Americans have been dismantling and weakening their regulatory bodies for quite a while now. The idea is that this will unshackle big corporations and allow them to innovate faster. This sounds like a great idea, until you realize that this “innovation” is most often about increasing profits. And the quality of the product is often sacrificed to increase profits. Just look at what is happening to telecommunication services, with big corporations growing their profits while Americans get stuck with slow and expensive service that becomes relatively worse comparing to other western countries.
Lack of proper regulation (or enforcement) might lead to short-term gains in some economic indicators, but in the long term will lead to worse quality, relative decline of America comparing to other countries, and sometimes -like in this case- avoidable deaths of hundreds of innocent people.
> Just look at what is happening to telecommunication services, with big corporations growing their profits while Americans get stuck with slow and expensive service that becomes relatively worse comparing to other western countries.
I get 1 gig internet service for $80 a month in a mid-sized American city in the midwest. No complaints here. The offerings just keep getting better and cheaper.
You must realize that is not the norm though, right?
It wasn't until Google Fiber came into my area that everyone else starting offering competitive pricing, but the vast majority of land in the US is a high speed broadband wasteland.
Google fiber never came here. It was Verizon 5g that made Comcast and at&t offer gigabit internet in my neighborhood. I was even ready to shell out the $2k setup fee and Comcast was like mmm no gigabit for you.
So I don’t believe it is subsidy I fully believe it is competition. Google realized that it’s incredibly difficult and expensive to lay fiber and stopped. 5G realized they don’t need fiber to be competitive.
And you are right, it's not subsidies, it's engineered monopolies causing the problem which is why you see the competition actually working.
Google had to use microtrenching because they couldn't get access to existing rights of ways on telephone poles owned by other providers, mainly AT&T in my area.
Not only is it EXTREMELY rare to get 1 gig internet anywhere in the US (I just got it in Silicon Valley, 3 months ago) (btw, hopefully this is symmetric FTTH), but that price is extremely far from impressive in the places that get similar speeds.
Monthly public transport ticket 14.55 USD
1 ticket to the movies (adult price) 5.70 USD
High speed internet per month 9.50 USD
1 month gym subscription 41.30 USD
Assuming that's accurate, other stuff is cheaper than US cities but not by nearly as much as internet service. I could go for a $10/month high speed connection.
Yep, this is exactly my point. A lot of stuff in various European cities isn't cheaper, or not that much cheaper, than internet service, so internet service in America is comparatively overpriced.
Of course, everything else in America is overpriced too, and you're not actually getting a better overall experience for that money. If it were an extremely safe, clean, and well-managed country, then it'd make sense for the cost-of-living to be high, but it isn't: gun violence is an epidemic, environmental regulations are being gutted, and the political leadership is utterly incompetent. And don't get me started on what an utter disaster the healthcare system is.
It's accurate. Just got back from spending a few weeks at my dad's country house that's wired with 940/450mbps fiber. No problems remote working from there, except, of course, time zone differences. Here's the ISP link, in Romanian unfortunately: https://www.digiromania.ro/servicii/internet/internet-fix/fi.... The price is 40 Lei / month, which is approximately $9.5 at current exchange rates.
What kind of speeds do you get to non aws, gcp, and azure sites? I’ve found in my travels that you get ridiculous speeds to “net neutral” sites but once you go off the grid you’re back down to T1 speeds.
Like good luck seeing 10mbps+ to a server in the US. In the us I know my transfer speed is limited by the router I’m hitting. So I can go to .jp sites and still pull 30mbit
This is a common misunderstanding I see repeated a lot. The idea isn't unshackling big corporations, it's about unshackling small to medium sized businesses and entrepreneurs. Big corps actually love regulations for the barriers to entry they create, and most of them already have a whole host of regulatory compliance teams armed and ready to dissect the next big regulation that comes.
> Americans get stuck with slow and expensive service that becomes relatively worse comparing to other western countries.
Internet speeds in most suburban, and urban locations in the US have dramatically increased as of late due to increased threat of competition (namely Google Fiber, which prompted AT&T to start heavily developing Fiber, which prompted the Spectrums of the world to increase speeds) and could be further accelerated by deregulation. Regulations are actually the primary reason that keeps cable companies in their monopolistic/oligarlistic positions.
