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Please, remember to vote on the European elections! We do need the EU to keep taking actions like this
As an American, please vote. Our country is owned by the corporations, at least yours can bring them to heel sometimes.
:`-( I miss voting in the European elections! 🏴🇪🇺💪
What parties should we vote for to make sure they keep protecting consumers?
Volt wants:
To make digital rights binding. They call for a “Declaration on European Digital Rights and Principles”.
Tax revenues from digital technologies where they are generated.
Guarantee net neutrality and reject contradictory laws.
Enact laws against the unethical use of AI.
How does taxing revenue from digital technology where it’s generated work?
Can you explain what that means for me.
When you buy something, the seller pays a VAT tax (something about 17% to 23% of your purchase, depending on the country).
If I’m a French company and I sell something to a customer in Finland (we would be both in the EU) taxes would be paid in either France or Finland (it depends on the kind of thing I’m selling and the kind of customer).
If I understand correctly, they want to tax digital services in the place where the work is actually generated. So, in France.
Correct. Amazon for example: everything that is sold via Amazon in Europe is taxed in Ireland. Even if a product which is available on Amazon is produced in France, stored in a French Amazon warehouse and shipped to a French customer. Just because it’s possible, they pay the reduced taxes in Ireland for such a deal. That needs to be fixed.
Ahh now I understand the reasoning, and I completely agree.
To be fair, some things are already taxed in the place where work is created, regardless of the company headquarters. E.g. event tickets (VAT is always applied in the country where the event is taking place)
Depends on you country, but the right wing one are usually not the ones that are so pro-regulation.
Discard the Brownshirts, their collaborators, and the Putin fluffers, and you probably won’t have many choices left.
And thieves. Usually also some of the 3 you mentioned, but sometimes just that.
anything but the right-wing ones.
As left as you can. I’d recommend something less extreme if proto-fascists aka liberals had not lied to us for decades.
European elections have this advantage that the morons don’t even go to vote nor know what is going on.
It’s the sole reason why is it going so good, obfuscation. Anything outside of the country is too much too grasp for the rightists.There’s some kind of deep moral to this and I am not sure it is a good one
I don’t think that’s true at all.
When the UK was in the EU, UKIP was their largest party. For France, Le Pen’s National Front party was the largest. And they aren’t alone. There’s a number of right wing EU parties.
And it’s due to get worse, if we bring data into it. Many countries in the EU are swinging to the right. Polling is indicating right wing parties will have a solid majority in the EU parliament this year.
Well it’s true where I live. Those elections are seen as unimportant and not many care and even skip them with a tendency for more… intellectually, EU versed ppl to vote
25% attendance in eu elections vs 45% for country parliament. Most recent elections improved 40 to 65
As I said the moral of this story isn’t pretty
I think those politicians don’t really bother going to the parliament and mostly cash the checks in, but it’s just a guess
Nah these people love imposing their BS on people.
Well the ones from France don’t seem to do much, maybe the other ones are worse
When the Parasite Class objects so vehemently to something that is impacting their obscene profits and sociopathic control, you know that something is being done correctly.
There’s a rule banning “self-preferencing.” That’s when platforms push their often inferior, in-house products and hide superior products made by their rivals.
Spaz isn’t going to like this.
Unless the saga continues, they didn’t “hide” the competition, they paywalled their access.
There’s nothing wrong, per se, with charging access to the API. Where they went wrong was setting an exorbitant price. That was clearly anti-competitive. They knew the pricing they set wouldn’t be sustainable to any third party developers. Then he started shit talking the Apollo developer…
Well it may or may not be wrong. One of the measures would be, can Reddit afford the price if it also had pay for the same access? If the answer is no, then it might be considered preferential treatment to their own app. However ianal so there could be a carve out for that.
He wouldn’t if it applied to him. Unfortunately, reddit is not a gatekeeper in the sense of the DMA and due to its management it’s also unlikely to ever reach that position :)
The Internet is a perfect example of why we can’t have nice things, or rather, why anarchy could never work.
That’s what the Internet used to be, and what it largely is. And it worked quite well, until people realized the Internet could be monetized beyond just being an extension of your brand.
Now it’s quite obvious that regulation is necessary. People are idiots and they can’t be trusted with a dopamine-injection-button run by greedy corporations. That gives those companies really unprecedented power.
Big tech can go F itself.
All big tech has done is stolen our data and lied to us for their own needs.
Make all software FOSS
That’s not true. Try also destroyed really good things, like the internet as a whole.
Make all software FOSS
That would require extreme socialism
that makes it even better then
wake me up when someone figures that out. so far I haven’t seen any large scale implementation that could last and/or keep everyone happy.
Happy? I’ll settle for dignity.
If it’s not FOSS, it’s not yours.
