> Under the DMA, app developers distributing their apps via Apple's App Store should be able to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative offers outside the App Store, steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases.
To me, this is the most easily agreeable part of what the EU has been after. It is unfair that Apple restricts Netflix from telling it's users that they can sign up and pay for Netlifx on their own website. It's unfair that Netflix can't even tell its users the rules that Apple enforces on them.
It's telling that Gruber is pretty staunchly against EU/DMA interferance in Apple, and broadly thinks they're wrong. But this is the one thing he agrees on
> If Apple wants to insist on a cut of in-app purchased subscription revenue, that’s their prerogative. What gets me, though, are the rules that prevent apps that eschew in-app purchases from telling users in plain language how to actually pay. Not only is Netflix not allowed to link to their website, they can’t even tell the user they need to go to netflix.com to sign up
> The Commission takes the preliminary view that Apple failed to comply with this obligation [to allow third party app stores] in view of the conditions it imposes on app (and app store) developers. Developers wanting to use alternative app distribution channels on iOS are disincentivised from doing so as this requires them to opt for business terms which include a new fee (Apple's Core Technology Fee). Apple also introduced overly strict eligibility requirements, hampering developers' ability to distribute their apps through alternative channels. Finally, Apple makes it overly burdensome and confusing for end users to install apps when using such alternative app distribution channels.
This is great to hear. It sounds like they've just found Apple non-compliant in making alternate app stores as discouraging for both developers and user as possible. I guess it'll take another 12 months for any fines or changes from Apple.
I don't think so - they’ve only been fined for the in-app anti-steering provisions.
For the second App Marketplace issue, I think that’s just a preliminary finding and is going to take longer to work out
> Apple now has the possibility to exercise its rights of defence by examining the documents in the Commission's investigation file and by responding to the preliminary findings
>the most easily agreeable part of what the EU has been after
It's also probably the most dangerous for Apple. It creates a cash incentive to push people outside of Apple's walled garden and show them what's outside.
I really really hope Apple gets its act together, they are the greatest "the user experience comes first" company and they actually have great hard tech but they show signs of rent seeking behavior which can destroy them.
If Apple just play nice with EU, open up and focus on bringing the greatest experience possible they will keep winning. If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.
The Apple's AI blunder is mostly a blunder only because they insist to do it all by themselves so to have higher margins on the services revenues. IMHO those blunders will be more damaging as the Americans no longer have the higher moral grounds than Koreans or Chinese.
I would imagine that getting the user out of the in-app purchase payment screen and attempt to redirect them at the website for payment, have them figure out how to enter credit card details etc would result in a drastically decreased conversion rate though.
Imagine a major streaming service: Subscription through Apple 30USD/Month or 25USD/Month if you do it through this one click fintech app.
The fintech app can even pay the streaming service for every customer they bring.
So for the users who already have the fintech app its a no-brainer, click once and get a free coffee each month. For those who don't have the app already it can push them to create an account as they see it on every app as a cheaper alternative. In Europe at least, even traditional banks are able to create a new customer account through a few steps in the in the app. It's usually just about entering your name, taking a photo of your ID and then scanning your face by looking left and right on the camera. You can have a grace period to add the funds for the subscription.
Banks already pay a lot of money for new customers, its pretty common in some places to offer interest-free loans or give cashbacks when you create a bank account through the app. They can partner with those services to offer months of free use or upgrades and then suddenly the value for the trouble of a few click and a scan goes up substantially.
> If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.
But what alternative? There is no European smartphone OS. Windows and Steam OS and XBox are US-american, too.
The alternatives are Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo and others. Already the dominant brands in Europe. It doesn't have to be European, it has to be good and those are pretty good at much cheaper prices. They also offer premium models that Apple doesn't have a match.
People pay a lot extra for the feelings the brand invokes in them. Tesla was like that when it was about the values it used to represent, right after Musk dropped those values they had to start pricing their vehicles based on the specs to compete with similarly specced alternatives.
If Apple goes into fight with EU and becomes the "anti-european tech giant" they will have to start selling 300 euro iPhones.
American brands should tread carefully: while America is willing to ban their (cheaper, sometimes better) competitors, Europe is much less willing to — especially now as America itself has taken a much more bullying tone towards its allies.
> It's telling that Gruber is pretty staunchly against EU/DMA interferance in Apple, and broadly thinks they're wrong. But this is the one thing he agree on
I’ve stopped seeing Gruber as any sort of authority on Apple for a while now. He’s just a single guy with an opinion like everyone else, and it’s, more times than not, clearly biased in favor of Apple.
Some of his analysis of objective data is informative, but when he gets into subjective material, I tune out. I don’t really care any more about what he says than most others sharing their opinion on the internet — it’s just one more data point to consider collectively alongside everyone else’s.
I agree with your overall comment, but I think this is basically what OP was getting at: it's not surprising that Gruber is against EU/DMA interference, yet even he has issues with this particular point.
Technically, the first amendment applies only to state actors, not private entities. See Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, Hudgens v. NLRB, and many other cases that upheld this interpretation. Private companies like Apple can restrict free speech on their platforms legally (at least as far as the first amendment is concerned).
That said, I believe in the principle of free speech, especially as envisioned by Tim Berners Lee for the Web. I wish more Americans could adhere to those principles even when the speech is not to their taste. Certainly feels like a lot of cultural backsliding happening.
As an American who thinks free speech is one of the most important rights we have, I wish the answer to your question would be a collective "yes" but unfortunately it is not.
In America free speech is always limited to what "I find acceptable". There's an infinite number of things that lots of Americans will find unacceptable. Swearing is beeped/censored everywhere (even on youtube), songs release "explicit" and "clean" versions, nipples are blurred on TV, some words you can't say even in an educational or karaoke setting (N-word, R-word, etc.)
If you extend "speech" to "any kind of action an individual or company can do", then no. There's plenty of laws regulations that restrict what you can do in USA.
Sure it is. Lots of us also go on about private property rights and freedom of association. Apple is restricting the behavior of entities doing business through them on a platform they own. The logic is that you remain free to speak - elsewhere. Meanwhile Apple remains free not to do business with you if you can't or won't accept their terms.
(Well really the legal argument is that Apple isn't the government and so the first amendment doesn't bind their policies but there's an ideological aspect in addition to the legal one.)
The issue missed by such an analysis is the outsized impact the megacorp has. Without strong competition (ie not a duopoly or even an oligopoly) regulation is required to protect consumers against practices that otherwise would be financially discouraged.
There are also a few other blindspots people here tend to have regarding regulation. In particular that sometimes detrimental behaviors exist that are perversely incentivized rather than discouraged by the market despite being obviously worse for consumers. A lot of people here seem to conveniently forget that such things are even within the realm of possibility.
US officials and businessmen keep on repeating the same thing:
> The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards.
But this is wildly untrue. The EU isn't hand-picking individual organisations and fining them because they're American, they're fining them because they're in breach of existing legislation. The same legislation applies to local companies.
Ironically, it's the US who takes stances like the one they claim the EU is taken. E.g.: The US required that TikTok be sold, without actually proving that TikTok was in breach of any actual law.
But repeating the same claims gets those claims out into the media, and that's what people hear. So we see a dissonance between what the media says (and many people believe) and what's really happening.
Agreed with your first point. Regarding TikTok though the argument was never (AFAIK) that they were actively breaking the law but rather that their structure and ownership posed a threat to US interests. That's pretty reasonable and largely mirrors China's stance against the US.
If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations. They seem to prioritize free trade above all else.
The US is lying about tiktok, the only reason is to mirror China's strategy towards American app. After watching the tit-for-tat video of Veritasum[1] I agree with America's strategy of banning Chinese apps until China allows American apps. That being said, I wish the US was more transparent about why they're doing this instead of lying.
I'm guessing the reason why they're lying is that they don't want to scare ALL Chinese companies.
I find this so confusing. Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk are foreigners who are both demonstrably influencing American politics through media they control. What makes Tiktok different?
Well... Though I agree with you in principle, the DMA does target specific gatekeeper companies and the criteria for these were set conveniently to ensure no EU company is regulated by it. So I can see their point a little
My mistake. While Booking.com is HQ'd in Amsterdam, Booking Holdings is indeed a US company.
> There are zero European companies, including Spotify - the #1 music streaming marketplace in the world.
This still doesn't answer the actual question of whether the gatekeepers were selected because they are US companies, or because they are are Internet gatekeepers. I don't find it surprising that the US's legal and economic culture resulted in more conglomerate gatekeepers than other nations.
That's not really true. You can easily switch to Deezer, Apple Music, Tidal, Qobuz, YouTube Music, etc. You'll have access to just about the exact same library of music.
You can't just ignore YouTube, TikTok, Facebook Marketplace and still have access to the content they gatekeep.
thats only kinda right. The DMA does include booking.com as a gatekeeper, which is european. But most gatekeepers (except booking and tiktok) are US-based
There is no irony. The EU is targeting US companies. The US is targeting Chinese companies. The US is or soon will be targeting EU companies. China is targeting US companies. China will probably soon be targeting EU companies if they aren't already, which is probably already debatable. And this is not a complete list, it's not even a complete list of the highlights.
If they're doing it by legislation, well, the EU has been passing "legislation clearly designed for US companies to be in infringement of" for a while. Maybe you like that. Maybe it's a good thing; after all, the things they're passing laws about are basically just actions only US companies are capable of taking right now. Nevertheless it is clearly targeting. It's just targeting you like. The US has passed such legislation. China does it both with formal legislation and with de facto rules.
Free trade is a dead letter. Whether you like that or not is not very relevant to whether or not it is dead. It's dead. Maybe it'll swing back around in a few decades but right now even that is a distant prospect, we're not even done accelerating into the current merchantalist phase of the cycle, let alone decelerating, let alone heading back.
(Note "whataboutism" would be an inappropriate response to my point here; that's about "it's ok for us because they do it". My observation is not normative, merely descriptive... everyone is doing it, and they're doing it more rather than less right now.)
US corporations are too used to breaking laws as they see fit and getting away with a slap on the wrist, so being asked to follow the rules feels like an attack to them.
I think you make many good points. Slight tangent: Why isn't EU more concerned about TikTok? While it is very difficult to prove, various studies have demonstrated that TikTok pushes more content favoring the Chinese Government (CCP).
In my anecdotal experience of one, American platforms are way faster in pushing far-right content on me even though it has to be clear to the algorithm that I don't want such content.
That's called gaslighting, and it's a hostile act. Truth is the first casualty of war. If someone is trying to deceive you (or deceive others and ruin your reputation), they are actively exposing you to some kind of risk, usually for their own benefit, which is a hostile act. Recommend you act accordingly.
>So we see a dissonance between what the media says (and many people believe) and what's really happening.
This thing right here terrifies me. The entertainment-information media oligopoly has a tight grasp on public conversations. It feels like a hydra that can't be defeated.
It can be defeated by talking to people about things. If you are known to be an expert in topic X, and you are saying something different to what the media says about topic X (and which makes more sense), people (who know you and your reputation) are inclined to believe you over the media.
This only has a local impact, but global is made of local.
I do this as much as I can. Between chatrooms and local meets, I spend a significant portion of my time attempting to politely dispel misinformation.
It's exhausting, but it's worth it.
I want to organise with other people that do this, but I'm not sure how to do that. It feels like our efforts would be multiplied if we started to publish or otherwise spread information.
Ah, they said the T-word, presumably to invoke some political fire support from across the Atlantic. I wonder how that will go. Of course, this is not a tariff, for two reasons: firstly, it does not involve money (the UK's digital services tax does, but that's not this), and secondly, the same rules would apply to EU native competitors .. if there were any. It's what's knows as a "non tariff trade barrier". Of course those are all over the place, and many of them are there to protect consumer and public interests.
