Apple vs the Law

The EU is fundamentally a centre-right, liberalist, pro-business coalition, but what that means is that it is pro-competition. What's really impressive is that it seems to mostly refrain from devolving into protectionist policies, giving no preferential treatment to European businesses against international (intercontinental?) competitors, despite strong populist tendencies in certain member states.

Add to that feel-good green initiatives like a packaging initiative that might lower packaging waste from European companies, but more likely will just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead.

That said, you can't argue that this isn't protectionist - we simply don't have any gatekeepers here, so if we're fair the DMA is only hitting international competitors (except Spotify maybe?)

Booking would love that to be the case. And last I heard, Zalando is currently fighting the EU over having to comply with the DMA.

> just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead

Temu is under active investigation for breaching these laws, anyone operating within EU is subject to those laws, not just European companies (e.g. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-ope...)

Are you arguing that 27 different sets of laws was a better approach? That these countries would just gladly lie down and never regulate the societal-level harms, systemic lawbreaking, and massive infringement of privacy across the board? I don't think so.

For a moment the political system in the US seemed to get to the same conclusions as the EU under Bidens FTC and anti-trust cases. But the conclusions of that remain to be seen.

Zalando has three enforcement actions against them since June 2023

Booking.com has one

Technius (mainly streaming) has two

WebGroup CZ (Adult entertainment) has five

edit: I looked it up - you are talking about the DSA (digital services act) while I was talking about the DMA (the one including the gatekeeper specification) - so that's not really what I meant....

Then show me the handful of European, medium-sized companies competing for customers. The problem is that you pass DMA, DSA, GDPR, etc. which Google, Apple etc. can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it.

Instead what's happening is that European alternatives (the kind that's actually good, not the kind that's European and half as good) don't exist and the incentives to build one shrink because any scaling company is instantly hamstrung.

But that model you describe is cracking: Cost of living is going through the roof in Europe, taxes/social contributions going up every year, etc.

The problem is that Europe is like an old, rich person who now lives off of the principal of their wealth. For a person that's fine because they'll eventually die. For a government, you should strive for an environment that lets you keep growing wealth.

There's the EU-Inc initiative that the EU has basically made pointless (by wanting to introduce 27 new standards, not one, just making things more complex).

Note that I'm not arguing for zero regulation.

The DMA (that this article is about) applies to gatekeepers (massive companies like big tech), not mom and pop startups

Competing in category chemicals:

BASF, Akzo Nobel, Lanxess, Air Liquide, and a bunch others

Competing in category engineering:

Siemens, Bosch, ABB, Alstom, ThyssenKrupp, Airbus and a bunch others

Competing in category metals:

Aurubis, Umicore, Norsk Hydro, Gruppo Riva, ThyssenKrupp, and a bunch others

Competing in category pharma:

Novartis, AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, Bayer, and others

Competing in category electronics:

Nokia, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Electrolux, Schneider Electric, and lots of others

> any scaling company is instantly hamstrung

You are assuming scaling this way is a long-term positive for consumers, investors, employees, and/or markets. I can find no such evidence.

> Add to that feel-good green initiatives like a packaging initiative that might lower packaging waste from European companies, but more likely will just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead.

Does this actually happen or are you just making shit up?

Is Temu exempt of any packaging requirements?

It's not national law that can be bent locally, it's EU law that applies to all companies of certain size.

I think the EU learned the hard way that they can't rely on its members to prioritize common interests

(see Ireland vs. Apple tax avoidance, Germany vs. Car evolution, Austria vs. Reduction of Russian influence, Hungary vs. everything)

There are no 27 sets of laws to do business in Europe. It's not perfect, but it's a SINGLE MARKET, if you comply to the EU regulation you are allowed to sell everywhere.

It does however not absolve you from additional local market demands to be competitive, i.e. local language support, service infrastructure, etc.

For example: Miele is one of the largest washing machine manufacturers in Europe. They have their front panel translated to local languages for most of its markets. You can sell a washing machine with a English front panel, but you won't be able to compete in e.g. the German/Italian/French market

I use our product, it's better than GCP for my use cases.

We've got Hetzner in Germany doing the same thing we are.

The same company can have provide CPSs, with different status. For instance, Google is a designated gatekeeper of Android (OS) and Google Maps (Intermediation), but not Gmail. So the DMA won’t dictate anything related to Gmail, even if Google is a gatekeeper in other areas.

