Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Generally speaking, what changed was the value in the tech sector skyrocketing (enabling political lobbying as well as propaganda - the latter of which Apple is extremely good at, just look at the amount of HN comments mindlessly repeating their propaganda about how opening their platform is such a massive security problem. Meanwhile the App Store has been rife with spam and fake apps for the past decade; you literally can't easily find government apps here because shady app companies buy adspace on the searches and put up apps with similar sounding names but with aggressive monetization) combined with ~20 years of US regulators just not really enforcing much in the way of antitrust cases whilst the EU was still on the boat of "maybe we should ask nicely" since that usually works for local enforcement.

Things are finally changing on that end (far moreso in the EU because big tech basically keeps pretending it's just the backyard rather than to be taken seriously and it's pissing off regulators), but it's still somewhat of an oddly prescient fact that Silicon Valley/US tech companies broadly more or less "invent" old corporate crimes that take a decade to get enforced because regulators don't get that the difference between a physical form of fraud and a digital form of fraud isn't really that big.

EU is catching on and has been passing landmark regulations specifically to attack this crap, while the FTC is doing what it can in spite of the GOP having been pulling it's teeth for the past 20 years.





Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: