They have many ways to manipulate the LLM's results, for example they can use a lot of the same mechanisms that are used to block or filter out inappropriate material.
If they want to offer functionality in Europe they should consider this from the beginning as cost of doing business.
They pride themselves as being privacy and security minded when releasing new products.
They already have mechanisms to trust some accessories and apps ("my watch" vs. "your watch"). Just offer the same to devices not made by them.
If the user then decides to install the (probably illegal) "Meta Spy Master 9000 App" then so be it.
They are adults after all.
The DMA very explicitly disagrees with the notion of "Apple knows best" and until the tech giants come to terms with that, their comments on the laws cannot be trusted.
I would love to see them cooperate because then, over time, their considerable technical knowledge could be used to work out the details.
Even for a big company like Apple or Google, a 10x increase in public API surface area sounds nuts to maintain in terms of cost but chiefly in terms of time: it will be so much slower to evolve a system once it’s festooned with previously private api surfaces that could change quickly, but now need to be public and offer backwards compatibility or you’ll get hit with a DMA fine.
They do it quietly offer clear benefits to decision makers (e.g. Palantir with it's promise to reduce crime) and give up control where it doesn't disturb their core business model.
Apple on the other hand is pretty much absolute in its desire control the Hardware and the software. They act like they themselves are beyond any doubt and publicly denounce politicians with their contrarian attitude.
There is some strategy to this madness I'm sure but I don't see it.
I expected and predicted exactly the behavior that Apple is showing right now.
Currently it's impossible to differentiate real issues of the DMA from Apple being in active resistance.
They themselves are not a trustworthy source on this because it endangers their power and income.
Personally I still support the act and urge the EU to stay it's course. Once Apple returns to sanity and compliance we can talk about reasonable improvements where required. Right now they apparently still think they can bully themselves out of any obligation and this must not succeed.
Users will live without mirroring and AI translation for a little bit.
I am very very careful around activities and substances which could become addictive, because I know from benign life experiences that I sometimes lack the self control to stop.
It would probably be fine but there are no upsides risking it.
That and ever since my undergrad statistics class I hate the thought of playing games which are staked against me from the beginning. The thought of betting or gambling feels like voluntarily signing up to be swindeled.
Currently the same proposal is being discussed over and over again but if that wouldn't be possible it's easy introduce "similar" ideas.
Ultimately law makers need to be able to pass new laws, even controversial ones, or the power to so slowly shifts to someone else (e.g. the executive in the USA)
Not having a majority is the only way to stop the process and if the population is in favor, doesn't care or can't be bothered any law will pass.
The whole point of governance in a democracy is consent of the governed. When lawmakers start actively going against the interests of society at large, then they've entered into the realm of authoritarianism with an occasional election - which is exactly what we accuse the 'bad guys' of doing.
>When lawmakers start actively going against the interests of society at large[...]
But how does banning subsequent attempts at passing bills prevent this? Moreover what's preventing this mechanism from being abused to block legislation that society actually want?
The tactic here is sneaking legislation through the system by bringing it up again and again, hoping for the public to eventually lose interest, or to catch a time with a lot of other drama going on so they can avoid the public attention/backlash.
I do think there are procedural ways to support this, like: proposed bills that are very similar to previous rejected ones need a preemptive vote with 60%+ support to be considered - if brought again with a certain time frame.
I do see your point though, there can be unforeseen consequences.
There's really no fixing that kind of failure state with a bandage solution. The whole idea of a representative democracy is premised on citizens being able to elect representatives who represent their interests. If that's not holding then that's the part that needs to be fixed.
No the idea of representative democracy is that the representatives would still be of "better quality" than the population average, because it takes something to become one. This is done because there's no way the majority of citizens would vote to, say, responsibly manage debt.
So some cool off period that gets larger each time a bill fails. There is not a detailed proposal, but I would assume some max cool off period is reasonable/desirable as well.
So it could not be used to block legislation that society actually wants forever but it would block the legislature from passing it in a limited time frame.
Another reasonable addition that would work well at more local levels but would be a new challenge to implement at the national level in the USA is to have citizen lead referendums with minimum participation requirements to by pass this cool off period. That way if legislation is important the voters can bypass the cool off period.
I am not sure because this assumes a very well informed and educated population.
