It was a (steel and coal) corp affordances union to begin with, so it's no wonder it's pandering to business rather than civic interests after all.
Von der Leyen is corrupt yet shapes EU policy without backlash, and the citizenry is left to pay the price, precisely because the EU pretends to speak for the people.
The EU is basically run by the Council, who are the national governments, all of whom are elected.
It's incredibly depressing that this keeps needing to be repeated when its been this way since the inception of the EU (with a small hiatus where we were gonna get a constitution).
The Commission can propose laws, but unless the Council (mostly) and Parliament (theoretically) agree, they won't happen.
Selection/rejection of the European Commission president (there is no such thing as the EU president) is indirect democracy, not popular vote. But it is still representative and democratic.
US contrast: in the US, citizens also don't vote for the President directly. Instead, we use a two-step system centered on the Electoral College.
Hypocrisy: if anyone (especially us American citizens) are going to argue that europeans should get to vote directly for the President of the EU commission, then they should also argue strongly to get rid of the Electoral System in the US and let the presidential popular vote be the decisive factor.
And the democracy part which you got wrong. That's the salient point.
I don't think that's an unpopular idea as of 25 years ago now. With current technology, nationals should be a direct democracy (and with ranked choice votes, not FPtP), the house should be doubled (if not tripled since we stopped growing 100 years ago), and the supreme court should be expanded to at least 15.
And that's just the start of small updates we need for government.
Power corrupts, and the more steps removed politicians are from whomever put them in power, the safer they are.
What is the UK's playbook in this case?
If you want to do your part as a consumer, boycott all American products:
Do you have plans to overcome those sort of challenges and sustain this initiative ?
Yeah, EU is super fucked too since it outsourced its energy dependence to Russia, consumer manufacturing to China, defence and tech services to US, and only just woke up in the last 3 or so years that it was all a huge mistake that's now costing us dearly since we're at the whims of all 3 belligerents who know that now is the time they can squeeze us.
Trying to undo just one dependency is a slow and painful process, but fighting all 3 at the same time is a suicide mission.
The US outsourced its manufacturing too, but unlike EU, it has a strong enough economy and military that they can just snap their fingers and the likes of Taiwan and Korea will immediately onshore manufacturing of their high end chips and ships to the US, but EU doesn't have this kind leverage.
If only! We just outsourced all our agriculture to Latin America (MERCOSUR free trade agreement).
The EU policies makes sense if the goal is peace and prosperity. You can't reach that goal without collaboration and trade. If you're going to blame someone, blame the Great Powers, the US, China and Russia, in order of importance, who have suddendly gone ballistic and can only talk of war, War, WAR, and nothing else.
Oh, sorry, President Trump is all about trade... tariffs.
I mean if the world has gone mad, don't blame the EU for trying to be sane.
How can EU maintain peace and prosperity with no military? With hugs and kisses?
Because if that was their goal, then they really fucked up because they delivered the exact opposite: war next door and lowest purchasing power of the working class in years/decades.
You see, people like this are so detached from reality, they don't understand that peace and prosperity comes from strength, not from weakness. When you don't have military strength you invite conflict, since everyone else now sees you as an easy target and wants your slice of the global GDP.
The world leadership is composed of competitors and bullies fighting for dominance of land and resources, not of nice guys who bend over to your demands just because you're nice and peaceful. If you don't have any leverage, you get run over and colonized. It's wild this hasn't sunk in yet, especially given Europe's colonial past.
>If you're going to blame someone, blame the Great Powers
Ah yes, it's always everyone else's fault that the EU kicked its military, IT, energy, economy, manufacturing industry (and now farming too) in the balls for the past 20-30 years, allowing the US, China and Russia the opportunity to exploit this self inflicted weakness for their own benefits.
All countries are economic competitors to each other. Every fuckup you make is an opportunity for the rest to enrich themselves from your stupidity. They aren't obliged to save you from your mistakes when they can profit from it. It's how Europe got rich in the first place during colonialism.