In addition to them there are also countless small to medium sized companies that nobody's ever heard of, that don't experience hypergrowth but have slow and steady growth - especially in the B2B sector. I've worked at some such companies.

This is a very inaccurate view. I’ve worked with multiple SMEs and no such “complexities” ever become operational challenges. Even as a indie developer, my compliance is a default provided I’m not trying to do something shady.

Looking into the EU regulations, in most cases what they want you to do (or not do) is common sense.

Cost of living is increasing in the US too (in large part due to geopolitical reasons), and social contributions are rising because of demographic factors. I'm not sure how market liberalism is magically going to fix that latter issue.

The biggest headaches/issues are normally local regulations (country specific or even more local). The EU directives are more frameworks with a lot of flexibility and well grounded on common sense + expertise. How the different countries implement them in their own laws (with their own historical laws) is a different story.

I do have one concern though.

Established markets are more entrenched, and hearing that smaller companies may have "slow and steady growth" here seems excellent.

Yet emerging markets move incredibly fast, and the goal is to discover those trenches and occupy them. Being held back in such a market can be troublesome.

So this is what I'd worry about.

And how do you compete with the big tech companies without it? It's been decades without anyone being able to do it. Not in Europe and not in the US. OpenAI might have a chance, but they also have billions.

The days where someone could drop out of school and start a company in the garage is over. Cost of living is up, so is competition. Companies need to expand and regulation like GDPR makes it easier to do so instead of having to deal with multiple countries regulation. The US always had an advantage in regulation like the DMCA.

To spell it out, before regulation European companies had to...

Deal with privacy regulation of each country. Which in the EU was supposed to be similar, but wasn't entirely. With GDPR not only is it the same in the EU, but other countries are now following the same model.

Register for VAT in every EU country it sold (enough) products in. Making many not sell to other countries at all until Amazon ate their business. With VAT MOSS you only register in you own country.

Accept many form of payments with many different fees since credit card adoption and cost could vary wildly. With interchange fees capped you increasingly only need to accept common credit cards.

Pay large roaming charges when traveling, making starting services like Uber or Airbnb less relevant since you couldn't assume someone had data in another country.

Try to compete with big tech companies that were charging for access to their platforms while minimizing their taxes through royalty payments, VAT deals and offshore holdings. Giving them a huge advantage. This is still the case, but lesser so.

For actually running a company it is a lot better now.

There are other problems with EU regulations. Some things are natural monopolies or in other ways doesn't do well as markets. Privatization and state-aid rules prevent European countries from effectively managing these areas. Any advantage Europe had over the US in cost of living and public services is rapidly diminishing.

The DSA tells platforms how they must keep users safe and transparent, the DMA tells the largest gatekeepers how they must behave toward competitors and business users.

To be fair, the regulations are there because companies are out-of-control paperclip maximisers. For example, the cookie banner didn't have to be obnoxious - companies choose to comply maliciously to adhere to the text and shit over the spirit of the regulations, which have to become more and more verbose and explicit.

Merely doing monopoly regulation won't help. We have to actually destroy the monopolies.

https://www.foiaresearch.net/sites/default/files/styles/body...

I would consider ALDE center-right still, and S&D the first left coalition.

Let me ask you guys something else, if EU hates large monopolist companies so much as you claim, then why are all its car companies monopolistic mega conglomerates that rule the world like Volkswagen, Stellantis, Daimler Benz, BMW, and Renault? Where's EU's equivalent of Tesla if they supposedly hate all these big companies?

I'll tell you why: Just like the US, the capital controlled EU also supports its domestic monopolies and only bitches about foreign monopolies in sectors they don't control and threaten their economic hegemony. That's the cold hard truth, everything else is just political hot air and virtue signaling for brownie points, and I'm pissed people are not only buying it but also parroting it when the goal to monopolize business sectors is as strong in EU corporations as it is in US and Chinese ones.

Europe is just more stricter now with controlling large (mostly foreign) corporations since its own economy lost a lot of ground to the US and Chinese ones (it has now half the real GDP it had 2 decades ago), and since it can't create new large companies, all it can do now is protecting what it has left from foreign companies taking over their turf. The upshot being that a lot of those rules are congruent with the consumer protections which also end up globally favoring consumers abroad.

Re: demographics. It's relatively straightforward: To keep contributions constant while supporting more people, you need either:

-more people via immigration (which is extremely tricky to get right) who are net contributors, not beneficiaries of social systems -massively increased productivity through innovation/technology -cut benefits from social programs

If you do none of those things, the systems will either collapse or you need to raise taxes/mandatory contributions which are de-facto taxes.