> The EU regulator also dropped Meta's Marketplace's designation as a DMA gatekeeper because the number of users fell below the threshold.
Now that's interesting. I think the threshold is 45 million? Falling EU userbase?
"the same rules would apply to EU maybe competitors... if there were any."
That can actually be an example of a tariff, though. Basically every country specializes in something, and imports things they're not good at making. For example: cheese, or luxury watches, or GPUs. If you have a special law that charges companies money only for the categories you import and you carve out exceptions for "small" (aka domestic) markets, a la the DMA, you have effectively created a tariff.
I'm a bit surprised usage was ever that high; that would imply that almost 10% of the population was using _Facebook Marketplace_!
I think I've looked at it maybe twice since it launched, to admire all the weird scams. Maybe it's gotten better since? It used to be sub-ebay levels of complete nonsense.
Remember that you're probably in a bubble. Marketplace was incredibly popular back in the days when I was at FB, and I'd have expected it to get more popular based on the people I see around me (kids stuff is all over it).
Maybe the gatekeeper thing is a reflection of less people in the EU using FB at all, rather than specifically Marketplace.
That bubble is the EU, which this law is about. I know a bunch of European countries have their own Ebay/Craigslist websites. Marketplace has never been even somewhat popular in my country.
Yeah fair. I guess I forget that Ireland is now the largest English speaking country in the EU, so I guess I'm in a bubble. I am still really surprised that Marketplace is no longer big enough to count as a gatekeeper.
> What surprises me is how much people on this site underestimate facebook.
It’s the classic disconnect between engineering and product management: When engineers don’t want a product and therefore conclude that nobody wants the product.
When I’ve brought up Facebook active user stats here in the past I got flooded with responses suggested Facebook was lying or manipulating their user counts to pump up the stock.
Yeah, I often see claims online that Facebook is dead, Facebook is just Boomers posting pictures of their grandkids, etc. Maybe it's a regional thing, because where I live, everyone's on Facebook. Most small businesses, organizations, and communities here use it as their primary (or only) online presence for promoting themselves and staying in contact with their customers/members. Marketplace has completely replaced the old newspaper classified ads. That's unfortunate since the search in Marketplace sucks, but it's happened.
My family uses its messenger for organizing things because everyone has it, even if some of us rarely use it except for that. If I wanted to draw attention to something locally, whether it was promoting a service or running for office, I'd be a fool not to use Facebook.
Part of the disconnect is that these days, a lot of the Facebook use is concentrated in places you don't necessarily see from the outside.
Like, fifteen years ago, if you happened upon the Facebook page of a random person, you'd usually see a handful of vacation pictures, a meme or three, some updates from their latest Clash of Cookie Farm Kitchen Dash session, and whatnot.
These days, all that stuff - if it's even still being posted - is likely siloed away to Friends-only posts. That random person might still be there, might still be logging in every day, but you don't see the Messenger group chats and the Marketplace offers/haggles.
Likewise for small businesses - a lot of the "look at this thing we're selling now, come check it out" posts now go to Instagram. They might still be auto-logging in, still responding to PMs on Facebook, still clicking a few news posts here and there, but that's just not visible on the outside, and creates the perception of Facebook the Ghost Town.
> "This isn't just about a fine; the Commission forcing us to change our business model effectively imposes a multi-billion-dollar tariff on Meta while requiring us to offer an inferior service."
Meta complaining about getting tariff'd is objectively hilarious.
> the Commission forcing us to change our business model
This is total, utter, complete 100% grade A organic nonsense.
I worked at FB (but the same is true of basically all action driven advertising systems). Only a tiny proportion of users ever click, but they are incredibly lucrative for online advertising platforms.
The whole subscription was a really transparent attempt to get people to accept the tracking and it's honestly profoundly depressing that this is what they're reduced to.
I don't understand meta's statement that this handicaps american businesses while allows European and Chinese companies to operate under different standards.
It's not completely unwarranted. According to the article, Facebook was fined for their model of asking for pay or accept tracking. Which is exactly what almost all publishers do, e.g. all big German newspapers. It's absolutely clear that this is against the law - they could show ads, but can't invade the users privacy for that, so no tracking ads - but they do it anyway and got away with it in various decisions. And now Facebook gets a huge fine for the same behaviour.
Which is good in a way, maybe it will lead to a behaviour correction also for the smaller publishers. But it's of course not an equal treatment.
Apple on the other hand completely deserves its fine, without a question. They got clear rules and did everything to circumvent them. The Apple's Core Technology Fee was obviously illegal. Don't know why they expected to get away with that, there wasn't even a minimal chance of that working. Idiots.
Big German newspapers do not need to comply under DMA.
The EU focusses, rightfully, on EU macro dynamics with these laws, not how smaller outlets work.
This is very much reasonable. When a platform is big, it has bigger impact, but also bigger budgets to hire legal help and bigger budgets to stay compliant.
This is well established in accounting where there exists different rules depending on size (in many jurisdictions)
What’s another example of different rules depending on size? “Content Moderation” I think? Anything outside the DMA? I think small companies get some exceptions for documentation requirements?
It is a derivative of what is called the "Risk Based Approach" in compliance, and is widely adopted.
As for companies and accounting you can look into the directive 2013/34/EU that established micro, small, and medium sized companies based on their size. These types of companies have different reporting requirements.
in my part of Europe there are tons: companies over a certain size might have different rules for layoffs, have to have union representatives, must pay for safety courses for the employees, must employ a certain percentage of people with disabilities...
In the US, some laws specifically exclude small companies. For example, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 requires 15 employees, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 requires 4 employees.
It also means that not all US companies have to comply, and that the ones that do are the most competitive companies in the market, making their claim that they have trouble competing moot.
I agree, except the DMA specifically only applies to companies over a specific size. I think if the German newspapers were at FB/Apple scale, in terms of number of users, then the DMA would apply (i.e. they would be designated gatekeepers or similar) and they could also be fined. Although I think pay for no ads is also a violation of GDPR maybe?
Exactly. While DMA does not apply, GDPR does. But it gets ignored and weakened by decision against the letter and the spirit of the law - which does not surprise if you realize how much power those legacy publishers hold. Not so FB, not here at least.
So it's not exactly the same regulation but pretty much the same situation. I'd also be pissed.
GDPR does not purport to outlaw targeted advertising. It just purports to require that the target consent.
In pretty much every other area of law in most of the world (including Europe) consent can be bought--the party requesting consent gives the consenter something in exchange for consent, and will not give that thing unless consent is given.
But under the rulings from some regulators that doesn't work for GDPR. Consent is apparently only considered to be freely given if withholding it would not result in any detriment such as not getting the same level of service or having to pay money for service.
If regulators want to outlaw targeted advertising it would be a lot better if they just did that, instead of making consent in GDPR work differently from how it has worked for pretty much everything else pretty much everywhere for centuries.
That's not entirely fair. The concept of duress exists and is always at odds with consent in a transactional setting. The issue is where to draw the boundary between "you freely chose to do business" and "you were coerced into accepting unfavorable terms".
I'm inclined to think that "pay or be tracked" is usually the former. The issue was never that I shouldn't have to pay but rather that I wasn't given the choice in the first place.
> When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.
Don't blame the regulators, it's pretty clear that "paying" with consent is a no-go from the text itself.
The measures apply by size, not by country of origin. It happens that the companies over the threshold are American. So their statement is basically untrue, but that's politics these days.
Probably also important to note, is that ByteDance and TikTok are also currently being investigated by the European Commission. Although for different reasons under the Digital Services Act - so it's not like they are targeting US companies specifically with the law.
Also the commission is known to fine European entities all the time for various reasons, one of the recent ones I can think of is Pierre Cardin and it's partners for restricting cross border European sales.
Spotify conveniently falls outside of the scope of this law when any artist would tell you it should absolutely be covered.
The DMA is gerrymandered to exclude domestic businesses. Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
> EU are basically enforcing market capitalism by disallowing monopolistic practices.
Users are free to just not buy iOS devices. Users are free to just not use Meta services.
There is no monopoly here. This is all much ado about nothing.
No real-world user is meaningfully harmed by the current state of Apple App Store/Meta Ads, but plenty will be harmed once spyware/piracy sideloading becomes common. Many small businesses will collapse due to ineffective advertisement (large businesses will love it though - it becomes a winner-take-all market).
> The DMA is gerrymandered to exclude domestic businesses.
Except Booking (~EU, based in NL~*) falls under the DMA, and ByteDance (China? I think) does as well. All the same restrictions fall on them too.
> Users are free to just not use Meta services.
True in theory, not so much in practice. I work for a company that deals directly with WhatsApp in NL, and I guarantee you for businesses it's a death knell to not have a WA Business presence. Even the local gemeente (aka city council) and other gov't establishments are on WhatsApp too. Recently more people are moving onto Signal and Telegram, but that remains a minority.
Don't even get me started on Asia, especially India/Indonesia, where even despite the existence of Line and similar apps everything is still* almost exclusively on WA. A bit different in East Asia where Line and other apps are more predominant (hardly relevant for the EU though).
Spotify doesn't fall under the DMA because it's not gatekeeping anything and it does have plenty of competition, many of which pay artists better and have basically equal selections. YT Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, Bandcamp and I'm sure dozens and dozens of others all exist and are used.
> ... but plenty will be harmed once spyware/piracy sideloading becomes common
Interesting how this evil sideloading boogeyman hasn't happened on Android.
> ... Many small businesses will collapse due to ineffective advertisement
The same small businesses that are forced into paying 30% to Apple/Google for simply existing on their app store?
> (large businesses will love it though - it becomes a winner-take-all market).
So, the gatekeepers as listed under the DMA? Y'know, the giants that literally hold all the keys and can dictate how the entire market should work based on their rules? The very same ones that have opaque ad-bidding systems that they control inside-and-out and can do anything they want to with?
[**] Seems I'm wrong there (See andsoitis' reply to my comment), but didn't want to edit out my original comment.
Regardless, calling it gerrymandering of local businesses is simply incorrect, and I can speak for at least myself that if we even had any tech companies that big (and I hope we never do), we'd expect them be subject to the exact same rules and laws.
Spotify feels like a slightly marginal case, and it wouldn't be surprising to see it added to the list. It clearly wasn't big enough a few years back when all this was being defined, but it's gotten quite a lot bigger since.
I'm curious, what is your preferred financial regime? EU are basically enforcing market capitalism by disallowing monopolistic practices. Do you find that wrong in general?
Perhaps you prefer an industro-fascist regime where businesses are not bound by any tailored laws? Pretty sure there would already be alternative iOS app stores under such a regime - government controls (IPR system, computer security laws) seem necessary to enable these sorts of tech monopolies.
500 million sounds like a lot but that is just a drop in the ocean for first world nation states.
The Netherlands has a yearly budget of 300 billion for example.
> Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
The EU's budget is massive, no shortfall is covered by these fines since to collect them it takes another massive legal battle, that's just bullshit being regurgitated on the internet (especially on this forum). If that was the case the EU would be issuing GDPR fines all over the place to cover shortfalls, it doesn't happen in reality.
> Spotify conveniently falls outside of the scope of this law when any artist would tell you it should absolutely be covered.
Spotify does not behave like the most similar category covered by the DMA: video sharing like YouTube. Spotify does not hold exclusive access to the content and the audience, YouTube Music, Apple Music, and other players have almost the same catalogue as Spotify has so users are free to move between those services without penalty. Now try moving from YouTube to a competitor, a completely different beast.