This smells like sour grapes to me, just like when people say to boycott Starbucks and then in the same breath say their coffee sucks. These companies became behemoths because people find a lot of value in the products and services they offer. Failing to acknowledge that truth just makes you sound out of touch.
I mean you SHOULD boycott starbucks for their business practices. But you can’t say their coffee sucks. They don’t have coffee. They have “diabetic inducing coffee flavored sugarwater”
But it’s not coffee
They have regular coffee at Starbucks.
I think the point being made here is that many people clearly enjoy what Starbucks offers. So, saying they suck is preaching to the choir. The only people listening to that are the people you aren’t trying to convince. If you want an impact, suggest an alternative that will make those people happy. To do that, start with an understanding of the value Starbucks brings them. Failing that, you are just signaling that your thinking isn’t for them. They’ll just ignore you and continue to happily give Starbucks their money.
You can, in fact, go to Starbucks and order an Espresso. Let’s just say that it tastes as if the barrista had never drank one straight.
Americans found lots of values in Starbucks coffee because Americans have no concept of coffee that’s simultaneously black, not bitter, not acidic, and sweet. It would be wrong to blame Starbucks for that, they’re a symptom, not the cause, but yes their coffee sucks. As it does everywhere else in the US, the country that thought that percolators were a mighty fine idea.
(And yes I know you guys invented the Aeropress. Good thing, good job, good coffee (with proper beans), now also use it).
Me to Big Tech: “Drop Dead”
I hope the EU retaliates in an incredible show of force
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And stop charging a “Core Technology Fee”. And allow JIT compiling for non-browsers so emulators for newer systems can perform well.
Wow. I have no idea what a “Core Technology Fee” is. Guess I’ll stick with Android.
There’s a rule banning “self-preferencing.” That’s when platforms push their often inferior, in-house products and hide superior products made by their rivals
Wow, I can see Microsoft fighting this one tooth and nail. It’s basically their whole business model
Continue the good work, EU. You obviously hit a nerve, so you know you’re on the right track.
Apple’s going to fight all of this tooth and nail, country by country, to the end of time. Anything less and they risk a shareholder lawsuit.
This is billions and billions of dollars we’re talking about, not chump change.
Apple get get out of my face. In EU, it’s not even close as popular as in NA. I wouldn’t care if they stopped selling products here
I’m swiss and not a EU fan, but I’m really proud of how they are standing up and facing these huge companies.
We’ve clearly reached a point where these companies need to see that they can’t do everything they want.
Let’s fight for reparability, interoperability and privacy!
To this articles question on why apple should care about EUs 500 million citizens when they have trillions of Dollars. Well given that the USA only has 333 millions I would say they should care a lot.
Apple needs to realize that the EU doesn’t care if they left. They barely pay any taxes in the EU and don’t even create much economic value. Since most Apple jobs in the EU are in retail, businesses administration and tax evasion. They don’t produce shit here.
Meta tried to do the same. The EU response was to ask when they’d leave to plan the going away party. Meta was a lot less confrontational after that.
I think that the EU is fully aware that what makes those extra powerful is network effect. And, once they’re gone, something else pops up in their place. The case of Germans using WhatsApp for example would become inconvenient for them for fifteen whole minutes, then they’d jump into an alternative, and business as usual, without Faecesbook/Merda meddling.
But what about the blue chat bubbles?!
edit: /s
Nobody cares about that in EU
As of the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, the Americas held around 41 percent of the revenue, whereas Europe came in second with roughly over 26.5 percent.
As the second largest revenue generator, Europe has a powerful voice.
The EU is only one chunk of Apple’s “Europe” segment, which is defined as “European countries, as well as India, the Middle East and Africa.”
I’d heard Apple Maps was bad, but I didn’t know it was that bad.
Most companies group MENA separately. They must sell so few devices there that they don’t want to show the numbers separately
They’ve used the same segments for a long time and presumably maintain them for consistency, so I think it really just tells us that they used to sell very little there. India, in particular, has been a large growth market for Apple in the past couple of years, but is still just thrown in with “Europe.”
I can’t speak for Apple, but every company I’ve worked for has split their region reporting as soon as one of the traditionally smaller regions gets big enough
It creates hype and a boost to their stock price
I would have never expected the EFF to use a lame click-bait headline like this one.
The article is ok (summary of the current state of things) but the title is completely out of place.
On meta’s while it is flagrant screw you, they may have a valid argument. Human beings don’t actually need any kind of social media to survive, ergo it is a convenience or luxury that could be charged for.
I’m certainly not agreeing with them, but they may be banking on that style argument and their ungodly amount of money to fight it.
You absolutely can charge for social media, just not the way Facebook does. They’re not charging for the service, just for not spying on you, which is illegal under GDPR.
Yes. But we have all gotten pretty used to things on the Internet not costing money. If they start costing money, many people will either not want to or be able to use them.