Think about this one, start a populist stupid referendum like: "Should the gov give you $10M?", I could bet it will end up at 90% yes and the entire country ends up in ruins.
So democracy is good but you need some sort of trust in the middle. With this backward law, the trust is eroding.
> Think about this one, start a populist stupid referendum like: "Should the gov give you $10M?", I could bet it will end up at 90% yes and the entire country ends up in ruins.
I think people might agree with that if they alone were going to get the money, but far too many people vote against their own interests to keep "the wrong people" from getting anything. They'd never allow a "give everyone 10M" referendum to pass.
We want the population to be well informed. But when you consider the history of literacy, journalism, and what media most people have access towards, that assumption was never really true in the first place. People were always getting propagandized as soon as they had the power to vote or even merely chose among suppliers. Probably long before that too.
The problem here is that many who are in favour of Chat Control (and of its predecessors) really do honestly think they're doing something for the benefit of society.
Focusing on these supposedly well-meaning individuals - I'm going to assume they somehow never consumed any dystopian fiction as a child, the purpose of which was to inoculate a generation against totalitarianism. They don't understand the overreach they are committing to. They think that, because they're a Good Person and wouldn't abuse it, nobody else will, and the massive security loophole created by this effort will not have any downsides. They'll just be able to stop all the baddies!
Meanwhile, those of us who live in reality know that:
* smart criminals will just use unlicensed technologies to get around this, trivially
* dumb criminals will figure out how to use code words for plausible deniability / bayesian "hide in plain sight"
* political dissidents who are exercising free speech will become more vulnerable than ever
And, of course, that's all if the government was only populated by good people who don't intend to abuse this! I have no reason to believe that; does anyone? Is there anyone who so truly loves their government in 2025 that they want them reading all their messages (even moreso than now)?
Can't wait to go to jail for texting a meme to the group chat.
> Can't wait to go to jail for texting a meme to the group chat.
For a second I thought that was a great hypothetical example, then I remembered that's a thing that actually happens now in the UK and got a little sad instead.
That's the benefit and frustration of the democratic or representative democratic process.
Balance access to governance with fairness, and accept that you will never always get your way.
Similar to this, indeed some kind of fair and predictable cooling off period for a piece of legislation ensures the governing body isn't frozen in one influential faction's obsessions, while also allowing the voice of the people that faction represents to still be heard.
But exponential backoff feels too open to be gamed by countervailing factions. Some small period of time within a session however could make sense.
In the same way you can't be prosecuted twice for the same crime in the US system under the "double jeopardy" clause, there should be an equivalent system where the same law can't be pushed over and over until it passes.
Double jeopardy in the US means being prosecuted for the exact same crime more than once. It does not, however, prevent being prosecuted for similar or related crimes.
For instance, when local white juries would acquit white defendants in for lynching black people in the South, the federal government could (and did) try them again for the crime of violating the victim's civil rights. Same set of facts, but different crime. Not double jeopardy because they were being prosecuted for a different crime.
That doesn't work for legislation, because defining when a law is "the same" is basically impossible. If I change one word, is it the same? What if I "ship of Theseus" the law? At what point is it a different law?
Many legislatures ban members from repeatedly bring the same bill in the same session, which does require a similar determination. But that's a much weaker prohibition (even if the determination was wrong, you can always bring the law for a vote next year), and it is a necessary limitation to allow the legislature to get other work done without having members clog the process by bringing the same bill for a vote over and over again.
And there is in most parliamentary law, but usually restricted to sessions. Additionally, there's usually a proscription against passing negative laws (i.e. "we will not do X"), meaning that when something passes it becomes law and needs a supermajority to repeal, but when it fails, all it needs is a majority to be passed (in the next session.)
The problem is that parliamentary law and democratic processes have ossified for the last 175 years, while "positive" bills have been passed to push more power to the executive, but can't be removed without supermajorities (that are now impossible because the executive has more power over elections and the schedule.) The last person to think seriously about parliamentary law was Thomas Jefferson, and he was really just encoding, organizing into a coherent system, and debugging Commons practice.
If you think that the US has pushed too much power into the Executive, you should look at recent history (since the 80s-90s) in Britain. The opposition has no power at all, and even backbenchers in government have no power at all. They've been reduced to hoping that the right marble gets pulled from a bowl that allows them to hopefully read a bill out loud that might get on tv that might get an article written about it that goes viral, that might put pressure on the government to do something about it.
