I think we underestimate just how difficult it is just to replicate existing services, let alone keep up with the innovation.
It's like the Argentinian effort to stimulate its own computer manufacturing by banning Apple products.
That is completely unrelated though. The only thing this ruling confirms is that you can not process data of EU residents when you can not be adequately protect them due to local laws i.e. the CLOUD act. If your laws allow you to keep the data safe, you can offer your cloud services to the EU market as much as you want. If they wanted to, the US could easily allow companies to guarantee those protections too.
I would not be surprised when, if no solution is found, some of the major cloud providers in the EU end up being e.g. japanese, israeli or canadian.
Careful, there is such a thing as network effect for knowledge. More fractured systems mean more different approaches means less aftermarket documentation means less people being able to work for you.
And that totally fine, if you think European companies have no competitive disadvantage on the global market to being forced to use traditional VPS providers or build and set up everything themselves. But I imagine it'd be very challenging if other companies outside the EU can go to market faster, deliver better services for lower cost, etc. than their European counterparts because they can use American cloud providers like GCP or AWS.
As a US citizen I've contemplated getting my wife residency down there and it's simply ridiculous - as are the hoops I'd have to go through to relinquish my US citizenship and that only matters because the US feels entitled to own me even though I haven't resided there for nearly a decade at this point. US immigration, from the working visa angle, is extremely unpredictable and only really estimable if you've got a large corporation with a whole bunch of lawyers to get your back - spousal visas aren't terrible but most come with some seriously onerous lifetime costs to execute (like taking a year off working).
I know there are a bunch of European countries and they've all got their quirks to immigrate into but you can really trivially get an EU passport and then move around within the EU.
On the other hand Italy denied my application once already, after my great grandparents basically left the country because Italy was not defending their town from Germany. They rejected my application because they say my great grandparents were not Italian but Austro-Hungarians. The lady at the consulate was super racist to my grandmother about it, in my face. After that now there's another way I could get my Italian citizenship by birthright by suing the government because of another racist thing they use to do where women were not transferring citizenship.
Again the US is not great but a lot of this things make me feel whatever "racial tensions" I may be a victim of in the US are mostly the media blowing stuff out of proportion, when most of the "racial tensions" I felt dealing with the EU are actual racial violence or discrimination that either me or my family where victims of.
That seems like a very reasonable requirement. How can you expect to participate in society, especially elections, without a decent command of the local language?
By hiring a local accountant and paying a small fortune in taxes? If I learn the language then yeah cool maybe I'll get into their politics thing but it's not that if I don't vote I'm not going to be a productive citizen. A lot of countries let you become a citizen without learning their language, most notably the US.
Being a part of society is a lot more than working and paying your taxes.
> A lot of countries let you become a citizen without learning their language, most notably the US.
An English test is required to become a naturalized US citizen. https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship/learn-about-citizenship/th...
Note: I'm only spreading rumors :)
What does that mean? Are you suggesting that countries should control where their citizens choose to work/live?
Why did you move there in the first place, raising a kid there, when just learning the language is apparently a hurdle too big to take?
This doesn't sound like a crazy requirement to me. The giving up other nationalities would be a deal breaker for me thought.
The US is "allowed" to offer whatever it wants for people to move there.
Recent European judgements seems to make it illegal to embed content from YouTube or Vimeo for example.
I don't see how dividing services up by region will help me anyway. I'd rather be able to choose from a few (I imagine there are more than a few at the moment) international Mailchimps than one in EU.
It’s similar to the UK’s pornography laws being more about surveillance and censorship rather than protecting children.
That's how the internet has been. That's how I feel about US tech giants getting all my data. They write their privacy policy, they dictate their terms, they follow US laws. I have absolutely no choice or voice or vote, unless one considers "yo dawg just build your own internet" a realistic choice.
I don't feel like the purpose is to drive out foreign competition. I feel like the purpose is to enforce privacy as a right, and I fully support it. I also fully support the right to transmit data across borders as long as the destination country also respects my privacy and rights instead of treating me as an alien and potential terrorist. Is that too much to ask for?
And in general, is following the rules of the country you offer a service in too much to ask for? Local laws apply to brick and mortar business; if Walmart wants to come to my neighborhood, sure go ahead, but please respect our laws. I don't see why internet companies should be above the law either.
GDPR is replacing rules dictated by US corporations with democratically established rules written by our representatives. It's unfortunate that there's now a clash between US laws and EU laws, but it's not the end of the world.
imo it's just a thinly veiled protectionist law that will fracture the internet all for the sake of propping up EU incumbents who can't innovate.
