EU isn't ever going to have its own "tech" industry as long as US has full access to EU markets and IMHO the ChatControl thing is totally unrelated.
Anyone who has a "tech" industry besides US has it thanks to trade barriers and embargoes because otherwise doesn't make sense to have it. The product doesn't have a considerable marginal cost to distribute, doesn't make sense to have it made in more than one place. 50 US states don't have EU regulations and yet everything is still happening in SV only, the rest of the "tech" in US is about as developed as in the rest of the world and they all feed into SV one way or another. Also, there's no way for competition as the capital in US(which can come from Europe, Arabs etc. too) can provide the services at loss for 10-20 years until drives everyone out of business.
EU tried to be open for business and have sovereignty through things like privacy and data control laws but the end result was that whoever is worth their salt goes to SV and sell it in EU from there and when tangental industries like VW or Mercedes need top talent for their software there's no one left or those who are still in EU are not doing things that transfers well into their niche.
ChatControl, IMHO is just some career move of some politicians from the ultra low corruption small northern countries where people trust the government way too much. They appear to believe that they can solve some issues with it. Not that different from all the governments who want control and each one wants as much control as possible.
I think the age control attempts are much more interesting and consequential. Why? Because bots don't have age. If implemented in a way that preserves anonymity while ensuring that the things are written by a real person(or at least has someone responsible for it even if its AI written) it can actually solve the bot problem and social manipulation problems like people from other countries pushing an agenda that doesn't actually have organic roots in the society.
Anyway, the issues are real and the risk are real and I think its a good idea to seek methods to mitigate the risks while keeping in mind that even if you currently like the government in few years the people who you don't like might be in power so, be careful.
>I think the age control attempts are much more interesting and consequential.
Exactly. The age verification and the "human identification" problem are the same problem. Anyone who thinks this tech/policy ends with identifying 16-year olds is out of their depth. Everyone, including governments and adtech firms, is planning for a world post-AI whether they're smart enough to realize it or not. I'm just worried about the details of that world.
>EU isn't ever going to have its own "tech" industry as long as US has full access to EU markets and IMHO the ChatControl thing is totally unrelated.
It's even simpler - EU does not foster any form of framework for growing any industry, they incentivize things that were already successful elsewhere and were found necessary to have in EU. It's all top-down in form of EU grants/benefits/whatevers.
And even then - those grants are are tied up with basically pre-planned prince2 style project management that makes deviating from them hard, and sometimes impossible. Purchases have to be pre-planned, for almost anything.
>ChatControl, IMHO is just some career move of some politicians from the ultra low corruption small northern countries where people trust the government way too much. They appear to believe that they can solve some issues with it. Not that different from all the governments who want control and each one wants as much control as possible.
Yes but no - it comes from Denmark, which has a lot of issues with overstepping legal bounds when it comes to data gathering and privacy. It seems more like attempt to legalize those using excuse of "EU forced us to adopt it :)".
>I think the age control attempts are much more interesting and consequential. Why? Because bots don't have age. If implemented in a way that preserves anonymity while ensuring that the things are written by a real person(or at least has someone responsible for it even if its AI written) it can actually solve the bot problem and social manipulation problems like people from other countries pushing an agenda that doesn't actually have organic roots in the society.
I think it's quite the opposite - identity fraud will become more profitable, while "open" internet will be infantilized into child-safe zone. Full of bots, but now any real form of communication will have your full doxx attached to it - doesn't matter if visible or not, just possiblity of it is enough. You will self censor yourself just in case.
Also all of those systems do not preserve anonymity, and basically are another mass surveillance tool.
It is just another step towards ChatControl, one surveils, other forces self-censorship.
While reverse would make sense - make children only internet that's actively monitored, accessible only via government issued smartcard/e-sim/thingy, while leaving it up to parents if their child should or should not access real internet.
Financial central was mostly London due to favorable local laws.
Nokia fills very small niche now, basically services backbone
Bosch and Siemens predate EU
BWM also, but i wouldn't put it at forefront of innovation with how automotive industry is going.
did you notice that not even a single company you've mentioned is something new, and all of them basically come from "western" side of EU or are already established industries sometimes predating WW1?
You are wrong in few ways, ie pharma - check where your ozempic comes from, that mostly US money has become a significant factor in Denmark's economy.
I get it, its easy to throw various statements around to feel oneself' good, but can you please back them up with some hard facts to have a healthy discussion? This site strives for a better behavior.
Some pharma companies in the EU come up sometimes with good ideas (famously BioNTech), but it's the US and its money, building on that or just simply coming on top in most cases and ripping off the benefits. But let's not forget, that like for BMW or Bosch or others, the EU pharma companies that are somewhat competitive with the US companies are companies which exist for decades ...
Americans really believe in this stuff ha, comedians on TikTok weren't exaggerating when they talk about how they used to believe that US invented everything, has everything and the rest of the world live around dirt roads. Amazing.
Anyway, BMW and Bosch is also American because they make their money by selling to Americans. Don't let anybody say its not true.
> EU does not foster any form of framework for growing any industry
Also you:
> did you notice that not even a single company you've mentioned is something new
K, but that was not your point since they did indeed "grow as an industry". Aren't you saying that auotomotive hasn't grown as an industry in the EU, I hope. Also,
> Pharma is miles behind US,
Source?
> Financial central was mostly London due to favorable local laws.
You mean like Paribas, MPS, Allianz... none of which are in the UK?
All those industries were fostered by individual countries with little-to-no transnational support from the EU.
On top of that, traditional European industries like Automotive have not kept up with challengers, the financial industry across Europe itself is morose in comparison to similar markets in the US or China, and European Pharma itself is overwhelmingly clustered in Switzerland which is not an EU member.
Nokia itself was at the brink of collapse in the early 2010s, and Siemens and Bosch have faced increasing stress at the bottom market from Chinese players and at the upper market by American players, plus states like the US and India required significant firewalls between those companies operations in their countries and Europe.
Long story short, while individual European states may have been able to build innovative companies, that muscle has largely atrophied over the past 20 years.
Why would politicians do any of that? Did United States House of Representatives invent anything?
All these EU companies are all private enterprises and they are %100 from a country in EU because there's no such thing as EU as a country, EU doesn't have companies(beyond entities created to fulfill certain functions). This too may change soon because they are looking into introducing a 28th regime which would be like virtual EU member.
I think there's huge confusion on what is EU.
BTW, EU has roots in "European Coal and Steel Community" and role in forming the Airbus but even in these ase it was just a facilitator.
All these expectation that are based on imaginary things(don't take it personally please, I see these things all the time) shows that EU desperately needs to become a country by its own right. Its so confusing to understand what EU can and can't do, what organization is under EU control and how much.
> Why would politicians do any of that? Did United States House of Representatives invent anything?
Most industries in the US developed due to state and federal government subsidizes and industrial strategy.
You can see this with the development of semiconductor clusters in Oregon, Arizona, and New York in the 1990s-2010s because of state level industrial policy, the development of the telecom hub in Dallas TX in the 90s becuase of Texas's state level industrial policy to leverage the telco boom, and historically Michigan and now South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and TN's industrial policy for automotive manufacturing.
Furthermore, this ignores the impact that the IRA and IIJA subsidizes and investment promotion had in bringing European manufacturing industries to the US at the expense of their European operations - so much so that both France and Germany lobbied at all levels of the US during the Biden admin to try and kneecap the policy.
> All these EU companies are all private enterprises and they are %100 from a country
Absolutely, as are companies in the US yet our states have been open to leveraging industrial policy where possible in order to attract and retain investments.
