Look, you can have the laws protecting your citizens from the horrors of everyday web-cookies and the privacy nightmares of the surveillance industry all you like. You can make them as heavy handed as you want, threaten massive fines on worldwide revenue, go mad.
You just can’t have them and also simultaneously expect everyone is going to find it worthwhile to deal with you under such laws, such that you’re outraged when they don’t. Or, well, you can, but it’s either quite foolish of you, or it’s imperialistic.
EU privacy rules are not about the horrors of web-cookies. They require asking for informed consent when you do things that are invading privacies.
All the annoying cookie pop-ups are not mandated by the EU; they are a consequence of website operators choosing to use traffic data in a way that some users might disagree with. You can easily do without. You can, and many do, make them clear and informative.
Those laws would be imperialistic if a majority of citizens around the world, including a vast majority of American citizens, would not gladly demand the same protection when shown what websites do with their information.
This is not just about a frustrating cookie pop-up; this is about having legal options to prevent spammy telemarketers from scamming your elderly relatives. This is about mandating a way to tell ad platforms not to sell you prams after the death of your infant, or show gambling and alcohol ads to addicts.
Surely there is a better way for the website operator to manage asking for permission for services that could be considered an invasion of privacy or avoiding using that all together.
And you are more than welcome to design one and submit your proposal to the Council. Note that no one here objects to asking for permission. People resent the intentionally poorly designed version that doesn’t give visitors a meaningful, informed choice. The complaints have targeted either deliberately confusing messages, modals that block access to services that don’t need invasive data processing, or pop-ups that re-appear as soon as you refuse them.
There are compliant and well-designed versions: if a website operator chooses to use a frustrating one, that’s not because the law is wrong; it’s because the operator favors their short-term profit from reselling data over convenience (which is almost always a losing bet).
> Those laws would be imperialistic if a majority of citizens around the world, including a vast majority of American citizens, would not gladly demand the same protection when shown what websites do with their information.
Imperialism for the good of the imperial subjects is as old as time. The barbarian nations need civilizing, and if they only knew what was good for them they'd gladly embrace our regime!
Or, as CS Lewis put it:
> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their conscience.
You are confusing paternalism (deciding what others want without asking them) with informed democracy. I’m not saying to decide for American voters. I’m saying that, if you explain GDPR to American citizens, they overwhelmingly think it’s a good idea. I’m not saying they should think so because I know better: I’m saying that they do.
The US is welcome to use any political system they want. The current system is a government of the people, by the corporations, for the executives.
No, I'm not, I think you missed the context. OP responded to this statement:
> You just can’t have them and also simultaneously expect everyone is going to find it worthwhile to deal with you under such laws, such that you’re outraged when they don’t. Or, well, you can, but it’s either quite foolish of you, or it’s imperialistic.
By saying:
> Those laws would be imperialistic if a majority of citizens around the world, including a vast majority of American citizens, would not gladly demand the same protection when shown what websites do with their information.
This is false. Whether the other nations being imposed upon would embrace the laws if they simply knew what was good for them is irrelevant to whether a state action is imperialistic. What matters is the degree of consent.
There's been a strong theme in this thread of people arguing that Google should be required to do business in the EU and obey their privacy laws, and that would be imperialistic.
I'll have "cannot immediately use shiny new thing from faceless soulless tech giant" over "have to live under constant threat of identity theft and personal info leak" any day of the week, thank you.
There's this implicit embedded assumption that because it's the EU we're talking about and not some small developing nation of course you can't just take your ball and decide not to play with them. But of course if you can make the finances work you can do just that.
This is the balance of powers between the EU and the US. The EU is too big and profitable market to ignore, so it can get away with significant degree of autonomy - but not too much, thanks to US having a lot of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and the EU countries approximately zero.
The European Union and other nations obviously cares about us military power it's use it as a critical part of their defense strategy. This is such a strange comment to read during a hot war in Ukraine when many countries are trying to join NATO
Everybody's gangsta like they don't live near Russia until Trump is threatening to withdraw the US from NATO, then suddenly it's "how dare the United States not freely pledge its nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and the rest of its military to protect us in Europe on its own dime even though we refuse to spend even a base amount on our own defense, we literally can't even!"
However badly the US fucked up the three invasions you mentioned, it was way worse for the people in those countries - so sorry, but it's an irrelevant objection. I'm not implying that US politics are rational, just that it projects a credible threat. It's geopolitics 101.
I don't like us interventionist foreign policy, but the fact remains that Europe and the EU benefit greatly from the US Military and it's Global power projection
OpenAI finds it worthwhile. So I guess they are working out pretty well.
