) want to come to an English speaking country.
  
  My political ideology has definately changed: I now think of myself as European, rather than British. The point of the EU project is that it doesn't fucking matter what flag you live under, or what language you talk, or which imaginary friend you worship; for all our differences were 99% the same, and want to live in safe places, eat good food, travel freely, speak out minds, work rewarding jobs, love who we want, work together to make the world better and delight in seeing others getting do the same. As a sometimes-vegeratian, coffee-loving IT worker from Manchester I have more in common with sometimes-vegetarian, coffee-loving IT workers from Mannheim, Maribor or Madrid than I do with some fat-necked millionaire power-lusting would-be dictator with whom my only common ground is a flag.
  The purpose of the EU and it's predecessors is to make war in Europe impossible. It's that simple. Who are these people that would see that undone? Whoever they are, they call themselves British.
  
  Lol, some would call you over remain-minded. I appreciate that you miss what you lost clearly (beyond even the wages).
  As an EU citizen in blighty, I care even less about the EU than before seeing that even the wealthiest countries within the EU have regressed socially and politically.
  Obviously your own issue doesn't have much to do with EU countries' domestic policies, you relied on UK membership of the EU for trade.
  
  Damn, that's awful!
  
  Jesus, i'm really sad to hear all that. 😢
  Let's hope the british goverment comes out soon with a good strategy to push the economy forward, (or just reverse brexit altogether).
- One urgent thingis that the EU follow the UK in abandoning the ill-conceived "client-side scanning", aka Chat-Control.
  
  Both have laws like that in the making and beside tiny formalities the UK sadly didn't abandone it at all! :/

69 comments