'Europe Regulates Its Way To Last Place' (wsj.com) 267
From mergers to AI, the EU's aggressive rule-making hampers its ability to compete with China and the U.S. Greg Ip, writing for WSJ: These are humbling times for Europe. The continent barely escaped recession late last year as the U.S. boomed. It is losing out to the U.S. on artificial intelligence, and to China on electric vehicles. There is one field where the European Union still leads the world: regulation. Having set the standard on regulating mergers, carbon emissions, data privacy, and e-commerce competition, the EU now seeks to do the same on AI. In December it unveiled a sweeping draft law that bans certain types of AI, tightly regulates others, and imposes huge fines for violators. Its executive arm, the European Commission, might investigate Microsoft's tie-up with OpenAI as potentially anticompetitive. Never before has "America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates" so aptly captured each region's comparative advantage.
The technocrats who staff the EU in Brussels aren't anti-free market. Just the opposite: they still believe in free trade, unlike the U.S. or China. Much of their regulation is aimed at protecting consumers and competition from meddling national governments. But there's a trade-off between consumer protection and the profit motive that drives investment and innovation, and the EU might be getting that trade-off wrong. For example, to preserve competition, European regulators have resisted mergers that leave just a handful of mobile phone carriers per market. As a result Europe now has 43 groups running 102 mobile operators serving a population of 474 million, while the U.S. has three major networks serving a population of 335 million, according to telecommunications consultant John Strand. China and India are even more concentrated.
European mobile customers as a result pay only about a third of what Americans do. But that's why European carriers invest only half as much per customer and their networks are commensurately worse, Strand said: "Getting a 5G signal in Germany is like finding a Biden supporter at a Trump rally." Putting European networks on a par with the U.S. would cost about $300 billion, he estimated. This has knock-on effects on Europe's tech sector. Swedish telecommunications equipment manufacturer Ericsson's sales in Europe suffer in part because many carriers are too small and unprofitable to update to the latest 5G networks. "Europe has prioritized shorter-term low consumer prices at the expense of quality infrastructure," chief executive Borje Ekholm told me in Davos earlier this month. "I'm very concerned about Europe. We need to invest much more in infrastructure, in being digital."
The technocrats who staff the EU in Brussels aren't anti-free market. Just the opposite: they still believe in free trade, unlike the U.S. or China. Much of their regulation is aimed at protecting consumers and competition from meddling national governments. But there's a trade-off between consumer protection and the profit motive that drives investment and innovation, and the EU might be getting that trade-off wrong. For example, to preserve competition, European regulators have resisted mergers that leave just a handful of mobile phone carriers per market. As a result Europe now has 43 groups running 102 mobile operators serving a population of 474 million, while the U.S. has three major networks serving a population of 335 million, according to telecommunications consultant John Strand. China and India are even more concentrated.
European mobile customers as a result pay only about a third of what Americans do. But that's why European carriers invest only half as much per customer and their networks are commensurately worse, Strand said: "Getting a 5G signal in Germany is like finding a Biden supporter at a Trump rally." Putting European networks on a par with the U.S. would cost about $300 billion, he estimated. This has knock-on effects on Europe's tech sector. Swedish telecommunications equipment manufacturer Ericsson's sales in Europe suffer in part because many carriers are too small and unprofitable to update to the latest 5G networks. "Europe has prioritized shorter-term low consumer prices at the expense of quality infrastructure," chief executive Borje Ekholm told me in Davos earlier this month. "I'm very concerned about Europe. We need to invest much more in infrastructure, in being digital."
I'd rather have regulations (Score:5, Insightful)
Rich people complaining they're forced to at least pay lip service to the prole's rights and it is impairing their ability to accelerate wealth concentration into their pockets.
Screw 'em.
The problem isn't EU regulations, it's the lack and corruption of them in the US and China.
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This is an ironic statement given corruption is all about getting in the way to get "donations", then things mysteriously clear up.
Why do you think these people go into power? In dictatorships and other democracies that suffer massive corruption, that's how it works. Chicken and egg? The corruption of government seeking to get in the way comes first.
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> The corruption of government seeking to get in the way comes first.
Not sure what you mean ?
"A worldwide ranking of corruption" - https://www.worlddata.info/cor... [worlddata.info]
Re:I'd rather have regulations (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. An alternate title for this story could be "Europe Resists Race To The Bottom"
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Rich people complaining they're forced to at least pay lip service to the prole's rights and it is impairing their ability to accelerate wealth concentration into their pockets.
