[mikkupikku]

After decades of trying and broadly failing to regulate American tech corps, at what point does the EU admit that leveling fines against Meta will never stop Meta from being Meta, that American megacorps are essentially ungovernable in Europe (or elsewhere for that matter) and the best course of action is to ban and block them in Europe?

Just more fines. Bigger fines, surely this will work eventually... It's been 20 years, its not working. A new approach is needed.

[troyvit]

This talk from Cory Doctorow made the rounds on HN when it happened:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

In it he espouses going a little further. He posits that other countries should repeal their versions of the DMCA and just start jailbreaking American megacorps' app stores, hardware, software, etc. and providing their own, much cheaper (or free) versions. Free trade has already broken down, what do they have to lose?

As you might guess he puts it a lot better than I do.

[mikkupikku]

Brilliant idea, my appreciation for Doctorow has grown even more than before.

[dehrmann]

Except it's already possible to install a third-party app store or OS on Android devices. The process isn't trivial, but it's officially supported.

[mikkupikku]

Haven't you heard? Google is changing their traditional policy on """side loading""" apps and are, quite soon from now, planning to lock the whole thing down and make users submit to anal probing to opt out. Android has been good but times are changing and we need to stop trusting old institutions.

[CalRobert]

That's cool, but on a practical level, can I generate whatever the APK equivalent for iOS is and just give it to my friends with iPhones?

[SirMaster]

Yes. They will have to reload the app every 7 days, but yes.

[rescbr]

> Free trade has already broken down, what do they have to lose?

The US parking an aircraft carrier nearby so the crew can enjoy a sunny vacation.

Or meddling with elections.

Or both.

[vincnetas]

I doubt this would work for the better. As we have recently seen when carriers got parked near Iran.

[troyvit]

That second one is already happening.

[SllX]

Or: a guy who is anti-copyright is performing an angle shoot to see if he can get some legislators to bite.

The EU taking staunchly anti-American positions and targeting American businesses looking for a way to “legally” rob them blind is probably not going to work out for them in the long run.

[troyvit]

Not rob them blind, just rob them a tiny bit to make up for a generation's worth of extortion.

[SllX]

So rob American businesses blind, but say you didn’t, but if you did, they had it coming anyway because of an unsubstantiated flimsy moral justification that disregards the purchasing choices of the EU citizenry, businesses and governments?

[benoau]

What is not substantiated?

Practically everything the EU DMA/DSA addresses was highlighted in the "House Antitrust Report on Big Tech" back in 2020.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/06/technology/ho...

But if that's not enough, since then:

Apple's policies banning developers from referring customers to alternative payments has been widely ruled illegal around the world, first and foremost in the USA where they were even referred for criminal investigation for continuing to do it after being court ordered to stop.

Google has been twice convicted of antitrust monopoly abuse in the last year in the USA, and found to have exploited user privacy settings several times.

Meta's harmful practices have been continuously revealed in court: allowing sex trafficking and prostitution to help train their AI, allowing scam ads because they're profitable, deliberately exploiting children spending in games because it's profitable, and illegally tracked users.

Amazon's antitrust for exploiting vendor data is ongoing, so I guess you can have a point there.

[cookiengineer]

You are free to not trade with EU citizens then. Nobody forces you to accept their money.

[szszrk]

My monkey brain would love to see if corporate strategy would work here:

For repeating offenses fines should rise much faster, multiplied by 10x-100x every time, until we find fines so big they are physically unable to pay even if corps would consider liquidating their all global assets. Then lower it just slightly, so that being operational in Europe would produce no financial benefits and see if they'll comply, or just quit themselves.

Recent political and technical events makes me question why do we even attempt to keep such strong relations with megacorp businesses (and, by extension, US gov). We would still be here even if multiple megacorps would die. It would take us decades to build up capacity to have complex tech of our own (fully local). But meanwhile we'd be just fine, just less trendy.

