It drives me insane when in Europe the link between Google Search and Google Maps is broken and I often have to copy paste an address between the two. Thanks EU, what if I like Google's integrations?
The EU told them they can not by default prefer their own maps product when linking from their search product, they have to allow the user to choose.
They could have simply added a selector when a user first clicks on the maps preview in the search result, and then remembered it on device or across that user's account.
But of course, then the user could choose a competitor's product and Google would have to honor it. That would be horrible, so instead they just made the user experience worse for everyone and elegantly made people blame the EU.
I wonder if the EU will someday figure out a patch for this "Deteriorate everyone's user experience in a way that is technically compliant and blame the EU" behavioural exploit...
Yeah, it's very overpowered and should be nerfed - they still haven't patched the cookie consent dialogs out.
To expand upon the silly comment a bit, not sure about this particular initiative, but to me it very much feels like something that should be configurable at browser level, instead of half-assed dark-pattern-filled JS dialogs: https://killthecookiebanner.eu/
I'm blaming Google for this, but most people just don't know why it happens. Probably they'll end up mandating that Google must show a notice with the reason and it will be implemented in the worst possible way.
All of these hissy fits Google and Apple are throwing are just making me wanting to use them less and less and I'm doing my best to explain how tech companies are doing malicious compliance to others.
What does it has to do with the topic? And saying “governments do not build” is a crazy antihistorical take: many things, from the space industry to the telco one were built by governments, as well as the energy and transport sectors in many countries.
For the past 50-ish years the West convinced itself that government should not build, and as a result we're suffering from a slow collapse of basic infrastructures. Meanwhile, in China and the Gulf, government kept building and the world's center of gravity steadily keeps moving eastwards.
It's fine + obligation to fix, and daily fine until fixed, and higher fine if you do it again.
I know that sounds like it comes from "it will never work", but that's how active directory, office file format, etc ... got opened, and in a case more similar to here that's how windows n and decoupling of media and internet component from windows internals happened.
The issue is, yes, it takes time.
Another issue, purely PR, is that yes the EU gets attacked repeatedly by people trying to match "respect the law of the market or leave" with "the EU tax US companies because they can't compete".
> It's fine + obligation to fix, and daily fine until fixed, and higher fine if you do it again.
The important proviso is that the penalties need to (on some non-geological timescale) get high enough that the offender is no longer capable of operating. That could mean the fines reach $500 billion, or it could mean the company is barred from operating in the EU, or it could mean people get arrested and assets are seized. But unless the penalties become crippling, it won't matter. It needs to reach a point where the downsides of noncompliance are actually greater than the benefits.
NIS2 allows for the arrest of managers in case of cybersecurity incidents resulting from negligence. I think it's a step in the right direction, but we'll have to see how it plays out.
The solution is to mandate that websites are built for browsers/devices as much as they are for humans. That way you never see a cookie banner because you've set up your device to never accept marketing cookies; A Google Maps link clicks through to Google Maps because you told your browser Google Maps was your preferred online mapping tool.
Why should be? I think it is abundantly clear by now that market competition alone will not fix this. Though that does not stop people from claiming "Yes that failed and people suffered/died, but that was not real capitalism! If only we had a real free market, it would have been better!"
The specific problem with Maps is that Google _can't_ deep link to other providers except by lat-lng or address, both of which throw away the actual context of the PoI in the common case of searching for PoIs. Well, it could perhaps deep-link to OSM-based maps, since their map data is open... but Google, as a proprietary map maker, probably treats OSM data as radioactive.
Google measures latency at microseconds.100 ms ≈ 0.2% fewer searches. Google tracks this very closely and invests a lot as that's the operational life blood of the company. You can make more money by simply making search easier.
To save "it's easy" and Google chooses to nuke their own products for... I don't know what, stick it the European regulators, strikes me as incorrect. It's because it's incredibly hard to navigate this arbitrary punative regulatory framework.
No one would use the other maps because other maps are worse. As much as euro regulators hem and haw about lack of competition, it's precisely these types of dictats that make Europe not have any viable competitors in tech.
I often hate how loaded/incendiary Ed Zitron's tone is and don't like some of his takes, but I wouldn't call it "some random blog". I run a random blog, that guy's closer to being a proper journalist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Zitron
It's malicious compliance with the intent of having the users misunderstand what's happening (that you don't have to do that but do it on purpose, and instead blame the law protecting them).
And eh, it works for the cookie banner so why change the strategy ? The comment you're answering to prove it still works. As long as people can't be bothered to think and inform themselves for a second about it, they won't stop. Same with the purposefully annoying and unclear and user hostile 'gdpr popup' about third party consent.
I'm not saying I agree with it. I'm saying from Google POV that's the correct move given their intent, the issue then become people like parent.
Well no, the cookie banner is a well intentioned but flawed and poorly designed law. Any law that is that technically specific but relies on people without an understanding of how it works is doomed to repeat the same fate. The eu should have seen prop 65 and not sleepwalked back into it.
1. The EU works on intent of the law rather than specific wording and precedence.
2. The law is a very simple "if you want to do it, you have to make sure they know", intended to force information without creating excessive administrative / legal / tech burden, please inform me about what other way you would present it that would reach the goal without being subject to malicious compliance ?
I understand. I'm generally a proponent of the spirit of the law rather than the wording of the law, and I've argued that is how the EU works here in the past. I think GDPR is a much, much better attempt at solving the problem, and has made meaningful change in tech industries. The ePrivacy directive just added pseudo-mandatory popups to every company without a technical lawyer.
Why? The whole point of the GPDR was to prevent medical information being used for insurance and all sorts of purposes.
Then come the lists of what exceptions are approved. Your medical info is used for divorces (anything involving court cases, anything involving criminal law), the police has access to it, your mayor has access to it, tax departments have access to it (think you can not pay tax and pay for your kid's cancer treatment instead? In Europe, think again). Insurance (if you get treatment for getting hurt in traffic your car insurance goes up). Unemployment (if you get treated for anything drug-related ...). Hospitals and doctors can use your medical information without your permission (for billing, for other treatments, for deciding if you should be interned, ...). And so on and so forth.