The DMA exists to counter an imbalance in the power these massive tech companies have in detriment to competition, it's quite a simple prerogative, Spotify doesn't hold at all the same power as YouTube has, or Google Search, or any other platform under the DMA.
A good start, but far from enough regarding the societal damage (anti-competitive, anti-user, psychological harm especially of minors, proliferation of radicalisation) they did.
The EU made a serious point that these are the first time they are issuing those fines as as such have capped them as a signal to show that they are serious but also that they aren’t taking the maximalist approach some in the US are accusing them of.
They can legally go for 10% of global revenue if I’m not mistaken as the top level of fines and both Apple and Meta would be wise to not find themselves as repeat offenders as a result.
Would looove to distribute an app without it having to be in the App Store, and not paying the App Store fee (direct download of signed binary). Happy to pay a yearly fee or fee per update to cover code review if it’s crucial. But 30% of revenue for doing bugger all… cmon, they’re squeezing the lemon a bit too hard.
Personally I wouldn’t install software unless it were from a really trusted person doing something extremely unique and useful that doesn’t have an alternative on the Apple Store (think UTM with JIT for iPad).
Please don’t take that as a negative comment but I suspect most people source their software from conveniently centralized repos whether it be App Store, Steam or even the main package manager on a Linux distribution.
But I'd still like to be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my iPhone, should I decide to based on my own criteria, without going through Apple or even a fucking "alternative app store" that is still Apple censored.
You mentioned linux package managers, these existing are proof enough that a 30% cut isn't required for ensuring the safety of what you install. In fact, I'd wager there is that much more dangerous garbage in the app store than in pacman's database.
As much as I think Apple's cut is unreasonable, I think all this shows is that people are making a lot more dangerous software for apple's larger less tech savvy userbase than for arch's.
I can install Jetbrains via most linux package managers, launch it, and pay money. I can install steam and pay for games. I can install sublime text and give em cash.
Arch linux doesn't try to take 30% of all the games I buy on steam, nor does it prevent steam from asking me for my credit card.
Apple reviews all apps to make sure they don't ask for your credit card, don't tell you where you can buy the same good online, and make sure that if you do sell anything, apple gets its 30% cut, even if it's a virtual store like steam. That's the reason you can't buy kindle books on iOS (even though you can buy apple books? Weird? Isn't that illegal anti-competitive behavior?)
It would absolutely not be reasonable for linux package managers to demand that I pay 30% more for all games on steam if I did "pacman -Sy steam" vs downloading steam from valve's website and figuring out how to get it working on arch-linux (taking the deb, extracting it with 'ar', and installing some dependencies)
The point is that it becomes your choice. For example some people might choose to use a different web browser instead of Safari on their Apple device so they can use some web apps fully and not have to install similar local apps at all.
> cmon, they’re squeezing the lemon a bit too hard
They got hooked on the lemon juice. Nobody at Apple making millions a year to write emails and sit in meetings wants to be out on the street for putting up their hand and saying "hey lets just take 10% and have a healthy ecosystem long term, which will let us continue to sell phones to people every year with a profit margin of $500".
Phil Schiller has actually made some comments about being less greedy, like possibly ratcheting down the 30% cut once the App Store started making serious revenue or not shaking down developers if they use external payment methods. Not that Schiller has actually made any changes at Apple to do any of the less greedy things.
> “You download the app and it doesn’t work, that’s not what we want on the store,” says Schiller. This, he says, is why Apple requires in-app purchases to offer the same purchasing functionality as they would have elsewhere.
PWAs offer support for push notifications [1], but apparently they are not as seamless as in native apps, especially on iOS.
If you've never heard of PWAs [2], they allow you to add native mobile app functionality to a mobile website, including the ability to install your website as though it were an app, and ability to cache resources for offline use. I haven't worked on app development for a while, but when I did several years ago, all that was required to turn a mobile website in to a PWA was a service worker file (a JS file to define resource caching rules), and a manifest.json file (essentially metadata used by the home screen icon, including title and icon image).
Apparently PWAs still aren't on par with native apps in terms of capability and UX. Nonetheless I hope PWAs become popular for their simplicity, and for being decoupled from platforms. It's a bit insane to me that native app development usually requires heavy platform specific IDEs (Android Studio, Xcode), both of which have steep learning curves, and after all that development effort, you only have an app that works on 1 platform. Building a basic mobile app shouldn't require anything more than HTML, JS and CSS, and it shouldn't be tied to any specific platform.
A little caveat of Web Bluetooth API is that it's like WebUSB and mostly available on Chrome. I don't think Chrome for iOS is using blink yet so you'll probably not have access to this API on iOS.
There isn’t a default on iOS, you’re prompted for each new app when it requests notification permissions. People have found that users hit no a lot more when the app prompts with no explanation than when it clearly explains what benefit it has to the user.
The barrier of entry for me is having to pay $99/year just to notarize and sign my macOS applications that me and maybe three other people use. Just a lot easier to link to instructions on how to bypass Gatekeeper or make them compile it themselves from source.
> The EU fines could stoke tensions with U.S President Donald Trump who has threatened to levy tariffs against countries that penalise U.S. companies.
Mark Zuckerberg, in his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, specifically noted this as his goal for falling in behind Trump. That Trump would be the big-stick man that would protect Meta and other cos from foreign interference. Where "interference" is anything restricting that American exceptionalism "do anything we want, however we want".
Only then Trump started a trade war with quite literally the entire world -- aside from, predictably, Russia -- and now he holds, as he likes to say, no cards. The EU and anyone else can do whatever they want and Zuck and co can cry about the millions they wasted trying to buy a protection racket.
Of course Meta could just withdrawn from the EU. I wish they would withdraw from Canada. Their garbage misinformation platform is a massive net negative for humanity and has offered nothing but harm for the planet.
Most Canadian small businesses rely on Meta to get customers.
If you think these companies don't add value, you are totally oblivious to the millions of small businesses that rely on these platforms to reach customers and niche audiences around the world.
I've seen too much from the last few years (covid, mostly, but other things) to take much stock in what people are commonly referring to as misinformation
But yeah, I don't like what they do competition wise (Whatsapp seems like clear antitrust) and their products are badly designed (have more things shoved into your feed that you're not following!)
What is ugly or uncivil about noting someone's biases? The "your small businesses would fail without Meta" line is from the official lobbyist arm of Meta, and it's usually a pretty good tell that someone is a Meta employee and is thus likely to have a very rose coloured, idealized version of the org.
Full disclosure: I worked at Facebook from 2013 to 2018, almost entirely on ads.
Like, you may not want to hear this, but lots of SMBs get value from targeted ads, and this has lead to lots and lots of successful businesses.
I encourage my wife to use these kinds of ads (mostly on TikTok and IG these days) for her business, and they work reasonably well.
That's not to say that Facebook hasn't had a bunch of bad impacts on the world (Myanmar and other poorer countries come to mind), but the OP's point is a good one, and lots of people who don't work at Meta believe this.
Ultimately, Facebook provide a service that it appears lots of people like (I do use Whatsapp but not really the rest of them) and it's not up to you to determine whether or not they've been good or bad for society.
As I keep bringing up in these discussions, should we ban radios for their role in the Rwandan genocide?
Changing forms of communication are always going to cause societal changes, and we're currently living through the biggest one since the invention of the printing press.
I'm not sure one can blame just one company for all of this, and honestly if you had to pick one I'd probably pick Google for making it profitable to write garbage and monetise through ads (but as I said, the Internet and computer mediated communication are a huge change and it's basically impossible to say what actually drove the changes).
What do you achieve with that? Isn't it better to argue against the points made rather than argue against the person making them? Anybody could have made the same points.
I've worked at most FAANG companies, including Google, Apple, and Meta in the past (not currently).
In my experience working at these companies and diving into the reported incidents/issues (e.g. Batterygate, Myanmar, Cambridge Analytica), I have found that comments like yours present an overly reductive worldview. You are likely entirely informed by ragebait news articles that grossly misrepresent the issues as opposed to a nuanced understanding of (1) the widely reported incidents, and (2) the services these companies provide and those that rely on them to make a living.
No, it would not be replaced "in an instant" with other options, and any other options would quickly evolve into the same state as FB/IG today unless you make targeted ads illegal (which - again - would collapse millions of small businesses and centralize power for wealthy large businesses).
My experience using Facebook is that every third post is an advertisement, often for something I can't even buy (common one: a tax adviser specialising in US citizens living in the UK, when I'm British and live in Germany), or are not gender appropriate (they've shown me ads both for boob surgery and for dick pills).
Another third are "recommendations" for groups that are often not merely of zero interest, but geographically irrelevant — a page for a team I've never heard of in a sport I don't follow in a state I've never even visited, that kind of thing.
The remaining third are mostly from just one person, because everyone else I know seems to feel much the same way about the website and have mostly stopped posting content there.
My actual, literal, spam folder is less irrelevant than what Facebook shows me on the default feed.
> No, it would not be replaced "in an instant" with other options, and any other options would quickly evolve into the same state as FB/IG today unless you make targeted ads illegal (which - again - would collapse millions of small businesses and centralize power for wealthy large businesses).
1) It's already centralised, that's the problem.
2) We managed OK before the internet enabled targeted ads. Back then, local newspapers were a thing (I still get them around here), and you could put an ad for your barber shop or dance hall in that. Local forums that you can find on a search engine are still able to serve local ads, without targeting or profiling users. Biggest problem with that is that spam was already a problem 20 years ago (personal experience trying to host a phpBB forum), and now we've got LLMs that make it increasingly difficult to even know if you're talking to a fellow human let alone a fellow resident of ${local area} or member of ${specific interest group}.
> We managed OK before the internet enabled targeted ads. Back then, local newspapers were a thing (I still get them around here), and you could put an ad for your barber shop or dance hall in that
To be fair, we are in a wholly different world today. The small business landscape has changed dramatically - most of them are online. I get instagram ads for my really niche hobbies, and I don't mind.
There is no chance of that business surviving based off of local newspaper ads alone - the likelihood of finding a viable customer base in your town is low. Generalized ads would be totally unaffordable to reach widely enough to cover your viable target customer base, which is sparse and global. Search based ads don't work because people don't even know this exists until they see it.
But good ad targeting enables instant global reach to the specific people that are likely to be interested in what you're selling. There may only be 1k-10k people globally interested in buying $500 titanium miniature puzzles, but if you can reach them, that's enough for your small business to survive.
Lots of small businesses rely on this. I'm not sure about "millions" but on the order of 100k seems likely, if you assume there's one interesting niche business for every 80k people.
I see what you mean - but I am not sure it would work for the "you don't know what you don't know" cases, or cases where the user isn't invested enough to follow the relevant forum.
I personally wasn't interested in miniature titanium puzzles until I saw the ad - I'm not interested in puzzles in general, so I wouldn't have found it via a puzzle forum.
The same pattern can be seen in my other hobbies (tritium collecting, mokume and titanium/zirconium Damascus items, unique independent watches, flashlight collecting, rocks).
I'm involved enough to buy something from an ad while scrolling through my friends' timelines or reels, but certainly not enough to frequent a forum on these topics. So I am not sure forums suffice.
How do you expect small businesses to acquire customers? Spending tens of millions of dollars competing in generalized ad space to reach the same audience they can reach today with $1000?
Most small businesses that exist today would become nonviable overnight, and that is a huge chunk of the economy. Sure, you can say "they shouldn't have the right to exist" because they use targeted ads, but I have yet to hear a solid argument for why such ads are an infringement on our fundamental rights such that the whole SMB segment of the economy is worth destroying.
A tech bro true believer comes to the rescue to set us all straight. Of course the world would fall apart if Thanos snapped his fingers and disappeared Meta.
