I'm pretty resentful that people in the US are stuck using worse/less featureful versions of products from US companies, while the government in Europe can get these kinds of concessions for their people. If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well, since we can't be bothered otherwise to pass any of these nice laws for ourselves. See also: choice in app stores
It can go both ways: for example in the EU Apple disallows mirroring of iPhones on Macs because of its interpretation of EU statutes, though it occurred at the same time as they were required to support third-party app stores, so I strongly suspect it was a bit of ‘FU’ to the EU.
But yeah broadly speaking I’m very content about the greater legal protections this continent affords. (And it only works because the EU makes rules for such a large and valuable market, why is why breaking away à la Brexit amounts to such a loss of leverage: you have to reach consensus, but you also become a behemoth. Useful tradeoff.)
That’s because your government aligns itself with businesses, not consumers.
> If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well
This is a pretty typical self -entitled attitude that Americans have. You chose your government, not the rest of the world.
> If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well
The obvious implication of the above statement is that the US government should force the company to do this.
>This is a pretty typical self -entitled attitude that Americans have.
When Americans ask their government for the exact same thing that Europeans asked their government for, suddenly Europeans think Americans are "entitled". There's no content to your ideology beyond just "America Bad".
No, their statement was ‘if another country gets it, I should get it too’. That’s not the same as ‘I long for the privacy benefits offered to Europeans and actively write to my government representatives to request it’. It’s more like expecting a privilege your parents gave your sibling just because they got it as a result of doing well in school while your grades were so-so.
At let’s not forget, most of the egregious privacy violations like faang and adtech come from American companies.
"X should do Y" is common phrasing Americans use to talk about US public policy.
>It’s more like expecting a privilege your parents gave your sibling just because they got it as a result of doing well in school while your grades were so-so.
It was once believed that privacy is a right that all humans share, and should be advanced for everyone. Modern scholars understand that this view is mistaken. Privacy is a privilege (your word, not mine!) that Europeans earned through their refined culture and discernment. Us Americans will need to catch up in terms of ancient ruins, cheese, and multilingualism in order to earn the the same privilege that Europe has by birthright =)
>At let’s not forget, most of the egregious privacy violations like faang and adtech come from American companies.
Was this statement intended to disprove my claim that 'There's no content to your ideology beyond just "America Bad".'?
America has eroded and treated privacy not as a right, not as a privilege, but as nothing. It has been doing this more and more blatantly across the world for the past 2 years and has now become an authoritarian state, threatening war across the globe while simultaneously destabilising the global economy. America IS bad, for multiple reasons.
Surely you are aware that WhatsApp is a product of a tiny US co. Meta? Funny how the world sans the US is so in love with it. Shouldn’t the EU be out on the streets boycotting it?
Commision [executive], Council (of Ministers/of the EU) [legislative] and Parliament [legislative] are the three most significant in terms of doing/looking like what any sovereign country government would.
Yes, the EU would never dare to regulate European companies, for example require banks to offer free and instant person-to-person money transfers or mobile phone operators to offer data roaming at domestic rates.
The only reason we have that is because fintech is eating the meal of traditional banks.
They came up with ways to transfer with just a card (which benefits Visa and Mastercard, US companies) and do inter-account instant transfers for free.
SEPA normalization took forever, and even now instant transfers are still very often paid past the limit in your card bundle (probably around 3 if you don't have an expensive card).
Brussels rarely works for the little people; they just support whatever the big players at the moment want, unless they are foreign and can come up with a reason to tax them.
It is delusional to think politicians in Brussels care about the little guys; it is always about maintaining or gaining power, otherwise they wouldn't come up with absurd regulations that hit the small players much harder than any of the big ones.
SEPA was a pain for us citizens anyway because now we have to use huge long account numbers even locally within the same country. I never understood why that had to be the case, just leave that for international transfers.
Well, that's because with the EU there is a law to allow any citizen from any participating country to receive a salary/payment. to any EU-based bank.
So you do need SEPA normalization; otherwise that can't work.
It's hardly a problem, and the fact that it required a regulation just shows how ineffective governments are in practice.
Fintech banks came up with an easier-to-use, more efficient, and more convenient system in less time than it took them to do this. And they manage to be cheaper.
The problem with banks is entirely regulation related; they are established players, working with/for the government, and basically get rewarded for stealing.
Once I had a problem with my legacy bank, who robbed me of over 1k euros because they were generating 150-euro letters to tell me they refused a government tax debit for a lack of provision (mind you, the rejected amount was 50 euros, less than a third of their fee for rejecting it).
As far as I'm concerned, banks are legal criminals, enabled by the even bigger criminals running governments.
Because the entire point of the EU is to make transactions across member states as easy as domestic ones, and mandating support for 27 or so bank account formats in all contexts where they're collected sounds like a nightmare.
Also, how much longer are they really than legacy national standard ones? In the countries I'm familiar with, they've added exactly four characters: The country code in positions 1-2 and the robust, standardized check digits in position 3 and 4.
Both are extremely worth it, in my opinion. Take a look at ACH in the US if you want to see a great example for how not to do it: No checksums, two fields instead of one (ABA routing number and account number), separate routing numbers per domain (some banks have different numbers for wires, and some even for checks and ACH) etc.
