Because for now, that's just what those financially profiting from the AI-hype tell us. Be it sama, hyung or nadella, they all profit if people _believe_ AI is a force multiplier for everybody. Reality is much more muddy though and it's absolutely not as obvious as those people claim.
And keep in mind that a 5-10x price hike is to be expected if those companies keep spending billions to make millions.
Right now, there is a consistent stream of papers incoming which indicates that AI might be much more of a specialized tool for very particular situations instead of the "solve everything"-tool the hype makes people believe. This is highly significant.
And not only are those cries wrong, reality is quite the opposite. The vast majority of fines are towards european businesses. Big Tech aren't the only ones who violate data privacy standards all the time. [0] You just don't read about those here, so people like to just assume those fines don't exist.
Additionally, it helps to actually learn how the current law developed - it primarily was modeled after the german Bundesdatenschutzgesetz, which was put into law in a modern form in the 90s, long before FAANG.
Worth noting the tracker does not track which fines are currently being contested (in an obvious manner). i.e. do not assume all the fines you see there have actually been paid
Though probably safe to assume the smaller fines against smaller companies with smaller lobbying^H^H^H^H^H^H legal teams most likely have :-)
I went to the site and sorted by fine - I needed to go to the bottom of second list to find a non US company ? By the time I get to pages that are mostly non US companies the fines are two orders of magnitude smaller and dropping fast - do you have any aggregate view to compare ? I would not be surprised at all that indeed most of the fines were towards US companies in total amount.
I saw TikTok at #3 and #5, Enel (Italian) at #15, Vodafone at #19 (British) and starting at around #21 the list is basically dominated by European companies.
Speaking from personal experience, American companies, especially the big ones, tend to treat everyone else as "Americans that they don't know they're American yet" or alternatively "slightly dumb Americans".
At least for one of them, yeah, they apply the legal laws, but the general decisions are taken in the US with little regard for local "non-impeding laws", I would call them. "Impeding laws" would be laws that would block the launch of something (for example they wouldn't attach an AR-15 to every product sold). "Non-impeding laws" would for example be, labor laws. They just assume that what works in the US sort of works everywhere else and deal with the consequences along the way.
I count TikTok as big tech non-EU so I automatically put it in to that bucket but you are right it is not a US company. Still fits the theme that EU is using GDPR to shake down big tech it does not own. I missed Enel (did not know about them) and yeah Vodafone was bottom page 2 first EU brand I recognized from the list, but OK middle of page 2 for non-EU.
Again just a rough feeling from the list but I would speculate that over 50 percent of fines in total were towards US or non-EU based companies.
Please re-read what you’ve written in these two comments with a critical eye. You’re speaking from a lack of knowledge without very much care and reaching incorrect conclusions that agree with your initial bias. When someone else does the work of helping nudge you towards reality you seem to be doing a poor job correcting. Sorry if this comes across as rude, it’s said with the kindest of intentions.
So I did quick excel math - I took just the US companies from top 100, sumed them and then I summed everything else (the entire list, not just top 100) - including tiktok - and the ratio is almost 3 to one against US companies in total.
In fact Meta alone is fined more than everyone else combined.
The fact that the EU just doesn't have big companies in the fields that are more likely to be abusive with customer data.
It's a bit like the sweatshop argument. If your company wins out by using sweatshops, yeah, you're going to end up with the billion dollar argument. But if a certain market doesn't want stuff produced by sweatshops, and they decide to dis-incentivize it by tariffing it, that:
Thats all a matter of perspective, not something I am willing to argue. EU has a history of making protectionist legislation under the guise of protecting its members, eg. the whole GMO story, and I can see how someone can make an argument here. If it is valid or not is up to you I guess.
But saying that the fines are mostly towards EU members when over 2/3 is fined towards US companies is misrepresenting the data and the opposing viewpoint.
If a company does business in the EU, it's dealing with EU citizens, giving the EU jurisdiction over how that business is conducted.
The EU absolutely has full legal standing for this; if big tech doesn't want to abide by it, they can always leave the EU.
American companies get fined more often for the simple reason that they break the GDPR more often since the US lacks the same legal privacy framework, which means they don't have the same incentive to comply with it and instead try to rules lawyer around it.
> Still fits the theme that EU is using GDPR to shake down big tech it does not own.
It's not a shake down, it's the fucking law which they don't follow and have to pay fines accordingly. Every single business in the EU has to follow these laws, if the US-based ones are not taking proper measures to not act illegally that's on them, not on the legislation, this shake down narrative is quite tired by now.
