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.

69 comments

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) 🇨🇱✌️
- 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
  
  Some countries in EU offer Americans free education and easy work permits after graduation. I think Germany has program like that.
  
  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?
- 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! :/

Glad the EU is cracking down on tech companies. They have done a good job fighting for consumer rights. Even improving them in nations outside the EU both by forcing companies to make global changes and by inspiring local legislation. It's something they should be proud of.
- I am

Reading the guardian article I was like meh.. some stuff is good and anything is better than nothing but then I read the actual DMA
“Fines: of up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide annual turnover, or up to 20% in the event of repeated infringements
Periodic penalty payments: of up to 5% of the average daily turnover
Remedies: In case of systematic infringements of the DMA obligations by gatekeepers, additional remedies may be imposed on the gatekeepers after a market investigation. Such remedies will need to be proportionate to the offence committed. If necessary and as a last resort option, non-financial remedies can be imposed. These can include behavioural and structural remedies, e.g. the divestiture of (parts of) a business.”
Fuck ya break up some of these fuckers if they keep breaking the rules and percentages of worldwide turnover? I can only get so errect
Even though this is EU based, if they actually follow through with the fines and possible breaking companies up I can’t see why the companies would not just make this a worldwide standard… I could be wrong of course cuz corporations are shit

EU comes to the rescue! Again!

The European Commission aims to empower consumers and ensure tech giants adhere to European rules, providing immediate accountability for any issues.
Part of this "adhering to European rules" means complying with EU laws on "disinformation" and giving police forces of EU refined backdoor access to take down content.
- I'm fine with (takedown-only) backdoors only for the big tech companies, as long as you're allowed to self host without backdoors.

I don't really understand how this is a material change from what AOSP gives you right now? Can anyone explain?
For example: AOSP has been available to EU start-ups for over a decade for free and open source but none have built alternative payment systems or email or maps or advertising services on top of it in a cohesive way before. What is this law going to allow them to do that they couldn't before? 🤔
- Stock Android on every phone sold in EU will have to offer those features. There's a big difference for a start up between targeting AOSP and targeting all Android phones in EU. That's exactly the point of this law: making gatekeepr devices/services equally accessible to competition.
  
  Stock Android is AOSP. And it's free.
  I'm not sure why EU start-ups don't just build services on top and compete like Huawei does in China or to a certain extent Amazon does with its Android variant.
- First of all, phones aren't sold with AOSP.
  They're not. But my point is that EU manufacturers / start-ups could easily make their own flavour of Android based on AOSP and launch that as a product. Why don't they? Case in point Huawei.

I know that I can uninstall first-party apps on iOS (for years now). I think Android users can, as well. It seems like, other than the monetization bit, this bill simply codifies things that already exist. Am I getting that right?
If so, they are praising themselves for saying "you have to" about things that already exist. Don't get me wrong, it's important to prevent backsliding (I hate that word), but c'mon. And yes, the anti-monetization bit matters, it should be there, I just think this is overblown reporting.
- Carrier pre-installed apps are definitely not easy to uninstall on android
- Have you ever touched a Google phone? You CAN'T uninstalled preinstalled apps on ether of them, if you don't root your device third party app stores suck, the law allows you to get rid of preinstalled bloat, messager interoperability is included and so on, that's a huge law and the first against silicon valley giants with enforcment that will actually hurt them!
- It's not just that. Apple can't self preference their own app store on iOS for example. They not just have to allow other app stores or just installing stuff, they also can't have their own store as a default. They also have to enable people to use browsers other than Safari.
- You can definitely disable most pre-installed apps on Android, and even force uninstall them with adb. But complete removal is hard, so they'll still sit on the hard drive.
  
  Because every man and there dog can be bothered to go open a shell and find the command to uninstall via adb?

Tyrannical government overreaching and stifling innovation. This is what happens when you don’t have the second amendment and civil rights for corporations.
- The innovation: So, we hasn't implemented any of the features our rival has for 5 years, but take this one that makes you harder to switch.
  
  Sometimes a big company has to stagnate for a while for the innovation to manifest over time. Big government regulations like this don’t give them that chance.

- Are you just commenting 'hot takes' in random posts?
- I miss the good old days when corpos could pay in scrip and shoot strikers.

69 comments