from Hacker News

Break Up Big Tech: Civil Society Declaration

by janandonly on 6/20/25, 8:02 AM with 153 comments

• by seydor on 6/20/25, 9:15 AM

  Fighting insanity with more insanity: Asking the EU to force break up american corporations.

  There is a simple path to EU sovereignity, china has already done it: Ban US services in order to spring up local alternatives. Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling. then you won't have to bother with "big tech".

  But all of that would require doing actual work, and judging by the list of signatories, they don't want to do it.

• by keiferski on 6/20/25, 9:58 AM

  As an American living in Europe for the last decade: there are actually quite a few small tech companies that are quite strong in their regions. I’m thinking of companies like Allegro.pl, which IMO is better than Amazon.

  The problem seems to be that there is no real coherence to expanding local companies beyond their origin countries. Partially because of other competitors, which each country wants to promote their own, and partially because the whole infrastructure for serving ~30 states is a headache.

  IMO major benefits would come from investing heavily into translation AI tech. Europe will never have one main language, and so it won’t have the single unified cultural market that China or the US have. But that can be reduced dramatically to make it as seamless as possible.

• by bluecalm on 6/20/25, 11:57 AM

  They keep mentioning Google ad monopoly and how it "unfairly sucks revenue from publishers, killing journalism and the news media, while forcing consumers to pay more through an “adtech tax” to industry middlemen.".

  Those publishers don't have to be listed by Google, they can opt out, right? Let's assume Google disappears, how are publishers getting more money that they are getting now? Do they envision some publishers' owned search engine more efficient than Google which people flock to once other options are removed? Can someone convince me that Google is actually bad for traditional publishers/journalists?

• by awongh on 6/20/25, 9:19 AM

  I'm not against this in principle but I am a little skeptical that it would actually work in this case- I think search could be a good case for this (Google) but it's also in the process of being disrupted by LLMs so I feel like it's becoming less relevant.

  One thing that I do believe could be relevant is regulation that forces open the platforms- social media and messaging as an open standard. Now that the technical underpinnings of it are well understood I don't know why we couldn't have an open standard for making posts that my real friends could see and rich-media standard for me sending messages and being in group messages. It's ridiculous that we're locked into these messaging platforms that want to show us ads when the tech to run these things is well understood and should be commodified in a more open market. The cost of switching should be near zero.

• by veunes on 6/20/25, 11:23 AM

  While monopoly power is an issue, fragmentation could also lead to unintended consequences (think privacy/security fragmentation or entrenching local gatekeepers). I'm skeptical this kind of structural breakup would magically “fix” the internet, but stronger and more consistent enforcement of existing competition and privacy laws seems like a good starting point

• by talkingtab on 6/20/25, 12:37 PM

  An accurate diagnosis of a problem is crucial. The problem addressed here is real. The diagnosis is wrong. Big Tech enables the problem and certainly is associated with it. Societies rely on "messaging" to adapt. When messaging is broken, so is the society. The messaging in our social societies is now driven by targeted "advertising". Or more accurately propaganda: "communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade".

  And certainly the big tech (here's looking at you Google and FaceBook et al) business model is propaganda. As is the business model of the Washington Post (here's looking at you Jeff Bezos) and the New York Times.

  If the messaging in a society is used to persuade rather than listen things break. A simplistic model of is social insects. If ants can't leave a pheromone trail, or if some ants lead misleading trails, the colony will die. It will not be able to adapt.

  Breaking up big tech is appealing, but it does not change the fact that we now "live" in the internet and that the current internet is a gigantic propaganda machine.

• by zoobab on 6/20/25, 8:56 AM

  Antitrust barely works, when it's not a monopoly it's an oligopoly.

  And remedies are often pocket money.

  For Microsoft Windows, antitrust authorities and courts did not do anything.

• by bluecalm on 6/20/25, 1:35 PM

  I considered coming to Mr. Pedro Sanchez' country to do business there. I would even come to one of the poorest regions not to contribute to the housing crisis as I like the weather, fresh food and emptiness of it.

  >>3% tax on my global wealth every year (in effect it's more like 4.5% because there is also significant capital gain tax)

  >>60% tax on a semi-decent tech salary

  >>25%+ capital gain tax for my investors (if I find any)

  >>people don't speak English, many of them are proud of it

  >>scheduling anything with anybody is impossible, the concept of being on time doesn't exist

  >>Bureaucracy is slow, full of paperwork, can't be done online, can't be done in English, the result depends on clerk's mood on a given day

  >>if someone comes to my house when I am away I can't kick them out, need to find another house and keep paying bills for the new occupa(s)nts

  I am sure that once they kick Google out they will make some innovation fund where many government officials find work. Then the money is going to be transferred to the newly sprung industry of innovation grant appliers. It will be a lot of money for a lot of people. In the middle of it a new search engine arises - made by a disgruntled European in Singapore.