As far as I am aware, the only western countries that have surpassed the US in internet speeds and stability for the majority of its populace are actually east, in countries like S.Korea and Japan.
Interestingly enough, Japan is mostly voluntarily self regulated.
It astonishes me that so few HNers have (evidently) tried to start businesses. The staggering regulatory, tax and accounting burden that small business are groaning under is incomprehensible, unless you've experienced it.
I'm a Canadian, in a super-simple business (no payroll, no significant hardward stock) and we are forced to spend double-digit percentages of our gross income just to stay "compliant" with regulations -- and our big, national-level accounting firm is still not certain that we are!
In my opinion, any small business owner that thinks they are complying with regulations is probably deluding themselves; one false step, one "investigation" by tax or regulatory authorities (of, if they get on the bad side of someone in these offices) -- and they are toast.
So, before you go about chanting in the streets for more regulation, think about who you're hurting.
Any company with an office tower, with several floors of lawyers and accountants is laughing at you, for being a "useful idiot", working on their behalf. They can trivially comply.
Because, remember -- they wrote the legislation. Your esteemed member of parliament or congress person doesn't write legislation. At best, they might adjust it after it gets dropped on their desk. The lobbyist, and the corporate lawyers and accountants who oversee them, wrote it, and gave it to your legislator.
I'm an HNer who has started and sold my own businesses, I have family who have founded & operated businesses in highly regulated areas, and I'm an investor in startups. I have also been audited by the IRS (the US tax service). One wrong step does not mean you're toast. It means you need to admit and fix your mistake and make sure it doesn't happen again.
I'm sure agencies such as the FAA or DOE might be more of a PITA to deal with. But that's because they're regulating functions that are literally life and death.
You sound very successful; unfortunately, most small businesses remain small. Year by year, the ever-increasing drain of time, energy and money expended to accomplish nothing of value (to the owner, their families who often work in the business, or to their clients) increases.
Unless they quickly cross this "chasm of despair", it is inevitable that the small business owner will simply give up and close the business.
Soon, all you have left is dead-eyed, heartless corporate strip-miners, laying waste the landscape (see: modern industrial livestock production and processing, vs. local farmers and butchers). And they have a very limited risk of any viable competitors crossing the chasm.
There is one thing that could change this -- remove the "economies of scale" for compliance to all regulatory and tax requirements. This means: the amount it costs the company to comply is calculated to be in direct proportion to their gross revenue.
If it costs a small business 10% of their gross revenue to comply, but it costs Apple, Eli Lilly, Exxon, Walmart etc. only .1% of their gross revenue, then taxes would be levied/refunded to ensure that the regulatory burden is equitable.
You would be able see the big corporation's lobbyists lining up in Washington, DC from orbit, to get the regulatory burdens on small businesses reduced!
So, on the high end, the US is fine, and thus is does fairly well on mean speeds (top 10 on some metrics). However, if your internet in the US is bad, it's often really, _really_ bad. In areas without competition, providers still sometimes use ADSL1! (Max 8 down, <1 up, if you're lucky).
In general, the tendency in most European countries has been to force wholesaling and/or LLU, and set minimum standards for both; this has generally at least wiped out ADSL1. The FCC is somewhat lighter touch.
How is American internet when taking into account its rural-bias and sheer size? My understanding is it's reasonably good, all things considered (not that it couldn't be improved, especially in dense metros). I remember seeing an apples-to-apples comparison chart a while ago, but I can't find it. I understand we're 9th in the world on average in 2017[1], which I believe is not a bad place to be considering our density. For comparison, the highly dense city-state of Singapore has a non-mobile average broadband rate about double ours. Our speed also rose 40% that year so we may have moved up the rankings.
Side not as a Canadian...you can bet the farm the the second satellite internet becomes mainstream, Bell Telus and Rogers will be shitting them selves because they provide the shittiest service for the worst price you can imagine and just like BCTel had us by the balls at one point the second competition came in they were done for and people left in droves. I really hope it pushes these crappy business to offer better service for the price.
