It would be a political catastrophe right now if the EU blocked US companies due to them needing to comply with temporary US court orders. My guess is this'll be swept under the rug and permitted under the basis of a legal obligation
What about the other way around? Why don't we see a US court order that is in conflict with EU privacy laws as a political catastrophe, too?
Because deep down Americans don't actually have any respect for other countries. This sounds like a flamebait answer, but it's the only model I can reconcile with experience.
Because courts are (wrongly) viewed as not being political, and public opinion hasn't caught up with reality yet.
Even if the we imagined the courts as apolitical (and I agree with you, they actually are political so imagining otherwise is silly), the question of how to react to court cases in other countries is a matter of geopolitics and international relations.
While folks believe all sorts of things, I don’t think anyone is going to call international relations apolitical!
International relations could fairly be called anarchic because they aren't bound by law and no entity is capable of enforcing them against nation states. Remember that whenever 'sovereignty' is held up as some sacred, shining ideal what they really mean is 'the ability to do whatever the hell they want without being held accountable'.
The court system as a whole is more beholden to laws as written than politics.
And that's a key institution in a democracy, given the frequency with which either the executive or legislative branches try to do illegal things (defined by constitutions and/or previously passed laws).
Yes, courts ought to be apolitical. Just that recently, especially the supreme court has not been meeting that expectation.
Courts have always been political, which is why "jurisdiction shopping" has been a thing for decades. The Supreme Court, especially, has always been political, which is why one of the biggest issues in political campaigns is who is going to be able to nominate new justices. Most people of all political persuasions view courts as apolitical when those courts issue rulings in that affirm their beliefs, and political when they rule against them.
You're right though, in a perfect world courts would be apolitical.
> You're right though, in a perfect world courts would be apolitical.
Most other western democracies are a lot closer to a perfect world, it seems.
Germany, where they lock you up for criticizing politicians[1] or where they have a ban against protesting for Palestine because it's "antisemitic"?[2]
Or UK where you can get locked up for blasphemy[3] or where they lock up ~30 people a day for saying offensive things online because of their Online Safety Act?[4]
Or perhaps Romania where an election that didn't turn out the way the EU elites wanted is overturned based on nebulous (and later proven false) accusation that the election was somehow influenced by a TikTok campaign by the Russians that later turned out to have been funded by a Romanian opposition party.[5]
I could go on and on, but unfortunately most other western democracies are just as flawed, if not worse. Hopefully we can all strive for a better future and flush the authoritarians, from all the parties.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc
[2] https://www.euronews.com/2023/10/19/mass-arrests-following-p...
[3] https://news.sky.com/story/man-convicted-after-burning-koran...
[4] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
[5] https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...
I understand these are court decisions you don't agree with. (And neither do I for the most part, though I imagine some of these cases to have more depth to them.)
But is there any reason to believe that judged were pressured/compelled by political powers to make these decisions? Apart from, of course, the law created by these politicians, which is how the system is intended to work.
>But is there any reason to believe that judged were pressured/compelled by political powers to make these decisions?
No, but I have every reason to believe that the judges who made these decisions were people selected by political powers so that they would make them.
>Apart from, of course, the law created by these politicians, which is how the system is intended to work.
But the system isn't working for the people, it is horribly broken. The people running the system are mostly corrupt and/or incompetent, which is why so many voters from a wide variety of countries, and across the political spectrum, are willing to vote for anyone (even people who are clearly less than ideal) that shits all over the system and promises to smash it. Because the system is currently working exactly how it's intended to work, most people hate it and nobody feels like they can do anything about it.
The American Supreme Court could have been balanced though. Sadly, one team plays to win, the other team wants to be in a democracy. The issue is not the politics of the court, but the enforced Partisanship which took hold of the Republican Party post watergate.
All systems can be bent, broken, or subverted. Still, we need to make systems which do the best within the bounds of reality.
>Sadly, one team plays to win, the other team wants to be in a democracy.
As a lifelong independent, I can tell you that this sort of thinking is incredibly prevalent and also incredibly wrong. Even a casual look at recent history proves this. How do you define "democracy"? Most of us define it as "the will of the people". Just recently, however, when "the will of the people" has not been the will of the ruling class, the "will of the people" has been decried as dangerous populism (nothing new but something that has re-emerged recently in the so-called Western World). It is our "institutions" they argue, that are actually democracy, and not the will of the foolish people who are ignorant and easily swayed.
>All systems can be bent, broken, or subverted.
Very true, and the history of our nation is proof of that, from the founding right up to the present day.
>Still, we need to make systems which do the best within the bounds of reality.
It would be nice, but that is a long way from how things are, or have ever been (so far).
My impression was that American democracy is supposed to "derive its power from those being governed" (as opposed to being given power by God) and pretty explicitly was designed to actively prevent "the tyranny of the majority", not enable it.
I think it's a misreading to say the government should do whatever the whim of the most vocal, gerrymandered jurisdictions are. Instead, it is a supposed to be a republic with educated, ethical professionals doing the lawmaking within a very rigid structure designed to limit power severely in order to protect individual liberty.
