Also, I'm not sure there's much pressure involved. Mass surveillance is a thing "centrist" EU politicians very much want themselves.

The EU should abandon the stupid Commission structure and have a real Parliament that can actually draft legislation. The current one can just vote down legislation drafted by the Commission.

The EU overall either will start acknowledging that there are problems and serious reforms are needed or history will repeat once again and we'll have another fallen empire situation.

It's not just the age verification and chat control - the list crimes is much longer and doesn't revolve solely around IT sector. The recent Mercosur agreement that just showed how the heads of EU pissed over its own agricultural sector.

Somehow, I'm afraid that we're already for at least 15 years on a path of slow fall - we're once again in the history the peasants and EU politicians has become king and queens, again not listening to vox populi at all.

>"two thirds of the Trilogue essentially don't give a shit about European people, their rights, their freedoms or their wellbeing"

Every bureaucracy works for themselves eventually. The EU's main task is to make superstate they can control. Since they are trying to eliminate / reduce rights of member countries one can imagine what kind of concerns they have towards individual people and their freedom.

Hint: the reason why your observations about reality doesn’t match up to your expectations is because the premise you’ve built for yourself is wrong.

This is obvious to the outsider. The premise that you made up for yourself is that Europe wants to change Meta and how it works to protect its citizens. It’s obvious to me that this is not the goal. The goal is to extract wealth from those companies under the guise of consumer protection.

The EU makes more from regulating and taxing US tech companies than it makes from its own quaint tech sector. Ban and blocking those companies is never going to happen for this reason. Why destroy your cash cow?

This talk from Cory Doctorow made the rounds on HN when it happened:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

In it he espouses going a little further. He posits that other countries should repeal their versions of the DMCA and just start jailbreaking American megacorps' app stores, hardware, software, etc. and providing their own, much cheaper (or free) versions. Free trade has already broken down, what do they have to lose?

As you might guess he puts it a lot better than I do.

My monkey brain would love to see if corporate strategy would work here:

For repeating offenses fines should rise much faster, multiplied by 10x-100x every time, until we find fines so big they are physically unable to pay even if corps would consider liquidating their all global assets. Then lower it just slightly, so that being operational in Europe would produce no financial benefits and see if they'll comply, or just quit themselves.

Recent political and technical events makes me question why do we even attempt to keep such strong relations with megacorp businesses (and, by extension, US gov). We would still be here even if multiple megacorps would die. It would take us decades to build up capacity to have complex tech of our own (fully local). But meanwhile we'd be just fine, just less trendy.

Well you have to ask why fines aren’t working. In Meta’s case, recent revelations show that they make choices based on how much they stand to make by refusing compliance and just paying the fine. They decided the fine was small relative to the billions they made. A fine could still work but it needs to reach maybe unprecedented punitive levels.

What you're seeing here is why the US has such a massive amount of leverage over the EU.

The US has for some time fostered an environment where people build and grow businesses. I've started many myself, some totally for fun.

And as it happens some of those US businesses have grown into massive corporations, and yes, some not so great ones too.

I think the EU in general (not everyone of course) leans more in the realm of letting the government take care of everything.

This of course creates dependency, not just on that government, but upon companies who create things that government can't provide.

Because of that dependency upon the government, there isn't any recourse against a business' practices because at some point, the fines and penalties will fall flat.

In the US, a pretty normal response to a bad/annoying/corrupt business is: "ok cool, I'll build a competitor."

If instead of creating a culture of dependency in the EU, one of innovation and creativity was fostered instead, this point in time could be very different.

Levy harder fines until they go away? At least some money goes into the union

Per the book “Careless People” Meta started “backing” right wing candidates everywhere (via algorithms, not money) to avoid regulation and taxes as soon as the EU tried to tax and regulate it more - thus leading to a surge of that sentiment all over the EU.

At some point, EU needs to build an alternative to those corps and that will never happen as long as they keep holding on to their precious pearl clutching regional and linguistic issues. EU needed to be a single country like 10 years ago.

It's very hard to imagine the EU enacting a ban on products that over half of Europeans use, regardless of the theoretical benefits of doing so. It doesn't seem like a practical option.

the issue isn't fines themselves

it's the fact that fines are part of agency's income and it is their best interest(as a bureaucratic agency) to keep them at highest level where companies will still pay them.

Effectively this makes this a tax, enshittifying everything even worse.

if fines were decoupled from agencies, and had exponentially rising curve for repeat offenses, i think that would work better than ban, as much i would prefer for them to get banned.

> After decades of trying and broadly failing to regulate American tech corps, at what point does the EU...

The crux of the matter is it's a subset of the European Parliament versus a subset of EU member states.

When push comes to shove, EU member states can and already do ignore the EP for anything tangentially related to national security, and national politicans don't and won't give up sovereign power to the EU.

