What struck me as quite interesting was Guy Verhofstadts sideremarks.
>"You have to ask yourself how you will be remembered," he said. "As one of the three big internet giants together with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who have enriched our world and our societies, or on the other hand, the genius that created a digital monster that is destroying our democracies and societies."
I imagine you have to talk like this to a guy like Zuckerberg to actually have a chance to get through to him.
>>Im pretty sure the fall of the EU has little to do with Facebook
Wait, what? EU is doing better than ever and it looks like after Brexit we will enjoy greater integration, and hopefully a full financial and political union in the future. If this is what a "fall" looks like to you, then I don't really know what to say to you - but from the rest of your sentence it seems like you don't like EU as an institution, so I guess it's unlikely you share my enthusiasm for it.
Maybe the EU is doing better than ever on some metrics, but I find it quite scary how over the last 20 years, Europe has completely missed the train on technology. We are now in a vassal position where we have to beg foreign CEOs to have some sort of view / control over the technology that runs our society. And it's not getting any better.
GDPR is too little too late, and may even be counterproductive[1]. It would have been vastly preferable to have healthy European competitors to Microsoft / Apple / Google / Facebook. But we don't, and probably will never have.
The situation with Microsoft in the 90's should have made it obvious of what was to come. Our politicians ignored it entirely. They are now making grand statements about democracy that leave me less than impressed.
[1] Some say that GDPR will cement Google / Facebook's advertising monopoly as they are in a much better position to gather data sharing consent from their users than their smaller competitors.
Missed the train? Maybe didn't fully participate in the dot-com boom or the startup-buzz, but that's not the full picture with regards to technology. The world wide web came from CERN. ARM which powers most popular mobile devices was founded in the UK (only bought by a Japanse company post-Brexit). German cars are everywhere. Nokia and Ericsson were at the forefront of the boom in mobile telecommunications. ITU is based in Geneva and GSM (the basis for all modern mobile telecomms) orginated in France (it took years for the USA to catch up).
But there's no way to way to fight back for Europe unless EU countries get even more homogeneous laws concerning running a multi-national (basically any online) business.
It's easy in the US because they have a large, wealthy and boundary free market with almost no access cost beyond marketing.
B2C is still wildly localized. In the earliest days of the commercial web (and before), this wasn't the case and it felt like a truly level playing field (the general lack of transactions involving the real world fulfillment certainly helped as well).
Only when the giants started translating their offerings to reach an even wider audience in non-anglophone countries did end users start to expect a web in their home language and the potential audience of non-anglophone-based companies dropped (because they usually address their home language first).
Now the most inhibiting cost of multi-language offerings is usually not the act of translation itself, but the resulting quality which is rarely high.
I just mean with Brexit and all ... if the English leave, English will be deprecated as an official language, yet it will still be the lingua franca of European Business. It's just a kind of a funny, and slightly ironic situation I think.
EDIT: I think actually it speaks very much to how european unity is about so much more than just the EU. By extension how culture and national identity is about so much more than what the Westphalian paradigm provides.
UK leaving EU doesn't mean it's leaving Europe. It still is and will be a huge business partner, travel destination etc. so I seriously doubt English will deprecate as an official language.
I'm sure Italy and Hungary are excited about 'greater integration' too - they've certainly expressed that desire in their recent elections. I'd say 'fall' is the wrong word, but the European Union is not in a particularly healthy state right now. One large member leaving, one founding member making potentially illegal demands after electing populists, another three being sued for refusing to follow rules on migrants. It's not the first time, and it probably wont be the last, but it's not a good place to be.
I can't speak for Italy, but as one of the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who could easily get a job outside Hungary _because_ of Hungary joining the EU, I'm deeply thankful for the fact that EU is trying to control the damage that Orban Viktor is doing to the country.
As for the elections: Orban used lots of tools (cheating) to make sure that they win again. Migrants/illegal border crossers are not a problem here at this time here actually (they prefer Germany with a better economy).
Most of us Hungarians want to stay in the EU, but we have a dictator who would prefer to be outside if the money stops flowing from EU to them.
The EU has massive structural problems - sure most of them are not a direct fault of the EU but it certainly weakens the union.
Just look at youth unemployment in Spain for example. There is an entire generation growing up out of work and not building any skills. They can't compete in a global market.
What happens when Spain falls on actual hard times?
Or for example a small number of refugees have caused a huge shift right in politics and a lot of friction between member states. What will happen when there is a serious refugee crisis?
Spain, or actually any other European nation for the sake of this argument, has been through rougher times by any measure. Successfully if I may say, time and time again.
If only most people out of Europe, and most certainly Spain, would take a glimpse of the standards of living people take for granted in Western Europe, in particular Americans, they’d be demanding their governments at least the same.
Far right is having a strong time in many parts of the world, partly due to the rejection by electors of "establishment", but also because some politicians are quick to kindle nationalism and xenophobia to get cheap votes from angry people. Not sure what it has to do with the collapse of the USSR.
You didn't really address his points though. He named multiple countries in which Eurosceptics are on the rise, and that is going to become a problem in time for EU. Hell, even here in Latvia anti-EU sentiments are (albeit slowly) becoming more widespread. I don't think there will be a fall anytime soon, but we certainly have interesting times ahead of us.
So you like your free travel and ability to work anywhere in the EU??? But beyond that what does the EU offer other than a lot of regulations that seem to be hurting a lot of smaller countries?
"...beyond that"... that is funny. The "ability to work anywhere in the EU" is a huge win for all countries involved, and it alone would be worth having the EU.
And what kind of "regulations that seem to be hurting a lot of smaller countries" do you mean? I can't think of any.
Poland is not anti-EU, it just opposes the migrant quotas due to variety of reasons. The society also has a generally negative view on multiculturalism and forcing the refugees to live where they will feel unwelcome and oppressed doesn't seem like the best idea.
I'm struggling to see what massive wins you are referring to here.
The only 'win' I can think of of the top of my head was the UK referendum, which was 52/48 in favour of leaving. Polls taken now suggest that people are now mostly against leaving but the referendum result still stands.
reject[ing] giving more power to the EU is not the same as being anti-EU. I think there's a broad understanding that the EU isn't perfect, but that it's better than not having an EU. Britain is the one exception to this of course, but that depends on who you ask ... but even of the 50% who voted to leave, a large %age of those didn't really take stock of what it entailed.
In The Netherlands Geert Wilders' PVV became the second party by size, but the rest of the mainstream parties refuse to form a coalition with them so they are pretty much always in the opposition. I don't like that type of party (we had the LPF, then PVV and in the future maybe FvD) but I have to admit that as long as they don't actually govern they have a very useful function in that they often point out painful truths or situations that the other parties won't touch for fear of seeming politically incorrect.
That's four countries out of 28, and the Polish government is losing popularity (my girlfriend is Polish, I visit Poland often) due to its ultra-conservative Catholic views.
Poland was one of the most pro-EU countries in the union, and it will be again. It has seen the benefits firsthand, regardless of a vocal minority of xenophobes.
Le Pen had big gains yes, and still lost because the country decided to vote tactically, together to stop a fascist getting any power. She lost.
Hungary I'll give you, because it has been hardcore right-wing for a long while and massively corrupt.
How about arguing specifics instead of merely emoting? For instance, what does a national border mean to you? Is it totally meaningless? What is a nation? Does it share any characteristics at all, with the concept of a family? Should a country not set any requirements for entry or should it adopt a free-for-all with no barriers? Actually I'm not taking sides here but merely suggesting it would be instructive to see a salient point or two in support of your evident take on Orbán. There are lots of people I don't like but who gives a damn if I don't offer reasons for my preferences that show some evidence of intelligent analysis on my part?
Orbán's flirting with far-right groups, his opposition to everything related to EU and his extremely nationalistic bent are all well-known. He has a history of policies and laws that are overtly nationalistic and isolationist. Which is not a healthy approach in an increasingly global politic climate.
His policies and speeches bring definite reminders of nationalistic policies past, of using immigrants as refugees and scapegoats for everything wrong in a society, as well as appealing to traditionalist values, the "things were much better in the old days" rose-tinted glasses mentality.
It is a symptom of being stuck in the past, a wish to bring society back to the imagined "good old days", which never actually existed in the first place. There are also the obvious calls to maintaining traditions and cultural identity that is "under attack" and in many cases were actually imported from other cultures and assimilated over decades. It's the exact same story with every other nationalistic politic party, in every European country.
This was to make it clearer across all Markets what products you buy to make a single market easier on everyone. This is just FUD that really shouldn't be part of this conversation.
It's not FUD, its not a myth, its real: Commission Regulation (EEC) No 1677/88 of 15 June 1988 laying down quality standards for cucumbers [1]
Yes i know this regulation is no longer in place, thats not the point. The point is that the EU is a overblown bureaucracy that should not be in charge of regulating every silly little aspect of life across the various member states.
And yes, they are STILL passing laws like this. Recently they passend regulation that limits the power consumption over regular vacuum cleaners.
