List of companies that I'd like to be investigated for corruption and anti trust abuses:<p>1. Alphabet/Google<p>2. Apple<p>3. Facebook<p>4. Match Group<p>Match group is lucky they're not getting much attention, but they own all major dating apps. They need a bit of smacking.<p>Reasons:<p>For Google, the biggest problem is their bundling of Chrome, YouTube, Gmail if you want to have Google certified android phone that has the Google play store. Google should be prevented from having their own WWW crawler too.
The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google and any other company that want to purchase it at the same costs.<p>For Apple, it's their app store. The app store needs to be eliminated. Apple has a problem with not allowing competing browser engines on iOS and misleading people by saying it's for privacy reason. Eliminating the control of the App store from Apple is going to fix the problem.<p>For Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp should be spun off to their own entities.<p>For Match group, break off tinder into a separate company. And prevent any future dating app accusations by Match group or Tinder. NO MERGERS.<p>---<p>From the Chinese side:<p>I'd like to see Alibaba group and Tencent being investigated.<p>-----------<p>Edit: replying to calls below for travel industry.<p>The travel industry is already competitive enough, and the situation in these areas should be reviewed after a year or two.<p>For now, these are the critical problems for tech. Their control is taking the breath away from smaller companies and reducing innovation.
I've come to realize this: free markets of winner-take-all products are a losing game for Europe. We're too late to the game, we can't compete with these huge companies, and there's no way to catch up in terms of venture capital. There are structural difficulties, namely that there are 50 very different countries on this continent with completely different languages and cultures. There is no way we can support massive tech companies such as Google, even if they would arise here as startups.<p>As such, the only reasonable thing to do is to slowly ween ourselves off American tech in favor of letting our our own grow, just like China did. They probably won't be as good, but unless we want to be completely dependent on a foreign power for all our IT, we have no choice. And really, we have no obligation to let American companies pick the fruits of our markets out of some weird sense of "fairness" of free markets. The world is not fair. Of course, there will be retaliations, but for any non-IT tech there are local or Chinese substitutes.
> Tech giants could be entirely banned from the EU market over "serious and repeated breaches of law," AFP reported.<p>If this comes to pass as described, this is a landslide shift in mentality. Paying fines for shady practices will no longer simply be the cost of doing business, but there's a real risk of being locked out of a major market.
> Companies favoring their own services could be outlawed.<p>Apple would have to significantly redesign their entire OSs if this comes to pass. Will be really interesting to see!
What I dont understand is why they keep allowing mergers for those huge companies in the first place.
Maybe there should be a certain company size where they are not allowed to merge with new companies any more!!
> Facebook and other firms have warned that the more regulation could prompt the company to move away from Europe, which could cost jobs and block access to its site for EU users.<p>Please, please make it happen...
Correct me if I'm wrong, I think that unlike some other markets (China and to some extent other Asian countries / Russia / etc) it's surprising how dependent the EU is on US corporations for digital services. As said the EU anti-monopolies chief Margrethe Vestager: "In the past few weeks we have all been fascinated by what is possible digitally. But the coronavirus showed how dependent we are on US corporations, and that was a wake-up call,".
EU-wide regulation might make sense to give a "stick" to existing giants, but what about creating an EU-wide "carrot" for European companies to become giants (in the form of unified market and capital)?<p>Ms. Vestager kind of glosses over this (2:40 min into the interview video).
I have a naive question: In this regulated market, where is the line drawn in relation to which companies one entity can acquire? It seems that IG wanted to sell to FaceBook and the government blessed it, same with Google's acquisitions but I do not know much about the process of purchasing a company.<p>Also what does the HN community think will happen to the "Get big fast then exit" strategy if these conglomerates get busted up? Will that SV investor scene die or change? I'm already seeing the rise of bootstrappers and the term lifestyle business no longer being a "lesser-than" moniker.<p>Just what's on my mind this morning, would love good discussion.
If this gets through and implemented, it's probably gonna affect Google a lot, but I wonder whether they'll also go after Apple with their App Store and the whole Spotify situation, since I don't think I've seen the EU regulators look into that before.
