https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_2934

EU personally fines elon musk for, seems, kinda dumb bullshit

@sun

I don't understand why the US gov kept silent on this extortion for so long.

> As with most grand criminal enterprises, the EU’s grift started small. Back in 2021, it was a €746 million “fine” for Amazon, or €225 million for WhatsApp, over a bullshit “data protection” ruling. But a year later, with nothing but a thumbs up from the Biden Administration, European regulators got a little more creative. In 2022, the EU slapped Google with a €4.125 billion fine. Allegedly, the company violated foreign monopoly laws. Google “restricted competition,” regulators said, by preinstalling Chrome on Android devices. The following year, Ireland fined Meta €1.2 billion over more data protection bullshit, and Google was rocked with another €2.4 billion “fine” for favoring its products over competitors in search. Concurrently, Meta scored a slimmer €797 “fine” for anti-competition yet again, and Apple was hit with a €1.84 billion “fine.”

https://www.piratewires.com/p/eu-slams-x-with-140m-fine-for-deceptive

@sun home depot is bigger than all european startups of the last 50 years combined.

@sun our governments and civil organizations are very scared of internet things being used to spread propaganda and fake grassroots campaigns and such

@whiteline the eu manufactures consent through fake grassroots social media accounts, it just doesn't control this platform. I would be happy if twitter didn't even exist though but tbh the eu funds mastodon and a world where fedverse was dominant would be way more infested with fake and unverifiable accounts

@sun

>EU
>dumb bullshit

Name a more iconic duo.

@lain @sun eurobros...

@lain @sun

@georgia @sun did we get too cocky?

@sun They need that Christmas money

@sun the EU does not need to manufacture consent via bots inside the EU, it has massive civil organizations to back it up, every major political party and all organizations linked to them

i'm not entirely sure why americans think the EU is this conspiratorial behemoth, it's largely a function of the politics of the member states outside of being a trade union that everyone benefits from

@whiteline I can't prove it because search engines suck now but it's a fact, on one point it was paying to have fake muslim immigrant accounts made to try to spike refugee community socials with deradicalization messages. the program was on public record, it just didn't disclose the accounts

@whiteline @sun i don't have the image at hand, compare the organigrams of the EU and the USSR. they are about the same.

eu parliament has no say in things, they can't even propose new laws. it exists only so the eu can be called democratic.

it's an elite circle deciding things, without any control whatsoever. cases like recently the italian lady who is persecuted for bribery iirc aren't to uphold justice but to make examples of what happens if you fuck up as member of the elite circle.

@sun that's not consent manufacturing though, that's antiterror measures, we are quite desperate about the muslims over here so i can see this happening 100%

@whiteline I do agree with what you said that there's not like a shadowy eu government that has an NSA and CIA like America but consent manufacture is imo definitely a thing and often done the same way, funding ngos to keep their hands clean

@sun @whiteline no need to manufacture consent when the population comes pre-brainwashed

@lain @sun @whiteline Number of votes based on population/gdp/etc. was a mistake since those with the highest number of votes also have the dumbest ideas. But such is democracy. If you have a justification for the current regime (we put more money in, therefore we have more votes), anything can be labeled as democracy.

@phnt @sun @whiteline at least we can rest serenely in the knowledge that votes don't matter.

@lain @sun @whiteline is this about the us lmfao

@sun @whiteline Many years ago when the EU was still starting it's disinformation program they invited the wrong people at the commission and they recorded their whole mentality on the subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JKKgy4NOWc

@sun @whiteline
>I do agree with what you said that there's not like a shadowy eu government that has an NSA and CIA like America
It's not fully centralized, it kinda depends who rules what at the moment in time, remember eunomia nad and military industrial complex behind it ?

@mangeurdenuage @whiteline that was an ngo thing

@sun @whiteline Basically the EU wants their own In-Q-Tel/BENS. That's how france lost gemplus to the CIA (company that created simcard tech) via bullshit stock acquisition/sabotage.
But it's the wrong path imo. Look at the state of the USA by using these subversive methods now.

@sun @whiteline Ngos can still be puppets of acronym agencies.

@lain @sun I wonder how much of that is due to old EU companies adapting better to new markets than old US companies. For instance, mail-order catalog companies crumbled in the US after they couldn't adapt to e-commerce. Meanwhile the biggest e-commerce company from the EU is Otto, an old mail-order catalog company.

Alternatively, maybe EU customers tend more towards old, established companies than new startups. There's a reason Germany is the country with the second most companies over 200 years old. Obviously, this works well together with the previous assumption.

Either way, even if both of those things are true, I think the proof is in the pudding that the US managed to get more growth out of newer markets.

@besserwisser @sun yeah good points.

@lain @sun Number 1 country with really old companies is Japan. And they have some really good examples of at least some of them going with the times and making it big.