We're veering off-topic, but I was very pleased to see that the CRTC effectively told the incumbents to shove it with last month's telecom order setting wholesale access rates:
Background - incumbent ISPs in Canada are required to sell last-mile access to third-party ISPs. Third parties pay a speed-dependent per-user access fee as well as an aggregated per-Mbit capacity fee which defines the size of the pipe at the carrier hotel where they interface with the incumbent network.
The incumbents were asked to provide rates they thought would be fair for wholesale access, as well as financial justification that those fees were reasonable. Their responses contained a range of creative accounting features and omissions. In response, the CRTC eviscerated the incumbents in their decision and cut the capacity fees almost in half, and set the access fees to a flat rate regardless of connection speed. They also made the new rates retroactive to 2016.
If the order stands (the incumbents are doubtless going to challenge it), we should be seeing some significantly cheaper internet options from the third-party ISPs in the near future.
well is ADSL1 that bad? in most cases (non video on demand) bandwidth is never the problem. no matter how good your bandwidth is as soon as the latency is bad, it won't get better.
There are times when my mobile speeds degrade to around 1-2Mbps (typical ADSL1 sync speeds), with variable latency depending on how much throughput is being used (typical ADSL1 experience). Webpages (being the insanely bloated things that they are today) stop loading at that point, and I have to wait for my phone to sync to a different tower. This often happens during my commute when I hit congested towers. It's annoying that the experience on a 56k dialup connection in 1999 was better than it is on a 4G mobile phone in 2019.
Yes, ADSL1 is that bad. 8Mbit/sec is the best case, but closer to 1 or 2 is common depending on distance from exchange. About a 30ms latency penalty, IIRC.
Some of the problems are unique to America - for instance, states each have their own regulations, as well as federal ones, which makes nationwide roll-out far costlier. You also have way more geographic concentration of homes in Europe, which makes the ROI for roll-out over a particular area way better.
UK's utilities are generally quite good (despite grumbling), which I think is because regulators focus on creating frictionless marketplaces - ie, easy to switch, providers can't obfuscate costs, proliferation of comission-based switching services.
I don't think the "US is big" argument really works when it comes to forcing telcos to get rid of their 20th century DSLAMs. Like, obviously ideally they'd be upgrading to something semi-modern, but even swapping out the last of the ADSL1 for ADSL2+, like it was 2006, would be an improvement.
>Big corps actually love regulations for the barriers to entry they create, and most of them already have a whole host of regulatory compliance teams armed and ready to dissect the next big regulation that comes.
So then why do big corporations spend so much time and money lobbying against regulation?
It’s more nuanced than either of these ways of putting it. They lobby for specific regulation packages that work well for keeping competitors out.
Regulation does set up barriers to entry, generally by definition. Needing to have lawyers e during compliance etc. is expensive. So $BIGCORP’s ideal position is regulation that they can absorb easily but smaller competitors can’t.
I live in a DC exurb and literally do not have land-based internet access at home. The US broadband regime is a massive failure. It delivers neither high speeds nor universal access.
> Big corps actually love regulations for the barriers to entry they create...
When they can get regulations that have that effect, then they are indeed in favor of them, but in this case, Boeing was doing all it could to avoid and subvert regulation in its haste to catch up with its competitor.
It’s important to understand that the main threat to both agency from this issue is very different.
The threat to the FAA is external, they risk losing their worldwide stamp “if we validate it then the rest of the world do”. That means the long term damage they risk is much bigger, but the short term and political one is non existent, they just need to convince everyone that nothing happened and they’re back at their game. For the FAA either nothing change or they lose some standing and power, there is no path where they come out better than before.
The EASA complaints are internal, each country and the remnants of their own agency blaming them for accepting the plane validation from the FAA when it’s clear they shouldn’t have. Short term they look stupid, but either they go back to the old position like nothing happened, or they make themselves more powerful and independent compared to the FAA on such issue, possibly getting other countries outside EU/USA to listen to them as much if not more than to the FAA.