>who have suddendly gone ballistic and can only talk of war, War, WAR, and nothing else.
Doesn't matter what other sovereign countries choose to do on the global stage, they're not accountable to you. But it's your job to have a strong military to deter others from having chimp-outs with you or in your backyard. Unless you live in a fairytale, you would know that world peace was never the default state in human history, but only a temporary state created by wielding orders of magnitude more force than everyone else who will then have to follow your rules and ideologies creating a state of compliance which you interpreted as peace. You should prepare for the worst even, or especially in times of peace, as other countries won't keep world peace for you or in your favor, but will try to free themselves from compliance to your game and try to enforce their own rules that benefit them. It's the EU's fault it slept at the wheel in terms of defence and lets itself get bullied around.
>Oh, sorry, President Trump is all about trade... tariffs.
For all Trump's problems, the US still got TSMC to build a cutting edge fab there, they're getting south Korea to build new ships there, and attract cutting edge tech companies like Infinera to close shop in EU and move everything to the US. What did EU get from being nice and generous with others? Other than illegal welfare scammers.
>don't blame the EU for trying to be sane.
I CAN blame the EU since that's where my taxes go so they're accountable to me. Being weak and powerless is not being sane. There's no virtue in letting everyone walk over you and exploit you. "Turn the other cheek" does not work in competitive international politics. Your weakness and complacency will always be used against you. I know what I wrote above isn't popular to hear but it's how the world works. Ignoring it doesn't help anyone.
Another one is that war doesn't work anymore and if we keep at it, we'll just mess everything up to a point of no return.
Is removing the dependence on US tech easy for the EU? No, it's tough and takes a lot of work and time. It's still a piece of cake compared to the dependence on Chinese manufacturing. They're incomparable.
Massive endeavor for a lot of setups.
Not depending on Chinese manufacturing is borderline impossible even if you are starting from scratch. Not only it will be way more expensive, with potentially longer delays and lesser capacities, but just finding some company that can and wants to do the job can be a nightmare. From what I have seen, many local manufacturers in the US and Europe are really there to fulfill government contracts that requires local production.
Most hardware kickstarter-like projects rely on Chinese manufacturing as if it was obvious. It is not "find a manufacturer", it is "go to China". Projects that instead rely on local (US/Europe) manufacturing in order to make a political statement have to to though a lot of trouble, and the result is often an overpriced product that may still have some parts made in China.
A large corporation just migrating from everything hosted on VMs can take years.
And if you are responsible for an ETL implementation and working with AWS and have your files stored on S3 (every provider big and small has S3 compatible storage) and your data is hosted on Aurora Postgres, are you going to spend time creating a complicated ETL process or are you going to just schedule a cron job to run “select outfile into S3”?
And “most” of the services on AWS aren’t based on open source software and you still have to provision your resources using IAC and your architecture. No Terraform doesn’t give you “cloud agnosticism” any more than using Python when using AWS services.
Are you going to tell your developers to spend weeks writing ETL code that could literally be done in an hour using SQL extensions to AWS?
Are you going to tell them not to use any AWS native services? What are you going to do about your infrastructure as code? Are you going to tell them to set up a VM to host a simple cron job instead of just using a Lambda + Event Bridge?
And what business value does this theoretical “cloud agnosticism” bring - that never is once you get to scale.
It took Amazon years to move off of Oracle and much of its infrastructure still doesn’t run on AWS and still uses its older infrastructure (CDO? It’s been a while and I was on the AWS side)
I have yet to hear anyone who worries about cloud agnosticism even think about the complexity of migrations bring at scale, the risk of regressions, etc.
While I personally stay the hell away from lift and shifts and I come in at the “modernization” phase, it’s because I know the complexity and drudgery of it. I worked at AWS ProServe for 3.5 years and I now work as a staff consultant at a 3rd party consulting company.
This isn’t me rah rahing about AWS. I would say the same about GCP, Azure, the choice of database you use, or any other infrastructure decision.