> Companies with over 45 million EU users would be designated as digital "gatekeepers" — making them subject to stricter regulations.<p>Do "shadow profiles" of people who never registered but have data collected on them count towards this?
"curbing the power of tech giants" sounds harmless doesn't it? but when the end-game is to also break encryption:<p><i>"> Europe adopts resolution on security through and “security despite” despite encryption"</i> see <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25429373" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25429373</a><p>it becomes a lot different and realistic goal to achieve. "think DRM!" too. Lawful Interception on "legal comms channels" are then the norm, and e2ee (because it breaks LI) is illegal.
In short, people don't like a deal, and rather than walking away (which they are free to do), they want a well-armed third party to alter the deal.<p>I see a lot of critiques about "bundling", but the fact is every deal is a package deal. Force Apple to allow installing a non-Safari browser; you're still running iOS, you're still using Broadcom chips, you're still indirectly supporting the CCP, etc. But good for Apple because these token changes keep people from leaving their product altogether.<p>The sad irony is that these actions will further entrench established firms by diminishing/obviating competitive advantages of would-be competitors, and/or yield worse outcomes for consumers. This has been the case throughout the entire history of "anti-trust" law.<p>Aside: Competing is not "anti-competitive". A "competitive market" is not determined by counting extant competitors, but by whether or not would-be competitors are interfered with by third-parties.
Does this help big tech or hurt big tech? One way to create a monopoly is to regulate competition out of existence. Lawsuits against big tech are becoming the latest form of semantic satiation.
How convenient. Just as the UK leaves a big gap in their budget, they've just realised that all these mega wealthy companies are actually breaking a bunch of EU laws they've just thought up, and will have to pay the EU lots of money, it's the only way to redress the harm of course.
As an EU citizen, I'm extremely happy for the way the EU is pushing back on the tech giants. It's empowering.<p>The GDPR, in my opinion, turned out to be a terrific first step (which does not mean it does not have its issues). It's been a rocky two+ years, but most sites are already up to a point where they actually give me a way to express my consent, or (more importantly) to object to processing on grounds of legitimate interest (which is where advertisers come in).<p>And that's just one example. The GDPR starts with the following sentence (in recital 1): <i>The protection of natural persons in relation to the processing of personal data is a fundamental right.</i> And the EU is living up to it.<p>It's empowering to actually have a say in how one's own data is being processed, rather than just being the product at someone else's mercy.<p>I can only welcome any further steps in this direction. I have no issues with some entity getting rich and powerful, the problem is when they get <i>too</i> powerful.
As we see more and more companies leave the EU under increased regulation I wonder what kind of potential will exist in the void. GDPR for instance caused a lot of smaller players to peace out entirely. The early bird gets the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese comes to mind.
This very much needed to be implemented worldwide. We have not seen capitalism to have been exploited to such extent, so we need regulation to limit any anomalies. I would go further and require that at a certain scale companies should be divided into smaller ones.
It would be more effective to just regulate the maximum % commission that these platforms are allowed to charge. Set it at 5% for developers located in the EU, and be done with regulation forever.<p>But - this method doesn't allow for over-regulation, over-government, and megafines. The benefits go to small and medium-sized European businesses, instead of the European bureaucrat class, so its a no-go.
One more law from EU that won't accomplish anything.<p>We should be grateful it doesn't look like they're screwing up small businesses (VATMESS) or the entire internet (cookie law, GDPR, copyright link tax) this time
The EU is only good at hindering progress these days. The tech market here is extremely dry with only ARM and DeepMind being the only non-gaming tech companies that come to mind that are actually relevant, with DeepMind needing the backing outside of the EU to be where it's at today and ARM being bought by NVIDIA.<p>The way you improve the tech scene is by providing better alternatives. Music piracy was reduced through services like Spotify rather than some business/political people getting sites 'removed'. Elon Musk creates OpenAI with the goal of building safe AGI, the JS creator created Brave for privacy.
Good luck trying to start any of these projects here.<p>Laws that try to moderate only create a chase that goes in circles. They are not a solution.