Thinking about I might watch that movie, a Thanos redemption arc maybe...
>You are likely entirely informed by ragebait news articles
Sure. Do you think I haven't experienced every aspect of Meta properties? Instagram reels, for instance, is a racist hellhole full of the most vile content and snuff videos. It seems to have zero moderation, profiting off of the worst of humanity[1]. Facebook actively runs obvious scam ads for scam businesses and does absolutely nothing if you report it.
Meta at this point is basically a criminal operation.
And it's hilarious how much fear mongering there was about Tiktok (which is a positively benign platform compared to Meta's garbage platforms). I recently uninstalled Instagram after it fed me an endless stream of 51st state propaganda, despite the fact that I Not Interested/Blocked every single occurrence (this was around the time that Instagram turned up the "snuff" dial so millions were getting feeds full of violent deaths[2], which is a mechanism that immediately should subject Meta to government inquiries). Meta properties should be banned everywhere outside the US purely based upon the fact that they're enemy propaganda at this point.
>and any other options would quickly evolve into the same state as FB/IG today
No, they wouldn't. Like literally somehow loads of other sites manage to not be the cesspools of garbage that Meta properties are. This is by design. Here in Canada, engagement on Facebook has dropped to negligible levels outside of the 51st state/conspiratorial sorts. Reddit is an enlightened intellectual promised land compared to the shithole that Meta properties all are.
>which - again - would collapse your small businesses
This is such nonsense. The only businesses that are reliant upon Meta are largely scammy new-age bullshit. And your rhetoric is like saying that if McDonalds closed millions would go hungry because surely there is no way for people to eat otherwise.
And again you've tried to pull other companies in. Google offers enormous value to the world. They are largely a responsible company. Apple offers value. Netflix offers value. Microsoft offers value.
META...blinked out of existence and the world would be much better. Meta is the world's digital Purdue Pharma.
[1] And to be clear, I'm a free speech person. That fringe sites exist where people ply this content is fine. That a major corporation seems to build a business around it, however, monetizing nuts and mental illness and racism and conspiracies and violence, is absolutely disgusting, and I cannot comprehend how someone could work at Meta without feel shame every moment of every day.
Reddit can be astroturfed to hell, I don't trust it. Mods are shared across subreddits, they ban you for unjustified reasons, as does the site in general
It's a statement of fact. Meta profits off the worst of society. It is a heinous company.
If you find my comment so reprehensible, feel free to downvote, flag, etc. The crocodile-tear moralization comes across as concern trolling, and it's just a waste of bits.
>What is your end goal here?
You strangely keep editing this. I stated my thoughts. People are free to disagree. If it's so distressing to you I suggest you look inwards as to why that is.
> Of course Meta could just withdrawn from the EU.
I mean, probably not without being sued by their shareholders. As a public company, you cannot simply abandon 40bn revenue/year because you feel aggrieved.
But yeah, the "you'd better be nice to us, EC, or Trump might be angry" tactic is kinda shot at this point.
> I mean, probably not without being sued by their shareholders. As a public company, you cannot simply abandon 40bn revenue/year because you feel aggrieved.
Someone here hazarded the hypothesis that Trump's tariffs are a stick aimed not towards other countries, but towards American corporations, who have to pledge fealty (and resources) to Trump in exchange for relief. I think it makes a lot of sense, if any of this is rational, which I'm not entirely sold on.
It's always funny when shit happens and everyone jumps over themselves to figure out what "5D chess" the people in charge are playing. There's never any chess. They are just incompetent.
Look at 47's truth social some time. In between the posts 'destroying' liberals and lionising the worst actors in his party, he posts up a disturbing amount of 'settlements' with Law Firms that previously displeased him.
They were basically forced at gunpoint to make deals to provide pro bono services to the Trump administration, in return for regulators dropping investigations into their diversity practices.
The firms - including Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Allen Overy Shearman Sterling, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft – are among the most prestigious and recognized firms in the US.
Cadwalader is the former firm of Todd Blanche, who resigned his partnership there to represent Trump in criminal cases when the firm would not take on Trump as a client. Blanche is now the deputy attorney general – the number two official at the Department of Justice.
Overall the MAGA cabinet has now secured more than $900m in pro bono pledges from law firms threatened with either executive orders or investigations from the equal opportunity commission. How this isn't seen as a straight up RICO case or old-fashioned criminal shakedown is beyond me.
It would be really cool if the EU managed to make a consumer tech industry on their own rather than rent-seeking from US tech via protectionist, gerrymandered laws.
It is absurd that websites are legally required to provide free services to EU users. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a "pay or get targeted ads" option - you are free to simply not use the site.
Same goes for iOS devices and the App Store. If you want to sideload, just get an Android device. There is no monopoly here.
There's nothing special about US software engineering vs. software engineering made elsewhere from a purely technical and know-how point of view.
The key difference is availability of capital and appetite for risk that make US exceptional by enabling a speed of scaling and execution not possible anywhere else (well, other than China).
If US companies that can't be bothered to follow EU laws leave the +500M people market that is the EU, I'm positive some other equally competent alternative (local or otherwise) would appear sooner or later to fill in the gap.
Perhaps the same regulations that US companies keep running afoul of are the regulations that prevent European investors from putting money behind European startup competitors.
The EU has some extremely strong consumer protection laws, which is excellent for consumers, but it comes with downsides too.
> Perhaps the same regulations that US companies keep running afoul of are the regulations that prevent European investors from putting money behind European startup competitors.
Nah, it's all the capital which gets invested into the US caused by the dollar's role in international payments that drives the US exceptionalism is tech.
Like, 65% of world equity value relates to 4% of the world population. That's not sustainable long-term, and if something cannot go on forever, then one day it will stop (and we might be seeing that start to happen now).
Don't get me wrong, the US market has a bunch of advantages (large, one language, standard regulation) but it's mostly all the capital sloshing around that drives the outperformance of the US tech companies.
> If you want to sideload, just get an Android device. There is no monopoly here.
The Digital Markets Act is not about a user's right to sideload. It's about 100s of thousands of businesses' right to reach billions of users without Apple in the middle. That's why it's called the Digital Markets Act, not the Phone User Rights Act
This word doesn't simply mean 'I don't like this', you know.
Facebook is under no obligation to operate in Europe. Of course, they make about 40 billion revenue in Europe annually, so they will be inclined to want to stay in Europe. And they can do this! They just have to follow the rules.
I'll be generous and assume you're being disingenuous by accident: This isn't about the ads, it's about the tracking. Meta is free to put ads wherever it wants, but it's not free to track people who don't want to be tracked.
In the end, a population has the right to govern itself how it wants. There's absolutely NOTHING wrong with that - Meta is free to simply not operate in the EU.
Why shouldn't you allowed to track people across your own services if users consent? If they don't consent, they are free to simply not use your services. Problem solved.
There is no actual need for this law. No rights are being infringed on. Just don't use the website.
Because that's how we like it, and that's the end of it. The people of the EU have said that these are the rules for doing business there, and saying "I should be able to murder people in my own house, if you don't want to be murdered, just don't come here, there's no need for anti-murdering laws" is rather irrelevant.
> saying "I should be able to murder people in my own house, if you don't want to be murdered, just don't come here, there's no need for anti-murdering laws"
Conversely, you can justify any authoritarian unjust law because "that's how we like it."
"Deporting brown people without due process? That's how we like it, who are you to complain? You're free to not work with the US, but we know you will!"
Obviously a nuanced and meaningful conversation goes much deeper than "that's how we like it." Why is it such an infringement on user rights to not be allowed to use a website if they don't follow the owner's terms of use? That is unaddressed.
This logic works just the same applied to Meta, without the requiring the expectation that Meta should be able to operate without following the law.
Why shouldn't Meta be forbidden to track people? It's the law. If they don't want to follow the applicable law in the jurisdiction they operate in they can cease their operations there.
Blaming Europe for "rent-seeking" when enforcing basic consumer protections rules on those massive foreign-propaganda disinformation and wealth extraction engines really takes the cake. Fuck Meta, if it was up to me Facebook, Instagram and X would have been long gone from European soil. We gain nothing from them.
They keep doing that to try to paint this as a loss for users. Users have much to win with this, as it will give some real competition to the Apple ecosystem, and potentially saving users money. So it's only natural Apple will pull all the cards like saying it threatens users privacy.
They called it on themselves. Were so greedy with access to unlimited capital, bought everything out or undercut with free. And now there are no EU competitors left to lobby for more favorable regulations.
The EU is using populist claims to introduce laws with ideological bias (big corp bad, America bad, America corp super bad). Everyone knows the digital act was never meant to be a fair set of rules, it was introduced to punish US companies at will.
At the same time, most governments, public offices, agencies and businesses in Europe would not be able to operate normally without access to American software.
The problem is that it is way easier to (over)regulate and tax, than to create a strong environment for business and innovation to thrive, in order to grow your own tech giants.
Can't deny that some EU politicians (mostly conservative ones, surprise, surprise) have a hidden agenda behind it.
The statement that gov & businesses in Europe would not be able to operate normally without American software is easy to disprove. Just look at how easy the Chinese or the Russians could shed or avoid their dependency on crappy Microsoft or expensive US cloud providers. The problem is just that many European politicians are so technically inept they believe it themselves.
I don't see how your comment is adding value to the discussion besides claiming emotionality and an absurd reference to FOX news, which implies that my opinions are not welcome here and I should go elsewhere with them.
My post is my opinion, offering an entry point for a discussion to those who might have a different opinion from mine.
The opinion is so detached from reality that it’s not going to result in a useful discussion.
There’s nothing about America in the consumer protection laws. It doesn’t matter if the service provider is a corporation or a non profit.
You can have any opinion you want but if you don’t ensure the quality of it, people will call it out for what it is.
In some circles you can defend lack of intellectual rigor with „any opinion is valid” and „you just don’t like my politics”, but that’s useful for electoral politics, not for intellectual inquiry.
> The opinion is so detached from reality that it’s not going to result in a useful discussion.
Maybe you should try.
> There’s nothing about America in the consumer protection laws. It doesn’t matter if the service provider is a corporation or a non profit.
Thierry Breton and his "the sheriff is in town".
Jean-Noël Barrot: "Apply with the Greatest Firmness"
Axel Voss, German MEP, called for the EU to use the DSA against (what he calls) fake news and platform owners like Elon Musk interfering in elections. This explicitly links the DSA to regulating US tech companies (particularly X).
Pedro Sánchez (Spanish Prime Minister) proposed using the DSA to regulate social media, fight bots, fake profiles, and go after tech barons undermining democracy - US platforms, of course.
You may agree or disagree with my views being right or wrong, but it is clear that the leitmotif seems to be EU politics vs US big tech here.
When it comes to election interference it’s more like EU vs Russia. Who owns the platforms is secondary, it’s not like TikTok should be allowed to do election interference because it isn’t American.
You’ll learn in the course of your future experience that not every discussion will introduce a new perspective into your life. And you usually can tell very early when that’s the case.
Are you saying that if a business (or individual) wants to pay the lowest tax possible (legally, that is) it should be a reason for more taxation? Is that what taxation is about, revenge?
The real problem was that Silicon Valley was flooded with capital and bought out all competitors. Or undercut with free. Or all kinds of other Microsoftlike practices. So nobody was left in the EU to advocate for better rules.
That's just a US propaganda myth people can't stop parroting.
The SV ecosystem is definitely better funded, but there is no lack of digital start-ups in the EU.
Consider what happened to Nokia. The first business blunder caused it to be sold to US and gutted. Now if someone else wants to make smartphones in EU, has to start from scratch. But if that happens to US company, everything(at least the IP) stays in the US.