>And what business value does this theoretical “cloud agnosticism” bring - that never is once you get to scale.
The "business value" here is not being beholden to an increasingly hostile "ally" who owns the land these servers operate on. If you aren't worried about that, then there is no point in doing any of this.
But if things do escalate to war, there's a very obvious attack vector to cripple your company with. Even if you're only 20% into the migration, that's better than 0%.
I of course don't know the scale of your company and how much they even wanted to migrate. Those are all variable in this.
How often has been replacing Chinese tech manufacturing dependency at scale done before? About 0.
As long as mobile os and adjacent services like the store etc are controlled there is no true path to digital independence especially in a highly digitalized region like the EU.
One example is if EU allows the Android developer verification to pass this year in its current or even in more relaxed form, that just means EU is still open for some hard lessons in the future.
While a massive endeavor, it's absolutely doable to create the EU's own OS and store. It's not doable to create the manufacturing capacity needed to produce all the hardware that goes into smartphones at scale.
China itself ironically serves as a great example - they have their own Android store, mostly run on Chinese phones, some on non-Android OS. Yet they still haven't been able to get rid of the dependency on TSMC/ASML. They're working on it and will get there, but it's taking many years longer than the software part. And not for lack of trying. The fact that they're still tolerating iOS doesn't disprove the existence of the former ecosystem. iOS is said to have maybe 20% market share in China.
I find this highly optimistic. It will take years, maybe decades for EU to replace US clouds and tech. And if they're going to do it with LLMs, then it will take billions of euros in devs and tokens (again, all going to US tech companies).
Meanwhile, USA continues to strategically re-home TSMC to Arizona whilst simultaneously make huge investments to invigorate Intel and Micron.
Over the last decade USA and China have doubled-down on massive investments to out-compete each other while the EU seems like it's struggling to understand where to even begin.
Oh don't worry, Trump's already kneecapped both of those for a decade to come from 2025's actions alone. Y'all got time to catch up.
China, much scarier. But we all kinda let that happen over 30 years. Too late to complain now. I'd say we work together but uhh... I think we both understand (or rather, fail to understand) modern US policy these days.
But what’s funny is that Claude Code is from US company so can’t be used in a boycott scenario
As a compute engine its SQL capabilities are worse than the slowest pretend timeseries db like Elasticsearch.
As far as S3, are you trying to ingest a lot of small files or one large file? Again Redshift is optimized for bulk imports.
Clickhouse, even chdb inmemory magic has better S3 consumer than Redshift. It sucks up those Kinesis files like nothing.
Its a mess.
Not to mention none of its Column optimizations work and the data footprint of gapless timestamp columns is not basically 0 as it is in any serious OLAP but it is massive, so the way to improve performance is to Just align everything on the same timeline so its computation engine does not beed to figure out how to join stuff that is Actually time Aligned
I really can’t figure out how anyone can do seriously big computations with Redshift. Maybe people like waiting hours for their SQL to execute and think software is just that slow.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/ctas.html
I have a sneaking suspicion that you are trying to use Redshift as a traditional OLTP database. Are you also normalizing your table like an OLTP database instead of like an OLAP
https://fiveonefour.com/blog/OLAP-on-Tap-The-Art-of-Letting-...
And if you are using any OLAP database for OLTP, you’re doing it wrong. It’s also a simple “process” to move data back and forth between Aurora MySQL or Postgres by federating your OlTP database with Athena (handwavy because I haven’t done it) or the way I have done it is use one Select statement to export to S3 and another to export into your OLTP database.
And before you say you shouldn’t have to do this, you have always needed some process to take data from your normalized data to un normalized form for reporting and analytics.
Source: doing boring enterprise stuff including databases since 1996 and been working for 8 years with AWS services outside AWS (startups and consulting companies) and inside AWS (Professional Services no longer there)
Why are you doing this manually? There is a built in way of doing Kinesis Data Streams to Redshift
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/using-other-s...
