1. Alphabet/Google

2. Apple

3. Facebook

4. Match Group

Match group is lucky they're not getting much attention, but they own all major dating apps. They need a bit of smacking.

Reasons:

For Google, the biggest problem is their bundling of Chrome, YouTube, Gmail if you want to have Google certified android phone that has the Google play store. Google should be prevented from having their own WWW crawler too. The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google and any other company that want to purchase it at the same costs.

For Apple, it's their app store. The app store needs to be eliminated. Apple has a problem with not allowing competing browser engines on iOS and misleading people by saying it's for privacy reason. Eliminating the control of the App store from Apple is going to fix the problem.

For Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp should be spun off to their own entities.

For Match group, break off tinder into a separate company. And prevent any future dating app accusations by Match group or Tinder. NO MERGERS.

---

From the Chinese side:

I'd like to see Alibaba group and Tencent being investigated.

-----------

Edit: replying to calls below for travel industry.

The travel industry is already competitive enough, and the situation in these areas should be reviewed after a year or two.

For now, these are the critical problems for tech. Their control is taking the breath away from smaller companies and reducing innovation.

> Match group is lucky they're not getting much attention, but they own all major dating apps. They need a bit of smacking.

I had never heard that name and just googled them. HOOOOLLLYYY COW!!!!!!! That's what I call monopoly.

Doesn't seem terribly monopolized to me, especially if you factor in that one person often uses multiple of those apps.

That's exactly why I mentioned people using multiple apps, which lessens the effect quite a bit. Users on dating apps are also rather fickle, and will jump to the next best app once that becomes available, so even with a big market share, there isn't much lock-in and there isn't much of an outsized benefit to the position as a market leader. E.g. in the European market Bumble appeared a few years after Tinder and within 1-2 years basically everybody that I know that used Tinder before at least tried out Bumble and many continue to use both or switched outright. Of course that's very anecdotal, but current statistics for number of US users for both apps paint a similar picture[0].

> I think it's safe to assume they own 80-90% of the market share. That is pretty close to monopoly if you ask me.

In 2016, they apparently owned 25% of market share[1], which is pretty far away from a monopoly if you ask me.

It seems a bit weird to me to group them together with Alphabet/Facebook/Apple. The others span far more markets, and have much much stronger lock-in effect which they can unfairly leverage to push other products. Compared to that, Match Group is laughable.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/826778/most-popular-dati...

[1]: https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/06/07/why-match-group-st...

...so duopoly??

I think it's much more than that.

Google makes apps and services. Google makes the platforms apps run on (Android, ChromeOS, Chrome [web + electron], Stadia). Google makes the services used to monetize apps (AdSense). Google makes the services used to distribute apps (Google Play Store, Stadia). Google makes the services used to find apps and services (Google Search, Google Maps, Google Play Store). And that's not to mention the deployment platforms, communication platforms, payment platforms, analytics platforms, development tools, content hosting services, etc.

They have so much control that you can't hope to compete with any of their established apps or services - no matter how much better your own product might be. All you can to is try to make something new and get big enough that Google can't take you on directly.

Android was motivated to compete with Apple. The Play Store and Chrome Web Store required platform ownership for integration and optimization. Intertwined services demand mutual optimization. Many other Google products would likely struggle as startups, requiring massive scale to become profitable, if even possible. Most only exist because ads pay for them and they may contribute to improving ads.

Who knows? How many alternatives died or resolved themselves to relative obscurity because Google managed to get a strangle hold on the market before their competitors could establish themselves?

Maybe Windows Phone would still exist. Maybe we'd be much further along with a truly open mobile Linux platform.

Maybe Firefox wouldn't be slowly fading into obscurity. Maybe Opera would be one of the top browsers. Maybe Edge would still be developing its own browser tech instead of just reskinning Chromium.

Maybe OSM would be the most popular map provider. Maybe Vimeo would be the go-to platform for video hosting. Maybe people would prefer store their files on Box. Maybe ads would have never have become such a popular monetization strategy and we might have seen some new and innovative strategies in its place.

Who knows?

If anything Google made Maps shittier over time (similarly to how they've managed to fuck over their own GMail offering).

As for Chrome, that was originally developed by KDE devs first and Apple second into a modern browser engine. The innovation part was theirs. Google just adopted it wholesale in the beggining, and started monopolizing its steering...

That’s... not how that works. You’re talking about WebKit, but the innovation of Chrome was separate processes for everything so a crash anywhere wouldn’t take down the whole browser. Sure, they’ve gone a bit “mad with power,” but to claim Google did nothing in the beginning is ignoring reality.

I'd argue that's more of an evolution than an innovation.

It had only just become normal for home and office PCs to feature multi-core processors. High capacity RAM was becoming relatively cheap compared to other PC components. We were still in the early days of webapps and social media. The concept of "browser tabs" was still new.

Google had the advantage of starting from ground zero, so they could consider these new trends as part of their design. Incumbents had to re-work their existing tech to take advantage of those trends.

That's not to say I agree that all these predicates are met in Google's case, but if you really do find yourself in a situation where a company can't be broken up because the constituent products are necessary to society but can't function without one another, then that company probably can't be effectively regulated by any government.

Suppose Chrome couldn't be a part of Google. They would have just contributed to Firefox, wouldn't you say?

Or if they were worried about Apple, donated startup capital to a non-profit Android Foundation to get it off the ground, where it could subsequently operate under a business model similar to Mozilla.

The difference is that the independent entities wouldn't have the same conflicts of interest as they do as part of the mothership. Firefox can care more about privacy than Chrome, so if it was the dominant browser, all the better. An Android Foundation operated by people in the spirit of Debian would probably care more about continuing to support older phone hardware, and care less about monopolizing app distribution to their operating system.

