And they created a powerful cartel which can pressure politicians to benefit the cartel:
The Danish Press Collective Management Organization (DPCMO), formed in 2021, now represents what CEO Karen Rønde calls a “99 percent mandate” of the entire industry.
> In 2024, Google ran a set of tests of user interest in news content in Denmark and several other countries, concluding that removing such content had “no measurable impact” on search ad revenue. Those findings — along with the testing itself — have come under harsh criticism from Danish lawmakers.
I'm not really sure what Denmark is complaining about? It sounds like Google decided that removing Danish media and news from their services would have no impact on their finances whatsoever, therefore they are firm on their negotiating position since it's basically "take it or leave it".
And Denmark is also somehow trying to force Google to list and index their media, and at their price.
Because "business" isn't just "business" in Denmark and many other countries. Journalism for example, isn't just about the financial bottom-line, journalism has a societal role, and also the move could be seen as trying to avoid paying publishers under EU rules designed to support a free press.
I think a lot of friction between businesses and countries in Europe can be better understood if we better understood the difference in how countries treat things like "business" and other stuff. I understand in the US it's different, money basically rules, you can fire people whenever you want and so on, but in many places in the world, people have a different relationship to businesses, it's not just about money there.
Particularly when it comes to journalism. From reading news from Denmark about it, politicians been repeatedly argued that Google's framing reduces journalism to a revenue input, ignoring its democratic function.
In this context "journalism" usually refers not to a crowd of Mothers Teresas seeking to improve society in voluntary contradiction to their own market (or guild/class/whatever) interests, but a bunch of business entities which were born out of printed newspapers, feeling uncertain about their revenues after changes in technology of information delivery ruined their niche. And trying to leverage their established relations with politicians to extract more profit. It's not like Google is offending little pixies here. After all, there are youtube channels which have a societal role too, and search engines too I guess can make a similar claim.
Other commenter's note about national security issue is more on point but then I doubt that bailing out failing news platforms would make them as influential as they used to be in the bygone era.
If journalism really weren't just about the financial bottom line in Denmark, then why are they quibbling over what Google will pay them at all? It sounds like they'll be happy with just Google listing and driving traffic to their content for free.
You're missing the point. I speak American so I can translate. He's basically saying journalism is a matter of National Security. It needs to be done correctly to a high level at all costs, much like education. Google (Silicon Valley) is messing with it.
National security could be a valid concern. But Danish media leveraging DK gov't to rollback the reality could never be a success story. Those media are failing not because they are not in the US. Established American media have the same troubles and complains.
I think it's ok if the highly productive parts of society subsidize the crucial-but-low-productivity areas (healthcare, education, etc).
Otherwise this happens https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/te... See all the important careers on the bottom right of the first graph. Then your people elect fascists because the media and education systems suck and they don't know any better.
Why is it the responsibility of American tech companies to subsidize Danish news and media industries? If it's really that important for national security, shouldn't the Danish government be setting up some kind of a state journalism fund to subsidize it themselves?
> Denmark isn’t just resisting U.S. tech; it is one of the few nations actively building its own sovereign alternatives for critical infrastructure.
> In Rogaczewski’s view, sovereign digitization is not just a defensive measure against Silicon Valley; it is the only way to maintain the welfare state in the 21st century.
If regulations can legitimately be advocated for, they can be advocated against as well.
Facebook wouldn’t have any vested interest in the far left, the far right, the far up or the far down in the EU if the EU wasn’t giving them reasons to take an interest. If the parties in power were really worried that Facebook was going to be the difference-maker, they could undercut the opposition and remove the issue entirely by rolling back their needless regulations and keeping their own desire to overstep their authority and dictate terms to foreign enterprises in check.
That’s missing the key detail that some opposition parties are anti-democratic, or funded by enemy states that would benefit from the downfall of the current democratic world order.
Right. You must be referring to the libel laws that have specific exemptions for politically powerful or otherwise publicly prominent individuals specifically to avoid intrusion into freedom of the press. And you think that helps your point?
If it's a matter of national security and compromise isn't possible, I'd encourage Denmark to seek or create alternatives; it's the best they can hope for. Denmark has no obligation to deal with Google and Google has no obligation to deal with Denmark, regardless of the impact those choices have on the other party.
Hmm, they're not 'messing with' journalism or national security. They just don't care enough to index denmark journalism. I'm also not sure how denmark can strongarm google et. al. into doing anything at all. Is this incorrect, is there some sort of path forward here for denmark to get what they want?
But Google is willing to host their content in search, right?
They're just not willing to pay since there's no revenue benefit to search hosting it. It seems like Danish media doesn't like this and has chosen to withhold their content, which is their right of course, but it seems strange to contort that into a claim that Google is doing censorship.
> In practice, that's a form of censorship since it inhibits the ability of people in Denmark to discover domestic news articles through search.