Also by default, while you can through Glue Catalog have S3 directly as a destination for Redshift, by default it definitely doesn’t use S3.
If the government switched away from Microsft and refused to accept MS document formats for any legal reason - then things might shift.
Most businesses just don't care, they want they easy button.
A law firm does not want to screw around, they just click 'buy' on Word, Outlook, Teams.
There's a deep psychology to it.
I remember a developer telling me that Oracle 'was the only real database'.
It's not so much propaganda, just the propagandistic power of incumbency. People who only know one thing are hard pressed to believe there could be something else.
This is more than 50% brand, narrative etc.
We techies tend to underestimate the power of perception, even when it's of our own creation etc. i.e. people fighting over Linux and it's various distros.
but any companies which have their brand closely tied to the US image (e.g. Coca Cola) will most likely have bug issues
and if people have a choice between a product from a company they now is EU or better local and one where they don't know about it the choice will be influenced by it
and maybe we can finally take tear down some of the absurd misinformation companies and corruption originating from MS and similar. (E.g. systematic malicious misinformation often supplemented with non fair competition/subsidization and outright bribery (no joke, MS has (through middle mans) wide spread bribed public, research and school organizations in Germany, like actual bribes, not just things which should count as bribes but do not(1)))
(1): I knew some people which had been involved in it. But any case where legal actions where taken ended without relevant outcome because all the blame always feel to the sales middle man AFIK and supposedly MS didn't know. Also the bribes mostly ended up as additional founding for the research institute and only in small parts in personal pockets from what I have heard. At the same time politics have caused so massive issues due to incompetently made laws and regulations for many public organizations that accepting this bribes and using them as additional founds often looked as a necessary evil... :sob: (yes I know there are not emotes on HN)
Assuming the person burns the money they would've spent on Cola in the first place. But they aren't, they'll probably just redirect that money to an alternative soft drink, probably a more local one.
Virtually one will stop buying Coke. Virtually no one will stop wanting an iPhone. So on and so forth. They will gladly criticize the US while continuing to indulge in the biggest brand names.
Today, yes. Once US troops start forcefully occupying European territory, eh...
Jim Beam (the bourbon distillery) said before Trump 10% of their sales were to Canada, and that has gone to nearly zero.
or by most people agreeing Cola isn't healthy, so it's becomes a Luxus product they just sometimes drink and then going for a slightly more "interesting" alternative brand which fit's more the "fancy treat" vibe is pretty common (we already have been seeing this in part of Germany, where it's not rare that restaurants serve Fritz or Afro Cola over Coca Cola as the Brands "seem" more fancy while Coca Cola feels more like the cheaper non fancy choice. By being relative cheap Coca Cola might have opened created the perfect basis for it being replaced in the "fancy" context. And by it not being cheap enough it get replaced in the "people with no money" context. This leads the "in between" context (which would still be a majority in Germany) and all the US food chains etc. but only if the people don't have a personal reason to switch. Most people in Germany drink Cola only from time to time.
many alternative Colas don't try to imitate Coca Cola but give Cola their own twist, and IMHO multiple of them taste noticeable better then Coca Cola
and for people with little money getting cheaper knock-off is pretty common and people get used to it
at the same time Coca Colas brand isn't seen as "fancy"/"high quality"/"well regarded" enough anymore. So many restaurants for which cola isn't just a "default fallback they don't care about" but a drink commonly combined with their meals, started serving other Cola brand like e.g. Fritz Cola, Mio Mio Cola or Afri Cola. Also some of the more beer/alk. focused companies have started to branch out to soft drinks as Alkohole consume is going down with some surprise successes (e.g. Paulana Spezi) but also with existing distribution contracts with Restaurants and Food Chains, so their stuff is popping up increasingly more often.
And I mean we are still speaking about the kind of soft drink with the most dominant brand control (Cola/Coca Cola), for all other soft drinks the US companies have a far less strong hold on them.