Oh and there are even silent exceptions. You see, YOU can't sue anyone under the GPDR. You can only ask a specific "supervisory authority" (you can't even choose which one)
They are under control of the executive, and so it is in most cases the currently elected party that decides if your GPDR complaint does anything, NOT the courts. Not the police. Not the public prosecutor. None of that. And it's even closed on the back end: you don't agree with these "supervisory authority"'s actions? Doesn't matter if you're complainant or defendant. You can't sue them either. You can't get a judge on your case, only appointed politicians.
There are even organizations that the GPDR supposedly applies to that have their own supervisory authority. Interpol violated your rights? No worries, file your complaint here in this building. You know, the building with "Interpol" on it in big letters.
So really, we do not even know the full list of exceptions.
More generally, the GPDR was supposed to prevent further encroachment of all sorts of organizations on privacy, with a big focus on medical data. It has achieved the opposite of that. FOR NOW (and not in every country) the only way to get a private medical file is to only use private medical care. For now that is still possible.
It's like the DMA (Digital Markets Act). Prevents organizations from using control of the OS to implement policy. There's a few exceptions though. Google gets an exception. Apple gets an exception. Through specific deals made with these organizations and the EU commissioner of
Nobody seems to have thought to scream into the commissions face: "THEN WHAT'S THE POINT?".
Well, who made those deals? Thierry Breton. He currently serves as a remunerated member of Bank of America’s Global Advisory Council (who have huge investments in Alphabet and Apple).
Yeah, I get why you want to focus on the intent only and not on what practically happened. Theory and practice are very, very different and the EU is incredibly pro-business and uses their power to literally grant billionaires exceptions to laws. That's how Goldman Sachs got it's first communist president (Barosso, who saved Goldman Sachs as president of the EU commission). That's reality, but of course the intent is thoroughly disguised, and you don't want to talk about the difference.
Gdpr whole point was about insurance? Can you please diversify your news source and educate yourself? I didn't even bother to read your pamphlet of a comment after seeing such an obviously wrong first sentence
Then again, the very same people complain about GDPR not being technically super specific.
At some point we have to accept the pattern. People with ideological objections against any limits at all will try to frame any regulation as stupid, regardless of what is in it.
Yes and no, it's true now but the EU fines are not just "you did that" but "you did that we're going to assume you're going to be better and if you do again next time it will really hurt". Which I think is a fair point of view.
You might still answer too little to late, but given that we're at the starting point to a massive sovereignty push here thanks to the current US admin being proved as a possibility rather than a novelty, I think this matters a lot.
Google really sucks at giving users a choice. The Gmail app on iOS has a browser selector dialog, which asks if you want to open a link in an email in Chrome or Safari. Despite the fact that you can change your default browser in iOS settings if you really want to use Chrome. And even if you choose Safari and don’t ask it to remind you every time, it will still prompt you again later if you’d like to switch to Chrome this time. Couldn’t I just pick Safari and you respect that choice until I say otherwise?
I do wonder if people using Chrome on iOS face the same issue, or if Google respects your browser of choice a bit more if it’s their browser.
This is intended to drive you insane on purpose. It is just malicious compliance intended to make users blame the anti-monopoly regulators instead of the monopolists.
This is a corporation with tens of thousands of software developers. If they wanted to do better, they could. As always: If the UI is bad for you, that probably means that particular implementation is good for the corporation.
What drives you nuts is Google's malicious compliance and your ignorance: what EU forbidden is defaulting to it in a way that they can't be decoupled. What Google was allowed to do was adding a option to enable it.
They didn't. That's specifically to piss you off on EU.
Nobody is forcing me to use Google search, regardless of all the browser and search engine selection clown show, so much wasted money and time for nonexisting problem
> They could simply ask you which map provider you'd like to use.
Yeah that's why EU isn't producing capable tech competitors. If other map services want my business they need to work on that. Instead, someone who built a search infrastructure is supposed to do a free promotion for competitors.
> Yeah that's why EU isn't producing capable tech competitors.
Actually its how the EU avoids monopolization.
> If other map services want my business they need to work on that.
Yeah.. Because a startup is going to meaningfully compete against a company who uses forced internal integrations? DropBox is a good example I heard about recently, iCloud, OneDrive, lesser products maybe, was able to basically make Drop box irrelevant because of in-house integration with systems.
It's kind of obvious that when someone says "Europe can't into tech" what they mean is when the EU officials fly to the US and beg "Please give us Mythos access".
I share the frustration but maybe if Google hadn't gained a monopoly status Google Maps wouldn’t have been in its current sorry state.
My assessment is that EU is doing too little too late, the fine should have been something like 20B and used towards creating a non-profit, open and extendable map service ideally with the people who already do great mapping tech that don't show up in Google search results at the top.
EU is too vanilla, too unopinionated towards the tech, they go over the problem after the damage is done, take the money for themselves and force a non-solution that doesn't fix the problem and often makes it worse because they leave the implementation to the convicts who make sure to make it maliciously compliant.
On mobile its navigation is terrible, takes you into strange routes that might be technically faster but are hard to drive at or sometimes non-existent. Sometimes tries to be smart, makes everything worse. i.e. suggest a route that it says its 5 min faster and shows no traffic and you find out that there's no traffic because of a road closure further ahead. The UI when driving is not as good as the competition. I only use it because it has superior business listings with decent reviews and photos.
On desktop the web app is jittery, occasional freezing of UI, buttons stop working(most often the street view figure just doesn't show the available street view or would refuse being dropped at a location). Textures wouldn't load, sometimes will downgrade the UI to non-webgl version.
Also, businesses are often frustrated when it comes to changing their address, no proper support exists to fix mistakes or do updates.
