Whenever the EU steps in to regulate the big technology companies, the response from news outlets and bloggers (often funded or outright owned by right-wing extremists) is to claim it’s just a bunch of dumb , tech-illiterate bureaucrats telling the vastly more intelligent and superior technology companies what to do. Of course, this is just propaganda. Case in point:
Something big just happened. As the Open Home Foundation’s Android developer for Home Assistant, I was invited by the European Commission (EC) to consult on Android interoperability. The call for feedback was part of the Commission’s work under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). For anyone unfamiliar, the DMA is an EU law that defines and regulates “gatekeeper platforms” – those that offer “core” services like search engines, app stores, and messaging platforms – to make digital markets fairer and more open to competition. As you might imagine, I had plenty to say about Google’s restrictions on Android, especially the tech giant limiting wake word detection to its own Gemini assistant, a concern I surfaced in our Home Assistant 2026.3 Release Party. To put it plainly, Google had no grounds for limiting Android interoperability in the first place, other than to give itself the upper hand. We knew our community deserved better, and that’s what we told the Commission.
The result? The EC listened to us and all the other organizations that contributed. On July 16, 2026, the European Commission adopted a decision under the DMA that requires Alphabet (Google’s parent company) to open up eleven Android features, including always-on wake word detection, ambient sensor access, and screen automation – to all assistants, on equal terms.
↫ Timothy Nibeaudeau
What’s really interesting is just how deeply technical and detailed this new EU decision really is. Timothy Nibeaudeau laid out the technical details of how wake word detection on Android works for the European Commission – in short, a DSP runs a really tiny model in a process isolated from the network to detect just a specific wakeword, and only once that wakeword is detected does it hand things off to a larger model running on the actual main SoC – and the EC’s new decision accurately and precisely describes this method and wrote their decision to take every detail into account.
When I was invited to share these limitations (and others) with the Commission, I didn’t hold back. Which is why we were thrilled to discover an impressively precise and technically accurate decision from the EU: it correctly describes the two-stage wake word architecture, the DSP, the isolated process, and the role coupling. The report went down to details we only figured out by reading Android’s source code ourselves. […] ↫ Timothy Nibeaudeau
The idea that the European Union and Commission are a bunch of dumb, illiterate bureaucrats imposing impossible, unworkable, unrealistic demands on poor, hardworking, honest technology companies is a bunch of propaganda paid for by these very same companies, and every decision and ruling by the EU around the Digital Markets Act further confirms this by having strong technological underpinnings and being based on the actual workings of the technologies they cover. The EU does a lot of dumb things – as any government body does – but you don’t get to enjoy a nearly two-thirds approval rating for nothing, especially not in the face of the state of the world today.
The Digital Markets Act has already proven to be incredibly effective, and this is exactly why the right-wing propaganda against it is reaching an ever crazier fever pitch. When basic consumer protection legislation makes the most powerful companies, right-wing media empires, and even the most powerful country in the world throw tamper tantrums like toddlers, you know you’re doing something right.
For a bunch of “unelected bureaucrats” and the parliament “way detached from the realities of people who elect them”, the EC and the Parliament do a waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better job and seem (I hope for how long) relatively resistant to the moneyed interests.
Especially when compared to our national governments. The kind of stuff our national and local governments focus on makes me think that the average European truly does not have all that many “basic necessities” problems to solve. It is truly a bunch of invented problems and imaginary issues designed to get people scared and voting for self-serving morons.
I’ve recently visited the European Parliament local PR office and it is a great place. Also recently I had issues at an airport to travel with photographic film, I wrote the EC and not only they got back to me in a couple of days, they provided me with useful information to avoid the problem in the future.
When I need the local government, it is somehow “never their competence”. They avoid even noise issues. Ugh.
Thom, the other day you had an article lamenting the fact that the EU Age Verification App (or whatever it’s called) requires Play Integrity checks and therefore won’t work on GrapheneOS, LineageOS or any other degoogled Android, nor will it run on GNU/Linux phone or on any kind of desktop/laptop OS.
This time you are implying that critics of the EU’s tech policy must be either ignorant or funded by “right-wing extremists”. Which one is it?
I’d say, the truth is that some of the EU tech laws are good (GDPR for privacy, DMA against Big Tech monopolies) and other are bad (Chat Control removing privacy, DSA enforcing censorship). It’s probably different parties and people pushing for different things.
I appreciate the intent of what the EU is trying to do, but they’re essentially trying to micromanage sociopaths that are constantly trying to work around any rules you have in place. Just imagine if you tried to raise a kid that way. Like you tell the kid that bedtime is 9pm, but when 9pm comes around, the kid is still up and tells you that ‘Well, it’s technically not 9pm in California.’ So you make up another rule that says they have to be in bed by 9pm in THIS time zone.
And so this continues such that by the time the kid gets into high school, you have 400 pages of legalese you have to hire a lawyer to go through just to determine if a rule has been broken. And what’s worse is that in all fairness, any other kids you have that aren’t chronic rulebreakers will be forced to abide by the way over complicated set of rules that are already in place.
Unopposed0108,
I agree. There are good and bad policies. Not giving into tech monopolies is one of the EU’s strengths. However I think governments in general, be it liberal or conservative, are prone to Orwellian mission creep. Rather than protecting individual rights over time governments can often get elevated above the people without accountability. So although I’m glad the EU is working to keep abusive tech monopolies at bay and protect consumer rights, I worry that the EU could face the same corruption that has taken over the US. It just takes a few evil politicians to capitalize on anger enough to get the electorate to protest vote against their own interests. Once corruption is established, it becomes structural.
A notorious example here in the US is Gerrymandering. Republicans have successfully taken congressional seats in defiance of the electorate’s wishes using blatantly undemocratic methods. They even stole a seat on the supreme court. Democrats, who’ve been witnessing that fighting fairly is a loosing proposition, are turning to embracing the same Gerrymandering to help them win congressional seats. I’m deeply saddened by that both members of the Republican-Democratic duopoly resort to such undemocratic methods because democracy and all of us by extension are the losers.
What part of “The EU does a lot of dumb things – as any government body does” was unclear, ambigious, or written in Finnish?
Any government regulation that isn’t related to fraud or health & safety is an illegitimate abuse of state power and a drag on prosperity. The government has absolutely no moral right to tell anybody that they must allow competitors free access to their own platform.
I know America has a lot of highly visible problems, especially in recent years with that narcissist madman in charge, but stuff like this is precisely why Europe has been lagging behind the US for decades. They muzzle economic freedom in the name of “consumer protection”. I’m a consumer and you know what I do when I’m unsatisfied with somebody’s product? I use a different one. A different one that only exists because entrepreneurs had the freedom to experiment, to try new technologies and new business models and new management approaches.
https://www.mheducation.com/highered/product/Economics-McConnell.html
DeepSpaceWhine,
The thing is, if we don’t put rules in place to protect competition and alternatives, they die and the consolidation of power gets worse. The market becomes so concentrated consumers often end up with no good options. Without government protections consumers often become deprived of traditional ownership rights and control over their own hardware. You may not agree with this opinion, but for many of us regulation is a necessary evil to protect consumer rights. There are problems with regulation for sure, but at least reasonable policies can mitigate them and point us towards a better future than the alternative, which is to allow oligarchs to own and run everything.
I would much rather see the EU and UK Governments push for banks and car manufacturers (see VW) support home grown mobile operating systems to break the duopoly of American Tech companies. Support for Graphene OS and Sailfish OS could make them truly competitive.