No it doesn't. It it inhibits the ability of people in Denmark to discover domestic news articles through GOOGLE search. A subtle but hugely distinct difference, making your point quite moot.
This does not support freedom of the press. This policy is essentially a tax on web indexers (in practice, Google) that is paid directly to the news companies. This means that they are entirely dependent on government authority for their revenue, which is the opposite of freedom of the press. On top of that, only companies that are defined as "news outlets" by the government are eligible for forced indexing and payment. So not only is the government setting itself up as the revenue source, but it gets to choose who gets the money.
lol only on this forum can you construe the government regulating big tech as an anti freedom stance.
Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon are society destroying companies. They are Walmart times a trillion. Any country that is not directly taxing these wildly profitable companies are leaving free money on the table.
You are hiding behind the word "regulating" which is meaningless by itself instead of talking about the particular regulation in question. This is a regulation that the tech companies pay money directly to a list of media companies picked by the government. It is absolutely an anti freedom stance.
No, you're just decrying any government intervention as bad which is moronic. The only solace I can take is that a large majority of US voters despise big tech and tech workers. Go out and do some canvassing, I have across the country and the sentiment is quite clear.
Whoever is the first President to decapitate a tech company will likely be put on Mount Rushmore as a hero of the people.
Get out of your bubble because the upcoming change is going to give you whiplash.
Just like they hate oil companies. But that doesn't stop them from pulling up to the gas station, or enjoying any of the other thousands of goods and services dependent on oil. They even go out an buy massive inefficient cars and spend multiples of what they need to. And despite all the supposed hatred, no politician dares to mess with the oil industry because at the end of the day they know nothing will get the voters out for blood against them quite like rising gas prices.
They hate the tech industry you say? They want you to "decapitate" a tech company you say? Americans love two things above all else, convenience and complaining. Go ahead, take away their overnight Amazon deliveries, Google searches, smartphones, Instagram, and Tiktok, and see where that gets you.
The criticism was that Google have a dominant position on search market, Google selected 1% of their users to run the experiment on, but without informing them. That is users didn’t know that their search results were manipulated and articles they would otherwise have found didn’t show up.
So the argument presented by Danish authorities and media companies were that information should flow freely in a democracy and by doing a huge experiment like this without informing users is against the rights of Danish citizens.
"Manipulated" is a loaded and meaningless term here. All results are generated by algorithm, so that means 99% see the output of algorithm A and 1% see the output of algorithm B. Neither is more "manipulated" than the other.
It is possible that neither are more manipuled tough it's impossible to tell. What seems clear from your example above is that both are manipulated, just in different ways and with google's incentive. It is understandable that countries came to the conclusion that this is posing a threat to their national security.
"Manipulated" has strong negative connotations, but it could just mean that the results are chosen and controlled by the search engine. In which case, it's a meaningless statement. The entire purpose of any search engine is to choose results for queries.
Or it can mean the results were altered from some ideal baseline algorithm that we consider unmanipulated. The only obvious candidate for this baseline would be the search engine's regular algorithm. But if you're saying that's not the baseline, then it's unclear what you consider to be the true baseline and therefore unclear what "manipulated" means.
I agree that countries may consider search engines, social media, or anything else that can affect flow of information to be a national security threat.
And what, exactly, is the national security threat here? If Google is manipulating results to favor its advertisers or the political positions of its owners, that's what all publishers do, and have always done and nobody ever called it a national security threat. The "national security threat" here seems to be that they are showing people content that the government doesn't want them to see.
I’ve been part of multiple clinical trials and consent was always there. The control group exists. They know they’re in the study but they may not know they’re the control group.
I'm not commenting on the ethics of A/B testing without informing the customer.
Maybe I misunderstood the comment I was replying to. If they meant that the experiment's results were probably valid but conducting the experiment was unethical, then my response was unnecessary.
First it is not manipulation please read the terms of service and user consent on this issue. Second this is standard practice A/B testing is universal and companies do a holdout experiment all the time it is also called Withholding test.
It sounds to me like Denmark's media and news isn't very valuable from an ad sales perspective. So Google has set their price reflecting what they think that value is: not much. And Denmark is now getting their lawmakers involved because they think it's worth a lot more and they want to force Google to buy it for a lot more.
Honestly, it doesn't sound like a lot of these EU countries are interested in digital sovereignty or developing their own services. They just want to force the American companies to sell their services at rates favorable to them by getting their regulators involved.
Yeah it seems like if they were really struggling to break up then they wouldn't be trying to force Google or Meta to the negotiating table. They would be simply kicking them out and not utilizing their services at all.
But it's actually the opposite. They are trying to get their lawmakers to force Google and Meta to provide them their services at below market value!
It seems like Google and Meta are using their dominant position to take as big a part of ad revenue as they possibly can, and if that means independent news companies where actual journalism is conducted can’t survive, then they don’t really care.
