autonomousPunk

cross-posted from: https://belgae.social/post/1289254

This is the 2024 update to the “Law of 11.04.1994”:

EN (machine translation):

Art.3/1.[¹ Federal administrative bodies inform citizens of federal regulations and, in particular, of the rights and obligations arising therefrom. This information includes at least the federal legislative and regulatory standards for the jurisdiction of the administrative body concerned. It is at least published on the website of the administrative body. ]¹

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(1 Inserted by L 2024-05-12/18, art. 5, 007; Effective: 15-07-2024)

FR (original):

Art.3/1.[¹ Les instances administratives fédérales informent les citoyens de la réglementation fédérale et en particulier des droits et obligations qui en découlent. Cette information porte au moins sur les normes législatives et réglementaires fédérales relatives aux compétences de l'instance administrative concernée. Elle est à tout le moins publiée sur le site internet de l'instance administrative.]¹

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(1 Inséré par L 2024-05-12/18, art. 5, 007; En vigueur : 15-07-2024)

The official website for federal statutes is https://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be/, which is an access restricted website that blocks people on the Tor network.

This is the 2024 update to the “Law of 11.04.1994”:

EN (machine translation):

Art.3/1.[¹ Federal administrative bodies inform citizens of federal regulations and, in particular, of the rights and obligations arising therefrom. This information includes at least the federal legislative and regulatory standards for the jurisdiction of the administrative body concerned. It is at least published on the website of the administrative body. ]¹

---

(1 Inserted by L 2024-05-12/18, art. 5, 007; Effective: 15-07-2024)

FR (original):

Art.3/1.[¹ Les instances administratives fédérales informent les citoyens de la réglementation fédérale et en particulier des droits et obligations qui en découlent. Cette information porte au moins sur les normes législatives et réglementaires fédérales relatives aux compétences de l'instance administrative concernée. Elle est à tout le moins publiée sur le site internet de l'instance administrative.]¹

---

(1 Inséré par L 2024-05-12/18, art. 5, 007; En vigueur : 15-07-2024)

The official website for federal statutes is https://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be/, which is an access restricted website that blocks people on the Tor network.

It’s interesting that roaming charges were eliminated in the EU when roaming from one member state to another. In principle, this could be great for consumers so that competition sufficiently suppresses unreasonable GSM costs.

But then the EU brought in what they call a “fair use” law. This blocks continuous roaming. Which effectively denies consumers the benefits of competition.

In Belgium we have only 3 real GSM carriers. The rest are MVNOs. So we get shitty deals on prepaid service.

www.iot-sim.tech has a quite interesting deal: 1gb for 10 years for €10. The raw price per gig is bad, but the credit persists for 10 years which is quite generous compared to all options in Belgium (use-it-or-lose-it in 1 year).

So as a consequence, iot-sim.tech has a rule that the comms can only be used IOT or M2M, perhaps due to some strange exception. But that’s a bit of a perverse outcome because it really should not matter whether the signal is “personal” or not.

IIRC, Belgium bans the anti-competitive practice of banks forcing other services to be bundled with current accounts. As I understood the law, a bank could not force you to open a savings account (for example) as a pre-condition to opening a current account. Although the reverse was always possible. That is, you ask for some kind of account that is not a current account, and the bank forces you to open a current account.

At some point “basic” accounts became a thing.. an EU mandate whereby banks cannot refuse you a bank account unless you already have an account. These basic accounts are generally shit. Trully basic, feature poor, nannied, and costly. There are no gratis basic accounts.

So recently a friend tried to open a retail current account and the bank tried to force them to open another account of some kind along with it. When my friend refused the other account, the bank said: “we can accommodate but only if the current account you open is your only current account”. This implies that the bank is only granting stand-alone current accounts if they are basic accounts. Strings are now attached to retail accounts.