I would loved if EU forced Google to open its maps business data for a year for download so competing services can achieve parity in this regard. After all, Google has this data because its a monopoly - people simply uploaded their photos and reviews to Google Maps because most people use it because Google forced it down the throat of everybody.
Ah, also Google is pretty evil when it comes to maps. They jacked up the API prices to ridiculous levels once the become the absolute dominant service and they also tried to make iPhone undesirable by not making their Google Maps app in some countries when Apple screwed up with Apple maps and Apple maps was practically useless outside the US.
It was a not specified but clearly meant part of his question that it's asking in the context of "... that could be tied to decoupling".
Eg this has nothing to do and thus can't be hand-wavy blamed on for things like "On mobile its navigation is terrible, takes you into strange routes that might be technically faster but are hard to drive at or sometimes non-existent. Sometimes tries to be smart, makes everything worse. i.e. suggest a route that it says its 5 min faster and shows no traffic and you find out that there's no traffic because of a road closure further ahead. The UI when driving is not as good as the competition. I only use it because it has superior business listings with decent reviews and photos."
It's the same thing with Internet Explorer, they can get away with low quality and orders of magnitude prices increases and restrictions on the API because they can and they can because of the monopoly. Early decoupling could have allowed competition which might have had good data, more open or more fairly priced api, better UI and navigation since it could have made commercial sense to invest in these things.
Eh, on the other hand the EU has now effectively forced usb-c for devices after apple refused to play it clean for years and they still got people who complained (how dare the regulator be opiniated toward tech !).
The EU loves to play it the european way, and while on the surface it seems "oh that means regulations" in reality it's a "figure it out yourselves and please behave like adult, we don't want to deal with that" and we ask for some sort of regulatory association or whatever that we can refer to to talk to them all.
It's worked in a ton of industries including ones where we have no moat but somehow tech companies are always incapable to behave. At least the US ones, eg for the phone thing it ended up being Samsung who told the EU "hey I've been playing ball for years and Apple isn't , make them or I stop too".
Im sure you are right, but I’m not sure what you mean. I can search for an address fine in search and I get an embedded map that I can click to open Google Maps. How does it work in the US?
There is no standard clickable "link" for physical locations. There is no URL-equivalent you can send to someone, they click it, it open up their map viewer of choice. You can send Lat Lon coordinates and then have the recipient copy and paste them. It generally works though there isn't a standard format and no service will make it clickable like an email address, so the whole process remains clunky.
When you "Share" a location in Google Maps or OSMand, you get back a URL link to their service and not an service agnostic "link" to the geographic location.
What's surprising here is that people still cheer on this, but no one is suggesting to do the same on mobile today. I honestly am confused by this. Obviously, the current situation warrants it 100x as much.
> but no one is suggesting to do the same on mobile today.
I am unsure what you you mean with this? If you are talking about choosing a different browser on mobile I will point you to the DMA Browser Choice Screen page for Android[1], it has been a thing for a while as far as I can remember.
Instead of going insane, why not try to think about how to solve this problem? With the correct markup, your browser could recognise the address as a physical location and ask you how you would like to handle the address. You would choose Google Maps.
We need to stop being so helpless. A proper user agent should be able to do what you want it to.
as with all of these laws, its EU writing a reasonable law, and the companies throwing their toys out the pram and complying as maliciously as possible
And I hate when someone sends me a goo.gl link, which I need to first open in a browser and then open in my maps app just to be able to see the coordinates they're sending me.
The market is a funnel, rewarding centralization, you can thrustbust the t-1000 all you want, but the mercury meets in the middle and guess who is back.
Yes, but that's by design in some sense. Monopoly is a carrot, entrepreneurs are donkeys on treadmills chasing after such carrots. The market's value to society in this metaphor is the energy produced by the treadmills, so while it's critical to offer donkeys the promise of a carrot, it's even more important they don't actually get it, because then they step off the treadmill and become a nuisance.
I agree you could make laws allowing for self-busting. As in, some management whistleblower having evidence of monopoly practices, reports it and the company gets autosplit- with the dissidents as manager of the new company.
The EU just finds a new thing to fine each time. Since the scope of US consumer internet companies is so vast, they can mine €1b fines more or less limitlessly.
The argument is that the laws are so broad that the EU can always find a violation even when companies try to follow the law, and that they mostly target foreign companies. TBH I find this focus defensible: the big US companies are just so much bigger that it makes more sense to police them than insignificant local players. But it is a good cash cow.
The problem is that American companies try to follow the letter of the law, while going as much against the spirit of the law as possible. This is why they complain it's "too broad", because they can't avoid the spirit as they would like to.
Example here: Facebook changing their ToS to claim usage itself constitutes freely given, informed consent under GDPR. No it doesn't, you knew that was against the spirit, you did it anyways, you got fined.
This is fundamentally how the EU legal system works, you're expected to do what the law wants from you, not find some clever way to avoid what the law is for while ticking the right checkboxes.
Sometimes the "spirit of the law" seems to be "degrade your offerings until the European competitors who keep pestering us stop". Little consideration ever seems to be given to telling those European businesses to make a good product themselves. European competition regulators could be weighing consumer welfare more heavily.
I'm not sure I've observed any of that. American companies usually degrade out of spite in my experience - they'd rather not offer the product than to offer it lawfully.
Look, US tech services can either follow our laws our they can get the fuck out of our market.
The way people treat them breaking our laws as their god given right and then frame our fine as anything but their own fault is starting to really annoy me.
Respect our sovereignty, follow our laws. Or don't, but then don't be surprised that breaking the law is punished.
Maybe things are different in the US, maybe corporate capture has progressed to a point where laws are optional for megacorps. But we still have rule of law and we'd like to keep it that way.
While there is “law”, how much agency does an average European individual have in shaping those laws? This is a multi national body for which you can’t vote for its leader. You can’t vote on any of its resolutions or referendums.