Screw 'em.
The problem isn't EU regulations, it's the lack and corruption of them in the US and China.
Actually, the EU model of demanding the entire world prostrate themselves before your interminable rules and regulations, might have something to do with this.
Protip - if you want to rule the internet, and EU obviously does - then dominate it, not just sit back and demand it bend to your will. Because the EU does not create, it makes powerless demands.
Now quickly! Mod me down to troll ASAP. And that dear Eurofriends, is the extent of your power. Modding truth on Slashdot down, as if it makes you the w
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Never heard of sovereignty, have you? Arguments from ignorance while claiming your target is both helpless and oppressing you is a technique used by idiots with inferiority complexes. If you don't want to be grouped in with them, maybe try a reasoned fact-based argument instead.
Re:I'd rather have regulations (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure it is "obvious" that the EU wants to "rule the internet". I don't think that's a particular goal it has in mind when it develops regulations. It seems to me that the EU wants the internet to work for the benefit of the citizens, inside the EU.
Sometimes the regulations are an advantage anyway. Services provided in jurisdictions with strong privacy laws can be attractive, for example. A bit like the old numbered Swiss bank accounts, but without the crime.
Re:I'd rather have regulations (Score:5, Insightful)
Rich people complaining they're forced to at least pay lip service to the prole's rights and it is impairing their ability to accelerate wealth concentration into their pockets.
Screw 'em.
The problem isn't EU regulations, it's the lack and corruption of them in the US and China.
Actually, the EU model of demanding the entire world prostrate themselves before your interminable rules and regulations, might have something to do with this.
Protip - if you want to rule the internet, and EU obviously does - then dominate it, not just sit back and demand it bend to your will. Because the EU does not create, it makes powerless demands.
Seems you haven't heard of the "Brussels effect" [wikipedia.org]. Europe is a lucrative market with roughly half a billion affluent consumers that global companies cannot afford to ignore. As a result, to quote the linked article, "firms trading internationally find that it is not economically, legally or technically practical to maintain lower standards in non-EU markets. Non-EU companies exporting globally can find that it is beneficial to adopt standards set in Brussels uniformly throughout their business.".
Basically if you can sell your product in Europe, you can sell it anywhere. So there is no need to "demand"; it just makes good business sense to comply with European standards.
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Rich people complaining they're forced to at least pay lip service to the prole's rights and it is impairing their ability to accelerate wealth concentration into their pockets.
Screw 'em.
Regular people complaining that if you're going to regulate, do it to correct specific abuses that you see occurring in existing markets, such as the pending US ban on holding pack part of a price quotation until the customer commits to a purchase. The EU's approach is to write detailed socialist specifications around a new technology, like AI, that isn't really here yet, therefore stifling it in its crib.
Yes, Euro-weenies, you screwed 'em. While the rest of the world pushes into new technologies, you sheep
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No. The problem is the EU reaching out beyond its borders and "regulating" those of us who are not *in* the EU. IDGAF if France wants to reglulate what people in France can look up on google.fr. Nor do I care if Belguim wants a popup for every single cookie that's ever set. And if Spain wants its deadbeats to be able to skip out on paying their bills and "be forgotten" such that other people won't know they're deadbeats and they can go on to scam others; that's on Spain.
But nothing that any EU lawmaker
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No. The problem is the EU reaching out beyond its borders and "regulating" those of us who are not *in* the EU. IDGAF if France wants to reglulate what people in France can look up on google.fr. Nor do I care if Belguim wants a popup for every single cookie that's ever set. And if Spain wants its deadbeats to be able to skip out on paying their bills and "be forgotten" such that other people won't know they're deadbeats and they can go on to scam others; that's on Spain.
But nothing that any EU lawmaker or regulator says should ever be allowed to have any impact on what I... sitting here in the US...
And the USA regulates beyond its own borders so much that, eg, banks in other countries don't even want US citizens as customers because dealing with your regulations is so onerous.
Except that the USA tends to use its military and dollar hegemony to enforce its regulations. Thats what your service men and women die for, to enforce your regulations and hegemony overseas, to the benefit of your super-rich. Not to benefit your people as a whole.
