The basic solution is FOSS. An individual, a school or a business of any size can self-host the AGPL-licenced Elements server for free, and use their FOSS client from F-Droid. What they charge for is buzzword-features like "Corporate oversight", "Dynamic scaling". The "Sovereign" offer for governments is an airgapped deployment (internal communication of intelligence agencies)

Basically they're a service company around a FOSS solution.

Information taken from: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Felement.io%2Fen%2Fpricing

1) The Pro version isn't open source, but purchasing their proprietary offer also supports the AGPL version of their server 2) The EU wasn't going to develop anything internally, it's not what they do; they open a tender for the supply of services. They wrote the tender to somehow exclude Microsoft, maybe they wrote "must be based on an open protocol" (Elements is based on Matrix). Any company, whether local FOSS developers or large IT consulting companies could have proposed to do what you suggest, take a fully FOSS offer and take it to the needs of a government organisation. Maybe Elements won because they have an existing offer and not only promises.

Personal piggy bank? Isn't Trump the only president whose net worth actually decreased during the presidency? The decrease in wealth is unlike most modern presidents.

Element Pro is not Open Source. So the EU is swapping a shitty proprietary solution for another shitty proprietary solution. And what will they do when the company that developed Element Pro is bought by an American company ? Swap to another one ?! Stupidity and corruption is deeply ingrained in the European Commission.

Personal piggy bank? Isn't Trump the only president whose net worth actually decreased during the presidency? The decrease in wealth is unlike most modern presidents.

This could work in conjunction with a future "just walk out" checkout implementation. You see a price at the shelf, pick up the item, you're presented with a bill in your email. You can't claim the price changed on the way to the register, and they know what price they showed you.

I'm not worried about the idea of personalized pricing. It just doesn't seem feasible. Implementation hurdles are abundant, the likelihood of complaints in-store is very high, and for not that much benefit.

Corporations with no physical presence here to NOT have to comply with US law, moron.

Of course, the US government has a bit more reach than most, so not complying could mean facing lockouts from the global financial systems. You think I give a rat's ass that my website isn't compliant with EU privacy laws even though an EU citizen can reach it?

Uhh.... no, you have it backwards. The gross money is the amount BEFORE the accounting shenanigans; the net is AFTER. A percentage of the net could be nothing after Hollywood accounting.

I recall Sir Alec Guinness getting about 2% of the gross for Star Wars. He made a LOT of money from that.

It was legitimately a decent movie though. Not going to change the world or anything, but it was funny and well executed.

That is absolute and utter bullshit. It MIGHT be the case if DeepSeek had offices and/or facilities in the US. It does NOT. Merely offering services in the US doesn't get you anything.

There must be an "ACME" stencil somewhere on Amazon? :-)

"there is no implied obligation to keep making it faster or more powerful"

That's why they don't allege slowing or lack of improvement as a cause of action, they allege collusion. Slowing or lack of improvement might be a overt act used to prove collusion, but is neither sufficient nor necessary to that proof.