A list of features that would allow third-party AI systems background access to your microphone, camera, screen contents, location, notifications, contacts, SMS, Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Maps, and Phone.
If this were granted, the expectation is that we would act surprised when it is fast-followed by requirements to use EU-controlled systems that can monitor this content.
benoau 1 days ago [-]
The other option is nobody has this access, since it is only required because Google have built this access for themselves and the DMA simply requires they do not have privileged access because it is not competitive. This is a problem that only exists because Google wants that access for their own benefits.
moronicles 1 days ago [-]
It is required to facilitate the AI features Google wants for its product. What you're advocating is not having those features. That's fine, but it is also not going to happen. If this is what the EU wanted they'd be asking for these features to be disabled, not to have access.
baridbelmedar 1 days ago [-]
The EU as a whole is walking a tightrope. Its largest economies still depend heavily on the US market. If the current US regime perceives that US companies are being targeted by EU "taxes", regardless of whether those laws are legitimate, there is a real danger of US retaliation.
Key sectors could take the hit, including automotive manufacturing, industrial equipment, chemicals, electronics, fashion, textiles, and luxury food and wine.
Given that these nations are already managing high debt loads while funding generous social welfare programs and expanding their defense budgets, trade sanctions could cause serious damage...
So yeah...EU is performing a delicate balancing act here.
pseudony 1 days ago [-]
Yes. But what this discussion so often misses is.. So is the US.
The US needs military bases, it needs general market access, it wants to sell military equipment and so on and so on.
The US is already being reckless with the relationship and diversification is underway, but how deep the split will be is in large part determined by how the US wants to behave going forward.
It's like a divorce, there aren't really any winners here (in terms of wealth, assets, ...). So it's a tightrope both need to walk, balancing each other's interests.
leonidasrup 1 days ago [-]
US tariffs on EU automotive manufacturing, industrial equipment, chemicals, electronics, fashion, textiles, and luxury food and wine, would be only slap on wrist.
The real danger of US retaliation for EU are: export tariffs on US LNG, loosing arms exports for Ukraine. This the real EU delicate balancing act.
moi2388 1 days ago [-]
At the beginning of 2025, the US was only supplying 20% of the military aid to ukraine.
After that it has practically completely dried up. Ukraine and the EU are already producing themselves.
This is a big long term loss to the US.
Also if US makes their LNG unaffordable the EU will simply switch to countries like India.
Who exactly is the US going to still sell to?
leonidasrup 8 hours ago [-]
India is LNG importer, not LNG exporter.
moi2388 4 hours ago [-]
India exports small amounts to Nepal and Bhutan, but more importantly already resells Russian oil and gas.
So it’s a nice circumvention for the EU if they were to require one.
lardosaurusrex 1 days ago [-]
I think that's the point; much like how Canada isn't blinkimg every time the US jacks up whatever nonsense tariffs.
They know it's going to hurt and they can't just order their own country -- or in the case of the EU; countries -- to fully decouple and so they're using the pain to encourage the creation and growth of alternatives.
Nobody says it isn't painful or that it isn't going to suck but it's viewed as inevitable rather than something to be avoided.
tialaramex 1 days ago [-]
> there is a real danger of US retaliation
This would make some sense under normal circumstances. However the Trump administration isn't "retaliating" except in the same sense you saw ICE "retaliating" by murdering unarmed protesters.
Violent bullies respect strength to the extent they respect anything at all.
dlahoda 1 days ago [-]
Article has no reference how exactly fine was reasoned to be specific amount. Nor specific examples of violations.
At this point I assume Google is just budgeting for a $1B annual tax for operating in the EU.
Ae0lis 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, 1bil sound like a lot but it's about 0.2% of just their annual revenue. I don't think they're too worried tbh. Barely even a slap on the wrist.
Muromec 1 days ago [-]
They figured out that part too
maelito 1 days ago [-]
I hope these fines will fund NLNet.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Have you applied? What's your project?
warrenmiller 1 days ago [-]
where does the money from these fines go to? to the people affected or just gov coffers?
petcat 1 days ago [-]
These fines go toward the EU's general budget as "other income" which reduces the amount that member states must contribute annually for the budget to balance. So the EU partially funds itself by leveraging fines like this on AliExpress, Google, Meta, Apple, etc. and the trickle-down savings to member states is then (presumably) used to fund public works and social services locally.
dmos62 1 days ago [-]
Goverment coffers fund public works.
ExoticPearTree 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
izacus 1 days ago [-]
Please refrain from these kind of lazy comments, especially when they're trivially proven wrong.
ExoticPearTree 1 days ago [-]
How are they false? Will the EC fund the road in front of my house from the money it gets from Google? Doubt it.
And the AC is real, during the heatwave a few weeks back, the EC turned it off for the lower floors and kept it on the higher floor where the commissioners work. It was an article linked here on HN too.
That is less than 30mm on average per project. Pocket change for port infrastructure or decent railway improvements.
And yet, on that list it does not say the money comes from Google and the road outside my house is also not there.
You have to do better.
izacus 1 days ago [-]
Yes, I'm not going to spend energy debunking your lying, but it's really trivial ti find out which budget does this money go to and how much EU funds.
victorbjorklund 1 days ago [-]
Fines is for the government. Damages are for others (and sometimes govt).
timpera 1 days ago [-]
The lengthy legal battle against these fines is going to be extremely interesting, especially on the Shopping/Hotels/Flights side since it is an extremely competitive market. I wonder if the lower EU court will keep its overly proactive approach despite the CJEU's reversals.
firesteelrain 1 days ago [-]
Interesting to see how Google solves this in their UI because this isn’t a new problem: In 2017, they were fined for a similar problem with Shopping and the auction house concept to compete for placement was heavily scrutinized.
It’s all sort of intertwined now.
cmiles8 1 days ago [-]
For Google this is just like parking tickets to UPS. A cost of doing business in town.
riffraff 1 days ago [-]
this comment always comes up and it's _wrong_.
The goal of the regulation is to get the operators to comply, which they usually do after fines (EDIT: and litigations and whining, of course), because the costs of infractions are increased if they don't comply.
