European Union officials have drawn up an aggressive 173-page plan to counter both President Donald Trump's trade moves and American tech giants including Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook.
According to a document obtained by POLITICO, European Commission officials are pushing their president-elect, Ursula von der Leyen, to set up a European Future Fund that would invest more than $100 billion in equity stakes in high-potential European companies.
The goal: get Europe competing head-on with the American and Chinese tech giants it has lagged behind for decades.
[...] The EU would use a so-called draft "Enforcement Regulation" if the Trump administration succeeds in its efforts to grind the World Trade Organization (WTO) to a halt.
[...] The EU is hoping to emulate past successes, such as its development of the GSM mobile global standard, which fueled the rise of companies such as Nokia.
[...] The document seeks more stringent measures to block Chinese companies from taking part in tenders in Europe to penalize them for the level of subsidies that they receive from the government in Beijing.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/22/europe-plan-trump-tech-companies-1472326
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What started it all:
On 2019-08-24 13:02:01 UTC an accusation (https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33244&page=1&cid=884682#commentwrap) was made that a Journal Entry "It would have been posted before 6 hours ago" (i.e. posted at approximately 2019-08-24 07:00:00 UTC) was deleted by a member of the staff at SoylentNews. The circumstances surrounding the making of the Journal Entry are elaborated upon in this comment. (https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33244&page=1&cid=885191#commentwrap)
I have been with this site since before it went live. Its founding principal has been the making available of a forum whereby the community can submit stories — and post comments — to predominantly tech-related items. Further, each logged-in user has been made available the ability to post entries to their Journal.
As Editor-in-Chief I took this allegation seriously and performed an independent and in-depth investigation. My findings are presented below.
Note: It is not lost on me the futility of trying to prove a negative. It is for good reason that the criminal justice system in the US is founded on the principle of "innocent until proven guilty." It is not up the the accused to vindicate themselves, but for the accuser to bring sufficient evidence to bring about conviction.
NB: In the course of writing this, I discovered a bug in how the site displays wide elements contained in an ECODE element. It incorrectly wraps the text onto the next line (leading to a jumbled mess) when it should, instead, provide horizontal scroll bars. Please accept my apologies for its current appearance.
Executive Summary:
An in-depth investigation making use of: external resources, the UI presented by SoylentNews, and ad-hoc queries of the site database (DB) failed to locate a "smoking gun", i.e. found no clear proof that a Journal Entry was posted to the site and subsequently deleted by anyone other than an author.
It is my estimation that the user submitted an entry, but the site failed to receive and save it correctly. In other words, the user tripped over some kind of bug be it in the site's code, communications between the user and the site, or something else.
Recommendation: When a user completes making a Journal Entry and submits it to the site, the code should respond by using the newly-created journal parameters in conjunction with the normal journal-loading code to present the Journal Entry to the user as confirmation that the entry was properly received and saved. That is to say, affirmative feedback of receipt, storage, and accessibility of the Journal Entry.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @12:47PM (23 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @12:54PM (1 child)
What I don't get is, part of this is to get rid of state-funded subsidies in China. They then plan to invest in companies? Erm, what's that?!
I'm all for leveling the playing field, but investment (eg buying shares) = ownership!!
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:29PM
Europe is simply recognizing that it is dropping from the developed countries list.
Free trade works best for a developed capitalism, while weak needs direct government help. My pet example is England against Netherlands story when wool ruled the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Plan_of_the_English_Commerce [wikipedia.org]
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:25PM (9 children)
The EU is really good at throwing palletloads of money at research activities and institutions that never produce anything - I've worked with some of them, or at least reviewed work they've done, and I wouldn't be able to commercialise any of it. So I don't think this is any threat to either the US or China.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:48PM (8 children)
I guess you never heard of GSM cellphone standard or Airbus or any of the numerous fine European companies. There is nothing wrong with investing in companies or research involving critical infrastructure at a national level. If you don't, you'll find yourself beholden to some idiot somewhere that starts a trade war with you.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:19PM (2 children)
Unless, of course, you nurtured a economy that doesn't need large infusions of money from you in order to do the things they should be doing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:37AM (1 child)
Good luck with your "nurtured a economy" when it comes to funding armed forces, postal system, health system, aerospace, etc. You really think corporations are going to build your country? Governments all over the world invest in areas of their countries where corporations won't or can't.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:06AM
Luck? You just need to spend the money competently.
Corporate welfare being a huge example of the "invest" approach they use.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:55AM (4 children)
GSM came out of CEPT and was paid for by telcos. Airbus was an ongoing series of mergers of European aviation industry companies and consortia, with financial assistance from various EU governments (e.g. France had been propping up Aérospatiale more or less forever). None of that came out of EU-funded research initiatives.
