Wish they’d go further and encourage European industry and FOSS - the US has already gone full protectionism with the Inflation Reduction Act. And now Europe faces being overtaken by China in terms of real-terms take-home pay.
Don’t just fine Apple over the App Store monopoly tactics, but actively support FairPhone and Spotify against them - with tariffs and more anti-trust rulings. Fund Arch Linux, LibreOffice, Matrix, MariaDB, etc. to cut out Microsoft and Oracle completely.
This has worked wonders for the Chinese Tech industry with Baidu, Xiaomi, Huawei, Bytedance, etc. able to compete at the highest-levels now - imagine if they’d just let their markets be dominated by Google, etc. too and be happy with their engineers just being a pool of cheap labour for them?
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Yeah, I’m a bit disappointed with EU at the moment. They are going into the opposite direction either by ignorance or stupidity. https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/18/in-letter-to-european-commission-open-source-bodies-say-cyber-resilience-act-could-have-chilling-effect-on-software-development/
There’s always been a lot of bureaucracy - the eurocrats meme exists for a reason. Look up the precautionary principle which influenced an anti-GM and anti-nuclear stance.
It seems to be getting even worse under Von der Leyen though - with the Chat Control act, AI act, Cyber Resilience act, etc. - even parts of the GDPR and Digital Services Act introduce a lot of red tape for starting companies. Just look at Germany too, like all the CDU corruption with the masks - where they were effectively bribed by certain companies to then force all their citizens to buy those particular masks.
Ideally everyone would be able to easily try new endeavours - with no issue around filing taxes, bank accounts, filing trademarks, checking patents, data privacy laws, etc. and there’d be wealth and property taxes and a lot of investment in education and FOSS to level the playing field.
They need to crack down on these monopolistic tactics. As it stands the EU is hostage of software made by corporations of other economical blocks. This leaves the EU hostage of economic competitors.