Danish media are trying to survive, as high quality journalism is necessary for democracy to function. They can’t avoid being on the big platforms, as Google and Meta have this dominant gatekeeper position in the market - this is where the media pull new users into their sites.
People who are capable of building things don't go into government. "Bureaucracy" has a connotation of where creativity and innovation goes to die for a reason. The personality type that goes into bureaucracy thinks about this like "why would I put in the effort to build something when I could just use the state monopoly on violence to shake down the suckers who already did all that hard work for me?" Of course they lie to the public, and most importantly to themselves, that they have higher motives, but that is the underlying logic.
I don't see how that is possible. The web site is a disconnected graph with a lot of components. If they get hold of a url, maybe that gets them to a few other pages, but not all of them. Most of the pages on my personal site are .txt files with no outbound links, for that matter. Nothing to navigate.
The biggest problem I have seen with AI scrapping is that they blindly try every possible combination of URLs once they find your site and blast it 100 times per second for each page they can find.
They don’t respect robots.txt, they don’t care about your sitemap, they don’t bother caching, just mindlessly churning away effectively a DDOS.
Google at least played nice.
And so that is why things like anubis exist, why people flock to cloudflare and all the other tried and true methods to block bots.
> The US has its own TSMC supply (insert comments about it not being cutting edge)
USA has been strategically re-homing TSMC to the US mainland for a long time now. 30% of all 2nm and better technologies are slated to be produced in Arizona by 2030.
The real loser in all of this will be the EU which will be completely without the ability to produce or acquire chips. They'll just end up buying from China and USA, which will only further deepen their dependence on those countries.
That's announcing 40k WSPMs of eventual capacity spread across 28nm and 16nm nodes. I mean, it's a start, and I'm sure automakers are totally stoked given the Nexperia debacle, but the EU will remain completely dependent on foreign advanced node semiconductors.
Compare to TSMC's Arizona project, which will supply 30% of TSMC's 2nm and smaller process output. Already just one of the six planned TSMC fabs in Arizona is pumping out ~30k WSPMs at 5nm or smaller.
And that doesn't even get into CoWoS packaging, which is essential for all the highest-performance and highest-margin parts.
The fact is: In semiconductors, Europe is getting left in the dust. Sure they can fab some mature node chips for industrial uses--and that's not nothing--but Smartphone SoCs, "AI" accelerators, DRAM, even boring CPUs simply cannot be made any more in Europe, and to the limited extent that they can, they will be horrendously uncompetitive on the market and outclassed in every performance metric by Chinese and American chips.
EU is on a big sovereignty kick right now, which makes sense given that their foreign dependencies keep blowing up in their faces. So it's strange that EU is so complacent about their foreign dependency on advanced node semiconductors.
Has the Ukraine situation not shown that the EU has relegated itself to second fiddle?
It’s too old, too complacent, and too broke. Even compared to the US and our level of discord, there’s no unity across divisions.
The US absurdly threatens Greenland, but Denmark/EU’s response is “Sanction US tech or kick out US military bases on Europe”, rather than be able to rattle a saber back and show some credible backbone.
Without San Diego based Cymer they can't move forward on their latest and greatest. As far as I know they still do R&D in San Diego even after purchase.
"Our system produces 4X more power that enables better lithographic patterning, which is necessary to manufacture chips with smaller and more efficient feature sizes. In addition to being more powerful, our FEL system has programmable light characteristics that improve current capabilities and enable next-generation lithography (e.g., shorter wavelengths) - uniquely enabling the extension of Moore’s Law for decades. Connecting existing ASML scanners to an xLight FEL significantly improves the tool’s capabilities, delivering next-version scanner performance without the cost and complexities."
Is it supposed to work independently of other technology at some point?
Then anyways: multilateral cooperation is at the heart of scientific progress anyways. It's fitting that ASML is in a country that is culturally strongly influenced by its history of seafaring and trade.
Will see how the braindrain caused by people not wanting to live their lifes in a society taht doesn't share values like these will influence that whole technological armsrace thing.
Some people in Japan are coming up with a successor to EUV as far as I remember, what was their name again?
Proton is relocating their servers out of Switzerland and into Germany over privacy concerns. They are now facing the possibility of the same privacy concerns in EU countries. Ironically, the safest place to host a private VPN service may actually be USA given the way privacy-related things in the EU are going.
The EU member states are still sovereign, though. This French court ruling doesn't really affect the prospects of certain kinds of privacy in Germany. I think the parent might have been referring to the fact they didn't raise a no-log argument, thus implying they do log. But I don't think that makes much sense either.
That article says that Cloudflare is fighting Spain about the censorship.
ISP-level censorship is extremely rare in the US. Copyright and piracy is almost always handled by domain seizure ordered by a court, not ISP-level blocking (as is common in the EU).
