Y Combinator urges the White House to support Europe's Digital Markets Act

I personally don’t care about alternative app stores, but I know many do, especially here.<p>I really want two things:<p>* companies cannot engage in any activity a common person would consider “spying”, cannot take the data collected by users of that service and transfer it to another entity, and third parties may not aggregate data collected about persons for any reason. There are a million and one useful reasons to do each of these things, but companies have proven themselves morally bankrupt and should lose that ability. This would go beyond “opt-in”, just make it illegal or the impractical (e.g. it would require a notary, licensed broker, or lawyers on both sides to engage in the practice)<p>* digital “purchases” are transferrable and have all of the rights and privileges afforded to physical goods. The producer&#x2F;consumer balance shifted completely in favor of the producer with digital goods. Terms need to be more favorable to the purchaser as well as protections following the dissolution of a digital marketplace.

&gt; The DMA designates six tech companies as “gatekeepers” to the internet — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft — and limits these technology kingpins from engaging in anticompetitive tactics on their platforms, in favor of interoperability.<p>DMA seems like a no-brainer for those that support users’ freedom. Since DMA came into effect almost two years ago, can anyone comment on its effectiveness?<p>Side note, I’m glad the EU takes normal people’s rights seriously. Wish the US was a leader on this too.

Big tech has always driven me mad with how they leverage their monoplies once they reach a certain size.<p>Why can&#x27;t I swap cloud backends on the mobile platforms?<p>I shouldnt need a gmail&#x2F;icloud account to setup an android&#x2F;ios device. Open those api&#x27;s and let me use another hosted service or host my own.<p>After a device becomes unsupported release the unlock codes or whatever. At that point it becomes a security hazard anyway. I should be able to create custom roms&#x2F;software to keep using it if I want.

Supporting a policy or a regulation which looks at just competition with zero incentives to care for users because it may help the portfolio is not a good look. People may argue otherwise, but DMA exists to make sure the gatekeepers lose market share to their rivals, even if it comes at the expense of consumers. Eg: Google asked to remove maps from their search page, which means a user has to do extra clicks to get to the info they want. Bad experience yes. And now, they still did not lose market share so EU is asking google to do more.<p>I am not against the spirit of the act, but their goal is to listen to competition and ask for changes accordingly. If it screws up users, so be it. There would be no winning. Yes, google search is a monopoly, and should not be so big. The act is unbalanced.<p>A lot of proponents of iMessage example miss out that WhatsApp won outside of USA. By just building a better product and utilizing network effects.

What worries me is the way big tech is forced to build some kind of law book (they call their TOS) some kind of detective apparatus, some kind of kangaroo court and a model for punishing the citizen (user) which is not something anyone should want them to do including them. It is like the old time court where every decision is made though the lens of profit. It gets even more dystopian in a closed ecosystem.

Sex workers in Bangkok pay around 10% of their salaries to the bars where people can find the workers.<p>Apple and other companies take around 30% as a fee for using their marketplace.<p>I don&#x27;t see a reason why big tech should get a higher cut.

Breaking up monopolies used to be one of America&#x27;s greatest strengths—Standard Oil, AT&amp;T, even Microsoft faced real antitrust action. That willingness to enforce competition fueled economic growth and innovation.<p>But under Trump, there’s little chance of that happening. Big Tech has only grown more entrenched, and instead of being challenged, it’s likely to gain even more influence. The era of real trust-busting is over for now, and these companies aren’t going anywhere. I hope for the best in future.<p>I&#x27;m interested how it would be with Musk. He has enormous influence over the markets but he is not an &quot;company&quot; but an individual. I wonder how this would be resolved. I guess just let him choose what he can keep? That&#x27;s sounds fishy to me.

I take it the legislative branch is completely irrelevant in the US at this point… how quickly you gave adapted to living under a dictatorship!

The outcome of the dma is better served by breaking up the companies so that google cannot share data with YouTube or facebook with Whatsapp.<p>The EU regulations so far did not achieve much (other than eradicating EU ads market) , and the YC knows that.<p>They want to distract the government away from breaking up bigtech and towards an anodyne (but annoying) regulation.