It’s representative democracy, like most democracies. It is, granted, a particularly complex and confusing one.
In practice, the average European has more agency in shaping EU law than the average American does in shaping US law; the US’s electoral system means that, realistically, on a federal level, most peoples’ votes simply do not matter (two party FPTP system, with most seats being safe). The EU parliament is at least multiparty proportional representation, and most member states’ governments are also elected via some sort of PR.
> for which you can’t vote for its leader
Most democracies don’t have a directly elected head of state; it’s _largely_ a thing in the Americas and Africa. In terms of big countries with a true presidential system, you’re really talking the US, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria and Indonesia. I’m, ah, not sure that we should be rushing to emulate those paragons of democracy :)
France does have a directly elected head of state (I wouldn't want to emulate that either, though their system is not purely presidential), as does South Korea, Mexico, Turkey and many other countries really.
" it’s _largely_ a thing in the Americas and Africa"
" In terms of big countries with a true presidential system, you’re really talking the US, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria and Indonesia."
These are factual inaccuracies.
South Korea is a functioning democracy. They tend to jail their ex-presidents quite often, but then only those that do deserve it, which is more than we can say about a few western democracies which are very lenient about the criminality of politicians. Ah yes and the president is limited to serving one term.
The US doesn't have a directly elected head of state either. The demos elects the electoral college, which elects the head of state. Twice in recent memory directly against the popular vote, most recently Trump I.
For the Council, it is literally just a grouping of our democratically elected heads of state. Those we can of course vote for according to our countries own democratic systems.
For the Commission, our democratically elected national governments each send a representative, so those are as elected as any minister in government is.
For Parliament, the EU demos elects directly.
Not sure where the issue is? It all seems more democratic to me than, say, the Electoral College.
This time the American tech industry is the uncolonized native America, and the Europeans are the settlers that ran out of land to take over and decided they must forcefully re-colonize Americans and our design decisions and way of life by force.
This is such a ridiculous offender/victim reversal. American tech companies are free to do whatever they want in America. In our country, they need to follow our law. If they don't want that, they can get out.
What they're trying to do is colonize Europe with their lawlessness, they're trying to deny us our sovereign right of determining our own rules.
There's no right to come to our jurisdiction and then decide to ignore our rules. Either come and play by the rules or stay out.
That reference doesn't matter. The reference that matters is profit due to presence in Europe market. If it is lower than fines per year, it makes sense to pull out of the market.
The issue is that app developers can not offer alternatives to this, not that Google's apps only favour their own services. This is the exact same issue Japan had with Apple. Both were fair rulings. Forcing developers to use services is just removing free competition.
Expect threats by the Trump administration towards EU.
US: our beloved tech companies (also funded our POTUS elections) tried to navigate the complex regulation landscape in the EU to innovate and accidentally stepped into very complex rules. But EU is fining them for being good boys.
Shame on you EU, for not supporting criminals as much as US does
It should be clear to everyone that Google is too big and is engaging in anti-competitive behaviour. The EU giving them a token fine every once in a while is just part of the cost of doing business for Google. Google could just choose to not favour their own services and to give users a choice. But they don't. Hence the fine.
Don't worry, EU will give it back in almost every gov running on the American BigTech, it's just a show. The Granny In Chief has to get the emails somehow. /s
Probably referring to how quite a few e-ID and online banking sites require you to use Chrome or Safari, as the companies behind them don't test with eg. Firefox.
The Danish "MitID", for example, doesn't quite work right with how a lot of apps using it for authentication (the default Firefox settings probably strip something from the intent links the MitID login page uses) and Danish citizen service sites require Chrome for some things such as booking an appointment, iirc.
It drives me insane when in Europe the link between Google Search and Google Maps is broken and I often have to copy paste an address between the two. Thanks EU, what if I like Google's integrations?
The EU told them they can not by default prefer their own maps product when linking from their search product, they have to allow the user to choose.
They could have simply added a selector when a user first clicks on the maps preview in the search result, and then remembered it on device or across that user's account.
But of course, then the user could choose a competitor's product and Google would have to honor it. That would be horrible, so instead they just made the user experience worse for everyone and elegantly made people blame the EU.
I wonder if the EU will someday figure out a patch for this "Deteriorate everyone's user experience in a way that is technically compliant and blame the EU" behavioural exploit...
Yeah, it's very overpowered and should be nerfed - they still haven't patched the cookie consent dialogs out.
To expand upon the silly comment a bit, not sure about this particular initiative, but to me it very much feels like something that should be configurable at browser level, instead of half-assed dark-pattern-filled JS dialogs: https://killthecookiebanner.eu/
I'm blaming Google for this, but most people just don't know why it happens. Probably they'll end up mandating that Google must show a notice with the reason and it will be implemented in the worst possible way.
All of these hissy fits Google and Apple are throwing are just making me wanting to use them less and less and I'm doing my best to explain how tech companies are doing malicious compliance to others.
The European Commission is way too pro-business for that, even when the said businesses are parasitic actors who don't even pay taxes in the EU.
Plus that just isn't how governments work. Governments work by imposing costs on others. They do not build.
What does it has to do with the topic? And saying “governments do not build” is a crazy antihistorical take: many things, from the space industry to the telco one were built by governments, as well as the energy and transport sectors in many countries.
For the past 50-ish years the West convinced itself that government should not build, and as a result we're suffering from a slow collapse of basic infrastructures. Meanwhile, in China and the Gulf, government kept building and the world's center of gravity steadily keeps moving eastwards.
"What have the Romans ever done for us?"
It's fine + obligation to fix, and daily fine until fixed, and higher fine if you do it again.
I know that sounds like it comes from "it will never work", but that's how active directory, office file format, etc ... got opened, and in a case more similar to here that's how windows n and decoupling of media and internet component from windows internals happened.
The issue is, yes, it takes time.