I feel like this is all going to end up with Denmark agreeing to long-term resource share with USA where USA gets something like 85% in exchange for Denmark getting to keep the title.
Nobody is going to war over this and Denmark/EU wants to save face.
I disagree. I think that the US could very easily trigger a war here (I suspect that's the intention), and not a war that would be contained to Greenland. It's not just about Greenland or Denmark, after all.
- Greenland has always been open for companies starting mining resources under fair terms. But while they have a lot of resources Greenland is mostly cliffs and glaciers, worse increasingly melting glaciers and permafrost in cliffs, i.e. increasingly unstable terrain. Little infrastructure you can take advantage on. Few places you can safely build harbors. Wetter so cold that a lot of equipment simply would fail. So it's not nearly as profitable as it might look. Maybe you can make some decent profit if you run it like the soviet union ran many things, i.e. forced labor with 10s of thousands of people dying.
- The US has one military outpost in Greenland, and AFIK they don't need more to a) protect the US from that direction and b) project power to arctic shipping routes and similar. And realistically if this where to actually need some expansion then any past president probably could have come to an reasonable agreement with Greenland. I mean it's land they don't use and can give for some monetary benefit to one of their closest allies while implicitly gaining some added protection, like why would you say no to that. Except maybe the past Trump presidency as he had already been eroding checks and balances then and that is a red flag for trusting that an ally will stay an ally.
> Nobody is going to war over this and [..] wants to save face.
This is what people also said about:
- Hitler starting WW2 (like seriously he said he would start war, neighbors countries where like: "Nah no way he is just barking")
- Same, but after Hitler had already rearmed Germany and sized some boarder territory (he -> war, other countries -> na, no way he actually want to start another large scale war)
- heck even after he invaded Poland many still insisted that there is no way he would go beyond that as that would be just supper dump
- a Wall being build around west Berlin to prevent people from entering it (there is a famous citate: "Nobody intends to build a wall." (after rumors started that they might want to do that, many people believed them as build a wall would just be too absurd))
- during WW2 most Germans (in cities) knew something really bad is happening to Jews, many approached it like "there is no way he is literally killing all of them" (even trough he kinda wrote exactly that in his book)
- etc. etc.
The point is humans are very very prone to make them-self believe that there is no way some very unpleasant possibilities will happen.
Also if person who as repeatedly shown to act unreasonable, sometimes outright despotic, with clear autocratic tendencies, who has shown to be fully fine with civilians suffering or dying as consequence of his actions says "I want to size your country", and has the military might to do so, you should assume that they want do _exactly that_ (at least in the moment when saying that).
Historically speaking claiming that "nobody wants that, because it's supper dump" has rarely ended well.
Lets hope it wont happen anyway it would likely spiral into WW3 as it's a pretty clear signal for China that the the US has lost most of its allies and Nato is disfunctional and the EU is weaker and more likely to work with or at least unlikely to antagonize them then ever before (in recent times). If not now when else is a better time to size Taiwan. China increasingly doesn't need TSMC, the rest of the world including the US do. China might even profit from it being destroyed in the war... Really don't give them a reason to believe Nato is weak it will screw over the quality of live/cost of living/etc. of pretty much all western countries for years to come.
> Nobody is going to war over this and Denmark/EU wants to save face.
I'm not so sure. Between all of Trump antics, and Russia's invasions, I think they're starting to realize that if you let the bully take the small things you don't especially care about, they're just going to demand bigger things.
Just in that your agent runs on your local machine, has access to your local filesystem, and no code execution happens on our cloud, and that we don't look at or store the emails. Pure relay, so it’s just as private as business collaboration on regular email in that sense.
It's a paid product, you are not the product. We have 0 interest in your email content or data. Only in making it easy for you to run your agents without being stuck on your console.
Are the emails end to end encrypted (PGP or S/MIME where you/your server don't have the keys) or just in transit (TLS)? That would make the difference between "we can't look at your emails" and "we choose not to look at your emails".
I have not reviewed privacy. Copied it from another of my products. I will take a look.
It's a paid product, you are not the product. We have 0 interest in the content of your mails, or your data, we are interested making it easy for you to enjoy your life, so you're not stuck at your desk.
Your intentions are only as good as the systems (including governance frameworks) that back them up. You may not have any interest in my data, but your future self (or your acquirer) might.
Even if you have the best intentions, customers need to build trust through contracts and policies. They won't care about what you post here on social media.
To me it seems that you have not paid sufficient attention to important parts of the business, and it is a red flag.
GDPR says that consent for non-essential tracking purposes should be freely given, you can't use dark patterns nor make the "consent" option more prominent than the "decline" option. Similarly, inaction (ignoring the banner) does not count as consent.
Most products fail on that alone, and that's the very basics. But happy to be proven wrong.
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