Up until now the word of the FAA may as well have been the word of god in that field, they risk losing it, and the EASA is in a good place to get a good piece of it.
So the FAA needs to downplay it as much as possible, and the EASA needs to instead make it into as much of a big deal as possible. Of course the EASA is very much helped by the fact that it was indeed a totally avoidable yet complete failure and disaster that, from a regulatory perspective, can be entirely pinned down on the FAA.
All they need to do is point at the fact unaltered, and say “the only way we can stop that from happening again is if you agree to give us authority to check all the plane ourselves without automatically accepting the FAA approval”.
I just hope it will give us better oversight, Boeing, Airbus, newcomers from China etc ... We can’t afford so many death for such stupid reasons. The max fiasco is really an insult to the entire industry, and I’m sure many “older” people in Boeing feel ashamed of how far their company has fallen.
Trump attempted to nominate his personal pilot to run FAA. When it did not go trough, FAA was run by acting director until this July.
Trump government seems to sell influence in government organizations to companies they are supposed to oversee, so I don't know if Stephen Dickson is step for better or worse.
When the FAA asked for a software fix after they decided there was an issue after the first crash they came to an agreement with Boeing for a January deadline. Boeing didn’t deliver, the FAA didn’t do anything. In March the second crash happened. This alone is horrible to think about.
Or the fact that Boeing determined that the lack of a functioning AOA Disagree (by mistake, it was only operational for customers that have the AOA indicator) did not constitute a safety issue.
I think this isn't just a test of Boeing, it's a test of the FAA. If the EASA finds issues that the FAA didn't (either because they were missed, or not brought up), that'll hurt the FAA's reputation even more.
If the EASA finds real major issue that the FAA didn’t find then the FAA being the world validation office for Boeing planes is over.
But I don’t think this will happen, the FAA seem to have realized how angry the rest of the world agencies are. 350 dead because they screwed up, and their first reaction was to say it was the dead pilots fault...
The FAA lost a big chunk of it's credibility in the way they handled the fist MAX 737 crash.
The fact Ethiopa insisted on sending the flight records for their MAX 737 crash to Europe and not to the US shows some serious loss of trust in the FAA had occurred.
And that was not helped when the USA was the last country to ground the aircraft.
>The fact Ethiopa insisted on sending the flight records for their MAX 737 crash to Europe and not to the US shows some serious loss of trust in the FAA had occurred.
I don't blame them, given how Boeing had previously tampered with crash evidence[0].
From the article on the investigation of the crash of Flight 585:
>Walz, of Parker Bertea, was assigned to hand-carry the servo valve to Irvine. John Calvin, the quality-control engineer from Boeing, instructed an assistant to pack up the parts. According to court records, the assistant left the room and returned with a taped package, which he handed to Walz, who carried it on a flight to Southern California.
>When Walz opened the package that afternoon at the Parker Bertea plant, he discovered that three servo-valve parts were missing: a spring, spring guide and end cap.
>Boeing, citing ongoing litigation, has never explained why those three parts were left out of the package forwarded to Irvine.
Well when they made that decision every country in the top 10 by air traffic volume had banned the plane except for the USA and Japan (who basically does what the FAA says on such issues), and the FAA and Boeing were still saying it was pilot error and basically blaming the dead people. I don’t see how any self respecting country could have trusted them with the black box in those conditions
This is strange wording to me. There's nothing inherently wrong with blaming "dead people" for something, because many accidents caused by user error result in death of the user. However, in this situation, it certainly seems rather hasty and inappropriate.
Well first of all blaming people is the wrong thing for an accident investigation to be doing anyway.
The purpose of accident investigation is not to fuel Americans' apparently insatiable appetite for revenge, you already have plenty of means for that, the purpose is the Prevention of Future Harm. Why Future Harm? Because we don't have time travel.
You clearly won't prevent any future harm by blaming anybody, whether alive or dead. To prevent future harm you will need to change what is done or how.
Almost invariably‡ the Right Thing™ will be some mix of procedural changes and engineering changes. For example ensuring that the right staff are empowered to stop something that's a bad idea being done even if senior management are short-sighted enough to demand it.