This seems to be an inferiority on Google’s part and they couldn’t work out support at launch. I expect they will eventually add support, they’re just lagging a bit. It’s not some value judgement.
There’s a value judgment in the business-value sense. Once there’s meaningful revenue from it, or similar, it’s far more likely to be made available there. Until then it’s a business risk and a compliance-auditing expense for nothing.
Also a value judgment: the Europeans in this discussion who are confident it’s a sign Google is treacherous.
> OpenAI finds it worthwhile. So I guess they are working out pretty well.
The trade-off is pretty different for OpenAI because the maximum penalty for violating the GDPR is 4% of worldwide annual revenue. Google has a lot of revenue, from unrelated projects, and it makes sense to me that they would be reluctant to risk that on Bard. OpenAI doesn't, so the threat is effectively far smaller for them.
GDPR fines are based on revenue, not assets. But to an extent this is correct; big companies are much more scared of the GDPR than small companies just because the amounts involved get so huge.
Listen, I agree with you that the web cookie stuff is a pain in the ass, but I'm all on board requiring user's informed consent about what you do with their data. It's Google that's being a little bit evil here.
If Google is going so far as to avoid the European market, then I assume that they are not doing informed consent here, and I would consider that a little bit evil.
Yes, why have any nuance in our speech. Should just go all the way though and say Google is Hitler. No reason to stop at evil if we are being hyperbolic.
> can’t have them and also simultaneously expect everyone is going to find it worthwhile
wait do people think Google is going to forfeit the 20 trillion European market instead of just making some angry noises, adjustments and going live in Europe a month later?
I mean, the fact that some European commentators are so outraged over a few years’, maybe even just months’ delay because of efforts invested complying with the law… that’s part of the silliness here as well. “How dare our laws have costs that we bear! The rest of the world that should put us first and bear them for us!!”
There won’t even be angry noises.
(Although calling it a “$20T market” isn’t that informative when we’re just talking about a new unproven product without any obvious revenue itself that distracts from your main revenue product.)
Interestingly, if you use Bard, there are buttons that direct people to use the Google search engine to find out more information about subjects. Google has a problem that their search results absolutely suck nowadays, though. One of the worst search features on any website is on YouTube which is owned by Google. They seem to value revenue generation techniques more than functionality, but it is going to eventually bite them. We are seeing that now with many people finding better results using Bing or by simply asking ChatGPT.
Well, Google clearly want to be in Europe. Lot of money to make. What is happening here is that they don’t find it worthwhile to wait until complying with all EU’s regulations when rolling out their latest innovation. The opportunity cost may be too high. It may happen more in the future as well.
Why European people here feel so upset about it? You should celebrate the fact that Google or big tech can’t ignore your laws, and because of that decide not to launch —- or delay to launch —- their products despite the financial potential. That’s the trade off that I thought you’d been happy to make.
Pretty tired of hearing this, the EU law does not mandate tracking pop-ups, it basically just says “you cannot collect information about a person without their consent”.
There are a million ways to do that, like not collecting data in the first place unless a user opts-in to your research group for example.
But companies chose the most user-hostile one intentionally. Essentially forcing everyone to give consent anyways (just click the big bright “consent” button!)
The fact that you’re able to maintain any amount of privacy at all on the internet is thanks to the EU, you can decline the pop-ups. If it wasn’t for that, then you wouldn’t even know when companies were abusing your data in the first place.
Exactly. Nowadays on some websites which load for example twitter messages, they will show an inlined form asking you to consent (for twitter's tracking). The rest of the page loads, except the tweets.
I think the main issue is that the EU is very quick to regulate before it even fully understands the problems or what the potential consequences of the regulation would be. The cookie banners were an absolutely obvious outcome. And we're seeing it again right now with their draft AI regulations before anyone even barely understands what it is or what the problems are.
It's why EU simply can't produce anything useful at all because any European with a spark of entrepreneurial spirit goes to USA to start their company.
Not sure why you’re downvoted—the evidence is in your favor. This whole thread is basically about the EU not being brought along in what most consider a tech revolution, and it’s likely a direct response to their laws that are well intentioned, but practically onerous. Arguable, we recently saw the same thing with labor laws. The net result will be a smaller presence of American tech companies/jobs/services in Europe. Many self-identified Europeans here seem to be in support of that outcome—Godspeed!
This is the web privacy version of, “but that wasn’t REAL communism.” Look, you guys made a law, and what happened happened. When someone criticizes the law because of the consequences it led to, you don’t get to whine, “but it was the fault of the people responding in a way that we didn’t intend!” If your best argument is that the law was vague as to what compliance meant, then that sounds like a problem with the law.
