As a general rule, when trillion-dollar companies don’t like regulation, it simply means they’re admitting the rules are good for their customers.
I guess they’re going to be replacing their lobbyists because the last batch didn’t do their job well enough.
Or, the EU recognizes bribery that the US hides behind the euphemism called ‘lobbying’.
I am skeptical of how long that’s going to last. There’s too much money at stake.
There’s many EU commissioners pushing for commercial projects already, like Thierry Breton and his ever present “digital everything” initiatives that nobody asked for except the companies that are implementing it. Like eIDAS and the recent digital ID thing. The EU is very receptive to commercial interests but mostly ones originating from the EU.
It is true that we do have a very different outlook on privacy but that should not be mistaken for a lack of commercial interests.
That’s definitely a concern. But at least for now, the EU isn’t a pretend-democracy like the US is, with the actual shots being called by rich billionaires and corporations.
So sometimes there is good news and we can smile a little
As a general rule, when trillion-dollar companies don’t like regulation, it simply means they’re admitting the rules are good for their customers.
We’re not their customers. That’s the root cause of this problem.
“Changes to our Search results may send more traffic to large intermediaries and aggregators, and less traffic to direct suppliers like hotels, airlines, merchants and restaurants,” Bethell wrote.
This is exactly what is happening right now. Every time I search for some random stuff on Google, I get eMag links (eMag is basically the biggest online retailer in my country. Kinda like Amazon).
They usually sound like:
Looking for [query]? Choose from the eMag offer
And then I get redirected to their search page if I click on it.
Found the Romanian! 😁
When we were trying to book a hotel, my partner clicked on the top link of a Google search, which was of course a sponsored link and took her to some completely off-brand intermediary whose website was designed to mimic the appearance of the hotel’s. She completed the booking there before ever realizing it wasn’t the hotel itself, and when I quoted the same stay directly with the hotel it wound up being some $100-$200 cheaper.
I had to have a lengthy phone call with their customer support and exchange a few emails before they finally agreed to refund us. I suppose we’re lucky they even had a reachable customer service, but I was and remain infuriated by the conditions that created the situation in the first place.
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Under the DMA, companies designated as gatekeepers—Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft—must follow strict rules to ensure that they don’t engage in unfair business practices that could limit consumer choice in core platform services.
At its heart, the DMA requires more interoperability than ever, making it harder for gatekeepers to favor their own services or block other businesses from reaching consumers on their platforms.
Some companies, like Google, have announced various changes impacting businesses and users, while others, like TikTok-owner ByteDance, are begrudgingly updating services now while still contesting their gatekeeper status.
Partly formed to cooperate on setting best practice technology standards, the next meeting is scheduled for this spring, just after the EC publishes summaries of gatekeepers’ compliance reports.
Other countries, including Turkey, Australia, Brazil, India, and the United Kingdom, have already embraced the DMA model, according to the nonprofit tech policy think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).
Some critics of the DMA, including ITIF, have urged countries to “carefully consider the full implications before copying the EU’s digital regulatory system,” warning of potentially burdensome restrictions possibly hampering innovation and distorting competition.
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At its heart, the DMA requires more interoperability than ever, making it harder for gatekeepers to favor their own services or block other businesses from reaching consumers on their platforms.
Wow Google/Apple/etc. will actually have to compete instead of just having a de facto monopoly? But how could they ever earn money under such conditions /s
I predict layoffs coming, along with PR campaigns blaming regulation, and pat-yourself-on-the-back bonuses for executives to follow shortly thereafter.
Corporarions should be forced to calculate C level pay based on total employee pay divided by a factor. They cut jobs they lose their own income
I feel like only being able to pay say 10 times the lowest paid employee or contractor would be more effective. If the janitor makes 40k, the boss can make up to 400k. That way you wouldn’t have situations where there is a high average pay, but that’s all in the highest levels of management and maybe a few key personnel while everyone else struggles to make rent.
Using average comes with the trouble that if Jeff Bezos walks into the room, everyone in that room is on average a billionaire even if all by one is hundreds of thousands in dept.
I’ve considered this myself. A sort of “maximum allowable wealth disparity” limit. The only trouble is enforcing it. There are all sorts of ways to shuffle wealth around that might not count as “pay.” You’d need to plug all of those loopholes.
Yep, make it 10x salary, they can pay everyone in the company half as much, and the C-suite gets the difference in options or straight-out vesting.
The quickest and simplest way of doing it is to simply regulate for all assets to be valued/revalued and tax paid appropriately any time it changes ownership, and “changes of ownership” is given a definition that includes a corporation giving it to the CEO, a CEO moving it to a trust or holding company, etc. It would do away with the bullshit “our CEO doesn’t get paid” when really he got millions in stock options instead. The stock options changed hands, therefore they have to be professionally and independently valued, and then taxed.
I agree, your proposal is better
Knowing them, they’ll just say the equivalent of “Hey, we pay our already filthy rich CEOs $1 an hour! We cannot afford to pay them less!” while those same CEOs are out committing tax evasion and fraud.
Apple speaks like overprotective parents that don’t want their kids to leave home alone.
They don’t want their “kids” to leave the beautiful walled garden where everyone pays a fee to be there :P
More like over-controlling parents.
…warning of potentially burdensome restrictions possibly hampering innovation and distorting competition.
Oh yeah, when I think of innovation now I think Google and Microsoft. Seriously what has been innovated in the last 10 years by either of them? Most products by big tech over the last 10 years are knockoffs of competitor products or things they captured by buying out a startup. They’re big lumbering slow corporate behemoths who are just maintaining their power status.
True innovation is what will come out of this. If they can’t hoard users and be anti-competitive… then they actually might have to innovate.
It’s difficult to innovate when most (or all) of what used to go to R&D is instead given to shareholders.
Feature not a bug
I didn’t know Direct Memory Access was still so controversial! (I feel old now).