[benoau]

The DMA and DSA already allow fines up to 10 - 20% of global turnover (effectively 30 - 40% of annual profit) and breaking up noncompliant companies.

The issue is nobody wants to pull the trigger because the companies that would get fined or broken up have curried favour with Trump to circumvent these consequences.

[szszrk]

That's a similar scale as GDPR violations. And EU companies I worked with were always very serious about GDPR regulations, even if their internal training confirms fines were always really small compared to maximums.

US doesn't care about warnings and small fines, though. If penalties are not enforced, it's like they don't exist.

[anthk]

Block FB at IP level. Every domain, from FB to WA to IG and whatnot. No access from Europe unless you comply with privacy laws.

[Isamu]

Well you have to ask why fines aren’t working. In Meta’s case, recent revelations show that they make choices based on how much they stand to make by refusing compliance and just paying the fine. They decided the fine was small relative to the billions they made. A fine could still work but it needs to reach maybe unprecedented punitive levels.

[dzink]

Per the book “Careless People” Meta started “backing” right wing candidates everywhere (via algorithms, not money) to avoid regulation and taxes as soon as the EU tried to tax and regulate it more - thus leading to a surge of that sentiment all over the EU.

[alephnerd]

> After decades of trying and broadly failing to regulate American tech corps, at what point does the EU...

The crux of the matter is it's a subset of the European Parliament versus a subset of EU member states.

When push comes to shove, EU member states can and already do ignore the EP for anything tangentially related to national security, and national politicans don't and won't give up sovereign power to the EU.

Additonally, the incentives of individual EU states with strong US FDI ties and not as strong domestic champions such as Poland, Ireland, Czechia, Luxembourg, and Romania means they fight tooth and nail to ensure American FDI continues. Member states like Hungary and Spain do this for China and Hungary and Austria for Russia.

There's also the added issue of perception - the EP was historically (and for larger states like France and Germany still is) used as a way to sideline unpopular domestic politicans or as a cushy retirement posting. There's a reason VdL is in Bruxelles and not the Bundeskanzleramt.

Plus, European companies have massive fixed capital investments in the US, especially after the IRA [0], so they don't want to face retaliation from American regulators, and are especially cozy with the Trump admin [1].

Also, European politicos also heavy leverage the revolving door of lobbying like their American peers. The "spend a couple years in Bundestag or Bruxelles and then take a cushy gig at Harvard [2][3]" remains strong. Heck, we'd always organize a fest where the wine would flow and European leaders would network with American and European policymakers studying and working in the US or in Europe [4].

[0] - https://flow.db.com/topics/macro-and-markets/us-german-trade...

[1] - https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/trump-bernard-arnault-lv...

[2] - https://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/leo-varadkar

[3] - https://ces.fas.harvard.edu/people/ces-alumni/past-policy-fe...

[4] - https://euroconf.eu/speakers/

[Gud]

Levy harder fines until they go away? At least some money goes into the union

[SpicyLemonZest]

It's very hard to imagine the EU enacting a ban on products that over half of Europeans use, regardless of the theoretical benefits of doing so. It doesn't seem like a practical option.

[whateverboat]

At some point, EU needs to build an alternative to those corps and that will never happen as long as they keep holding on to their precious pearl clutching regional and linguistic issues. EU needed to be a single country like 10 years ago.

[vincnetas]

what do you mean by single country? All the cultures in these countries can not disappear in 10, hell even 100 years. And i would prefer that they would not.

[whateverboat]

You know single country doesn't mean single culture.

[mikkupikku]

Or, they should not globo-homogenize themselves, wiping out their cultures in the process (are you even human? How can you so casually recommend the eradication of Europe's varied cultures?), but should instead ban a handful of American corps which would then create market space for small local competitors.

[whateverboat]

You know single country doesn't mean single culture, right? right?

[Xelbair]

the issue isn't fines themselves

it's the fact that fines are part of agency's income and it is their best interest(as a bureaucratic agency) to keep them at highest level where companies will still pay them.