In particular in this case they want to take on Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. Europe is culturally incapable of doing that, name one single mainstream software product at the level of Windows, Office, OS X, Gmail, etc, that comes from Europe. Apart from SAP from Germany there's basically nothing, and even SAP is a specialised back-end product. The problem, as a friend of mine who works for a major German software vendor put it, is that "the European approach is to set up a study group and spend ten years studying and standardising and planning and agreeing on how to do it, and then look back and realise that by about the third year of the process an American company has already brought a product that did that to market. Alternatively, realise at the tenth year that what we've finally agreed to build isn't wanted any more".
Oh, and just for reference, I'm European, so this isn't a US person bashing the EU, it's a European frustrated that all the software I use comes from the US.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:27AM (1 child)
Uh, Linux.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:41AM
Linux came from contributors everywhere. Even if you assume exclusively that Linux == Linus, he spent the initial five years working on it in Europe and the remaining 23 years when it went mainstream and took over in the US.
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:40AM (1 child)
StarDivision (Germany) produced StarOffice, which begat OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
The problem with most of the products you mentioned, is that they are inevitably monopolies. Interoperability requirements has led to near monocultures in most of these categories. This is not a reflection on the countries, but on the companies which got there first and entrenched themselves. No one can produce a Windows replacement. No one can produce an Office replacement. Because they are so huge and complex, that to replace it you have to be equivalent to it. Making a better, alternative product is possible and has been done, but it's not going to be as interoperable, and that's going to kill its commercial viability. That's why most alternative operating systems are niche embedded stuff or server-side.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:22AM
Even Office is not interoperable with Office. I have to open old Office documents in Libreoffice at times because Office will not open them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:41PM
Unfortunately the U.S. is starting to go down that path.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:53PM (3 children)
"protectionism, throwing money at cronies, ratcheting a little more on human freedom"
So...what Trump is doing?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:28PM
Too real too soon for the likes of khallow. They can only handle reality in their next reincarnation where they suffer from the consequences of their previous choices. Will be become a seal choking in oil soaked waters, or a chinese kid who can't breathe due to smog?
Who knows, but they are seriously defending the Koch douche so awareness isn't in the cards this round.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:42PM (1 child)
Much of the same. But not everyone considers what Trump does to be a green light to do the same.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:58PM
I'd agree, except "throwing money at cronies, ratcheting a little more on human freedom" seems to be the politics of Obama and Bush as well. Maybe I could go on, but I'm not THAT familiar with American politics.
I'm sure Clinton and other Bush, etc, shovelled loads of cash to friends, at the least.
Not just in Europe.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:43PM (5 children)
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/24/world/europe/trump-g7-summit.html [nytimes.com]
hahahahahhahahaha
"President Trump asserted on Saturday that he has the authority to make good on his threat to force all American businesses to leave China, citing a national security law that has been used mainly to target terrorists, drug traffickers and pariah states like Iran, Syria and North Korea."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Stable fucking genius you support there, "just a jooooke brooooo"
Get woke khallow before you ACTUALLY go broke
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:15PM (4 children)
I would fucking LOVE to see him do this. It'd be painful but it might actually force us to get our shit together. Trump is so completely, utterly, cluelessly wrong about everything, with his default algorithm being "do the opposite of what everyone tells me," that occasionally he may accidentally do something that turns out to be good for us, long-term. It's a hell of a gamble, but it may turn out to work.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:13PM (2 children)
Better hope it doesn't happen. The US is far behind China in number of patents filed each year. In fact, China filed more patents than received at the European Patent Org., Japan, Korea, and the US combined.
China has been working towards being the #1 power in robotics by 2025, and they started buying up competitors in the EU and US years ago. There's no reason to believe they won't succeed, since they're not guided by "next-quarter profits" thinking.
If you want the USA to be like what China was before it ended its' policy of isolation from the world, fine ... but it's a sure bet you won't like it.
To get back into the race, the US needs free university education and free health care. For-profit education and health care are draining the economy of money that could be invested elsewhere, as well as the lost opportunity costs that making universities accessable to all would bring.
It's the same thing with reparations to blacks for a couple of centuries of injustice. If it lets the country move on instead of replaying the hatreds of the civil war over and over and over, a trillion would be cheap, and the estimated cost of $200 billion would be easy to justify just on decreasing the economic burden of racism to the economy.
Most who were promised 40 acres and a mule never got either - what does that work out to after all those years of inflation? Pay your debts.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:08AM
That short term thinking you mentioned is a BIG fault of US companies: long term planning is needed to go up against China, but the American reward is "Gimme! NOW! I don't care about tomorrow."
Meanwhile, China is thinking decades ahead.
Belt and road...South China seas... robotics... making friends with neighbours and Europe...
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @11:48AM
"The US is far behind China in number of patents filed each year. "
Yet Trump keeps complaining that China is stealing all of our intellectual property and he keeps insisting that their theft costs the U.S. billions of dollars.
