It is good that Europe is keeping some distance from Big Tech. This kind of infrastructure has enormous influence on people here and US companies can easily bend to the whims of whichever administration is in power. That is dangerous, as unpredictable as Russian gas which was used to blackmail us. Strategic systems should not be in foreign hands, especially given their reputation.
The EU is not one voice. It's comprised of multiple member states, each one with their own views and opinions. One member state proposed privacy friendly laws and it passes, another proposed privacy invasive laws and it doesn't pass.
Like all bureaucracies .. the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
Also our government (I'm a citizen in the kingdom of Denmark) doesn't listen to experts when it comes to IT/security/encryption and is making a fool of itself..
Chat Control isn't really "the EU". It's the national governments. USB-C was the bureaucrats/technocrats ("the EU"), Chat Control is government ministers from each country (the "Council")
The EU isn't one single decision-maker. There was a brief period where the EU had both the GDPR and the Data Retention Directive, which were practically contradictory (the courts nuked the Data Retention Directive).
The official name is not "Chat Control" but rather "The Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse".
Of course, people are free to claim that it won't work, or that it's heavy handed, or that it's secretly nefarious, but there is a plausible answer to "why?" in the title itself.
It's also not necessarily against their interests either. For example Article 15 made any European google alternative much harder, that's good for Google. Google can afford to comply with any regulation, smaller EU google wannabes can not as easily.
Then regulation like unified digital id is big business, the EU is a neoliberal institution, most of everything their member states governments do is through public-private partnerships, there is profit to be made. So investments in things like age verification are funneled to lobby for them. The EU in general is almost as big in lobby spending as the US.
The other thing is the US intel easily gets a full plaintext feed from things like whatsapp, but the EU needs chat control/etc. to get the same access.
This is a good step. The notoriously malicious actors should not have access to last piece of data they do not have which is the most sensitive data you can acquire.
EU should also take a look at Visa and Mastercard. Skimming fraction of most retail payments in Europe for an obsolete service that adds little real value is crazy.
With the digital euro ecosystem, Europe has a unique chance in the coming years to build its own payment rails and end this dependency.
Really like the idea of digital euro unfortunately when you look at the timeline for implementation I am skeptical if it will ever become a reality. Changing politics are not favouring long term projects. I would have expected it to be live sooner.
Yeah, what the EU needs is its own domestic tech to violate rights to privacy and spy in companies, individuals and politicians. We call that sovereignty!
This sounds great! Does anyone know what this means for Google Pay and Apple Pay? In this country there's not a single bank anymore that offers contactless payments without going through Google or Apple...
I blame Apple, who hindered the adoption of alternative NFC payment apps by disallowing access to the hardware for developers.
Banks wanted to make their own payment solution but since they definitely couldn't on iOS it was pointless to come up with a separate solution for Android. So, they negotiated a contract with both tech firms and that was it.
Uhh. I passionately don't want mega corporations to have this information about me - European or not. My bank has it, but even then I'd rather they didn't!
If companies can trivially identify people bad at saving...that won't end well.
Intensification of the already powerful psychological warfare waged on regular people to separate them from their money and concentrate it in the hands of those with enough wealth to engage in this kind of psychological warfare.
Why is that a negative outcome (not in the case of scamming)? The advertiser makes a sale, and the customer gets something that they find value in. It's a win win situation.
Sorry but how optionnal is google, really ? Even if you are tech savy enough to use better tools, the rest of the world is still sharing their data with them and so your data too as you interact with it.
The EU's bank count per capita is tiny compared to the US. Their offers are never competitive if you compare to the US banks (e.g. interest rates, apps that actually work, customer service, etc). They lack competition due to over-regulation, which, if you understand the history of corruption within banking in europe, should not imply good regulation.
Regulating big tech is good. Kill gatekeeping platforms and engagement-driven newsfeeds that are tearing us apart. I wish they could do that. Big tech competition with banking, on the other hand, would be welcome.
It's too bad, too, because overall the EU in most places has a history of better representing their citizens. I wish that mechanism was more functional.
My experience is living in 3 EU countries as an American - the banks are similarly terrible and entrenched in each.
The EU has recently reduced fees for one of the biggest instant payment systems of the world (SCT inst reaches the Eurozone's 350M residents). Compare the quality of that to a wire or to a ACH transfer.
EU is also ahead with security. PSD2's requirements go further than US requirements, and they are also ahead in the magnetic swipe card phaseout.
Wise and Revolut, two companies which brought a lot of innovation to international money transfer, were founded in the EU as well (since 2020 not EU companies any more).
Of course, all of this doesn't mean that the average EU bank doesn't suck. But I heard worse of the US.
Swipe? I don't recall a time when I needed to swipe in US in the last few years. Pretty much tap, tap, tap, tap. Actually you cannot swipe a card in US that has a chip, and probably 99% of cards have chips.