This seems like an unlawful (and obviously shitty) practice. It means they are abusing the basic account mechanism to impose service bundling on their retail current accounts. This completely defeats the purpose of the anti-bundling law because there already is an obligation to open basic accounts with no extra conditions anyway. Am I missing something? It’s as if the existence of “basic” accounts has given banks the idea that they can arbitrarily refuse access to retail accounts.

cross-posted from: https://belgae.social/post/1185423

EU Directive 2019/1 defines cartel this way:

“(11) ‘cartel’ means an agreement or concerted practice between two or more competitors aimed at coordinating their competitive behaviour on the market or influencing the relevant parameters of competition through practices such as, but not limited to, the fixing or coordination of purchase or selling prices or other trading conditions, including in relation to intellectual property rights, the allocation of production or sales quotas, the sharing of markets and customers, including bid-rigging, restrictions of imports or exports or anti-competitive actions against other competitors;”

“(12) ‘secret cartel’ means a cartel, the existence of which is partially or wholly concealed;”

A cartel is quite harmful to consumers as I understand it, and as that definition suggests. But I find no prohibition on cartels in EU Directive 2019/1. There is a huge amount of text about giving leniency to secret carels. Leniency implies there is a prohibition to begin with. The anti-competition prohibition seems to be wholly in the TFEU arts.101—102, though nothing about cartels specifically. That’s also just strictly regulating cross-border competition. So IIUC, the EU is unconcerned with anti-competitive scenarios falling wholly within a member state, correct?

I’m ultimately trying to work out whether this trend of ATM cartels is lawful. It seems to have started in NL but the shitshow is spreading out from there. I get the impression the ATM cartels would not be considered cross-border anti-competition, thus not an EU concern. From there, it’s down to just national anti-competition law, correct?

Why I give a shit

I visited a city where 100% of the ATMs were owned by a single ATM cartel. The machines rejected my perfectly valid card and it gave a bullshit reason. The machine gave a vague lie. The card works in other ATMs, just not that of the cartel that dominated that whole city. I was legitimately afraid to try more than two ATMs because failed withdrawal attempts themselves become a red flag for banks’ shitty AI fraud algos. Three failed attempts and the ATM might confiscate the card, or my bank might cut it off from all transactions. So it’s sensible to make every attempt at a different kind of machine to not waste the precious few attempts that are tolerated by the skiddish algos coded by those without accountability for DoS errors.

Do we have to eat this shit? Do I have to accept that I can never get cash from an ATM in that city now that the ATMs are all pawned? Or is there recourse?

Incompetent engineering is just one example of why I give a shit. Another example is that I do not want one single giant entity to track my banking and totally control my access to money. Facebook users are happy to be centrally surveilled but I am not.

If their shitty AI fraud algos falsely trigger, I obviously would like a 2nd opinion from a different ATM owner. Competition law should ensure that, I would think, but I’m not finding it.

cross-posted from: https://belgae.social/post/1185423

EU Directive 2019/1 defines cartel this way:

“(11) ‘cartel’ means an agreement or concerted practice between two or more competitors aimed at coordinating their competitive behaviour on the market or influencing the relevant parameters of competition through practices such as, but not limited to, the fixing or coordination of purchase or selling prices or other trading conditions, including in relation to intellectual property rights, the allocation of production or sales quotas, the sharing of markets and customers, including bid-rigging, restrictions of imports or exports or anti-competitive actions against other competitors;”

“(12) ‘secret cartel’ means a cartel, the existence of which is partially or wholly concealed;”

A cartel is quite harmful to consumers as I understand it, and as that definition suggests. But I find no prohibition on cartels in EU Directive 2019/1. There is a huge amount of text about giving leniency to secret carels. Leniency implies there is a prohibition to begin with. The anti-competition prohibition seems to be wholly in the TFEU arts.101—102, though nothing about cartels specifically. That’s also just strictly regulating cross-border competition. So IIUC, the EU is unconcerned with anti-competitive scenarios falling wholly within a member state, correct?

I’m ultimately trying to work out whether this trend of ATM cartels is lawful. It seems to have started in NL but the shitshow is spreading out from there. I get the impression the ATM cartels would not be considered cross-border anti-competition, thus not an EU concern. From there, it’s down to just national anti-competition law, correct?