Hopefully much fewer.

>How much innovation is restricted by splitting entities.

None. It's actually increased. What you listed is products, not innovations.

So was MeeGo, maybe we would be using that now if Google couldn't just throw its weight around.

> The Play Store and Chrome Web Store

Ah vendor locked in store fronts, nearly as innovative as the company store in mining towns. The promise by Google to completely pull the rug out under any Android manufacturer trying to get away from it only ads to its clear innovative superiority .

> Many other Google products would likely struggle as startups, requiring massive scale to become profitable, if even possible.

Yes, the last decade of venture capitalist funded loss companies like Uber has shown that no one could reach that size without Google to guide them.

Over the past 10 years, how many companies chose to build native apps for iOS instead of web apps running everywhere? How many people bought iOS devices instead of competing products because of that rich app ecosystem (working only on iOS devices)? How much money did they make through the App Store fee that app developers could have saved if Web Apps had been a viable option? How much money was poured in the native industry instead of the Web?

Apple has been preventing the growth of the Web as an app platform for years, it's time for a change, and it's time they pay for it.

The problem is that they prevent other browsers to add these features, because they prevent them from using their browser engines. That way, they prevent these browsers to really compete with theirs (Safari). Because if we could run the real Chrome on iOS, with all the APIs it supports, it's obvious everyone would ditch Safari straight away.

And more importantly, that way they prevent Web apps from competing with native apps. Because obviously, who would use a Web app which can't even send push notifications instead of a native app with all the native APIs it has access to?

So the problem is not Apple not caring enough about the Web. The problem is Apple having anti-competitive behaviour regarding Web browsers and application platforms on iOS.

You'd be running features that both Mozilla and Safari consider harmful and will not implement.

And if I'm not happy with that, maybe I'll switch to Firefox, which doesn't support them while not holding the Web back on many other features and with many unfixed bugs for years, like Apple does with Safari.

That's the advantage of competition, if you're not happy with a product, you can use another one instead.

Most frontend devs that I know making PWAs complain endlessly about the number of exceptions and workarounds for Safari, and indeed it does slow down development and ends up being a justification for contemplating dedicated mobile apps.

Apple doesn't have to do anything, they just have to stop blocking others from doing anything.

Anything else, like two iOS versions, is simply a provocation on the level of "we cannot unbundle IE".

This is where this line of reasoning goes wrong.

People will be persuaded to go out of the App Store ecosystem regardless of whether it is good for them or not.

Tens of billions of dollars and the most valuable advertising real estate on Facebook, Amazon, and the front page of Google, not to mention Epic and the other TenCent owned games companies will all be used to convince users to install alternative App Store.

Facebook and Amazon will presumably bundle stores directly into their apps. Why wouldn’t many other companies do this. Presumably TikTok would.

But it doesn’t matter, because all this is effectively false in practice. The overwhelming majority of people can barely be bothered to change their desktop browser, and even then they mostly do it only when directed (by their IT or their power-user of reference). This idea that they will all suddenly go tweak-crazy and install every appstore under the sun is simply an exaggeration, a strawman propped up to defend Apple’s utterly anticompetitive practices.

You’re going to need to explain this. I don’t see anything in what I wrote that leads to the conclusions in your first paragraph.

1. Users may not understand the security/privacy benefits until after they have sacrificed them.

2. There will be very large competitors trying to persuade them that there are no benefits. E.g. https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/16/22178068/facebook-apple-...

3. Alternate stores will pay for exclusives and users will be forced to use them or lose important apps.

4. Key apps such as Facebook itself will just build stores into their apps.

As to your second paragraph:

“The overwhelming majority of people can barely be bothered to change their desktop browser, and even then they mostly do it only when directed..”

This is true, which is precisely why only Facebook and Google plus Amazon and a few others, E.g. Epic, will have the resources to persuade users to establish large alternative stores. Google advertised Chrome on the front page, and on TV. This is exactly what would happen with alternative stores.

“This idea that they will all suddenly go tweak-crazy and install every appstore under the sun is simply an exaggeration..”

A strawman is when you present a deliberately weak version of another person’s argument, and then attack it. This paragraph of yours is a strawman. Nobody alluded to anyone going tweak crazy etc. Nobody defended Apple.

My comment was a response to this:

“People who want to stay safe in the Appstore garden have nothing to do, and everyone else can go the extra mile if they want to.“

Which is clearly an unrealistic depiction of how things would be.

This. We devs do a great/horrible enough job of this already being lazy with implementations and saying “Chrome is the only supported browser”

Google seems iffier, since Chrome at least would never be viable as a standalone product (as the fates of Mozilla and Opera have taught us).

Totally agree that Match group is an interesting under-the-radar one. It's shocking how much of the market they control with all their "competing" apps.

Firefox has been viable as a standalone product for over a decade because Google pays for being the default search engine. This is roughly viable with Chrome being around, it would be even more viable if Chrome was not around.

However, Mozilla doesn't have a massive userbase like that, which leads me to suspect that Google only pays Mozilla to stave off pressure form regulators who would otherwise accuse them of having a monopoly on browsers.

You can't compete with Chrome when your primary merit is simply not being Google. Forcing Google to spin-off Chrome should have been done earlier though, before Microsoft had a stake on the engine. Now additional steps need to be taken to ensure that spinning off Chrome will not actually kill competition; with an independent Chrome, we can count on Google cutting down on Mozilla's funding since Google wouldn't be any longer in danger of being ruled as a browser monopoly.