It's _better_ for the EU to define these things. If the EU hasn't done it centrally, member states would be doing it individually. This way:
1) You get a single definition of cucumber class 2C for every country, rather than a bunch of definitions that make trade more complex
2) It's (num_countries_in_EU) times cheaper to do it once than to do it seperately for every single country.
It has become quite clear to me that anyone who brings up the shape of bananas or cucumbers in the EU is either just spreading FUD because they've decided they're against the EU for other reasons, or believes anything the papers tell them without applying critical thinking to the matter.
Other people already pointed out the mistakes in your argument as this is necessary to build a common market across dozens of countries and hundreds of millions of people. Please read up on what the EU is trying to do, you really don't seem to have a grasp on it.
Classifying produce only helps the consumer. You'd be a little annoyed if every week you went to the supermarket and they had a varying quality/size of produce but the price remained the same.
I thought we are on hackernews here, and not some bullshit propaganda spreading site. Can you provide a documented example of devaluing your currency? Can you provide the number of illegal refugees that came to welfare states (can you name those welfare states?), regulating the form of cucumbers? Who are you, Nigel Farage? https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/straight-cucumbers/
Are you aware that in recent years the ECB has engaged in one of the two largest money printing runs in human history? The ECB's balance sheet as a share of GDP is still increasing. Only Japan's central bank has done more.
And are you aware that when you create money, the value of that currency drops to reflect that? If it didn't any country could become infinitely wealthy by just printing money endlessly. Obviously printing money doesn't increase the amount of stuff, and printing enough creates inflation that pushes down currency values.
The fact that you took this trivial statement and described it as propaganda is very worrying. It seems to me that people have lost the ability to evaluate the EU objectively.
As for illegal "refugees" (many of them come from countries that aren't at war), in 2017 204,219 people crossed an EU border illegally compared to 511,074 in 2016 and 1.8 million in 2015.
And straight cucumbers - the EU does in fact regulate the straightness of cucumbers. The page you link to says bendy cucumbers aren't banned, they just fall into a different grade. But the OP didn't claim they were banned, he claimed these laws were 'silly' and a waste of time - a subjective evaluation but not propaganda.
There was drop in 2014-2015, but ever since Euro has not moved down, rather in opposite direction... So both facts and theory contradicts your continuously-deprecated-currency theory.
I did. Go back and try again. You are so eager to defend the EU you can't even be bothered reading what I wrote and immediately dived for the insults: scaremonger, propaganda, lame.
Now for your misunderstanding of basic supply and demand.
Look. Let's say there's a million euros in circulation, total. People are using these million euros to buy and sell things. Suddenly the ECB awards itself 9 million euros and starts spending them. Eventually the currency equalises out and those 10 million euro total are spread over the entire economy. But the total amount of stuff being bought and sold hasn't changed, so the prices must have done - they will have gone up by 10x. Likewise, an external currency will now buy 10x more euros than before.
If you understand that you will understand what I was talking about.
Your confusion about the USD/EUR rate is fairly basic I'm afraid. USD was also engaged in huge money printing during the same period. Despite that the ECB still managed to depreciate the currency. The reason the value started dropping at the start of 2015 is that this is when Mario Monti began huge monthly printing runs:
on 22 January 2015 Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank, announced an 'expanded asset purchase programme': where €60 billion per month of euro-area bonds from central governments, agencies and European institutions would be bought
I assume he is referring to the ECBs bond buying program and to the migrant crisis. He is not wrong that this is the source of dislike of the EU and not Facebook. HN is one of the most extreme echo chambers on this topic.
Did you actually read the regulation you linked to?
It defines a standard for the quality classification of cucumbers. It doesn't require cucumbers to be straight, it just requires them to meet certain criteria to be declared a certain class of cucumber. It didn't prevent anyone from selling bent cucumbers as long as they were classified accordingly.
In fact, what I just said is exactly what the blog post linked in the comment you're responding to is said and which you're completely ignoring.
The EU didn't pass a law requiring cucumbers to be straight. The EU passed a standard for classifying cucumbers. Exactly the kind of standard that would have been passed by each country individually if the EU didn't exist (as evidenced by non-EU countries having such standards).
How much of the information about EU politicians robbing people by artificially devaluing currency, influx of illegal refugees, and whatever you could go on about, has been shared and spread through Facebook, generating attention for that information (whether it is accurate or not) in the first place?
Yeah it seems like this guy doesn't even know how the EU works. If you reduce it to "they regulate cucumbers but don't care about real threats" you probably fell for some cheap propaganda but it doesn't speak for your understanding of EU regulations.
The power consumption regulation (actually giving it a grade) for vacuum cleaners is just continuation of what EU has been doing with a lot of other household appliances like dishwashers/fridges/etc. Basically once you mandate a easy to understand energy consumption rating system to some type of product people do start to care about it. Especially if you mandate that this score has to be visible on the packaging and all advertising material.
> Do you honestly believe that the average citizen wants highly paid bureaucrats in Brussels debating on how much power a vacuum cleaner should draw?
I certainly do. Wait, there is no equivalent discussion of power draw of vacuum cleaners in the US? Well, then the EU might be at the forefront of consumer electronics regulations and in the end, that's very good for me.
Yes, there is similar regulation in the US that mandates every appliance have a standardized sticker indicating energy efficiency and where each particular model falls within defined classes.
I am quite happy with a number of the "bureaucratic rules" they produce, such as allowing the ban on roaming changes between EU countries and net neutrality for example.
What you are doing in this thread is the definition of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt around the institution called "EU". I'm personally not against you doing just that. I'm just against you trying to call it something else.
Boiling down what you have actually said in this thread I'm left with "but the EU spends money on things that _I_ wouldn't have". Is that the gist of what you are trying to convey here? Or are you opposed to EU as a concept?
So, cucumber regulation seems very silly indeed. Hopefully we have gotten to the stuff that matters now.
Voicing an opinion that announces the downfall of a large collective of states is spreading fear though. Maybe you're right and we're heading into a scary future, but it doesn't change that expressing that opinion is spreading fear.
Don't get me wrong, you have the right to express that opinion - but everyone has the right to form an opinion about you based on it.
- opinions are never the equivalent of spreading FUD
- classifying an opinion as FUD is a slippery slope that will lead to an Orwellian dystropy
Here's an opinion:
- Linux is a terrible operating system, because it is open-source. Open-source software does not allow you to capitalize on the work you put down. Anarchy will arise when all software is open-source.
And do you know why that happened? Ever considered the reason?
Just like cameras had a megapixel war, vacuums had a power war. In reading electricity consumption without increasing actual air throughput.
At its height there were 3500W vacuums with less than 10% effectivity. Billions of euros every year were wasted on electricity for this.
Just like the laws encouraging LEDs, the vacuum laws had a major effect, manufacturers could easily switch to brushless motors and did.
I have a vacuum from before and after the regulation here.
2400W vs 900W.
The 900W one creates a stronger vacuum than the 2400W one.
The regulation has not just been necessary, it's also been an amazing success.
Every European saves money on electricity, the environment is damaged less and we have more efficient and powerful vacuums.
And similar with the incandescent light ban. It led manufacturers to new innovation, which in turn meant LEDs quickly became popular and over the years better.
By now 1200lm 8W E27 leds are in every IKEA for 10€.
As a result of these two policies electricity usage could be significantly reduced, helping the environment and your electricity costs.
There's absolutely no way you can declare these policies a failure.
Just like the cucumber regulation, which, after it ended, stores started enforcing on their own, because they need that regulation.
Its funny that you mention the light bulbs. Actually, the EU did NOT encourage LED light bulbs for the longest time.
You may recall that they banned some conventional wolfram based light bulbs and instead tried to force compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) to the consumer, not LEDs. This has actually lead to a huge recycling problem. The CFLs contain mercury, the plastic parts are hard to recycle and the glass can not be recycled because it is contaminated.
Its not EU regulation that made the LEDs popular, it was consumer demand.
What actually happened was that they set a minimum efficiency for lightbulbs, which tungsten bulbs didn't meet, but CFLs (and some halogens) did. LED bulbs weren't quite ready for prime time at that point.
They actually did the most sensible thing possible. They set a target efficiency, and let the manufacturers figure out which technology to use in order to meet those requirements. The alternative would have been to make a specific energy-efficient technology mandatory, which would have unfairly benefited manufacturers focusing on that specific technology, and would have made the law outdated when a better technology inevitably comes along.
Nobody forced CFLs on people. They were simply the best option at that time, until LED bulbs improved.
And in my family we didn't buy CFLs as response to the law, instead we bought LEDs from day one. At first they were quite bad and expensive, but due to the demand, over time, they significantly improved.
Do you even remember what LED bulbs were like when the traditional bulbs went the way of the dodo? The reason CFLs were popular wasn't that the EU mandated them, it was that LED bulbs at the time were utter rubbish. If anything the ban increased a demand for proper LED lighting. If everyone was still happily using tungsten I doubt we'd have anywhere near the range of quality LED lighting we have today.
Democracies once upon a time, in theory atleast, were for the people, by the people, off the people.
