The American view of the EU is very much a grass is greener one. They see the things that are better than in the US but not the things that are worse.
The green deal stuff seems to be pretty bad. Manufacturing seems to have a hard time. The next tier economy, e.g. AI, is not seen on the horizon. Over-the-top regulations for agriculture and then opening up the market from goods where such regulations don't exist does not seem smart either.
And there're lots and lots of small things like those.
And no, it's certainly not that bullshit astroturfed story that has been going around, of Meta behind this concerted effort across the Western world because they're too lazy to validate one's age.
https://europeanpirates.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-want-to-...
I think several EU governments want chat control paving the way for domestic surveillance. Though I don't consider that conspiracy theory really. Last years, there have been big scandal cases with use of pegasus, predator and similar spy software from several EU governments for domestic surveillance (eg Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain). The issue is that legal surveillance, the regular phone tapping kind, is inefficient due to people using E2EE chat apps rather than regular phone calls and SMS. There is no legal basis for the more advanced spyware afaik, so these surveillance cases were illegal and kinda "off the books", even though rather widespread. A legal way to surveil the people would be welcome to those who did that and those who want to do the same.
I'm to afraid of the f'ing EU to mention specific names here... But maybe some braver souls will
Internally chat control and migration are never talked about together. Chat control has no leverage on migration in Denmark. Its not a factor that would change anything. It's all about international treaties making it impossible to send people out of the country forcefully. That's the policy the migrant crisis really ignited.
We know how trustable ai outputs are, and now govts' are ready to let the AI's control their people?
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/11/denmark-ai-po...
Edit: this in no way should be read to condone Denmark’s position here.
Whatever we call centre-left today we would have placed much further to right a couple decades ago. At this point even the US Democrats are more progressive than our EU "liberal" parties.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require...
> The KIDS Act Regulates Private Messages, Too
Would you still believe this if Chat Control got though? What good did the EU bring that's good enough to make up for the badness of everyone in Europe having all their private digital communications constantly scanned?
Chat Control is being pushed by member states. The people who keep saving you are the MEPs (elected EU MPs).
You would most likely already have chat control if you were not in the EU. All governments around the world are pushing for this.
Peace in Europe. You have to remember that the EU is fundamentally the world's most successful peace project, founded after the horrors of WW2 to make war in Europe not just unthinkable, but materially impossible.
Before the EU, we had centuries of constantly being at each others throats. There hasn't been armed conflict between EU members and there won't be for as long as it exists. It worked. It broke the cycle of generation after generation of horrible slaughter.
Chat Control is obviously bad. But fundamentally, the good of peace outweighs even that.
However, one should also note that Chat Control is pushed by the member states and their representatives - the EU is actually the institution that's kept it at bay so far.
You're confusing the EU with NATO. Germany is already planning on re-arming[^1] because NATO is dead. The EU is by all means an unfinished project and if I had to bet, I would bet that it won't survive the next two decades. There's no pro-EU majority in any European country right now. Not one. It's a great idea, very poorly implement that gets (some times unfairly, some times fairly) all the blame for everything wrong with Europe right now. Migration, energy, housing, etc.
[1^]: https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2026/04/22/germany...
> It proposes that Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an organization open to the participation of the other countries of Europe. The pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of common foundations for economic development as a first step in the federation of Europe, and will change the destinies of those regions which have long been devoted to the manufacture of munitions of war, of which they have been the most constant victims.
> The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible. The setting up of this powerful productive unit, open to all countries willing to take part and bound ultimately to provide all the member countries with the basic elements of industrial production on the same terms, will lay a true foundation for their economic unification.
[0] https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
Also, the least consequential even ignoring often stated fact that cookie banners are malicious compliance. I care much less about cookie banners than about the ads, and for both of I have uBlock origin filters. So, what to be angry about exactly?
I have a different hypothesis for why the GDPR exists: it is to create a market for EU based compliance companies.
Because the USA tends to privilege corporations over people whereas in the EU it's more balanced (still pretty biased towards corps, though), and I am a people, not a corporations.
