- New regulations will target six major tech companies to improve consumer experience and data privacy. These include Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft.
- Pre-installed apps like weather and email that are difficult to delete will be disallowed, aiming to promote interoperability and reduce “gatekeeping” activities.
- Companies will be prohibited from monetizing user data collected from phone apps for advertising purposes.
- The regulations will encourage competition by allowing alternative payment systems, benefiting startups and consumers.
- The European Commission aims to empower consumers and ensure tech giants adhere to European rules, providing immediate accountability for any issues.
Once more, the EU being leader when it comes to users’ rights and keeping the big companies accountable for their shady practices. 👍
Sometimes i wish i lived there :')
As a Canadian, I appreciate a lot of what the EU does when it comes to consumer protections. Hopefully this one also ends up impacting the rest of us!
Not the person you asked, but for me:
- In 2017 I lost my £70,000/yr dream job as the company I worked at decided they couldn’t keep their EMEA campus in a country that hasn’t decided how, when or even if they were going to allow foreigners in.
- I had to move to a shithole town in Nottinghamshire to live by myself in a cramped one-bedroom flat to do a job I hated for £22,000/yr.
- That company went under because we couldn’t import the network equipment into the UK because of Brexit. Most vendors weren’t bothering since there were shortages anyway, so why not just send all their stock to Germany where there’s no nasty surprises and plenty of buyers waiting.
- Ended up doing minimum-wage shift work at an Amazon warehouse and Deliveroo deliveries to survive.
- Got another, similar job on £20,000/yr.
- Not had a holiday in six years. I used to have at least two a year.
- Can’t get a CPAP machine for my apnoea because of difficulty importing them (ended up getting a friend in France to buy one for me).
- Local supermarkets still can’t get a lot of fresh fruit that they used to stock. Empty shelves common.
- My savings went from £50,000 to zero.
- Government is pissing money away on detention centres and hotels for immigrants because they refuse to cooperate with the EU.
- Government is also planning on ripping up our Human Rights (ostensibly to deal with the immigrants) and has even indicated they would like to abolish GDPR, bringing it full circle to OP’s comment.
So, yeah. Not everyone has had as bad a time as me, but everyone I know has encountered some negative fallout. I’ve yet to encounter anyone who has actually benefitted, even indirectly.
I plan on moving there as soon as possible when I graduate high school. Real tired of America
Some countries in EU offer Americans free education and easy work permits after graduation. I think Germany has program like that.
Come to Ireland, the weather is mostly shite but global failures on climate change are making it very Mediterranean
Ireland is probably is a nice country to live in, but it’s pretty ironic recommending it to someone wanting to come to the EU because of its regulations on big companies.
Ireland costs other countries 16bn a year by allowing those companies to evade taxes in the EU.
I was planning on Germany, and I’ve recently met a German friend online which has solidified my choice
One urgent thingis that the EU follow the UK in abandoning the ill-conceived “client-side scanning”, aka Chat-Control.
Reading the guardian article I was like meh… some stuff is good and anything is better than nothing but then I read the actual DMA
“Fines: of up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide annual turnover, or up to 20% in the event of repeated infringements
Periodic penalty payments: of up to 5% of the average daily turnover
Remedies: In case of systematic infringements of the DMA obligations by gatekeepers, additional remedies may be imposed on the gatekeepers after a market investigation. Such remedies will need to be proportionate to the offence committed. If necessary and as a last resort option, non-financial remedies can be imposed. These can include behavioural and structural remedies, e.g. the divestiture of (parts of) a business.”
Fuck ya break up some of these fuckers if they keep breaking the rules and percentages of worldwide turnover? I can only get so errect
Even though this is EU based, if they actually follow through with the fines and possible breaking companies up I can’t see why the companies would not just make this a worldwide standard… I could be wrong of course cuz corporations are shit
I don’t really understand how this is a material change from what AOSP gives you right now? Can anyone explain?
For example: AOSP has been available to EU start-ups for over a decade for free and open source but none have built alternative payment systems or email or maps or advertising services on top of it in a cohesive way before. What is this law going to allow them to do that they couldn’t before? 🤔
Stock Android on every phone sold in EU will have to offer those features. There’s a big difference for a start up between targeting AOSP and targeting all Android phones in EU. That’s exactly the point of this law: making gatekeepr devices/services equally accessible to competition.
Stock Android is AOSP. And it’s free.
I’m not sure why EU start-ups don’t just build services on top and compete like Huawei does in China or to a certain extent Amazon does with its Android variant.
You’re confusing start ups making phones with start ups offering services. If you want to sell phones yes, you can sell phones with AOSP or Lineage OS, no problem. If you’re a start up that sells Map application you’re competing with google and their app can’t be removed from phones that most people have. Most google apps can’t be removed. This is about equal access to the platform most people use, not offering alternative platform.
Stock Android is AOSP + Google Apps, which is a part that has become so integral to Android that you wouldn’t be comfortable with actually running just AOSP anymore.
First of all, phones aren’t sold with AOSP.
They’re not. But my point is that EU manufacturers / start-ups could easily make their own flavour of Android based on AOSP and launch that as a product. Why don’t they? Case in point Huawei.
I think the argument is that the monopoly is present because it’s basically pointless outside of China to launch a phone without play services. So while you can release a phone based on AOSP, it’s not going to be successful financially without the Google apps and tweaks from Play Services
Glad the EU is cracking down on tech companies. They have done a good job fighting for consumer rights. Even improving them in nations outside the EU both by forcing companies to make global changes and by inspiring local legislation. It’s something they should be proud of.