It looks to me like the exact opposite is true now. We're the ones that keep stealing their intellectual property. So by Trump's own logic we should just start handing them over boat loads of money because we owe them all that money from all the intellectual property we keep stealing. Or maybe we should just start filing for more patents because, you know, more patents = more innovation, am I right? Then we can better do cross patent negotiations with China and not have to owe them so much.
I thought we voted for Trump because he wasn't going to parrot corporate nonsense that bought and paid for politicians do. We figure he had more money than the bought and paid for politicians and corporations couldn't buy him. Yet now he is here parroting the same garbage about intellectual property and how it keeps getting stolen. Sounds just like another corporate bought shill.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:31AM
The correct phrasing is "it's a million to one shot, but it just might work". You have to actually say it out loud at a dramatic moment, and then nine times out of ten it will work.
(thanks pterry)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by The Shire on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:21PM (2 children)
WTO still classifies China as a "developing country". Trump has nothing to do with that. They can start their fight by properly changing that status.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:01AM (1 child)
I'm not sure if they can. Although China has a lot of industry concentrated in large cities, a lot of the rural population is still living in the 1800s. You can argue their developed status either way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @11:19AM
That's an internal problem. China has the means and knowledge to be a developed country, so it should be classified as such. Otherwise, you provide a big incentive for countries to keep a part of their country living in stone-age conditions to keep their "developing" status.
We don't classify the US as a developing nation based on the illiteracy rates in some states, now do we?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 24 2019, @02:05PM (4 children)
As long as Europe plans on taxing the everlovin fuck out of its corporations, they're never going to be able to compete. That's just a fact. Shoveling government money at industries in the hopes that they'll put you on top does not work, ask the Soviet Union. If you want them to go all out, you have to not take away their reason to.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:02PM (1 child)
How do you spell Bell Labs in Russian?
compiling...
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:08AM
KGB Sixth Directorate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:46PM (1 child)
Ah yes, playing to the lowest common denominator. You do realize that is how we're in the current state of the world right? Also "globalism" by those "progressives" is what your mindset leads to.
Easily solved with legislation, tariffs, embargoes. Want to do business in the US? Pay your share of taxes. Foreign companies undercutting the locals? Tariff the shit out of their products.
Real talk for a sec, just how dumb are you?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:29AM
Trump said it was easy. So it must be.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 24 2019, @02:26PM (1 child)
I missed that with the first reading . . .
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:01PM
I missed it completely: I read it out as "hwey phloong poo" .
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:53PM (2 children)
Microsoft out of EU States' PA (Public Administration)?
No more PC with MSWindows?
No more MSOffice?
No more MSExchange/Outlook?
Hah! Now I'm rolling on the floor laughing, my ass out :D
Good luck on re-educate people who panic if the usual icon isn't in the usual place on the usual MSWindows desktop :D
CYA
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:05PM
Seems ReactOS is becaming mature.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:09PM
A win-win-win-win* situation
*NOT shorthand for windows, but "the opposite of losing".
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:03PM (1 child)
Europe stuff is good quality. chinese tourist bring back souvenirs in forms of pots and pans. go figure.
problem is, euro stuff is hard to get outside of europa. i guess that's why chinese-ware is available everywhere: no quality guarantee; just sell and forget.
the euro made stuff wants to know if it breaks so it can be improved which requires a "dealer" in the external export country and a sub- or even a sub-sub office for a bigger city to COLLECT THE DEFECTIVE merchandise (for analysis, we hope).
also comms with euro companies seems to be quantum entangled with ghostlike particles (if palavaring with them from outside of europe):
if you call the chinese "sure suuuure!, we have and can deliver. when you want and how you pay?" but with euro companies they seem to extract the invisible ghost particles(*) and use it to determine if you are worth dealing with at all ... or something?
(*) maybe it's a ghost particle generated that you get when you get admitted to their club?
example: haven't tested it yet, but built like a tank but virtually impossible to ...uhm ... err ... acquire: https://letrikasol.com/en/ [letrikasol.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:50AM
Seems very easy? Down the street from me ;) But more seriously, the problem is not them not wanting to sell you. The problem is regulatory. If they sell something to US, they have to comply with US standards. Does the product follow UL standards? Or just CE? Is is certified for UL? And if not, they could just get lawsuits from America for nothing. Fuck, very small companies don't want to deal with America at all because of legal threats about nothing.
If you are Chinese, you don't give a rats ass because China will tell you to pound dirt if you buy something that catches fire. They'll laugh at you for not checking WTF you are buying.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday August 25 2019, @11:09AM
"to set up a European Future Fund that would invest more than $100 billion in equity stakes in high-potential European companies."
lawyers picking winners in technology and sciences is so absurdly arrogant and laughable it's difficult to imagine any group of people less suited to drive top-down innovation. To actually be effective they would have to give up power and tax funds, which of course will not happen. But no, of course their plan is to take money from everyone in the form of taxes and redistribute it to their personal picks. which of course will have more to do with politics, bribes, and personal interests/vendettas than anything else.