HN is sometimes incredibly biased towards consumer tech.

We don't need cars from fascists.

To be fair, that’s not what they said. I believe they’re asking where are the car companies of Tesla’s size and market position.

Well, only if you make it a goal to occupy all the trenches. The EU has realized that it does not want all possible trenches occupied. For example: There is a lot of market share to be had in waste disposal by dumping it in the rivers and oceans. Regulation generally prohibits this, because we don't want our rivers and oceans full of waste.

Capitalist market self-regulation wouldn't have done this without external pressure (regulation, litigation, etc.) because the capitalist market would externalize all costs if it would increase profits.

Perhaps the problem here isn’t that smaller brands don’t exist, it’s that if we give examples of smaller brands then you’ll argue

“Never heard of them. Thus proof that the EU is holding them back”

And if we mention household names then you’d argue

“Those aren’t small companies”

You’ve basically crafted an impossible to satisfy condition. A question that would be equally impossible for you to satisfy with US firms as it is for EU firms.

———

By the way, there’s quite a few car manufacturers that are small listed here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufactu...

A few of them are relatively big names despite their small company size, for example Noble Automotive.

Likewise, market cap is measured in monetary units, dollars, euros, etc., while GDP is measured in money per the unit of time: $XXXX / year.

Like, Tesla are very small (in terms of cars sold) but very large in terms of valuation. Seems like a once-off, not something that would be replicable (anywhere).

It hardly cares about unions beyond what the ECHR and ILO treaties demands, i.e. it's obviously not left wing. If it was inherently left wing it wouldn't have the kind of parliament it has, but rather something like Yugoslavia or the DDR did.

It's also not conservative, hence why that movement has had to bolt on militarisation and stuff like Frontex.

Tesla Q4 sales: https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-fourth-quarter-2024... approx 500k.

So Tesla are not the biggest anymore (which honestly surprised me).

European companies compete with US companies, including Apple, in areas where there is competition. In music software, music streaming, engineering and finance software, services and so on.

Apple has around 33% smartphone market share in Europe. Where is the US competition? Google at 3%. The actual competition is non-US in Samsung and Xiaomi. You can argue that Google competes with the Play Store, but then there is no competition with the Play Store on Android from the US.

Big US tech companies don't compete with each other as much as one might think. Most of their revenue comes from dominating one area or platform, with little competition from the rest.

So therefor the common conclusion that Europe should be more like the US to have competition also doesn't make sense as the big US tech companies don't have serious direct competition in the US in their core businesses.

You can't compete with the big tech companies by creating a Google with 3% market share in smartphones to compete with Apple, a Walmart with 6% online retail market share to compete with Amazon, or a Microsoft with 4% search engine market share to compete with Google.

I recommend using more precise language about what you are talking, at the moment you just sound very confused.

Like, lots of the Treaties are pretty neo-liberal (private services, competition is always good, privatise stuff) but lots more are more left wring (the anti-monoploy stuff, the social charter etc).

Really though the EU is 27 governments in a trenchcoat, so it tends to reflect those governments (which change over time).

If you know of some other institutionally left wing bureaucracy you consider more appropriate to use as an example, name it.

The social charter is firmly liberalist, though not distinctly of the neo- flavour.

Due to the institutional structures and processes EU rule making tends to be quite resistant to immediate political fashion. For one the power of framing from interest and lobby groups is quite strong, hence the influence from expert groups and lawyer like people. It's why conservatives are pushing towards a kind of United States of Europe direction, they'd prefer a centralisation of power in areas currently governed by the founding agreements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsBTkAXnPZs

Really? Because look up on the history of VW, BMW, Porsche, Fiat, etc and their founding families, some of who still own a large part of the shares of those companies today. Most of them worked with fascists no problem, some by force of the era some by opportunity but none of them opposed them.

You see this is the typical European hypocrisy that I dislike. Pointing fingers that Elon is somehow a fascist cause he raised his arm once, but Porsche or BMW who used slave labor from work camps is somehow not fascist now because ... reasons I guess.

Explain me that with logic and reason, and not with the "Elon is a fascist because reddit told me he is".

The DMA really isn't particularly complex though. And what complexity it has only becomes complex once you're a manager of a whole consumer platform (a "gatekeeper" in its jargon).

