If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations. They seem to prioritize free trade above all else.
Tesla is headquartered and has most operations based in the US. Murdoch's ventures are similar AFAIK.
Given how much surveillance modern vehicles do I wouldn't be surprised if imports start being subjected to additional scrutiny at some point. But at least most vehicles can't be used to subtly and intentionally manipulate the owner's perception of the world so I guess the stakes are a bit lower.
But really, what makes Tiktok different is China.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-tiktok-ban-linked-isra...
Here's a piece of history from 1985 that talks about it: https://archive.ph/HlHrx
I'm guessing the reason why they're lying is that they don't want to scare ALL Chinese companies.
This is pretty much as vague as it gets "they're doing _something_ wrong".
The exact behaviour that is prohibited needs to be codified into law. Then you can go after organisations what break such law.
In this case, they've just been found guilty of an unwritten crime.
> If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations
Corporations in general rather. I do agree that we should be stricter of foreign corporations, and on non-foreign ones equally so.
5/7 designated gatekeepers are US companies: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
There are zero European companies, including Spotify - the #1 music streaming marketplace in the world.
> There are zero European companies, including Spotify - the #1 music streaming marketplace in the world.
This still doesn't answer the actual question of whether the gatekeepers were selected because they are US companies, or because they are are Internet gatekeepers. I don't find it surprising that the US's legal and economic culture resulted in more conglomerate gatekeepers than other nations.
They control access of businesses, in this case music labels, to the final customer.
You can't just ignore YouTube, TikTok, Facebook Marketplace and still have access to the content they gatekeep.
The DMA is about disintermediation of businesses from customers on large platforms with business and non-business users and durable user bases.
- treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
- prevent users from un-installing any pre-installed software or app if they wish so (Chrome on Android can be disabled but not uninstalled)
- track end users outside of the gatekeepers' core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent having been granted.
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/about-dma_en#what-d...
The assessment for whether Chrome qualified as a gatekeeper is less than 3 pages long. All they care about is whether they qualify as a platform and that they are over the threshold for active non-business users, active business users, revenue in the EU for enough time.
At no point did they concern themselves with potential anti-competitive practices in making the determination.
It's only after they're designated a gatekeeper that they're required to avoid things like self-preferencing or negotiating MFN terms with business. This conveniently allows the EU to pick and choose who the restrictive rules apply to on a company by company and product by product basis.
https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
That regulation is very much concerned with anti-competitive practices. What we're seeing now is the application (or execution) of those regulations.
When I look at Regulation (EU) 2022/1925, it's pretty clear to me that Spotify does not have, for example, "very strong network effects, an ability to connect many business users with many end users through the multisidedness of these services, a significant degree of dependence of both business users and end users, lock-in effects, a lack of multi-homing for the same purpose by end users, vertical integration, and data driven-advantages."
Spotify most certainly does have strong network effects (your friends are all on it, the party you go to with collaborative playlists uses it, etc), data driven-advantages (Spotify's personalized recommendations are built on vast historical playing data), lock-in effects (your playlist/history and all your friends' playlists are there), dependence of businesses users (Spotify is the go-to platform for music labels for promotion and only way to reach certain customers) and end users (because of network and lock-in effects).
From a brief search, Facebook and Google are responsible for ~60-80% or more of digital advertising spend. This is because of their data-driven advantages that come from the multisidedness of their services, forcing a dependence of business users.
While Spotify does have social features, I don't really know anyone who joined Spotify because that's "where their friends were." The social features consist primarily of playlists (which can be viewed without an account) and a feed showing what friends are listening to, if you connect to Facebook - which many don't. Additionally, Spotify has very open APIs that make it easy to move a playlist to another service: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
Facebook requires an account to access Marketplace, even to view it (lock-in effects), and many communities and neighborhoods have made Facebook the sole source of online discussion / information sharing (strong network effects.) Eschewing Facebook means missing information you can't get any other way. And it's literally impossible to avoid Google online.
Simply having a product and customers ("your friends are all on it, the party you go to with collaborative playlists uses") or an audience ("Spotify's personalized recommendations are built on vast historical playing data") is not the same as being a gatekeeper.
Former Apple Music user here. I switched because of Spotify’s collaborative playlists. Technically, I could have used a sync solution to sync changes between platforms. In reality, it was just cheaper all around to switch to Spotify instead, and be on the same platform as my partner and friends. Being able to open Spotify links being sent to me without having to run it though some translation shortcut was wonderful.
Apple deleting all my playlists immediately after my subs lapsed was the icing on the cake to never return.