Effectively this makes this a tax, enshittifying everything even worse.

if fines were decoupled from agencies, and had exponentially rising curve for repeat offenses, i think that would work better than ban, as much i would prefer for them to get banned.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> it's the fact that fines are part of agency's income and it is their best interest(as a bureaucratic agency) to keep them at highest level where companies will still pay them.

and yet there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they've done this. The fines that have been levied are easy to pay.

[abletonlive]

Hint: the reason why your observations about reality doesn’t match up to your expectations is because the premise you’ve built for yourself is wrong.

This is obvious to the outsider. The premise that you made up for yourself is that Europe wants to change Meta and how it works to protect its citizens. It’s obvious to me that this is not the goal. The goal is to extract wealth from those companies under the guise of consumer protection.

The EU makes more from regulating and taxing US tech companies than it makes from its own quaint tech sector. Ban and blocking those companies is never going to happen for this reason. Why destroy your cash cow?

[vincnetas]

Do you have any numbers for this? I somehow have doubts that US tech companies pay more taxes in EU.

[SunshineTheCat]

What you're seeing here is why the US has such a massive amount of leverage over the EU.

The US has for some time fostered an environment where people build and grow businesses. I've started many myself, some totally for fun.

And as it happens some of those US businesses have grown into massive corporations, and yes, some not so great ones too.

I think the EU in general (not everyone of course) leans more in the realm of letting the government take care of everything.

This of course creates dependency, not just on that government, but upon companies who create things that government can't provide.

Because of that dependency upon the government, there isn't any recourse against a business' practices because at some point, the fines and penalties will fall flat.

In the US, a pretty normal response to a bad/annoying/corrupt business is: "ok cool, I'll build a competitor."

If instead of creating a culture of dependency in the EU, one of innovation and creativity was fostered instead, this point in time could be very different.

[tokai]

>I think the EU in general (not everyone of course) leans more in the realm of letting the government take care of everything.

Your understanding of business in EU countries seems to be make-believe and personal fantasy.

[runarberg]

Also the picture of the US is totally fictional for the vast majority of people. The US has fostered an environment where only a tiny subset of the population can start a business. Even opening up a restaurant you are usually met with an avalanche of paperwork, of requirements to fulfill, and unless you have a lot of money to fix any issue, they rule some aspect of your business in violation. Even a tiny business like a food cart you need to make sure you keep it x meters from a public restroom, that your neighbors don‘t complaint, that you provide 2 parking spaces per gas-burner (or 3 if you use an induction stove) etc. etc.

[SunshineTheCat]

You can not like the statement, and call it whatever you like, however, it is objectively true.

You are far more likely to find a government regulation on a US business/product than you are to find any EU-based product used widely in the United States.

That is the main point I was making and it is true by any objective measure.

There is far more leverage with the country exporting goods/services globally then there is importing those things and then nanny-stating them into a form they think is better.

[btasker]

> than you are to find any EU-based product used widely in the United States.

Spotify?

If you don't mind including companies that offer multiple things: Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Mistral, SAP

I'm also assuming there that you're only referring to tech products and services, otherwise you probably want to look at the long, long, long list of pharmaceuticals, cars and other products.

I think the issue is more that you don't have a good understanding of which products and services aren't American.

> There is far more leverage with the country exporting goods

True leverage comes from import, not export of goods and materials. The thing that grows GDP is buying materials cheaper from elsewhere, turning them into something and selling on at a healthy margin (whether domestic or as an export).

> then nanny-stating them into a form they think is better.

I'm no fan of nanny-stating, but I don't think that that's the case here.

There certainly are examples of that, but then the ones that I can think of (age verification in particular) are also getting pushed hard in the US. In fact, by all accounts, a lot of that pushing is being driven/funded by Meta

[anthk]

>"The goverment take care"...

So, like Boeing and tons of corpos too big to fail.