For me, the amount of outright lying, propaganda, blatant corruption, and voter abuse makes a claim like "democracy is the will of the most people who agree" seem misguided at best (and maybe actively deceitful).
Re reading your comment, the straw man about "democracy is actually the institutions" makes me think I may have fallen for a troll so I'm just going to stop here.
>Re reading your comment, the straw man about "democracy is actually the institutions" makes me think I may have fallen for a troll so I'm just going to stop here.
You haven't, so be assured.
>I think it's a misreading to say the government should do whatever the whim of the most vocal, gerrymandered jurisdictions are.
It shouldn't, and I didn't argue that. My argument is that the people in charge have completely disregarded the will of the people en mass for a long time, and that the people are so outraged and desperate that at this point they are willing to vote for anyone who will upend the elite consensus that refuses to change.
>Instead, it is a supposed to be a republic with educated, ethical professionals doing the lawmaking within a very rigid structure designed to limit power severely in order to protect individual liberty.
How is that working out for us? Snowden's revelations were in 2013. An infinite number of blatantly illegal and unconstitutional programs actively being carried out by various government agencies. Who was held to account? Nobody. What was changed? Nothing. Who was in power? The supposedly "good" team that respects democracy. Go watch the conformation hearing of Tulsi Gabbard from this year. Watch Democratic Senator after Democratic Senator denounce Snowden as a traitor and repeatedly demand that she denounce him as well, as a litmus test for whether or not she could be confirmed as DNI (this is not a comment on Gabbard one way or another). My original comment disputed the contention that one party was for democracy and the other party was against it. Go watch that video and tell me that the Democrats support liberty, freedom, democracy and a transparent government. I don't support either of the parties, and this is one of the many reasons why.
EU has few customer facing tech companies of note.
Without trying to become too political, but thanks to recent trade developments, right now the US is under special scrutiny to begin with, and goodwill towards US companies - or courts - has virtually evaporated.
I can see that factoring in in a decision to penalise an US company when it breaks EU law, US court order or not.
Ultimately, American companies will be pushed out of the EU market. It’s not going to happen overnight, but the outcome is unavoidable in light of the ongoing system collapse in the US.
EU software scene would take a decade to catch up. Only alternative being if AI really delivers on being a force multiplier - but even then EU would not have access to SOTA internally.
Given what happened with DeepSeek, "not state of the art" can still be simultaneously really close to the top, very sudden, very cheap, and from one small private firm.
Not really with the EU data sources disclosure mindset, GDPR and all that. China has a leg up in the data game because they care about copyright/privacy and IP even less than US companies. EU is supposedly booting US companies because of this.
The data sources is kinda what this court case is about, and even here on HN a lot of people get very annoyed by the application of the "open source" label to model weights that don't have the source disclosure the EU calls for.
GDPR is about personally identifiable humans. I'm not sure how critical that information really is to these models, though given the difficulty of deleting it from a trained model when found, yes I agree it poses a huge practical problem.
> and even here on HN a lot of people get very annoyed by the application of the "open source" label to model weights that don't have the source disclosure the EU calls for.
That's because they are obviously trained on copyrighted content but nobody wants to admit it openly because that opens them to even more legal trouble. Meanwhile China has no problem violating copyright or IP so they will gladly gobble up whatever they can.
I don't think you can really compete in this space with the EU mindset, US is playing it smart and leaving this to play out before regulating. This is why EU is not the place for these kinds of innovations, the bureaucrats and the people aren't willing to tolerate disruption.
What does the EU lack? Is it the big corp infra? Or something more fundamental?
In my opinion, we lack two things:
a) highly qualified people, even European natives move to Silicon Valley. There is a famous photo of the OpenAI core team with 6 Polish engineers and only 5 American ones;
b) culture of calculated risk when it comes to investment. Here, bankruptcy is an albatross around your neck, both legally and culturally, and is considered a sign of you being fundamentally inept instead of maybe just a misalignment with the market or even bad luck. You'd better succeed on your first try, or your options for funding will evaporate.
Worth pointing out that DeepMind was founded in London, the HQ is still here, and so is the founder and CEO. I've lived in North London for 8 years now, there are _loads_ of current-and-former DeepMind AI people here. Now that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral have offices here the talent density is just going up.
On risk, we're hardly the Valley, but a failed startup isn't a black mark at all. It's a big plus in most tech circles.
The UK is a bit different in this regard, same as Scandinavia.
But in many continental countries, bankruptcy is a serious legal stigma. You will end up on public "insolvency lists" for years, which means that no bank will touch you with a 5 m pole and few people will even be willing to rent you or your new startup office space. You may even struggle to get banal contracts such as "five SIMs with data" from mobile phone operators.
There seems to be an underlying assumption that people who go bankrupt are either fatally inept or fraudsters, and need to be kept apart from the "healthy" economy in order not to endanger it.
Why? I would see it 2 years ago but now every other platform has completely catched-up to ChatGPT. The LeChat or whatever the French alternative is just as good.