20k 1 days ago [-]
The issue is they usually comply with the specific law being broken, and then immediately stop complying with a different law
The goal should be to incentivise them to comply with the law as a whole, not to keep deliberately breaking different sections of the law to make profit above the level of fines
That's why people want the level of the fines to go up, to disincentivise the more broad lawbreaking
p-e-w 1 days ago [-]
Imagine regular laws worked that way, where a prior conviction is only relevant if it was for the exact same crime, and you can go around committing dozens of crimes and be treated like a first offender every time because this time you chose robbery and last time it was theft.
riffraff 14 hours ago [-]
This is literally how it works for most fines.
You don't get a higher fine every time you go very the speed limit or park in the wrong place.
You don't get a higher fine if you don't have a bus ticket.
This is not a felony. Perhaps it should be, but it's not.
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
Well, usually for small crimes, repeated offenders get subsequently higher and higher fines. Now if only this were to work for corporations too ...
Teever 1 days ago [-]
If the cost of penalties doesn't exceed the cost of the offence then it's a winning move to offend.
The correct solution to this is to have fines scaled to the value of a company and an exponential doubling of fines for every re-offence that falls under the same category of crime with a cooling off period after a few years.
benoau 1 days ago [-]
The fines do scale with noncompliance, if Google were to continue to offend they would get a daily fine that is retroactively applied to the full duration.
maccard 1 days ago [-]
Because the goal isn’t to punish, it’s to get them to do what the law wants them to do. The fine is supposed to be a slap on the wrist - the actual desired behaviour is compliance
Teever 1 days ago [-]
That is the incorrect way to apply fines.
The first fine should sting and the second should be damaging to a company and the third should be crippling.
The EU has been fining Google for years to no avail.
HatchedLake721 1 days ago [-]
> The EU has been fining Google for years to no avail.
Me after a quick research:
2017: €2.42 billion fine for favoring its own comparison shopping service.
Results: huge changes to Google's shopping service.
2018: €4 billion fine over Android-related practices.
Results: Google Play separately from Google Search and Chrome, and manufacturers gained more flexibility over preinstalled apps.
bornfreddy 1 days ago [-]
2026: Google again found breaking the law.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
yeah, 8 years later? If someone was born on the last one they're now in 4th grade and halfway to being able to drive. Are these really correlated events?
Teever 1 days ago [-]
Given that Larry Page and Sergey Brin still control Alphabet, still act with impunity, and show no signs of slowing down yes, they are absolutes correlated events.
Teever 22 hours ago [-]
I think that's a great start and I see a something close to a doubling from 2.42B to 4B but it stops there and this most recent fine is under a billion.
What we need to see is that exponential function. Everyone here should have at least the intuition from Moore's Law and COVID that exponential growth is either your best friend or your worst enemy depending on if it's working for you.
The next fine should've been 8B, and the one after that 16... The regression back down to 1B is counter productive to the goal of inducing compliance and reducing the offender's ability to continue to offend by taking away their resources to do so.
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
No, the comment is not wrong. It is correct.
The big corporations don't really fix their evil behaviour. That's why fines keep on re-emerging.
> because the costs of infractions are increased if they don't comply.
See above. If the fines were to work, it would not become a repeating issue.
I think mandatory jailtimes are the only solution. When the CEOs are suddenly for 10 years in a small room, slowly they will begin to stop their mafia-strategy.
sajithdilshan 1 days ago [-]
Not really, next time they just make a calculated risk decision, if the revenue from non-compliance is quite significant than the fine they have to pay later (if they have to, because I can imagine so many other cases which went unnoticed or didn't result in a fine) there is no reason for them to comply next time. It's not like they will be prohibited from doing a business after n number of compliance violations or fines
dinfinity 1 days ago [-]
Except they did comply for all the cases where they were fined. They're not fined for one-off behaviors, but for how their services are structured. That's GPs point.
OsrsNeedsf2P 1 days ago [-]
I work in this space (not for Google). These fines are 100% a tax, and would be levied for any reason whatsoever
hirako2000 1 days ago [-]
The cost increases, but given the revenue Google generates how is that not just a tax?
I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim. If the fines are moderate and big co keeps paying that's steady revenue for the EU institutions.
ben_w 1 days ago [-]
You appear to be arguing with the assumption that "get the operators to comply" is false.
These companies do, in fact, change behaviour in response to such actions; they may hire lawyers to find and exploit as many loopholes as they can, but they do ultimately comply. Even X ultimately complied in response to Brazil, and the EU is a much more important market for Google than Brazil ever was for X.
(Why would you expect to get dollars from an EU settlement?)
ivan_gammel 1 days ago [-]
It‘s nice to have such revenue to fund EU programs on digital sovereignty. European institutions give plenty of money to startups. You need an entry to the program, but when you are in, it can account for 50-70% or more in your early stage funding. And that‘s nice, because you keep more equity.
mosura 1 days ago [-]
> You need an entry to the program, but when you are in, it can account for 50-70% or more in your early stage funding.
It is almost entirely unsurprising that the EU tech industry is such a disaster area when people say things like this as if they are a good thing.
brazukadev 1 days ago [-]
I find it more interesting that US Americans think letting their companies do whatever they want everywhere (as they currently do) is the better "strategy".
mosura 1 days ago [-]
“Everyone opposed to EU policy is a US American” fallacy in play.
As is the “letting their companies do whatever they want everywhere (as they currently do) is the better "strategy"” when this wasn’t said or even implied anywhere.
It is amazing how HN has descended into arguing against people making points by saying they are someone else and saying something completely different.
sam_lowry_ 1 days ago [-]
Looking at the ivan_gammel's startups now and chuckling.
mosura 1 days ago [-]
Looking at the state of the EU tech industry and chuckling.
The point of the EU subsidies is, surely, not to enrich a few people with the right connections but to stimulate a productive ecosystem that supports well paid skilled employment, right? Right?
ivan_gammel 8 hours ago [-]
You don‘t need the right connections. You can be an outsider and spend 10% of the grant to hire a guy who will help you with paperwork and refining the idea to fit in support initiative. Basically, you look around what grants are there, find the ones you like and can align to, find a consultancy and get your 200k-1M€. Just make sure you can show something in the end, as promised.
Honestly, I don’t know what are you talking about. Tech industry in Europe is far from being dead. Not least because for many American companies Europe as market is dead.
clear-octopus 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
sajithdilshan 1 days ago [-]
I don't think that's a sustainable model. Also most of those fines goes into filling the gaps in budgets related to recurring costs of maintaining the bureaucratic behemoth rather than funding research or innovation.
close04 1 days ago [-]
The US was lucky to have Musk and DOGE fix that bureaucratic behemoth, if only the EU had the same luck.