Additonally, the incentives of individual EU states with strong US FDI ties and not as strong domestic champions such as Poland, Ireland, Czechia, Luxembourg, and Romania means they fight tooth and nail to ensure American FDI continues. Member states like Hungary and Spain do this for China and Hungary and Austria for Russia.

There's also the added issue of perception - the EP was historically (and for larger states like France and Germany still is) used as a way to sideline unpopular domestic politicans or as a cushy retirement posting. There's a reason VdL is in Bruxelles and not the Bundeskanzleramt.

Plus, European companies have massive fixed capital investments in the US, especially after the IRA [0], so they don't want to face retaliation from American regulators, and are especially cozy with the Trump admin [1].

Also, European politicos also heavy leverage the revolving door of lobbying like their American peers. The "spend a couple years in Bundestag or Bruxelles and then take a cushy gig at Harvard [2][3]" remains strong. Heck, we'd always organize a fest where the wine would flow and European leaders would network with American and European policymakers studying and working in the US or in Europe [4].

[0] - https://flow.db.com/topics/macro-and-markets/us-german-trade...

[1] - https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/trump-bernard-arnault-lv...

[2] - https://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/leo-varadkar

[3] - https://ces.fas.harvard.edu/people/ces-alumni/past-policy-fe...

[4] - https://euroconf.eu/speakers/

> I don't know how to force this issue as a European. There are just too many levels of abstraction between me and Brussels.

> EU moves so much faster when it comes to regulations like forcing all of us in Denmark to use timesheets, annoying lids on our bottles, and invasive surveillance laws.

Rediscovering the principle of subsidiarity from first principles...

Meh, you're right but the EU also makes laws in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect). In the end it's not about who makes the law but whether it's a good law. Ecodesign laws making US vacuum cleaners more economical is good. Trade pressures undermining EU privacy protections maybe not so good.

Americans don't either, but the "free" (with ads*) model is so wildly popular with humans that it is unavoidable.

If anything it's more interesting that it has American origins. At it's core, the model provides flat rate access to anyone of any class at no upfront cost. High value users with high ad conversion rates subsiding the platforms for low income low consumer spending users. That's something that is particularly European, and not very American.

> personal injury attorney

> ... a degraded culture

Do matters of personal injury liability not apply in Europe?

I once read that PayPal was not successful outside the US because people outside the US couldn't understand why not just do a normal bank transfer. PayPal realized this and tried lobbying governments outside the US to make bank transfers harder.

No idea if this claim is true. How do Americans transfer money? Don't your banking apps allow that?

Better Call Saul was a docudrama.

Common claims from a subset of Americans:

"They hate our freedom!"

"They want to destroy our culture!"

Since every accusation is a confession with these people, I guess this is what they want to do to others.

The "Digital Services Act" effectively takes the divisive dark money out of advertising and requires more than minimum-effort moderation, affecting Meta and X:

- bans targeted advertising based on a person’s sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or political beliefs and puts restrictions on targeting ads to children

- requires transparency on content algorithms and advertising

- requires online platforms prevent and remove posts containing illegal goods, services, or content in a timely fashion

The "Digital Markets Act" requires interoperability and competition:

- requires Apple to allow competing app stores, very contentious for Apple who invented a stack of fees for this

- requires Apple and Google to allow apps to freely use 3rd party payments, this is very contentious for Apple and they still charge for doing so

- allow 3rd parties interoperability, eg headphones and smartwatches for Apple and messaging clients for Meta, this is starting to improve

- allow removal of preinstalled apps, settings of new defaults, this is largely done although malicious compliance has kept rival browsers at bay on iPhone

Digital Services Act / Digital Markets Act (similar in spirit, but one targets online stores like Google Play, another one online services like Instagram more generally)

More specifically, both are already in effect, outlawing certain things, and designating certain companies as "digital gatekeepers" when they reach a certain threshold of users within the EU.

These regulations don't really specify what every gatekeeper needs to actually do (above the bare minimum), but say that once a company is designated as a gatekeeper, corrective action to prevent their monopolistic behaviour are going to be decided on a case-by-case basis. In practice this means that corrective actions can be something very significant (like iOS having to ask EU users to set a default browser during device setup instead of defaulting to Safari) or nothing, which is why this direct line of conversation shows spinelessness.

It's pretty much an equivalent of a judge having open discussions with a criminal about how the court should interpret the law to suit the criminal better.

It will be messy, but if the EU can make political and economic decisions for the benefit of their own people, instead of subservient to the US, this paradigm shift could turn out to be very healthy and productive for the region and future generations. China's prosperity is undeniable, and it's due to their willingness to question the unipolar dominance of the US in the decades since WWII. In terms of economic and geopolitical strategy, they've been ahead of the game and prepared for the disintegration of the "rules-based" order. Is the EU ready?