Post advertising funded internet/24*7 news we just have a system for propping up attention cravers, by the attention merchenants, off everyone elses attention and resources.
After creating such an environment do you really believe any of the issues you point out become easier to solve?
Fuckerberg is going to go down as the guy who turned the info age into the age of reactions and noise. Nothing else.
I upvoted you because I think you are addressing the root problem.
I'd suggest that in future discussions, you back your claims with sources. Then people would not simply downvote you for expressing a 'populist' opinion.
The issue isn't the (alleged) "fall" of the EU as much as the fact that the EU (and, to a lesser extent, US Congress) wants to shut down platforms that host content that is not aligned with their political viewpoint. None of this hysteria would be happening if 55,000 fewer Americans had voted for Trump (and thus Clinton won), or about a million people who voted for Leave instead had voted for Remain. The obvious partisanship behind the Facebook frenzy is galling and should negate it on its face.
It's both. Verhofstadt is a full-blown European federalist (people who want Europe to be united under a single government and single flag). The fortunes of that dream have not been good lately, and he's looking for people to blame that aren't people like himself.
I find it pathetic. Verhofstadt and people like him are one of the things that turned me off the EU and turned me into a Brexit voter. They routinely describe almost anything they don't like as "destroying democracy" or "violating democratic norms" regardless of the facts of the matter. In reality they couldn't give a rats ass about what the people want. Just compare cross-Europe opinion polls asking people what they think the top priorities of government should be (hint: immigration, terrorism) vs what the EU actually chooses to do.
As an EU resident I am so, so glad immigration and terrorism are not priorities. There are more important things to worry about (such as privacy, housing, equality, welfare).
Only in the dreams of some people where all of these were not massive problems before. Sure, more people may make some very small dent on these issues, but nothing remotely relevant. Despite all the fear-mongering there has not been a "massive" refugee influx, but a very, very small one.
This is an age-old strategy of "make sure those who have less fight each other for scraps instead of asking the rich to pay their fair share."
First: I appreciate you actually making a point, instead of just down voting other opinions.
They were massive problems before, i agree, but adding more than 1 million refugees over the course of 2 years (in the case of Germany) adds a very real problem to the housing market and we should be honest about that. You can not blame so called right wing populists for hoping on this issue if other parties fail to even talk about it.
I'm German and I have no idea why you think the refugee crisis would pose a "very real problem to the housing market". The housing market hasn't changed much.
There's plenty of vacant housing in Germany. It's just not in the places people want to live anymore (i.e. mostly rural East Germany). Housing is scarce in the urban areas but that didn't really change.
The 1 million number sounds scary in isolation but it's really just a drop in the bucket. The real problem is our attitude to refugees and our immigration laws: a lot of people are stuck in a legal limbo where they are forced to live off welfare because they're not allowed to seek employment or attend craft schools or universities, many who are technically allowed to do those things only have temporary visas that get extended quarter-to-quarter but could be discontinued at any point. This creates a lot of unnecessary uncertainty while also isolating them socially, hindering "integration", which in turn increases frustration and all kinds of social ills.
Additionally, our welfare system is based on the assumption of a growing population but our birth rates are too low, so immigration is actually necessary. There's a lot of untapped potential in the refugee crisis, our attitudes just need to change to see it as an opportunity rather than a problem.
As we have seen asking the general public about an important topic leads to a situation like Brexit. Just because ppl have an opinion about what the priorities should be does not mean they have the slightest understanding about what the is happening in the world. The MPs are the ppl claiming to know best so you should trust them that they are doing everything in your interest and if they are not then it is your right to remove them from power. Having the average Joe decide on external politics is one of the stupidest thing you can do (e.g. Boris Johnson).
I do find your argument for Brexit to be a bit better than the average but employing the same logic London should just be a separate city state because there are ppl outside who vote against London’s values (openness and inclusion). I’d be the first to admit that in that vote if asked I would vote for an independent London from the U.K. and this is exactly why general population should not be making these descions.
The UK does in fact have regular swings of devolution of power to regions and cities. See: the Scotland referendum, which resulted in more powers being given to the regional assembly despite the independence campaign losing. The flow of power over time has been slowly away from central government, or at least, people have been offered that choice.
The MPs are the ppl claiming to know best so you should trust them
Hmmm. But I also claim I know best. Now who do you pick?
While you're not wrong in spirit, it seems the current UK government (and its opposition) also downplay the major concerns of people.
And I do agree with some of the concerns. (See Corbyn downplaying grooming gangs, antisemitism, etc and see the current gov ignoring the economic impact of Brexit)
Well, Corbyn has been taking a beating because of what he's ignoring. At this point in the electoral cycle Labour should be well ahead of the Conservatives. They should have cleaned up in the last round of council elections. Neither happened, and it's partly because Corbyn is seen as ignoring those sorts of things.
Meanwhile the current government isn't ignoring the economic impact. So far there has been none - the economy is growing and has little spare capacity, if you believe the 4-5% unemployment lower bound. As for future economic impact when the EU inevitably tries to block UK companies and trade, that's pretty much all the Tories are talking about these days. Very much not ignoring it. So I'm not sure I agree that the government is downplaying the concerns of the people.
The Governor of the Bank of England disagrees with you that there has not been an economic impact yet. His estimates are that we have lost possibly as much as 2% of GDP as a result of the vote. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44207677
I'd also point out that last year in the first 3Qs the UK grew its economy, true, but at by far the slowest rate of any of the G7 countries indicating we are lagging behind. Not all of that can be definitively put at the feet of Brexit of course. https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-economy-performanc...
I don't think the government is actively ignoring the economy, I just think they are hamstrung by the clear divisions in the nation (and indeed their party) as to whether we pursue a hard Brexit, or a Brexit in name only.
BoE and the profession of economics in general has a long history of failure to make correct economic predictions. Carney in particular has a catastrophically bad track record of predictions with respect to Brexit and has been publicly and repeatedly slated for it.
He can pull some figures out of the air to claim that the UK has "lost" economic performance compared to some model he won't reveal, if he likes. Those of us who understand the limitations of macroeconomics will roll our eyes and ignore his biased pseudo-intellectual nonsense.
I am in favor of a united democratic European government and a united democratic world government in order to increase cooperation and to enable political innovation (e.g. a basic income, a job guarantee) and to decrease competition and wars and poverty worldwide.
But many politicians of the European elite and European national elites live in a fantasy world where privatization, austerity, competition, unconditional support of the USA and Israel, wars, bombs, islamic rebels, sanctions and brazen lies and propaganda against Russia (e.g. Skripal, panama papers, referendum in Crimea) and Syria (after Libya after Iraq after Yugoslavia after Iraq after ...) create peace, democracy, friendship and prosperity.
I was pleasantly surprised that aggressions against Iran were even a topic among politicians and in the mainstream media in Europe instead of just following the USA and Israel and Saudi Arabia into the next disastrous conflict. But this reluctance has more to do with business than with morality and wisdom.
Immigration is good for any economy, because a growing economy is a strong one. There are many, many things more important than terrorism. And I imagine there are as many views on what exactly, as there are people. My biggest issue personally is that I want to see a common fiscal policy adopted across the union, to match the current monetary policy.
Well, I'm also a full-blown federalist, although I understand very well why people don't like the idea. I'm still hoping to be able to hold a genuine European passport in my hand that states "European" as nationality and "German" as mother tongue. Here is the main reason why I favour a genuine union with a partially joint military, a strengthened power for the European Parliament, and less power for appointed commissioners in the future:
The EU is in my opinion a great success, way greater than what most people realize. Previous generations, who still remember WW2 or its effect from their childhood, recognize what kind of monumental achievement the EU was - which is based on unanimous votes by member nations with varying governments from all political sides!
Unfortunately, younger generations have lost sight of this, some of them erroneously believe that wars could not start again in Europe without the EU. That's very short-sighted, historically, Europe has been torn by wars almost all the time.
Although the EU is certainly not a warrant for peace, it makes a peaceful future overall much more likely in the long run. Take the cordial relations between Germany and France as an example, without the EU these would not look nearly as good as they do now.
Besides that, there are also economic reasons for the EU, of course, but I just wanted to mention this perspective which is all too often forgotten today.
So what about different cultures? Does the EU "destroy" local culture? About that I have to unfortunately point out the sad truth that nationalists generally tend to lack culture. Few outliers aside, the people who actually advance culture have practically always been international cosmopolitans and humanists. And there is a reason why we all don't speak Latin any longer. So I don't buy the "culture" argument from nationalists, it tends to be very hypocritical.
Finally, as for the priorities you mention, sadly there is a case for technocracy to make here. The impacts of terrorism and immigration are minuscule and almost neglectible in comparison to the impact of, say, advances in technology, and the public's fear tends to be badly aligned with reality.
I don't think the EU is a recipe for peace or is making Europe more peaceful. Far from it. The EU looks a lot like a bunch of very unhappy neighbours kept in line by the threat of wildly over the top retaliation from the federalist core if they even think about stepping out of line.