How long have you been working inside the behemoth? Can you tell us more about the inner workings, where the money goes, how much, etc?
sajithdilshan 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
close04 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
stavros 1 days ago [-]
It's a tariff on noncompliance, designed to make it cheaper to comply than to not comply.
oblio 1 days ago [-]
> I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim.
There's this standard assumption that HN users are well educated.
Budgets don't work like that. It's not like the US federal government collects taxes and then deposits bags of gold coins on people's doorsteps.
Taxes, fines, etc are all collected and then they mostly go to a general, undifferentiated budget which is then divided by the various ministries (departments, whatever).
So yes, if you're a EU citizen you did get the money back. As roads, hospitals, research funding, etc.
cromka 1 days ago [-]
> I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim.
This isn't a class action.
BadBadJellyBean 1 days ago [-]
The maximum fine the EU can impose with the DMA is "10 % of its total worldwide turnover in the preceding financial year". I think this would hurt even Google. And I think a billion dollars is not nothing.
benoau 1 days ago [-]
Last year Google had $400 billion revenue so it's a massive amount of money, and they are allowed up to 20% for repeat offenders!
mnicky 1 days ago [-]
That would be something like 70% of their yearly global profit AFAIK.
dlahoda 1 days ago [-]
EU is just 1/20 of world population, why 10%? Seems dishonest. EU human valued 2x more of other human?
throw101010 1 days ago [-]
The same principle evoked in the rest of this thread, if the penalties match exactly or are under the profits you can generate by injuring (in the legal sense) EU citizens it's not really a penalty but rather a cost of business. Plus markets are very interconnected, especially the digital ones.
EU competition law is not framed around valuing Europeans more than others, it is framed around protecting competition and market functioning inside the EU.
No need to moralize it and pretend anyone is using this "value" European humans more than other humans.
BadBadJellyBean 1 days ago [-]
Because they decided that way. Any other country in the world can decide the same thing but they don't have the same leverage as the EU. Google makes a lot of money in the EU.
ben_w 1 days ago [-]
Why a year, when they've often been breaking the rules for much longer than that?
Why not 20% (30%), given that's the share of world GDP (PPP) due to the EU?
Why revenue rather than profit?
The answer is: big round number that's roughly justifiable as a big stick for, and I want to emphasise this, a punishment to make sure they don't break the rules.
account42 1 days ago [-]
The damages done that caused the fine are usually spread over multiple years.
benoau 1 days ago [-]
India is doing 10% as well.
The reasoning is very simple just "carry a big stick", multinational companies need to fear the fines to want compliance.
1 days ago [-]
dlahoda 1 days ago [-]
When fines became casual? Is it like taxes?
Tade0 1 days ago [-]
It is functionally just a form of tax that can't be offshored.
Corporations reliably break the law, the EU reliably enforces it.
I'm actually happy that this is the path the EU went, as there's a financial incentive to keep laws which benefit consumers.
spwa4 1 days ago [-]
No of course not. Ireland makes sure Google doesn't pay the minimum tax rate in the EU:
'a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money'
...but this is a private(ish) business, it doesn't have a printer in the back yard, a billion is a lot no matter how you look at it, especially if they're now facing a tough choice between cannibalizing their results with AI summaries or having AI competitors eating their lunch.
petre 1 days ago [-]
Well it's 15% or their Q2 spending, to put things into perspective.
vrganj 1 days ago [-]
This fine is more of a warning shot. The DMA allows for fines of up to 10% of global revenue or 20% in the case of repeat offenders.
These 890M are a first warning. Now Google has some time to react, but if they don't implement what is required of them, another, higher, fine will be issued.
20% of global revenue is not just cost of doing business, to any business.
atoav 1 days ago [-]
fine = previous_fine²
stodor89 1 days ago [-]
Yep. If a train ticket costs 100 euro and the fine for freeloading is 5 euro, you'd be a fool to buy a ticket.
Don't blame Google for pushing boundaries. That's what people (and corpos) do in any competitive activity. Do blame our politicians for being incompetent and ill-meaning.
ben_w 1 days ago [-]
Back when I lived in Cambridge, someone worked out this was actually true for one of the car parks.
(Not those exact numbers, but the same point).
suslik 1 days ago [-]
I lived in a city where police can fine you for biking in the night without the lights on, but police catches people so rarely that, per ride, the mathematical expectation of a fine was lower than the cost of batteries.
throwway120385 1 days ago [-]
You really shouldn't apply statistics this way. Expected value is useful if you're an insurance company because you can price insurance products slightly above the expected value, but if the fine is $100, batteries are $90, and you get fined after going on 10 bike rides the fine doesn't magically become $10 it's still $100 and you still could've saved $10 by spending $90 before getting on your bike. That is, unless you put $10 in a piggy bank every time you get on your bicycle, and then at that point why not put $90 down and then pay yourself back $9 per ride with $1 of interest?
suslik 1 days ago [-]
I mean that if fine / E[N_f] < battery_cost / E[N_b], where E[N_] is an expected number of rides before a fine / battery expire, then I save money per ride. In your example, you just pick the values such that the relation becomes '>'.
ben_w 1 days ago [-]
Today? Wow. You must have very weirdly expensive batteries and/or electricity. Around here, a complete replacement of non-rechargeable bike light batteries would cost €1.25, and they'd still last more than one ride each. Rechargeable batteries may cost more, but last thousands.
suslik 1 days ago [-]
That was quite a while ago. I can't recall exactly anymore, but the yearly battery cost was probably indeed quite low, ~20 euro maybe? They just didn't fine people often enough.
account42 1 days ago [-]
Even if a train ticket costs 9 Euros and a fine is 60 Euros but you are almost never checked it quickly becomes cheaper to eat the fines.
suslik 1 days ago [-]
Until the tragedy of the commons kicks in.
stodor89 1 days ago [-]
That's a problem for future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy!
pours vodka into a mayo jar
Muromec 1 days ago [-]
When the fare dodging rate increases they send out more fare controllers too.
dlahoda 1 days ago [-]
Nor. It more like train costs 15 and fine 5 if caught, and payed later.
