Comments by "Paul Aiello" (@paul1979uk2000) on "How the EU is Taking on Tech Giants" video.

  1. I've always felt that governments should push small to medium size companies more at the expense of big companies. For one, there are a lot more small to medium size companies which give consumers a lot more choice, it's also a lot more competition whiles they are also far less abusive with it's position compared to bigger companies which are very controlling and try to monopolize any given market by giving us less choice and making it harder for smaller companies to compete, we see this playing out time and time again and it's rarely in the interest of competition and consumers, I also feel it holds back innovation. On the other size of the coin, I understand why countries like the US and China push big corporations and part of it is because they like to use that as a weapon on other controls, in the end, it's really about control and domination, it's rarely ever about what's best for the consumers and society at large. This is why it's great to see what the EU is doing, it doesn't always get it right but let's be honest, could you imagine how much worse things could get if left to the US government or worse, China? Both of which seem to have little interest in what's best for their own people. Funny thing is, many Americans will think a lot of this is targeting American corporations and in a sense, it is American corporations that got the ball rolling by being abusive with its monopolistic position, the thing is, corporations are not really loyal to any country, they are international now, they don't care about the people, even in the country of origin and with a lot of the policies the EU is doing, others around the world like in the US stands to benefit by that, basically by the EU doing the job the US government should be doing with its own companies.
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  2. True, buzzwords might seem useless but it's a statement of intent and the public seems to respond to that a lot more than jargon.
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  3. A lot of the times they are, but like all governments, they get something's right and something's wrong, but imagine this, if the EU didn't exist and the US or worse, China managed to push its morals onto the world, I somehow doubt many people would want that and because of that, I'm grateful we have the EU because things could be much worse without them as the US doesn't seem to care about the people and China is way behind them.
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  4.  @0w784g  Not quite because I would say the EU goes after EU companies more than they do international ones, just that international ones are not used to the norm in the EU and feel they can get away with bending and braking rules, especially in the US which everything is so twisted up to favour big corporations. Protectionism exist everywhere, let's not kid ourselves and in some sectors, it makes sense to do that, energy security is one area but even then, it's still to a minimum.
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  5. Us remainders Brits love it as well, it gives us this warm and fuzzy notion that most EU laws, rules and regulations will filter down to the UK even thought the UK isn't in the EU any more, that and it also gets up the nose of Brexiteers because they truly thought you can have true independence when in this global connected world, there's is no such thing, you have the big players like the EU and US that makes up a lot of the rules, laws and regulations that smaller ones have to more or less follow to have good links with them, usually the laws and regulations tend to be under a different name with small differences to make it seem like it's their own law, but in truth, it's almost a carbon copy of the law another power did. Hence the reason why many think the EU is becoming a vassal of the EU because of how close we are to them geographically, it makes it very difficult to diverge away without doing a lot of economic harm and with that, it makes a lot of sense to close in a lot of the rules to benefit the economy and even if the country doesn't do it directly, companies themselves do it indirectly, as for them, if they are planning on trading in Europe, most are likely going to set their standards on EU standards even for countries that are not in the EU, in other words, countries like the UK ends up following the same rules and regulations even if they are not put in place because most companies are not going to have two different standards. Simply put, the EU market is far more important to them than the UK market so most companies standardize on EU standards for none EU countries in Europe and in many cases, even around the world.
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  6. I suspect the big difference is that in the EU, we have big governments which makes it harder for corporations to get their way with them, throw in that the public tend to be a lot more protest happy which means governments fear the people a lot more than they do in say the US and that allows the people to more than likely get their way in the EU. The irony is, in the US, Americans want small government but that's backfiring because it's trading in democracy for big corporations that run the show and I suspect unless they get their act together, it's only going to get worse in the US because of all the lobbying and money being thrown at it, something that is much harder to do in the EU because of the two reasons above.
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  7.  @Painfulldarksoul  That's why many were grateful that the UK left the EU, you only have to look at the op-outs the UK had when in the EU, many of which would have benefitted the British people if they didn't op-out like the Working Time Directive. But in the case of the UK, I don't feel it's truly a European nation in the sense we like to think of it, they are like a hybrid from the EU and US, many of the good things from the EU but a lot of the negative things from the US, the NHS is a prime example of that, which is one of the worst out of all the EU countries, then there's workers rights and countless other things.
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