The EU's ability to regulate beyond its borders PALES into insigni
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Like so many things, regulations must strike a healthy balance lest they become destructive. Consider the case at hand - by focusing so heavily on the number of competitors in the market, EU regulators have produced a situation where none of the players have the resources to reinvest in
Re:I'd rather have regulations (Score:5, Insightful)
This. The EU's losing the capitalist rat race to the bottom they say? Sounds like a feature rather than a bug...
Re:I'd rather have regulations (Score:5, Insightful)
Rich people complaining they're forced to at least pay lip service to the prole's rights and it is impairing their ability to accelerate wealth concentration...
That's one take. The other is we've performed a 50-year experiment. If you like consumer protection and increased safety, you'll get slower growth and less innovation. If you're willing to take some risks, economies evolve much faster. It seems clear based on the evidence there is a tradeoff, not that I ever doubted it.
As a result, the question now is, which tradeoff to people prefer? What we can't suggest is that there is no tradeoff between innovation, economic growth, and government regulation.
Re:I'd rather have regulations (Score:5, Insightful)
We really could use to have less of the regulation butthurt. Having seat belts in cars is regulation. Having food not contain poison is regulation - go and check out the poison eaters.
Regulation in itself is a great idea, and inescapably necessary, if you care at all about what is going on. Regulation is the society deciding that well, this is a bad idea and it should not happen any more, and well, this is a good idea and we should make sure it only happens this way from now on.
But guess what. Not putting borax in food costs money for the food industry. So the indusry fights back. And the industry fights back with regulatory capture, they have enough influence to pass their own regulation to make their own life easier and the life of upcoming competition harder. So someone notices that we are getting bad regulation, and the counter-regulation argument is born.
But guess what. Who ends up wielding the counter-regulation argument? It's not the society or anyone doing it in public interest. It's the same industry, who uses it to get rid of imposed on them regulation they don't like, while keeping their own regulation they do like. So the society ends up between a rock and a hard place, with useful idiots everywhere parroting the industry line and numbing down the populace's critical thinking.
Then you also have the genius concept of industry self-regulation, where the lack of political will of the state to care and pay for oversight meets the industry's giddyness to not give a fuck, and from that you get gems like the Boing or derailing clusterfucks of the recent years. I'm sure these could be solved by further deregulation! Because this 100% is going to be how they are going to be "solved".
Now to the TFA. We know very well what this recent round of butthurt is about. EU, Apple, walled garden app store. It should be obvious to anyone that breaking up the monopoly Apple has there is as common sense a deal as breaking up any other monopoly, for both immediate public interest, and also for increasing the competitiveness of the industry. But the WSJ does not get paid to talk common sense. They get paid for being a mouthpiece of the Wall Street, and that's a whole other game. So we get yet another cringe article about "regulation bad". Cry me a river.
But the nerve on them to shit on European cell network. WTF. Have they been to the US then? There is nothing but horror stories about the cell network of the US, but I guess it somehow becomes magic pixie land if I sprinkle my bullshit with 5G marketing wank. Oh the humanity...
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Most websites could certainly be less obvious and intrusive. Although, incidentally, I'm finding the Google login pop-up the most irritating at the moment - what would it be like if Facebook and Apple logins were also as bad? What annoys me are the web sites whose cookie policy pre-checks a bunch of items as "legitimate interest". Does that mean the "consent" box allows them illegitimate usage? I'll decide what's "legitimate" usage, thank you. It doesn't seem these pop-ups are GDPR compliant and sites
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Ah yes, that great "right" to getting a pop up about Websites having cookies, a thing everyone fucking knows and no one wants to fucking be told about every damn time they visit a website.
To be fair? the legislation was about tracking not cookies. You don't need permission for cookies, you need it for tracking. People keep saying this site uses cookies because it sounds better than telling the truth "this site stalks you, do you consent to being stalked?"
I often wonder how many of these cookie choice controls are themselves leveraged for tracking? I guess my commentary is all rather moot because regardless the predictable consequences of the legislation the avoidable annoyances do very mu
Which being translated means: (Score:5, Insightful)
The rich bankers and other financial sharks who make money by buying and selling companies are miffed at the EU's resistance to their blandishments and are using one of their mouthpieces, the WSJ, to attempt to bully Europe into letting them play their games.
Probably an over simplification - what isn't - but I suspect more true than is comfortable.
Race to the bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a race? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wasn't aware the USA was having a capitalism race with the EU.
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Probably a good article (Score:5, Interesting)
If I could read it.
"Getting a 5G signal in Germany is like finding a Biden supporter at a Trump rally."