Look at Brexit. The EU is talking about grounding all flights, banning British firms, insisting on obedience, suggesting that the UK be split up to convenience them and demanding huge ransom payments (and don't argue with me about this, these are my perceptions). Then you look at eastern Europe, Catalonia and so on.
I do not perceive the EU as a happy peaceful entity. If it looks peaceful it's only in the sense that a successfully dominated population doesn't fight back. True peace comes from understanding, collaboration and compromise. The EU sucks at all three.
Not that many people, Brexit was a pure coincidence. It wasn't caused because most people in the UK were against the EU but by irrational fears against imaginary immigrants. If there hadn't been an immigrant problem in other EU countries due to the civil war in Syria at that time, Brexit would never had happened. That there was this problem at the same time was a pure coincidence and had nothing to do with the EU - and a lot with the USA's and UK's military involvement in Iraq, of course.
Also bear in mind that the vast majority of all British politicians were "Stay", because they knew what's at stake.
It is also mysterious to me what makes you think that the EU would "suck" at understanding, collaboration and compromise. These are central pillars of the EU, without those three factors the EU could not have possibly been founded by unanimous votes of all 28 member states. All I can say to people like who - who genuinely leave me baffled - is that you could inform yourself better about the EU structure and what EU programs and institutions are actually doing and, most importantly, how incredibly cheap the EU is in comparison to the respective national budgets.
Last but not least, there is either peace or no peace. People, states, and nations will always disagree about certain matters. Your idea of a "true peace" is naive and unrealistic.
* Unfortunately, younger generations have lost sight of this, some of them erroneously believe that wars could not start again in Europe without the EU. That's very short-sighted, historically, Europe has been torn by wars almost all the time. *
We live in different times today. 2018 is not 1918. I would be worried if younger generations could imagine to waste their lives and their wealth for war.
The problem is that too many of the younger generations trust the older generations (current politicians) which trust in lies and wars as solutions. E.g. Syria, Libya, Iraq, Israel.
> The people who actually advance culture have practically always been international cosmopolitans and humanists.
That claim is hard to square with the literary canons of a number of European peoples, the creations that these people consider the bedrock of their culture and which are exported around the world as what that respective people has to contribute to humankind. You'll find that these canons are to a large extent dominated by nationalists, especially in the wake of 1848. Sándor Petöfi, Mihai Eminescu, Taras Shevchenko, and Elias Lönnrot were not international cosmopolitans, at least not in their literary activity.
"Stop robbing your people by artificially devaluing your currency"
As opposed to every other central bank that also has low interest rates because inflation is still terrible? Sweden has negative interest rates for example and we're off the Euro.
"Stop the influx of illegal refugees into the welfare states"
How do you know if an individual refugee is lying about their refugee status? We can't collectively punish groups of people, the right to asylum is a human right that looks at the need of an individual. Everyone has the right to plead their case individually, no matter what country we're talking about.
"Stop passing silly laws regulating the form of cucumbers"
This is a myth, those are WTO and OECD regulations not voted on by the EU but by individual countries. However, instead of each EU member enforcing these regulations separately the EU enforces it centrally. If a country leaves the EU it still has to enforce these regulations to follow the WTO and make sure the countries they trade with enforces them as well.
Disagree. FB will not be our destruction. This kind of hyperbole (and getting others to believe it) harms the type of rational discourse they claim they wanted. I disagree with the evasiveness of course, but this is grandstanding and witch-hunting. With those types of statements, how could one expect a productive inquiry? (hint: one couldn't...it was pandering/posturing and it accomplished that goal)
Inclined to agree. In $job_i_had we dealt with a partner who would routinely ratchet the rhetoric up to the max in this way and all it did was foster bad feeling, damage morale and productivity, as well as block any further useful discourse on whatever topic was under discussion. Not only was it extremely frustrating to deal with, but it didn't achieve anything. It certainly didn't get them what they (thought they) wanted any quicker - quite the opposite in some cases.
All this to show off in front of colleagues/superiors/underlings, or to give the impression of doing something or being actively involved in the process whilst actively causing harm and wasting other peoples' time.
I was occasionally heard to mutter that they could scarcely have done more to sabotage the project if they were actively trying to, which I don't believe they were.
(Btw, I'm not defending facebook: just saying that if you're really making honest enquiries or trying to have a productive discussion, this is not the way to go about it.)
Presumably Zuckerberg has learned the lesson of Bill Gates: Europe periodically discovers a reason to fine American tech companies large-but-relatively-immaterial amounts of money. Then you eventually graduate to being Old Money, and Europe reminisces fondly about you.
'fraud' and 'illegal' might be problematic words here. The tax evasion schemes used by large corporations are often considered exploits of loopholes - i.e. technically legal. Countries try to offer companies a system to provide ridiculously low tax rates for larger regions, because if they get 1% of the revenue of the entire region it's more beneficial to them than getting 20% of their local revenue (numbers are fictional here). That's partly also a reason why e.g. Ireland is fighting on Apple's side on the $13bn ruling, despite them loosing out on $13bn. They'd loose the ability to guarantee companies a low tax rate, which is worth far more.
Ireland also benefits from lots of highly paid, highly skilled employees, which it can tax, and also people are happy because there are jobs and oppertunities in Ireland. Many of the big name US tech companies in Ireland employee thousands of people each.
> 'fraud' and 'illegal' might be problematic words here. The tax evasion schemes used by large corporations are often considered exploits of loopholes - i.e. technically legal.
In your example on Apple this is not clear at all: there are two legal systems at play (the Irish one and the EU one). Apple is only playing by the rules of the Irish one. The problem comes from the EU saying that the Irish laws are not within the EU framework and thus not allowed.
Apple is very much doing not legal things from a perspective of EU law, hence the fine.
Wrong. Ireland's competition rules are harmonised with EU rules. Not by dictat either, it's a condition of signing the various European treaties that you will implement particular laws that conform to certain principles. In this particular case Ireland had broken her own laws on competition. Like with so much of the skullduggery that goes on in Ireland, it took an outside agency to blow the whistle.
it's a condition of signing the various European treaties
These treaties by the way, are passed with popular consent. As a constitutional democracy Ireland requires a Referendum for any constitutional change, which is always necessary when signing up to anything that says we'll conform to some outside agency.
I agree that it is not very clear - which is why I wrote "are often considered" etc.
Also the Apple example was brought up to explain a nations' interest in low tax rates, not about whether they're legal or not.
Parent was the one making definitive claims about fraud and illegal actions.
you mean that we treat people like human beings with their own rights, and not some spreadsheet item of potential revenue that have these dumb but exploitable thing called emotions and desires?
Human rights, emotions, and desires are relatively distant to why Europe fined Microsoft about a billion dollars. The thing which got them very vexed was, per the extensive written record of administrative actions, bundling Windows Media Player.
From what I gathered on news sources, most of the (german) MEPs are extremely pissed at Zuckerberg in regards to the question answered, the format of the Q&A and the refusal to livestream a real Q&A. He brought up the question about FB's monopoly on the market, stating that there are plenty of competitor products ("we might have a monopoly on cars but there are still planes, bikes and walking!").
Zuck didn't make friends, I'm fairly certain he made enemies in Europe.
At least the format and the fact that a lot of the time was taken up asking long-winded questions was the fault of the European Parliament and not Zuck personally. Of course the idea that you can just drag the CEO up to account for whatever grievances you have against the company and hope to get anything out of it seems a bit misguided to me. Looks like more of a PR exercise.
> Of course the idea that you can just drag the CEO up to account for whatever grievances you have against the company and hope to get anything out of it seems a bit misguided to me.
Well, we have to restore the long-forgotten idea of responsibility. The CEO is legally responsible for any wrongdoings of the company. He should also be morally responsible for all unethical activities. But Zuck's defense strategy so far is "I see nothing wrong".
That's because the ethics of what Facebook (and by extension, all online companies) do is a relatively new question and business model. Morally questionable maybe, but it's taken e.g. the EU over ten years to finally start realizing what's going on - bit too late if you ask me. Moral grey area, and legally anything happening to actual Facebook users - who agreed to the terms & conditions - is fine.
The non-facebook users (and by extension, anyone being picked up by any analytics tooling or other 3rd party) is a different matter however.
it's taken e.g. the EU over ten years to finally start realizing what's going on
The Data Protection Directive is from 1995. The GDPR is only an extension and reformulation of it. For example, the existing law already killed the so-called Safe Harbor that US companies had to move data to the US[1], and forced FB to start providing copies of the data they hold to EU citizens[2].
And a bad one at that. The first question I heard when I put on the livestream was something along the lines of: "answer yes or no to the following questions! (...) Will Facebook delete all fake accounts before $date and prevent all new ones from being created?", with the MEP putting on a stern look.
Zuckerberg is smart enough to show up and pretend to get a verbal beating, but I wish he would just point out to the governing bodies that if they want something they should pass laws. The GDPR is a start, but Facebook is not in the business of selling data under the table. They will get the consent they need and I'd be surprised if the percentage of users that make use of their right of access and to be forgotten is relevant to them.