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I am under no illusion that the EU is a country. Heck, if you re-read my initial comment that is my point.
I know that it is Germany, France, Netherlands, etc who are setting policies, but the EU at a macro-level can help solve the coordination problem that exists amongst individual EU member states to develop industrious policies.
That said the current status quo needs to end - either member states need to admit the EU as a central body is powerless and return to the pre-2000s vision of the European Union, or admit that a unified Europe is ideal and centralize.
The current status quo is the worst of both worlds, because the delimitation of power is wonky, and leads to nation state-EU clashes.
EU doesn't have top down control, in fact EU has very little control over anything and that's why its ineffective in its current form despite having enormous wealth as a block. All these initiative this initiative that are, IMHO, just political FOMO and I don't expect them to amount to much.
EU doesn't have the capacity to plan stuff, even under grave danger from the war in Ukraine EU barely coordinates building some bombs. EU is able to bite only when each country is coordinated well enough to implement some laws, i.e. GDPR thing bites through the regulators of each country and not through EU. If EU eventually becomes a state then thing can change but thats not the case at the moment.
EU is not a communist state and doesn't have a top down planning, its a coordination centre for 27 free market countries and its up to the EU capitalist and engineers to come up with technology and investment. They actually do, that's why EU is huge exporter of stuff. Believe it or not, there's more in this world than coding, there are all kinds of engineers that deal with atoms and electricity.
However the "tech" doesn't flourish in Europe because doesn't make economic sense. US has full access to EU markets, they already have the know how and capital concentration, so why bother to re-invent the wheel in EU? Just go do it in US or do work for the US companies cementing their position even further.
US can afford not to have much regulations over the "tech" because they have the HQs and all the important people in SV. The moment some company that's not from US becomes big they take it down. TikTok for example, they forced a sale to fking Oracle, US doesn't allow foreign communications on its land. Its a semi-open knowledge that US government is working with those "tech" companies to control its own population and interests.
I don't know, if the US way of doing this is the better one, maybe EU should just force all the US "tech" companies to sell to EU owners just like with TikTok. Then get rid of all these regulations and just summon the local people when things go bad, like the "wrong" ideas spread like the way it happened on TikTik with Israel-Palestine conflict. The US way is like, oh you are not cooperating and not pushing the right agenda? Oh that's fine but too bad the new employment rules will hurt you and you can forget about this datacenter permit thing.
I'm saying they are trying top-down initiatives - the difference is subtle but important.
This is about attitude and how attempts are made - not how successful they are at it. This isn't central planning - this is just plan ineptitude that's sabotaged by inter-country conflicts of interests, with extremely bloated beaurocracy - sometimes just to have enough representation from each party.
EU is stuck between worst of both worlds, and i don't see anything changing for better in here without a shift - either towards more looser union akin to trade union(original idea) or a federation.
They aren't try, they don't have tools to even try doing these things. But I agree, it needs to shift to a new format. Ideally federation because as we see with Greenland and Switzerland being a small independent country comes with significant risks in this new world order.
Personally i would prefer trade union, as EU countries have shown themselves already incapable of offering support in case of any real threat due to conflicting interests, and federation would most likely end up being run by Germany/France duopoly.
also look at energy and AI initiatives for examples of top down initiatives.
In most non-western EU countries the only realistic way to get a tech startup going is via EU grant process which is extremely top down with keywords they want for specific year, and basically prevents any form of pivoting as a business.
It's not some top brass of party, soviet style, making top-down decisions. Its the whole system that's designed to operate that way - bureaucrats here and there incentivized to do so, committee here and there setting up guidelines for results.
what they should do is to setup a framework in which results emerge.
Whatever it becomes, IMHO it needs to have much more clear set of responsibilities and adequate tools to fulfill those duties.
Currently everything is too patchy, the currency the passport the agencies like ESA, the trade barriers within itself - everything needs a re-do in the integration or scaling down the scope.
At this level it really is a case of purpose-of-the-system-is-what-it-does. The EU is clearly not interested in building up a tech sector. Factions in the EU, yes. EU as a block, no. They've shown less than no interest; the EU would be a great place to build software companies if the governments weren't hostile to the idea of large tech companies which is where the market wants to go. Nice place to live. Software companies tend to migrate to the US.
I suspect that in the halls of power they would rather interpret "digital sovereignty" as a state where they, the sovereigns, have power in the digital world to mess with EU citizens online lives. It seems very optimistic to think that the EU is suddenly going to get interested in supporting software companies. Even philosophically, why bother changing suddenly just to do something they can ask the Americans to do? Economies require specialisation, everyone can't do everything.
It isn't even a bad thing that the EU doesn't have a thriving software ecosystem but for the fact it appears to be driven by governmental hostility to freedom. Good companies can come from the US. Bad companies can come from the EU. They already have a good FOSS ecosystem. The only problem is the EU seems to be more likely to bring in something like chat control and beat down anyone who achieves enormous success.
The creation of a monopoly is always desirable for the company owners, so tech isn't unique in this respect.
I think the main distinguishing feature is that big IT companies are new, so the bad outcomes of tech monopolies are only now being recognised and so competition authorities have been slow to act.
Imagine one actor in the tech space charges $/whatever which is slightly cheaper than the next nearest rival. Everyone flocks to that company and they become fabulously wealthy. Because of that effect the market tends to centralise. Another way to look at it is some company is the best at whatever, everyone wants to go with that company and it is technically possible for that company to serve everyone. So there is the same tendency for companies to get very large. Obviously oversimplifying, there are a lot of ways the tendency manifests. Metcalfe's law and all that.
That applies less in the physical world because distance is a factor. If there is some hairdresser in Silicon Valley who does amazing haircuts I'm still not going to go there to get my hair done. But I'm happy to watch YouTube which is ultimately being coordinated from nearby to that hairdresser.
The issue is, based on how things have actually played out, the EU is not the place to be if you're a hyper-efficient company serving a huge number of people with huge capital reserves. I assume the tax system is the root cause.
Not exactly. The general centralisation trend is a result of relative forces. The EU's suitability for a software ecosystem might be relative or absolute.
It is like if one country bans encryption and another doesn't. Any company that relies on encryption will be in the other country, but even if there were no alternatives they still wouldn't be in the first. They've been banned. So the first is relatively unfavourable, but in an absolute sense the same companies just won't exist there.
In the case of the EU, relative inferiority to the US in software makes the situation more extreme, but they probably couldn't maintain the same ecosystem even if they were the entire market. People get very excited about breaking up large companies, but as far as I can see there needs to be a behemoth like Google to fund Gmail and YouTube. The market price for something like Gmail is more like $5/mo unless there is an advertising giant involved who sells the data and can find ads buyers anywhere in the world. I don't think it is obvious that the EU would tolerate a home-grown Google.
> They've shown less than no interest; the EU would be a great place to build software companies if the governments weren't hostile to the idea of large tech companies which is where the market wants to go.
That last part is certainly true, and the big tech companies in the US and their constant abuse of customers show why we don't want it. We just need a different type of market here. We should lock out the American companies more. We can't play on the same field because we have very different values. The US care only about money, we care more about ethics.
If the market wants to go there the market is wrong and we need to curtail it. Having unrestricted capitalism isn't a European value.
Sure, but race to the bottom brings best price/value ratio that most consumers value above some nicer underlying ethics. What race to the bottom means long term for society, ie its annihilation of middle class and proper misery for the poor who will forever stay poor to be exploited cheaply is another topic.