That's a great quip but what about 4G? Is that widely available? If my cell phone plan was $20 a month I might be willing to tolerate my data coming in a bit slower.
Maybe the article explains it more but a pet peeve of mine when talking about cell tech is people acting like 4G/LTE was basically like another version of EDGE, that "only" having 4G is just unusable for life when in my experience most of the time I can't tell a difference, so long as I have good reception they're both just fine.
Europe does have some economic problems but this summary very much reads like American businessmen feeling that they have a god given right to exploit not just America's markets for their gain but every market on Earth and if some areas don't play along with that then they are functionally heterodox and must be excommunicated from the church of capitalism.
USA has it's share of problems too one of which is corporate ghoulship that reads like this.
Re:Probably a good article (Score:5, Insightful)
>>That's a great quip but what about 4G? Is that widely available? If my cell phone plan was $20 a month I might be willing to tolerate my data coming in a bit slower.
Exactly. Do you really need to watch a 4K streaming movie on your tiny phone screen? No doubt some will say 5G speeds are necessary because for many in the US that is their only internet connection; but that really just points out how shitty the US fibre/broadband service/coverage is.
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At least in well-populated areas, the US coverage is really good. It also likely costs more because people have higher median incomes and cellular requires a lot of active maintenance.
Tell that to the SF Bay Area, the Monterey Bay Area, etc. There are significant holes where you can't get service indoors, often coinciding with major retailers, not to mention multi-mile stretches of major highways that have poor to no service.
And heaven help you if there's a blackout anywhere, because the cell towers only have a thirty-minute battery, and then they stop passing traffic. Yesterday, there was a four hour outage where I was trying to do a livestream, and even though we could power up all o
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That doesn't really explain the issue though, just having an upgraded network in the fastest timeframe doesn't always mean that is the best outcome though, especially for the consumer. If the EU has a slower rollout from 4G to 5G, sure that could be bad but what if the 4G is fully saturated an upgraded and is giving people more than acceptable, LTE 4G can reach 150mb/s down, still very good for a cell phone, even 20-50mb/s for cell phones is plenty for streaming. 6 years ago I was able to do a public event
Re: Probably a good article (Score:2)
4g is fine for most purposes, arguably any purpose for which one would use a handheld.
The bigger problem is capacity. If the hardware at the tower canâ(TM)t handle sufficient simultaneous connections or thereâ(TM)s insufficient backhaul, all the bars are useless.
Iâ(TM)m curious how eu v us v elsewhere compare in this metric.
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I would agree, I think this is overlooked in coverage maps and is a bigger issue that the generation of tech and providers I imagine are under zero obligation to report how much they cut their capacity to the bone.
Maybe some actual Europeans can chime in with their experience.
Re:Probably a good article (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.nperf.com/en/map/D... [nperf.com]
Cue the population density XKCD comic
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https://www.bundesnetzagentur.... [bundesnetzagentur.de]
Re:Probably a good article (Score:5, Insightful)
"Getting a 5G signal in Germany is like finding a Biden supporter at a Trump rally."
This is indeed a nice sounding quip. The problem with that wonderful sounding sentence is that it is not true. I travel every year to EU visiting couple of countries and I readily get 5G. I was in Germany 5 years back and 5G connectivity was fine, only occasionally dropping to 4G service. Mind you I was using roaming service (Google Fi), so some of that may have been issues with the roaming.
I love how the article claims that a competitive market is bad. Somehow more carriers in the EU market that invest larger portion of their revenue into their networks than US carriers (three times lower prices, but just two times less investment) is a bad thing. The amount of investment also depends on the density of the population. You need less investment to cover the same number of people if they live closer together. This is standard WSJ fare, where greed and rent seeking are masqueraded as "free market" and facts are twisted to fit the narrative.
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That's a great quip but what about 4G? Is that widely available?
5G SA is starting to get deployed. 5G (non-SA) is widely deployed. 4G is *everywhere*, 3G is almost turned off, 2G is remaining in place due to legacy M2M applications.
Heck, 4G has 90% coverage of the population in *Ukraine* of all the places. Granted, 5G deployments are a bit stalled because it's a bit harder to do infrastructure installations with missiles flying in.
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Granted, 5G deployments are a bit stalled because it's a bit harder to do infrastructure installations with missiles flying in.
On the other hand, if infrastructure has been destroyed you can't keep putting off upgrades, you have to replace the destroyed equipment so you might as well deploy current versions.