Timon3 1 days ago [-]
You're leaving out the tiny detail that Google, like all tech giants (and like all big companies) is pouring tons of money into politics, and that's just talking about spending out in the open. How much money do you think Google and it's investors have collectively spent to influence politics?
So no, Google shouldn't get a pass for pushing boundaries. Thinking like this only protects the capital class and the politicians responsible for this mess.
stodor89 1 days ago [-]
Of course they shouldn't get a pass.
My point is, we can't expect them to behave. And if they promise to, that promise isn't worth much.
saltysalt 1 days ago [-]
Ultimately AI will kill Google's search monopoly, not fines.
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
That's an interesting comment. I noticed already years before
AI emerged that Google ruined its search engine. I am not sure
AI per se kills search engines, but interestingly the other
search engines also suck immensely. Even from the User Interface,
which is strange to me. Qwant just copy/pasted Google's horrible
UI. DuckDuckGo is praised for reasons I don't understand - it
also produces really low quality results. It seems nobody is able
to come up with really good search engines anymore - they always
end up being absolute horrid jokes in this or that area.
28304283409234 10 hours ago [-]
Tried Kagi.com yet? Search without being an ad-target in itself is a breath of fresh air.
saltysalt 1 days ago [-]
Yes you are correct, most are horrible. I built my own as a hobby because I wanted to go back to the "ten blue links" model of the early Internet, but freely admit that model is now dead with the majority of end-users asking their AI assistants instead. Gemini is vital to Google as a result.
jdw64 1 days ago [-]
I looked it up, and it seems that one issue is that Google, as a DMA gatekeeper, is supposed to provide anonymous data to other search services, but in practice, important parts of the actual data have been removed. The other issue is that competing AI services (not just Gemini) should also be allowed to run integrated app search.
Reading about it, both points seem valid to me.
BadBadJellyBean 1 days ago [-]
Also apps need to be allowed to conduct their transactions outside the appstore and the appstore must allow them to advertise that.
benoau 1 days ago [-]
And supposedly, "steering must be free". Or at least that's what they told Apple when fining €500M, I think today they both charge up to about 20% commission if apps use third party payments.
cadamsdotcom 1 days ago [-]
It'd be great if they put the headline in terms of how many minutes of revenue this is.
Tariffs so far are on paper entirely, and in practice still overwhelmingly, paid for by the buyer.
So go ahead, make the stuff you buy from us 10x more expensive with you (not us) paying the difference to your government, then be surprised by how many of your factories can't run because they can't afford stuff they need that only we make.
Or, shock, substitute us with China.
But either way, you're hitting yourself and calling the pain a sign of victory.
dathinab 1 days ago [-]
Google knowingly and _intentionally_ breached the law.
A fundamental rule for capitalism to work well long term is that oligopoly and similar should not exist and must be rained in or outright split up if they exist. If that rule isn't followed capitalism turns from a tool which can support democracy to one which will sooner or later tear it apart. It's basically the economic version of the number one rule of democracy: "never concentrate too much power into two few people".
This also isn't just some theoretical thing, if you look through history having too much money/power in to few entities(1) always sooner or later lead to suffering of people, injustice and collapse.
Lastly it's worth noting that historically companies often do challenge such fines and managed to cut them down by quite a bit, that is iff they actually started being compliant by then. Sadly the end result is often still that, the economically benefit of huge companies systematic breaking the law, outweighs their penalties. I mean they often do calculate the most likely level of penalties into their cost-benefit analysis.
(1): Through it should be noted that this is about effective power, not theoretic power. It isn't rare through history to have people which theoretically are autocrats with absolute power, but practically the power is spread quite widely and in turn them having a brain fart, mental decline, megalomaniac, irrational hate against some groups of people etc. didn't lead directly to atrocities being committed.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
You are describing free markets, I think, not capitalism. Capitalism is when rich people control everything, and we've achieved that.
Muromec 1 days ago [-]
That usually corrects itself too, eventually.
dathinab 1 days ago [-]
if we are nit picking definition then to quote wikipedia:
> Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit
this neither implies free markets nor that "rich people control everything" but it more like a large category of economical systems we haven't always given distinct names
but common reasoning why capitalism and democracy work well together are based on a form of capitalism which fundamental requires fair and free markets.
This are the forms of capitalism the US had been fighting for in the past, the forms of capitalism most EU countries have committed to, but definitely not the form of capitalism we have in the US today.
The forms of capitalism which endanger instead of complement democracy have IMHO no place in democratic countries and IMHO we should give this harmful sub-category of capitalism it's own name to be able to better fight it.
Anyway just because there are bad forms of capitalism doesn't mean there aren't also good forms. And when pushing for "fixing" capitalism you at least have some chance to reach people. When you instead push to "replace" capitalism you are pretty fast hitting a wall where people aren't even willing to entertain reasoning with you (which is probably why the right wing tries to re-lable most things they don't like as anti-capitalist, communist or socialist even when the arguments have nothing to do with any of that (well the term socialism has been redefine and appropriated so often it has lost any meaning in taken out of context, but that is a different topic).
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
That's the same system where rich people control everything. There's no system where people privately control the means of production and none of them ever use it to expand their control of the means of production.
sylware 1 days ago [-]
google:
1 - restore interop with noscript/basic HTML browsers, stop favoring your 'whatwg cartel' web engine.
2 - gmail: restore interop with self-hosted SMTP servers without DNS (filtering on the IPv[46] literal from email address, this is stronger than SPF).
And there is probably more to add.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
sylware:
3 - stop writing comments only in english, stop favoring your 'anglosphere' linguistic bubble
dlahoda 1 days ago [-]
What exactly monopoly is here?
sylware 8 hours ago [-]
"anti-trust" in many EU countries, is made of "competition authorities", namely dominant corporations on some significant "markets" get strong rules forced upon them that to allow to exist any reasonable real-life alternatives.
Here, Big Tech must interop with Small Tech. A common malicious behavior from Big Tech is to inflate by tons the required complexity and size of their 'tech' in order to make it out of reach by small competitors. This is one of the roles of market regulation. It seems they are now using 'security' (something which is only best-effort, it actually does not exist) to scare people to go to alternatives (how deep the rabbit hole goes here... mmmmh...)