Btw don't get me wrong, that ethics push sounds nice, all patting our backs in our little bubble slowly sliding down, but we are what, 7% of the global population? Economically still more significant, but unless we get our shit together right now and become more competitive we will slide into mediocrity soon, no way to avoid that. Chinese will easily push us away and steamroll over any tech we are still proud about.
There is absolutely no reason ridiculous social and welfare systems should be in place. Ie in France, they interviewed some rioter lady - she is doing some cinematography work when she wants, but otherwise living in free apartment in heart of Paris, and getting additional welfare from state. While protesting against evil capitalism which pays for it all, expecting to be richer because... ?. She herself is insignificant, but there are fuck millions of such spoiled people out of touch with current reality out there, who grew up with very twisted socialist/communist ideologies, while expecting a stellar economy to fund their little resistance to hands feeding them. Ultra-protected corrupt and inefficient state employees that each state has too many of.
There is absolutely 0 reason for any sort of green deal while rest of the world doesn't give a nanofraction of a fuck, not in 2025, not when facing a massive decline up on horizon. Thats self-harm par excellence and a great ammunition for most of eastern EU bloc and extreme right wing to get more popular, just pointing how ridiculous all that has become. But now there is no age limit for gender change, really something that all parents of kids across whole Europe need to hear now. Look, we all want to help saving the planet, but this political super-costly corrupt meh will only achieve our poverty and instability, nothing more.
If you want future for Europe, I mean realistic and achievable path, look no further than ie Switzerland. Still has most European values, has stronger middle class than any EU country, has way more actual freedom than any EU country has (not joking here, look it up), but also most capitalistic country in old continent. Simple, uneducated people keep blabbing about nazi gold (still in 2025), or some evil bankers or some other hoaxes while economy is based on a very different mix of income, and primarily a population which doesn't mind putting in some hard work when needed, and not just envying and complaining all the time and expecting to be taken care of when not even trying to contribute to society by working. The difference between them and literally any other EU country is striking, and so is their future. But good luck having western EU egos accepting that somebody figured out a better way, not happening.
>the EU would be a great place to build software companies if the governments weren't hostile to the idea of large tech companies which is where the market wants to go.
All unregulated markets over time tend to strive for monopoly, as it takes just a short period in which a dominant faction emerges - which kills the capitalist system. Your statement is pure tautology.
EU is hostile to tech and innovation due to top-down approach and working against market forces for sure, but market forces aren't morally good, they just exist - there's no virtue in them.
What needs to change is a shift from top-down approach to one where they setup a framework for competitive AND profitable industry. But this will never happen - EU is too rife with internal conflicts of interest between countries as they are also competing with each other.
It is stuck in-between trade union and federation, and reaps downsides of both.
You are confusing free and unrestricted markets. A free market means that reality is accurately is reflected in prices, so people can make a free and informed choice. I think free and unrestricted can't exit, but that's just my opinion.
Restaurants weren't a monopoly, or even close to a monopoly before any of that. Neither were most industries before any of those regulations. In fact they were less monopolistic. Excessive regulations make things more concentrated, not less, because the compliance costs are less burdensome on large companies.
"Industries" are something that only appeared after a huge popular movement that killed or threatened to kill several government heads around the world and whose one of the demands were to extinguish the monopolies.
I think this paints it as more black-and-white, more set in stone, than it really is.
True, the EU has not shown such an interest in the past. But that was when it could mostly trust that the US would, y'know, act like a sane and vaguely reasonable nation. It's been less than a year since the orange menace was re-elected, and the wheels often take a while to turn.
> In cyberspace only individuals can have sovereignty.
If you set the sovereignty at the lowest hardware level, it doesn't seem right to call it a space: what you are postulating is a set of unconnected nodes. To a get a network you will need individuals to give up some of their sovereignty to a shared entity that decides things like what protocol to use.
> It is time for Europe to develop a coherent tech strategy. Can we build digital sovereignty while simultaneously undermining the protocols that enable it?
We should. The problem is that politics is messy and with lots of opposing views. See the GDPR versus this Chat Control absurdity. But _principles_ are those that stick, and I think that the principle that communication should be private _always_ should become sort of constitutional within the EU. We are the ones that vote, we are the ones that need to signal that we don't want to give up privacy for whatever "security" some, completely uninformed, want to promise.
Anybody actually living in EU is absolutely tired of hearing "It is time for Europe to..." It's the standard sentence starter for every "bold proposal" for a decade+. Europe will keep fumbling around. The fragile unity that propelled the sweeping changes of the 90s/00s had fallen apart.
>we don't want to give up privacy for whatever "security" some, completely uninformed, want to promise
You'd be surprised how easily people give up their rights for the made up security promises, without putting up a fight.
Let's go through a short list I experienced during my lifetime in my country, off the top of my head.
-2001 Invasive airport checks after 911
-2015 mandatory registration with ID of prepaid SIM cards after islamist terrorist attacks
-2020-2022 mandatory COVID vaccine ID, to be able travel and enter establishments
None of these saw any kind of major disruptive backlash against the government to convince them to backtrack, so chat control and digital ID to access the internet and comment online is only a matter of time, all it needs is another black swan or even a false flag event.
Sure there was the famous trucker protests in Canada against mandatory COVID pass, but the government cracked down on that, so your protests against systems of control are irelevant. Chat control is inevitably gonna happen with or without your approval.
I’m still not sure what exactly the trucker protest people wanted (before they got co-opted by a bunch of additional groups with all their additional grievances). It was the U.S. requiring Canadian truckers to be vaccinated and have documentation if they wanted to cross the border. The federal government was responsible for making these documents available for truckers who wanted to do so.
> -2020-2022 mandatory COVID vaccine ID, to be able travel and enter establishments
Imo this one was slightly different, because it was (at least where I live) a temporary emergency measure with an end date as a response to an active crisis.
But I agree that people can get blinded by security theater.
> As for corona, it's more or less common knowledge by now that unless you're 60+ a common cold is more dangerous.
That's a lie. The reality is that Covid-19 is massively more fatal than the ordinary flu [1]:
> We take the comparison between Covid-19 and flu seriously by asking how many years of influenza and pneumonia deaths are needed for cumulative deaths to those two causes to equal the cumulative toll of the Covid-19 pandemic between March 2020 and February 2023—that is, three years of pandemic deaths. We find that in one state alone—Hawaii—three years of Covid-19 mortality is equivalent to influenza and pneumonia mortality in the three years preceding the Covid-19 pandemic. For all other states, at least nine years of flu and pneumonia are needed to match Covid-19; for the United States as a whole, seventeen years are needed; and for four states, more than 21 years (the maximum observable) are needed.
The reduction in CFR since 2022-ish can mostly be attributed to vaccines [2], but unfortunately it turns out that said vaccine protection only lasts for about 6 months - that is why we are seeing COVID "summer waves" [3] which hasn't been a thing for influenza... people get vaccinated in autumn and winter, which lessens the impact of Covid during the winter time, but once that partial immunity expires cases go up again.
The first one is sufficient to counter the completely unsubstantiated claim of the common cold/influenza being more dangerous than Covid, but I do agree that handing out exact numbers would have been better.
It isn't remotely sufficient. It cherry picks the first few years of COVID. Of course more people died because it's a novel virus. If you somehow genetically engineered an exact clone of the flu virus in every way except with it was completely novel to the immune system and released it, of course way more people would die of it in the first year.