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The USA is one country, whereas the EU consists of 27 countries each with their own mobile networks. These networks are not competing with each other, although some are owned by the same companies they are running different networks and providing different services in each of these countries.
Each individual country typically only has 3-4 options available.
Each country also has their own separate regulatory framework and spectrum allocations, so it's quite difficult to run an EU-wide network.
Re:Probably a good article (Score:5, Informative)
The US is the United States.
It is composed of 50 states which are independent with borders, different rules, regs, etc.
The US is more analogous to the EU than just one of the European countries.
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I'm in the US. My phone plan is $15/mo and I get quite-good data rates via 5G almost everywhere. It's fantastic. The FCC rules that created the MVNO ecosystem are a triumph. It's an example where regulation is great. But there are plenty of other examples where regulation is terrible. And in general neither voters nor politicians are any good at telling the difference, nor is there much appetite to ever go back and fix any regulations which turn out to be bad.
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$20 a month seems cheap?
It seems that certainly you're paying a lot. You can get a cell plan paying less than 10 € (obviously there are many more expensive), I can get a second cell by 5€.
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All things relative my friend you are just making my case stronger. Check what Americans pay for cell service.
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It's nice to make up imaginary people to argue against.
If having 4G over 5G means I get a universal healthcare system I will take it all day long.
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Strong claims.
Show me the relevant health outcomes in the US vs Europe or Asia
Then show the healthcare spending per capita for those places versus the US.
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Slashvertisments have gone political now? (Score:5, Insightful)
The same arguments were made about Europe's privacy laws. If the price for "competition" is to be steamrolled by mega corps selling my personal info to anyone and everyone I'll happily bow out of this particular race.
Quality infrastructure, hey? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Europe has prioritized shorter-term low consumer prices at the expense of quality infrastructure," chief executive Borje Ekholm told me in Davos earlier this month. "I'm very concerned about Europe. We need to invest much more in infrastructure, in being digital."
Every time I read something like this, I remember the regular power outages in different parts of the US every time there is a storm, or it gets too cold, or too hot, or some other natural disaster hits.
I never experienced a single power outage in a EU country in my entire life. Not an expert, but I think this has to do with the stuff going underground and not being suspended on flimsy poles that are exposed the forces of nature.
Last time I checked, Internet connectivity and bandwidth was on average also much better in the EU:
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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Re:Quality infrastructure, hey? (Score:4, Insightful)
So how long would a doubling of your energy costs take to make up the amount you've coughed up for that solar energy system?
But then you live in a country that still builds most of its housing out of cheap fucking wooden planks even in cities. Then we all get to watch the sobbing inhabitants on the TV news sitting in the remains of their oversized shed after it got blown away by a storm/tornado/big bad wolf. Usually with the brick chimney left standing. You'd think that might be a BIIIIG clue as to how to rebuild.
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WW2 was far too long ago to use as an excuse and while large areas of low population density certainly works against us we have far too many areas with moderate population density and above with above ground lines just waiting to be knocked out in the next storm.
As for a $5,000 personal solution to our unreliable power grid, why does that sound far too much like the type of shit one needs to do in developing countries and not something one should have to do in a first world one to me?
Your remote cabin not h
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They definitely happen, even if the US infrastructure is not nearly up to snuff.
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Lucky you. Unfortunately not everyone was having the same experience two weeks ago:
Power cuts across the UK after Storm Isha brings 99mph winds [bbc.co.uk]: "Electricity companies say people have lost power in several different parts of the UK - including 45,000 homes in Northern Ireland, 8,000 in the north-west of England, 3,000 in Wales and several hundred in Cornwall."
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Technically, the UK is no longer part of the EU...
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Well, you got me there. I also forgot that they've completely revamped their grid infrastructure in the past 7 years ;-)
Good thing a Google News search for "Europe blackout" is quick to illustrate the point [france24.com]: "At least five dead and 1.2 million French homes without electricity as Storm Ciaran sweeps Europe"
Yes, sure (Score:2)
Bring more semi-literate shills to tell me how to live my life. Thanks.
Truer words have never been spoken (Score:3, Insightful)
> But there's a trade-off between consumer protection and the profit motive that drives investment and innovation
The WSJ said the quiet part out loud.
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Something like 90% of the innovation investment is government driven, even in the US.