In my EU country, we have a very good internet, thanks to _HARDCORE_ regulation which allowed small alternatives to be bootstrapped and to exist and grow. It is a bit different for gogol which is trying to create a 'very walled garden' like the "rotten fruit" company with this 101 malicious behavior on the long run: strong interop with 'Small Tech' at the beginning, slowly (~decade+) but surely this interop is broken to favor the 'Big Tech' from their cartel.
It is really complex: devil hides in the 'technical' details, it is case by case over some kind of continous spectrum. Here, it boiles down to the complexity/size of protocols, file formats with their stability in time: if you regulate here, "Small Tech" becomes a real-life alternative.
And don't be a fool at believing they are not talking to each other and play fair...
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
Fines are not enough.
Mandatory jailtime - otherwise they just shrug it off.
28304283409234 10 hours ago [-]
Looking at NIS2, that mindset is actually developing: "personal liability for members of management bodies".
zoobab 1 days ago [-]
Pocket money.
hunglee2 1 days ago [-]
EU regulatory apparatus is maybe only part of the EU which is operates without obsequiousness to the US; on the one hand, this is necessary assertion of sovereignty, on the other you fear for the wider collateral damage which will inevitably ensue. Trump gonna respond to this with an escalation for sure
oaiey 1 days ago [-]
This is the fine after it got influenced by the political branch. It is a sign towards the companies that the law still bites and has to be adhered but reduced in this case to a level where it can be accepted by Google without major escalation in trade politics.
flohofwoe 1 days ago [-]
> Trump gonna respond to this with an escalation for sure
This is basically the equivalent of the weekly nuclear annihilation threat from the Moscow direction ;)
to be fair to Trump, he does respond to corporate lobby - Pichai just got to make a phone call and an EO will be rolling out in short order. This is not because Gogole controls Trump, it is simply that Trump is a nationalist and will defend US companies, he just needs to be reminded to do so
yodsanklai 22 hours ago [-]
> Trump is a nationalist and will defend US companies
Does it though? Companies have to corrupt him in various ways to get his favors. Pichai won't get that for free.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Trump has tariffed Canada 50% allegedly because of wildfires. He acts randomly, your actions don't matter either way.
louthy 1 days ago [-]
The Supreme Court has already said that blanket tariffs aren't allowed, so it's all bluster, as per usual.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
The current government has defied the supreme court many times. It can do this because the police force is controlled by the government, not by the supreme court, so it won't arrest the government.
xorcist 1 days ago [-]
The private sector often complies in advance. Large logistics companies collected obviously illegal taxes long before they were challenged in court. It's not easy and the cost of doing business is already high, and not only in the US.
tzs 1 days ago [-]
He’s using a different tariff authority this time than the one the Supreme Court took away.
nubg 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
flohofwoe 1 days ago [-]
You think all those deranged nuclear threats from Dmytry Medvedev and all those "Russki Mir from Lisbon to Vladivostok" imperial phantasies are some "good tsar, bad boyars" bullshit? Russia won't stop unless they are stopped or at least incapacitated for the next few decades.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Actually you know that giving Putin Crimea won't stop him bombing Kiev, seeing as they gave him Crimea, and then he bombed Kiev to get Donetsk. He also suicided politicians while we were buying his gas.
"Once you pay the Danegeld, you'll never get rid of the Dane."
mentalfist 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
yodsanklai 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
inemesitaffia 1 days ago [-]
Less than the Iranian regime has.
Hikikomori 1 days ago [-]
At least they didn't double tap a school.
inemesitaffia 1 days ago [-]
Agents of the Iranian government rape women as part of religious enforcement and hide bodies post murder to hide the evidence.
There's no evidence of double tapping the school.
That requires live surveillance. Come back when you have video of that.
Hikikomori 1 days ago [-]
Hey you forgot to call me an anti semite.
inemesitaffia 1 days ago [-]
Apart from that, the IRGC has trained militants in Africa and supplied them with weapons and staff augmentation.
One of the groups took over a church where refugees were hiding and burnt them alive in the building.
Hikikomori 8 hours ago [-]
How many revolutions, terrorists, genocides, dictators has usa supported? I can easily say that the Iran regime should not exist, what I can't stand is people pretending USA has not done similar shit for the last 100 years. They're even the reason why the current Iranian regime is in power.
yodsanklai 22 hours ago [-]
Is that the standard Trump should be measured against?
krisroadruck 1 days ago [-]
That's one read. For me it feels like practically (ASML, ARM, SAP not withstanding) their only "contribution" to tech is fines and exporting regulation. Sometimes this works out well (usb-c on iPhone), but most of the time it feels like if they want software, hardware, or the web to operate the way they want, perhaps they should try to actually produce some of it instead of being wholly reliant on others while also trying to dictate the terms. I also don't really feel like Trump will do anything, mainly because neither he, nor anyone else before him has any track record of attempting to block or slow EU overreach into US tech interests. Or maybe I'm just cranky and pessimistic.
cleansy 1 days ago [-]
Google, Apple and co are free not to do business in the EU. There is no "overreach". It's a 450M pop market with a high median per-capita income. There are many reasons why the EU has a rather small tech industry of its own, high up among them that the EU does comparatively little to protect its market compared to China where most US tech companies don't even bother to enter anymore. In China, if a fine like this hits you, you are not allowed to do business anymore until it's either paid or revoked in court. So yeah, the EU is very lenient on all accounts.
thesmtsolver2 16 hours ago [-]
Isn't the median income per capita higher in the US. European companies are likewise free to pay tariffs or not do business.
EU does much more to protect its market compared to US.
EU was never a developing country like China. Most countries in EU benefited from centuries of exploitation of Asia, Africa and the Americas. They don't need protectionism.
It is immoral and ugly.
imp0cat 1 days ago [-]
Is ASML really that insignificant?
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Yes, it's only one company out of the whole market. If ASML makes EU count as a good tech market then everywhere is a good tech market because it has at least one important tech company.
amazingamazing 1 days ago [-]
Speaking of competition how is the EU doing these days？feels like they missed the boat on pc, mobile, cloud and now AI.
jacekm 1 days ago [-]
Pretty well, to the point where the US administration complains that there's a trade imbalance. (which is true for manufactured goods, false when we count in services)
sholladay 1 days ago [-]
Mistral and ElevenLabs seem to be doing pretty well.