Another issue, purely PR, is that yes the EU gets attacked repeatedly by people trying to match "respect the law of the market or leave" with "the EU tax US companies because they can't compete".
> It's fine + obligation to fix, and daily fine until fixed, and higher fine if you do it again.
The important proviso is that the penalties need to (on some non-geological timescale) get high enough that the offender is no longer capable of operating. That could mean the fines reach $500 billion, or it could mean the company is barred from operating in the EU, or it could mean people get arrested and assets are seized. But unless the penalties become crippling, it won't matter. It needs to reach a point where the downsides of noncompliance are actually greater than the benefits.
NIS2 allows for the arrest of managers in case of cybersecurity incidents resulting from negligence. I think it's a step in the right direction, but we'll have to see how it plays out.
In the EU they like the "daily fine until fixed". It's how Microsoft bowed down.
But unlike the story some on HN and in the US like to think, US tech companies don't ever get there except rare exception, they know the game.
The solution is to mandate that websites are built for browsers/devices as much as they are for humans. That way you never see a cookie banner because you've set up your device to never accept marketing cookies; A Google Maps link clicks through to Google Maps because you told your browser Google Maps was your preferred online mapping tool.
The corrective force should be market competition, but Google is a monopoly not a monopoly with so many moats it might as well be a monopoly.
They also buy up the competition before it gets a chance as is the way now.
Why should be? I think it is abundantly clear by now that market competition alone will not fix this. Though that does not stop people from claiming "Yes that failed and people suffered/died, but that was not real capitalism! If only we had a real free market, it would have been better!"
The specific problem with Maps is that Google _can't_ deep link to other providers except by lat-lng or address, both of which throw away the actual context of the PoI in the common case of searching for PoIs. Well, it could perhaps deep-link to OSM-based maps, since their map data is open... but Google, as a proprietary map maker, probably treats OSM data as radioactive.
Google measures latency at microseconds.100 ms ≈ 0.2% fewer searches. Google tracks this very closely and invests a lot as that's the operational life blood of the company. You can make more money by simply making search easier.
To save "it's easy" and Google chooses to nuke their own products for... I don't know what, stick it the European regulators, strikes me as incorrect. It's because it's incredibly hard to navigate this arbitrary punative regulatory framework.
No one would use the other maps because other maps are worse. As much as euro regulators hem and haw about lack of competition, it's precisely these types of dictats that make Europe not have any viable competitors in tech.
Google also makes money by making search worse.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
[flagged]
I often hate how loaded/incendiary Ed Zitron's tone is and don't like some of his takes, but I wouldn't call it "some random blog". I run a random blog, that guy's closer to being a proper journalist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Zitron
> No one would use the other maps because other maps are worse.
Do you realize how many commercial driving apps are based around OSM data?
It's malicious compliance with the intent of having the users misunderstand what's happening (that you don't have to do that but do it on purpose, and instead blame the law protecting them).
And eh, it works for the cookie banner so why change the strategy ? The comment you're answering to prove it still works. As long as people can't be bothered to think and inform themselves for a second about it, they won't stop. Same with the purposefully annoying and unclear and user hostile 'gdpr popup' about third party consent.
I'm not saying I agree with it. I'm saying from Google POV that's the correct move given their intent, the issue then become people like parent.
Well no, the cookie banner is a well intentioned but flawed and poorly designed law. Any law that is that technically specific but relies on people without an understanding of how it works is doomed to repeat the same fate. The eu should have seen prop 65 and not sleepwalked back into it.
1. The EU works on intent of the law rather than specific wording and precedence.
2. The law is a very simple "if you want to do it, you have to make sure they know", intended to force information without creating excessive administrative / legal / tech burden, please inform me about what other way you would present it that would reach the goal without being subject to malicious compliance ?
I understand. I'm generally a proponent of the spirit of the law rather than the wording of the law, and I've argued that is how the EU works here in the past. I think GDPR is a much, much better attempt at solving the problem, and has made meaningful change in tech industries. The ePrivacy directive just added pseudo-mandatory popups to every company without a technical lawyer.
Why? The whole point of the GPDR was to prevent medical information being used for insurance and all sorts of purposes.
Then come the lists of what exceptions are approved. Your medical info is used for divorces (anything involving court cases, anything involving criminal law), the police has access to it, your mayor has access to it, tax departments have access to it (think you can not pay tax and pay for your kid's cancer treatment instead? In Europe, think again). Insurance (if you get treatment for getting hurt in traffic your car insurance goes up). Unemployment (if you get treated for anything drug-related ...). Hospitals and doctors can use your medical information without your permission (for billing, for other treatments, for deciding if you should be interned, ...). And so on and so forth.
Oh and there are even silent exceptions. You see, YOU can't sue anyone under the GPDR. You can only ask a specific "supervisory authority" (you can't even choose which one)
They are under control of the executive, and so it is in most cases the currently elected party that decides if your GPDR complaint does anything, NOT the courts. Not the police. Not the public prosecutor. None of that. And it's even closed on the back end: you don't agree with these "supervisory authority"'s actions? Doesn't matter if you're complainant or defendant. You can't sue them either. You can't get a judge on your case, only appointed politicians.
There are even organizations that the GPDR supposedly applies to that have their own supervisory authority. Interpol violated your rights? No worries, file your complaint here in this building. You know, the building with "Interpol" on it in big letters.
So really, we do not even know the full list of exceptions.
More generally, the GPDR was supposed to prevent further encroachment of all sorts of organizations on privacy, with a big focus on medical data. It has achieved the opposite of that. FOR NOW (and not in every country) the only way to get a private medical file is to only use private medical care. For now that is still possible.
It's like the DMA (Digital Markets Act). Prevents organizations from using control of the OS to implement policy. There's a few exceptions though. Google gets an exception. Apple gets an exception. Through specific deals made with these organizations and the EU commissioner of
Nobody seems to have thought to scream into the commissions face: "THEN WHAT'S THE POINT?".