One idiot in the bunch asked Zuckerberg about having founded Facebook as a hot or not site. They had no idea what they were talking about.
Another politician just used the Q&A platform as an excuse to threaten Facebook with being broken up, while adding very little substance to the discussion.
Another was seemingly out of control emotionally, waving his hands angrily and belting hysterics, while pretending Facebook was going to bring on the end of Democracy and that Zuckerberg might be an evil villain.
Another tried to pretend that somehow Facebook needed regulation to stop bullying: as though bullying doesn't occur every day in every school in the world. It's like saying: we must regulate human behavior to end all crime! Good luck with that. They all seemed to not understand that Facebook = everything that you see everywhere else in life, from the public square to school to home. You can't actually regulate an end to bullying, no matter how sad that is.
After how much I've seen others talk up the wise politicians of Europe, I expected a lot more. They were no better than the US Congress. Which makes sense, given the condition of most of the EU and its politics.
I, for one, am very eager to see what is the official definition of a fake account. Sorry: the European Parliament guided, State Parliament confirmed definition.
Question one: Do either body claim to have jurisdiction over accounts who claim to be from, live in or are friends with European citizen, residents?
Question two: how many pieces of official document will need to be provided before registering, and does a temporary driving license, a refugee certificate, an official copy of your live birth certificate count (all are without photos)?
Question three: is Facebook mandated to confirm that the same piece of information, or the same name, is not used for several accounts; what are the tolerance level for optical matching and recognition?
Yup, in the states we call that Grandstanding. It's not unusual for a witness testifing for Congress to answer one or two questions and the rest of the day is spent listening to long winded speechmaking from the panel with no actual questions.
Yeah, I was reading it this morning and wasn't certain which of them said that or if I heard it elsewhere in a chat.
It's imo a good point and I really hope that the EU gets nasty with FB if they abuse their monopoly any further (or puts up steps to remove the monopoly as with IE (though I don't think the IE case really did much))
The form of the meeting gave no chance for more than fleeting cross-questioning and ensured that while sharp questions could be asked in plenty Zuckerberg was free to respond with loose generalities and was never put on the spot.
That is the point I think, let him show his commitment or his lack thereof.
He did answer the spiky questions by ignoring them. (I know a real answer would be more useful to us, but I believe that what most interested MEP were Zuckerberg intents)
I think they were interested in getting answers from Zuck but with how the session turned out, I think most of them have most of the answers they need even if Mark didn't speak it out loud.
There's some irony in getting the Oath panel forcing me to consent to their tracking (in apparent violation of the GDPR) before showing me an article about Facebook's data handling problems.
By the way, if you want to read the article without agreeing to their stuff, stop the page load after the article shows up.
Requiring consent as a pre-condition of a service is frowned upon under GDPR. If you have a legitimate requirement (which is fairly rigidly defined under GDPR) or legal obligations for that data then you don’t need user consent, but if you don’t then you need to offer the service regardless of the user consent or not.
There will be years of battles in court how to interpret the GDPR, but not for this.
> (Article 4 ) ‘consent’ of the data subject means any freely given, ...
> Recital 42: Consent should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has no genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent without detriment.
> Article 7: 4. When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.
you can make an account and still not consent, e.g. to be tracked because they can't prove that 'being tracked is necessary for reading quora'. the two are orthogonal
You have to be very explicit and clear about what you data you are handing over in GDPR and how it will be used. Making an account usually does not have that information.
Additionally, you need to give a person an option to not hand over that data and still use your app/site 'without detriment' unless that data was essential to your tool.
> Requiring consent as a pre-condition of a service is frowned upon under GDPR.
No, it's not. Requiring extraneous consent as a precondition of service, that is, requiring consent for some processing as a precondition of provision of a service that does not depend on that processing is an indication that consent is coerced rather than freely given, and hence not effective consent, under the GDPR. But what that means on concrete terms with complex interdependent services (and whether it is a de facto ban on such services, because instead extremely granular services and granular consent is required) remains to be clarified, probably through practical enforcement. If one views, for instance, what Facebook was offering pre-GDPR as a service, then “consent for what the service entails or no service” is not extraneous consent. If you view it as a cluster of distinct services, that becomes different. Whether the monetisation model of “free” services is essential or not is another question, and it's quite possible that GDPR will result in a lot fewer free-of-charge services available in the EU.
> Consent must be freely given, granular and revocable
“Granular” appears nowhere in the article you cite nor the related recitals (and even if the exact phrase did, the specific degree of granularity required would still be an open question.)
> Consent is only one of the six grounds for lawful data processing.
I’d argue it's two of the six, as voluntary entry into a contract which requires certain processing is a form of consent, even if the word doesn't “consent” isn't used in that provision.
But in any case, it's the one that's going to be most important to a wide range of consumer online services.
>“Granular” appears nowhere in the article you cite nor the related recitals (and even if the exact phrase did, the specific degree of granularity required would still be an open question.)
Recital 43 states:
"Consent is presumed not to be freely given if it does not allow separate consent to be given to different personal data processing operations despite it being appropriate in the individual case, or if the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is dependent on the consent despite such consent not being necessary for such performance."
Recital 42 states in part:
"Consent should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has no genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent without detriment."
This is quite plainly worded - if you don't allow users to freely choose which data they give you and what you do with it, then you don't have valid consent. I think that "granular" is a reasonable description. There's certainly a degree of grey area, but the spirit is clear. Putting that into practice requires careful thought. Would a reasonable person understand the implications of your consent agreement? Would they be surprised or annoyed at the scope of your data collection or the use you make of that data? Could you reasonably anticipate a user being unable to properly exercise their rights to choose due to the choices you offer them?
>I’d argue it's two of the six, as voluntary entry into a contract which requires certain processing is a form of consent, even if the word doesn't “consent” isn't used in that provision.
The distinction between consent and contractual necessity is significant. If you're relying on the grounds of contractual necessity, then you can only collect and use the minimum of data for the minimum duration and process it to the minimum extent necessary to fulfil that contract (Art. 5 & recital 39). You can't keep customer data indefinitely or tack on a bunch of clauses to your T&Cs that allow you to sell that data to third parties. If you want to go beyond the absolute necessities, then you'll need to ask for consent. On the other hand, if you're relying on contractual necessity, then the conditions for consent (Art. 7) do not apply.
Requiring extraneous consent as a precondition of service, that is, requiring consent for some processing as a precondition of provision of a service that does not depend on that processing is an indication that consent is coerced rather than freely given, and hence not effective consent, under the GDPR.
But if the service does depend on that processing, then you don't need to ask for consent at all, so why would you? In practice, the statement is true.
Techcrunch isn't an European company though, and IIRC they have no obligation to serve European customers so a "wall" is probably allowed. Even if it was european, I don't think the GDPR makes websites obligated to be accessible for everyone.
They are not European, but they have European "partners" (read: advertisers and ad-networks) siphoning off data from their EU users. They are not just a site that happens to be available to the EU.
I still don't see why not. Maybe it's what GDPR says, but it's wrong and I can't see this being enforced. If data collection is the "payment" for using the "service", you have two choices: you don't pay and don't use the service, or you pay up.
This is like saying a business can't make usage of a service conditional to payment.
"In the EU, personal information cannot be conceived as a mere economic asset: according to the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, the processing of personal data requires protection to ensure a person's enjoyment of the right to respect for private life and freedom of expression and association".
Which is another way of saying that people in the EU do not have the right of ownership over their own lives or property, including their data - that the State owns it and dictates what may be done with it. Terrifying.
It's funny though, to watch everyone talk about how people should own their data in these threads. And there's the EU proclaiming plainly that you in fact do not own your data and may not do with it as you wish.
How did you get that impression. When I read this I get a completely different meaning from it. The State does not own my live or property and they are also not dictating what I can do with it. They are dictating that no one else can do what they want with MY live, property or data without my explicit consent. The state can not give consent to my data: only I can.
adventured is saying that the State removed your possibility of using your data as payment, since now you can't consent if it's a condition of use of the service.
Or to put it another way: the problem with inalienable rights is that you can't alienate them :)
Not all contracts are legal, not in any jurisdiction. The EU has taken the viewpoint that privacy is such a fundamental thing that you cannot be expected to forfeit it without limitation as a ”payment” for a service.
I believe you can still store non-personally identifying information, that is to say if you cannot store that User X is a male of 40 years of age and that user x read the article, you can still store that a male of 40 years of age read the article. Probably you don't know User X gender and age under those conditions though.
But assume you have to store some personal information about User X and you do know gender as part of it. Or have code to derive gender at data saving time (This part is tricky by my reading, you have to be able to sort of sandbox the ways that you can get personally identifying info out so that you can show regulatory agencies that you're not pulling it out to do stuff you shouldn't. If you're pulling it out to enrich data before saving, but that data is still not personally identifying the user I think it is probably ok (I'm on shaky ground on this part)
User X as a user of service with login has to allow you to keep their login information or service cannot function. User X says you cannot save my reading history, meaning it cannot be associated with them. But at the time of reading it you save reading activity (this example is of course contrived and silly) - userType: 'requestAnonymous', haslogin: true, age: deriveLikelyAge(User), gender: returnLikelyGender(User), articleId: current.articleId
and so on and so forth. You still have quite a lot of valuable analytics, and you do have some other analytics about the user that has to be saved anyway - which is they have opted out of data collection schemes 1, and 3, but not 2,4,5.