No, I'd go further and argue that the root cause of what you see as the destruction of the internet is the entire industry responsible for those privacy and tracking issues.
Edit: As pointed out by others in response to your comment, the same industry who decided to act like petulant children and take the most user-hostile approach - the one I'd assume you're lamenting - in reaction to the GDPR even though they didn't have to.
> But they decided to mandate the absolute most annoying, user-hostile mechanism possible.
Whenever you bump into such user-hostile and annoying mechanisms, it is not the fault of the EU law but the service. They make it that way on purpose, precisely so you blame the wrong people (i.e. not them) and have you give up from exhaustion.
It was not the EU that “ruined the internet”, it was all the websites hungry for your data above all else. They “comply” in the most spiteful manner possible by design.
The EU law does not mandate anything, it's the website owners that decided to comply in the most malicious way.
What a mature position, "tHe eU HaS RuInEd tHe iNtErNeT"
It's the endless capitalistic greed and urge to monetize every single mouse hover and click that has ruined the internet.
Advertising. It's advertising that has ruined the internet. It's advertising that created this surveillance dystopia, enabling businesses and governments, large and small, to exploit you and your loved ones. Not the EU. Advertising.
GDPR is just a tiny bandage on the thumb of an encephalitic newborn, infected at birth with an opportunistic pathonagen. That pathogen is called Advertising.
That's kind of a stretch when Bard has been barely relevant since its launch.
It's somewhere between a 7B and 13B for most tasks, which can be run on a cellphone now, and we were already able to run better models locally on commodity hardware. Model complexity and capability are improving so quickly that there's no feasible way for Google to respond.
Sure, Google don't want to look like they're late to a party and under-dressed, but Meta just got a decade of advancement for free in three months with the LLaMa leak. They're looking for anything they can say to sound like they're making progress.
Benchmark this stuff yourself. Use logic problems, have the local model talk through them, and if it doesn't understand what to do, you'll be shocked how a single hint or seed change can lead it to a solution. You can even ask them to generate contexts for themselves that would help them solve those types of problem in the future, which work incredibly well.
Combined with arbitrary length context and long term memory projects, finetuning almost isn't necessary with sufficiently large models. It's really exciting.
I don't see why "western civilization" should be a relevant category for a technology release. You're leaving the EU out, yes, and that's relevant in itself. I don't get why leaving X% of western civilization or not would add anything to it.
(Btw, I consider latinamerica to be mostly part of western civilization...eastern europe too, so the EU is much less than 50%. However, people that care about the term usually prefer to exclude non white people for some reason)
I worded my previous message poorly, but I would say that keeping a product out of a market, for what I assume are legal reasons, is the opposite of following the law. Anyway, sorry for this–I should stop arguing about semantics.
Do you think they are doing this without commercial incentive in mind? I'm fairly confident they are, and they just decided the costs were not worth it in this case.
Google would be profitable even without the entirety of the EU, and I think their decision to continue using practices (elsewhere) that the EU does not allow, probably means that the profit gained from such practices far outweighs the effort of complying with EU + any profit gained from EU users themselves.
I think the anger actually comes from users upset that Google did not design their product in such a way that it complies with EU laws so that it can be used there.
Google is presumably not competent or willing here to uphold or conform to important law in a leading democratic region, which is rather different to "following" it - and if indicating an intentional direction, pretty much a disgrace for a flagship tech company - so let's hope it's just temporary poor performance (or charitably, a staggered release) unrepresentative of their intentions going forward.
> Google is presumably not competent or willing here to uphold or conform to important law in a leading democratic region
The fact they are democratic doesn't make all the laws they pass good or worthwhile to "implement".
A key difference here. Google is following the law. They are not implementing the standard that the EU requires because that standard requires overhead.
Google has probably just done the math and realized the effort isn't worth the reward. They'll probably change that once things exit beta.
And if they don't, that's likely the EUs fault more than it is Google. Google isn't just banning the EU for fun, they want that extra reach and money for sure.
The fact they are democratic doesn't make all the laws they pass good or worthwhile to "implement"
That's not for Google to decide. Google is a worldwide corporation, not some SV start-up dipping its toe in the water that is only expected to serve a tiny legislative region.
The absurdity of the perspective that they can pick and choose laws to approve should become clear if you change EU-conformance with US.
I'm guessing that this is a temporary situation and Google should clarify that as soon as possible to avoid looking arrogant or incompetent.
