Re:Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in E...
by cyphar on Monday March 05, 2018 @02:35AM
(#16519412)
I think that's a fair point, and I completely agree that the emissions scandals were horribly handled by the EU. For the record though, Germany actually did an arguably better job than the EU commision (actually doing investigations into the fraud and raiding several car companies), while the EU appears to have done very little.
But neither have not done as well as Switzerland (banning VW diesel cars entirely), South Korea (criminal case against VW executives), Netherlands (class action and investigating the reacquisition of the subsidies paid to VW previously), Australia (forced recalls and class action lawsuits), or America (as you've already mentioned).
I don't know whether the car industry is the best example of "EU interventionism" done right, given how central the car industry is to Europe's enconomy (which is a whole different issue). I'm not sure whether they would've treated non-EU companies differently.
The obvious counterpoint here is the Volkswagen emissions scandal. Europe generally went "oh, maybe we should make it harder to cheat on emissions" whereas the US went "here's the fine for not meeting emissions, here's the fine for cheating, oh by the way, you can't sell these cars anymore since they don't meet emissions, and mind the class action lawyers on your way out." That said, it could well be the cause that the EU would have been equally nonplussed had GM been the heart of the scandal instead of VW, but there is room to argue that Germany isn't treating domestic companies with the same vigor that it does foreign ones.