The criteria for gatekeepers are the following:
1. The company must have a core platform service in online advertising, browsers, intermediation (distribution), communication, OS, search engines, social networks, or video sharing. These are the areas of concern for the legislature.
2. They must have either a €7.5B turnover in the EEA for three consecutive years or a market capitalization of at least €75B.
3. For three consecutive years, it must have either over 45 million active EU users or over 10,000 active business EU users.
Initially, in 2020, the EC suggested that the market sectors concerned would also include travel, audio streaming, film/TV on-demand streaming, and e-commerce, as it identified significant market concentration in these areas. Spotify eats up 55% of the EU streaming market, and Booking.com - 35% of EU hotel bookings. Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, Sky, and DAZN collectively account for 90% of the EU TV/film streaming. Along with current market gatekeepers, these companies were the reason for the new EU DMA laws.
Today, Spotify arguably still meets the criteria. It is an intermediation platform that distributes music and podcasts, similar to YouTube, an identified gatekeeper, distributing videos and podcasts. It has nearly 200 million active users in the EEA and a market capitalization of over €120 billion. By all criteria, it should be included, and it was included at a point in time.
The only reason it's not included is procedural. The core platform services (area of concern) in final DMA didn't include audio streaming. Therefore, Spotify was never asked to self-assess for gatekeeper status, its assessment was never processed, and so on and so forth. The same applies to Booking.com.
It's relatively clear and transparent that these EU gatekeepers conveniently fell through the legislative loopholes. Then again, there are other unaccounted-for areas of concern/core platform services provided by other companies like Uber. Arguably, Uber's price-dumping strategy to monopolize markets poses a greater threat to EU consumers and local competing companies than Spotify. So why wasn't ride-sharing a core platform service in DMA? Who knows. Just one more suspicious omission, like Spotify.
The only justification I can think of for this that doesn't show EEA bias towards its own companies is "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". Maybe DMA regulation is coming for Spotify next, the EC just didn't do a thorough enough job this round.
EU companies tend to keep group entities separate instead of running for absolute synergies. For instance the AOL-Time-Warner-Direct-Dish kind of merger is pretty much unheard of.
Does that violate EU law? (Serious question, I really don't know)
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-tiktok-ban-linked-isra...
No doubt that it became an argument by some more recently, but it was just another straw on the already broken camel's back.
TikTok never does that.
The tinfoil hats come out pretty quickly when China is mentioned but Occam's razor still applies here.
This thing right here terrifies me. The entertainment-information media oligopoly has a tight grasp on public conversations. It feels like a hydra that can't be defeated.
This only has a local impact, but global is made of local.
It's exhausting, but it's worth it.
I want to organise with other people that do this, but I'm not sure how to do that. It feels like our efforts would be multiplied if we started to publish or otherwise spread information.
If they're doing it by legislation, well, the EU has been passing "legislation clearly designed for US companies to be in infringement of" for a while. Maybe you like that. Maybe it's a good thing; after all, the things they're passing laws about are basically just actions only US companies are capable of taking right now. Nevertheless it is clearly targeting. It's just targeting you like. The US has passed such legislation. China does it both with formal legislation and with de facto rules.
Free trade is a dead letter. Whether you like that or not is not very relevant to whether or not it is dead. It's dead. Maybe it'll swing back around in a few decades but right now even that is a distant prospect, we're not even done accelerating into the current merchantalist phase of the cycle, let alone decelerating, let alone heading back.
(Note "whataboutism" would be an inappropriate response to my point here; that's about "it's ok for us because they do it". My observation is not normative, merely descriptive... everyone is doing it, and they're doing it more rather than less right now.)
They already do, lookup how many European banks have been fined by the US and by how much then compare that to US banks.
Everybody plays these games.
It doesn't matter what applies, only what's enforced matters.
Laws being selectively enforced for an agenda is a tale as old as the existence of laws.
The iPhone App store existed before this legislation, and I suspect the rest of the targetted things did too.
This legislation only applies to companies that have a certain marketshare, which includes no European companies unless you count one that's a subsidiary of a US company.
Maybe it's the case that it is reasonable to handicap successful businesses, but this is a handicap that only applies to some businesses, most of which are US (but one is Chinese).
> The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards.
But this is wildly untrue. The EU isn't hand-picking individual organisations and fining them because they're American, they're fining them because they're in breach of existing legislation. The same legislation applies to local companies.
Ironically, it's the US who takes stances like the one they claim the EU is taken. E.g.: The US required that TikTok be sold, without actually proving that TikTok was in breach of any actual law.
But repeating the same claims gets those claims out into the media, and that's what people hear. So we see a dissonance between what the media says (and many people believe) and what's really happening.