Duopoly but yea. Because there is no third alternative. Microsoft failed/gave up with Windows Phone. The people trying to fix secure government services can't really tackle that issue, but the systems needs to be built now anyway.
I question that premise.
Age verification solutions could also be built on dedicated hardware tokens, even though the tokens required to build a ZKP or blind signature based solution may not be available off the shelf right now.
Wasn't there some talk about the pressing need for European digital sovereignty recently? Or was that just performative nonsense?
Same goes with the prosecutors in Sweden; a phone call and the US got, not charges (as that would actually be official misconduct in Sweden), but enough of an official statement from a prosecutor to get the words “Assange” and “rape” in headlines together around the world by that evening.
European countries are, by and large, lapdogs of the USA. It’s sad. And then the US president turns around and stabs them in the back by threatening invasion and annexation, or complete disregard for the fundamental obligations of NATO members.
I really don’t know what the fuck the Europeans are thinking by playing the US’s stupid games. As we see time and time again, it won’t be repaid in kind.
And yes, not every regulation destroys monopoly, but regulation is the only thing that could break one.
No.
A better answer would be 'not always'.
The proposed regulations forcing everybody to use google or apple are ridiculous and very much the opposite of the kind of regulations we need though...
No. Monopolies are only inevitable if the goods aren't elastic, if there is a large cost of entry into the market, or if its a market you can create a moat that is unsurmountable.
Many markets don't have that even with 0 regulation, but might have second order problems like firms creating unsafe products for example.
But in general regulations almost always even unindentedly raise the cost to enter the market. If you make a new regulation that food needs to be safe, then the company needs to pay a safety inspection that a small home-made recipe might not be able to afford (to give a simple example).
At the same time, we now have uber large corporations due to non elastic parts of supply chain (like land) or moats that are insurmountable (like access to US capital). In which case, the FCC should break up monopolies as the current market is not catering to end users and consumers but to owners, which is why the Stock market has been in a never ending bull run.
And complement it with hardware tokens for highly sensitive applications.
Passkeys could have been that, but they were quickly subverted by the industry.
> EU App Store: Apple Removes Thousands of Apps Due to Digital Services Act Requirements
> Apple’s app removals follow the Digital Services Act, a European law requiring all app traders to display verified contact details, including address, email, and phone number.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/eu-app-store-apple-digi...
You think apps which wouldn't want to implement Chat Control will remain on the app store?
EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707719)
Vendor lock-in is real
No thanks, I don't want any of that for obvious security reasons
So Italy's IO app https://github.com/pagopa/io-app (wallet, documents, age verification) continuously refuses the users' request for GrapheneOS support and requires google.
Nothing will change until the lawsuits start coming in.
The only hope is the motorola/grapheneOS collaboration and consumer associations, that might sue for anticompetitive behavior.
Make noise on any channel for the apps that require play services, it will help in the future if the lawsuits start, since it will show user support for the initiative.
Only months later did I learn that her husband was investigated for misappropriation of funds, so keeping a minimal digital footprint was important for her.
Anonymous digital age verification based on a suitable ZKP scheme and/or blind signatures does not require a general purpose operating system, it just requires a few cryptographic primitives and a set of device-bound keys. It is not too much to ask that the EU develops a specialized hardware token with these exact capabilities and offer them for free to all citizens as an alternative to the app. This also gives the citizens of EU the freedom to choose not to own a smartphone without having their access to digital services severely restricted.
It should be an open standard that's local first. Government issues certificate, user loads it into any supported client app on any platform (official, open-source, Google/Apple Wallet, etc). The user should then be able to selectively share data from the certificate with third-parties, directly between the client-app and the third-party, using an open standardized protocol/format. The important challenge is that we obviously shouldn't have to share the entire certificate (which would include all data in it), there shouldn't be a static subject pubkey which creates linkability between data-shares, and obviously we'd need privacy-focused data fields like {"isover18": true} in addition to full DoB.
Obviously, on both side (and beyond) they are nice people trying to plan good things without being too naive. But bragging all day through and destroy all that is in your power is both easier and more attention grabbing than discrete hard work at building better future for everybody.
It will take 100 years and an extremely expensive, government-mandated reimplementation of every critical US tech service and company.
No EU country is putting up budget for this, and no private enterprise is going to do it because building a worse version of AWS just so that it is "European" makes no financial sense and would most likely just fail anyway.