Interesting seeing people downvoting this. I mean this is literally what happened after Brexit:
> you should look at recent history (since the 80s-90s) in Britain .. and even backbenchers in government have no power at all
All pro EU Conservatives were forced to either get in line or commit political suicide since local party constituencies aren't allowed to pick their representatives. US at least has primaries...
In many countries, it took multiple attempts to get gay marriage legalised. Having a double jeopardy type block for repeated attempts at passing laws would prevent social changes being captured in law.
Also it would be easy to weaponised by proposing something that doesn’t have enough support now so that it can never be passed in the future.
You're fighting a strawman there I think. He said nothing about it then never being possible to propose a law. A reasonable cool-down period to ensure politicians can't simply exploit the fatigue of the public would be reasonable - perhaps 10 or 12 years.
>He said nothing about it then never being possible to propose a law. A reasonable cool-down period to ensure politicians can't simply exploit the fatigue of the public would be reasonable - perhaps 10 or 12 years.
So if gay marriage or weed legalization was defeated in 2015 you shouldn't be able to have a go at it until 2025? Or if YIMBY zoning reforms or AI regulation were defeated in 2025 you shouldn't be able try again until 2035?
That sounds like a terrible idea. Suppose a malicious actor wants to prevent something you support. They can simply bring a bill with a poison pill.
To use the prior example: They could create a criminal reform act which makes weed legal, but also (by total coincidence) makes child rape legal.
Nobody will vote for the pedophiles, so now they have successfully prevented weed legalization for at least 10 years, and they can use a different poison pill next time.
Before you say "well, bring it back without the child rape part", see my other comment in this thread about deciding whether two bills are the same.
I understand where this "exponential backoff" idea is coming from as much as anyone. Chat Control would have been an effective continent-wide ban on my own startup, Cyph, and it's been dismaying to watch the consistent background erosion of civil liberties due to the world's inability to maintain a constant state of SOPA-style blackouts and and similar massive grassroots influence campaigns.
That being said, I agree that it probably isn't the most practical approach. It feels too vague to have any teeth, and if we were to collectively spend political capital to implement something like that, we may as well be more direct and push to constitutionally enshrine digital bills of rights that nip all this nonsense in the bud for good. No more E2EE bans, VPN bans, mandatory backdoors, age verification laws, undermining of Section-230-style protections, or criminalization of online speech — throw it all out, and roadblock any such future attempts.
Should an outgoing Republican legislature be allowed to deliberately introduce a gun control bill, vote not to pass it, and thereby block an incoming Democratic legislature from passing gun control for their entire term?
So if party A votes down proposal X and the next election party B that publicly supports it wins they shouldn't be allowed to propose that law?
Logical conclusion would be for the governing party to get some stooge to propose all the policies they oppose, get them far enough to the voting stage and reject them. Now your opponents can't do anything even if you lose the next election...
Of course doesn't really apply to pseudo-democratic institutions like the EU..
I guess the main thing should be, there should be a lot more transparency with this whole thing. We should know who is behind it and vote them out.
This whole Commission Grouping thing is smoke and mirrors, there are representatives of our governments facilitating this, we should know who they are, they should not be able to just stay anonymous. It should all be public when a vote is taken.
It's ripe for abuse such as corruption, they've been forced them to open up a bit but it's clearly not enough.
Usually it's the representatives themselves that propose laws (the ones we directly vote for). The commission could be viewed as a sort of potential trojan horse, in that it can make these proposals and yet it's inner workings are not fully transparent. With it's usual "government" work secrecy can be a good thing (trade negotiations etc.), when it comes to it drafting laws that should be transparent. Perhaps they should even look at splitting these things out but that also has a host of issues.
It is not at all obvious to me that a government, acting from the authority of a public mandate, has to be able to pass controversial laws—which by definition lack that same consent.
I was under the impression that Faraga was heavily advocating for Brexit and he and his supporters ultimately got what they wanted so at least some people should be really happy that it happened (the ones who went into it with realistic expectations at least).
They should be happy. But the promised utopia didn't arrive, so now Farage is blaming the next thing, "just get rid of the 30k boat arrivals and things will be great".