Well, who made those deals? Thierry Breton. He currently serves as a remunerated member of Bank of America’s Global Advisory Council (who have huge investments in Alphabet and Apple).
Yeah, I get why you want to focus on the intent only and not on what practically happened. Theory and practice are very, very different and the EU is incredibly pro-business and uses their power to literally grant billionaires exceptions to laws. That's how Goldman Sachs got it's first communist president (Barosso, who saved Goldman Sachs as president of the EU commission). That's reality, but of course the intent is thoroughly disguised, and you don't want to talk about the difference.
Gdpr whole point was about insurance? Can you please diversify your news source and educate yourself? I didn't even bother to read your pamphlet of a comment after seeing such an obviously wrong first sentence
There a reason why we have courts. Laws aren’t algorithms despite what the tech world wet dream might want them to be.
Then again, the very same people complain about GDPR not being technically super specific.
At some point we have to accept the pattern. People with ideological objections against any limits at all will try to frame any regulation as stupid, regardless of what is in it.
Yes, but by the time you are sued and fined into compliance again, you already made a ton of money to pay 10x the next fine.
Yes and no, it's true now but the EU fines are not just "you did that" but "you did that we're going to assume you're going to be better and if you do again next time it will really hurt". Which I think is a fair point of view.
You might still answer too little to late, but given that we're at the starting point to a massive sovereignty push here thanks to the current US admin being proved as a possibility rather than a novelty, I think this matters a lot.
They could also just have their maps and others show in the results as normal.
That would suck, though? Showing places on a map makes so much more sense than burying them in a list of webpages.
~don't~ be evil
Google really sucks at giving users a choice. The Gmail app on iOS has a browser selector dialog, which asks if you want to open a link in an email in Chrome or Safari. Despite the fact that you can change your default browser in iOS settings if you really want to use Chrome. And even if you choose Safari and don’t ask it to remind you every time, it will still prompt you again later if you’d like to switch to Chrome this time. Couldn’t I just pick Safari and you respect that choice until I say otherwise?
I do wonder if people using Chrome on iOS face the same issue, or if Google respects your browser of choice a bit more if it’s their browser.
This is intended to drive you insane on purpose. It is just malicious compliance intended to make users blame the anti-monopoly regulators instead of the monopolists.
This is a corporation with tens of thousands of software developers. If they wanted to do better, they could. As always: If the UI is bad for you, that probably means that particular implementation is good for the corporation.
What drives you nuts is Google's malicious compliance and your ignorance: what EU forbidden is defaulting to it in a way that they can't be decoupled. What Google was allowed to do was adding a option to enable it.
They didn't. That's specifically to piss you off on EU.
Why are you blaming the EU and not Google's malicious compliance? They could simply ask you which map provider you'd like to use.
Nobody is forcing me to use Google search, regardless of all the browser and search engine selection clown show, so much wasted money and time for nonexisting problem
> They could simply ask you which map provider you'd like to use.
Yeah that's why EU isn't producing capable tech competitors. If other map services want my business they need to work on that. Instead, someone who built a search infrastructure is supposed to do a free promotion for competitors.
> Yeah that's why EU isn't producing capable tech competitors.
Actually its how the EU avoids monopolization.
> If other map services want my business they need to work on that.
Yeah.. Because a startup is going to meaningfully compete against a company who uses forced internal integrations? DropBox is a good example I heard about recently, iCloud, OneDrive, lesser products maybe, was able to basically make Drop box irrelevant because of in-house integration with systems.
There are many amazing tech companies in Europe.
Siemens, Sulzer, ABB, Rolls Royce and so on.
Or perhaps you meant advertising companies like Google and Meta when you said "tech"?
It's kind of obvious that when someone says "Europe can't into tech" what they mean is when the EU officials fly to the US and beg "Please give us Mythos access".
I share the frustration but maybe if Google hadn't gained a monopoly status Google Maps wouldn’t have been in its current sorry state.
My assessment is that EU is doing too little too late, the fine should have been something like 20B and used towards creating a non-profit, open and extendable map service ideally with the people who already do great mapping tech that don't show up in Google search results at the top.
EU is too vanilla, too unopinionated towards the tech, they go over the problem after the damage is done, take the money for themselves and force a non-solution that doesn't fix the problem and often makes it worse because they leave the implementation to the convicts who make sure to make it maliciously compliant.
> if Google hadn't gained a monopoly status Google Maps wouldn’t have been in its current sorry state
What's up with Google Maps? It's great for me.
On mobile its navigation is terrible, takes you into strange routes that might be technically faster but are hard to drive at or sometimes non-existent. Sometimes tries to be smart, makes everything worse. i.e. suggest a route that it says its 5 min faster and shows no traffic and you find out that there's no traffic because of a road closure further ahead. The UI when driving is not as good as the competition. I only use it because it has superior business listings with decent reviews and photos.
On desktop the web app is jittery, occasional freezing of UI, buttons stop working(most often the street view figure just doesn't show the available street view or would refuse being dropped at a location). Textures wouldn't load, sometimes will downgrade the UI to non-webgl version.
Also, businesses are often frustrated when it comes to changing their address, no proper support exists to fix mistakes or do updates.
I would loved if EU forced Google to open its maps business data for a year for download so competing services can achieve parity in this regard. After all, Google has this data because its a monopoly - people simply uploaded their photos and reviews to Google Maps because most people use it because Google forced it down the throat of everybody.
Ah, also Google is pretty evil when it comes to maps. They jacked up the API prices to ridiculous levels once the become the absolute dominant service and they also tried to make iPhone undesirable by not making their Google Maps app in some countries when Apple screwed up with Apple maps and Apple maps was practically useless outside the US.
It was a not specified but clearly meant part of his question that it's asking in the context of "... that could be tied to decoupling".