Not releasing a product in the EU is well within their right to do, and if the EU begins to demand not only regulation but also that all products are released equally they'll be holding back the entire world and Google should have the EU entirely.
It's entirely within Google's rights to decide they don't want to be a worldwide corporation anymore if they find it's unprofitable to continue being one!
The law says "if you want to operate in the EU, you must do X." Google looked at that equation and said they didn't want to do X, so they didn't roll out Bard in the EU. That's in full compliance with the law, no different than PornHub blocking Utah. If you don't like it, talk to your representatives.
I think what people in this thread are really frustrated with is that for a long time the US has been imposing its laws on other countries quite successfully. International corporations have generally found it worthwhile to comply with US law in order to operate there, and people were hoping that the same would be true of the EU. When it turns out that for some companies it hasn't been, it seems unfair.
So Google is so big that they have to offer all their services in the EU in a way that's compliant with EU laws? They can't simply choose not to offer services that may run afoul of regulations? If some large manufacturer has products not compliant with EU regulations, they're similarly also not allowed to restrict the markets where their products are sold?
Google is a US company, that's why they have to obey US laws. Companies don't pick and choose which laws to approve, they pick and choose where to do business.
The parochial "US company/US customers/US laws" argument here and elsewhere in the thread has already been addressed.
It's a long time since Google has been merely American, its on everybody's desktop and phone and is a huge multinational that is part of everybody's culture.
They’re complying by not offering the product. Makes sense to me.
It’s a free product. Any effort spent making it compliant is an expense not paid for. Any non compliance is a business risk, with a percent of global revenue at stake. Why take that risk for no benefit?
Maybe once they have a revenue model for it and find it profitable things will change. Until then the GDPR is not the essence of all that is good in the world such that only the wicked heathens would dare not pay it homage. That’s imperialistic moralizing of the sort which at this point belongs in the dustbin of history along with Europe’s other collective efforts in the area.
This makes complete sense to me. Amazing that a company is getting criticism for not making a product available. One thing I’ve learned from HN over the years is that people are going to be mad and criticize you regardless of what you do, so just do what you want anyway and ignore the criticism.
I really don’t like the way a lot of big corporations are handling things recently (especially with regard to layoffs and RTO), but I’m also not surprised that overly critical feedback by anonymous commenters on HN has little effect on changing people’s minds.
There is this very strong thread here that a large US company has some moral imperative to offer a (free for now) product/service in the EU by people who presumably would not make the same case for China, much less Russia.
The appropriate reaction is probably the same as if you hear that a brand of snacks is not legal to sell as food in the EU. You probably want to investigate.
EU is many things and has some wacky laws (check Northern Ireland), but if a digital service is breaking EU law, they are likely doing something you do not want them to do.
There are lots of agricultural goods not available in the states that are available in Europe, and vice versa. Few people take that as a signal that there is some danger in those products (well, except those chocolate eggs with toys in them), it’s just different places having different rules.
I can assure you that most Europeans think the reason US meat is not for sale here is because it is unfit for consumption: look at the debate in the UK around “chlorinated chicken” just after Brexit, or hormone beef. For most processed food, the (founded) assumption is that it’s full of HCFS.
The EU is not within their right to regulate products made by Americans companies sold to Americans. If we want to talk imperialism, this is exactly that sort of overreach.
No it is not malignant. The west needs to realize it is not the center of the world.
China and India alone (given the population and economic growth trajectory) plus the US (given it's economic clout) are the critical markets a for-profit enterprise needs to target.
> India has emerged as one of the most attractive destinations not only for investments but also for doing business. India jumps 79 positions from 142nd (2014) to 63rd (2019) in 'World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Ranking 2020'.
Come on, why are you defending a misleading marketing tactic. Any American company that announces in English it "launches in 180 countries" tends to imply the G20 is in it.
To say that someone is implying something that's false implies that they are misleading on purpose. And I just don't see that here. Yes, there was a time when one might have assumed that if a product is launched in 180 countries it includes the G20. I guess that's not the case anymore.
I'm sorry it IS misleading on purpose, Google's previous product roll out for 180 countries have included the UE.
Unless they have a statement about the why/how, it's still considered misleading. Hard to prove in court that it's misleading to investors but easy enough to ask around to any consumer on the planet and get the same understanding.
We aren't EU any more (UK), but even when we were, the UK seemed to get first-dibs on most new tech releases after the US, and more often than not at the same time as.
Why malignant? It's presumably still that number of countries, and its not like there is anything special about "western civilization." There is still a whole lot of planet outside of Europe!
