That is precisely what the Digital Markets Act is there to do.

Turns out the Americans don't like the idea of worthwhile competitors.

The EU built an anti-coercion instrument that allows for all sorts of trade measures, including bans from public tenders and no longer recognizing intellectual property. It was built specifically for cases like this and only requires a qualified majority of member states in order to be used.

I say it's high time we threaten its use.

A simple Chinese-style firewall level ban would make it quite simple, actually.

I'd rather go to the China model of authoritarianism with working infrastructure (trains, what have you) and a belief in science than to the US model of anti-science regressive authoritarianism where the one percent are the new feudal lords...

The big assumption here is that authoritarianism in Europe would get you better infrastructure.

My personal belief is that for good infrastructure you want capable local industry (to build it) AND a population that is not too wealthy (because this gives additional infrastructure more relative value, keeps the workforce for building it more affordable and thus citizens less likely to oppose the whole thing).

I don't think that having european dictators would really help either of those points, so my infrastructure expectations from neofascism are quite low.

You think the "one percent" are anti-science authoritarians? Have you met them?

The Koch brothers and there anti climate science propaganda network immediately come to mind, as does the Mercer family and their sponsoring of Breitbart.

If I had said "you can't even find 2 extreme outliers among the 3 million 1%ers in the US that are opposed to one particular type of science because of their financial interests" then this would be a reasonable argument. But I didn't say that. And even then, Koch industries is a terrible example. They employ thousands of scientists and engineers.

Can the EU finally grow a pair and fight back? Jfc

Android is open source. It is not free software. The issue we're discussing right now should make the difference very clear.

A better world is possible. Rise up, workers! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

and your salary

If you're in a product-adjacent role at Google there's a 100 other companies that would hire you. Yes, even in this market.

History has seemed to show the only likely outcome is the violent redistribution of riches from one set of oligarchs to another.

Based on what? Sure quips like that are catchy, but what "oligarchs" were there in the Soviet Union circa 1920-1989? The "nomenklatura", while well-off, were absolutely nowhere near the wealth of today's American oligarchs or modern (capitalist) Russian ones. Moreover, unlike oligarchs, they do not form a class: wealth does not transfer reliably one generation to the next, and individuals would phase in and out of high status according to their position in their career.

A very striking way to illustrate this is to look at the career histories of high government officials even very late into the Soviet Union. The last Minister of Coal, Mikhail Shchadov, was born in a village, worked in a mine, went to mining school for engineering, became head of his mine, and thereafter worked his way up the ranks until he was head of the whole apparatus. This story, not that of inherited wealth or monopolistic oligarchs, dominates the histories of Soviet ministers even very late in the decline of the Union.

Where is the "other set" of oligarchs of which you speak? There is none, which means there is hope for workers who might wish to enact fundamental economic change.

You can quibble over degree and the path taken, but wealthy insiders using money to control politics and ideological insiders using political control to amass wealth feel like two sides of the same coin, both leading the same way.

Your definition of class also seems to be very different from a traditional Marxist take -- hereditary systems were mostly seen as a symptom and not the problem itself, and were mostly orthogonal to any understanding of class.

I _hope_ there is hope, but I don't have much confidence that it lies in century old tropes of "rise up and throw off your chains."

But that's the key point: these people weren't insiders, not before gaining their positions, and they didn't even really accumulate wealth. They gained benefits from their position, sure, but little of that was attached to their position -- rather, to their office, and when that office lapsed, so did those privileges. When Khrushchev was removed from office, he got a small pension (500 rubles/mo.) and a house + cottage in which to spend his retirement, and even that was considered relatively comfortable.

So what did they accumulate? Few acquired power for life; none acquired significant wealth, or a power base independent from the party-state. Even after the end of the union, it was not the former nomenklatura who became new oligarchs: by and large it was the security services and their affiliates who were able to feed on the corpse.

You're right to critique how I described class in the previous message, but what I was trying to accumulate was essentially the above. It's not perfect, but I think this is very much a situation where it's important to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I would far rather live in a society where my leaders were once workers like me, raised in the same way, and all men were subject to the same basic economic guarantees. What we live in today is the rule of oligarchs, and it'd be a big step up to merely suffer the rule of bureaucrats.

Please do not spread right-wing conspiracy theories. ("WEF plant", "illegals" killing people etc)

How would not allowing giant death machines on roads cost lives?