Eg this has nothing to do and thus can't be hand-wavy blamed on for things like "On mobile its navigation is terrible, takes you into strange routes that might be technically faster but are hard to drive at or sometimes non-existent. Sometimes tries to be smart, makes everything worse. i.e. suggest a route that it says its 5 min faster and shows no traffic and you find out that there's no traffic because of a road closure further ahead. The UI when driving is not as good as the competition. I only use it because it has superior business listings with decent reviews and photos."
It's the same thing with Internet Explorer, they can get away with low quality and orders of magnitude prices increases and restrictions on the API because they can and they can because of the monopoly. Early decoupling could have allowed competition which might have had good data, more open or more fairly priced api, better UI and navigation since it could have made commercial sense to invest in these things.
Eh, on the other hand the EU has now effectively forced usb-c for devices after apple refused to play it clean for years and they still got people who complained (how dare the regulator be opiniated toward tech !).
The EU loves to play it the european way, and while on the surface it seems "oh that means regulations" in reality it's a "figure it out yourselves and please behave like adult, we don't want to deal with that" and we ask for some sort of regulatory association or whatever that we can refer to to talk to them all.
It's worked in a ton of industries including ones where we have no moat but somehow tech companies are always incapable to behave. At least the US ones, eg for the phone thing it ended up being Samsung who told the EU "hey I've been playing ball for years and Apple isn't , make them or I stop too".
Im sure you are right, but I’m not sure what you mean. I can search for an address fine in search and I get an embedded map that I can click to open Google Maps. How does it work in the US?
Does not work for me. Presumably there is some popup you have to accept somewhere for it to work.
If you click on the address result (the button in the map), it will normally work.
Mostly tested on Firefox on Mac in the EU.
I think this is a larger web-standards problem.
There is no standard clickable "link" for physical locations. There is no URL-equivalent you can send to someone, they click it, it open up their map viewer of choice. You can send Lat Lon coordinates and then have the recipient copy and paste them. It generally works though there isn't a standard format and no service will make it clickable like an email address, so the whole process remains clunky.
When you "Share" a location in Google Maps or OSMand, you get back a URL link to their service and not an service agnostic "link" to the geographic location.
There is a standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo_URI_scheme
I have it working on my Android phone. It's clickable links that open my map app of choice (or rather a selection dialog).
It's just that the big players do not want to use it.
US's DoJ fined Microsoft for bundling a web browser into its own OS. EU is the apprentice.
What's surprising here is that people still cheer on this, but no one is suggesting to do the same on mobile today. I honestly am confused by this. Obviously, the current situation warrants it 100x as much.
> but no one is suggesting to do the same on mobile today.
I am unsure what you you mean with this? If you are talking about choosing a different browser on mobile I will point you to the DMA Browser Choice Screen page for Android[1], it has been a thing for a while as far as I can remember.
[1]: https://www.android.com/choicescreen/dma/browser/
If you click the "address" link in the Google Maps sidebox in Google Search it will show you on Google Maps -> even in EU.
When I search for a place on google, and I click on the 'directions' button, I'm taken to maps, ready start navigation. I'm in Ireland.
What's your experience?
Google can give you an option to set in your settings which maps can be linked directly, and they can provide an API for map providers.
similar with video. No, I don't want to watch the Facebook video, I want the YouTube version!
Instead of going insane, why not try to think about how to solve this problem? With the correct markup, your browser could recognise the address as a physical location and ask you how you would like to handle the address. You would choose Google Maps.
We need to stop being so helpless. A proper user agent should be able to do what you want it to.
Good god. That was an EU thing?
as with all of these laws, its EU writing a reasonable law, and the companies throwing their toys out the pram and complying as maliciously as possible
This is unrelated to Google's apps being integrated and working together which should not be affected by that.
And I hate when someone sends me a goo.gl link, which I need to first open in a browser and then open in my maps app just to be able to see the coordinates they're sending me.
yes, everybody lose here
You are thanking the wrong entity.
You should thank Google for their shitty product due to malicious compliance. A daily reminder that they don't care about their users.
The EU has found a clever way to charge US tech companies for market access without triggering a WTO violation.
Its a reverse uno after decades of fines by the US against European banks and car makers.
They will just write it off against the tax they pay back in the US anyway (which is why the US doesnt like it).
If the US had working anti trust this wouldn't really even be a thing.
The market is a funnel, rewarding centralization, you can thrustbust the t-1000 all you want, but the mercury meets in the middle and guess who is back.
Yes, but that's by design in some sense. Monopoly is a carrot, entrepreneurs are donkeys on treadmills chasing after such carrots. The market's value to society in this metaphor is the energy produced by the treadmills, so while it's critical to offer donkeys the promise of a carrot, it's even more important they don't actually get it, because then they step off the treadmill and become a nuisance.
I agree you could make laws allowing for self-busting. As in, some management whistleblower having evidence of monopoly practices, reports it and the company gets autosplit- with the dissidents as manager of the new company.
(Actually I think it was Gallium but your point stands ;) )
This is only true if Google isn't ordered to change its behavior and the fine isn't higher next time.
The EU just finds a new thing to fine each time. Since the scope of US consumer internet companies is so vast, they can mine €1b fines more or less limitlessly.
Maybe US consumer internet companies should try following our laws?
What do they expect if they come to our countries and break the law there? Of course they're gonna get fined?!
The argument is that the laws are so broad that the EU can always find a violation even when companies try to follow the law, and that they mostly target foreign companies. TBH I find this focus defensible: the big US companies are just so much bigger that it makes more sense to police them than insignificant local players. But it is a good cash cow.
The problem is that American companies try to follow the letter of the law, while going as much against the spirit of the law as possible. This is why they complain it's "too broad", because they can't avoid the spirit as they would like to.
Example here: Facebook changing their ToS to claim usage itself constitutes freely given, informed consent under GDPR. No it doesn't, you knew that was against the spirit, you did it anyways, you got fined.