Yeah, the common cold statement is just wrong. Also COVID is actually more deadly than the flu by about 3x from what I have read when it adjusts for all the relevant factors. The problem I have with the whole thing is that the media and government whipped everyone up into a panic over it. If you said to people, "there's a virus 3x as bad as the flu, what should we do?" I thik very few would say "lockdown everything non-essential."
> -2020-2022 mandatory COVID vaccine ID, to be able travel and enter establishments
That one makes sense for any government valuing the lives of its citizens. COVID was one hell of a nasty bug for healthy people, and for those not in good health it often meant death.
COVID cost the lives of at least 7 million people worldwide, of which 1.2 million were in the USA. "The cost of <<freedom>>" one might say if one were absolutely cynical, simply because of the massive difference in deaths per capita to just about every other large developed country [1].
And that doesn't include the cost of lost productivity due to people being out sick, struck by Long COVID/MECFS or having to be caretaker for affected people.
> The US is mid-way down that list, below most of Eastern Europe.
That's why I specifically mentioned large and developed countries, of which the US is leading. Not to front Eastern Europe too much, I'm half Croat myself, but you can't expect the former USSR and Yugoslavian countries to be up to par with Western healthcare systems or with Western economies - even in Western countries, the socio-economic status has had a measurable effect on patient outcome during Covid [1] so it's reasonable to assume that the effect is just as pronounced if not worse comparing whole blocks of countries.
> Sweden, with notably lax mask/distancing approach, is better than EU average.
I'd rather say "notorious" instead of "notably". During the early pandemic phase, Sweden had 5x the mortality than Denmark [2], explained as follows:
> Behavioural data (Fig. 1b,c) suggest that the major difference between Sweden, the UK, and Denmark was the rapidity with which population contact rates were reduced, rather than the extent of this reduction
The study also mentions the UK as being similarly bad but I'm choosing to exclude the UK given the widespread reports of NHS being on the verge of collapse [3][4], which makes it harder to attribute deaths to Covid itself vs deaths that would have been preventable had the NHS not been in shambles even before Covid hit (as evidenced by polling showing NHS issues a greater pressure point than Brexit woes just right before Covid appeared on the global stage [6]).
Other evaluations of Sweden against other countries come to a similar conclusion, blaming lax policies for marked increases in excess deaths and the acute crisis duration [5]:
> Sweden is an interesting case because the country never introduced a formal lockdown. Excess mortality peaked at 49.2 percent and remained high for 12 weeks, i.e. longer than in Italy, which had much higher excess mortality. Looking at the figures for Sweden in comparison to especially Italy and Switzerland, it seems that the lockdown in the latter two countries did have a major impact, both as concerns the level of excess mortality and the duration of the recovery period.
Ministers are making laws for themselves, especially their police services.
Montesquieu warned about the seperation of powers between the legislator and the executive, but it seems that it is still not the case at the EU level.
I really wish it were as easy as presented in this article.
Realistically speaking, we'll probably see some minor changes thrt address concerns of some opposing member states (or maybe there will be some bribery behind the scenes) to win majority support.
IMHO, the position statements of VPN companies like this one suffer from a conflation of "private communication" with "business of providing private communication 'as a service', for profit"
AFAICT, "Chat Control" did not target the notion of "private communication"
It targeted third parties, e.g., "VPNs", providing "private communication" to the public "as a service", for profit
IMO, there is a difference and using third parties for "private communication" has consequences
This demonstrates the incompetence in tech in EU. Either she wants to enforce laws for the common people and not for the elite, or she is incompetent enough to believe that deleting text messages affects storage.
> incompetent enough to believe that deleting text messages affects storage.
Do you think that message somehow magically don't have a size? Phones aren't able to receive messages when they have no storage for that. I have been regularly deleting messages for that reason.
Depends on the phone. The phones I had this problem with don't do more complicated things than "receive simple text messages", so they also don't have the storage for more. I guess when you do shady contracts you would use a burner phone, so it's quite likely that this was the case here.
A few seconds of video on a recent phone is quickly the size of thousands of text messages. So the size of a text message is basically zero. So deleting text messages for the sake of storage is ridiculous
For the vast majority of cases, it's malicious compliance by websites to make people believe the issue of the banner when the problem is the data collection.
Mostly it is general caution of website owners not wanting to get sued by Saul-Goodman-type lawsuit mills who abuse this - and virtual every - half-baked law that comes out of the EU.
Now, if I was cynical, I would point out that most parliamentarians - regardless on where they sit - have a background in legal professions. I would then suggest that there is a 'make a bad law' -> 'make cash suing over it' pipeline.
But that would be cynical. Instead, I'll end with Tacitus: Corruptissima republica, plurimae leges.
And did it achieve the desired effect? I don't think so. But it caused banner fatigue and insane amount of cognitive load while not improving privacy for probably +90% of people.
Desired by whom? At this point the desire of EU legislators is to make sure that EU never gets any chance of success in the tech field. Cookie banners do serve this goal well.
The truly mind-blowing thing to me is that chat control literally goes against the constitutions of a lot of EU countries. Pooling sovereignty is one thing. Voting for regulations that you then need to implement as local laws where those local laws would directly contradict the constitution is something else.
I don’t assume malice where stupidity suffices though.
We build robust encryption, then comes the naive-ignorant wave of "why do we need this? let's remove it" because policymakers don't grasp the extent of it, nor have any clue how it works and why.
EU isn't ever going to have its own "tech" industry as long as US has full access to EU markets and IMHO the ChatControl thing is totally unrelated.
Anyone who has a "tech" industry besides US has it thanks to trade barriers and embargoes because otherwise doesn't make sense to have it. The product doesn't have a considerable marginal cost to distribute, doesn't make sense to have it made in more than one place. 50 US states don't have EU regulations and yet everything is still happening in SV only, the rest of the "tech" in US is about as developed as in the rest of the world and they all feed into SV one way or another. Also, there's no way for competition as the capital in US(which can come from Europe, Arabs etc. too) can provide the services at loss for 10-20 years until drives everyone out of business.
EU tried to be open for business and have sovereignty through things like privacy and data control laws but the end result was that whoever is worth their salt goes to SV and sell it in EU from there and when tangental industries like VW or Mercedes need top talent for their software there's no one left or those who are still in EU are not doing things that transfers well into their niche.
ChatControl, IMHO is just some career move of some politicians from the ultra low corruption small northern countries where people trust the government way too much. They appear to believe that they can solve some issues with it. Not that different from all the governments who want control and each one wants as much control as possible.
I think the age control attempts are much more interesting and consequential. Why? Because bots don't have age. If implemented in a way that preserves anonymity while ensuring that the things are written by a real person(or at least has someone responsible for it even if its AI written) it can actually solve the bot problem and social manipulation problems like people from other countries pushing an agenda that doesn't actually have organic roots in the society.
Anyway, the issues are real and the risk are real and I think its a good idea to seek methods to mitigate the risks while keeping in mind that even if you currently like the government in few years the people who you don't like might be in power so, be careful.
>I think the age control attempts are much more interesting and consequential.
Exactly. The age verification and the "human identification" problem are the same problem. Anyone who thinks this tech/policy ends with identifying 16-year olds is out of their depth. Everyone, including governments and adtech firms, is planning for a world post-AI whether they're smart enough to realize it or not. I'm just worried about the details of that world.
>EU isn't ever going to have its own "tech" industry as long as US has full access to EU markets and IMHO the ChatControl thing is totally unrelated.
It's even simpler - EU does not foster any form of framework for growing any industry, they incentivize things that were already successful elsewhere and were found necessary to have in EU. It's all top-down in form of EU grants/benefits/whatevers.