And sure some pople like I guess you will insist on drinking Coca Cola.
But also if the US continues to paint themself as the new big evil (while Russia looks increasingly weak, and China is clever enough to move mostly behind the scene) then it's just a matter of time until people will start ostracizing people for buying (unnecessary) products which are "well known US" and haven't somehow separated their company image from the US. Like seriously how did the US became so incompetent in politics that you find people all over the EU which think joining with China against the US would be a good idea and long term better for their quality of live... like wtf.
The main drawback of them is that due to them operating on a (way) smaller scale and need to have a factor to differentiate themself, so most of them are more expensive. (but there are cheap no-brand clones, too).
A much bigger problem is that Nestle and co. try to either buy up any new innovative successful German food/drink companies. Sure after being bought up they tend to continue operate like before so technically they aren't dependent on the US, but they have been bought up anyway.
well I guess that is good news?? maybe?
Or, now that someone's reverse-engineered the Coca-Cola formula and everyone's saying we need to stop pandering to USA IP rights, governments have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever. I think Russia already did.
In the niche perfumes hobby, you have small brands doing that or people paying for gcms analysis on perfumes, i guess that companies have already done that on coke for decades
Their real genius was always marketing, associating sugar water with freedom, free time, summer AND christmas, ... Not to look down on them, good marketing is both very hard and very powerfull.
I for one seriously doubt they assume such a thing. They are most likely given something in return that they think somehow makes such a trade worth it. Whether it's access to some fancy US intel/survelliance tech, "discounts" on US defense purchases or what have you, until you get transparency or clarity on the very specific items included in all these deals it's hard to determine the scale of their stupidity. It's either that or personal bribes, blackmail, and kickbacks to key EU politicians depending on the EU country in question.
If there was a "false assumption" above all others it was most likely the assumption that the post-WWII US foreign policy towards Europe would continue to the end of their lifetimes.
Why are these articles finding their way here? In europe , this is not news, never.
Yes, I'm still here, despite being told (paraphrasing) 'fuck off we don't want anyone from outside USA here'.
Interesting because doesn't every sort of democratic state try to be 'a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls'? Depends how stringent and usually not stringent enough for many on the Left and on the Right.
When tempted to use the word 'fascism', is it not better to describe the issue with which one's concerned (maybe deeply) rather than using a fit-all word and take care not to devalue the significance of the word as it was, for instance, applied in WW2 to some of the appalling atrocities that occurred in that period and those we've seen reports of recently?
I'm sure there's loads more if the question is somehow genuine?
Just spending $billions on an illegal (ie not established through constitutionally sound, democratic legislative means) military force, who travel in unmarked vehicles, conceal their identities, and target citizens in areas that politically oppose Trump are alone actions of a fascist regime. They murder, disappear, deport with no due process and act as if outside the law. Their actions, such as murder, are supported fully by the public face of the regime.
This regime is publicly supported by the billionaire owners of tech and media companies operating in USA.
Little people like me don't have much, but every £pound is a vote.
... Because this is hacker news and not euro news? This is pretty much on point both for tech topic and vague "hacker ethos" as a topic.
A provably untrue statement. Examples:
https://www.politico.eu/article/big-tech-lobbying-brussels-d...
https://www.brusselstimes.com/1916422/us-tech-giants-allying...
https://taz.de/Digitale-Rechte-in-Europa/!6130097/
https://fr.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/18/champ-de-batail...
That's just false. Example, here's a shitty tabloid in Croatia:
https://www.24sata.hr/news/vrh-europske-komisije-mijenja-pra...
Hmmmm
Do they also complain when they themselves meet with Meta, or is it an issue only when their growing opposition do it?
You know the saying "For my friends everything, for my enemies, the law"?
The only relevance to the article is that it indicates which parties have sided with the US administration to fight consumer’s digital rights.
They don't really care about those ideologies they preach, they just virtue signal however needed in order to appease the mobs and governments in power so they can be allowed to extract wealth.
