> If Google and Facebook would be locally home grown [...] it would be safe to assume the EU would let many of the current things slide.
These laws are not designed to hit only Google and Facebook they are hitting tech in general, including local companies. If the EU were to have any locally home grown tech companies to speak of, it would be safe to assume the EU would let many of the current things slide.
I can only assume the EU gave up completely on its own businesses to ever be able to compete with any US tech company. These regulations upon regulations increasing the bar of entry continuously practically guarantee that there won't ever be a competitor to any US tech company coming out of the EU.
Whats even the point of becoming a Google or Apple if then some clueless bureaucrat gets to tell you what you are allowed to do with your market position? Nobody is stopping other companies to build their own Android or iPhone, its working as intended, no reason to do anything.
People do vote with their wallets, there are many websites that let you pay to remove ads. How is that not self-regulating?
> That's how we got leaded gasoline for 60+ years.
But lead wasn't known to be bad, once it was, an entire industry scrambled (successfully) to innovate to provide alternatives. I think this makes the opposite of your point lol
I don't think that any government should ever make such fine-grained regulation. Telling the most innovative companies on the planet how they supposed to function is a recipe for disaster. There will never be another Google-like company if this becomes law that's for sure.
Also of course people have control already, they can chose not to visit websites with ads on them.
I think your comparisons are terrible, they are either not the same product at all or exactly the same argument applies. Of course food banks should (and are in many places) be means tested, so as not to compete with grocery stores. You can't compare water with booze, there may be an argument of tab water competing unfairly with bottled water though.
In this case, 25 MBit/s is 25 Mbit/s there is no difference in service between a community ISP and a commercial/public company ISP except the price.
I actually am a shareholder of CenturyLink, I really don't care if you think that's satire, as long as the people we put in charge do everything they can to make it happen.
The market already makes commercial ISPs "step up their game and provide even better access" exactly as you say, it works perfectly. If you have every community suddenly owning their own fibre in the streets they live on, what are commercial ISPs supposed to do? No there has to be legislation to stop this, many cities are already doing this which is a good thing.
This should be illegal, how could private enterprises possibly compete with community organized ISPs? You have to take into account the increase in profit every ISP has to make every year. How is the industry going to survive if you allow competition from ISP's that do not need to make profit?
Many cities are already making this illegal, hopefully Baltimore realizes how damaging this truly is for business.
These laws are not designed to hit only Google and Facebook they are hitting tech in general, including local companies. If the EU were to have any locally home grown tech companies to speak of, it would be safe to assume the EU would let many of the current things slide.
I can only assume the EU gave up completely on its own businesses to ever be able to compete with any US tech company. These regulations upon regulations increasing the bar of entry continuously practically guarantee that there won't ever be a competitor to any US tech company coming out of the EU.