And even then - those grants are are tied up with basically pre-planned prince2 style project management that makes deviating from them hard, and sometimes impossible. Purchases have to be pre-planned, for almost anything.
>ChatControl, IMHO is just some career move of some politicians from the ultra low corruption small northern countries where people trust the government way too much. They appear to believe that they can solve some issues with it. Not that different from all the governments who want control and each one wants as much control as possible.
Yes but no - it comes from Denmark, which has a lot of issues with overstepping legal bounds when it comes to data gathering and privacy. It seems more like attempt to legalize those using excuse of "EU forced us to adopt it :)".
>I think the age control attempts are much more interesting and consequential. Why? Because bots don't have age. If implemented in a way that preserves anonymity while ensuring that the things are written by a real person(or at least has someone responsible for it even if its AI written) it can actually solve the bot problem and social manipulation problems like people from other countries pushing an agenda that doesn't actually have organic roots in the society.
I think it's quite the opposite - identity fraud will become more profitable, while "open" internet will be infantilized into child-safe zone. Full of bots, but now any real form of communication will have your full doxx attached to it - doesn't matter if visible or not, just possiblity of it is enough. You will self censor yourself just in case.
Also all of those systems do not preserve anonymity, and basically are another mass surveillance tool.
It is just another step towards ChatControl, one surveils, other forces self-censorship.
While reverse would make sense - make children only internet that's actively monitored, accessible only via government issued smartcard/e-sim/thingy, while leaving it up to parents if their child should or should not access real internet.
> EU does not foster any form of framework for growing any industry
You are right. Pharma, automotive, financial in EU all come from the US. Companies like Nokia, Siemens, Bosch, BMW... all american names.
Pharma is miles behind US,
Financial central was mostly London due to favorable local laws.
Nokia fills very small niche now, basically services backbone
Bosch and Siemens predate EU
BWM also, but i wouldn't put it at forefront of innovation with how automotive industry is going.
did you notice that not even a single company you've mentioned is something new, and all of them basically come from "western" side of EU or are already established industries sometimes predating WW1?
> Pharma is miles behind US
Ozempic was invented by a Danish company, Novo Nordisk. Only recently did Eli Lilly, an American company, catch up.
You are wrong in few ways, ie pharma - check where your ozempic comes from, that mostly US money has become a significant factor in Denmark's economy.
I get it, its easy to throw various statements around to feel oneself' good, but can you please back them up with some hard facts to have a healthy discussion? This site strives for a better behavior.
Some pharma companies in the EU come up sometimes with good ideas (famously BioNTech), but it's the US and its money, building on that or just simply coming on top in most cases and ripping off the benefits. But let's not forget, that like for BMW or Bosch or others, the EU pharma companies that are somewhat competitive with the US companies are companies which exist for decades ...
Americans really believe in this stuff ha, comedians on TikTok weren't exaggerating when they talk about how they used to believe that US invented everything, has everything and the rest of the world live around dirt roads. Amazing.
Anyway, BMW and Bosch is also American because they make their money by selling to Americans. Don't let anybody say its not true.
You:
> EU does not foster any form of framework for growing any industry
Also you:
> did you notice that not even a single company you've mentioned is something new
K, but that was not your point since they did indeed "grow as an industry". Aren't you saying that auotomotive hasn't grown as an industry in the EU, I hope. Also,
> Pharma is miles behind US,
Source?
> Financial central was mostly London due to favorable local laws.
You mean like Paribas, MPS, Allianz... none of which are in the UK?
All those industries were fostered by individual countries with little-to-no transnational support from the EU.
On top of that, traditional European industries like Automotive have not kept up with challengers, the financial industry across Europe itself is morose in comparison to similar markets in the US or China, and European Pharma itself is overwhelmingly clustered in Switzerland which is not an EU member.
Nokia itself was at the brink of collapse in the early 2010s, and Siemens and Bosch have faced increasing stress at the bottom market from Chinese players and at the upper market by American players, plus states like the US and India required significant firewalls between those companies operations in their countries and Europe.
Long story short, while individual European states may have been able to build innovative companies, that muscle has largely atrophied over the past 20 years.
Why would politicians do any of that? Did United States House of Representatives invent anything?
All these EU companies are all private enterprises and they are %100 from a country in EU because there's no such thing as EU as a country, EU doesn't have companies(beyond entities created to fulfill certain functions). This too may change soon because they are looking into introducing a 28th regime which would be like virtual EU member.
I think there's huge confusion on what is EU.
BTW, EU has roots in "European Coal and Steel Community" and role in forming the Airbus but even in these ase it was just a facilitator.
All these expectation that are based on imaginary things(don't take it personally please, I see these things all the time) shows that EU desperately needs to become a country by its own right. Its so confusing to understand what EU can and can't do, what organization is under EU control and how much.
> Why would politicians do any of that? Did United States House of Representatives invent anything?
Most industries in the US developed due to state and federal government subsidizes and industrial strategy.
You can see this with the development of semiconductor clusters in Oregon, Arizona, and New York in the 1990s-2010s because of state level industrial policy, the development of the telecom hub in Dallas TX in the 90s becuase of Texas's state level industrial policy to leverage the telco boom, and historically Michigan and now South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and TN's industrial policy for automotive manufacturing.
Furthermore, this ignores the impact that the IRA and IIJA subsidizes and investment promotion had in bringing European manufacturing industries to the US at the expense of their European operations - so much so that both France and Germany lobbied at all levels of the US during the Biden admin to try and kneecap the policy.
> All these EU companies are all private enterprises and they are %100 from a country
Absolutely, as are companies in the US yet our states have been open to leveraging industrial policy where possible in order to attract and retain investments.
--------------
I am under no illusion that the EU is a country. Heck, if you re-read my initial comment that is my point.
I know that it is Germany, France, Netherlands, etc who are setting policies, but the EU at a macro-level can help solve the coordination problem that exists amongst individual EU member states to develop industrious policies.
That said the current status quo needs to end - either member states need to admit the EU as a central body is powerless and return to the pre-2000s vision of the European Union, or admit that a unified Europe is ideal and centralize.
The current status quo is the worst of both worlds, because the delimitation of power is wonky, and leads to nation state-EU clashes.
EU doesn't have top down control, in fact EU has very little control over anything and that's why its ineffective in its current form despite having enormous wealth as a block. All these initiative this initiative that are, IMHO, just political FOMO and I don't expect them to amount to much.
EU doesn't have the capacity to plan stuff, even under grave danger from the war in Ukraine EU barely coordinates building some bombs. EU is able to bite only when each country is coordinated well enough to implement some laws, i.e. GDPR thing bites through the regulators of each country and not through EU. If EU eventually becomes a state then thing can change but thats not the case at the moment.
EU is not a communist state and doesn't have a top down planning, its a coordination centre for 27 free market countries and its up to the EU capitalist and engineers to come up with technology and investment. They actually do, that's why EU is huge exporter of stuff. Believe it or not, there's more in this world than coding, there are all kinds of engineers that deal with atoms and electricity. However the "tech" doesn't flourish in Europe because doesn't make economic sense. US has full access to EU markets, they already have the know how and capital concentration, so why bother to re-invent the wheel in EU? Just go do it in US or do work for the US companies cementing their position even further.
US can afford not to have much regulations over the "tech" because they have the HQs and all the important people in SV. The moment some company that's not from US becomes big they take it down. TikTok for example, they forced a sale to fking Oracle, US doesn't allow foreign communications on its land. Its a semi-open knowledge that US government is working with those "tech" companies to control its own population and interests.