If there is a higher level mandate or incentive to switch, people absolutely will - for example, if a government decides en masse to switch away from one OS or platform. [0]. This will likely be hugely influential, as then everyone who wants to communicate effectively with that government needs to make sure that they are compatible - which will likely drive adoption of the alternate technologies over time.
However, IMO the big challenge is MS Office - as much as people like to mention the FOSS Office alternatives, there's still a huge gap to cross before mainstream companies will adopt them. (To paraphrase, no-one gets fired for choosing Microsoft Office.)
Beyond this, on the more 'personal' level you discuss, the picture is more varied than you describe. Some people's elderly parents absolutely can and do switch to different email clients or browsers. Some groups of friends can and do switch messenger platforms - my personal comms are now split roughly 80:20 between Whatsapp (the default) and Signal. (It just took a determined minority deciding to switch, and the others followed.)
> We already have social media, hosting, email, operating systems, messengers and the likes from European providers.
Yes, but they aren't really competitive, as they currently aren't the easy/free/well-marketed/popular options that everyone defaults to when they first get a computer, or that their friends are already using. It's just network effect and inertia.
This can and will change if the need for a reduced dependence on the US continues to be front and center of people's minds. (Note this is mostly driven by the Trump administration's behaviour; the next president could probably heal many of these wounds and our European politicians will move one to caring about something else.)
[0] https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20260417-france-to-remove-windo...
Unless it becomes necessary because of EU regulation?
And, unless the regulatory environment changes., there probably never will be.
I hear them complaining but for now, the alternatives are mostly run by hobbyists.
We're starting from so low that even a few dozen millions would help a lot.
There shouldn't need to be. Realistically for something like this an EU backed highly-audited non-profit should be in place for permanent highly controlled services like this that do not rely on any non-EU entities for it to function.
EU regulators have stop listening to tech company lobbyists.
At FOSDEM, we discuss this at great length. There has been some movement, and I am optimistic that it is improving year on year.
This ad hominem stuff is genuinely worthless.
In econ the easiest part is to create a model, the hardest part is seeing it crash against reality. But the basis of monopolies seems to be pretty thoroughly tested. The biggest issues you have now are Chesterton Fence's. Were its hard to know what laws and regulations are therefore safety, parity and economic performance and ones are only creating friction with no benefit due to years of laws being put on top of other laws
A lot of these were international. Just read up on "Cartel capitalism".
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/enterprise-and-socie...
The European Steel and Coal Community (precursor of the EU) was also involved in the effort to stop these. In general this has been something the EU has been involved in since its inception and the best action against monopolies is to not let them form in the first place (why there is so few of them in general in most developed countries. Though that is now slowly changing it seems)
Electing to not do something impossible and framing it as a surrender is strange to me.
(nit: I assume you meant "marketshare becomes unavailable")
So you mean that regulations that are created based on lobbying by corporations help them become monopolies? Sure, that makes sense. But thats different from a blanket "Regulations create monopolies".
1/3 of the population functionally illiterate in Europe seems beyond wild to me.
Are you talking about technical illiteracy? security illiteracy?
Or do you mean they can't read english, which is a very different thing.
These mobile id's are too powerful, signing contracts, transfering all your funds or taking loans, regulation is also papering it over a bit by requiring high-stakes lenders,etc to do additional checks.
Germany was going in the right direction imho, they NFC enabled their ID cards (Sweden has info on them but no enablement procedures) that is then paired with the app, so the card acts as a 2nd factor that makes the app itself less of a security issue since a user will be required to physically enable it (sadly the NFC pairings are kinda fiddly.. but I'd take that as a security option for all non-trivial transfers).
Many countries in the EU already have all of that just done though some national equilevant system (for example here in Finland mainly with bank credentials).
And in fact additonal checks are done when enough money is moving. For example when I signed my bank loan for an apartment I had to sign it again after 24 hours just to be really really sure that I wanted to sign it.
For smaller (but still big enough) stuff a second "second factor" usually kicks in usually in the form of a sms verification after the actual proper login with bank credentials (which has a proper 2 factor auth in itself too)
buffer_overlord•1h ago
djantje•1h ago
From fingerprint/face id to digital id..
Like banking apps are now using play protect/depending on Google.
(Just a matter of time Google/Apple will be a banks themselves, as is the danger with governments)
Ofcourse the world could be a more open place, but constraint, rules and control are too pleasing to not implement, sadly.
lotsofpulp•59m ago
Without the proper laws and proper leaders of law enforcement that protect an individuals’ right to transact, one’s rights were always just a technological advance away from being taken away.