If free market were effective, we wouldn't have needed labour laws to keep people from dying in factories where they work 16 hours a day, we wouldn't need laws to make vehicles safe, we wouldn't be desperately looking for agreements to curb pollution and climate change, we wouldn't need laws to protect minorities against discrimination.. hell, I don't think we'd need laws at all because everyone would just rationally and effectively choose good actors & displace bad actors.
It's a nice fantasy, but it's not one we live in.
Even the US knows rules for markets - it’s never entirely free. European laws just set more rules and give the consumers more rights - something I consider useful where there’s a strong imbalance in knowledge and power between the consumers and the companies offering a service.
National regulation is a form of centralized economic planning. Is it always bad? No. Is it always good? No.
TikTok was nearly forced to sell parts of its operation so it could continue operating in the US, in India it's actually banned.
> DuckDuckGo's success is an example of that.
As good as DDG is, it's not that great of an example as all the background tech there still relies on Microsoft's Bing, which means there is very much a US-centric search engine monopoly in place.
> that will fracture the internet
Maybe the Internet needs fracturing, we've reached a point where a handful of US corporations control the vast majority of the web traffic [0], that kind of massive centralization is the absolute antithesis to what the web is supposed to be and presents a massive filter bubble in-itself.
[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
Yes, that's a great example of protectionism that was reversed.
> As good as DDG is, it's not that great of an example as all the background tech there still relies on Microsoft's Bing, which means there is very much a US-centric search engine monopoly in place.
DDG is not the only privacy focused search service. There are others with their own homegrown search engines. I believe some of them are French. This also reflects consumer demand. DDG only able to evolve and grow based on how many people want to use the service.
The US could coordinate and work with the EU to try and craft laws that span both regions in a unified manner so that businesses can operate more freely but instead they're choosing to subsidize a protectionist agenda by levying a cost on the privacy information of its residents.
I love your wording. Regulation mixed with "operating more freely" is oxymoronic. The same can be said with your argument of "subsidizing a protectionist agenda" when you're referring to the lack of regulation and legislation.
> As a counter point - I think it's fair to view the extreme lack of consumer protection laws in the US as protectionism for domestic tech companies. T
The spat between US tech companies and France's ancient media companies is not new. It's very disingenuous to pretend that the purpose of these laws is just to protect consumers.
Regulation is a firm requirement to a free market, without regulation of any kind you will pretty quickly descend into authoritarianism as whoever has the biggest stick will just take everyone else's stick. While there definitely are dangers at the other end of the spectrum if you're fanatically at either end you've got to ignore a whole bunch of pretty well known issues.
> Regulation is a firm requirement to a free market, without regulation of any kind
I agree, but there are lines that when crossed either negates or greatly lessens the overall benefit for most people outside of vested interests.
> you will pretty quickly descend into authoritarianism
Moreover, historically speaking - centralized economic planning tends into devolve into tyranny vs systems with primarily free markets.
This is also much less about protecting consumers than it is about protecting old French incumbents who are unable to evolve.
Common regulation between jurisdictions allows businesses subjected to the regulatory oversight of multiple involve jurisdictions to operate more freely than if the jurisdictions did not coordinate and instead adopted regulations where it was impossible to comply with one without violating the other.
You shouldn't just pick one word from one part of a statement and a two-word phrase in another part and ignore the rest of the statement in order to create your own argument to respond to.
No, I’m pointing to the exact subject of discussion, the suggestion that the US and EU, who currently do regulate and do so independently, could coordinate regulation.
This isn't a case of doublespeak at all - it's just that the world isn't a simple place.
> regulations often help to make free markets more free.
No. They do not. That's nonsensical. The whole point of regulation is to exert control over something for better or for worse, depending on the situation. That's the exact opposite of freedom regardless of the consequences.
Your analogy is poor because it doesn't mirror the original quote. A better analogy that mirrored the original quote would be, "We need to murder people in order to save their lives." It makes about as much Orwellian sense as saying, "There's freedom in slavery."
I’m specifically addressing how the statement which branched this sub thread off was, itself, a non-sequitur to the statement it pretended to rebut.
There are many good arguments in favor of regulation, but that is not one of them, despite all the mental gymnastics being done to pretend that it’s a good argument.
...when convenient.
I have enough things to worry about, I don't want to consider 10 different cloud computing options, 10 different database options, 10 different analytics services. I want to just go with the big popular option.
Heck I'm willing to bet even if more options come up, the most popular option will be some aggregator site that tells you which one to use.
I would call fragmenting these things rebuilding the internet. Not sure how consolidating everyone on a few Mailchimp type services is in anyone's interest.