I think they're intentionally putting severe restrictions on business models that are built around paying for a consumer service by analyzing and sharing consumers' personal data instead of taking money. You're viewing this as a bug in the law; Europe views this as a feature.
There are certainly cases where one can make access to the service conditional on consent: for example, if the service is to analyze your resume/CV and give you feedback on improving it, or even job leads based on it, of course you'll need to consent to them collecting and processing the personal information on your resume. But you probably don't have to consent to them selling that data or using it to target you with ads going forward. They don't want that business model to be easily and broadly viable in Europe.
It amazes me how both the hearing at the US senate, and the one at the European Parliament, were marred by an absurdly ineffectual format of the Q&A session.
You'd think that having achieved the seemingly hardest part, which was to get Zuck to talk to these bodies at all, care will be taken to make the most of the opportunity. Rather, the complete opposite has taken place.
I found it laughable how many times I've heard, during the US Senate session, an injunction addressed to the speaker to wrap it up, as their allotted time was up. The entire thing was rushed as if they were in a hurry to catch a train.
Is the Cambridge Analytica fiasco alone not reason enough to keep Zuckerberg in the hot chair for 12 hours over 2 days, if need be, if that is what is ultimately required to get him to actually divulge meaningful information, rather than the sound bites that he happily served up?
It seems that these hearings were mostly carried out for show, and rather than actually protect the interests of their constituents, these legislative bodies are content to operate on a purely formalistic level, devoid of any actual meaning. This is global politicians v.2018 for you - fumbling, toothless, woefully out of their depth on crucial issues of our time.
Of course it was for show, that's why it was public. If the politicians wanted real answers to real questions they'd have done the whole thing behind closed doors, they have these little hearings as a group PR exercise. This is hardly unique to 2018, it's pretty much always been like this.
As I recall, Zuckerberg didn't provide any answers to the important questions that were actually asked during the hearings, but just said "Sorry" over and over.
I think it's pretty clear he had no intention of admitting substantial error on Facebook's part, come what may, and I think it's not likely that the outcome would have changed substantially had the questioning been longer or more intense.
Simply put, you can approach being questioned honestly, evasively, or in rare cases switch approach due to what is said to you during the questioning. I think it is well demonstrated that Facebook has chosen to be evasive as a core strategy, so the mere manner of questioning will at best serve to make it more blatant.
If worst comes to worst and EU tries to break up Facebook — and it seems likely they might — what would be Facebook’s best path forward?
Theoretically, would it send a stronger signal to US regulators if Facebook simply shut down all operation in the EU? A pop up message to all EU citizens along the lines of “You may no longer access Facebook from within the EU due to X Y and Z from your government. As such, all of your data is unavailable for download and no longer subject to GDPR privacy regulations.” Would that be safer for Facebook in protecting its child companies (which presumably make up a large part of its value) in the US as an effective way to grandstand? Eventually the EU would have to come up with a compromise solution then, too, right? I can’t imagine everyday citizens being happy with the EU if they perceive they’ve blocked them from Facebook.
I’m not saying I would be on Facebook’s side (I definitely wouldn’t), but the sheer scale of Facebook as a global company makes me question the effectiveness of current antitrust law.
I’ve never seen a trade war between a company and a government. And I don’t want to.
Just my impression: if this was Google, then yes. It is very hard to replace Google at this point in time.
Facebook is on its way out. Due to the network effect, Facebook will stay relevant for a long time. But if Facebook would leave the EU then it wouldn't take long for other social networks to take its place.
Facebook is relevant because everybody is on Facebook. Not because it is such a great service.
In the olden days of a new social network every other week the percentage of my friends and family on each social network (including Myspace, the most dominant) was relatively low, so the pain of switching was low.
Now the percentage on Facebook is extremely high and I don't even know what an alternative would be.
Lots of friends and family are on Whatsapp, quite a lot of people use Instagram but beyond that... there's very little uptake in any other heavily used social network. And of course, they're both owned by Facebook anyway.
So, for me at least, to say Facebook is on the way out, is something I cannot agree with.
Do the people you know actually engage with Facebook a lot, though?
I'm still on it and log in a few times a week but I engage far less. I recently used a Chrome extension to delete my old comments and I'm surprised at how much more I posted on it (and publicly, too). Although changing the newsfeed to be mostly memes and adverts was one cause of my disengagement, I think it's also just changing use. I haven't really noticed the recent changes Facebook touted because my friend network simply seems to engage with it less. Maybe a few people still insist on posting dozens of photographs of every trip they take, but I see so much less public discussion and so on.
What happens to a social network when the 'social' bit tails off?
Due to the network effect, you may end up with lots of people using Facebook, but actually disliking the service.
What you can see happening is that people treat Facebook more as a news feed then as a platform to communicate with friends.
Once personal communication moves away from Facebook, other communication is likely to move as well. It may take as while though. When that happens, Facebook will be more like a twitter feed.
I'm really curious what will happen to WhatsApp. Will it stay the way it currently is. Or will it become some sort of Facebook?
I wish people would stop taking their anecdata so seriously . . .
> What you can see happening is that people treat Facebook more as a news feed then as a platform to communicate with friends.
I see the opposite trend. People ignore worse-than-useless feed more and more, moving to messenger and especially group chats.
Until serious competitor appears (and I mean real one, not HN-ideal decentralized-blockchain-powered one), FB stays. Tons of people using it in spite of their dislike of the platform has not stopped FB's growth, and who knows if it brings any actual change any time soon.
Let's pretend facebook leaves and a EU competitor who follows the GDPR comes alive and Europeans start using it... And the other people outside the EU start using it to stay connected with their EU friends and family... and companies all around the world start using it to stay connected with their EU clientèle... and some major "celebs" start using it either as a political statement or because they don't like that facebook invades their privacy... and then other people outside the EU start using it to stay connected with the other outside-EU people, celebs and companies who already started using it...
We actually had a "facebook" in Germany once named StudiVZ. What killed it was low quality (i.e. many bugs), mismanagement, but more importantly facebook's network effect. If facebook leaves or gets pushed out of the EU, it's entirely possible it will suffer a lot or even go the MySpace route, being hit by hard by the network effect a new European player may create.
Unfortunately it is the nature of the internet social network sector to be monopolistic. Few (if any?) local social networks have survived because people typically - especially europeans - have friends outside EU. VK is a notable exception and i wonder how they made it - possibly anti-americanism played a role.
In a way, facebook should wish they have some competition, so they can avoid all the nosy anti-trust questions, but they don't.
vk is big in Russia (and some other parts) because they are proper Russian, in Russian and for Russians, and they are largely unmoderated, so you can easily find nice and nasty in the same place and also all the warez, porn (incl revenge and child) etc you will ever want. It's really the "wild east" there; I was pretty shocked when somebody started spamming child porn vk groups to one of the websites I moderate (and they were active weeks later still).
Then again, I was told by some Russian acquaintances that vk does not try to push American/European morals (like no nudity for America, no "hate speech"/gore for EU) and that really is how they explain it is so popular (then again, of course you wouldn't want to run an LGBT community on vk). Other folks from the West and Latin America found it useful too. E.g. I read that some German Nationalists/White Supremacist fringe groups moved to vk because it will not crack down on those groups, unlike Facebook.
But back to my point: if the EU really cracks down on facebook so that it is (forced to) stop(s) being available in the EU, then some new player from the EU might fill the gap and the network effect of friends and family may drive people to the EU version that anybody can use and away from the US version that EU cannot use and is a privacy nightmare anyway; so the effect may point in the opposite direction this time.
I know the likelihood of this happening is pretty low, but a lot less low now with the GDPR and the EU politicians' new found interest in facebook's business model.
I'm sorry but what is your source of information exactly? "Hate speech" vkontakte is very dangerous in Russia and could put you in prison for a long time. Even upvotes and reposts could lead to very undesirable outcome. On the other hand I never heard of any problems for LGBT communities: despite western propaganda no one really cares about them. It didn't took me long to google them.
I don't remember any significant bugs in studivz. Also, in my opinion, the site's design was very clear and straightforward. I definitely preferred it over Facebook and would still.
The reason I'm not is that Google appears to be a /lot/ more willing to respect their user's privacy, and were ahead of the curve with allowing opt-outs of personalized advertising and the likes...
I was really annoyed to see all my duckduck go searches via chrome got stored (there was a reason I was using duck duck go). Plus they know my email. Even if I used a different email address probably 50% of my emails would still go via google because that's what my contacts have.
Facebook is less transparent, but they get a fairly crappy subset of my data in my opinion. Plus I barely use it this days.