To wit: your point is backwards, the DMA is structured such that the only companies that need to bear its burdens are "big tech or Europe's legacy players". If you're a little company wanting to add a paid app store to your Tiny AI Robot Virtual Experience or whatever, go nuts. The DMA absolutely won't stop you.

It looks like you're right that Zalando is on the DSA list, though.

Yeah, there's a whole lot of American exceptionalism going on in this thread, assuming the way things are done over here in the states is the best and only way. I live here and let me tell you, it's not. Just the fact that we have gigantic tech monopolies with more money than several nations combined is proof of that - that's not a thing that should ever happen.

Yeah, look it could go either way.

> Due to the institutional structures and processes EU rule making tends to be quite resistant to immediate political fashion.

I don't really agree with this. For an example of why not, the AI act is a good one. This was a great Act that got a lot of LLM nonsense pumped into it following ChatGPT. While I get why that happened, I would have preferred that they wait, as the original stuff made lots of sense, and the less well thought through AI/LLM stuff significantly weakens the act.

> It's why conservatives are pushing towards a kind of United States of Europe direction, they'd prefer a centralisation of power in areas currently governed by the founding agreements.

Can you give me some examples of people (national governments particularly) pushing for this? I think that lots of governments are pretty happy with inter-governmentalism even though it has lots of problems.

Engineering plastics used in automotive and electronics applications. Styrenes for same.

Automotive OEM and refinish coatings - one of the bigger suppliers. Industrial coatings and paints.

Some of the bigger fungicides, herbicides, insecticides.

Catalytic converter components, battery components, cathodes, etc.

It only costs to somehow keep doing the abusive things they exist to prevent.

It's impossible to express how little sympathy this deserves.

LOL, what?

Tesla has a bigger market cap than those companies COMBINED. And more. How is it a "medium" player? I don't agree with that market cap, to be clear.

It seems that Tesla is the Schrodinger's automotive manufacturer: snappy young upstart when that's convenient, world's biggest/strongest/brightest when that narrative is convenient.

The US has 50 sets of regulations and I don't hear anyone complaining. Although they should - you're almost certainly controlled by California law because, surprise surprise, complying with 50 sets of regulations is hard.

You just named 5 companies, that’s competition.

US has 1/2 companies controlling 90% market share in several markets. That’s monopoly.

I don't care about any companies like Americans do with American business centric laws that hurts normal people. Life isn't about lowest price at any cost model. Buy from china (as everyone is doing but try to hide it) if you want low cost. I don't give a damn if all those companies die for not complying GDPR, fuck them.

Anyway, I’m not celibate. It’s just an excellent vehicle, if you don’t care about hivemind strangers glaring at you.

As soon as it's possible to run efficiently a large enterprise (Thanks to the telegraph, and an extensive rail/road + automotive network), economies of scale will favor consolidation.

If you compare annual revenue to GDP all of a sudden these so called maegacrop are tiny.

I will just go to the record store get some vinyls.

Sure, but I doubt there's any country in the world that aspires for its citizens to be treated like American consumers.

This is exactly what the GP was saying: you're looking at B2C companies as if they matter more, when in reality the vast majority of commerce (but not profits) is B2B.

Socialism means "corporations are owned by the people working in them", as in co-ops. State-owned corporations under brutal dictatorships are in no conceivable way "worker-owned". They all called themselves socialist just as they called themselves democratic - as in, basic propaganda.

This is very relevant in a discussion of left-wing VS right-wing economies. The Soviet Union and China are firmly in the right wing in reality, just as much as Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy were. They just had different propaganda.

A small note: state owned companies under actual Democratic societies is a more complex topic on the left-wing VS right-wing debate, that I won't go into here.

I'm sympathetic to the yugoslavian project and consider it an important source of inspiration and knowledge, but I don't believe fortune had anything to do with what happened afterwards.

Saying “Tesla aren’t one of the biggest EV manufacturer” is clearly rubbish.

BYD makes better batteries than Tesla. the EU brands provide a better luxury than Tesla.

the US / Japan brands provide a better car in terms of quality than Tesla.

With the JEDI contracts ect that is basically what is happening to Google, MS and AWS.

as much I'm not a fan of them, Leica is a peer competing against Nikon, Fujifilm, etc.

The approach would be to gradually limit EU market access till there are other alternatives. This has worked for e.g. China.

The German defense force uses Google cloud instances for their "sovereign cloud". I very much doubt that if there were a German Hyper-scaler that it would have similar market access to contracts such as JEDI. Having a buy European requirement there is pretty much a no-brainer IMO.