Re:Truer words have never been spoken (Score:5, Insightful)
"If we can't make all the profits it's an infringement on our rights. Having some or most of the profits just isn't good enough"
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Well, "profit drives investment and innovation" sounds like another "trickle down" trope, just with another funnel where it is supposed to trickle down into.
Yes, if nothing get's poured into on top,. nothing CAN trickle down. But just pouring money in on top will NOT MAKE anything trickle down automatically.
For any kind of profit I make I have to decide: Do I let them trickle down or do I keep them? Well, I'd choose to keep mine.
This article out of whack, yo! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm confused, how is having more options (and one should look per country, not "Europe" or EU-wide) a bad thing? Here in Finland there are 3 major networks by the main 3 operators, serving ~5.5 million people, all covering approximately the same area of the country. On top of that, there's some other mobile service providers (using those 3 networks) that I can choose from, as well. So, there's some competition. Now, I pay max 25 euros (let's say 28 USD), but usually only about 12 per month for all the calls and data (4G) I want to use in Finland, the Nordics and the Baltics (Fins do take trips to for example Sweden and Estonia on the regular so it's actually useful that it covers 7 countries). In the rest of the EU, I have a 13GB limit per month I believe. I think I'm going to survive on my holiday.
I once used 65GB of mobile data in a week, tethering my connection so we could stream stuff, from our summer cottage. The bill for that entire month? 19 euros...
Availability of 4G in Finland is excellent. There's a few spots where there's no main roads and nobody lives that aren't covered by the 1 network I checked. I can't talk 5G, since I don't see the need for it myself, but it looks like coverage from the Finnish networks is pretty good, though limited to the parts of the country where lots of people live.
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Well that's the point, you don't actually have more competition - you just have greater fragmentation and inconsistency because the market is smaller. You've got 3 options in Finland, just like there's 3 options in the US.
What you don't get is the same economies of scale, those 3 operators need to split the 5 million potential customers amongst themselves, whereas the 3 operators in the US have a base of over 300 million customers so potentially an average of over 100 million each.
EU regulates its way to a fair ... (Score:2)
... and sustainable market.
There, FTFY.
So what? (Score:3)
Sounds like winning to me (Score:2)
Mobile prices 1/3 of American prices. Sounds like winning to me.
No one is getting it right... (Score:2)
In the U.S. regulation is often driven by existing industries buying politicians to raise the barriers to entry and box out competition. In the E.U. regulation is driven by trying to protect and benefit citizens, probably to an excessive degree.
No one is getting it totally right, but at least the government of the EU is attempting to serve the people it's supposed to be serving - citizens. I'm not inclined to lean towards more regulations but given the choice between the two? I'll take a government that
Ah, more WSJ whinge attacks. (Score:2)
what a load of crap (Score:2)
the actual reason is that most EU telcos are just dividend cows for the stock market...
"Free Mobile" is at the forefront of investing, and is privately owned after doing a not so great stint in said stock market.
Last Place? (Score:2)
Well, "regulate their way to last place" only if the ranking is based on the amount of regulation. But the amount or lack of regulation is not a value in itself!
You want to get to the top of the list? Scrap all laws! Hooray, Number one! Well, you'll also have highest murder and poverty rate, but the lowest crime rate because nothing is regulated as crime!
You can't just count "Europe has x unit of regulation, the US has y regulation" and put it on an arbitrary ranking. The question is, if those regulations i
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uhmm.. on second thought.... let me add a big "in general" to my last statement :-)
Regulators killing Electric Vehicles??? (Score:2)
....losing out to the U.S. on artificial intelligence, and to China on electric vehicles. There is one field where the European Union still leads the world: regulation. Having set the standard on regulating mergers, carbon emissions, data privacy, and e-commerce.....
We see the political bias of the author in this line....Electric vehicles in Europe exist because of government regulation. The reason Europe doesn't lead in electric vehicles is because the European Automotive industry doesn't want to make electric vehicles.
Since this is a WSJ article, I think we need to realize this is more about American politics than European regulations. In America we have short memories, and most Americans haven't studied the 19th century. We have forgotten what it was like to have b
oblig (Score:2)
WSJ owned by? (Score:3)
The WSJ is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox "News". Are we surprised by its anti-government positions?
American Expat in Denmark (Score:2)
So, tell me... (Score:2)
All these posts against the EU... is Rupert Murdoch and/or his son paying you to post these lies? Is *anyone* paying you?