(There's 900k arriving each year on visas, which if you are concerned with immigration is a far larger number, but that is harder for Farage to argue against)
Once the boats are all blasted to bits or whatever, and things still don't get better, who will be the next person to blame.
Immigration has been a big issue for a very long time and it partly caused the Brexit vote.
To me your reply exemplifies my previous point: You dismiss those concerns. This is what happened with Brexit and this is what has been happening for a long time over immigration. This can only end badly.
> There's 900k arriving each year on visas, which if you are concerned with immigration is a far larger number, but that is harder for Farage to argue against
They argue against the high level of immigration legal or illegal. Of course illegal immigration is an easy topic handed to them on a plate by successive governments since it is very visible and very little is done against it.
If they were spending their effort arguing against 95% of immigration, which are people arriving at Heathrow, then I'd be more sympathetic.
People voted for brexit was all about stopping Iraq and Turkey from sending millions of people to the UK. -- I remember the leaflet, I remember the voxpop of people saying "Europe, fair enough, but not from Africa, Syria etc".
People voted for Brexit to stop immigration. It decreased European immigration, but more than replaced it with African and Middle Eastern immigration) because they believed that being in the EU meant. This was inevitable.
They were wrong based on their own beliefs, and its difficult to argue against that viewpoint.
> They argue against the high level of immigration legal or illegal. Of course illegal immigration is an easy topic handed to them on a plate by successive governments since it is very visible and very little is done against it.
One major policy was implemented which massively increased immigration, illegal or not, was Brexit. Farage's flagship policy.
people voted to stop immigration which wasn't happening (people from outside europe)
Brexit means we left agreements which let us send people on boats back to France. It also means that rather than having local europeans with similar culture doing work, we have people from further afield, and people aren't happy.
The last 5 years shows what a lie brexit was, it delivered exactly what brexit voters were voting against. We already had what they wanted.
Of course Vote Leave knew this, they went door to door to non-european communities saying "vote leave and europeans won't be able to come in and instead your friends and family will".
But sure, keep voting for the liar. Will be interesting to see what happens next.
As an Australian normally subject to two upper houses (the current state I happen to live in is the only unicameral state) that seems very counter intuitive
The way it seems to work in practice (here at least) is most partisan/normative legislation goes through the lower house upwards
And bipartisan (or broadly unpopular or highly technical) legislation goes from the upper house down
It’s more complicated than that, but a one way flow committee sounds extremely restrictive for meaningful reform
A small number of pathways is a good thing, one lone process is probably not (you risk over fitting on both sides)
Edit: Australian legislation has a lot of flaws, but this multimodal setup from my experience is not one of them
I think this is your "intuition" because it is what you are used to, I see no reason why this would be the objectively correct way to do things. The legislative procedure in the EU is a bit more complex than laws simply flowing "up" or "down". There is a trilogue, which is effectively a three-way negotiation between the Council, Parliament and Commission. But ultimately the approval of Parliament and in most cases the Council is required (ie, Commission cannot force laws).
The EU system is also not without its flaws but it's not the worst. Enacting broad, sweeping legislation is cumbersome and difficult which is a feature, not a bug. If we had a more streamlined system we'd probably already have chat control by now.
> There is a trilogue, which is effectively a three-way negotiation between the Council, Parliament and Commission. But ultimately the approval of Parliament and in most cases the Council is required (ie, Commission cannot force laws).
Also EU can't actually make any laws it makes directives that are then up to each member state to implement on their own. It also has no police/military/force to actually enforce that the member states implement the directives. Basically everything is very much about cooperation or finding a compromise everyone can agree on as there is no way to force anyone to do anything really (outside of cutting away EU funding but then the member state can also stop paying their dues which does not work for most of the big states as they pay more then they get back)
The thing where EU has power and actual means to enforce things is the reason it was originally created for. Trade.
Well, it can make regulations, which are directly effective. And some directives are actually directly effective - there is a whole line of case law on this (starting with a case called Van Gend en Loos).
But yes, the whole thing is of course based on cooperation between states. EU law applies in EU member states (whether directly or indirectly) because those member states say so.
I think it's less to make it hard to make laws and more to ensure the primacy of the member states governments over the parliament, but for the same reason you gave. To not become a federation.
