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GDPR To Be Defanged?
00:20:54
Is the EU about to pull back on tech regulation because they are feeling FOMO about AI? Is the whole initial COIN offering craze about to come back? Is Apple Music falling behind because they don’t have a free tier? And it turns out AI might not be that good at trading crypto.
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Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Monday, November 10, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today is the EU about to pull back on tech regulation because they are feeling FOMO about AI? Is the whole initial coin offering craze about to come back? Is Apple Music falling behind because they don't have a free tier? And it turns out AI might not be that good at trading crypto? Here's what you missed today. In the world of tech, when your business evolves, so does the risk of data loss. But with Veeam, your data is always on the map. Partner with Veeam for coverage that keeps you moving and get protection for workloads of all shapes and sizes, even the ones you haven't created yet so you can stay resilient as you scale. With Veeam, it's all good. Get workload coverage that works for your business. @veeam.com that's V E E A M dot com the EU might be tapping the brakes a bit on tech regulation. There are draft documents out there suggesting the European Commission plans to simplify some of its privacy rules, including gdpr, to boost AI growth and slash red tape for businesses in Europe. Quoting Politico, the European Commission will unveil a digital omnibus package later this month to simplify many of its tech laws. The executive has insisted that it is only trimming excess fat through targeted amendments, but draft documents obtained by Politico show that officials are planning far reaching changes to the General Data Protection regulation gdpr, to the benefit of artificial intelligence developers. The proposed overhaul will come as a boon to businesses working with AI as Europe scrambles to stay economically competitive on the world stage. But touching the flagship privacy law seen as the third rail of EU tech policy is expected to trigger a massive political and lobbying storm in Brussels. Is this the end of data protection and privacy as we have signed it into the EU Treaty and Fundamental Rights Charter? Said German politician Jan Philipp Albrecht, who as a former European Parliament member was one of the chief architects of the gdpr. The commission should be fully aware that this is undermining European standards dramatically. End quote. Brussels shift on privacy comes as it frets over Europe's waning economic power. Former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi name checked the General Data Protection regulation as holding back European innovation on artificial intelligence in his landmark Competitiveness report last year. European privacy regulators have already been spoiling Big Tech's AI party in recent years. Metax and LinkedIn have all delayed rollouts of artificial intelligence applications in Europe after interventions by the Irish Data Protection Commission. Google is facing an inquiry by the same regulator and was previously forced to pause the release of its Bard chatbot. Italy's regulator has previously imposed temporary blocks on OpenAI's ChatGPT and Chinese deep Seek over privacy concerns those same tech giants are racing ahead in the US without an equivalent blanket privacy law barring them from feeding AI with citizens data. The General Data Protection Regulations initial drafting in 2012 through 2016 triggered one of the biggest lobbying efforts Brussels has ever seen. Since taking effect in 2018, the EU has steered clear of amending it, fearing it would reignite the vicious lobbying war. In past months, commission officials have sought to preempt worries that it was overhauling the privacy rulebook. It insisted that its simplification proposals would wouldn't touch the underlying principles of the gdpr. Now that draft plans are out, civil society campaigners have begun sounding the alarm. The commission is, quote, secretly trying to overrun everyone else in Brussels, said Max Schrems, founder of Austrian privacy group NOIB and Europe's infamous privacy campaigner, who was behind court cases that brought down major data transfer deals with the United States in the past. This disregards every rule on good lawmaking with terrible results, he said. One line of attack from privacy groups is to poke holes in what they say is a rushed omnibus process. While the GDPR took years to negotiate, public consultation on the digital omnibus only ended in October. The commission has not prepared impact assessments to accompany its proposals, as it says the changes are only targeted and technical. The commission's tunnel vision on the AI race has resulted in a poorly drafted quick shot in a highly complex and sensitive area, said Schrems. The draft proposal, obtained by Politico, shows how far the European Commission is willing to go to placate industry on AI. Draft changes would create new exceptions for AI companies that would allow them to legally process special categories of data like a person's religious or political beliefs, ethnicity or health data to train and operate their tech. The commission is also planning to reframe the definition of such special category data, which are afforded extra protections under the privacy rules. Officials also want to redefine what constitutes as personal data, saying that pseudonymized data where personal details have been obscured so a person can't be identified might not always be subject to the GDPR's protections, a change that reflects a recent ruling from the EU's top court. Finally, it wants to reform Europe's pesky cookie banner rules by inserting a provision into the GDPR that would give website and app owners more legal grounds to justify tracking users beyond simply obtaining their consent. The draft proposal could still change before the commission officially unveils its plans on November 19. Once presented, the omnibus package has to pass muster with the EU countries and lawmakers who are already sharply divided on whether to touch privacy protections. End quot foreign heads up that the initial coin offering craze might be coming back Remember the ico craze of 2017, 2018? Yeah, might be coming back because Coinbase plans to launch a platform to let individual investors buy digital tokens before