No, you're just suckers. And no, the EU, with nearly half again as many people as the US, is not "falling behind". (Gee, I see they're talking about building a bigger supercollider - the US's last gasp of that was in the mid-nineties).
Libertarian vs Not Libertarian: A False dichotomy (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, there are many regulations that require more and more electronics and software in cars in order to achieve compliance (e.g. rear view cameras, software control systems for increasing efficiency). Perhaps if we have easy access to electronics, this is a reasonable cost to impose on auto manufacturers, because the safety gained is worth the tradeoff of increased costs and less competition. But say that our supply chain became weaker, and it was no longer a reasonable expectation that we could outfit every car with these electronics. How do we walk that regulation back? Or do we say that we’re willing to just dramatically reduce the number of cars on the road, even without concomitant improvements in urban planning and non-auto transportation, and forget everybody who can’t afford it?
Same with healthcare. We put so many documentation and IT requirements on doctors, that this has led to a dramatic reduction in individual health providers and an increase in giant hospital systems, because who can juggle all these requirements with a staff of one doctor, one nurse, and one secretary? The giant hospital systems are still suffering from personnel shortages, because even just meeting this regulatory requirements causes burnout and high costs (see the explosive rise in hospital administrators) https://www.athenahealth.com/k... [athenahealth.com] . We *could* walk back some of those regulatory requirements, because they cause explosive costs without concomitant improvement in healthcare outcomes, but that would mean recognizing that just because a regulation was made with good intentions does not mean it has good outcomes, even by its own standards.
With AI, it’s even more frustrating because many of the harms that the regulations are intended to curtail are abuses by monopolies, but in reality many of the survivors of the regulatory environment will be monopolies, and the people who will lose out are small businesses and hobbyists. It would be like if the moment the Personal Computer, the Amateur Radio, and the independent video game were starting to be built up by hobbyists, regulators came in so hard and fast, requiring such onerous restrictions to make sure nothing bad can ever happen (e.g. a hobbyist shocking themselves when wiring their radio up), that only IBM, Motorola, and EA lock up their respective industries before any competitors can even gestate. Would the Apple II or DOOM ever be created if regulators had the same attitudes back then for those industries as they do today for AI?
The EU absolutely aborted its AI industry in utero. OpenAI/Google/Microsoft won’t notice, but every enterprising AI hobbyist knows to stay far, far away from the EU.
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Per your hospital example - In the USA whenever you see over-regulation leading to the death of individual operators in favor of a few giant institutions run by even bigger finance companies, killing the individual operators is almost certainly the primary motivation of the regulation in the first place. That's what lobbying and campaign contributions are for.
I don't know a lot about Europe, but it sounds like they opted to favor a competitive market for their phone services and actually got it. Good for t
BS Signal Detected (Score:3)
The technocrats who staff the EU in Brussels aren't anti-free market. Just the opposite: they still believe in free trade, unlike the U.S. or China
Unlike the US? Or "unlike the U.S. or China", putting them both on the same bag? What does this even mean? How TF does the author even attempt to quantify such a statement?
This is not to say there aren't problems with EU regulators, but this is not a technically valid description of a problem. It's ideological propaganda.
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Indeed. Nowhere in Europe can you find such class. https://truthsocial.com/@realD... [truthsocial.com]
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Well good news for me, I get:
Sorry, you have been blocked - You are unable to access truthsocial.com
Putting that link there and me trying to view it made my day! Thank you
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Well, here you are: https://imgur.com/a/R45X6f9 [imgur.com]
If you're also blocked from imgur, then it is up to you.
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Well good news for me, I get:
Sorry, you have been blocked - You are unable to access truthsocial.com
Putting that link there and me trying to view it made my day! Thank you
Apparently you can't handle the truth.
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At time of posting you have a single "Overrated" downmod. Apparently someone didn't think +2 was the right place for your comment.
If you don't want to get modded down for posts making extraordinary claims, the burden is on your to provide extraordinary evidence.
Re: Just soak corporations more (Score:3)
I'd prefer that over what the EU does. Look at what they did to GM crops for example -- they pre-emptively banned it before they even understood it. Now Europe is currently in the proverbial stone age on that one, which is still banned there, even though the scientific consensus on GMO being safe is even stronger than that of climate change.
Now here they are pre-emptively banning even more shit that they don't even understand. Basically, they're afraid of anything they have no information about. They just l
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I think this is one of the few things they got right.
I really don't wanna eat wheat that has DNA of an electric eel spliced into it....