In theory, if parliament had the power to propose legislation, the council would still be able to shoot those bills down, assuming no other changes to the EU structure.
there will be always inequalities and "blind spots", just look at the US, more homogeneous in many ways, yet still there's no single market for many things (healthcare for example)
education seems similarly harmonized in both unions (the Bologna system works pretty well)
but just as in the US border issues are always affecting members differently (migration flows North, right? so southern borders are affected more; at the same time migrants went to NYC and Berlin because they are rich cities with opportunities and very migration-friendly policies)
and of course federalism in the US is also suffering from vetocracy (aka. tragedy of the anticommons), see housing, which very directly leads to "blue states" losing seats in the House (and similarly housing issues are catalyzing radicalization in the EU too)
(and the solution to the housing challenges are not obvious, and even if there are success stories - like Vienna - city-state politics is stuck in the usual local minimas)
Agreed, no big changes imminent. I was thinking more about the longer term. I would expect change in 20 or 30 years, and a lot of things could happen to change things even in the next decade (another financial crisis like 2008, another pandemic, wars, etc.).
The goal behind the EU is to represent Europe as a single unified economic bloc capable of being a world power. It's not meant to make the European Union into a superstate.
You can pretty directly tie this as a natural consequence of most of Europe's colonial empires falling; without the extra resources the colonies brought in, Europe would've risked being run under by both the US, Russia and nowadays China. The goal of the EU is to essentially find agreement between 27 member states to do things that all those states agree are things they want to do.
Actually federalizing the EU wouldn't work simply because Europeans are too different from one another; it's a cooperation between countries that spend most of their history being in varying degrees of "dislike" to "waging war" on each other, and while most people agree war is bad these days, those cultural differences have never gone away[0]. Trying to create a mono-EU "national identity" wouldn't work, the same way that most Americans find a shared national identity in well, "being American".
Probably the most topical example for HN would be tech antitrust legislation. If any one European country tried to pass tech antitrust laws with teeth, it'd be trivial for those companies to just... stop providing services to that country. Most European countries are too small to make a meaningful dent, and a few actions "to prove a point", will lead to a chilling effect. It'd lead to a copy of the US's current tech dystopia where you don't even own what's done with your private data. Passing it through the EU changes this; now it has the full backing of all 27 EU countries, and collectively, this makes the EU the second largest customer market in the world. Now the EU is impossible to ignore as an economic bloc.
This is why the EU democratic process is so fractured and can at times feel undemocratic/disconnected. It's not a regular country making laws; it's more international geopolitics playing their course in real time. EU laws aren't really laws either, they have more in common with diplomatic agreements than anything else, which is why the Commission works the way it does[1]. (EU regulations and directives are turned into local country laws that are legally required to do the same thing that those regulations mandate.) The EU parliament (which is a more typical elected body) primarily exists as a check on the Commission to prevent it from rubber-stamping things[2] that people don't want.
[0]: Watch any online discourse around Eurovision, and you'll quickly realize that Europe still has some pretty harsh population divides.
[1]: The Commission is made up of representatives from the member states, which are in turn locally picked by the member states through their governments. If you think this means the Commissions representatives are equal and work as one body; they don't. All the petty inter-country geopolitics you see on a global scale very much apply to the Commission. (There's a Yes Minister skit about this part: https://youtu.be/ZVYqB0uTKlE , which is oddly funny given Brexit happened.)
[2]: Which it generally tends to do - the parliament is much more subject to activist calls to action to avoid passing bad legislation than people usually expect.
I think you are right about the aims but I do not think you can be a world power without being unified to the extent that would be a federation.
The EU is a large market but it is shrinking as a share of the global economy (despite expansion) so how long does that lower last.
On the other hand the big EU economies are big enough to make pulling out of them a significant loss.I do not think any global business would be happy to just give up doing business with Germany.
As others gave said the UK left the EU 10 years ago.
Chat control (which isn't (yet) a thing) would not in fact lead to the outcome you describe.
Any company would be forced to comply or get the boot from EU market. Apple and Google will happily enforce that and that's probably good enough initially.
US Vendors could also decide to create an EU only version of their services.
The economic dynamics did not change and the methods will adapt.
Why wouldn't Google sell advertisers a prominent spot in the AI summary. That's their whole deal. Why wouldn't OpenAI do the same with (free) users.?