Are you referring to anything specific or you have just emotional urge to defend far right? (PfE in this case).
But of course you are unable to objectively see such non partisan issues, so you can only resort to calling everyone who has a different option than you on the left's actions as "defending" the right wing.
[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/aug/27/mark-zucker...
[2] https://itif.org/publications/2025/12/16/political-pressure-...
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/26/zuckerberg-meta-whi...
https://www.politico.eu/article/epp-votes-with-far-right-to-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_groups_of_the_Europe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_political_alliances
if there was selling of influence it's within the EPPO's jurisdiction (as far as I understand)
They, in essence, traded 10% of their GDP for Regulatory Independence and UK’s accession to the trans-pacific partnership, estimated by the government to be worth only 0.06% of GDP by 2040.
If the Falklands represented a major turning point, then imo Greenland does too. The simple mustering of an international task-force of troops for defense is a move unprecedented in the 21st Century. The recent Spectator article correctly identifies Trump as “playing geopolitical Monopoly with Greenland”, which holds substantial mineral as well as strategic value in the president’s eyes.
The author identified presidential “ego-politics” as a plausible top reason, along with a US quest for hemispheric power and sending a message to rival powers - concluding by noting that both Britain and France hold territories in the western hemisphere and asking if they could be next on Trump’s list.
https://spectator.com/article/trump-is-playing-geopolitical-...
They don't have the stomach for a fight.
QED.
Trump keeps talking about taking it because he knows the media will bite the bait and talk about that instead and forget about the epstein list and other illegal shit his administration did.
Remember how he was also talking about annexing Canada in his election? Trump just loves to bait the media by saying crazy stuff since the media feeds on sensationalist stuff like that.
But yeah, I also wonder what would happen if the media would just stop dissecting every late-night bleat (as some commentators have decided to call his Truth Social posts) and start treating them as what they are (the ramblings of a deranged 79-year old) instead? But of course those ramblings now spill into other places too: plaques on the "presidential walk of fame" (https://eu.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/politics/2025/1...), letters to allies (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/trump-letter...) etc.
Who said anything about doing. He doesn't have to do anything other than bring it up all the time.
The media loves this since it means more engagement farming and Trump knows this which is why he's doing it. ALong with things like "quiet piggy".
The problem is our Kremlinology is no longer capable of discerning what's a bluff and what's not. Therefore, at significant cost to both sides, we have to unravel some of the interdependency between the EU and the US.
His decision tree is like
Does it make me feel like a tough guy? -> Is there some way I can leverage it for grift and personal gain? -> Does it make my political enemies and undesirables feel angry and helpless? -> Is it a decision I can make unilaterally? -> Then YES
As for no stomach for a fight, Nato Europe can't even shoot down shahad drones that fly over their own territory.
This is not how it should be, but it is.
You would have been right if this were a couple of years ago, hell... even at the beginning of last year you might have been right, but now? If i would go with the things i hear of coworkers or other people around me (normal people in the lower middle class, no activists or something like that) then i can tell you: People are out for blood. The sheer arrogance of the Trump administration is just a tad too much to be ignored and this time Europe will not back down.
Oxfam said the $2.5 trillion rise in the wealth of billionaires last year would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over. Their wealth has risen by more than four-fifths since 2020, while nearly half the world’s population lives in poverty, the group said.
The Trump administration has led a “pro-billionaire agenda,” the group said, through actions such as slashing taxes for the wealthiest, fostering the growth of AI-related stocks that help rich investors get richer, and thwarting efforts to tax giant companies."
AI is killing humanity
Luckily, his reign of terror is not infinite. In November he'll be cut to size.
A significant part of the Draghi report on European competitiveness is about how the Parliament has been stifling the ability of EU companies to efficiently compete under the weight of more and more complex laws.
It's not very useful being the first to put in place complex regulations if nothing remains to regulate because every company has moved somewhere else.
It's a night and day difference trying to get something built in the EU vs the US.