>Compare the quality of that to a wire or to a ACH transfer.
Zelle? Just a qr code or a phone number? And it's free?
>Wise and Revolut
No clue. What's so special that I don't have with Chase?
>EU is also ahead with security
Um isn't that useless? As more scams are via social engineering.
> Swipe? I don't recall a time when I needed to swipe in US in the last few years.
I do, earlier this year visiting the USA. The readers on pumps at two different gas stations.
But the EU started phasing out reading magnetic strips twenty years ago, well before the USA had even started issuing EMV chip cards.
> Zelle?
Zelle is only for person-to-person transfers, Europe has had good person-to-business, business-to-person and business-to-business transfers for decades.
> ...
The point wasn't that the USA didn't have these things, but that Europe had them earlier (sometimes much earlier), so the banking system led to this innovation.
Well you found one, and I can tell you about time when in EU that a place took a hard print of my card in the last 5 years! Didn't even know that card imprinters still exists.
Zelle is not just person to person, it's just a transfer. You can pay businesses, people and even transfer to yourself. Zero fees.
Europe is a big continent and I can easily find a place that is way more backwards ;)
Also 2 letters from EMV stands for 2 American companies :).
Monzo was also founded in the EU, in the UK specifically when they were still in the EU.
> The EU has recently reduced fees for one of the biggest instant payment systems of the world (SCT inst reaches the Eurozone's 350M residents).
But that was done by regulation, wasn't it? Would have been nicer to see that come as a result of competition.
> Of course, all of this doesn't mean that the average EU bank doesn't suck. But I heard worse of the US.
I don't know about the average. But I can tell you that quality varies a lot. I was generally OK with German banks (having grown up there), but UK banks before Monzo (and Revolut, Wise etc) used to be the scum of the earth. Just like their supermarkets used to feel openly hostile to me as a customer before Aldi and Lidl showed up and shook up the market.
Yes, Tesco and friends regularly get told off by the regulator before, but nothing changed until competition forced their hands, and gave customers something they preferred.
> But that was done by regulation, wasn't it? Would have been nicer to see that come as a result of competition.
Bill Gurly has been crying for years now about how US banks have been bocking/not-participating in equivalent services in US(Fed Now) and for good business reasons for them.
A well functioning market does need regulations. Not everything can be magically fixed by "competition"
> A well functioning market does need regulations. Not everything can be magically fixed by "competition"
Ideally, you can set up your regulations so that competition has more bite.
Much of the time, you can remove special purpose regulations for a specific sector, and can get by with just the generics: enforcing contracts, punishing fraud, etc.
Haha, historically Americans over-regulated their banking system, and got rewarded with frequent banking crises in return. (And America was the only major economy with that problem.)
Eg until a few decades ago many American states banned banks from having more than one branch.
See also the big struggles Walmart had in trying to become a bank; and conversely see how US banks are (or at least were) banned from serving their customers coffee..
Yeah seriously doubting you really lived in the EU instead of just shitposting as another American patriot who has to declare that everything is better in the US. Because I’m Dutch and banks here are fine. I never even have to think about my bank because it just works.
Also no insane fees for going into the red, or having to pay to get my own money and all that fun stuff that American banks seem to love.
I'm surprised by the contraversy of my comment. Maybe I should have been clearer.
The banking /system/ in europe is superiour. It's crazy that the US isn't part of the IBAN system. ACHs suck, etc.
Revolut and Transferwise help a lot with country level bank shortcomings. But they're not really the same as those banks. And they're exactly two mega companies. In Portugal, there is MBWay, and in Denmark there was Visa Electron (might have changed). These payment systems are used everywhere here due to their low fee at the exclusion of other payment systems. I appreciate the low fees to the vendor but it means that Revolut and transferwise are not an every day banking solution here.
When I lived in Denmark, I could not get a visa electron card despite being a resident because I didn't have credit in the EU. This made me use cash for everything as local businesses did not take normal bank cards / credit cards.
In Portugal, banks charge to keep your money in them without offering interest. As an American, managing interest payments from a non-domestic bank is a tax nightmare so I wouldn't want it anyway. But it's notable that they don't have to compete here at all. It was the same, as I remember, in the other EU countries I was in. In contrast, US banks can be found offering competitive interest rates though brokerages are a better option, still.
My point was not some kind of America versus EU nonsense that this seems to have attracted. It's that banks had an outsized influence on politics in the EU.
If you look at the distribution of market cap of industries in the EU versus the US, you'll note that the financial industry in Europe is much larger as a percentage. Step back and think about what that represents.
The US economy has 14% of public economy in financials vs 25% in the EU:
A decline in business counts is not good. It's not good that the same trend for other business types is happening in the US, either. Western governments are now favoring large businesses that hold political capital at the expense of the smaller businesses. This isn't good no matter the industry.
We should all want our businesses and governments to improve. To do that, we must first understand deeply the problems.