Take, for example, the 'cookie law': I much prefer being annoyed by the cookie pop-up over websites shoving a ton of unnecessary and unwanted cookies onto my computer without permission.
...speaking of which:
> and their failures in regulating the Internet
Which political entity would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet? Where are citizens most protected from being inundated with advertising, unwanted cookies, unnecessary JavaScript, false news, scams, and all the other garbage one is normally subjected to when not putting in some amount of effort in combating that shit?
> would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet
So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance?
> false news
For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about this (I’m not sure they even tried doing anything that directly addressed it?)
No. Where do you even come up with this stuff?
> So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance?
Answering a question with a question only works if the question used as answer is a simpler way of getting the answer to the original question.
> For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about [fake news]
Okay, so which country/state/union/whatever has been effective in doing anything about it? Because according to the post I responded to there is someone way better at regulating the Internet than the EU is, so I'm wondering who it is.
inundated with advertising, unwanted cookies, unnecessary JavaScript, false news, scams,
Also:
> I’d rather have that instead of govt monitoring of all communications.
False dilemma, you can have neither. But sure, EU bad because you're not allowed to deny the Holocaust or call for the extermination of Jews/Muslims/the gays/...
Your argument is that voting with your wallet doesn't change things even if it reduces the profits of the company by an amount proportional to the number of people who do it, but voting in an election does where not only is your vote is still diluted by millions of other people, the result is all-or-nothing and the party/candidate doing the thing you didn't like can still retain full control of the government even after losing a couple percent of the vote?
It's the same problem in both cases. What you need is enough viable alternatives that you can pick the one doing the right thing instead of being given a fake choice between two or three "alternatives" that are all doing the wrong thing. And markets with hundreds of competitors are a lot more common than elections with hundreds of candidates/parties on the ballot.
One big thing you need a government to actually do is break up consolidated markets, and the current ones are evidently ineffective at it.
>> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Life is bigger than tech or entrepreneurship. In the 00's I dreamed of moving to the US. That's changed, especially over the last decade. If I was offered a huge salary tomorrow to work in the US I would turn it down.
They found out that they can offload blame on the EU instead and so have chosen to make the web as annoying as possible.
You could probably argue self-hosted, privacy-preserving analytics is a "legitimate business purpose" so doesn't need consent. AFAIK it's because you're sending user data to Google that you normally need consent for GA.
This could be solved on the client side, by requiring all devices with browsers sold in EU to have separate cookie jars per domain and by default those cookies would be deleted on window/tab close. If you wanted to stay logged in to a site, you'd click a button next to the url bar that says "keep cookies for this domain", and be done.
I assume you're pretty well read up on matters of privacy, right? So you have a better awareness and understanding. But do you believe the average person does? Or would you assume that the average person has either been trained to ignore the banner, automatically consent to more invasive tracking, or is generally more confused about why the banner exists, or what it does?
The cookie consent law is the dumbest application of an attempt to improve privacy. It's made the internet worse, and is being used to train people into consenting to giving away their privacy without thinking... because: "clicking accept is what you have to do to use the page" -- every normal person casually browsing any site.
No implementation for cookie based consent can be done correctly.
Personally, I'd love to see a law that makes any/all dark patterns a crime, and empowers state prosecutors via grand jury to bring charges for them against both the company, and individual authors of the specific commits as jointly responsible. I don't want statutory laws, I want a trial jury to look at it, and decide if any technological measure, pattern, tactic, procedure, design, or measurement was used to encourage one decision over the other instead of a fair choice.
I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.
(Not the person you replied to)
I'm not sure where all of this is coming from, the law is actually extremely obvious and useful: you want to track people, they have to be informed, and have to consent. The law says nothing about how, and the way it was implemented was entirely up to the corporations discretion, which of course opted for the most malicious terrible way to do it, but they did it.
The purpose of the law was that people should be informed about cookies being installed and consent to that happening.
Do you feel like people are now aware that cookies are being installed, more so than before the banner? Do people understand that they are consenting to this?
That is the law at work.
Everything above and beyond that is nice to have, and I'm sure the world would be better for it, but without the EU, people probably wouldn't even know what cookies were, let alone understand (or have control over) how they are being tracked.