This is fundamentally how the EU legal system works, you're expected to do what the law wants from you, not find some clever way to avoid what the law is for while ticking the right checkboxes.
I had a whole in-depth conversation on this not too long ago, check it out if you want more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707697
Sometimes the "spirit of the law" seems to be "degrade your offerings until the European competitors who keep pestering us stop". Little consideration ever seems to be given to telling those European businesses to make a good product themselves. European competition regulators could be weighing consumer welfare more heavily.
I'm not sure I've observed any of that. American companies usually degrade out of spite in my experience - they'd rather not offer the product than to offer it lawfully.
It's a win-win: Wild west for the US and fines for the countries that have laws and enforce them.
I m not sure about that. It raises the cost of doing business, but US tech giants still get to dominate the EU tech landscape.
What's the alternative -- let US companies continue with their anti-competitive practices?
Look, US tech services can either follow our laws our they can get the fuck out of our market.
The way people treat them breaking our laws as their god given right and then frame our fine as anything but their own fault is starting to really annoy me.
Respect our sovereignty, follow our laws. Or don't, but then don't be surprised that breaking the law is punished.
Maybe things are different in the US, maybe corporate capture has progressed to a point where laws are optional for megacorps. But we still have rule of law and we'd like to keep it that way.
While there is “law”, how much agency does an average European individual have in shaping those laws? This is a multi national body for which you can’t vote for its leader. You can’t vote on any of its resolutions or referendums.
It’s representative democracy, like most democracies. It is, granted, a particularly complex and confusing one.
In practice, the average European has more agency in shaping EU law than the average American does in shaping US law; the US’s electoral system means that, realistically, on a federal level, most peoples’ votes simply do not matter (two party FPTP system, with most seats being safe). The EU parliament is at least multiparty proportional representation, and most member states’ governments are also elected via some sort of PR.
> for which you can’t vote for its leader
Most democracies don’t have a directly elected head of state; it’s _largely_ a thing in the Americas and Africa. In terms of big countries with a true presidential system, you’re really talking the US, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria and Indonesia. I’m, ah, not sure that we should be rushing to emulate those paragons of democracy :)
France does have a directly elected head of state (I wouldn't want to emulate that either, though their system is not purely presidential), as does South Korea, Mexico, Turkey and many other countries really.
I mean, look, again, Turkey? South Korea? You’re not really selling it.
" it’s _largely_ a thing in the Americas and Africa" " In terms of big countries with a true presidential system, you’re really talking the US, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria and Indonesia."
These are factual inaccuracies.
South Korea is a functioning democracy. They tend to jail their ex-presidents quite often, but then only those that do deserve it, which is more than we can say about a few western democracies which are very lenient about the criminality of politicians. Ah yes and the president is limited to serving one term.
The US doesn't have a directly elected head of state either. The demos elects the electoral college, which elects the head of state. Twice in recent memory directly against the popular vote, most recently Trump I.
For the Council, it is literally just a grouping of our democratically elected heads of state. Those we can of course vote for according to our countries own democratic systems.
For the Commission, our democratically elected national governments each send a representative, so those are as elected as any minister in government is.
For Parliament, the EU demos elects directly.
Not sure where the issue is? It all seems more democratic to me than, say, the Electoral College.
This is the exact same thing the US should he doing, but its in love with corporate overlords.
This time the American tech industry is the uncolonized native America, and the Europeans are the settlers that ran out of land to take over and decided they must forcefully re-colonize Americans and our design decisions and way of life by force.
This is such a ridiculous offender/victim reversal. American tech companies are free to do whatever they want in America. In our country, they need to follow our law. If they don't want that, they can get out.
What they're trying to do is colonize Europe with their lawlessness, they're trying to deny us our sovereign right of determining our own rules.
There's no right to come to our jurisdiction and then decide to ignore our rules. Either come and play by the rules or stay out.
For reference, that's 0.25% of Alphabet's revenue last year.
Another reference: It's ~0.75% of Alphabets 2025 income.
That reference doesn't matter. The reference that matters is profit due to presence in Europe market. If it is lower than fines per year, it makes sense to pull out of the market.
You've submitted this 8 times OP; Please just read the site we beg of you
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49019220
That's last week's fine, isn't it? If so, it's a dupe.
https://archive.ph/zCYhX
The issue is that app developers can not offer alternatives to this, not that Google's apps only favour their own services. This is the exact same issue Japan had with Apple. Both were fair rulings. Forcing developers to use services is just removing free competition.
Expect threats by the Trump administration towards EU.
US: our beloved tech companies (also funded our POTUS elections) tried to navigate the complex regulation landscape in the EU to innovate and accidentally stepped into very complex rules. But EU is fining them for being good boys.
Shame on you EU, for not supporting criminals as much as US does
He already has: https://www.trumpstruth.org/statuses/40235
JFC these comments.
It should be clear to everyone that Google is too big and is engaging in anti-competitive behaviour. The EU giving them a token fine every once in a while is just part of the cost of doing business for Google. Google could just choose to not favour their own services and to give users a choice. But they don't. Hence the fine.
Don't worry, EU will give it back in almost every gov running on the American BigTech, it's just a show. The Granny In Chief has to get the emails somehow. /s
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I own nothing and am happy, am happy! Do not, I repeat do not send a senile agent my way, I can't stand listening to the Cold War stories anymore...
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wathefuk r you talking bout
Probably referring to how quite a few e-ID and online banking sites require you to use Chrome or Safari, as the companies behind them don't test with eg. Firefox.
The Danish "MitID", for example, doesn't quite work right with how a lot of apps using it for authentication (the default Firefox settings probably strip something from the intent links the MitID login page uses) and Danish citizen service sites require Chrome for some things such as booking an appointment, iirc.
It should be tested on Firefox, but its global usage share is hovering around 3.3% and dropping. At this time, even Opera is comparable at 1.7%.
sounds like very different groups of people. a few danish developers vs 27 politicians from across europe (european commission)
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