Also, here in the U.S., we’ve managed to screw up so badly on data privacy and basic rights that the EU has been systematically replacing their entire tech stack with sovereign components.
amazingamazing 1 days ago [-]
By what metric is Mistral competitive? And ElevenLabs is incorporated in the USA
Anoian 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
r_lee 1 days ago [-]
Mistral doing "pretty well"?
sunaookami 1 days ago [-]
On a huge decline and the people are dissatisfied which leads to populist parties becoming more popular and the current governments trying to hold their power by passing draconian laws.
actionfromafar 1 days ago [-]
Like the US.
Steve16384 1 days ago [-]
I used to come here for the intelligent discussion, but it's turning into X.
flohofwoe 1 days ago [-]
Could a mega-project like Linux have originated in the US instead of a Finnish bedroom? I have my doubts tbh, it takes an absolute madman to start such an obviously doomed project without any business potential ;)
throw-the-towel 1 days ago [-]
Someone accusing the US of having no madmen was not on my Bingo card for 2026.
flohofwoe 1 days ago [-]
Not of the Finnish kind ;)
Muromec 1 days ago [-]
We are getting used to the news about our decadence and decay coming from the West as regular as they did from the East before. Not sure what it means for anyone involved
mastermage 1 days ago [-]
How is the US doing with their Tariffs?
amazingamazing 1 days ago [-]
I didn’t see anything mentioned on tariffs in article. In any case tariffs are a dumb policy.
trusche 1 days ago [-]
Is that supposed to be a snark? Do better. I prefer that we didn't miss the boat on caring for each other, not shooting each other constantly, and generally not feeling we're better than anybody else, and the need to point it out on HN.
amazingamazing 20 hours ago [-]
You are projecting. Nowhere is it claimed that USA is better. The EU has been fining for competitive purposes, so where is it? The competition, if it is not clear.
gear54rus 1 days ago [-]
Doing just fine calling most of the american insanity for what it is. Beating apple and the likes into submission and making them produce actually somewhat good products.
kotaKat 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
transcriptase 1 days ago [-]
It’s July, you won’t get a response from any European for at least another month
croes 1 days ago [-]
How is the US doing? Seems like the missed boat is the Titanic.
lnsru 1 days ago [-]
EU just killed all hardware startups with Cyber Resilience Act. It killed all the SMEs <50 employees in hardware area too. The lost income from European companies will be replaced with fines for US companies. That’s a strategy! Visionaries at work.
I'm not familiar with the Act. Can you explain how it would kill theses startups?
lnsru 1 days ago [-]
So basically you need 3 persons writing compliance documentation and taking care of cybersecurity. Basically another 200000€ personal cost year in low cost area. 250000€ or more in bigger cities. You have a microprocessor in your product and it’s done deal.
No big deal for corporations though. Buddy’s workplace hired new compliance department for this topic with 30 persons. That’s competition european way.
BadBadJellyBean 1 days ago [-]
I'd rather have that than insecure hardware. It seems like it forces security to be a first class priority instead of an afterthought.
lnsru 1 days ago [-]
The thing is not that the product will be somehow secure. It will have properly filled compliance papers. That’s the same story with functional safety. For example car electronic components break all the time, but they have well done paperwork.
flohofwoe 1 days ago [-]
> It will have properly filled compliance papers
Sounds like a perfect job for AI tbh ;)
BadBadJellyBean 1 days ago [-]
> The thing is not that the product will be somehow secure.
I don't believe that is true. Cars do break but they have to meet safety standards. That doesn't make them perfect but it's much better than not having them. You can't make perfect safety standards in an ever changing world but you can define minimum standards.
I understand that documentation is a pain in the butt, but it's necessary to have some oversight. It's part of the enforcement. Everyone has to do it so we know the documentation should exist. That means we can fine companies that don't do it. If you mad the documentation and lied on it and it comes out you will probably fined even more. It's a deterrent and a way to enforce the rules.
WarmWash 1 days ago [-]
What you are also saying in the same sentence is
"I would rather only buy from megacorporations than small players"
logicchains 1 days ago [-]
It forces Europeans wanting to build hardware startups to go overseas, so there's even fewer new European hardware companies and Europe becomes even more dependent on the US and China.
BadBadJellyBean 1 days ago [-]
Just like everyone left when the GDPR went into place? Having safety standards in place (and yes that also means documenting them) can even be a selling point. To have demonstrably secure hardware according to a standard can be highly desirable.
I think losing the companies that don't have security as a main priority isn't too bad. I assume that the EU will create import restrictions if there is a meaningful shift to avoid EU rules.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
You know that when a regulation mandates a role like this, it isn't the person's entire job, right? When GDPR says you need a data protection officer, it doesn't mean you need to hire someone to be your data protection officer. In a very small startup, it could mean the CEO is also the data protection officer.
Muromec 1 days ago [-]
You don't need a whole full timer for that either. When we had to deal with the usual iso stuff it was one guy hired through the agency working on Thursdays
GJim 1 days ago [-]
It kills those hardware startups that attempt to make money by selling us insecure crap?
See also, the GDPR killing startups that attempt to invade our privacy and exploit personal data without permission.
logicchains 1 days ago [-]
And then there are no European hardware startups and your own options for hardware are Chinese and American, both with backdoors.
edb_123 1 days ago [-]
From what I gather, the cyber resilience act applies to all products placed on the EU market, regardless of whether the manufacturer is based inside or outside of the EU. So European hardware vendors will be competing on the same terms as American and Chinese ones when it comes to the CRA.
GJim 1 days ago [-]
Interesting that US Americans think letting their companies do whatever they want everywhere (as they currently do) is the better "strategy".
dathinab 1 days ago [-]
it sometimes feels (some part of) US citizens are so used to companies systematically abusing them that they think it's normal
and some other part seem to have "I have suffered so you must suffer too" mentality
and in generally there seem to be an increasing lack of basic human empathy ... which is very worrisome
GJim 1 days ago [-]
A significant percentage of HN readership are those working in US Adtech, who's very salaries are dependent on abusing peoples privacy. Hardly surprising a hefty part of the HN demographic slants towards opposing privacy laws (for software and hardware).
Google Search decision: https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
Android decision: https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
Look like feature request lists.
If this were granted, the expectation is that we would act surprised when it is fast-followed by requirements to use EU-controlled systems that can monitor this content.