I wonder if this means that we should all start starting dating app companies, given that apparently it's a guaranteed sale if you can attract enough users. We could start the "match group group," stamping out standardized dating apps and putting proven amounts of brand-building effort into each one, and selling them to Match Group at a repeatable price.

“ Google should be prevented from having their own WWW crawler too. The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google and any other company that want to purchase it at the same costs.”

I know someone working on DOJ’s case vs G search, yet I haven’t heard any decent proposals to solve the problem. This is one. Simple and could spark a lot of innovation. (Probably has drawbacks that I haven’t considered yet.)

The harder problem is what you do with the result of the crawl once you have it. You need to index it. This is one of Google's deepest moats. Being able to serve any of hundreds of billions of documents in milliseconds requires an enormous amount of infrastructure and hundreds of careers worth of difficult software engineering.

I don't see a good way to split indexing out as a separate company from the rest of the search engine. It's tightly integrated with ranking. Generally a new ranking technique requires some new information to be associated with each document in the index, e.g. some precomputed scores that describe the document's quality or fitness for different kinds of queries. At query time, you're often just weighting and comparing these scores across documents.

If you had Google's index, you'd be a long way towards being able to replicate Google's results, but I don't think that would lead to the kind of innovation you're hoping for.

Not even close. I've used Common Crawl, it has nowhere near the breadth that Google has in their index.

Problem no. 1 is that website owners block non Google crawlers because of limited bandwidth. So you can't reliably even get started on creating your own search engine. Once we have the data available, we can figure out the other bits and what they require. But to get to that door, you need access to the crawl.

You don't need to have everything in the Google index to beat Google.

You need to be better than Google in the search niche that you'll serve.

And for that, at the bare minimum, you need access to all the crawl data that Google has to get started, then throw away the bits that you don't need.

Quote via [2]

--- start quote ---

When Mr. Maril started researching how sites treated Google’s crawler, he downloaded 17 million so-called robots.txt files — essentially rules of the road posted by nearly every website laying out where crawlers can go — and found many examples where Google had greater access than competitors.

ScienceDirect, a site for peer-reviewed papers, permits only Google’s crawler to have access to links containing PDF documents. Only Google’s computers get access to listings on PBS Kids. On Alibaba.com, the U.S. site of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, only Google’s crawler is given access to pages that list products.

--- end quote ---

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dom...

[2] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/12/14/wakabayashi-goo...

When they saw crawler they don't mean Googlebot or something.

They mean the whole thing you've described, the search engine as a backend.

What the law proposes is that other companies should be able to just buy the search engine service from a new company split from Google, of which Google which will just be just another client.

>I don't see a good way to split indexing out as a separate company from the rest of the search engine. It's tightly integrated with ranking.

The idea is to split the whole search part from Google. Let them have the ad business, Android and so on, and just rent the search from the spin-off company...

And at the same time, on the same website I need to enter Google-provided captcha. To fight robots.

In the end, the point would be to make Google closer to what it was at the beginning -- just input and output. No ads on top of it, no bundling with other offerings etc. And if the publisher's ranking remains as good as it should, then surely some will be willing to pay not only for the raw data, but the ranking as well.

The search front companies would use the index to retrieve pages, then they would rank these pages with their own criteria and filter with their own white/black lists, then present the result in their own UI. Each one would have their own ads and tracking (or lack thereof). The index would not be able to know the identities of the users.

In the end they all boil down to an "attention economy", it's about us and our eyeballs, we should have more say on what we are consuming.

The part about ranking, filtering, tracking and UI is true for FaceBook and Twitter as well, even though they are a different kind of service. We could have alternative views on these systems, where we have more control on the way the system manipulates the information for us.

For site owners, it may prove to be lower maintenance to simply whitelist such a bot for crawling, though on the downside they may want to pick and choose which search engines can index it, and since the crawl (assumedly) would use one UA it would complicate how site owners can tell respective search engines what they're allowed to do with the crawl data.

While we're at it, how about making shady practices about "last seat available" and "secure your seat" and "sit with your family!" and so forth illegal. "Upgrade to clue!"

Oh fuck NO. Apple has saved me from scummy apps more times than I can remember. They always refund without question, including when I fell for Match.com's "Pay up to see how many bots like you" scam.

Right now I'm fighting to get my money back from Couchsurfing.com (they started throwing a "COVID contribution" prompt on the app and the website that blocks you from doing anything, can't even delete your account until you pay) and they're flat out ignoring me. They use a custom payments system. If it was a regular In-App Purchase, Apple would have refunded me within hours by now.

Anyone clamoring for the protections of the App Store to be abolished is very likely someone salivating to prey upon users.

They own Windows + Internet Explorer/Edge + Bing and a lot of internet services.

I think it's problematic that Skype gets auto-installed eery time Windows updates.

While Microsoft bundles, it's not problematic like Google or Apple. Their way of doing things is different.

The problem with the smart phone world is that apps are distributed through stores not websites. There isn't any worthy exclusive Windows Store app I can find. Every useful software is available from the websites.

In the smart phone world, as a device manufacturer you have to get Google's blessings. They control the play store. And as a device manufacturer, no play store = no sales.

The app store parasite model needs to end. I get no viruses in years, and I download software from websites all the time on Windows 10.

Not only has Chrome near monopoly, cemented by being the default preinstalled browser - they feel the urge to nip even the tiny insignificant competition in the bud.

We're beginning to see the limitations of globalization. For all the anti-trust rhetoric from the US, it's unlikely it'll accept this level of over-reach without pushing back. Imagine a US company getting approval for a merger from the US and not getting approval from the EU, what happens then? Can China also grant itself this level of influence over American business?