> Again just a rough feeling from the list but I would speculate that over 50 percent of fines in total were towards US or non-EU based companies.
Perhaps because the US companies are more eager in breaking laws and figuring it out later? Isn't that the whole take on EU vs US business approach, the US ones are big risk takers (including in acting illegally) vs EU ones being risk-averse?
I feel disheartened that this narrative is still spewed on HN, it's just vitriol, the US companies are breaking the law of EU members, if they do business here they need to follow the law, it's absurdly simple.
This isn't something I really care to argue - OP was pretending like the fines were spread out equally in the EU and somehow the US complaints are baseless - when its obvious that the fines are heavily weighted towards US companies.
Whatever this is based on - OP was misrepresenting the data.
I don't think OP said anything about the spread of the fines amount being equal, they brought up that there are many EU-based companies whom have been levied fines, I believe you interpreted it wrongly and are bashing a non-existing argument.
US companies have been fined larger sums because their transgressions are more common, they do it repeatedly, and their global revenue is higher, there's no conspiracy here, it's exactly how the law is written.
I invite you to re-read their point:
> The vast majority of fines are towards european businesses.
Which is true, the majority of fines are towards EU-based businesses, not the majority of the amount in fines.
Again, if US-based companies with a much higher revenue and market penetration weren't breaking the laws they wouldn't be levied the higher fines.
> It's not a shake down, it's the fucking law which they don't follow and have to pay fines accordingly. Every single business in the EU has to follow these laws,
That’s a lie, and you know it.
Spotify is not a “gatekeeper” according to the DMA. Why? Because there is a specific carve out for streaming businesses. German newspapers do not have to comply with the GDPR. Why? Again, because there is a specific carve out for newspapers.
These laws are specifically written so that they only apply to businesses that by an unbelievably amazing series of coincidences just happen to be those not based in the EU.
Can you point me to the carve outs in the EU's directives? No, I'm not aware of those carve outs (and German newspapers display the GDPR notices for me all the time).
And it applies to all newspapers so there's no distinction between being German or American.
If you believe it's a shakedown maybe you are looking at this with very nationalistic eyes, if US companies cannot abide by the law it's on them, most other companies do.
And Spotify doesn't have a carve out, if you read the DMA you'll understand why streaming is not considered a gatekeeper (since it's not a walled garden).
"Still fits the theme that EU is using GDPR to shake down big tech it does not own."
No, the EU is trying to protect the rights of its citizens.
If they wanted to "shake down big tech" they'd just do a Turkey or India and pressure them to do their bidding in terms of censorship and information exchange.
>If they wanted to "shake down big tech" they'd just do a Turkey or India and pressure them to do their bidding in terms of censorship and information exchange.
We are already leaning on US intelligence agencies for data and every audit finds no problem in how the US handles EU data... get real - the EU is just not in the position to pull the same move because it is not the same kind of entity or legal structure, they do tariffs and regulations/collecting fines.
Its because American companies are much larger than most European companies in terms of revenue. And because the impact of their infringements are much larger due to the nature of their business. If Bumfuck LLC from Sweden with maybe a 1000 customers fucks up they arent impacting millions of users, unlike when Google or Meta does things.
IME as an American, US companies play much more fast and loose with laws. Especially tech, which has "disrupt first, ask questions later" approach to ethics.
>misusing it just decreases clarity and hinders communication
There is no such thing as "misusing language". Language changes. It always does.
Maybe you grew up in an area of the world where it's really consistent everywhere, but in my experience I'm going to have a harder time understanding people even two to three villages away.
Because language always changes.
Words mean a particular thing at a point in time and space. At another one, they might mean something completely different. And that's fine.
You can like it or dislike it, that's up to you. However, I'd say every little bit of negative thoughts in that area only serve to make yourself miserable, since humanity and language at large just aren't consistent.
And that's ok. Be it REST, literally or even a normal word such as 'nice', which used to mean something like 'foolish'.
Again, language is inconsistent by default and meanings never stay the same for long - the more a terminus technicus gets adapted by the wider population, the more its meaning gets widened and/or changed.
One solution for this is to just say "REST in its original meaning" when referring to what is now the exception instead of the norm.
My cofounder's wife, during a parents together at school, was "advised" by some of the mothers to not "hang around those" mothers because they're stranger folk. Turns out, they lived 1.5 miles away in the next village.
well, if you ignore the current country borders then "German" would encompass a large portion of Switzerland and the Netherlands. So, with that assumption, I would be surprised if Italian had more dialects than German.