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"I really don't wanna eat wheat that has DNA of an electric eel spliced into it...."
And why not? eating wheat and eel together are diverse proteins. Combine them in one is bad? This is exactly what OP was saying. Irrational fear is, well irrational.
Right now they are busy irradiating oranges with nuclear decay to hope one of the mutated seeds has something they can use, and guess what? That is not considered GMO and doesnt have to be labeled as such because its a "natural" mutation.
Re: Just soak corporations more (Score:4, Interesting)
All new food-related inventions should be treated with suspicion. See trans-fats, animal growth hormones and fat free diets.
It could very well be that eel DNA does not cause problems, but I've heard of efforts to make plants make their own pesticides. Is it safe? Perhaps. Should we spend some effort making sure of that? Absolutely.
Right now in the US, there's no independent safety checks. The GMO producer says it's safe and the FDA has no choice but to believe them. It's essentially the same "self certification" program that worked out so well for Boeing. Except when an airliner crashes, it makes headline news and processes are changed in a hurry. In the case of unsafe food, it will be decades before anything is discovered.
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There really is no mechanism for GMO wheat to harm you. Think about it for a few seconds. If we absorbed DNA from the food we ate into us we would not live very long. Our stomachs break down DNA into base molecules and that stuff is specifically blocked from passing through the colon.
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It is absolutely true that most of the companies pushing GMOs are quite evil. And while there are some things you could do to create problems like putting the protein in peanuts that people are allergic to in something else in practice that is not an actual issue. There are databases of all known allergens and it is pretty simple to check against them before you insert some custom DNA. And while you are not completely impermeable to the DNA of the food you eat it is close enough and it is not like the fish
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Are you among the 80% of Americans [consumeraffairs.com] who support mandatory labeling of food that contains DNA?
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No.
But I am for labeling foods that have had DNA from other species spliced into the DNA structures of the food.
I don't want that drastic of a change, man made into my food....so at least label it so I can know what I'm purchasing.
I also would like these franken-foods to be made to where they cannot reproduce on their own in the wild, ie not be able to spread pollen and all so that "normal"
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Unlike the USA, the EU hasn't given up on social democracy just yet, although it's getting increasingly weakened. The EU legislates to protect its citizens while the USA eats its young.
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I agree with you mostly. What I do like is GMO to make a crop able to be grown locally without chemicals. For instance in Colorado it gets too cold at night for tomatoes most of the year. They freeze and die and that means tomatoes have to be imported quite a distance. However, a GMO tomato was created that adds a tuna protein to prevent freezing. It means the tomato can be grown locally and massively cuts down on environmental damage while posing no risk to people.
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And what do you think of GMO crops that aren't designed to be immune to those poisons, such as Golden Rice [wikipedia.org]? There've not only been protests against its use, there's been at least one case of vandals distroying a demonstration plot because GMO bad.
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Re: Just soak corporations more (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes I absolutely assume that Monsanto is going to do something evil. There is a thing called pattern recognition, which is the basis of brain function, and serves to be able to make predictions for the future in order to make decisions about the future. In other words, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. In even more other words, frog, scorpion, crossing the river. Monsanto and Bill have been nothing but a machiavellian fooling game of the grandest scale, and if you think that they will be good just this once, boy is there a bridge in Brooklyn waiting for you.
The people will be helped as well by growing a couple of fucking carrots, and that can be accomplished right now. But to instead spend years getting golden rice market penetration against the will of the very people you claim to want to help is counterproductive at the very least, and if you take into account of what you know of the "helpers", straight up colonialism.
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unless it's a hospital and he's having chest pain. Or it's a necessary good and all the companies who sell it do the same evil thing. or all the products on the market have the same problem. Or he doesn't have time to research which companies are actually lying. Or that information is unavailable.
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Joe Consumer buys what he sees other Joe Consumers buying. This means advertising is effective because Joe Consumer seeing someone else with X product is itself an advertisement of X product, why if Joe Consumer has one...shouldn't we ALL have one?
Soooo, you only buy things you see your peers buy? You never ever buy something different? And that's why there's only one brand of beer, car, and deodorant on the market?
Don't get me wrong. What other people buy does influence my decisions. It's just far from the only thing. And just because some consumer might like something doesn't guarantee it will be on the market. Bringing it back home to this thread, for example, I don't think I can buy a cheap 4G-only cell plan any more, none of the vendors in my ar