I agree with that analysis. The main reason why Facebook is relevant in Europe is because everybody is still on it - but actual usage is steadily decreasing, especially in the younger generation. Most communications nowadays is done via WhatsApp, but that is trivial to replace. (Telegram is already quite popular, and then there is Signal, Threema, etc.)
Of course, it would be a blow for individuals if all their uploaded content was suddenly locked. But at least in Germany FB already has such a bad reputation that public indignation might center more on the company than on the EU regulators.
Germany is draconian about privacy , but a lot of the rest of the EU is really not. I would even expect a backlash to GDPR from businesses or politicians or people who lose access to audiences.
GDPR is a whole other story. While I applaud the spirit, it is one nightmare of a regulation. (This is speaking from the small non-profit / volunteer organization sector - we neither have the know-how nor the manpower to deal with its requirements.)
Draconian? Just because we got laws in Germany saying you need permission to store personal data and you need to make available that data upon request and/or remove it upon request?
One thing I always found rather bizar is where ISPs break internet connections after 24 hours to force the customer to get a new IP address.
And then the next step was where the home routers would disconnect after less then 24 hours to make sure that the disruption happens in the middle of the night. Or something to that effect.
I wonder if in Germany people get new telephone numbers every 24 hours as well.
Ye, that's true... They started doing it so that you didn't just keep your IP for ages as a quasi static IP and then host things from there... because the "dedicated" lines with a static IP were/are different offers with a lot bigger price tag.
Yes, it's ridiculous, but has nothing to do with privacy laws.
I imagine US regulators would be on Facebook's side there. The US can't really tolerate a world where the EU purports to reach inside American borders and forcibly reorganize American companies.
Normally I’d agree with you, but my personal opinion is that this current administration seems to only help those it personally approves of (extending an olive branch to China and ZTE, coal miners, steel mills, middle America...) and root for the demise of those it doesn’t (Amazon/Bezos, any major newspaper, net neutrality, tech in general...)
Absolutely. Facebook deliberately chooses to have a business presence in the EU, and nobody denies that this means the EU can levy fines against them or set rules on how they operate within the EU.
The US have no qualms about regulating European companies, so they shouldn't complain. Just recently they were trying to keep Europeans out of Iran to enforce their unilateral sanctions...
Compliance would be facebooks best bet. If they pull out they lose a lot of money and give their competitors a large breeding ground to develop in. The superior privacy of competitor platforms would make them enticing for US users as well.
On the other hand, I guess Facebook really does not want to do that, because it would create an opening to attack Facebook. Right now, you can't compete with the network effects of Facebook's size, however if 10% or so of all Facebook users are up for grabs, and they are also correlated by region, then you could build a European Facebook competition and capture a strong enough base to effectively compete with Facebook. (Initially at least in Europe, however pretty quickly many people in the rest of the world would also have a 'European Facebook' account and then Facebook can't just rely on everybody is on Facebook anymore.)
I would actually be quite interested how that one plays out, I really don't have a good intuition of how that would look like.
There's currently a well-funded activist campaign advocating for breaking up Facebook by separating Instagram, WhatsApp, etc into separate companies: http://freedomfromfb.com/
What would a break-up of Facebook actually look like? With MS the threat to break up OS and apps led to browser choice as compliance; with hypothetical Google the business units can be dis-integrated. I'm having trouble thinking where the Facebook lines would be drawn.
Also not a lawyer (but skipping initialism of that), but I believe the GDPR covers any business servicing the region (EU), and this scenario indicates Facebook stop servicing EU.
However, they absolutely did business servicing the EU before and gathered an enormous amount of personal data of EU citizens by doing that.
As such I'd be surprised if they simply declare their service closed at one time and instantly lose all obligations for the data they collected in the past.
As an analogy, if you paid for some service in advance, the service took your money and then, instead of providing the service, spontaneously declared to end their relationship with you, you'd probably have good chances if you were to sue them.
Shut down the EU company entities, move all operations back to the US. There is no need to show a warning message to its users, EU laws do not apply to US firms. Also, despite what EU lawmakers may say, a purely US-based internet company is not required to comply in any way with EU laws even if they have customers/visitors/users in the EU.
If that’s the case, why do any multinational tech companies have entities outside of their home country? There has to be something that allows them to access banking and finance in each country, no?
They do have to comply with EU laws if the EU says so. If nothing else, none of their management will be able to visit the EU anymore without risk of being prosecuted.
Around 25% of Facebook's worldwide revenue comes from EU.
Taking your ball and going home means leaving a lot of money on the table.
A purely US-based internet company is required to fully comply with EU laws if they want to see a single (euro)cent from customers in EU, otherwise all that money can and will be seized.
Facebook can trivially afford to end all business in the EU as needed. Very little of their business growth is in the EU, and that will go for future growth as well. Courtesy of the changes to US corporate tax law, Facebook also has no need to store large sums of foreign profit overseas eg in Ireland or similar (where the EU can reach it).
They're one of the most profitable large corporations in world history in terms of margins. Their net income margin last quarter was 41.6%. Facebook will generate at least $23b in profit this year (probably closer to $25b). Giving up $4 or $5 billion of that is not a dire problem.
It depends on what you mean by "can trivially afford".
If you take it as "will they survive if they do that", then yes, it's true for the reasons you describe.
If you take it as "will they consider that as a plausible option worth discussing" the answer is hell no, it would be laughed at in their board room and not even given a serious thought.
Giving up $4 or $5 billion (actually, FB European revenue was 10+ billion in 2017; giving up EU would lose all the revenue but not decrease the costs proportionally, but not that the number matters) of that is much more than a dire problem, it's a taboo situation - they'll survive if it magically happens, but nobody would even dare to be seen allowing it happen or not doing their utmost to prevent it. Even if there's absolutely no way around it, they'll go down screaming and do pretty much everything possible and impossible to avoid giving up that much money.
If anything, this kind of regulation helps companies like Facebook keep their "monopoly", because it raises the monetary cost of starting a competitor. A number of smaller services and games have shut down due to increased cost of compliance, even for companies that don't have any privacy issues.
It's a huge competitive advantage for privacy-oriented companies that were actually following the old Data Protection Directive. I've spoken to people who are in a blind panic about GDPR day, but I've also spoken to people who were completely unconcerned because they already had their ship in order.
If your business relies on re-selling user data or aggressively targeting ads through data mining, coming into compliance will be painful and expensive; it might completely break your business model. If your business just sells a useful service at a reasonable price while respecting user privacy, you've got very little to worry about.
I get the advantage of being more prepared to apply GDPR but that lasts 1-2 months max. The fact that people keep using facebook mindlessly in and out of EU over the last year makes one wonder: Does it really matter to users?
>I get the advantage of being more prepared to apply GDPR but that lasts 1-2 months max.
The advantage is in having a sustainable business model that isn't based on exploiting user data.
With GDPR-compliant privacy controls in place, it'll be a lot harder to target advertising or profit from user data by selling it to third parties. Companies that provide a "free" service based on these revenue streams will face a long battle of regulatory enforcement and dwindling ARPU. They might have no choice but to completely pivot their business model. If you just provide a service in exchange for money and take reasonable steps to protect your users' privacy, it's business as usual.
This applies doubly to startups. If a service like Snapchat or Instagram were to launch next week, potential investors will be asking a lot of questions about how their revenue model will hold up against GDPR. The old approach of "grab a ton of users, harvest a ton of data and figure out how to monetise it later" doesn't really stack up when your ability to financially exploit personal information is severely curtailed. If you decide to fence off EU users and exploit everyone else's data, you're playing a risky game - the regulators will not react sympathetically if it turns out your geofencing technology is imperfect and you've been illegally harvesting EU user data.
> If your business just sells a useful service at a reasonable price while respecting user privacy, you've got very little to worry about.
What about games/apps people would never pay for but they would be ok with getting targeted ads within? Is the EU ok with losing these services because they would not be profitable businesses if their only option were to ask users to pay?
But what if those apps could survive if they were allowed to ask for your private data or a payment? That wouldn't infringe on anyone's rights as far as I can tell.
What alternative do you propose? The free market obviously fails to address privacy issues, I don't see how anything besides stricter regulation can help the affected people here.
- Produce clear example cases before things are litigated. That way, you don't run into the problem of "Well, nobody really knows how things are going to shake out and people are trying to stay in the middle of the pack in terms of compliance" (Which is what I heard from an entrepreneur at a panel at Slaughter & May)
- Post video courses with the same sort of content.
Part of the problem here is that law firms have a strong incentive to publish SEO-optimised content which proclaims that compliance is difficult and confusing and that you should hire an expert law firm.
I'm not a policymaker, but GDPR seems overly-reactionary, over-reaching, and not well thought-out. I think the negative unintended consequences are likely much greater than however much it actually protects the privacy of individuals (which I don't think will be much at all).
I don't think GDPR is flawless, but at some point if we don't do anything, privacy violations are going to become so common place and so entrenched in the online economy that we can't fix it anymore.
At that point, the discussion would be all about all the "jobs we would destroy" and "businesses opportunities we would shut down!", and heavy lobbying would make sure it gets nowhere.