Nokia is a strange story. I remember when it happened, and absolutely everybody knew it would kill the company to sell it to Microsoft. So of course the leaders and owners of Nokia knew the same thing. My guess is that they decided that they couldn't compete with the iPhone and decided to cash out what they could. Maybe Microsoft could help them with shuttling money to offshore accounts or some other under the table services? Nokia was publicly traded, so it could have been a great robbing of small time investors. But did Microsoft really get anything out of the deal that was worth the price?
I had the Nokia N9 at the time, which was years ahead of its time and one of the most well designed smartphones so far, both in hardware and especially in software. Modern iOS and Android still look dated in comparison.
> Under the DMA, app developers distributing their apps via Apple's App Store should be able to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative offers outside the App Store, steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases.
To me, this is the most easily agreeable part of what the EU has been after. It is unfair that Apple restricts Netflix from telling it's users that they can sign up and pay for Netlifx on their own website. It's unfair that Netflix can't even tell its users the rules that Apple enforces on them.
It's telling that Gruber is pretty staunchly against EU/DMA interferance in Apple, and broadly thinks they're wrong. But this is the one thing he agrees on
> If Apple wants to insist on a cut of in-app purchased subscription revenue, that’s their prerogative. What gets me, though, are the rules that prevent apps that eschew in-app purchases from telling users in plain language how to actually pay. Not only is Netflix not allowed to link to their website, they can’t even tell the user they need to go to netflix.com to sign up
https://daringfireball.net/2019/01/netflix_itunes_billing
https://daringfireball.net/2020/07/parsing_cooks_opening_sta...
(I think Apple now has their 'reader app' carveout for apps like Netflix, but it's still pretty obtuse and inconsistent)
Also, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
> The Commission takes the preliminary view that Apple failed to comply with this obligation [to allow third party app stores] in view of the conditions it imposes on app (and app store) developers. Developers wanting to use alternative app distribution channels on iOS are disincentivised from doing so as this requires them to opt for business terms which include a new fee (Apple's Core Technology Fee). Apple also introduced overly strict eligibility requirements, hampering developers' ability to distribute their apps through alternative channels. Finally, Apple makes it overly burdensome and confusing for end users to install apps when using such alternative app distribution channels.
This is great to hear. It sounds like they've just found Apple non-compliant in making alternate app stores as discouraging for both developers and user as possible. I guess it'll take another 12 months for any fines or changes from Apple.
The two companies have two months to comply, or there will be daily fines.
I don't think so - they’ve only been fined for the in-app anti-steering provisions.
For the second App Marketplace issue, I think that’s just a preliminary finding and is going to take longer to work out
> Apple now has the possibility to exercise its rights of defence by examining the documents in the Commission's investigation file and by responding to the preliminary findings
Hm, maybe, I'm just going by what the article says:
> The companies have two months to comply with the orders or risk daily fines.
Maybe they got it wrong, though.
>the most easily agreeable part of what the EU has been after
It's also probably the most dangerous for Apple. It creates a cash incentive to push people outside of Apple's walled garden and show them what's outside.
I really really hope Apple gets its act together, they are the greatest "the user experience comes first" company and they actually have great hard tech but they show signs of rent seeking behavior which can destroy them.
If Apple just play nice with EU, open up and focus on bringing the greatest experience possible they will keep winning. If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.
The Apple's AI blunder is mostly a blunder only because they insist to do it all by themselves so to have higher margins on the services revenues. IMHO those blunders will be more damaging as the Americans no longer have the higher moral grounds than Koreans or Chinese.
I hope Apple is treading carefully.
I would imagine that getting the user out of the in-app purchase payment screen and attempt to redirect them at the website for payment, have them figure out how to enter credit card details etc would result in a drastically decreased conversion rate though.
So it should! Then Apple's App Store and IAP could compete on its own merits, rather than restricting competition from existing at all.
Imagine a major streaming service: Subscription through Apple 30USD/Month or 25USD/Month if you do it through this one click fintech app.
The fintech app can even pay the streaming service for every customer they bring.
So for the users who already have the fintech app its a no-brainer, click once and get a free coffee each month. For those who don't have the app already it can push them to create an account as they see it on every app as a cheaper alternative. In Europe at least, even traditional banks are able to create a new customer account through a few steps in the in the app. It's usually just about entering your name, taking a photo of your ID and then scanning your face by looking left and right on the camera. You can have a grace period to add the funds for the subscription.
Banks already pay a lot of money for new customers, its pretty common in some places to offer interest-free loans or give cashbacks when you create a bank account through the app. They can partner with those services to offer months of free use or upgrades and then suddenly the value for the trouble of a few click and a scan goes up substantially.
> If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.
But what alternative? There is no European smartphone OS. Windows and Steam OS and XBox are US-american, too.
I suppose Linux, Playstation, and Nintendo, then?
The alternatives are Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo and others. Already the dominant brands in Europe. It doesn't have to be European, it has to be good and those are pretty good at much cheaper prices. They also offer premium models that Apple doesn't have a match.
People pay a lot extra for the feelings the brand invokes in them. Tesla was like that when it was about the values it used to represent, right after Musk dropped those values they had to start pricing their vehicles based on the specs to compete with similarly specced alternatives.
If Apple goes into fight with EU and becomes the "anti-european tech giant" they will have to start selling 300 euro iPhones.
American brands should tread carefully: while America is willing to ban their (cheaper, sometimes better) competitors, Europe is much less willing to — especially now as America itself has taken a much more bullying tone towards its allies.
There is android. Works pretty well in China without any google services.
Wouldn't be sad about a Linux smartphone.
The money comes first (:
> It's telling that Gruber is pretty staunchly against EU/DMA interferance in Apple, and broadly thinks they're wrong. But this is the one thing he agree on
I’ve stopped seeing Gruber as any sort of authority on Apple for a while now. He’s just a single guy with an opinion like everyone else, and it’s, more times than not, clearly biased in favor of Apple.
Some of his analysis of objective data is informative, but when he gets into subjective material, I tune out. I don’t really care any more about what he says than most others sharing their opinion on the internet — it’s just one more data point to consider collectively alongside everyone else’s.
I agree with your overall comment, but I think this is basically what OP was getting at: it's not surprising that Gruber is against EU/DMA interference, yet even he has issues with this particular point.
Aren't Americans always going on about free speech?
Technically, the first amendment applies only to state actors, not private entities. See Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, Hudgens v. NLRB, and many other cases that upheld this interpretation. Private companies like Apple can restrict free speech on their platforms legally (at least as far as the first amendment is concerned).
That said, I believe in the principle of free speech, especially as envisioned by Tim Berners Lee for the Web. I wish more Americans could adhere to those principles even when the speech is not to their taste. Certainly feels like a lot of cultural backsliding happening.
As an American who thinks free speech is one of the most important rights we have, I wish the answer to your question would be a collective "yes" but unfortunately it is not.
In America free speech is always limited to what "I find acceptable". There's an infinite number of things that lots of Americans will find unacceptable. Swearing is beeped/censored everywhere (even on youtube), songs release "explicit" and "clean" versions, nipples are blurred on TV, some words you can't say even in an educational or karaoke setting (N-word, R-word, etc.)
If you extend "speech" to "any kind of action an individual or company can do", then no. There's plenty of laws regulations that restrict what you can do in USA.
There is also the freedom to engage in a contact.
The freedom of speech isn't restricted, apple just isn't providing a platform to speak on.
This is an anti trust issue balance against two parties ability to be bound by contract.
Every American is pro free speech for the kind of speech they like.
Just never in a logically consistent manner.
Sure it is. Lots of us also go on about private property rights and freedom of association. Apple is restricting the behavior of entities doing business through them on a platform they own. The logic is that you remain free to speak - elsewhere. Meanwhile Apple remains free not to do business with you if you can't or won't accept their terms.
(Well really the legal argument is that Apple isn't the government and so the first amendment doesn't bind their policies but there's an ideological aspect in addition to the legal one.)
The issue missed by such an analysis is the outsized impact the megacorp has. Without strong competition (ie not a duopoly or even an oligopoly) regulation is required to protect consumers against practices that otherwise would be financially discouraged.
There are also a few other blindspots people here tend to have regarding regulation. In particular that sometimes detrimental behaviors exist that are perversely incentivized rather than discouraged by the market despite being obviously worse for consumers. A lot of people here seem to conveniently forget that such things are even within the realm of possibility.
and usually in a context where the concept they are thinking of (the constitution) doesn't apply (anywhere that isn't the government)
US officials and businessmen keep on repeating the same thing:
> The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards.
But this is wildly untrue. The EU isn't hand-picking individual organisations and fining them because they're American, they're fining them because they're in breach of existing legislation. The same legislation applies to local companies.
Ironically, it's the US who takes stances like the one they claim the EU is taken. E.g.: The US required that TikTok be sold, without actually proving that TikTok was in breach of any actual law.
But repeating the same claims gets those claims out into the media, and that's what people hear. So we see a dissonance between what the media says (and many people believe) and what's really happening.
Agreed with your first point. Regarding TikTok though the argument was never (AFAIK) that they were actively breaking the law but rather that their structure and ownership posed a threat to US interests. That's pretty reasonable and largely mirrors China's stance against the US.
If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations. They seem to prioritize free trade above all else.
The US is lying about tiktok, the only reason is to mirror China's strategy towards American app. After watching the tit-for-tat video of Veritasum[1] I agree with America's strategy of banning Chinese apps until China allows American apps. That being said, I wish the US was more transparent about why they're doing this instead of lying.
I'm guessing the reason why they're lying is that they don't want to scare ALL Chinese companies.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
I find this so confusing. Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk are foreigners who are both demonstrably influencing American politics through media they control. What makes Tiktok different?
Rupert Murdoch has exclusively been a US citizen for 40 years.
But really, what makes Tiktok different is China.
What makes Tiktok different is the GenZ were talking about Palestine on it, and the US and Israel couldn't allow that to happen.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-tiktok-ban-linked-isra...
Well... Though I agree with you in principle, the DMA does target specific gatekeeper companies and the criteria for these were set conveniently to ensure no EU company is regulated by it. So I can see their point a little
Isn't the question whether they were set because they were US companies, or because they are dominant gatekeepers on the Internet?
5/7 designated gatekeepers are US companies: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
I thought Booking Holdings Inc was also American.
There are zero European companies, including Spotify - the #1 music streaming marketplace in the world.
My mistake. While Booking.com is HQ'd in Amsterdam, Booking Holdings is indeed a US company.
> There are zero European companies, including Spotify - the #1 music streaming marketplace in the world.
This still doesn't answer the actual question of whether the gatekeepers were selected because they are US companies, or because they are are Internet gatekeepers. I don't find it surprising that the US's legal and economic culture resulted in more conglomerate gatekeepers than other nations.
What exactly does Spotify gatekeep though?
They're a gatekeeper in the same way YouTube or TikTok is.
They control access of businesses, in this case music labels, to the final customer.
That's not really true. You can easily switch to Deezer, Apple Music, Tidal, Qobuz, YouTube Music, etc. You'll have access to just about the exact same library of music.
You can't just ignore YouTube, TikTok, Facebook Marketplace and still have access to the content they gatekeep.
thats only kinda right. The DMA does include booking.com as a gatekeeper, which is european. But most gatekeepers (except booking and tiktok) are US-based
Booking.com was European, is not any more. It is now a subsidiary of Booking Holding (formerly Priceline), based in Connecticut.
Booking Holdings is American. They bought booking.com in 2005.
There is no irony. The EU is targeting US companies. The US is targeting Chinese companies. The US is or soon will be targeting EU companies. China is targeting US companies. China will probably soon be targeting EU companies if they aren't already, which is probably already debatable. And this is not a complete list, it's not even a complete list of the highlights.