We're definitely in the beginning stages of a new world order that's far less cohesive, with distributed levels of influence.

I don't think it's shocking at all. Every market is free to regulate itself however it sees fit, regardless of what "nationality" players on it have. It's interesting hardly anyone blinks an eye when that regulation allows "American" companies to save costs in developing countries but there are complaints when it disadvantages those companies, often for the same kinds of regulation: labour and environmental.

Both of these are already the status quo even before this law

Let's not forget that this is a US based website. It's only natural that US based issues and US based viewpoints will always surface.

- Bumble

- Badoo

- Eharmony

- Zoosk

- ChrstianMingle

- JDate

- tons of international and niche sites and apps

- many, many others

The idea that there is monopoly power being leveraged here to prevent other dating sites from being started and grown and be successful has very little evidence behind it.

If you agree that Apple should be on the list, then Match Group should without question be on the list.

Instead, the reason why they are bad, is due to things like barriers to entry, and the anti competitive practices that they enact.

For dating apps, I don't see how match group is putting up anything that could be described as a barrier to entry, for other dating apps.

Whereas Apple is absolutely doing things that effect competition in the market, by, for example, preventing competing app stores on the Iphone.

Therefore, Apple's actions are much worse than Match Groups, even though they have a smaller percentage of the market.

In your opinion, what is the real reason for no allowing alternative browsers?

I like this idea, but more precisely I'd put the index with the crawler as well and only keep the ranking/filtering and display part separate. I'd like to see many "heads" on top of the crawler/indexer.

Regarding "match". You would be surprised how much fraud exits in the dating industry. How many people get payed to keep paying customers engaged with the app. Also, just wait until your Tinder gold expries. You will get tons of (hidden) likes.

Microsoft

They might be the ones who finally push it for mainstream adoption, then PayPal can go kick rocks.

If it fails, then maaaybe we could think about it. Still not as bad as these 4 major offenders.

You'll have to explain why a dedicated hardware company wouldn't be able to come up with such a chip given sufficient competition. If many people use language X, then it makes sense for an IC design company to optimize for that language (unless there is a near-monopoly situation and they don't care about what the market wants).

> But there are plenty of other examples (ever wonder why no one seems to be able to replicate Apple's great trackpads?).

I'm afraid you'll have to provide some more context, because the connection between your argument and both hardware and software seems missing.

They gave you an example. Apple (software part) don't need to run around and ask hardware companies to implement optimisations in their hardware, and hope that implementation will be as promised (see: Microsoft and Qualcomm, and debacle called "custom ARM chip for Windows"). Apple (software part) can plan their releases many years in advance, knowing that Apple (hardware part) will fulfil their promise (see: Intel's roadmap recently, NVidia and Apple in the past). Apple (software part) can choose programming language that suits them and be sure that the hardware will follow. Apple (hardware part) can plan many years in advance and make obviously superior product knowing that there will be enough software support (Rosetta 2) to overcome initial platform switching pain. The whole M1 Mac story is all about the company that is so integrated that they can pull something that nobody else can.

You choose to ignore the example.

As such, the only reasonable thing to do is to slowly ween ourselves off American tech in favor of letting our our own grow, just like China did. They probably won't be as good, but unless we want to be completely dependent on a foreign power for all our IT, we have no choice. And really, we have no obligation to let American companies pick the fruits of our markets out of some weird sense of "fairness" of free markets. The world is not fair. Of course, there will be retaliations, but for any non-IT tech there are local or Chinese substitutes.

the issue is even deeper. You can't compete without recreating the same issues that those giants already have in the US or China. I don't even want to compete with Facebook just to have European Facebook, it'd suck just as much.

I want smaller companies, which don't abuse data, which don't sacrifice security for 'hypergrowth', who are able to moderate their content and comply with laws rather than ignore them, and so on. Companies like this will never compete with American or Chinese giants in a 'free market'. It's like having a green energy company compete with companies that can legally pour their waste into the river.

The EU needs to create rules to reward small companies and to curb large ones. Don't copy "maximal consumer welfare" doctrines or prioritise convenience, promote decentralisation. It looks like there's some good stuff in these new laws, but they don't go far enough yet.

Why would smaller companies be better positioned for those things?

any given smaller company is non-essential, meaning it cannot challenge lawmakers on the grounds of being essential, or bully lawmakers into submission.

Smallness also incentivises business models that aren't data-analytics driven because small companies simply lack huge pools of user-data, hopefully diminishing the toxic surveillance-capital model of predominantly large firms.

Also, the US has 50% of the worldwide online advertisement market in a single cultural region.

There's two things the EU could do here: force big companies to split up (so they can't favour their own services) and require social networks to be interoperable (using ActivityPub or similar).

The US got to take their wealth and invest it in innovation and growth. Europe had to beg, borrow and steal just to rebuild what it had a couple of decades earlier.

It certainly wasn’t charity, and most of it was via loans that were repaid. So yes, thank you, but equally don’t get too big for your boots, it was driven by only shrewd self-interest.

So why Germany and not say France or the UK? Countries that saw much less destruction than Germany?

For example it's difficult to create a startup in France because it's very difficult to discipline or fire anyone, and tech workers are used to clocking off at 5pm and having 35+ holiday days per year.

This means that no one's creating these epic billion dollar companies in a hurry, but at the same time the populous is defended, healthy, and not overworked. As opposed to the US where often a company's rise comes at the cost of a wealth of underpaid and mistreated workers (Amazon, Uber, we could go on).