Do you think that the GDPR has really changed anything for either Facebook or its users? Do you think that anything changed in the way data is being handled? All i see is a bunch of highly paid law firms writing up 200 additional pages in terms and conditions to shield the company, but nothing really changed as far as daily business is concerned.
If a company has money to hire lawyers to make an extra 200 pages of T&Cs, I'm sure they will have the money to argue that those pages are "concise, transparent, intelligible, easily accessible, and it must use clear and plain language".
Apparently they are already GDPR compliant (FB). In their case it's actually easy to justify their legitimate interest because their entire business is the handling of private data. Ironically, even though GDPR is supposed to affect things like facebook more, it changes very little about the way they work.
Whether their business model is handling data is irrelevant; they must ask for consent to use that data for ads and such - and that's even if they already have collected the data to provide a service requested by the user.
They recently came out with a new screen asking users to consent to a bunch of things, so they weren't compliant until then, and I wouldn't bet they are now.
GDPR is mostly a regulation that was a directive (DPD) before. If you handled data responsible before and didn't do shady stuff with it, there is little extra to do to be GDPR compliant.
Thinking on the run here, but: the reason big companies have an advantage here is that they grew big before regulations, and their current size can deal with the regulations easily; while small companies don't have the resources to deal with the regulations. So how about a levy on these larger companies that goes straight to small companies to help with the regulatory burden of such regulations?
Not that I am advocating this approach, but regulations that are more about liability and transparency (towards journalists and shareholders) might help.
Liability means that mistakes are (hopefully) punished more proportionally to their effects, which allows one to scale measures as the business grows. Meanwhile, the transparency means that any potential issues are easier to spot, making it possible for suits to be brought. Note that transparency towards users has been shown to be rather ineffective, similar to how no-one reads the eula.
I propose allowing people to use their private data as a form of monetary exchange. Iow, GDPR disallows apps/sites to ask a user if they would allow targeted advertising or would like to pay for the app. There is no good reason for this in my eyes. Transparency is great but don't force people to not be allowed to use their personal data in an exchange.
Someone who runs a club recently told me he was moving all comms to Facebook because of the GDPR. He says that means that he is not collecting user data only Facebook is and so he doesn't have to worry about GDPR things.
This is a bit awkward for me since I don't use Facebook.
If people actually start writing software from ground up where it's easy to handle GDPR requirements, such as user deletion, giving users access to their data, etc., then it shouldn't be hard to start compliant and stay compliant.
Is Facebook monopoly any worse than having multiple actors in the data collection field? If anything, having more competitors would push each to be more cunning in their collection and retention of data, to appear more valuable to stakeholders.
In that case compliance and regulation should be run similar to the way the SEC runs it. There is a threshold and if you report AMU over say 5mn you are subject to tier 1 compliance, then tier 2 and so on.
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It's a win-win politicians can make hey of continuing to hate Zuckerberg and "making good" on it by continuing to prop him up with such barriers to entry.
Most press I’ve read so far in Europe is largely neutral or positive about Zuckerberg but very negative about the procedings, the parliament and conduct of the representatives. This is unusual but in my option justified.
Here is one particularly devastating article (Google Translate):
Looking at the Dutch media it's the complete opposite of what you say. It's mostly about Zuckerberg not saying much, to the frustration of the members of parliament.
I don't know about that, French media at least seems to point out a lot how empty Zuckerberg answers were, and indeed criticizing the format of the session.
But deputies are painted as informed and not mincing their words, which is exactly what I would expect of my deputy.
I feel much more sorry for the citizens of Sweden than I do for that "poor lady" who made a point of looking like Zuckerburg's tool. If Cecilia Wikström was my elected representative, I'd start investigating how to expatriate.
She is clearly pretty naive but that grilling is fairly harsh imho. At least on twitter she seems to have become the symbol of how the entire group of EU politicians messed up.
ZuckBot? "attention-sapping, app gobbling elephant"? What kind of poor excuse for journalism is this? Or is it an op-ed that's just not clearly labeled.
Normally I would be disappointed such a terrible article would be so regarded by the community, but no longer. The pitchforks are out, and the more anti-FB you can be in your reporting, the larger the audience. Critical thought had ceased and it's one sided now. What a sham these politicians are in their grandstanding and IMO along with mass media outlets have grossly over exaggerated the harms.
We should be pissed at Antonio Tajani (President of the European Parliament since January 2017) who set up the hearing such that Zuckerberg could cherry pick his favorite questions and answer only those.
>> So while Facebook’s contract change for international users looks largely intended to shrink its legal liabilities under GDPR, it’s possible the change will open up another front for individuals to pursue strategic litigation in the coming months.
And it didn't seem as he wanted to make any friends either. I'm pretty sure the EC is already drafting regulation or actions against facebook based on this hearing... but i m not sure what facebook plans to do. Perhaps they 'll spin off a separate EU facebook? Go back to US and wall off EU? The EU parliament seems to think that facebook's users are their users but Zucc has not said a word about this.
In every one of the interviews that I have seen, he is cherry picking answers. He never directly answers them and purposefully makes broad statements that cannot be actually proved. This man created the biggest social media to date, which I thankfully do not use, which spies on its own customers, censors anyone who does not agree with the company's political views and sells personal data to anyone who can make a high bid. I wouldn't be surprised if Putin asked him to compile a list of all of the Russian people who talk poorly of him and Zuck just gave that list to him for a quick buck.
EDIT: I also love how he orders the court to stop and then "[He] seemed most uncomfortable at not having his orders instantly carried out."
How is TechCrunch still making the front page of HN? They are the masters of incendiary and polarizing "news" with the only goal to generate "outrage" and clicks and thus revenue. Hacker News audience still eats it up I guess.
Have we not learned anything by exposing the Russian mind-warfare ads that targeted US citizens? They played both-sides, with the goal of polarization, destabilization, and control. The same can be attributed to media such as TechCrunch, just with less lofty goals that of Russia.. Money.
Facebook should be moving to a decentralized, blockchain powered solution as fast as possible.
Ethics aside, the regulators are looking to regulate and looks like ready to hammer facebook. I’m pretty sure they’re interested in the data and surveillance Facebook can provide for them.
A blockchain solution can give Facebook some time. They have the userbase and the money.
The EU and its officials are a joke. I cringe when these EU bureaucrats act like they are going to "get tough" on US businesses and the Trump administration.
They lack digital sovereignty and nation state sovereignty. Local and federal EU agencies continue to depend on Microsoft and other US tech giants. They didn't even manage to unveil the NSA wiretapping, to this day still not a single person or company has been charged with wiretapping Germanys biggest internet exchange hub (DeCIX).
They rage about US tax cuts and tech companies using tax loopholes while doing nothing about the greatest tax haven on earth located within their own borders: Luxembourg.
The EU is a joke and i sincerely hope it falls apart soon.
Other than being politics as usual (which are a joke because politicians are not equipped for dealing with complex issues other than public relations)...
If EU died, who do you think would take over and why do you think they'd be any better?
US has problems of its own with "digital sovereignty" as it allowed China to take over most of manufacturing. Russia is saddled with social debts and social warfare. EU nation states on their own can't do nothing - the business mostly goes to "where value is". (Just look at what is happening in Romania - the question is, how long can they keep it up.)
As for the tax haven, the new regulations in quite a few baton states of the EU now require paying tax in the country where business is done, not registered. Obviously companies try to dodge this as much as they can.
> US has problems of its own with "digital sovereignty" as it allowed China to take over most of manufacturing.
US manufacturing output is at an all-time high. Presently manufacturing in the US is booming, and the US is the #2 nation in manufacturing.
I'm guessing that you're referring to the myth that China stole away all US manufacturing. That didn't happen. What did happen is vast productivity gains in US manufacturing have eliminated millions of manufacturing jobs. Real manufacturing output per US manufacturing worker increased by 4x from just 1980 to 2010 for example.
If EU died, who do you think would take over and why do you think they'd be any better?
Easy. Nation states would. And they'd do better, at least some of the time, because they're more accountable.
Just compare the Congress vs EUP performance. The USA is arguably too large and too centralised. But Congress, despite having many ancient politicians who clearly have never used the internet let alone Facebook, still managed to run rings around the EU "Parliament" (it's not really a parliament). The EU apparently allocated nearly all the hearing time to politicians speaking, leaving only minutes for Zuckerberg to reply, allowing him to pick and choose which questions he answered.
And yet there won't be any real impact on the EUP for this because it's not a real parliament, it can't actually change laws by itself. So the people who run can't have any real policies, and as a result it's stuffed with political nobodies with no ideas beyond rah-rah EU and sometimes boo-boo EU, so voters tune out and ignore it. There's little competition.
Zuckerberg is a very rational and collected person, so if he didn't make friends then he didn't want to make friends. It also implies the actual significance of the EU.
>"You have to ask yourself how you will be remembered," he said. "As one of the three big internet giants together with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who have enriched our world and our societies, or on the other hand, the genius that created a digital monster that is destroying our democracies and societies."
I imagine you have to talk like this to a guy like Zuckerberg to actually have a chance to get through to him.