If they're doing it by legislation, well, the EU has been passing "legislation clearly designed for US companies to be in infringement of" for a while. Maybe you like that. Maybe it's a good thing; after all, the things they're passing laws about are basically just actions only US companies are capable of taking right now. Nevertheless it is clearly targeting. It's just targeting you like. The US has passed such legislation. China does it both with formal legislation and with de facto rules.
Free trade is a dead letter. Whether you like that or not is not very relevant to whether or not it is dead. It's dead. Maybe it'll swing back around in a few decades but right now even that is a distant prospect, we're not even done accelerating into the current merchantalist phase of the cycle, let alone decelerating, let alone heading back.
(Note "whataboutism" would be an inappropriate response to my point here; that's about "it's ok for us because they do it". My observation is not normative, merely descriptive... everyone is doing it, and they're doing it more rather than less right now.)
US corporations are too used to breaking laws as they see fit and getting away with a slap on the wrist, so being asked to follow the rules feels like an attack to them.
I think you make many good points. Slight tangent: Why isn't EU more concerned about TikTok? While it is very difficult to prove, various studies have demonstrated that TikTok pushes more content favoring the Chinese Government (CCP).
In my anecdotal experience of one, American platforms are way faster in pushing far-right content on me even though it has to be clear to the algorithm that I don't want such content.
TikTok never does that.
> TikTok pushes more content favoring the Chinese Government (CCP).
Does that violate EU law? (Serious question, I really don't know)
no, and as far I know it doesn't violate any US law either. the thing against tiktok is not based on law, but based on suspicions.
Actually, the problem the US had with Tiktok that was it did not censor people from talking about Palestine
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-tiktok-ban-linked-isra...
That's called gaslighting, and it's a hostile act. Truth is the first casualty of war. If someone is trying to deceive you (or deceive others and ruin your reputation), they are actively exposing you to some kind of risk, usually for their own benefit, which is a hostile act. Recommend you act accordingly.
>So we see a dissonance between what the media says (and many people believe) and what's really happening.
This thing right here terrifies me. The entertainment-information media oligopoly has a tight grasp on public conversations. It feels like a hydra that can't be defeated.
It can be defeated by talking to people about things. If you are known to be an expert in topic X, and you are saying something different to what the media says about topic X (and which makes more sense), people (who know you and your reputation) are inclined to believe you over the media.
This only has a local impact, but global is made of local.
I do this as much as I can. Between chatrooms and local meets, I spend a significant portion of my time attempting to politely dispel misinformation.
It's exhausting, but it's worth it.
I want to organise with other people that do this, but I'm not sure how to do that. It feels like our efforts would be multiplied if we started to publish or otherwise spread information.
Ah, they said the T-word, presumably to invoke some political fire support from across the Atlantic. I wonder how that will go. Of course, this is not a tariff, for two reasons: firstly, it does not involve money (the UK's digital services tax does, but that's not this), and secondly, the same rules would apply to EU native competitors .. if there were any. It's what's knows as a "non tariff trade barrier". Of course those are all over the place, and many of them are there to protect consumer and public interests.
> The EU regulator also dropped Meta's Marketplace's designation as a DMA gatekeeper because the number of users fell below the threshold.
Now that's interesting. I think the threshold is 45 million? Falling EU userbase?
"the same rules would apply to EU maybe competitors... if there were any."
That can actually be an example of a tariff, though. Basically every country specializes in something, and imports things they're not good at making. For example: cheese, or luxury watches, or GPUs. If you have a special law that charges companies money only for the categories you import and you carve out exceptions for "small" (aka domestic) markets, a la the DMA, you have effectively created a tariff.
> the same rules would apply to EU native competitors .. if there were any.
By this same logic, I guess we can say that the EU isn't trying to build a trade barrier favoring local competitors. So, while, as you say,
> It's what's knows as a "non tariff trade barrier".
...It's also not that, since the goal isn't prevent them from competing equally in the market, where they have no competition.
I wonder if eBay's free listings is taking marketshare back?
I'm a bit surprised usage was ever that high; that would imply that almost 10% of the population was using _Facebook Marketplace_!
I think I've looked at it maybe twice since it launched, to admire all the weird scams. Maybe it's gotten better since? It used to be sub-ebay levels of complete nonsense.
Remember that you're probably in a bubble. Marketplace was incredibly popular back in the days when I was at FB, and I'd have expected it to get more popular based on the people I see around me (kids stuff is all over it).
Maybe the gatekeeper thing is a reflection of less people in the EU using FB at all, rather than specifically Marketplace.
That bubble is the EU, which this law is about. I know a bunch of European countries have their own Ebay/Craigslist websites. Marketplace has never been even somewhat popular in my country.
Yeah fair. I guess I forget that Ireland is now the largest English speaking country in the EU, so I guess I'm in a bubble. I am still really surprised that Marketplace is no longer big enough to count as a gatekeeper.
Facebook Marketplace is extremely popular depending on the city you’re in.
It has taken the place of Craigslist for younger generations.
What surprises me is how much people on this site underestimate facebook.
Facebook literally is the internet for millions of people.
Facebook marketplace is far larger than craigslist and ebay combined, even if you take both of those at their respective peaks.
The open web might seem huge, but it's actually dwarfed in size by Facebook.
> What surprises me is how much people on this site underestimate facebook.
It’s the classic disconnect between engineering and product management: When engineers don’t want a product and therefore conclude that nobody wants the product.
When I’ve brought up Facebook active user stats here in the past I got flooded with responses suggested Facebook was lying or manipulating their user counts to pump up the stock.
Yeah, I often see claims online that Facebook is dead, Facebook is just Boomers posting pictures of their grandkids, etc. Maybe it's a regional thing, because where I live, everyone's on Facebook. Most small businesses, organizations, and communities here use it as their primary (or only) online presence for promoting themselves and staying in contact with their customers/members. Marketplace has completely replaced the old newspaper classified ads. That's unfortunate since the search in Marketplace sucks, but it's happened.
My family uses its messenger for organizing things because everyone has it, even if some of us rarely use it except for that. If I wanted to draw attention to something locally, whether it was promoting a service or running for office, I'd be a fool not to use Facebook.
Part of the disconnect is that these days, a lot of the Facebook use is concentrated in places you don't necessarily see from the outside.
Like, fifteen years ago, if you happened upon the Facebook page of a random person, you'd usually see a handful of vacation pictures, a meme or three, some updates from their latest Clash of Cookie Farm Kitchen Dash session, and whatnot.
These days, all that stuff - if it's even still being posted - is likely siloed away to Friends-only posts. That random person might still be there, might still be logging in every day, but you don't see the Messenger group chats and the Marketplace offers/haggles.
Likewise for small businesses - a lot of the "look at this thing we're selling now, come check it out" posts now go to Instagram. They might still be auto-logging in, still responding to PMs on Facebook, still clicking a few news posts here and there, but that's just not visible on the outside, and creates the perception of Facebook the Ghost Town.
*US city. I think people in my country would be able to name Craigslist (not in use) over fb marketplace.
[dead]
This is a result of the severe neglect to enforce anti trust in the US. Now other countries need to kick in with diplomatic adverse effects... sigh.
> "This isn't just about a fine; the Commission forcing us to change our business model effectively imposes a multi-billion-dollar tariff on Meta while requiring us to offer an inferior service."
Meta complaining about getting tariff'd is objectively hilarious.
> the Commission forcing us to change our business model
This is total, utter, complete 100% grade A organic nonsense.
I worked at FB (but the same is true of basically all action driven advertising systems). Only a tiny proportion of users ever click, but they are incredibly lucrative for online advertising platforms.
The whole subscription was a really transparent attempt to get people to accept the tracking and it's honestly profoundly depressing that this is what they're reduced to.
Press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
Huh, so Facebook Marketplace is no longer designated as a Gatekeeper because it has not enough business users.
--
Other related PR: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
This rules that the "Core Technology Fee" is de facto illegal.
I don't understand meta's statement that this handicaps american businesses while allows European and Chinese companies to operate under different standards.
It's not completely unwarranted. According to the article, Facebook was fined for their model of asking for pay or accept tracking. Which is exactly what almost all publishers do, e.g. all big German newspapers. It's absolutely clear that this is against the law - they could show ads, but can't invade the users privacy for that, so no tracking ads - but they do it anyway and got away with it in various decisions. And now Facebook gets a huge fine for the same behaviour.
Which is good in a way, maybe it will lead to a behaviour correction also for the smaller publishers. But it's of course not an equal treatment.
Apple on the other hand completely deserves its fine, without a question. They got clear rules and did everything to circumvent them. The Apple's Core Technology Fee was obviously illegal. Don't know why they expected to get away with that, there wasn't even a minimal chance of that working. Idiots.
Big German newspapers do not need to comply under DMA.
The EU focusses, rightfully, on EU macro dynamics with these laws, not how smaller outlets work.
This is very much reasonable. When a platform is big, it has bigger impact, but also bigger budgets to hire legal help and bigger budgets to stay compliant.
This is well established in accounting where there exists different rules depending on size (in many jurisdictions)
What’s another example of different rules depending on size? “Content Moderation” I think? Anything outside the DMA? I think small companies get some exceptions for documentation requirements?
It is a derivative of what is called the "Risk Based Approach" in compliance, and is widely adopted.
As for companies and accounting you can look into the directive 2013/34/EU that established micro, small, and medium sized companies based on their size. These types of companies have different reporting requirements.
in my part of Europe there are tons: companies over a certain size might have different rules for layoffs, have to have union representatives, must pay for safety courses for the employees, must employ a certain percentage of people with disabilities...
G-SIB banks for example
In the US, some laws specifically exclude small companies. For example, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 requires 15 employees, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 requires 4 employees.
You could try to find some analogies but you probably won't succeed since this is clearly just targeting American big Tech
In practice it means that only American companies end up paying large fees to the EU.
It also means that not all US companies have to comply, and that the ones that do are the most competitive companies in the market, making their claim that they have trouble competing moot.
There are no fees.
I agree, except the DMA specifically only applies to companies over a specific size. I think if the German newspapers were at FB/Apple scale, in terms of number of users, then the DMA would apply (i.e. they would be designated gatekeepers or similar) and they could also be fined. Although I think pay for no ads is also a violation of GDPR maybe?
Exactly. While DMA does not apply, GDPR does. But it gets ignored and weakened by decision against the letter and the spirit of the law - which does not surprise if you realize how much power those legacy publishers hold. Not so FB, not here at least.
So it's not exactly the same regulation but pretty much the same situation. I'd also be pissed.
GDPR does not purport to outlaw targeted advertising. It just purports to require that the target consent.
In pretty much every other area of law in most of the world (including Europe) consent can be bought--the party requesting consent gives the consenter something in exchange for consent, and will not give that thing unless consent is given.
But under the rulings from some regulators that doesn't work for GDPR. Consent is apparently only considered to be freely given if withholding it would not result in any detriment such as not getting the same level of service or having to pay money for service.
If regulators want to outlaw targeted advertising it would be a lot better if they just did that, instead of making consent in GDPR work differently from how it has worked for pretty much everything else pretty much everywhere for centuries.
That's not entirely fair. The concept of duress exists and is always at odds with consent in a transactional setting. The issue is where to draw the boundary between "you freely chose to do business" and "you were coerced into accepting unfavorable terms".
I'm inclined to think that "pay or be tracked" is usually the former. The issue was never that I shouldn't have to pay but rather that I wasn't given the choice in the first place.
GDPR Art. 7 section 4:
> When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.
