lol of the day -
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Kevin Beaumont last edited by
@GossiTheDog I'm not a big fan of Bloomerg trying to discredit the EU regulation regime by calling its officials "czar" and "boss", which have well-known and decidedly negative connotations in the American political language.
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Passwordsarehard4replied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley @GossiTheDog we do generally dislike anyone in an authoritarian role, most titles would be out.
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@passwordsarehard4 @riley @GossiTheDog yeah well not all authorities are authoritarian, I guess the emphasis is on that.
Interesting though what would be the legal basis for the calculation, I suppose there’s none and this is just a good headline for a rumor.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Luca last edited by [email protected]
@securescientist It's described in the article. The letter of the law says that the fine is to be calculated out of the worldwide revenues of a business, which is commonly interpreted to mean a whole business concern — global businesses are commonly complex networks of corporations registered in various different countries, and the plain intent is to consider the whole beast, not one random limb or tail that might be at hand. But Xitter is peculiar among global corporations in that Melon took it private. The idea of a privately held global social network was likely not considered by the original writers of the law, so now there's a point of interpretation: if the concern's hierarchy starts with a natural person, does it mean that the concern comprises all corporations that the natural person controls?
And, well, there's a colourable legal argument that it does.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Passwordsarehard4 last edited by
@passwordsarehard4 The newspaper could just use their official titles, European Commissioner for X.
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@riley @passwordsarehard4 @GossiTheDog could not get past the paywall at least not accepting cookies, thank you for the explainer. That’s what I also imagined was the justification but to me it seems a stretch: the companies are clearly separated and hardly the revenue structure of X has anything to do with the revenue of the others. That the capital is in, sizably, one’s hand seems rather irrelevant and more of a threat than a legal consideration.
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@securescientist
archive.ishas a copy. You can find it by placingarchive.is/in front of the Bloomsberg URL. @passwordsarehard4 @GossiTheDog -
@securescientist Ah, but consider that the purpose of a fine is to compel change of behaviour. Whose behaviour? At least in this case, a strong case can be made that the person whose behaviour needs to be changed is Melon. He's made numerous statements about his personal opinions about following the law, after all.
Also, recall that EU law does not work like US law. It's largely built on principles of Napoleonic Civil Law, endlessly reinterpreted, and does not recognise a nearly-impossible-to-pierce corporate veil the way US corporate law does, for an example. European authorities can do a lot of things that American authorities don't, and even if they don't follow through in a particular case, the possibility that they might adds credibility to the threat.
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@riley @passwordsarehard4 @GossiTheDog I surely agree there is more room to case-by-case interpretation in EU then elsewhere. I understand the argument and I’ll leave to the lawyers any exact technical rebuttal (mine would be merely intuition driven, not actually well informed) but the issue of proportionality and fairness remains. As an EU citizen I’d question the fairness and maybe legitimacy of rule of law in EU was this enforced. Ad-hominem is bad.
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@securescientist A well-known example of European authorities doing what American ones couldn't was German tax officials buying stolen information about zillionaires' secret stashes in Panama, and using that information to levy past taxes and penalties. In USA, the Common Law principle of fruit of poisonous tree would prohibit such a manœuvre. (There's shady ways around it, ways that would make old Jedgar smile, but go figure, they're never used for tax enforcement.) But Civil Law doesn't recognise such a principle, and buying already-stolen information expressly for the purposes of law enforcement is not verboten here. It's only inciting new crimes where the line is drawn. (But then again, inciting and even procuring activities that are crimes under all sorts of foreign countries' laws is a big part of what all espionage organisations in the world do.)