they are listed on its exchange. Quoting the journal, Coinbase will host about one token sale a month on its new platform, which will use an algorithm to determine how tokens are allocated to investors. Investors will be able to submit purchase requests during a one week window following this period, an algorithm will distribute the tokens, aiming for broad and equitable allocation. Coinbase said investors must be in good standing, fully registered and compliant with Coinbase to use their platform. Their token purchases will be paid in USD Coin a dollar pegged stablecoin issued by Circle Internet Group. Meanwhile, blockchain projects seeking to offer tokens through the platform will be evaluated based on a set of criteria, including user interest, the founding team's record, as well as token economics and vesting schedules, the company said. The token sales platform will be accessible to individual investors in most global regions at launch, with further expansion planned for the future. Blockchain startup Monad will be the first project to offer its token through the platform next week, Coinbase said it intends to list any project that launches a token through its platform. The platform launch marks the first time since 2018 that US retail traders will be able to participate in public token sales, then known as initial coin offerings, or ICOs. The ICO craze reached a peak in 2017 and 2018. Startups with no more than a white paper and no established product managed to draw in billions of dollars in ICO fundraising. The subsequent collapse in crypto prices, along with the rampant fraud, led to regulatory scrutiny and a drastic decline in token offerings in the following years. Scott Shapiro, head of trading at Coinbase, said the exchange's new platform would provide users with a professional, safer way to buy new tokens. It will feature investor protection mechanisms that discourage quick profit taking and prevent immediate token dumping by project founders, he said. For example, users who immediately sell tokens will have reduced allocations in subsequent sales, and issuers and their affiliates will be limited from selling any tokens either privately or on exchanges for six months after the public sale on Coinbase in 2017 the market was so young that no one really had a deep crypto resume before launching a token, said Shapiro. Now projects and their team teams have more to show than just a white paper End quote from the AI bubble concern trolling file TSMC reported October sales up 16.9%, but that was the slowest pace of growth since February 2024, highlighting uncertainty over the AI boom's sustainability. Quoting Bloomberg Industry executives remain buoyant about AI driven growth as major tech firms are accelerating investments in data centers. The TSMC revenue gain covers just a single month of business, offering investors less insight. Still, the market is on edge. Investors were jolted last week by a sudden slump in Asia's technology shares, which raised concerns that the world beating rally in artificial intelligence and semiconductor stocks may be faltering. Wall street chief executives have warned of an overdue market correction, and Michael Burry's Scion Asset Management disclosed bearish wagers on nv. That's in spite of massive spending plans from leading AI players. End quote. We all remember the choices that shaped the course of our lives in business. World renowned venture capital firm Sequoia Capital calls them Crucible Moments. Their podcast brings you inside the pivotal decisions that defined some of today's most influential companies. Hosted by Sequoia's Rulof Botha, Crucible Moments Season 3 pulls back the curtain on the untold stories behind companies like Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna Supercell and more. I loved the recent episode with the founder of Zipline and how even late to the game, they are leapfrogging the bigger players to bring true autonomous drone delivery not just to hospitals, but now to customers of the likes of Walmart and Chipotle. I might win that burrito delivery bet someday soon. Tune in to Sequoia's new season of Crucible Moments to discover how some of the most transformational companies of the modern era were buil. Crucible Moments is available everywhere you get your podcasts and@CrucibleMoments.com is the daily commute making your muscles feel stiff? Well, there could be a natural way to help relieve that discomfort. Cornbread Hemp creates premium USDA Organic Full Spectrum CBD Gummies designed to help with stress, body aches and sleep. Their products are made exclusively from the hemp flourish, the most potent part of the plant for maximum purity and effectiveness. Every batch is third party lab tested to ensure quality, safety and consistency. In short, Cornbread Hemp Gummies are formulated to work with your body, not against it. Right now, Tech Brew Ride Home listeners can save 30% on their first order. Just head to cornbreadhemp.com brew and use code BREW at checkout. That's cornbreadhemp.com Brew and use code Brew when you look at the numbers, one way Apple Music is competitive with Spotify right 263 million paying subscribers for Spotify and 94 million paid subscribers for Apple Music. But on other metrics, Apple Music is way behind 615 million monthly active users for Spotify versus 110 million mouths for Apple Music. And on a weekly level, 43% of consumers use Spotify and only 16% turned to Apple. If you look closely at that, basically nobody uses Apple Music that isn't already paying for it. Basically, Apple Music's growth may be stymied by the lack of a free tier as a sales funnel. Quoting Bloomberg Apple's narrow focus, while a boon for the music industry, may also be dimming its prospects with the next generation of music consumers, namely, people who can't afford a pricey streaming subscription, particularly in developing markets. Midea Research pointed this out in a March report assessing 2024 subscriber growth across the industry. While Apple maintained its position as the third most popular streaming service by subscriber market share, Midea classified the platform's performance over the past year as underwhelming. During the period, Apple and Amazon Music had combined only added 6 million subscribers. By comparison, Spotify had added 27 million paying subscribers, a figure that didn't even account for people using the Swedish company's free tier, which media didn't incorporate into the report. Overall, Medea estimated