To use an intentionally extreme analogy, your argument feels like sitting around watching the US build lovely tall pyramids with slave labour, saying that Europe's regulations get in the way of it building such tall pyramids. Well, yes, of course, the US is better, if all you're measuring is the height of the pyramids. (nevermind that the US is the easily the biggest user of slave (penal) labour outside of China)

It seems like US workers and the US public lose out on almost every other measurement.

Well China would like to have a word with about your "tiny little" country. A world exists outside of the borders of the USA.

There"s always someone bigger than you so "tiny little" is usually not a good platform for an argument.

> If for some reason you still succeed, now you have to recruit tens of thousands of people to move to your tiny little country

Further, the idea that all employees of one company must work in one country is clearly not the case. Or did globalisation not happen?

> but also because who wants to spend the energy to learn Swedish for a single job

Whilst not in huge numbers, generalisations such as this also do not help your argument.

European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate. And that's the root of the tech issues, in that the culture doesn't foster risk taking.

Jury's still out on that one, Apple Music is making very large in roads, and Spotify is starting to struggle.

It quite possible for the statement "the US have greater cultural homogeneity than the EU" to true alongside the statement:

> European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate.

And I would argue that's exactly the case. Having been in startup that seriously looked at expanding in the US vs expanding in the rest of the EU (it expanded into the US), I'm confident to say the US is far more homogenous. Interestingly that doesn't necessarily mean that it's easier for an EU company to expand the US rather than the EU. But it does mean that EU startups have a much larger bump in the road than US companies when they're expanding.

Large in roads amongst Apple customers or large in roads to the general market?

I'm just a realist. Spotify is not big by comparison. I just looked up a list of the 30 most highly valuated America, and the least valuable was bigger than Spotify.

> European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate

I've lived in both and it's just no comparison. What differences you find within the US you find within single European countries. The fact is that an American startup can target a huge, homogeneous and rich country with barely any extra work.

Interesting—do you mind expanding on this?

I believe most of those big companies fed from Europe but not only from a market perspective but from a technological perspective.

Contrary to what the media try to depict, most of the tech on which those companies are built were designed in Europe and most of the brain that lead them studied in Europe.

I believe Americans are the best to market an idea, as they mostly focus on optimizing for the product market fit. Which produce the biggest market capitalizations.

But long term planning is still mostly done in Europe as it's considered too expensive almost everwhere else in the world, particularly in the states where remnants from the cold war makes the concept of the government pooling money to fund big projects a politicaly incorrect idea.

So the next logical step will be that like last time Americans will not produce anything meaningful for next 20 years which will give the time to Europe to capitalize on their previous innovations and to produce the next generation of ideas, and the cycle will repeat.

But if we wanted to increase the pace of those innovations, some bipartite solutions could be imagined...

In the US it is taken for granted that there has been a virtuous cycle between public research money, research universities, venture capital and tech companies. My impression is that most of the tech originates in this ecosystem.

I don't see why not. The EU's GDP is almost as big as the USA's, and the EU has plenty of educated people who understand the relevant technologies.

> As such, the only reasonable thing to do is to slowly ween ourselves off American tech in favor of letting our our own grow, just like China did.

Yes. This needs to be done not just for web services and social networks, but for the whole technology stack including chips and operating systems.

Try convincing tens of thousands of engineers to learn Polish, Estonian or Dutch. Some will do it, or are fine living in a country without speaking the language, but surely it puts a wet blanket on job market mobility. It's a hard sell: "Come to Stockholm to work with us, learn a new language that is useless anywhere else, and adapt to our culture or be forever an outsider. Oh, and your next job might be in Denmark, so do it all over again."

Google has 120,000 employees today. You may find half of that in Germany, France or the UK, but not in the rest of the 40-ish countries scattered throughout the continent.

> Yes. This needs to be done not just for web services and social networks, but for the whole technology stack including chips and operating systems.

Totally agree, especially chips. This one is the hardest though.

By the way, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are very similar to each other, and they are not tricky at all compared to German or Dutch. Most other rich EU countries are large enough that learning their language opens up lots of career possibilities. Eastern Europe is a different story. Many do well, but these countries still tend to suffer from a net brain drain towards the richer countries.

ARM was until recently a European company. This is part of the dynamic - some companies in the US have huge piles of cash. If a European company gets successful enough, there'll be interest from a large US company in acquiring it.

These 50 countries are so different (sarcasm) culturally and linguistically that in every single one of them almost everybody uses the same Google ;-)

I wouldn't mind using a Dutch search engine or a Portuguese social network if they were nearly as good.

I don't understand how is it harder to engineer a better search engine (or anything) in the EU than in the US.

If this comes to pass as described, this is a landslide shift in mentality. Paying fines for shady practices will no longer simply be the cost of doing business, but there's a real risk of being locked out of a major market.

The risk is that too large fines are bankruptcy events so companies gamble on polluting and then shut down after making a few years of profit. Companies that get environmental permits such as mines or chemical industry, should have to deposit the money required to restore the environment - even after bankruptcy.

It didn't happened like that. And it was not a fine, big or small. It just has to shutdown operations until the problem is fixed. So, it auto-scales with the size of the factory.

It works, it's proven, why not use it for tech ?

For tech there is obviously no environmental “cleanup” after bankruptcy.

It'd be interesting to see if the tech giants could use the same approach - create a child company in Europe, funnel the profits and user data back to the parent (offshore, of course), then let the regulatory fines bankrupt the child company. Repeat at will.

The EU doesn't seem willing to play along, and branding is important for tech companies. We'll never see a search engine that's secretly Google.

Yes! And that's how it should be.

A fine is just a permission slip for rich people.

