EU is something wonderful. Wish the US would participate in the reduction of power of large companies.
But what about the shareholders?!
It’s not just shareholders that have to be concerned, it’s end-users too.
I have lived both in the US and in the EU and move back and forth every so often. It’s surreal to see how far the EU lags behind in technology and userfriendly services. The internet feels completely different from the US – and not in a good way.
Lot’s of things that can be done very easily from my computer while in the US are completely impossible or at least extremely limited when living in Europe. Companies are very afraid of regulatory restrictions (rightly or mistakenly) and simply don’t offer the same online products. It feels very backwards. Subjectively, European web services feel like what the internet was like in the US in the early 2000’s. That’s 20 years behind.
I fully understand why the EU wants to regulate online behavior, but the politicians making these decisions don’t have a good understanding of how technology works; and in the interest of making populist policy choices, they regularly throw out the baby with the bath water.
Just to give an example: I lived in Europe during the lockdowns, and my kids weren’t allowed to send their teachers e-mail, because the school was afraid that doing so would violate my kids’ rights. They couldn’t articulate exactly what their worry was, but there was a lot of fear mongering about EU regulations and punative penalties that they’d expose themselves to. The upshot was that once a week, written letters would be exchanged with the teachers. This completely brought all learning to a standstill.
On the other hand, our US school made sure that all teachers were availably by Zoom conference at any time that the kids needed to talk to them. When we told the European school, they said that this was horrible and would certainly never be allowed in any civilized country…
My understanding is that some tech companies overcompensate, not because they’re afraid of running afoul of EU regulation, but as a means of pushing back against EU regulation that threatens to undermine their profits. That’s often the play when companies like Facebook warn that they’ll have to stop offering news in EU countries if a particular regulation passes. I have no doubt that regulation has constricted Google results in some ways (Right to Be Forgotten, for example), but I wonder if part of the disparity isn’t voluntary on Google’s part, as a means of applying political pressure in a system that’s less amenable to direct political lobbying than the US.
Where in Europe were you? Because I can’t imagine that the Nordic countries would be 20 years after the US when it comes to digital services, that simply doesn’t sound possible to me.
I feel like both of these are extremely location dependent. From my friends across North America I know that network connectivity can be very very poor if you aren’t living close to a big city.
And as far your example with school goes, I’ve seen the polar opposite happen where all kids got a mandatory Teams or Google account (depending on school) fairly early into the lockdowns.
Maybe subcontinents are still too big to generalize about from one person’s experience. :-)
I believe both all of the video conferencing services (Zoom, Teams, Google, …) are currently incompatible with German law, as far as allowing kids to use them. I don’t remember the exact details, but I recall that it was actual some EU wide regulation that triggered this issue, but national laws don’t always fully implement all EU laws. So, some countries might have been more relaxed. Also, some schools in Germany were initially more pragmatic and allowed the use of video conferencing.
But most of these programs got shut down by the authorities after making national news.
I didn’t even expect that much. Video conferencing would have been awesome. But I was perfectly prepared to settle for email. Turns out, even that wasn’t allowed in our school district
Oooh snap!