Don't blame the regulators, it's pretty clear that "paying" with consent is a no-go from the text itself.
The measures apply by size, not by country of origin. It happens that the companies over the threshold are American. So their statement is basically untrue, but that's politics these days.
There are a couple of companies in the list[1] (of seven) that aren’t US-based. ByteDance are Chinese and Booking are EU (NL).
[1] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
Probably also important to note, is that ByteDance and TikTok are also currently being investigated by the European Commission. Although for different reasons under the Digital Services Act - so it's not like they are targeting US companies specifically with the law.
Also the commission is known to fine European entities all the time for various reasons, one of the recent ones I can think of is Pierre Cardin and it's partners for restricting cross border European sales.
Booking Holdings which Wikipedia has as the parent of booking.com seems to be US owned.
Yes. Booking Holdings Inc. is incorporated in Delaware, listed on the Nasdaq with principal executive offices in Connecticut. See SEC filing: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001075531/87dc4e5...
Had no idea booking.com was american. I always assumed it was euro-based.
Booking.com was founded in the Netherlands and is still headquartered there, but was bought by a US company (Priceline) well over a decade ago.
That makes sense. It just didn't have the energy of an American company and I say that as one. I love booking.com
Spotify conveniently falls outside of the scope of this law when any artist would tell you it should absolutely be covered.
The DMA is gerrymandered to exclude domestic businesses. Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
> EU are basically enforcing market capitalism by disallowing monopolistic practices.
Users are free to just not buy iOS devices. Users are free to just not use Meta services.
There is no monopoly here. This is all much ado about nothing.
No real-world user is meaningfully harmed by the current state of Apple App Store/Meta Ads, but plenty will be harmed once spyware/piracy sideloading becomes common. Many small businesses will collapse due to ineffective advertisement (large businesses will love it though - it becomes a winner-take-all market).
> The DMA is gerrymandered to exclude domestic businesses.
Except Booking (~EU, based in NL~*) falls under the DMA, and ByteDance (China? I think) does as well. All the same restrictions fall on them too.
> Users are free to just not use Meta services.
True in theory, not so much in practice. I work for a company that deals directly with WhatsApp in NL, and I guarantee you for businesses it's a death knell to not have a WA Business presence. Even the local gemeente (aka city council) and other gov't establishments are on WhatsApp too. Recently more people are moving onto Signal and Telegram, but that remains a minority.
Don't even get me started on Asia, especially India/Indonesia, where even despite the existence of Line and similar apps everything is still* almost exclusively on WA. A bit different in East Asia where Line and other apps are more predominant (hardly relevant for the EU though).
Spotify doesn't fall under the DMA because it's not gatekeeping anything and it does have plenty of competition, many of which pay artists better and have basically equal selections. YT Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, Bandcamp and I'm sure dozens and dozens of others all exist and are used.
> ... but plenty will be harmed once spyware/piracy sideloading becomes common
Interesting how this evil sideloading boogeyman hasn't happened on Android.
> ... Many small businesses will collapse due to ineffective advertisement
The same small businesses that are forced into paying 30% to Apple/Google for simply existing on their app store?
> (large businesses will love it though - it becomes a winner-take-all market).
So, the gatekeepers as listed under the DMA? Y'know, the giants that literally hold all the keys and can dictate how the entire market should work based on their rules? The very same ones that have opaque ad-bidding systems that they control inside-and-out and can do anything they want to with?
[**] Seems I'm wrong there (See andsoitis' reply to my comment), but didn't want to edit out my original comment.
Regardless, calling it gerrymandering of local businesses is simply incorrect, and I can speak for at least myself that if we even had any tech companies that big (and I hope we never do), we'd expect them be subject to the exact same rules and laws.
> Booking (EU, based in NL)
Booking Holdings Inc. is incorporated in Delaware, listed on the Nasdaq with principal executive offices in Connecticut. See SEC filing: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001075531/87dc4e5...
Thanks, edited my comment to reflect I was wrong there.
Spotify feels like a slightly marginal case, and it wouldn't be surprising to see it added to the list. It clearly wasn't big enough a few years back when all this was being defined, but it's gotten quite a lot bigger since.
I'm curious, what is your preferred financial regime? EU are basically enforcing market capitalism by disallowing monopolistic practices. Do you find that wrong in general?
Perhaps you prefer an industro-fascist regime where businesses are not bound by any tailored laws? Pretty sure there would already be alternative iOS app stores under such a regime - government controls (IPR system, computer security laws) seem necessary to enable these sorts of tech monopolies.
> Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
If that would be the case, the EU could be drowning in money by being more aggressive with GDPR enforcement and follow-through.
500 million sounds like a lot but that is just a drop in the ocean for first world nation states. The Netherlands has a yearly budget of 300 billion for example.
> Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
The EU's budget is massive, no shortfall is covered by these fines since to collect them it takes another massive legal battle, that's just bullshit being regurgitated on the internet (especially on this forum). If that was the case the EU would be issuing GDPR fines all over the place to cover shortfalls, it doesn't happen in reality.
> Spotify conveniently falls outside of the scope of this law when any artist would tell you it should absolutely be covered.
Spotify does not behave like the most similar category covered by the DMA: video sharing like YouTube. Spotify does not hold exclusive access to the content and the audience, YouTube Music, Apple Music, and other players have almost the same catalogue as Spotify has so users are free to move between those services without penalty. Now try moving from YouTube to a competitor, a completely different beast.
The DMA exists to counter an imbalance in the power these massive tech companies have in detriment to competition, it's quite a simple prerogative, Spotify doesn't hold at all the same power as YouTube has, or Google Search, or any other platform under the DMA.
A good start, but far from enough regarding the societal damage (anti-competitive, anti-user, psychological harm especially of minors, proliferation of radicalisation) they did.
*insert Mike Myers One Million Dollars meme
they made more than the fine, so it's just reduced profit a little. mere higher cost of business and continue as usual.
The DMA fines are not supposed to be punitive damages, they're a tool to correct behavior, like the GDPR.
If Apple & co don't comply there are higher amounts that can be imposed, but the idea is that the companies will comply before that.
The EU made a serious point that these are the first time they are issuing those fines as as such have capped them as a signal to show that they are serious but also that they aren’t taking the maximalist approach some in the US are accusing them of.
They can legally go for 10% of global revenue if I’m not mistaken as the top level of fines and both Apple and Meta would be wise to not find themselves as repeat offenders as a result.
Millions is nothing for these companies. Just a cost of doing business.
Starting somewhere. The US ain't even doing that.
Breach. Get sued. Pay Fine. Rinse. Repeat.
At this point it looks like governments want the money and companies are gleefully willing to pay.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I get it that millions isn't much but it's something, and at least it sends a signal.
Would looove to distribute an app without it having to be in the App Store, and not paying the App Store fee (direct download of signed binary). Happy to pay a yearly fee or fee per update to cover code review if it’s crucial. But 30% of revenue for doing bugger all… cmon, they’re squeezing the lemon a bit too hard.
Personally I wouldn’t install software unless it were from a really trusted person doing something extremely unique and useful that doesn’t have an alternative on the Apple Store (think UTM with JIT for iPad).
Please don’t take that as a negative comment but I suspect most people source their software from conveniently centralized repos whether it be App Store, Steam or even the main package manager on a Linux distribution.
Great, and you are free to do so and will continue to be free to do so.
The point is that the OP is not free to do so.
Most and mostly.
But I'd still like to be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my iPhone, should I decide to based on my own criteria, without going through Apple or even a fucking "alternative app store" that is still Apple censored.
You mentioned linux package managers, these existing are proof enough that a 30% cut isn't required for ensuring the safety of what you install. In fact, I'd wager there is that much more dangerous garbage in the app store than in pacman's database.
As much as I think Apple's cut is unreasonable, I think all this shows is that people are making a lot more dangerous software for apple's larger less tech savvy userbase than for arch's.
The Linux package repositories take a 30% cut of zero. If the software wasn't free, it would be entirely reasonable for them to demand a cut
I can install Jetbrains via most linux package managers, launch it, and pay money. I can install steam and pay for games. I can install sublime text and give em cash.
Arch linux doesn't try to take 30% of all the games I buy on steam, nor does it prevent steam from asking me for my credit card.
Apple reviews all apps to make sure they don't ask for your credit card, don't tell you where you can buy the same good online, and make sure that if you do sell anything, apple gets its 30% cut, even if it's a virtual store like steam. That's the reason you can't buy kindle books on iOS (even though you can buy apple books? Weird? Isn't that illegal anti-competitive behavior?)
It would absolutely not be reasonable for linux package managers to demand that I pay 30% more for all games on steam if I did "pacman -Sy steam" vs downloading steam from valve's website and figuring out how to get it working on arch-linux (taking the deb, extracting it with 'ar', and installing some dependencies)
On Android there's a repository called F-Droid which offers free software. Apple won't let anyone create a FOSS repo like that for iOS.
The point is that it becomes your choice. For example some people might choose to use a different web browser instead of Safari on their Apple device so they can use some web apps fully and not have to install similar local apps at all.
> cmon, they’re squeezing the lemon a bit too hard
They got hooked on the lemon juice. Nobody at Apple making millions a year to write emails and sit in meetings wants to be out on the street for putting up their hand and saying "hey lets just take 10% and have a healthy ecosystem long term, which will let us continue to sell phones to people every year with a profit margin of $500".
Phil Schiller has actually made some comments about being less greedy, like possibly ratcheting down the 30% cut once the App Store started making serious revenue or not shaking down developers if they use external payment methods. Not that Schiller has actually made any changes at Apple to do any of the less greedy things.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22418828/apple-app-store-c...
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/25/apples-phil-schiller-co...
That was a long time ago. Now,
> “You download the app and it doesn’t work, that’s not what we want on the store,” says Schiller. This, he says, is why Apple requires in-app purchases to offer the same purchasing functionality as they would have elsewhere.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/18/interview-apples-schiller-...
From what I hear, users are tired of installing apps. You can make a website and not face any gatekeepers or restrictions.
What if your app needs to send notifications and/or use bluetooth, for instance ?
All modern browsers support notifications:
https://caniuse.com/notifications
Bluetooth is limited to Chrome because Apple and Mozilla were concerned about privacy and security:
https://caniuse.com/web-bluetooth
PWAs offer support for push notifications [1], but apparently they are not as seamless as in native apps, especially on iOS.
If you've never heard of PWAs [2], they allow you to add native mobile app functionality to a mobile website, including the ability to install your website as though it were an app, and ability to cache resources for offline use. I haven't worked on app development for a while, but when I did several years ago, all that was required to turn a mobile website in to a PWA was a service worker file (a JS file to define resource caching rules), and a manifest.json file (essentially metadata used by the home screen icon, including title and icon image).
Apparently PWAs still aren't on par with native apps in terms of capability and UX. Nonetheless I hope PWAs become popular for their simplicity, and for being decoupled from platforms. It's a bit insane to me that native app development usually requires heavy platform specific IDEs (Android Studio, Xcode), both of which have steep learning curves, and after all that development effort, you only have an app that works on 1 platform. Building a basic mobile app shouldn't require anything more than HTML, JS and CSS, and it shouldn't be tied to any specific platform.
1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
AIUI Apple has deliberately kneecapped PWAs on iOS to stop them competing with their App Store.
From what I hear, most users disable notifications.
You can do like Airbnb and send text messages.
You can do Bluetooth in JavaScript through the Web Bluetooth API.
A little caveat of Web Bluetooth API is that it's like WebUSB and mostly available on Chrome. I don't think Chrome for iOS is using blink yet so you'll probably not have access to this API on iOS.