IPO always means enshittification. So obviously people hate it, it's essentially a heads-up telling us to find something else. I've yet to find any major startup of the last decade where this pattern didn't hold.
That generous free plan will very likely either vanish or contain tons of aggressive nagging in the future, at least that's what usually happens.
A founder-led company can easily choose to reach a point were it says "enough profit for me - let's not make the product worse for more money" - in public companies, that point simply doesn't exist, at least not in practice. All the money means all the enshittification they can get away with.
"Great" for the majority of these is a stretch. There's no shortage of complaints about how Spotify treats both artists and customers, and Roblox enjoys yearly controversies from how it provides access to and exploits its customer base of children.
Bruh, Spotify has been absolutely shit, and their practices and push towards AI and completely unusuable suggestions algorithm are making it more and more shit.
It's not a big deal but the cars allowed on Uber has worsened. I remember trying to sign up as a driver a few years ago with a 2009 Corolla and being denied because the car was too old and now see cars from then allowed today. Maybe that's the cost of scaling but I find it worse. Also no more Uber pool.
I like Uber but I was surprised at how bad their mapping is - they get the route to get me home wrong and I've gone through the process of telling them about the mistake in their maps and they just seemed to ignore me.
> Any judgment of a court or tribunal and any decision of an administrative authority of a third country requiring a controller or processor to transfer or disclose personal data may only be recognised or enforceable in any manner if based on an international agreement, such as a mutual legal assistance treaty, in force between the requesting third country and the Union or a Member State, without prejudice to other grounds for transfer pursuant to this Chapter.
So if, and only if, an agreement between the US and the EU allows it explicitly, it is legal. Otherwise it is not.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the balance of power here.
In your mind it seems to be "those people come pleading for money so they can do research, giving it is essentially charity"- but it couldn't be further from the truth.
Most top-tier researchers can do their science anywhere. If you don't make stuff easy and comfortable enough to hold them, they'll just leave the country.
A significant chunk of science spending is an attempt to bribe researchers to stay. Drop that and other countries are going to get those invaluable people.
I can tell you that several major EU universities have started massive outreach programs and are starting to snatch all the top researchers from the US. The damage this will cause to the US' scientific leadership is not even quantifiable, it's completely insane.
Shooting your own foot because you "don't trust bureaucrats". Oh well.
Anyway, at my university the first few top researchers already arrived, this is going to be exciting in european research. If you guys don't want this massive advantage, we'll gladly take it.
Please stop correcting them, maybe then all my friends will come back and do research here instead of in the US.
One of my friends, who is a tenured professor in a top 10 US university, already switched our Signal messages to expire after 24h the other day. I asked him why, and he said "you never know what the current administration might use against you".
So yes, I'm all for having our people back if the US voted that they don't want them.
It is not charity for the researchers. That's money earned. It's charity for the bureaucrats who administer it. As for the facilities and administration it pays for, I take no issue with the facilities. I want to take an axe to the useless bureaucrats and lawyers involved. My dad is a university researcher and he faces endless bureaucratic nonsense to run his lab. If we want to keep researchers here we should start by making it easy for them. It's a cost savings too.
Because it's good enough for almost everything. The vast majority of projects will never have to scale to billions of users, so hyperscalability is not a huge concern.
It has a low barrier to entry and great language features - static typing being one of the big ones. It has become a really nice language over the years, great to work in and in no way less satisfying or effective than for example golang.
> The vast majority of projects will never have to scale to billions of users, so hyperscalability is not a huge concern.
I would have thought PHP would scale very well. It may not be high performance, but its start each request-response cycle from scratch should scale horizontally very well, surely?
It does. But scaling to billions of users (or billions of requests per day) is still not easy and you really need high performance for that. Laravel scales to a certain point, where their design decisions (eloquent, the queuing system etc.) are still working.
That said, with today's PHP it is possible to optimize the hot path pretty well with stuff like FFI.
> It has a low barrier to entry and great language features - static typing being one of the big ones
... and it's completely optional in many cases on top of that. Even if you're using third party libraries, it will only crash if you mess up your types at the library's interface.
And keep in mind that a 5-10x price hike is to be expected if those companies keep spending billions to make millions.
Right now, there is a consistent stream of papers incoming which indicates that AI might be much more of a specialized tool for very particular situations instead of the "solve everything"-tool the hype makes people believe. This is highly significant.
"Just believe me bro" is just not enough.