that by the end of the fourth quarter of 2024, Apple Music had 94.9 million subscribers, compared to Spotify's 263 million. Tatiana Cristiano, VP of music strategy at Midea, primarily attributes this wide gap to Apple's lack of a free tier. While eschewing free music might yield Apple a public relations win with songwriters and the like, she told me in an interview. The flip side is you lack this funnel to adoption, and it's also a lot harder to grow in markets outside North America and the uk, where Apple Music is the strongest because of the service's close association with Apple hardware, she added, Potential customers who own other brands of devices might never be enticed to sign up. Meanwhile, a post on LinkedIn about this trend recently caught my attention. Not long ago, Apple was positioned as Spotify's main challenger, lior Tabon, chief executive officer at Duetti, a music catalog acquisition company, wrote in September. Today, Apple remains powerful in the US and among certain demographics, but YouTube is scaling faster in the markets and formats that drive growth this decade. That's true for streams and crucially, for revenues flowing back to artists and rights holders. One executive I spoke with, who asked not to be named, criticizing a key partner, doubted that Apple's particular product focuses are connecting with general consumers. High fidelity Audio, which Apple Music promotes and rewards, hasn't seemed to drum up much enthusiasm from consumers. Also, Amazon Music already offers it, and Spotify recently launched its own version. This executive, who oversees music that appeals to a young global audience across genres, tells me that YouTube has consistently outperformed Apple Music by over 20% on a revenue basis. Apple's competitive challenges will be complicated by several other significant threats currently percolating in the industry in the months ahead. Artificial intelligence stands to not only disrupt the music creation process, flooding services with AI tracks, but also potentially shifting how and where people listen to music. Last week, when the AI music generator Udio settled its lawsuit with Universal Music Group, the two entities announced plans to launch a walled off version of the Yudio app that'll allow fans to remix music from UMG artists. While the new version has yet to debut, it's possible that this kind of model could eventually become a new, more popular way to interact with music. Already, Spotify is surfacing in ChatGPT results, an effort by the company to be ubiquitous even in third party destinations at a time when people are increasingly turning to chatbots, not platform playlists for recommendations. By contrast, a big part of Apple Music's pitch remains its continued reliance on human curation. During the first half of this year, revenue in the U.S. recorded music business grew by less than a percent, according to the RIAA. The competition to find more paying subscribers and revive significant growth in the music business is heating up, particularly in the US If Apple Music doesn't get more aggressive at finding and signing up people in this new area of rapidly changing music discovery, what will spur its future growth? End quote? Finally today, let me tell you about the Alpha arena experiment. Folks gave six Frontier AI models $10,000 each to trade crypto derivatives over two. It did not go well. Quoting the New York Post, four of the most popular AI programs crashed and burned in a cryptocurrency investing competition, with most losing over 50% of the money they were instructed to maximize. Only two Chinese programs managed to turn even a modest profit. The experimental Alpha arena contest from company N of 1 gave six AI models $10,000 identical input data and prompted each to make as much money as possible while trading crypto stocks on the open market from October 17th till November 3rd. Goal Find which bot could best make you rich AI programs Grok from Xai, Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Chinese owned bots Deepseek and Quen got the five digit endowments and were directed to make all other decisions, including whether to bet long or short their choice of crypto coins. The bots were able to invest in blockchain cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, xrp, Ethereum, Doge, BNB and Solana, with all trades recorded and shared publicly on the competition's website, which charts the financial positions of each program. Second by second, the results showed a shocking ineptitude. ChatGPT, the most popular bot according to StatCounter, ended with just $3,794, down 63%. Next worst was Gemini, down 56% with only $4,485 left. Despite making the most trades. 272 Elon Musk's Grok and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet had middling results and were occasionally profitable during the 17 day trial, but Grok ended down 45% with $5,226 while Claud pocketed $6,740, down 30%. Chinese model Deepseek saw profits sink in the final days of trading, but ended up in the black with $10,476 for a modest 4% return. It was at 100% around Oct. 26. Kwen, from Chinese company Alibaba was the most volatile, operating at a loss from its initial investment for the first three days and then successfully dumping in all but $90 of its remaining bankroll into a long position on bitcoin. It won the competition with 20% growth, growth and $12,287. It's hard to say how much we can take away from this, researchers said. One thing that we do know is that there are patterns in the models and they're clearly biases and have preferences. For example, Claude almost always goes long and refuses to go short. It's like an eternal optimist. Whereas Gemini is happy to short, the researcher said. They clearly have these inductive biases when it comes to trading. Alpha arena plans a next round that will add more AI models and also task the programs with trading equities along crypto. End quote BT dubs the final link in the show notes today is to an Internet history podcast episode with Clement DeLonge the founder and CEO of Hugging Face. Want to hear the Hugging Face founding story? How they became central to the whole AI moment? Want to hear about what they think of the possibility of an AI bubble? Give this episode a go, click the link, or subscribe to the Internet History Podcast right now in your podcast app, because we have some great episodes coming for the next six months at least. Talk to you tomorrow.
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