I don't know, if the US way of doing this is the better one, maybe EU should just force all the US "tech" companies to sell to EU owners just like with TikTok. Then get rid of all these regulations and just summon the local people when things go bad, like the "wrong" ideas spread like the way it happened on TikTik with Israel-Palestine conflict. The US way is like, oh you are not cooperating and not pushing the right agenda? Oh that's fine but too bad the new employment rules will hurt you and you can forget about this datacenter permit thing.
I'm not saying they have top-down control.
I'm saying they are trying top-down initiatives - the difference is subtle but important.
This is about attitude and how attempts are made - not how successful they are at it. This isn't central planning - this is just plan ineptitude that's sabotaged by inter-country conflicts of interests, with extremely bloated beaurocracy - sometimes just to have enough representation from each party.
EU is stuck between worst of both worlds, and i don't see anything changing for better in here without a shift - either towards more looser union akin to trade union(original idea) or a federation.
They aren't try, they don't have tools to even try doing these things. But I agree, it needs to shift to a new format. Ideally federation because as we see with Greenland and Switzerland being a small independent country comes with significant risks in this new world order.
Personally i would prefer trade union, as EU countries have shown themselves already incapable of offering support in case of any real threat due to conflicting interests, and federation would most likely end up being run by Germany/France duopoly.
also look at energy and AI initiatives for examples of top down initiatives.
In most non-western EU countries the only realistic way to get a tech startup going is via EU grant process which is extremely top down with keywords they want for specific year, and basically prevents any form of pivoting as a business.
It's not some top brass of party, soviet style, making top-down decisions. Its the whole system that's designed to operate that way - bureaucrats here and there incentivized to do so, committee here and there setting up guidelines for results.
what they should do is to setup a framework in which results emerge.
Whatever it becomes, IMHO it needs to have much more clear set of responsibilities and adequate tools to fulfill those duties.
Currently everything is too patchy, the currency the passport the agencies like ESA, the trade barriers within itself - everything needs a re-do in the integration or scaling down the scope.
At this level it really is a case of purpose-of-the-system-is-what-it-does. The EU is clearly not interested in building up a tech sector. Factions in the EU, yes. EU as a block, no. They've shown less than no interest; the EU would be a great place to build software companies if the governments weren't hostile to the idea of large tech companies which is where the market wants to go. Nice place to live. Software companies tend to migrate to the US.
I suspect that in the halls of power they would rather interpret "digital sovereignty" as a state where they, the sovereigns, have power in the digital world to mess with EU citizens online lives. It seems very optimistic to think that the EU is suddenly going to get interested in supporting software companies. Even philosophically, why bother changing suddenly just to do something they can ask the Americans to do? Economies require specialisation, everyone can't do everything.
It isn't even a bad thing that the EU doesn't have a thriving software ecosystem but for the fact it appears to be driven by governmental hostility to freedom. Good companies can come from the US. Bad companies can come from the EU. They already have a good FOSS ecosystem. The only problem is the EU seems to be more likely to bring in something like chat control and beat down anyone who achieves enormous success.
> large tech companies which is where the market wants to go
Could you expand on that? Is there something inherent about the tech industry that makes large companies desirable?
The creation of a monopoly is always desirable for the company owners, so tech isn't unique in this respect.
I think the main distinguishing feature is that big IT companies are new, so the bad outcomes of tech monopolies are only now being recognised and so competition authorities have been slow to act.
Imagine one actor in the tech space charges $/whatever which is slightly cheaper than the next nearest rival. Everyone flocks to that company and they become fabulously wealthy. Because of that effect the market tends to centralise. Another way to look at it is some company is the best at whatever, everyone wants to go with that company and it is technically possible for that company to serve everyone. So there is the same tendency for companies to get very large. Obviously oversimplifying, there are a lot of ways the tendency manifests. Metcalfe's law and all that.
That applies less in the physical world because distance is a factor. If there is some hairdresser in Silicon Valley who does amazing haircuts I'm still not going to go there to get my hair done. But I'm happy to watch YouTube which is ultimately being coordinated from nearby to that hairdresser.
The issue is, based on how things have actually played out, the EU is not the place to be if you're a hyper-efficient company serving a huge number of people with huge capital reserves. I assume the tax system is the root cause.
In other words it's more about whether the EU market is favourable relative to other markets?
Not exactly. The general centralisation trend is a result of relative forces. The EU's suitability for a software ecosystem might be relative or absolute.
It is like if one country bans encryption and another doesn't. Any company that relies on encryption will be in the other country, but even if there were no alternatives they still wouldn't be in the first. They've been banned. So the first is relatively unfavourable, but in an absolute sense the same companies just won't exist there.
In the case of the EU, relative inferiority to the US in software makes the situation more extreme, but they probably couldn't maintain the same ecosystem even if they were the entire market. People get very excited about breaking up large companies, but as far as I can see there needs to be a behemoth like Google to fund Gmail and YouTube. The market price for something like Gmail is more like $5/mo unless there is an advertising giant involved who sells the data and can find ads buyers anywhere in the world. I don't think it is obvious that the EU would tolerate a home-grown Google.
> They've shown less than no interest; the EU would be a great place to build software companies if the governments weren't hostile to the idea of large tech companies which is where the market wants to go.
That last part is certainly true, and the big tech companies in the US and their constant abuse of customers show why we don't want it. We just need a different type of market here. We should lock out the American companies more. We can't play on the same field because we have very different values. The US care only about money, we care more about ethics.
If the market wants to go there the market is wrong and we need to curtail it. Having unrestricted capitalism isn't a European value.
Sure, but race to the bottom brings best price/value ratio that most consumers value above some nicer underlying ethics. What race to the bottom means long term for society, ie its annihilation of middle class and proper misery for the poor who will forever stay poor to be exploited cheaply is another topic.
Btw don't get me wrong, that ethics push sounds nice, all patting our backs in our little bubble slowly sliding down, but we are what, 7% of the global population? Economically still more significant, but unless we get our shit together right now and become more competitive we will slide into mediocrity soon, no way to avoid that. Chinese will easily push us away and steamroll over any tech we are still proud about.
There is absolutely no reason ridiculous social and welfare systems should be in place. Ie in France, they interviewed some rioter lady - she is doing some cinematography work when she wants, but otherwise living in free apartment in heart of Paris, and getting additional welfare from state. While protesting against evil capitalism which pays for it all, expecting to be richer because... ?. She herself is insignificant, but there are fuck millions of such spoiled people out of touch with current reality out there, who grew up with very twisted socialist/communist ideologies, while expecting a stellar economy to fund their little resistance to hands feeding them. Ultra-protected corrupt and inefficient state employees that each state has too many of.
There is absolutely 0 reason for any sort of green deal while rest of the world doesn't give a nanofraction of a fuck, not in 2025, not when facing a massive decline up on horizon. Thats self-harm par excellence and a great ammunition for most of eastern EU bloc and extreme right wing to get more popular, just pointing how ridiculous all that has become. But now there is no age limit for gender change, really something that all parents of kids across whole Europe need to hear now. Look, we all want to help saving the planet, but this political super-costly corrupt meh will only achieve our poverty and instability, nothing more.