Key sectors could take the hit, including automotive manufacturing, industrial equipment, chemicals, electronics, fashion, textiles, and luxury food and wine.
Given that these nations are already managing high debt loads while funding generous social welfare programs and expanding their defense budgets, trade sanctions could cause serious damage...
So yeah...EU is performing a delicate balancing act here.
The US needs military bases, it needs general market access, it wants to sell military equipment and so on and so on. The US is already being reckless with the relationship and diversification is underway, but how deep the split will be is in large part determined by how the US wants to behave going forward.
It's like a divorce, there aren't really any winners here (in terms of wealth, assets, ...). So it's a tightrope both need to walk, balancing each other's interests.
The real danger of US retaliation for EU are: export tariffs on US LNG, loosing arms exports for Ukraine. This the real EU delicate balancing act.
After that it has practically completely dried up. Ukraine and the EU are already producing themselves.
This is a big long term loss to the US.
Also if US makes their LNG unaffordable the EU will simply switch to countries like India.
Who exactly is the US going to still sell to?
So it’s a nice circumvention for the EU if they were to require one.
They know it's going to hurt and they can't just order their own country -- or in the case of the EU; countries -- to fully decouple and so they're using the pain to encourage the creation and growth of alternatives.
Nobody says it isn't painful or that it isn't going to suck but it's viewed as inevitable rather than something to be avoided.
This would make some sense under normal circumstances. However the Trump administration isn't "retaliating" except in the same sense you saw ICE "retaliating" by murdering unarmed protesters.
Violent bullies respect strength to the extent they respect anything at all.
And the AC is real, during the heatwave a few weeks back, the EC turned it off for the lower floors and kept it on the higher floor where the commissioners work. It was an article linked here on HN too.
And heat rises. :D
And yet, on that list it does not say the money comes from Google and the road outside my house is also not there.
You have to do better.
It’s all sort of intertwined now.
The goal of the regulation is to get the operators to comply, which they usually do after fines (EDIT: and litigations and whining, of course), because the costs of infractions are increased if they don't comply.
The goal should be to incentivise them to comply with the law as a whole, not to keep deliberately breaking different sections of the law to make profit above the level of fines
That's why people want the level of the fines to go up, to disincentivise the more broad lawbreaking
You don't get a higher fine every time you go very the speed limit or park in the wrong place.
You don't get a higher fine if you don't have a bus ticket.
This is not a felony. Perhaps it should be, but it's not.
The correct solution to this is to have fines scaled to the value of a company and an exponential doubling of fines for every re-offence that falls under the same category of crime with a cooling off period after a few years.
The first fine should sting and the second should be damaging to a company and the third should be crippling.
The EU has been fining Google for years to no avail.
Me after a quick research:
2017: €2.42 billion fine for favoring its own comparison shopping service.
Results: huge changes to Google's shopping service.
2018: €4 billion fine over Android-related practices.
Results: Google Play separately from Google Search and Chrome, and manufacturers gained more flexibility over preinstalled apps.
What we need to see is that exponential function. Everyone here should have at least the intuition from Moore's Law and COVID that exponential growth is either your best friend or your worst enemy depending on if it's working for you.
The next fine should've been 8B, and the one after that 16... The regression back down to 1B is counter productive to the goal of inducing compliance and reducing the offender's ability to continue to offend by taking away their resources to do so.
The big corporations don't really fix their evil behaviour. That's why fines keep on re-emerging.
> because the costs of infractions are increased if they don't comply.
See above. If the fines were to work, it would not become a repeating issue.
I think mandatory jailtimes are the only solution. When the CEOs are suddenly for 10 years in a small room, slowly they will begin to stop their mafia-strategy.
I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim. If the fines are moderate and big co keeps paying that's steady revenue for the EU institutions.
These companies do, in fact, change behaviour in response to such actions; they may hire lawyers to find and exploit as many loopholes as they can, but they do ultimately comply. Even X ultimately complied in response to Brazil, and the EU is a much more important market for Google than Brazil ever was for X.
(Why would you expect to get dollars from an EU settlement?)
It is almost entirely unsurprising that the EU tech industry is such a disaster area when people say things like this as if they are a good thing.
As is the “letting their companies do whatever they want everywhere (as they currently do) is the better "strategy"” when this wasn’t said or even implied anywhere.
It is amazing how HN has descended into arguing against people making points by saying they are someone else and saying something completely different.
The point of the EU subsidies is, surely, not to enrich a few people with the right connections but to stimulate a productive ecosystem that supports well paid skilled employment, right? Right?
Honestly, I don’t know what are you talking about. Tech industry in Europe is far from being dead. Not least because for many American companies Europe as market is dead.
How long have you been working inside the behemoth? Can you tell us more about the inner workings, where the money goes, how much, etc?
There's this standard assumption that HN users are well educated.
Budgets don't work like that. It's not like the US federal government collects taxes and then deposits bags of gold coins on people's doorsteps.
Taxes, fines, etc are all collected and then they mostly go to a general, undifferentiated budget which is then divided by the various ministries (departments, whatever).
So yes, if you're a EU citizen you did get the money back. As roads, hospitals, research funding, etc.
This isn't a class action.
EU competition law is not framed around valuing Europeans more than others, it is framed around protecting competition and market functioning inside the EU.
No need to moralize it and pretend anyone is using this "value" European humans more than other humans.
Why not 20% (30%), given that's the share of world GDP (PPP) due to the EU?
Why revenue rather than profit?
The answer is: big round number that's roughly justifiable as a big stick for, and I want to emphasise this, a punishment to make sure they don't break the rules.
The reasoning is very simple just "carry a big stick", multinational companies need to fear the fines to want compliance.
Corporations reliably break the law, the EU reliably enforces it.
I'm actually happy that this is the path the EU went, as there's a financial incentive to keep laws which benefit consumers.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/business/companies/arid-417489...
€4.536bn on €86.6bn, or about 5% (which is one third of the amount Ireland promised in an international treaty they would charge ...)
[0]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/meta-says-it-s-staring-...
...but this is a private(ish) business, it doesn't have a printer in the back yard, a billion is a lot no matter how you look at it, especially if they're now facing a tough choice between cannibalizing their results with AI summaries or having AI competitors eating their lunch.
These 890M are a first warning. Now Google has some time to react, but if they don't implement what is required of them, another, higher, fine will be issued.
