Was always? I mean I remember a time when it was completely free, had an open source driver, and existed in a world where cloud services weren't a major thing yet.

I recommend not going full hyperbole. They have little point today, but they were once a very good free service. And no it didn't make an immediate beeline to enshitification, that's not possible since the act of enshitification relies on having a degree of customer lock-in in the first place. They locked customers in quite well over many years with a good product, and that also answers your question.

You're conflating different things. There's nothing against American companies providing services in the EU. That has nothing to do with preventing a purchase of existing companies in the tech sector.

To the point at hand, there are currently two US operators leasing mobile licenses already in the EU, ViaSat and EchoStar. Both have existing spectrum, and there has been precisely zero indication in any EU country that they are concerned about this.

There literally are no bribes needed. The entire mobile landscape is already a mixture of non-EU owned and operated businesses. Some of the biggest players: Vodafone - British, A1 - Mexican, Turkcell - Turkey (and part owned by Turkish government), TDC is owned by Macquarie Group - Australia, 3 (a major player) is owned by Hutchinson - Hong Kong, it's already a complete mixed bag.

At this point you don't need bribes, you can just take the EU to the courts for locking you out of competition.

Build a time machine, go back in time and assassinate trump before his first term as president?

Most bugs do not get CVEs. That's like saying "lets judge how many people in the population are speeding by counting only the fines issued by the police".

To be clear your premise is correct. Most of these bugs won't be critical. But I'd stop short of gaslighting them simply because you couldn't count the CVEs. Also this isn't Anthropic claiming Mythos discovered and reported them, this is Anthropic claiming security researchers looked at Mythos's output and confirmed they were in fact real bugs.

Well I'll be damned. Looks like they did remove the login requirement. (Honestly the previous thing was so bad that I purposefully stopped using it).

You dismiss it, but the reality is that it is a sign of precisely what the app is there for. It's a promotional marketing tool and no longer a system setting manager. It's a huge deal. Right up there with not having ads forced down your throat at an OS level.

If I kick you in the balls will you accept it when I tell you, "It's okay, yeah I kicked you in the balls but sure it's not as bad as the time I punched you in the stomach". Will we be friends? Your justification here is ... well it makes you sound like an abuse victim.

Why do you accept the status quo as being acceptable to you without complaint? - This post brought to you by Coca Cola, quench that thirst you marketing pay-bitch.

The difference is in the service requirements. We don't pay a fee for this and therefore it is limited to local residents of said council, hence an identity verification step.

Is there actually another player in this space which can provide these services (broadband, low latency, high speed - in the physical sense of the customer moving at >900km/h)?

Lots of actions were taken. This just happens to be the first that had a meaningful outcome within the legal framework. The ACM looked at this, the government contracts committee looked at this, it was subject to a legal battle in the courts, and ultimately a mix of this allowed the BTI to claim jurisdiction at which point they could issue a legal recommendation which the government jumped on basically instantly.

The contract with Solvinity would have ended naturally in a couple of week since it was due to expire on the 6th of August. Moving the contract to another provider was one of the things that was investigated by the government and the estimated duration for this was over a year worth of effort - unable to be done in the timeframe required. The government renewed the contract for 2 years on that basis. This was subject to a court case where citizens sued the government for renewing the contract, but the contract was lawful and reasoning behind it valid.

It's the government services. They have the power over you to begin with. Have another think about this and tell us why you think Peter Thiel should be in any way involved as a gatekeeper between you and your government (while of course skimming your tax dollars from the top).

Wait... are you Peter Thiel? Because that's the only reason I could think for your post.

You may recognise them under their previous name: IBM.

They were a major player from the day they existed. They birthed onto the New York Stock exchange as a privileged nepobaby with a birthday present of 75% of the Fortune 100 business as "existing" customers, an 90000 IBM employees..

Not quite. This was more of an intervention. In fact the discussions over the past 6 months have largely been focused on figuring out how to actually block the sale and on what grounds. The final decision may even be questionable. Initially the competition authority wanted to intervene and couldn't. The lower house attempted and failed. There was an attempt to move the contract but time didn't allow so the contract was extended for a short period. That kicked off a legal fight where the courts also ruled that despite how bad of an idea this was there wasn't really anything they could do to stop it.

The final deciding factor came from the BTI - who investigates business dealings with critical infrastructure providers. Solvinity wasn't considered one since all they had was a contract to provide services, but it wasn't really until that contract was extended due to the complexity of moving at short notice that someone convinced them they have jurisdiction to investigate, and now they've issued a legal opinion that caused the government to intervene on national security grounds.

There was no real process in this review. It was more of an "oh FAAAARK how can we stop this?" process.

To be clear there is a legal mandate but that is only to maintain the data within the country. The issue of potential foreign ownership didn't really come into the existing law in any clearly defined way.

Foreign takeovers don't inject any capital into the economy, they take capital out of the economy by definition. The GDP attributed to Solvinity's operations would be accounted for by a company based in New York.

To be clear, you think it's less terrifying to have a private for profit company gatekeep your connection to government's digitial services?

They don't have two control applications. They have one control application and one fucking horrendous poorly programmed marketing app that serves only to force users to register for an nvidia account.

One is a control panel. The other seemingly exists to offer me a "Marvel Rivals Geforce Reward" whatever the fuck that is.

If anyone every programs a tool which has the "System" menu option next to a "Redeem" menu option I hope you get hit by a bus... and don't die, but spend an eternity in pain.

For those who don't understand what DigiD is, it's the identity verification system used by the Dutch government for... EVERYTHING. Want to change your health insurance? DigiD login. File your taxes? DigiD login. Register a change of address? DigiD login. Get a new driver's license? DigiD login (after which you receive your new license and then use the app to link the new license to DigiD. Heck you want to get your local council to come and do a waste pick-up from your street - DigiD login.

The Netherlands is one of the most digitised countries in the world, but that comes of course with risks, they are very inflexible when the digital systems go down. That there wasn't a legal mandate to keep this company under Dutch control is the most astounding thing that's come out of this debate.