It's easy to rally behind the idea that bad foreign actors conspire to torpedo customers protecting laws because it provides a theorically easy solution: just stop allowing foreigners to interfer. Meanwhile, considering how these laws might be impacting companies in a fairly cut throat international environment and if we have put the cursor at the right place between protections and economic growth is a far more complex debate. It involves a lot of trade off and shades of gray and it puts the onus of decision strictly on us.
It's complex and as with everything involving trade offs, it's very easy to rattle purists of both sides. I rarely expect a rave welcome when I start discussing these topics on the internet.
The current US administration has done more to destroy US soft power on the world stage than any other in the country's history. The administration seems intent on destroying NATO. Personally I'm fine with that because it's a protection racket and a tool of imperialism. But this is going to materially hurt the US defense contractors who profit off of arms sales. That's really the turning point for any fascist regime: when you start screwing up the bag.
US tech companies are also a tool of American foreign policy in pretty much the exact same way the administration accuses China of doing.
So the EU needs to be responsible for its own security. And it's own platforms. But it may be too late for that as the EU itself may well splinter under the rise of far-right governments that are currently in place (eg Hungary) and only one election away from taking place (eg UK, Geermany maybe even France; even though the UK isn't in the EU I'm still counting it as part of Europe).
Unfortunately the EU (and the UK) is too committed to the US imperial project, such as in the Middle East. People don't seem to realize just how connected things like imperialism and the erosion of your own rights at home are inextricably intertwined.
While the goals are usually noble, I’m increasingly convinced we’re regulating ourselves into irrelevance. I’m not a Big Tech company yet my interests align with theirs. We desperately need an EU that prioritizes actual growth over well-intentioned paperwork. To me, the AI Act and the GDPR are the worst offenders here, representing the largest possible gap between "good intentions" and the actual effect they have on the ground.
Consider frontier LLM labs. We have the talent, the Nordic data centers, and access to the GPUs. But why would any investor drop $100B on a frontier LLM lab here when the legislative environment is fundamentally more hostile than the US? It feels like we’ve already watched Mistral and Aleph Alpha get left in the dust.
To give you an idea of the "compliance vs. reality" GDPR gap: I worked on a project processing healthcare data for millions of people. We had a clear, easy-to-find privacy policy and a responsive DPO. Total GDPR requests for info or deletion? Exactly 53. Out of millions. We spent thousands of hours building systems for rights that only 0.001% of our users cared to use.
If you look at the courts, the "damage" being prevented is equally vague. Since EU courts don't really do punitive damages, most awards are tiny unless there’s actual identity theft. Most of what GDPR protects is "mental distress" or "loss of control"-concepts so ambiguous that courts rarely award anything for them unless something else went wrong.
The result of all this "protection"? No FAANG-equivalent, no frontier AI leader, and no homegrown ad-tech. It turns out the most perfectly regulated company is the one that never exists in the first place.
We didn't spend thousands of hours on a deletion feature (or just development time). We spent them in total to be compliant in a healthcare environment. That time goes into:
Documenting the entire lifecycle (how, why, and where) of every single data point we process. Conducting and documenting formal risk assessments for every major processing activity (Privacy Impact Assessments (DPIA)). Drafting and negotiating data processing agreements (DPAs) with every single partner and vendor we use. Building strict role-based access and logging systems to track exactly who views and edits data and why. Implementing pseudonymization and logical data separation to ensure we meet "privacy by design" standards. Constantly coordinating between the product and dev team and the DPO to update policies and communicate changes to users.
The point I’m making is that the EU has built an incredibly expensive regulatory environment to support rights that, in practice, the vast majority of users don't seem to care about. We’re over-engineering for a "loss of control" that the average user hasn't shown much interest in reclaiming.
> We spent thousands of hours building systems for rights that only 0.001% of our users cared to use.