20% of global revenue is not just cost of doing business, to any business.
Don't blame Google for pushing boundaries. That's what people (and corpos) do in any competitive activity. Do blame our politicians for being incompetent and ill-meaning.
(Not those exact numbers, but the same point).
pours vodka into a mayo jar
So no, Google shouldn't get a pass for pushing boundaries. Thinking like this only protects the capital class and the politicians responsible for this mess.
My point is, we can't expect them to behave. And if they promise to, that promise isn't worth much.
Reading about it, both points seem valid to me.
So go ahead, make the stuff you buy from us 10x more expensive with you (not us) paying the difference to your government, then be surprised by how many of your factories can't run because they can't afford stuff they need that only we make.
Or, shock, substitute us with China.
But either way, you're hitting yourself and calling the pain a sign of victory.
A fundamental rule for capitalism to work well long term is that oligopoly and similar should not exist and must be rained in or outright split up if they exist. If that rule isn't followed capitalism turns from a tool which can support democracy to one which will sooner or later tear it apart. It's basically the economic version of the number one rule of democracy: "never concentrate too much power into two few people".
This also isn't just some theoretical thing, if you look through history having too much money/power in to few entities(1) always sooner or later lead to suffering of people, injustice and collapse.
Lastly it's worth noting that historically companies often do challenge such fines and managed to cut them down by quite a bit, that is iff they actually started being compliant by then. Sadly the end result is often still that, the economically benefit of huge companies systematic breaking the law, outweighs their penalties. I mean they often do calculate the most likely level of penalties into their cost-benefit analysis.
(1): Through it should be noted that this is about effective power, not theoretic power. It isn't rare through history to have people which theoretically are autocrats with absolute power, but practically the power is spread quite widely and in turn them having a brain fart, mental decline, megalomaniac, irrational hate against some groups of people etc. didn't lead directly to atrocities being committed.
> Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit
this neither implies free markets nor that "rich people control everything" but it more like a large category of economical systems we haven't always given distinct names
but common reasoning why capitalism and democracy work well together are based on a form of capitalism which fundamental requires fair and free markets.
This are the forms of capitalism the US had been fighting for in the past, the forms of capitalism most EU countries have committed to, but definitely not the form of capitalism we have in the US today.
The forms of capitalism which endanger instead of complement democracy have IMHO no place in democratic countries and IMHO we should give this harmful sub-category of capitalism it's own name to be able to better fight it.
Anyway just because there are bad forms of capitalism doesn't mean there aren't also good forms. And when pushing for "fixing" capitalism you at least have some chance to reach people. When you instead push to "replace" capitalism you are pretty fast hitting a wall where people aren't even willing to entertain reasoning with you (which is probably why the right wing tries to re-lable most things they don't like as anti-capitalist, communist or socialist even when the arguments have nothing to do with any of that (well the term socialism has been redefine and appropriated so often it has lost any meaning in taken out of context, but that is a different topic).
1 - restore interop with noscript/basic HTML browsers, stop favoring your 'whatwg cartel' web engine.
2 - gmail: restore interop with self-hosted SMTP servers without DNS (filtering on the IPv[46] literal from email address, this is stronger than SPF).
And there is probably more to add.
3 - stop writing comments only in english, stop favoring your 'anglosphere' linguistic bubble
Here, Big Tech must interop with Small Tech. A common malicious behavior from Big Tech is to inflate by tons the required complexity and size of their 'tech' in order to make it out of reach by small competitors. This is one of the roles of market regulation. It seems they are now using 'security' (something which is only best-effort, it actually does not exist) to scare people to go to alternatives (how deep the rabbit hole goes here... mmmmh...)
In my EU country, we have a very good internet, thanks to _HARDCORE_ regulation which allowed small alternatives to be bootstrapped and to exist and grow. It is a bit different for gogol which is trying to create a 'very walled garden' like the "rotten fruit" company with this 101 malicious behavior on the long run: strong interop with 'Small Tech' at the beginning, slowly (~decade+) but surely this interop is broken to favor the 'Big Tech' from their cartel.
It is really complex: devil hides in the 'technical' details, it is case by case over some kind of continous spectrum. Here, it boiles down to the complexity/size of protocols, file formats with their stability in time: if you regulate here, "Small Tech" becomes a real-life alternative.
And don't be a fool at believing they are not talking to each other and play fair...
Mandatory jailtime - otherwise they just shrug it off.
This is basically the equivalent of the weekly nuclear annihilation threat from the Moscow direction ;)
Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_final_warning
Does it though? Companies have to corrupt him in various ways to get his favors. Pichai won't get that for free.
"Once you pay the Danegeld, you'll never get rid of the Dane."
There's no evidence of double tapping the school.
That requires live surveillance. Come back when you have video of that.
One of the groups took over a church where refugees were hiding and burnt them alive in the building.
EU does much more to protect its market compared to US.
EU was never a developing country like China. Most countries in EU benefited from centuries of exploitation of Asia, Africa and the Americas. They don't need protectionism.
It is immoral and ugly.
Also, here in the U.S., we’ve managed to screw up so badly on data privacy and basic rights that the EU has been systematically replacing their entire tech stack with sovereign components.
There is Wikipedia article about this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_Resilience_Act
No big deal for corporations though. Buddy’s workplace hired new compliance department for this topic with 30 persons. That’s competition european way.
Sounds like a perfect job for AI tbh ;)
I don't believe that is true. Cars do break but they have to meet safety standards. That doesn't make them perfect but it's much better than not having them. You can't make perfect safety standards in an ever changing world but you can define minimum standards.
I understand that documentation is a pain in the butt, but it's necessary to have some oversight. It's part of the enforcement. Everyone has to do it so we know the documentation should exist. That means we can fine companies that don't do it. If you mad the documentation and lied on it and it comes out you will probably fined even more. It's a deterrent and a way to enforce the rules.
"I would rather only buy from megacorporations than small players"
I think losing the companies that don't have security as a main priority isn't too bad. I assume that the EU will create import restrictions if there is a meaningful shift to avoid EU rules.
See also, the GDPR killing startups that attempt to invade our privacy and exploit personal data without permission.
and some other part seem to have "I have suffered so you must suffer too" mentality
and in generally there seem to be an increasing lack of basic human empathy ... which is very worrisome