If that's not a net positive in a world where net-negatives happen every week, I don't know.
Are you even human? Do you really believe what you say? Doesn't it come across as absurd, from everything that happened to the US since the Snowden revelations, the Patriot Act, spiraling into fascism, a first time attacking science and democracy, a second time to install oligarchs, traitors, corrupt and incompetents to run the state, with the result of tanking your real economy (on every metric that's not related to AI), burning down your soft power, burning bridges with every ally, losing the war against Iran, and causing a generational talent exodus out of the US?
Oh yeah, by no means am I blindly defending "the EU leadership", but some reality check is much needed.
Bullshit!
Vickrum Digwa, the perpetrator of that crime, was jailed for life with a minimum sentence review time of 21 years.
What's more it's thought that sentence is unduly lenient so it's being reviewed to make is stronger.
Democracy only works well when the populace is properly informed and it's much easier for someone to tell a lie than for someone else to disprove that lie. Think of the Alex Jones Sandy Hook hoax conspiracy hypothesis.
Why is that the yard stick?
I certainly don't spend all day dreaming of F150s, McMansions, the psychopaths leading silicon valley, 9 lane highways, US style PE, and world-class fascist politicians such as Trump
Dear lord
Similarly top European companies used to rival American companies in profitability, power and valuation. There’s not really an equivalent of FAANG/ NVIDIA in Europe, just ASML and LVMH.
It's not a clear win for China, their car companies are struggling.
There is just nothing you can do really in that system other than pursue career in politics which is a no-go for most people for obvious reasons.
This is how democracy works pretty much everywhere. You vote for parties or people based on their policies.
This becomes immediately obvious when you vote for a party who fails to fulfill, or even go against their policies. Then for the EU there’s an additional level of abstraction for the commission. At this level, the voter is far removed from their initial vote and are completely powerless.
In "standard" party democracy there is just nothing that can be done. Calling it democracy as in rule of the people is a disgrace.
I realised this when people thought mandating the USB-C connections was a good idea because "it is the best standard". I didn't think the mandated connector was a huge deal per se, but it made it clear to me that there is a flawed thought process behind EU regulations. And this is a big deal.
Many things are not really understood in the EU. The majority don't seem to understand free speech. The EU has an article about free speech that clearly states there is no free speech, but people point to it when they claim there is.
All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation. But if I wanted to buy a device with a new type of connector, I should have been able to. This is how the USB-C came to be and how any new standard in hardware happens. New technologies are made and just sold, and if they are proven to be superior to others in the market, they often become standards.
The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe, but if this discovery process is blocked, we will be stuck with it forever, which, of course, will also constrain the design and engineering of devices in other ways.
It's the same fundamental flawed thought process that has made the EU reliant on the US for a lot of services.
I don't have this particular problem so it doesn't exist!
It did exist for huge amounts of people. At the time, many manufacturers had proprietary plugs and would still have them if it weren't for this decision.
> The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe
Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
No, what I said is that you could find devices with USB-C in all the categories that are now regulated. This means it was pretty easy to find devices like that if you really valued USB-C. Of course, if you wanted an iPhone but you liked USB-C, you would have had a problem. A problem that is much less worse than blocking progress.
> Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
You totally ignored what I wrote, or you didn't understand it. No standard can emerge if you can't test it on the market. You can have a bureaucrat choose the next one from some proposal. It's not the same.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1...
It failed to become a regulation (fortunately), but I have no reason to believe USB-C is different, and no better standards would have been tried by companies if they were allowed to do so.
I don't want a state-dictated standard like this. What you're saying is that because some people want iPhones and they want them with USB-C, everyone else must forgo the possibility of having a better type of connetor until "we" (Is it the majority? I don't even think the majority uses iPhones in Europe) feel like having a new one (at which point the progress has been delayed anyway and you'll also get the initial problem again). I find the premise quite capricious.
That statement just makes no sense. How can a new standard emerge when legally there is no option to validate its actually superior in the market?
> figures out something better
That’s not how it works. Most innovation does not occur in committees but through trial and error.