If you ever had any doubts (I didn’t) that the EU is as immoral as any other government, recent moves by the EU in the area of software will cure those.
EU hits Google with second antitrust charge by Foo Yun Chee reports:
EU antitrust regulators said that by requiring mobile phone manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and the Google Chrome browser to get access to other Google apps, the U.S. company was harming consumers by stifling competition.
Show of hands. How many of you think the EU gives a sh*t about consumers?
Yeah, that’s what I thought as well.
Or as Chee quotes European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager:
“We believe that Google’s behavior denies consumers a wider choice of mobile apps and services and stands in the way of innovation by other players,” she said.
Hmmm, “other players.” Those don’t sound like consumers, those sound like people who will be charging consumers.
If you need confirmation of that reading, consider Anti-innovation: EU excludes open source from new tech standards by Glyn Moody.
From the post:
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“Open” is generally used in the documents to denote “open standards,” as in the quotation above. But the European Commission is surprisingly coy about what exactly that phrase means in this context. It is only on the penultimate page of the ICT Standardisation Priorities document that we finally read the following key piece of information: “ICT standardisation requires a balanced IPR [intellectual property rights] policy, based on FRAND licensing terms.”It’s no surprise that the Commission was trying to keep that particular detail quiet, because FRAND licensing—the acronym stands for “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory”—is incompatible with open source, which will therefore find itself excluded from much of the EU’s grand new Digital Single Market strategy. That’s hardly a “balanced IPR policy.”
…
Glyn goes on to say that FRAND licensing is the result of lobbying by American technical giants but seems unlikely.
The EU has attempted to favor EU-origin “allegedly” competitive software for years.
I say “allegedly” because the EU never points to competitive software in its antitrust proceedings that was excluded, only to the speculation that but for those evil American monopolists, there would be this garden of commercial and innovative European software. You bet.
There is a lot of innovative European software, but it hasn’t been produced in the same mindset that afflicts officials at the EU. They are fixated on an out-dated software sales/licensing model. Consider the rising number of companies based on nothing but open source if you want a sneak peek at the market of the future.
Being mired in market models from the past, the EU sees only protectionism (the Google complaint) and out-dated notions of software licensing (FRAND) as foundations for promoting a software industry in Europe.
Not to mention the provincialism of the EU makes it the enemy of a growing software industry in Europe. Did you know that EU funded startups are limited to hiring EU residents? (Or so I have been told, by EU startups.) That certainly works that way with EU awards.
There is nothing inconsistent with promoting open source and a vibrant EU software industry, so long as you know something about both. Knowing nothing about either has led the EU astray.