• by fastball on 6/20/25, 8:52 AM

  How would Europe break up American tech companies, in practice?

• by oldjim798 on 6/20/25, 1:36 PM

  Can't come soon enough. Anything that is bad for big tech's business models is good for society. Break'em up, regulate them, ban algorithmic feeds, anything to reduce the impact these firms have on our world.

• by sylware on 6/20/25, 10:30 AM

  In order to do that, you have to consider the technical plane, or big tech will work around everything, maliciously: we need _lean_ open source software (including the SDK) and protocols, stable in time. This will foster real-life citizen/local/commercial alternatives. This is actually hard and dynamic to do, people in charge will face acute lobbying and pressure, and they have to bath in technical sauce all the time.

  For instance the web: noscript/basic (x)html for all dominant/critical online services, where reasonable. Or you will be jailed into the 2.5 engines of the whatng cartel. A few years back I could buy thingies with wallet codes using lynx/links/elinks/netsurf/w3m/etc web browsers on amazon.fr... now you MUST have a whatng web engine... how convenient... and recently, noscript browsers (which have a "non famous" user agent string), won't be able to perform a search on google anymore...

  Video streaming sites can put text ads (clearly identified) into a 2D HTML document and can provide HLS/dash/etc <video>&|<audio> URLs (and can inject ads into the video stream if they want to) which the browser will send to a media player.

  Chatting? One-time-usage IRC bridge URL with optional custom IRC commands which the browser will send to a IRC client?

  Namely, you can augment this noscript/basic (x)html portal with some "web APIs" or even leaner(simpler?) protocols, with proper online publication and definition ofc.

  The same attention should be given to the usage of PDF too. Generating a PDF with only utf-8 text should be "easy" and it is actually not really the case.

  And the list goes on.

  And you cannot 'break up' US companies, but you can make them "behave" if they want to do business in EU, and don't forget they have the backing of funds with thousands of billions of $ and they already have their own billions, in other words: there is ZERO, Z-E-R-O, economic competition here as they can spend out of business everybody (what they usually do over cycles of ~5-10 years or even longer) or "buy" anybody (until properly "disabled", then they are thrown away).

  Don't forget about EU companies and gov administrations too... those can be straighten with much more convincing.

  Basically the benchmark is the following: where appropriate, it should be "reasonable" for a few average devs/one average dev, with a lean SDK (including the programming language), to write real-life alternatives (citizen/local/commercial).

• by Mistletoe on 6/20/25, 9:23 AM

  I would put forth the assertion that Big Tech is more damaging than Standard Oil or US steel ever were. Altering the human mind at will is so much more dangerous than higher oil or steel prices ever could be.

• by untitled2 on 6/20/25, 8:59 AM

  How about just don't use their services and boycott their tech stacks at work? I know, it requires some brain use and more than just shouting at the cloud, but it's doable.

• by fergie on 6/20/25, 9:08 AM

  Europe has a number of loopholes for the accumulation of wealth that have traditionally been used by the aristocracy. These apparently only become problematic to the signatories when members of the bourgeoisie, for example tech entrepreneurs, start using them as well.

  There is a general need for taxation on wealth rather than labor in western societies. Its silly to single out big tech companies, which are actually an example of capitalism and free markets doing good: creating and rewarding the best products.

• by maizeq on 6/20/25, 10:36 AM

  I would encourage everyone to check out the other two major priorities of this movement. Of particular importance I think is the removal of recommender systems and opaque algorithms from feeds, which can and have been powerful instigators of misinformation, propaganda and discord.

• by pmdr on 6/20/25, 8:53 AM

  It's not a monopoly if it's at least 5 companies /s

• by logicchains on 6/20/25, 9:19 AM

  Europe can't even build its own tech companies and now it's trying to destroy foreign ones. Fundamentally the European cultural hostility to business and change is not compatible with a modern tech economy, and it'll continue to fall further and further behind the US and Asia, as GDP per capita in western Europe remains stagnant.

  A question to Europeans here, why do you believe that the bureaucracy that's been so completely ineffective at facilitating the growth of modern tech companies in Europe, should be given even more power and control?

• by fooker on 6/20/25, 8:51 AM

  Yeah great way to become dependent on tech stacks backdoored by different big tech companies from another country, or the same ones who move to different countries.

• by socalgal2 on 6/20/25, 8:54 AM

  They only mention google which of the big tech companies is the one closest to losing their dominant position to AI. Even their own AI is gutting their own business.

  Apple, the company that truly wants to control everything, isn't even mentioned