GDPR does not require that any of the data subject rights are automated, other than "right to be informed" (which it doesn't explicitly spell out has to be automated, but "put the information on the website" is the easiest way to comply if you're relying on the consent basis for anything). If you expect that under 200 people are ever going to exercise a particular right, and automation will take longer than manually fulfilling those requests, then don't automate them: just add it to your DPO's job description.
> that, in practice, the vast majority of users don't seem to care about.
You can't use "people are choosing not to waste the time of a healthcare provider" as an argument that people don't care. They may simply be being kind. I very rarely require GDPR data subject access requests, but when I do, it's very important that I can get them in a timely manner.
If I know what information is kept by the organisation (and therefore would be included in the GDPR request), and there are other ways of me accessing the information I care about having, I don't need to perform a GDPR request. It's organisations where there aren't where I'm most likely to need to make a GDPR request. If a company is actually complying with data minimisation and purpose limitation, I do not need to make a GDPR deletion request. etc etc. I think you're focusing on how annoying it is for you, and not thinking of the impact on your less-ethical competitors (who might otherwise be able to run you out of business – depending on the industry).
https://www.cnil.fr/en/economic-impact-gdpr-5-years
unfortunately the whole texts are in french
I'll note that of the three regulatory acronyms you gave, two of them (HIPPA and FDA approvals) are American.
I specified all three via comma to highlight that we had quite some history in compliance, in different jurisdictions.
HIPPA covers only medical devices, GDPR covers everything. FDA approval process is convoluted and expensive, especially for new types of devices, but it's still much easier than European MDR.
Also, I mentioned FDA because we didn't even try to get a proper compliance in the EU, because it's impossible for a startup without huge support.
If the goal is to stop breaches, we should mandate MFA and ban default-public cloud buckets. Those are technical solutions. GDPR, instead, mandates a massive administrative layer. No data breach has ever been stopped by a well-drafted Privacy Impact Assessment or a 50-page DPA. Those are legal shields, not security measures.
> then don't automate them: just add it to your DPO's job description.
The DPO isn't an engineer. To let them fulfill a request, I still have to build the internal tooling to query, redact, and export data from distributed production databases. Also, "I'll have my DPO do it manually" never sounds good when going through an audit.
> they may simply be being kind.
The simpler explanation is that the average person has no clue what these rights are because they’ve never had a reason to care. In healthcare, patients care that their data is secure and the service works. They aren't losing sleep over "data portability."
Ultimately, this "level playing field" only benefits incumbents. Unethical players ignore the rules until they’re caught, while legitimate startups are hit with a compliance tax that makes it nearly impossible to compete with US-based firms that can focus 100% of their energy on the product.
It's the same dynamic that has warped the California housing market by adding a forest of regulations that make it almost impossible to build new housing. Those regulations for the most part add nothing but cost and time to projects. Meanwhile housing prices go through the roof.
I cannot stand reading these comments left by people clearly detached from reality.
I used to work in a medical AI company myself, over the years we had a few requests for deletion, all from some crazy old German people. Moreover, we couldn't train our models on European data, which is absurd.
If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen. The big picture is that medical AI is scary stuff that can ruin countless lives if done even slightly wrong.
Article by article: how lawyers created impractical regulations that made sure big tech monopolized Europe and made sure small players had more trouble participating, and how the legal-industrial complex is fighting to keep milking that cow
Corporations and governments should be considered as balancing forces, one works to increase its profits by any means, other works to protect humans living in that area by any means.
You might say, corporations benefit its employees, true, but it is a small subset of people living in the country. If you allow everything to corporations, they will set up a slavery system from the birth of a baby
Then the low-hanging fruits: mandate exclusive data storage in the EU, encryption keys in the EU, ban AWS/Azure/GCP and Windows/Office from government procurement, force JV's or GTFO, force Linux government use.
These NGOs are saboteurs in disguise that will never lead you to the promised land of EU tech sovereignty. China's playbook was: deregulate to build a domestic ecosystem, then regulate to protect society once the ecosystem is mature. Flipping that playbook around is insidious wrecker shit.