Since e.g. Apple holds something like $200b in cash, fines are anti-competitive in this field. A small player can't afford to risk a fine; Apple can pay any level of fine, if it ultimately needs to.

If (in the US) corporations are people, then clearly corporations should face the prospect of ending their existence if they make an egregious-enough violation: the corporate death penalty.

That being said, of course Google and FB are never going to be banned in the EU. They'll lobby to death to get the regulation to be "reasonable", and they'll mostly comply because they want their part of the advertising market, and they'll pay the fines when they get caught.

That's how representative democracy works, and it's the kind of democracy 95% of the world uses.

Good luck influencing Google or Facebook's policy.

Sure they can be banned EU-wide, although it can obviously be circumvented by the ambitious. Have you been paying attention to EU politics lately regarding the digital single market? Because the EU already has huge behind-the-scenes plans (generally unannounced) for EU based platforms and developments.

Given that Brexit is looming, this doesn't sound very sustainable. If the people feel the EU's power is no longer legitimate, there may be consequences.

Brexit is just the latest chapter in a long European history. The same is true for the Union and the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties. European history isn't finished as long as there are Europeans.

The U.K. wasn't a founding member of the E.U. nor has it ever been a stalwart partner of the E.U. ever since it joined the Union back in There has always been contention in the U.K. about being a E.U. member ever since it joined through the 1972 Treaty of Accession. The U.K. even held a referendum as early as 1975 about the question of remaining in the then E.C.C. (67.33% voted remain)

The same is true for many other E.U. members, notably newer members who joined the union in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Warsaw Pact after 1991. Their incentive to join the union was just as much geo-strategic as it was economic. That doesn't mean there weren't voices opposition within those countries as well as elsewhere in the union.

These two companies coming under scrutiny isn't just because they monopolize a consumer market. It's because they enable forces of contention - nationalism, identity politics - that have led to some very dark chapters in the recent European history.

The E.U. such as it is today, originates from ideas that gestated right after WWII under such proponents as Winston Churchill, and the primary incentive was... creating a stable structure for peace on the continent. The E.C.S.C. as founded by the original 6 founding members (Schumann) was about consolidating the coal and steel markets exactly because those were enabling factors during both wars. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union#Background

And so, if the E.U. moves against Google and Facebook, it's because it feels these companies are evolving into a threat against the first principles from which the Union has emerged.

Right wing, often foreign owned, sections of the British media have been able to use that and other outright lies* to present the EU as against British interests whilst furthering their own agendas.

In a way, the UK tabloid press is like a precursor to the polemic fake news of social media. In the past politicians would suck up to foreign businessmen like Rupert Murdock and he would attack their rivals. The EU probably doesn't want to see that repeated elsewhere with Zuckerberg.

* When Boris Johnson was a full-time journalist he often made up populist stories. One well know example is the EU attempting to ban prawn cocktail flavoured crisps. Completely untrue and only written to get the naive frothing at the mouth in anger and advance his career. He repeated that lie, amongst others like his famous NHS bus poster, during the Brexit campaign.

I figured from phtrivier's account of things that they were suggesting it's a political pattern for national leaders to blame the EU as unrepresentative. If it were a one-off I'd agree.

> if the E.U. moves against Google and Facebook, it's because it feels these companies are evolving into a threat against the first principles from which the Union has emerged

My point was about undermining perceived legitimacy. I've not commented on whether the regulations themselves are a good idea. Do you think phtrivier's account of things is mistaken?

Well, he only points to a specific rhetorical device used in politics. What really matters are the incentives, interests, values, trade offs, tactics, available opportunities, risks,... that prompt a leader to use that device.

The E.U. is very much a representative body. Every 4 years, there are European elections and every European citizen does have a vote in those elections. And it's perfectly possible to start a so-called europarty. [1] The European Pirate Party - part of the Greens-European Free Alliance, is an example. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_political_party [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Pirate_Party

Moreover, a party could be nationally in the opposition, but be part of a political group holding a large chunk of seats in the E.U. parliament. Plus, as a party, you could be for and against particular policies at the same time.

The problem with phtrivier's account is that it surmises that politics must consistently operate from a particular, usually unmentioned or implied, moral high ground. The reality of democracy - and by extension any form of cooperation between individuals, groups, parties and nations - is that it can only function if one is willing to compromise and show pragmatism in which battles to pick, or where to draw lines in the sand.

The very real consequences of confusing rhetoric with pragmatism - and, ultimately, failing to display the latter - are clear in the second and third order effects as a result of Brexit on economic, political, geostrategic and social interests held by both the U.K. and the E.U.

Right, but that's the topic I was responding to. If politicians are making a habit of blaming things on the EU and implying the EU is unaccountable, that strikes me as a problem worth taking seriously. Presumably it wouldn't work in the first place if the people had unshakeable confidence in the legitimacy of the EU.

> The E.U. is very much a representative body

Sure, but I wasn't commenting on this. My point was a specific one about perceived legitimacy, without which there can be no EU. Whether the EU is actually democratic, is another matter.

I have to clarify that I only witnessed the rethorical device being used in France, mostly in the late 90's / early 20s. It was mostly used "informally" (through dog whistle, if you want) , and usually simply by "ignoring" the debates in Brussels and hide behind the commission after decisions had been made. Only the most nationalist parties would blame almost anything on the EU. Maybe other countries behaved differently.

> The E.U. is very much a representative body

The fact that the Parliement is the most obviously elected body, and the one with the least amount of power always bothers me. Although it always makes me giggle to hear this complain from right-wingers in France, where we have a Parliement that has been de-facto powerless because of the way we elect our MPs and President. Anyway, another matter it is !