Why I give a shit

I visited a city where 100% of the ATMs were owned by a single ATM cartel. The machines rejected my perfectly valid card and it gave a bullshit reason. The machine gave a vague lie. The card works in other ATMs, just not that of the cartel that dominated that whole city. I was legitimately afraid to try more than two ATMs because failed withdrawal attempts themselves become a red flag for banks’ shitty AI fraud algos. Three failed attempts and the ATM might confiscate the card, or my bank might cut it off from all transactions. So it’s sensible to make every attempt at a different kind of machine to not waste the precious few attempts that are tolerated by the skiddish algos coded by those without accountability for DoS errors.

Do we have to eat this shit? Do I have to accept that I can never get cash from an ATM in that city now that the ATMs are all pawned? Or is there recourse?

Incompetent engineering is just one example of why I give a shit. Another example is that I do not want one single giant entity to track my banking and totally control my access to money. Facebook users are happy to be centrally surveilled but I am not.

If their shitty AI fraud algos falsely trigger, I obviously would like a 2nd opinion from a different ATM owner. Competition law should ensure that, I would think, but I’m not finding it.

EU Directive 2019/1 defines cartel this way:

“(11) ‘cartel’ means an agreement or concerted practice between two or more competitors aimed at coordinating their competitive behaviour on the market or influencing the relevant parameters of competition through practices such as, but not limited to, the fixing or coordination of purchase or selling prices or other trading conditions, including in relation to intellectual property rights, the allocation of production or sales quotas, the sharing of markets and customers, including bid-rigging, restrictions of imports or exports or anti-competitive actions against other competitors;”

“(12) ‘secret cartel’ means a cartel, the existence of which is partially or wholly concealed;”

A cartel is quite harmful to consumers as I understand it, and as that definition suggests. But I find no prohibition on cartels in EU Directive 2019/1. There is a huge amount of text about giving leniency to secret carels. Leniency implies there is a prohibition to begin with. The anti-competition prohibition seems to be wholly in the TFEU arts.101—102, though nothing about cartels specifically. That’s also just strictly regulating cross-border competition. So IIUC, the EU is unconcerned with anti-competitive scenarios falling wholly within a member state, correct?

I’m ultimately trying to work out whether this trend of ATM cartels is lawful. It seems to have started in NL but the shitshow is spreading out from there. I get the impression the ATM cartels would not be considered cross-border anti-competition, thus not an EU concern. From there, it’s down to just national anti-competition law, correct?

The linked page has 2 “PDF” docs. But they are not really PDFs. If you wget them, they are HTML with javascript embedded.

So we can no longer simply download a PDF anymore. Apparently we must run a JavaScript application to get the PDF in a browser tab, then use pdf.js to save it. WTF? This breaks my script (which stores the URL as metadata on every PDF I fetch).

Other sites do this too. I’ve seen websites for restaurants pull this shit with their menus.

What’s the point?

A clip of beer was 1 day past the “best before” expiry, which implies a quality degradation not a safety matter. The grocer refused to sell it to me and said she had to put it in the back room. So I’m wondering, what’s the law on this, considering the EU has banned food waste?

I might assume the “consume before” dates on highly perishable food might be more controlled than quality dates on things like beer and sauces. I wonder if the grocer was treating all dates the same, and whether the store policy is equally simple.

What do grocers do with expired food in Belgium?

Note that in some countries it’s legal to sell expired food, so the answer isn’t necessarily obvious.

Although I applaud efforts like this to regulate the technofeudal fiefdoms, it’s disturbing how that movement has so much attention in comparison to the fact that Tesla’s cars impose surveillance on everyone who travels outside of their home.

I can escape Facebook to a sufficiently good enough extent by not creating an account. The fact that FB tries to track non-users is minor in the big scheme of things.

Where I have zero control is when I am out on the street, and a Tesla or Google car intersects my path. The robocams take a pic of me, likely performs facial recognition (I assume), and then my realtime location and face are captured by Tesla or Google without my knowledge or consent. Then if I want to send them a GDPR right to be forgotten request everytime their car passes me, I have to send them a copy of my ID to prove my identity, as well as my address so I can receive my reply.

This situation is fucked up in so many ways. There is no personal action I can take to protect myself other than to not leave my home. This is where regulation is most needed.

(edit) Well, I suppose I could wear a ski mask everywhere. But I don’t suppose the police would leave me alone in that case -- considering the burqua is banned in Belgium due to police being unable to ID someone whose face is covered.