If you want future for Europe, I mean realistic and achievable path, look no further than ie Switzerland. Still has most European values, has stronger middle class than any EU country, has way more actual freedom than any EU country has (not joking here, look it up), but also most capitalistic country in old continent. Simple, uneducated people keep blabbing about nazi gold (still in 2025), or some evil bankers or some other hoaxes while economy is based on a very different mix of income, and primarily a population which doesn't mind putting in some hard work when needed, and not just envying and complaining all the time and expecting to be taken care of when not even trying to contribute to society by working. The difference between them and literally any other EU country is striking, and so is their future. But good luck having western EU egos accepting that somebody figured out a better way, not happening.
Ah yeah, a classic, “practical”, capitalist realist take.
>the EU would be a great place to build software companies if the governments weren't hostile to the idea of large tech companies which is where the market wants to go.
All unregulated markets over time tend to strive for monopoly, as it takes just a short period in which a dominant faction emerges - which kills the capitalist system. Your statement is pure tautology.
EU is hostile to tech and innovation due to top-down approach and working against market forces for sure, but market forces aren't morally good, they just exist - there's no virtue in them.
What needs to change is a shift from top-down approach to one where they setup a framework for competitive AND profitable industry. But this will never happen - EU is too rife with internal conflicts of interest between countries as they are also competing with each other.
It is stuck in-between trade union and federation, and reaps downsides of both.
This is complete nonsense. Free markets have been operating for centuries and still most markets are nowhere close to monopoly.
Competition and anti-trust interventions have also been around for centuries.
find me single unregulated unrestricted free market that has been operating for centuries. the ancap paradise.
You are confusing free and unrestricted markets. A free market means that reality is accurately is reflected in prices, so people can make a free and informed choice. I think free and unrestricted can't exit, but that's just my opinion.
Restaurants
Subject to food and safety standards, environmental regulations, antitrust regulations, minimum alcohol pricing, event licencing, marketing and advertising compliance etc....
Restaurants weren't a monopoly, or even close to a monopoly before any of that. Neither were most industries before any of those regulations. In fact they were less monopolistic. Excessive regulations make things more concentrated, not less, because the compliance costs are less burdensome on large companies.
"Industries" are something that only appeared after a huge popular movement that killed or threatened to kill several government heads around the world and whose one of the demands were to extinguish the monopolies.
Which end up being ran by mafia every time the govt stops looking.
That's not true for 99% of restaurants, and it's not a monopoly either.
Not that the rest of his comments show some brilliant reasoning to be honest :)
I think this paints it as more black-and-white, more set in stone, than it really is.
True, the EU has not shown such an interest in the past. But that was when it could mostly trust that the US would, y'know, act like a sane and vaguely reasonable nation. It's been less than a year since the orange menace was re-elected, and the wheels often take a while to turn.
That’s a fairly sensible writeup.
The issue with these types of battles, is that each side tends to resort to extreme hyperbole.
That basically gives the other side ammunition for wholesale dismissal.
It’s important (IMNSHO) to have reasonable, sane discussions, and avoid falling into the “screeching monkey” trap.
It tends to happen when people discuss abstract topics. Interesting phenomenon.
In real life countries can have sovereignty. In cyberspace only individuals can have sovereignty.
Otherwise you’re just choosing who misuses their privilege to your data.
> In cyberspace only individuals can have sovereignty.
If you set the sovereignty at the lowest hardware level, it doesn't seem right to call it a space: what you are postulating is a set of unconnected nodes. To a get a network you will need individuals to give up some of their sovereignty to a shared entity that decides things like what protocol to use.
> It is time for Europe to develop a coherent tech strategy. Can we build digital sovereignty while simultaneously undermining the protocols that enable it?
We should. The problem is that politics is messy and with lots of opposing views. See the GDPR versus this Chat Control absurdity. But _principles_ are those that stick, and I think that the principle that communication should be private _always_ should become sort of constitutional within the EU. We are the ones that vote, we are the ones that need to signal that we don't want to give up privacy for whatever "security" some, completely uninformed, want to promise.
Anybody actually living in EU is absolutely tired of hearing "It is time for Europe to..." It's the standard sentence starter for every "bold proposal" for a decade+. Europe will keep fumbling around. The fragile unity that propelled the sweeping changes of the 90s/00s had fallen apart.
I don't see the EVP loose influence in the forseeable future. Democracy only works in theory.
>we don't want to give up privacy for whatever "security" some, completely uninformed, want to promise
You'd be surprised how easily people give up their rights for the made up security promises, without putting up a fight.
Let's go through a short list I experienced during my lifetime in my country, off the top of my head.
None of these saw any kind of major disruptive backlash against the government to convince them to backtrack, so chat control and digital ID to access the internet and comment online is only a matter of time, all it needs is another black swan or even a false flag event.Sure there was the famous trucker protests in Canada against mandatory COVID pass, but the government cracked down on that, so your protests against systems of control are irelevant. Chat control is inevitably gonna happen with or without your approval.
I’m still not sure what exactly the trucker protest people wanted (before they got co-opted by a bunch of additional groups with all their additional grievances). It was the U.S. requiring Canadian truckers to be vaccinated and have documentation if they wanted to cross the border. The federal government was responsible for making these documents available for truckers who wanted to do so.
> -2020-2022 mandatory COVID vaccine ID, to be able travel and enter establishments
Imo this one was slightly different, because it was (at least where I live) a temporary emergency measure with an end date as a response to an active crisis.
But I agree that people can get blinded by security theater.
If you enter someone‘s house you follow their ruled, but your smartphone is part of your home.
So your exampled don’t quite fit.
Try passing a law with daily house searches for security and you‘ll see the difference.
> -2020-2022 mandatory COVID vaccine ID, to be able travel and enter establishments
This never existed, you could also prove that have already been sick.
You're missing the point. You still had to exists in a "papers please" society. What if you've never been sick?
> What if you've never been sick?
That does not sound like an unfixable problem. :-)
> You still had to exists in a "papers please" society.
I agree and I didn't like that. This was far too fast to enact such a fundamentally change, even if it was an emergency.
People really like staying alive
Oh yes... there's a terrorist behind every bush! I had to chase awat 10 alrady this morning who were out in my garden!
As for corona, it's more or less common knowledge by now that unless you're 60+ a common cold is more dangerous.
I think you are confusing the current variant with the early ones.
But even if, who are you to decide the 60+ don’t need protection?
And what about the people with Long COVID?
> As for corona, it's more or less common knowledge by now that unless you're 60+ a common cold is more dangerous.
That's a lie. The reality is that Covid-19 is massively more fatal than the ordinary flu [1]:
> We take the comparison between Covid-19 and flu seriously by asking how many years of influenza and pneumonia deaths are needed for cumulative deaths to those two causes to equal the cumulative toll of the Covid-19 pandemic between March 2020 and February 2023—that is, three years of pandemic deaths. We find that in one state alone—Hawaii—three years of Covid-19 mortality is equivalent to influenza and pneumonia mortality in the three years preceding the Covid-19 pandemic. For all other states, at least nine years of flu and pneumonia are needed to match Covid-19; for the United States as a whole, seventeen years are needed; and for four states, more than 21 years (the maximum observable) are needed.
The reduction in CFR since 2022-ish can mostly be attributed to vaccines [2], but unfortunately it turns out that said vaccine protection only lasts for about 6 months - that is why we are seeing COVID "summer waves" [3] which hasn't been a thing for influenza... people get vaccinated in autumn and winter, which lessens the impact of Covid during the winter time, but once that partial immunity expires cases go up again.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10168500/
[2] https://www.rsm.ac.uk/media-releases/2023/risk-of-death-redu...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/nx-s1-5453516/summer-surge-in...
None of those links actually cite the mortality rate of covid vs the flu
The first one is sufficient to counter the completely unsubstantiated claim of the common cold/influenza being more dangerous than Covid, but I do agree that handing out exact numbers would have been better.