Yes, the rhetoric is problematic. But politicians can be held accountable by the people who give them a mandate based on election results. The public debate, journalism, education and the voting booth are instrumental in doing that.

These things aren't self-evident though.

They are really expressions of emerging collective behaviour. And that behaviour is always a function of a multitude of social, economical, political, cultural, religious, geographical,... factors.

Authoritarians don't necessarily take power through a violent revolution. It just as easily happens by simply exploiting weaknesses in the economy, society, financial system, the legal and the constitutional framework to a point where they arrive into power. Weaknesses such as economic and social inequality, widespread resentment, poverty,...

Many authoritarians and populist leaders derive their legitimacy from the same democratic processes that also lead to a lawful state which upholds moral values such as basic human rights.

"Democracy" in itself isn't a guarantee towards a net "good" or "bad" outcome. That's just value attribution. Democracy is just a form of governance which could just as well lead to less then desirable outcomes.

Democracy doesn't protect society from bad actors who spout populist rhetoric. Nope, society can only protect itself as long as enough individuals are willing to call that rhetoric out for what it is: damaging and hurtful. Your "democratic" rights are only worth anything to the extent that each member of society is willing to back them.

And that requires believing in the value - the legitimacy - of the E.U. as a shared project.

> Whether the EU is actually democratic, is another matter.

Well, during last year's election cycle, I did get presented a voting ballot that allowed me to directly elect members to the European Parliament. The candidate I voted for, did got elected.

... which leads me to believe that, yes indeed, the E.U. is "actually democratic".

And as far as I can tell, the fact that the E.U. provides a legal framework that allows me to enact my individual rights. Such as the GDPR. Not just from Facebook or Google. But also from public authorities itself.

I perceive that as a good thing.

I'm not from the UK but let's face it, the EU cannot afford to lose another big member like Germany or France. Smaller members can be Euro skeptics all they want as they'll just talk the talk but can't afford to walk the walk as they benefit the most from the EU.

Sure, the UK never did like to play ball with the rest of the EU and had to be let go but that doesn't mean it's a win for either side. A weak and divided EU only benefits China and Russia and to a lesser degree, the US.

As a reminder, Montreal was the biggest and most influential city in Canada before the independence movement and it lost a big chunk of influence even when the referendum went for No.

Leaner is meaner and the UK leaving - sure if it was just for the money then that wasn't a relationship and the children have already grown up so to speak.

What does worry me a bit is that tech/large companies have become in effect their own political parties with the amount of influence and impact they have had over the years. So any move by the EU now to rein them in, is a good thing and honestly, good to see that political lobbying by companies has some limits.

2021 is going to be a whole better year for all.

But the transition arrangements mean everything of importance changes at the end of 31.12.2020.

So far it's just a lot of government adverts telling us how things are going to be worse and to prepare for it. How much extra paperwork, tariffs, expenses, licenses, applications-for-permission etc there will be come 31st December, how we can no longer conduct some kinds of business, how professional qualifications cease to be valid in Britain after 31st December, and how some people who are currently employed can no longer be employed from 1st January.

All the adverts and policy effects that actually affect people are focused on 31.12.2020.

(Reading between the lines it also means some people will no longer be permitted a bank account or the ability to rent a roof starting in the middle of next year, though the government prefers not to headline that unpalatable truth.)

On 31.12.2020 things will change in a way that affects some of us harshly indeed.

I'm British.

As far as I'm concerned, Brexit proper happens for me on 31.12.2020 because that's the day I'm deprived of my previous life-long right to work, study and move my life to the other EU countries, which I have previously used, and hoped to use again :'(

I absolutely hate that such a major freedom, and my family's freedom, and my EU citizenship, is being taken away so forcefully against my consent and without me breaking any laws.

I was considering leaving Britain and emigrating to another EU country this year under EU-citizenship-grandfathering terms, but Covid made it infeasible. If the Brexit transition period had been extended I might have been able to do it next year, but it will cease to be possible after 31.12.2020.

What a Christmas present.

On 31st this year, around midnight, many of us will mark a day of darkness and sadness, as doors close on our life choices, and the Britain some of us had some sort of love and pride in some years ago finally ceases to exist.

More likely the EU would negotiate with the companies rather than outright ban them.

Ultimately, local politicians are the EU's decision-makers. MEPs sit as members of national political parties; the European Council are heads of national governments.

Passing the buck to the EU is a weak position, and in general a mistruth.

There aren't many issues divides nations in the EU from each other - most, if not all, decisions that the EU takes have divisions within nations (between the political groups), not without (between national groups).

You can argue that "blame the EU" is a position that the UK government has taken successfully - continually blaming the EU for any problems that they have created themselves (sometimes blaming the EU despite incompetently avoiding the EU's clear recommendations).

But, now that the UK has left the EU, they don't have anyone left to blame for their own poor planning and decisions. We'll see how that pans out.

(they were still rioting over other issues, just not Amazon)

As far as I can tell, this had no noticable effect on the political parties. I think you are overestimating the power of large tech companies to influence foreign EU democracies.

There are other examples, including one involving google, where they tried to block access to certain services and expected the population to blame their government.

Unless you can give me a counter example, I think it's more likely people will blame the tech company.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/9c9bf084-994f-11e5-95c7-d47aa298f...

Buying competitors, actions which are already well regulated and overseen by the FTC? And European bodies?

And then ... ?

Giving away software for free?

The populism is getting way out of hand.

First, if there are some anti-competitive issues to address, the EU should do that, but it's hard to do in retrospect.

