The AI act I won't comment on as I'm not that well read on it and it's not been codified yet. I agree that some parts are more wishful thinking then others.

The belief that if EU removed their regulation a big tech sector would pop up is absurd libertarian propaganda. I'm not saying you believe that, but some people do. Norms, values and the insanity of scaling a business across 20+ languages are way bigger factors for why companies settle into local geographical maxima's. Try managing 3 different marketing agencies, 3 different websites, 3 different app languages. Imagine doing an A/B test on this and maintaining different winner variants across geographies. Congratulations you've just scaled to 20 million people in Norway, Denmark and Sweden. I deal with this everyday - it's horribly inefficient. I think that's the main factor hindering the European B2C tech sector. It's easier to just scale in the US.

This article is about the DSA so I'll stick to that.

> Do you know that Meta, Google, etc have to hire literally tens of thousands of people exclusively to keep up with EU regulations?

A platform serving billions of users needs thousands, if not tens of thousands of moderators. Hell even a forum with hundreds of users need a couple of moderators to keep things in check. Unmoderated platforms turn into self-destructive cesspools without exception.

Facebook and Twitter scaled to other countries with the wishful thinking that algorithmic moderation would scale. Turns out it doesn't. It was a risk they took while moving fast and breaking things and now they're cashing in their check.

The DSA in large parts revolves around transparency around how platforms are dealing with moderation. Did you know that Twitter only has one polish speaking moderator? Do you think that's enough for the 14 million MAUs they have? [1]

In Germany it's illegal to show nazi symbolism. It's also illegal to "harm someones reputation". In Norway the Sapmi ethnic population is a protected class. In Denmark you can't burn the Quran. This are real codified laws and preferences that a foreign company can't just ignore. And you have. There's thousands of examples and a decade of cases. There's a reason the entirety of Europe is standing together to do something about it - and it's not to seek a measly billion euros or five in fines.

While you may be ideologically or philosophically opposed to the "limiting of speech" you'll find that this varies wildly across cultures and across topics. Just because the US has laws and norms around "free speech" and "safe harbour laws" doesn't mean that other countries must be forced to be imposed these rules from American tech giants who put no or a marginal effort into following laws behind extremely opaque platforms with zero accountability.

When doing business in another country you follow their laws, it's as easy as that. If the cost of the fine is less then the cost of following the law it won't be followed. If the cost is too high to bear, it opens room for local competition who will follow the rules. That's fine. American tech can do whatever the hell they want in the US, that's not our right to influence.

[1]https://transparency.twitter.com/dsa-transparency-report.htm...