Things like GDPR aren't supposed to be enforce in every instance. Similar to things like FCC or CE certification. That is just the better way to have such regulation. When someone complains or something happens, then these things will come into effect.
Things like the new roaming rules are essentially universally followed. It used to be extremely cumbersome to get mobile data when travelling, today it is essentially a non-issue. SEPA payments is another similar thing.
Other regulation isn't for users at all, but for other businesses. Most users won't directly notice the revised payment directive, but they will very likely get a lot of new service.
There is no "obvious trend" in the way that you are suggesting. The copyright directive is bad because copyright legislation is bad. If you want to enforce copyright the directive isn't incorrect, it is just that many people don't want that including myself. Most other reforms including data protection, roaming and payment services are huge steps in the right direction.
What makes you think this is a new development? When many of these large companies got started Europe was still recovering from World War II, even up until the '90s and continuing today. Europe isn't problem free, but in the grand scheme of things certainly getting better.
The "digital evolution" article is just ridiculous. Sweden which is "receding" has had three exits of more than a billion dollars in the last 12 months. Switzerland which is a "stand out" has, as far as I can tell, one tech startup valued at a billion dollars ever. Both countries have similar population and history.
You can make those kind of numbers say anything. Saying that a country like Sweden is "receding" in "digital evolution" is pretty ridiculous when almost everything is more advanced than 99% of the world. And on top of that most of these "stand out" countries have few to no technology businesses of note.
I think what has happened is that post war we have defined success as having it better than our parents. Which isn't necessarily incorrect, though ways of measuring that can be. Starting in the '80s people have been making a lot of money in things like real estate and the stock market, while the price of access to opportunities like education and job markets have increased. If you weren't part of the former group, you have essentially been left behind.
At the same time wealth, or inequity, isn't something a lot of people talk about openly. So you are left either accepting your place in the world or you can pretend that you have success by going into debt and hoping for the best. That is that the market continues to be on your side. Some people might even think this is the normal thing to do, not realizing other people have family wealth. Some people realize what is going on, but thinks that it is worth trying anyway. Or they could be those people with family wealth.
I don't know. I think things like producthunt is the long tail. It is the people who don't have time in a good environment or access to talent so they do whatever they can instead.
And I don't intend that to be an elitist statement. It is like the difference between playing an instrument and being in a band. You might be better by yourself, but it really the ecosystem that is going to take you to another level in terms of success. I think that sort of ecosystem is harder than ever to access. Especially with the rise in cost of education and housing. It is hard to start a software band these days.
While I get what you are saying, I mostly disagree. You have to differentiate between if the problem exists and whether the solution is any good. When computing became really mainstream we were standing on the shoulder of giants. A lot things had trickled down from things like research and were really good for the time. But they also lacked in a lot of things we care about today like encryption, automation, design, cross-platform and security. Today these things aren't coming out of research, nor necessarily large companies, but some random person who can see the problem. It would be a lot better if something like authentication was included in HTTP, but that isn't happening for various reasons, so it is going to be a job for a framework. That isn't necessarily a good solution, but it a solution to a problem that exists.
It really seems like things like PARC was an anomaly. Companies eventually figured that it was just better to "be part of the problem" and make a lot of money like in many other industries.
It generally doesn't matter that much. If you miss the cache you are going to hit Google's network, which will serve from their own data center over their own networks. That mostly isn't paid for by the ISP, but Google's customers. The problem with wireless is that the wireless part isn't Google's network nor "fixed" infrastructure. So it becomes costly for the ISP.
> Why do you think that is? I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly.
There are a lot of stories of people falling into technology entrepreneurship by showing up. I guess you could say that it was less competitive (which it was), but I also think that society was more lenient. We hadn't figured out yet how to charge a lot for everything. If some landlord was 'greedy' you could move to some adjacent area. Today with information spreading so fast everyone knows not only what something is worth but what it could potentially be worth and price accordingly.
Like this story from Max Levchin starting with "I didn't really make any arrangements, so I just crashed on Scott's floor" [0].
