Honestly, this seems like a win for X but the article tries (somewhat hard) to frame it as a loss. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the author's personal opinion of Mr Musk.
It's definitely a win for X! They'll be happy. It's also something nice to show all the cynics that pop up here every time an SV giant receives an EU fine, claiming it's purely an extortion racket. It would've been trivial to designate X as a gatekeeper to make some cash, but this shows that that's not the core idea.
> It would've been trivial to designate X as a gatekeeper to make some cash
The whole point of the article is that the sole reason why X is not "feeling the full force of the EU regulation" is that.... there is not enough cash to make so the EU does not bother. The very definition of an extortion market.
I'd argue that X is far worse than other tech giants in promoting hate crime etc. But since the EU can't really grab a lot of money from it (turnover too low) they care less. As a European, I read the law as; it does not matter how much of a threat to democracy you are: the amount of money you make (and thus we amount we can fine) are the main factor that will determine if we go after you or not. Great.
"The DMA aims at ensuring a higher degree of competition in European digital markets by preventing large companies from abusing their market power and by allowing new players to enter the market"
Those are all very nice intentions. But let's look at the facts: you can have massive impact, and still fly under the radar because the way the law is written "large companies" is all about money.
You have millions of users, be cited 1000x/hour on public/private media, be the place where Europe commissioner announce their resignations, and be the origin of countless lawsuits entered around censorship and freedom of speech; if you are owned by a billionaire who is able to squeeze costs and is not in need to make money, you will never be considered to be worth of investigation by the DMA. Just because you don't generate enough money to be worth the EU time.
The way the law is written is all about money; the amount of revenue you make (and thus the amount they can grab) is quite literally the main criteria when deciding if you are subject to it or not. They just sugar coated it with the usual layer of "EU citizen protection" and "protection from abuse of power".
Well, I guess I have a less cynical attitude than you. Sure, goverments and supranatinal organizations are not perfect and they deserve to be criticized. But, I also believe that many people who work there do care about these issues for the sake of humanity.
When you design a regulation like the DMA, how much revenue a company makes is a good proxy of their potential impact on citizens. It's not the only proxy, but it's also not the only criteria in the DMA.
I hate Musk just as much as next person, but it seems obvious that they don't fall under the criteria defined by DMA. I agree that the criteria should be adapted. So, we could discuss about adapting the DMA to include more companies as gatekeepers. And maybe this will happen, the DMA is a brand new regulation, and I'm sure there will be many amendments to it in the years to come.
But just retorting to calling the DMA as a money grab by the EU is not a constructive way forward.
> When you design a regulation like the DMA, how much revenue a company makes is a good proxy of their potential impact on citizens
Absolutely not; it's just a proxy for how much money you can get from them, especially when the way you define the fines is proportional to that number (a coincidence I am sure).
The origin of the problem is that the EU has been unable to properly tax big tech companies for a long time. Due to how accounting works, Meta, Apple, Alphabet etc have been reporting very little revenue in Europe despite Europe being a major market.
They do so because the EU tax rate is much higher than the US so they have a lot of incentive to move all the revenue away through "clever" accounting.
Because there is "no revenue" there is "no profit tax". And that drives the EU crazy to see so much $$$ being done here and no contribution to the states members budget, which are in dire need of cash. Because the international convention prevent you from taxing international revenue, you invent some kind of weird law to fine it instead. Different name, but same result. I am sure you noticed that the fine are proportional to the worldwide revenues of those companies. From a "EU citizen protection" perspective, there is no logic behind taxing money made in Thailand because you breached a law related to users in Belgium. From a "let's grab what we are owed because we have trouble taxing it the normal way" perspective it makes total sense. Fining based on world wide revenue is the one key reason why this law exists.
Because you actually don't want to impact European companies (which are already paying what the EU feels like the "right" amount) you carve some rules and boundaries that are specifically designed to only target the companies you are after. These kind of artificial threshold age poorly as we see.
An excellent counter example to this is Live Nation. They have huge revenue, massive user base and undeniably act as a Gatekeeper in the live music sector (when is the last time you did not use Ticketmaster to buy a ticket ?). Even the US is after them. Will the EU move a finger against them ? Absolutely not; because of the nature of the live music sector it's quite hard to "hide" revenues made in Europe. So Live Nation pays the right amount of tax, and thus will not be investigated. They check all the mark, but they also have already paid their due, so no one is going after them.
In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes — Ben Franklin
There are other reasons to fine companies based on % of their revenue: If it were a fixed amount, large companies would not care about the fine, whereas smaller companies would go bankrupt.
It's probably a reference to the news article about Whatsapp increasing maximum group size to 256 and a journalist pondering over why such a specific number was chosen. OP probably meant it a similar sense, why was 65535 chosen (but it's not really such a mystery).
that isnt logical. A tramp bursts into your store and tries to sleep on the floor. Telling him thats not cool isnt classy? Thats not the world we live in in either case.
Love it! Reminds me about Chip’s Challenge! I used to play it on my old man’s 486 at the ripe age of 6 or 7. Found it last year on an online DOS emulator and was stunned to know that I knew the entire sequence of one of the earliest ice puzzles through pure muscle memory (some 25 years later)
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we should! We have laws against oil spills, we should have laws that prohibit languages with the singular purpose of making me point a gun to my foot and pull the trigger repeatedly.
I was just thinking last night about how the average HN comment is at about written intelligence the level of a very bright college freshman. And how, that being the average, it means that for every 50 comments by people below that grade, there are 50 above.
But the one thing that's amazing here is that the smartest people in the room inevitably turn out to be either 14 year olds who invented a new category of social app, or 74 year olds who worked for NASA... everyone in between being sort of ephemeral.