So the result is never "Bob is to blame because Bob did X" but rather e.g. "Bob did X. The Foozle should be modified to prevent doing X" or "Bob did X. Company policy did not say that doing X was forbidden. Change policy to forbid X".
‡ I've written about this before on HN. The one investigation report I've seen that did _not_ have any actionable recommendations was into an accident where two people died when their fishing boat sank. The cause? They'd taken so much heroin they couldn't operate the boat safely. Why no recommendation? Using heroin is already illegal. Using any intoxicating substance while in charge of a boat is already illegal. This was already obviously a terrible idea.
blaming dead people may be a misnomer for a common cover-up technique in communist-countries investigations: the dead people are at fault, because then you don't have to punish anybody living, and the dead people are already dead, what you gonna do to them ?
Sure the FAA realizes that, but does the FAA, which has been hemorrhaging expertise as they started relying on Afompany experts, instead of their own, have the capability to find all issues?
The era of American exceptionalism is coming to an end and Americans are screeching from the pain. As technology leader and economic powerhouse, the US has left its cultural, political and financial footprint in Europe in the past decades but the extent of that influence is now downgraded. And the reason is inner decay.
When the wall came down in Eastern Germany, we tuned into Knight Rider and MacGyver. The A-Team and the Power Rangers were on and life seemed to change for the better as the German East experienced American liberalism after decades of authoritarianist socialism.
I glorified America growing up and as a 11 year old. In 2000, I was more excited to see the Statue of Liberty the first time than for any Christmas before. Nothing came close to seeing the city of my childhood heroes (the Ghostbusters) and seeing WTC/Empire State when driving in from JFK.
But 9/11 happened and somehow America sold its soul. Not that Gulf War or Vietnam didn't happen, but it changed everything about the tiny bits of the amazing USA that I had always imagined. Post-9/11 I ended up living for nearly 6 years in the US and all the problems became apparent to me as a growing teenager. America was not nearly as great as propaganda made it out to be.
Back home in Europe, I never once worried about health. Going to the doc was normal and expected. Emergency procedures were performed without a second thought to cost. In the US, I was billed $800 for 3 stitches when I cut my thumb (deeply) and I got lucky because university ambulance transported me.
In Europe, in my hometown of around 1 million people, I got into problems with bullies and ran into thieves/thugs and it definitely sucked.
But in the US, I experienced muggings at gun point, one mass shooting (~13 dead), one fatal stabbing on campus, one robbery in my SO's home, arson in the house across my street and one meth lab explosion... it felt absolutely surreal (happened all in Binghamton, NY - not really a prime example of a blossoming economy, I know).
In classes, people were overtly concerned with political correctness and yelled at Middle Eastern history professors for using specific "offending" terms. Also, excluding God from the evolutions lecture was a highlight. Every single international student felt cringe and embarrassment when that Midwestern girl yelled at 300 people that evolution is just a theory and intelligent design ought to be taught with as much dedication and she feels offended.
Personally, America often felt like it was run by corrupt cronies who torpedoed education where ever possible. College is a for-profit business rather than an investment into the next generation of citizens. It felt so weird and I think the social cracks that were apparent 15 years ago are now leading to structural failure in society.
There are many smart and capable people in the US. Whether they did amazing stuff for their local hospital, took part in the Apollo program or engineered comms for Lockheed Martin. I met so many amazing folks. I hope that their rational influence can be stronger again.
Now I will go back and concern myself with Europe's own massive problems. I carry the US in my heart, as I lived there for half a decade. I hope that the country is in a local minimum right now and that the path out is already in view.
While I have never been to the US, this somewhat reflects my feelings and thoughts, too.
When I was younger I thought I really needed to go and see the USA. Then 9/11 happened and it started to go down. These days I feel sorry for probably not being able to see the US and the landscape and whatnot that is great about it, but I really can't stand the political "atmosphere" and how this influences the whole world in a negative way.
> In the US, I was billed $800 for 3 stitches when I cut my thumb (deeply) and I got lucky because university ambulance transported me.