Google / Chrome / Android is an obvious one, Apple's issue with App Store another, but Facebook / Insta / What's a much less obvious one.

Second, the real underlying issue is Europe's failure to produce anything material in this landscape. They have almost no winners and are being dominated, these are the acts of system with a weak hand. If SAP and a bunch of other European companies dominated the US landscape, this legislation would be different.

Apple would have to significantly redesign their entire OSs if this comes to pass. Will be really interesting to see!

You can argue that someone else would fill that gap but they didn't really seem to be doing that before Apple stepped in. In fact I would guess that Apple would have preferred not to have developed them, it's not as if they generate any direct revenue.

I think you may have inadvertently stumbled on the point of these laws.

The EU doesn't want companies getting to Google or Apple scale, and all the power that amasses with it, without it being possible to ensure they're holding up EU ideals, rather than their own.

The sanest thing you can do is use LineageOS, but I can't really trust the LineageOS team since the april fools fiasco.

The lack of a third option is simply because of incompetence, not monopoly.

Would Apple itself be here if Microsoft didn't port Office to their OS?

But there could be a requirement that Apple open up their laptops to other OSs (and not just via virtualization). And honestly I don't see why that would be a bad thing.

You probably can't force them to write the drivers for other OS, but you could presumably force them to document the hardware.

Also size-based limits would be hard to create/enforce. IBM has about 350K employees wordwide. McDonalds has about 200K. Google has about 100K. Amazon 1.1M. Do you look at market cap? The industry specifically?

It's a complex problem, that's why there is no simple solution.

"Mergers: Commission fines Facebook €110 million for providing misleading information about WhatsApp takeover" https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_...

Please, please make it happen...

I don't see any of the major players having a hissy fit and walking away from that kinda user-base. Though the prospect of large companies hiding behind firewalls to protect themselves from EU users, does bemuse me.

Anecdotal and hardly conclusive but I work in UK local government and we get a weekly email from our web proxy showing the top 50 domains by proxy traffic in that period. The usual split is something like 42 domains that are linked to US companies, 5 are UK companies with the remainder being the rest of the world (including the EU). That's been the case for years now.

It's common for a pragmatic 'Cassandra' to point to the newest evidence as permission for people to finally wake up to the problem rather than berating them for not paying attention any earlier.

Surely the pandemic forced them to use some more tech.

I will use this in the future as an example for this simpler (and cheaper) system working just fine.

I would add that despite the funding coming from the government,

> The work of DW is regulated by the Deutsche Welle Act, meaning that content is intended to be independent of government influence [0]

Specifically, the supervisory board of Deutsche Welle consists of 7 members that get elected by the parliament and the acting federal government and another 10 members that come from non-profit organizations like labor unions, religious groups, cultural and sports organizations, among others.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle#Aufsichtsgremie...

Ms. Vestager kind of glosses over this (2:40 min into the interview video).

They're well within their rights to do it of course, that's how trade works, but I expect the US to defend American companies from unfair sanctions like this one.

Seems that language and regulations are not the barriers here.

Even US companies aren't that "unified", they're hailing from a specific state (often California) and have nothing to do with the other 49. You could easily swap "California" with "Germany".

Looks to me like access to capital and risk aversion are the biggest problems. Always have been.

The UK is by far the best place for a startup in Europe, and I'd wager that will stay the same even after Brexit, as long as every other country has this obsession with saving cash and not investing in risky business, or any business at all.

Localization is easy, getting millions for a startup is hard. And God forbid you fail, you will very likely never get any funding from anyone in the EU and will have to move to the US. Such a waste of entrepreneurs.

Yes, because that US company was already big in the first place thanks to its foothold in the US (a single-language market). The same thing was starting to happen with AliExpress just before the pandemic but I'm not so sure how things stand right now (politics-wise, mostly).

It's pretty hard close to impossible to become a "google" or "facebook" in the local German or French markets big enough to conquer the rest of the continent. Spotify and the rest of the similar European products have had the success that they encountered precisely because they focused on an international (i.e. English-speaking) market first.

Basically, I think starting with just one language is a mistake - if you're aiming for the whole EU market, start with as many languages as you can.

Of course, that will be more expensive on a continent where funding is not easily available.

Some resellers, Wish and Joom for example, have ads in every European language, it's the same ad but with different text/voiceover. Seems to work pretty well for them.

US companies can create massive businesses within the US. They are backed by massive VCs, national press.

Once you're 'big in the US' you can knock out many other countries like dominos - except for those that are protected, or too big, or both.

EU nations are mostly separate. The Swedish market is basically too small to be relevant for most things, to have a credible business model you have to raise money on the basis of 'EU wide' and that's a hard thing to do.

French media doesn't care one bit about Swedish startups, just the opposite, they probably prefer their own.

Ebay and Amazon bought up all their smaller competition in Europe, that same pattern is repeated.

So it's an existential problem.

We need a degree of fiscal integration at the federal level, similar to what the US have. At that point, smart people running smart companies will be free enough to deal with the cultural-border problems just fine.

Yes EU unifies a lot of things, but also leaves a lot of details up to the individual nations which means things aren't quite as similar as one might imagine.

EU visitors are obviously a small fraction of their traffic, which allows them to do this. But there are millions of other websites where that's true. And yet, none of them feel the need to implement geoblocking. I just tried Four Seasons Total Landscaping, and it works fine.

So there's something else going on. To cut to the chase, it's publishers being ideological and idiotic: they are trying to make some point about EU imperialism and US sovereignty, by pretending that the EU has powers it doesn't have.

As a European citizen, I don't want this.

It also costs money to implement GDPR