It isn't remotely sufficient. It cherry picks the first few years of COVID. Of course more people died because it's a novel virus. If you somehow genetically engineered an exact clone of the flu virus in every way except with it was completely novel to the immune system and released it, of course way more people would die of it in the first year.
> It cherry picks the first few years of COVID.
The original post this thread is about literally referred to these early years:
> 2020-2022 mandatory COVID vaccine ID, to be able travel and enter establishments
Claiming in this context that the common cold is more harmful is a lie, no matter what.
Yeah, the common cold statement is just wrong. Also COVID is actually more deadly than the flu by about 3x from what I have read when it adjusts for all the relevant factors. The problem I have with the whole thing is that the media and government whipped everyone up into a panic over it. If you said to people, "there's a virus 3x as bad as the flu, what should we do?" I thik very few would say "lockdown everything non-essential."
> That's a lie.
None of your links address the OP's claim. You'd need to consider < 60 mortality, not total. Replies like yours are not trust-building.
> -2020-2022 mandatory COVID vaccine ID, to be able travel and enter establishments
That one makes sense for any government valuing the lives of its citizens. COVID was one hell of a nasty bug for healthy people, and for those not in good health it often meant death.
COVID cost the lives of at least 7 million people worldwide, of which 1.2 million were in the USA. "The cost of <<freedom>>" one might say if one were absolutely cynical, simply because of the massive difference in deaths per capita to just about every other large developed country [1].
And that doesn't include the cost of lost productivity due to people being out sick, struck by Long COVID/MECFS or having to be caretaker for affected people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
> massive difference in deaths per capita to just about every other large developed country [1]
The US is mid-way down that list, below most of Eastern Europe. Sweden, with notably lax mask/distancing approach, is better than EU average.
> The US is mid-way down that list, below most of Eastern Europe.
That's why I specifically mentioned large and developed countries, of which the US is leading. Not to front Eastern Europe too much, I'm half Croat myself, but you can't expect the former USSR and Yugoslavian countries to be up to par with Western healthcare systems or with Western economies - even in Western countries, the socio-economic status has had a measurable effect on patient outcome during Covid [1] so it's reasonable to assume that the effect is just as pronounced if not worse comparing whole blocks of countries.
> Sweden, with notably lax mask/distancing approach, is better than EU average.
I'd rather say "notorious" instead of "notably". During the early pandemic phase, Sweden had 5x the mortality than Denmark [2], explained as follows:
> Behavioural data (Fig. 1b,c) suggest that the major difference between Sweden, the UK, and Denmark was the rapidity with which population contact rates were reduced, rather than the extent of this reduction
The study also mentions the UK as being similarly bad but I'm choosing to exclude the UK given the widespread reports of NHS being on the verge of collapse [3][4], which makes it harder to attribute deaths to Covid itself vs deaths that would have been preventable had the NHS not been in shambles even before Covid hit (as evidenced by polling showing NHS issues a greater pressure point than Brexit woes just right before Covid appeared on the global stage [6]).
Other evaluations of Sweden against other countries come to a similar conclusion, blaming lax policies for marked increases in excess deaths and the acute crisis duration [5]:
> Sweden is an interesting case because the country never introduced a formal lockdown. Excess mortality peaked at 49.2 percent and remained high for 12 weeks, i.e. longer than in Italy, which had much higher excess mortality. Looking at the figures for Sweden in comparison to especially Italy and Switzerland, it seems that the lockdown in the latter two countries did have a major impact, both as concerns the level of excess mortality and the duration of the recovery period.
[1] https://www.local.gov.uk/health-inequalities-deprivation-and...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8358009/
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78dl0xv7y2o
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/23/nhs-co...
[5] https://www.efta.int/media-resources/news/covid-19-excess-mo...
[6] https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/nhs-replaces-brexit-most-importa...
Ministers are making laws for themselves, especially their police services.
Montesquieu warned about the seperation of powers between the legislator and the executive, but it seems that it is still not the case at the EU level.
I really wish it were as easy as presented in this article.
Realistically speaking, we'll probably see some minor changes thrt address concerns of some opposing member states (or maybe there will be some bribery behind the scenes) to win majority support.
IMHO, the position statements of VPN companies like this one suffer from a conflation of "private communication" with "business of providing private communication 'as a service', for profit"
AFAICT, "Chat Control" did not target the notion of "private communication"
It targeted third parties, e.g., "VPNs", providing "private communication" to the public "as a service", for profit
IMO, there is a difference and using third parties for "private communication" has consequences
Do not take my word for it, read the draft legislation yourself
https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-10131-2025-...
Some HN voters seem to agree using third parties is not ideal
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45468830
And at the same time Ursula von der Leyen keeps deleting work messages … to free storage
This demonstrates the incompetence in tech in EU. Either she wants to enforce laws for the common people and not for the elite, or she is incompetent enough to believe that deleting text messages affects storage.
> incompetent enough to believe that deleting text messages affects storage.
Do you think that message somehow magically don't have a size? Phones aren't able to receive messages when they have no storage for that. I have been regularly deleting messages for that reason.
You will experience different problems if you are low on storage long before you can’t receive simple text messages
Depends on the phone. The phones I had this problem with don't do more complicated things than "receive simple text messages", so they also don't have the storage for more. I guess when you do shady contracts you would use a burner phone, so it's quite likely that this was the case here.
A few seconds of video on a recent phone is quickly the size of thousands of text messages. So the size of a text message is basically zero. So deleting text messages for the sake of storage is ridiculous
> So deleting text messages for the sake of storage is ridiculous
Say that when your phone refuses to receive text message due to full storage.
> A few seconds of video
The storage for video and for SMS don't need to be identical. Also not every phone is even capable of storing arbitrary files.
She uses an iPhone. No need for a burner phone if you delete everything
> Can we build digital sovereignty
We did. Cookie banners have persisted for well over a decade, so that's a proven track record.
Which EU law mandates cookie banners?
For the vast majority of cases, it's malicious compliance by websites to make people believe the issue of the banner when the problem is the data collection.
I think OPs point is that even malicious compliance is proof that companies feel they cannot simply ignore EU law.
Mostly it is general caution of website owners not wanting to get sued by Saul-Goodman-type lawsuit mills who abuse this - and virtual every - half-baked law that comes out of the EU.
Now, if I was cynical, I would point out that most parliamentarians - regardless on where they sit - have a background in legal professions. I would then suggest that there is a 'make a bad law' -> 'make cash suing over it' pipeline.
But that would be cynical. Instead, I'll end with Tacitus: Corruptissima republica, plurimae leges.
And did it achieve the desired effect? I don't think so. But it caused banner fatigue and insane amount of cognitive load while not improving privacy for probably +90% of people.
> did it achieve the desired effect?
Desired by whom? At this point the desire of EU legislators is to make sure that EU never gets any chance of success in the tech field. Cookie banners do serve this goal well.
Exactly. So the desired effect was privacy, and it failed at achieving that.
The truly mind-blowing thing to me is that chat control literally goes against the constitutions of a lot of EU countries. Pooling sovereignty is one thing. Voting for regulations that you then need to implement as local laws where those local laws would directly contradict the constitution is something else.
I don’t assume malice where stupidity suffices though.
Brightball's comment here is relevant in this context as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45579968
We build robust encryption, then comes the naive-ignorant wave of "why do we need this? let's remove it" because policymakers don't grasp the extent of it, nor have any clue how it works and why.