I was billed about that much, also in "Europe", when an ambulance was called, no treatment was performed on me, and I wasn't even transported by the ambulance. This was in Switzerland despite having health insurance. There's no general European health insurance system.
Switzerland is not part of the EU, so different rules apply. As far as I know, a EU health insurance would have covered you (retroactively; as in: pay $800 and send the invoice + proof of payment to your insurance and you'd get reimbursed), but when traveling outside the EU it is always a good Idea to carry a travel health insurance with you that covers these.
I think you may have misunderstood. I'm talking about having Swiss health insurance in Switzerland. The standards for health insurance and cost for treatment in "Europe" are not always lower than in the US as the parent commenter implied.
I'm an American who's never been to Switzerland (I've come close), and even I know full well that Switzerland isn't part of the EU, and is completely different from all the countries that surround it.
This is like traveling to Belize and complaining that they don't speak Spanish.
I was referring to Swiss health insurance in Switzerland and the cost of an ambulance call here. This has little to do with the EU. I live in Switzerland so I'm quite aware it's not in the EU.
EDIT: Also, for the record Switzerland does observe the EHIC system so health insurances from EU/EEA countries are valid here and vice versa, so your example of Belize isn't even accurate. Switzerland isn't in the EU/EEA but has a series of bilateral treaties which harmonize many things such as this, research funding for EU projects, freedom of movement of people, etc.
Ummm I have a European health card and I was stitched in France and Austria for free when I got my injuries. I don't know about Switzerland since it's got special snowflake status
Yes, it should work here as well because Switzerland uses the EHIC system. My experience is with Swiss health insurance, and how an ambulance call can cost more than it does in the US even in a place in Europe.
This is excellent news. The FAA has lots its credibility by rubber-stamping whatever Boeing said in recent years. This will both mean an independent review (and re-certification of what is a effectively different airplane) and additional pressure on the FAA to actually do its job.
> FAA has been under regulatory capture by Boeing for decades.
> The world ignoring anything the FAA has to say about anything is a stance that's long overdue.
I don't see how the second part follows from the first. Can you elaborate on how regulatory capture by Boeing affects FAA regulations on everything they do?
If, due to regulatory capture, the FAA has been wrongly approving Boeing designs, the rest of the world is wise not to blindly accept FAA approval.
Of course, outside of the specific domain of approving Boeing designs, if the FAA says something isn't safe, or produces a report on a crash or suchlike, the world may want to pay heed.
I really think HNers in this thread are overselling the so-called "lack of regulation" that airlines and jet makers operate under. My father worked in the industry for decades, it is highly regulated to the extent few industries are more regulated (medicine, perhaps?)
Good. The FAA should have realized their insistence that the 737 Max was safe to fly despite evidence otherwise was likely to shake both confidence and respect for them as a regulatory body. It shouldn't have taken the intervention of the President for them to do their job.
> It shouldn't have taken the intervention of the President for them to do their job.
That's your takeaway of what happened?
My takeaway is that the president 'intervened' only after it was clear that the combined Boeing/FAA/US position became untenable after other regions local air authorities and airlines declared the plane unfit to fly.
Trump threw the FAA under the bus to make himself look good, but the weeks before he was pressuring them to keep the planes flying on behalf of Boeing.
Agreed, they didn’t do it when the risk became clear, they didn’t do it after several big European countries banned it, they only changed their position once the ban was moved at the entire EU level. By that point they were getting their thunder stolen by the EASA and it felt protecting themselves was a much bigger motivation than protecting the passengers for who they actually work for.
Yep, this is exactly the way it looked to me too. He was good buddies with the Boeing CEO and supporting them up until he reversed course and threw them under the bus.
I guess that's one good thing about having a narcissistic President who only cares about his own ego: he'll happily change course if it suits him and makes him look good, instead of digging his heels in.
EASA rubber stamping the FAA’s rubber stamping of Boeing is still EASA making a mistake just as much as it’s the FAA’s mistake. This has become a major public issue, bet the problems started when the aircraft entered service.
It's nowhere near as big of a mistake on the EASA's part. You don't understand how international regulatory and standards bodies interact with each other.