I wish it wasn't so but I do think to the degree you can declare something dead the lean startup is. The problem is that lean startups requires a number of things that aren't accessible anymore.
A) Maybe the most important is time. You need time in a good environment to actually develop something. Which has become a lot more costly.
B) Large companies are controlling more areas than ever. People often wary of regulation as a barrier, but as time goes by the market participants creates their own barriers. Many areas are just harder to have an impact in than it used to be.
C) And then there is just competition, especially for things like talent.
I guess it isn't the lean startup that is dead so much as the environment for it. You can say the same thing about co-operatives, non-profits, community establishments and a lot of other things that are good ideas (probably more so than ever) but not able to flourish because of other interests.
Generally you are going to connect to Netflix or Google and then it is up to them how they serve their traffic. Presumably only a small percentage of YouTube videos gets a lot of the traffic. They could even control that by which videos gets suggested. Which would be my personal theory why Google search results have arguably been getting worse. Because they seemingly have a lot of incentive, both in terms of load and ads, to serve the same things to many people.
I have never understood how it is fair or open that a few providers are allowed to hold the rest of the Internet hostage because they are popular. Why should downloading a random file be throttled because people like to watch YouTube in 4k on their phone? It seem reasonable that someone should pay extra for that, whether that is Google or the consumer. Unfortunately the Internet is very messy and manual, so the current solution is lacking but that doesn't mean that the problem isn't real.
I guess the promise of remote work is a lot about the promise of not having to pay premium for space. I can't help thinking though that once remote work become more common the same thing would happen to nice places in smaller towns as have happened to nice places in cities.
I don't think "going well" is the same as not being dysfunctional. That someone can e.g. have decent life as a upper middle class American doesn't take away from the fact that the systems themselves are dysfunctional. There are millions and millions of people who lack de facto good access to health care, education, housing, transportation and other things that should be a basic in a modern society.
In most of the rest of the world it might be even worse. Especially if you also consider the size of countries like India and China. Most countries have only had peace for less than a century. New technologies end up abusing, if not killing, hundreds of thousands of people. The global economy seem to experience one large crash every decade. A lot of things are getting better, but I certainly wouldn't say the are getting more functional. I would even say that a lot of development is more unsustainable today than ever.
When a million people don't die in traffic every year I will get more hopeful about humanities ability to handle existential threats. Until then let's hope for a something smaller event first (I don't really know the distribution of something like a meteor).
> I don't understand how can there be countries ignoring this.
Any preventable scenario requires people ignoring it to happen. Which I guess in itself isn't very helpful. It is just that people tend to assume that dysfunction isn't normal when it is usually the opposite. That anything functional often requires long deliberate and concerted efforts. There are for instance still plenty of people dying in traffic.
Female-dominated professions generally doesn't suffer from lack of diversity at the top. There are less male nurses, but plenty of male doctors. There are less male teachers, but plenty of male professors. Etc. That is specifically what quotas for company boards deal with long term. Because a de facto career filter for gender is equal to the filer example you mentioned.
And the performance isn't very good either from what I have heard. It is a good candidate if you want to try and make something cheap, but few (none?) of the offerings really are (olimex has one if anyone is interested). Personally I am pretty tired of the Linux ecosystem in general. It is pretty well known that you can ship broken stuff by slapping an open source sticker on it.
I don't think there is any complexity as such. It is mostly just that power centralizes. This is hard to argue though since so many people an incentive to believe otherwise. But ask yourself if there is any concrete indication that e.g. the Internet has lead to decentralization? People used to say that companies were too centralized compared to co-operatives. That companies were "one dollar, one vote" instead of "one person, one vote". Today with different class shares most tech companies aren't even "one dollar, one vote". Everything is going the other way.
Things like the new roaming rules are essentially universally followed. It used to be extremely cumbersome to get mobile data when travelling, today it is essentially a non-issue. SEPA payments is another similar thing.
Other regulation isn't for users at all, but for other businesses. Most users won't directly notice the revised payment directive, but they will very likely get a lot of new service.