Does the law define criteria by which gatekeeper companies are identified, or does it explicitly call out six companies for scrutiny?<p>In the US, in general, that kind of targeted law is highly frowned upon (bills of attainder were a tool the King used to target political opponents and the Constitution wrote them out as a result).

The current admin is not going to support anything sane or european. But nice sentiment.

This is absolutely not what I would have expected.<p>I love Paul Graham but he&#x27;s always criticised the EU for having too much of a heavy hand regulating things and &#x27;stifling innovation&#x27; while there is plenty of room for nuance here -- the EU can be doing both. I think this suggests many in YCombinator are not as &#x27;Libertarian&#x27; as they originally thought and there small mindset change happening.

YC can&#x27;t even urge it&#x27;s own startups to do anything

This is also about being a monopoly, when there&#x27;s a monopoly there&#x27;s no competition. It would be similar to a dictatorship. Developers and customers should&#x27;ve more freedom to buy or sell without being controlled by a dictator. Briefly, there should be more choices from different competitors. This will be healthy for developers and customers.

Y Combinator &quot;Urges the Whitehouse&quot; is nothing but a fiduciary tight rope walking bribe to receive governance in your favor.

&gt; Specifically, YC in its letter points to Apple reportedly delaying its LLM-powered version of Siri until 2027, years after competitors brought generative AI voice assistants to market<p>Apple reportedly delayed its iPhone until 2007, years after competitors brought smartphones to market.

I think where this will fall on deaf ears is due to its branding.<p>~Europe&#x27;s~ America&#x27;s Digital Markets Act might work better with this administration, irrespective of how good or bad the content contained within it is.<p>In terms of what to focus your efforts on, this can be re-evaluated in a few years time when staff will actually dig in, beyond the optics.

Next time your startup is saying &quot;no politics allowed in our company&quot; remember this kind of announcement.

Well, the American credit scrore is made of ketamine ... EU do not need, nor have to respect any deal with a country under addictive substance.

Couching your stance towards a policy in terms of its effect on &quot;innovation&quot; is a surefire way to lose me.

Folks, let me tell you, our Big Tech is going to be absolutely massive—bigger and better than anybody&#x27;s ever seen. We don’t need Europe, okay? Their tech companies? Total losers. We’re going to keep on winning—so much winning you’re gonna say, “Please, Mr. President, enough with the winning!” But we won’t stop. If we don&#x27;t win the first time, we&#x27;ll slap tariffs on them so fast their heads will spin. And if tariffs don’t work, guess what? We’ll just buy them out—it’ll be huge. And if that doesn’t do the trick… well, let’s just say you really don’t want to know what comes next. We’re gonna win bigly, folks. Tremendous.

Worker 17 needs to get access to their app to complete their work!

DMA is cementing a duopoly in mobile OSes.<p>Trop break that duopoly, we need rules for hardware manufacturers to store complete spécifications in a trusted public registry, with fines if the doc is incomplete, misleading, etc...

We all are trapped by TOS into data mining operation. There is no denying this fact. You don&#x27;t own your computer or smartphone. You don&#x27;t own your data. Practically speaking, we don&#x27;t have an accessible and user-friendly tool to protect ourselves.<p>The humanity collective data output is weaponized, and the surveillance state is transforming itself to an AI governance.<p>Publicly announced by the WEF. And embraced by the masses, which have nothing to hide.<p>Moreover, this thing is labeled as inevitable progress and the only option is transhumanism and post human ethos.<p>Add to this incoming digital dollar&#x2F;euro plus social scoring systems, and we are cooked.<p>So, welcome China apparatus. :)

Why not enforce anti-trust law?

Good luck. I fear it will be a waste of time and resources.

I don&#x27;t see this happening although I would have a beer belly laugh if all of these tech oligarchs got on their knees just for Trump to piss on their heads.

It&#x27;s hard to believe that so many Americans, including prominent industry leaders like YC, are so delusional about the political situation in America today. You are not getting such regulation. You aren&#x27;t getting any regulation. If rules do pass it will be because of politics and corruption, not the public good.

1) that will never happen. 2) that should never happen.

At this point we should not be supporting ANY legislation related to technology that&#x27;s coming from the EU.