This is extremely bad. It it will be bad for any US regulated product used in EU markets like food, medical devices and equipment, pharmaceuticals, among others.
This is the long term cost of the defunding of the FAA and delegation of certifying a company's aircraft to that company. As we move forward fewer and fewer other countries will feel that deferring to US agencies is the wrong call and will move to (in this case) EASA.
I wouldn't be surprised if more and more other countries start looking into approvals from US agencies, and investigating how independent those agencies actually are :-/
It is more that this was the cost of failing to operate the FAA as an independent entity, but to get it to rubberstamp Boeing's airworthyness on behalf of Trump after it was clear that there were issues.
I wonder how much Boeing's strategy to reduce regulatory oversight as much as possible is going to cost Boeing shareholders going forward.
Share price may have benefited for a few decades, but Boeing's image will be tarred with this for quite a few decades with far higher certification costs worldwide in numerous jurisdictions. There are many potential jurisdictions [1] looking out for their own interests, and may choose to defensively force a certification on Boeing instead of trusting the FAA.
That will cost Boeing a lot of money. If the 737 line is continued at all, every single 737 variant that comes out after this will have a really steep hill of sales objections to climb, and they'll be handing out steeper discounts and lower profits to counter those objections. It may turn out that accepting an adversarial relationship with the FAA instead of lobbying to co-opt it was the optimal profit strategy in the long-term.
If it pans out this way, then the optimal profit strategy is to encourage the most stringent regulatory regime in the corporation's home country that all others hold up as the gold standard and follow without question. This avoids the multiple costs individual certification efforts rack up because no one can trust each others' certification results because they all recognize they're too weakened by industrial lobbying efforts.
A strong, quasi-centralized regulatory body then acts as the company's buffer to buy the benefit of the doubt, an insurance policy against a prolonged period when the company's culture is called into question.
It should operate how the judicial systems operate in Anglo-related countries. The US SCOTUS has used legal rulings from the UK and vice versa as "guidance" to their own legal rulings, but not as authoritative. The FAA/EASA/ATSB/* should refer to each other.
A nitpick: the usual term is "persuasive", as in "we find the argument of our brother court to be persuasive". This typically means that the foreign case does, in fact, become precedent by proxy.
For example, as an Australian law student, I read Marbury v. Madison, which was held persuasive in Australia because of the direct influence between the US constitution and Australian constitution. Another case with enormous worldwide effect is Donoghue v Stevenson, which was the beginning of modern Torts law.
EASA tended to certify on the same day as the FAA. FAA tended to certify a month or two after FAA. Now EASA no longer trusts FAA like FAA didn't quite trust EASA.
Yes, the upside of the terrible MAX crashes is that it was a good alert that the FAA is not trustworthy. Without them, we might have been relying on a smoke detector with a dead battery.
People may not realise that Boeing was depending on a October return to service for the 737. If that doesn't happen it has to shut down it's production line and that's going to be expensive. They had put a lot of pressure on the FAA to quickly approve their latest changes.
Having to satisfy EASA as well as the FAA is big enough a threat that it might actually be the stick to get Boeing to back off on its regulation-busting behavior.
On the other hand, can we expect US trade sanctions against the EU in response to this move?
If safety matters, perhaps we should not trust the regulatory body of a country on approving the aircraft built by that country. The conflict of interest is highly possible.
That would make the FAA look bitter and petty in addition to incompetent, it would trumpet their embarrassment and make them look worse than they already do, not avoid it or hide it. But in the long term, agency politics aside, it would be better for all of us if these agencies did independent reviews.
This is a matter of public trust. As an American I might trust the EASA’s certification more than the FAA, and that’s a really bad spot for the FAA to be in. International drama about who accepts who is just a side effect of lack of trust in the FAA.
The FAA and EASA have very different operating models, so budgets are not comparable. FAA certification efforts are tax-payer funded, whereas EASA’s efforts are funded by industry in a pay-for-service model.
Lack of proper regulation (or enforcement) might lead to short-term gains in some economic indicators, but in the long term will lead to worse quality, relative decline of America comparing to other countries, and sometimes -like in this case- avoidable deaths of hundreds of innocent people.