Both WebUSB and WebBluetooth is still a draft spec, and is doubtful to progress any further with both Mozilla and Webkit objecting to it
https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth
https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/#anti-fingerprinting
Essentially, these are proprietary that are a part of an embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy by Google Chrome.
> From what I hear, most users disable notifications.
Where’d you hear that? Surely most users don’t change defaults.
There isn’t a default on iOS, you’re prompted for each new app when it requests notification permissions. People have found that users hit no a lot more when the app prompts with no explanation than when it clearly explains what benefit it has to the user.
Then the flood of notifications gets ignored, with practically the same result.
Most apps that "need" to send notifications don't, in fact, need to.
Yeah but, what about apps that actually do ?
There are web APIs for both.
“Web Bluetooth” is a Blink-only API that both Mozilla and Apple rejected on security grounds.
What a weird thing to put in scare quotes.
Not on iOS. There’s no Bluetooth support in safari.
Web apps offer a subpar experience.
Meanwhile on Hacker News: "Web apps suck. Native apps are so much better. Why can't everything be a native app?"
The barrier of entry for me is having to pay $99/year just to notarize and sign my macOS applications that me and maybe three other people use. Just a lot easier to link to instructions on how to bypass Gatekeeper or make them compile it themselves from source.
Although I think my go-to instructions at https://disable-gatekeeper.github.io/ are not being kept up to date?
No, the barrier is to pay above 1m downloads. $99/yr is a o(everything your have to do to publish a safe app online and maintain it safe).
> The EU fines could stoke tensions with U.S President Donald Trump who has threatened to levy tariffs against countries that penalise U.S. companies.
Mark Zuckerberg, in his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, specifically noted this as his goal for falling in behind Trump. That Trump would be the big-stick man that would protect Meta and other cos from foreign interference. Where "interference" is anything restricting that American exceptionalism "do anything we want, however we want".
Only then Trump started a trade war with quite literally the entire world -- aside from, predictably, Russia -- and now he holds, as he likes to say, no cards. The EU and anyone else can do whatever they want and Zuck and co can cry about the millions they wasted trying to buy a protection racket.
Of course Meta could just withdrawn from the EU. I wish they would withdraw from Canada. Their garbage misinformation platform is a massive net negative for humanity and has offered nothing but harm for the planet.
Most Canadian small businesses rely on Meta to get customers.
If you think these companies don't add value, you are totally oblivious to the millions of small businesses that rely on these platforms to reach customers and niche audiences around the world.
They need a platform, but it doesn't have to be Meta.
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I've seen too much from the last few years (covid, mostly, but other things) to take much stock in what people are commonly referring to as misinformation
But yeah, I don't like what they do competition wise (Whatsapp seems like clear antitrust) and their products are badly designed (have more things shoved into your feed that you're not following!)
> Are you a Meta employee? Given your other comments it seems so.
That's a very ugly way of you to behave yourself in what is supposed to be a civil discussion. No matter what you think about Meta and their actions.
What is ugly or uncivil about noting someone's biases? The "your small businesses would fail without Meta" line is from the official lobbyist arm of Meta, and it's usually a pretty good tell that someone is a Meta employee and is thus likely to have a very rose coloured, idealized version of the org.
Full disclosure: I worked at Facebook from 2013 to 2018, almost entirely on ads.
Like, you may not want to hear this, but lots of SMBs get value from targeted ads, and this has lead to lots and lots of successful businesses.
I encourage my wife to use these kinds of ads (mostly on TikTok and IG these days) for her business, and they work reasonably well.
That's not to say that Facebook hasn't had a bunch of bad impacts on the world (Myanmar and other poorer countries come to mind), but the OP's point is a good one, and lots of people who don't work at Meta believe this.
Ultimately, Facebook provide a service that it appears lots of people like (I do use Whatsapp but not really the rest of them) and it's not up to you to determine whether or not they've been good or bad for society.
As I keep bringing up in these discussions, should we ban radios for their role in the Rwandan genocide?
Changing forms of communication are always going to cause societal changes, and we're currently living through the biggest one since the invention of the printing press.
I'm not sure one can blame just one company for all of this, and honestly if you had to pick one I'd probably pick Google for making it profitable to write garbage and monetise through ads (but as I said, the Internet and computer mediated communication are a huge change and it's basically impossible to say what actually drove the changes).
What do you achieve with that? Isn't it better to argue against the points made rather than argue against the person making them? Anybody could have made the same points.
I've worked at most FAANG companies, including Google, Apple, and Meta in the past (not currently).
In my experience working at these companies and diving into the reported incidents/issues (e.g. Batterygate, Myanmar, Cambridge Analytica), I have found that comments like yours present an overly reductive worldview. You are likely entirely informed by ragebait news articles that grossly misrepresent the issues as opposed to a nuanced understanding of (1) the widely reported incidents, and (2) the services these companies provide and those that rely on them to make a living.
No, it would not be replaced "in an instant" with other options, and any other options would quickly evolve into the same state as FB/IG today unless you make targeted ads illegal (which - again - would collapse millions of small businesses and centralize power for wealthy large businesses).
My experience using Facebook is that every third post is an advertisement, often for something I can't even buy (common one: a tax adviser specialising in US citizens living in the UK, when I'm British and live in Germany), or are not gender appropriate (they've shown me ads both for boob surgery and for dick pills).
Another third are "recommendations" for groups that are often not merely of zero interest, but geographically irrelevant — a page for a team I've never heard of in a sport I don't follow in a state I've never even visited, that kind of thing.
The remaining third are mostly from just one person, because everyone else I know seems to feel much the same way about the website and have mostly stopped posting content there.
My actual, literal, spam folder is less irrelevant than what Facebook shows me on the default feed.
> No, it would not be replaced "in an instant" with other options, and any other options would quickly evolve into the same state as FB/IG today unless you make targeted ads illegal (which - again - would collapse millions of small businesses and centralize power for wealthy large businesses).
1) It's already centralised, that's the problem.
2) We managed OK before the internet enabled targeted ads. Back then, local newspapers were a thing (I still get them around here), and you could put an ad for your barber shop or dance hall in that. Local forums that you can find on a search engine are still able to serve local ads, without targeting or profiling users. Biggest problem with that is that spam was already a problem 20 years ago (personal experience trying to host a phpBB forum), and now we've got LLMs that make it increasingly difficult to even know if you're talking to a fellow human let alone a fellow resident of ${local area} or member of ${specific interest group}.
> We managed OK before the internet enabled targeted ads. Back then, local newspapers were a thing (I still get them around here), and you could put an ad for your barber shop or dance hall in that
To be fair, we are in a wholly different world today. The small business landscape has changed dramatically - most of them are online. I get instagram ads for my really niche hobbies, and I don't mind.
Example: Let's say you're into "titanium miniature puzzles" (https://www.lazels.com/)
There is no chance of that business surviving based off of local newspaper ads alone - the likelihood of finding a viable customer base in your town is low. Generalized ads would be totally unaffordable to reach widely enough to cover your viable target customer base, which is sparse and global. Search based ads don't work because people don't even know this exists until they see it.
But good ad targeting enables instant global reach to the specific people that are likely to be interested in what you're selling. There may only be 1k-10k people globally interested in buying $500 titanium miniature puzzles, but if you can reach them, that's enough for your small business to survive.
Lots of small businesses rely on this. I'm not sure about "millions" but on the order of 100k seems likely, if you assume there's one interesting niche business for every 80k people.
That kind of example matches what I was saying about forums.
Targeting ads to a forum is (with consent) fine, in the way that targeting a person isn't.
I see what you mean - but I am not sure it would work for the "you don't know what you don't know" cases, or cases where the user isn't invested enough to follow the relevant forum.
I personally wasn't interested in miniature titanium puzzles until I saw the ad - I'm not interested in puzzles in general, so I wouldn't have found it via a puzzle forum.
The same pattern can be seen in my other hobbies (tritium collecting, mokume and titanium/zirconium Damascus items, unique independent watches, flashlight collecting, rocks).
I'm involved enough to buy something from an ad while scrolling through my friends' timelines or reels, but certainly not enough to frequent a forum on these topics. So I am not sure forums suffice.
> would collapse millions of small businesses
How? And do they have the right to exist if their only income is targeted ads?
How do you expect small businesses to acquire customers? Spending tens of millions of dollars competing in generalized ad space to reach the same audience they can reach today with $1000?
Most small businesses that exist today would become nonviable overnight, and that is a huge chunk of the economy. Sure, you can say "they shouldn't have the right to exist" because they use targeted ads, but I have yet to hear a solid argument for why such ads are an infringement on our fundamental rights such that the whole SMB segment of the economy is worth destroying.
Because small businesses didn't exist before meta?
A tech bro true believer comes to the rescue to set us all straight. Of course the world would fall apart if Thanos snapped his fingers and disappeared Meta.
Thinking about I might watch that movie, a Thanos redemption arc maybe...
>You are likely entirely informed by ragebait news articles
Sure. Do you think I haven't experienced every aspect of Meta properties? Instagram reels, for instance, is a racist hellhole full of the most vile content and snuff videos. It seems to have zero moderation, profiting off of the worst of humanity[1]. Facebook actively runs obvious scam ads for scam businesses and does absolutely nothing if you report it.
Meta at this point is basically a criminal operation.
And it's hilarious how much fear mongering there was about Tiktok (which is a positively benign platform compared to Meta's garbage platforms). I recently uninstalled Instagram after it fed me an endless stream of 51st state propaganda, despite the fact that I Not Interested/Blocked every single occurrence (this was around the time that Instagram turned up the "snuff" dial so millions were getting feeds full of violent deaths[2], which is a mechanism that immediately should subject Meta to government inquiries). Meta properties should be banned everywhere outside the US purely based upon the fact that they're enemy propaganda at this point.
>and any other options would quickly evolve into the same state as FB/IG today
No, they wouldn't. Like literally somehow loads of other sites manage to not be the cesspools of garbage that Meta properties are. This is by design. Here in Canada, engagement on Facebook has dropped to negligible levels outside of the 51st state/conspiratorial sorts. Reddit is an enlightened intellectual promised land compared to the shithole that Meta properties all are.
>which - again - would collapse your small businesses
This is such nonsense. The only businesses that are reliant upon Meta are largely scammy new-age bullshit. And your rhetoric is like saying that if McDonalds closed millions would go hungry because surely there is no way for people to eat otherwise.
And again you've tried to pull other companies in. Google offers enormous value to the world. They are largely a responsible company. Apple offers value. Netflix offers value. Microsoft offers value.
META...blinked out of existence and the world would be much better. Meta is the world's digital Purdue Pharma.
[1] And to be clear, I'm a free speech person. That fringe sites exist where people ply this content is fine. That a major corporation seems to build a business around it, however, monetizing nuts and mental illness and racism and conspiracies and violence, is absolutely disgusting, and I cannot comprehend how someone could work at Meta without feel shame every moment of every day.
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/27/instagram...
Reddit can be astroturfed to hell, I don't trust it. Mods are shared across subreddits, they ban you for unjustified reasons, as does the site in general
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>This really isn't civil
It's a statement of fact. Meta profits off the worst of society. It is a heinous company.
If you find my comment so reprehensible, feel free to downvote, flag, etc. The crocodile-tear moralization comes across as concern trolling, and it's just a waste of bits.
>What is your end goal here?
You strangely keep editing this. I stated my thoughts. People are free to disagree. If it's so distressing to you I suggest you look inwards as to why that is.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Of course Meta could just withdrawn from the EU.
I mean, probably not without being sued by their shareholders. As a public company, you cannot simply abandon 40bn revenue/year because you feel aggrieved.
But yeah, the "you'd better be nice to us, EC, or Trump might be angry" tactic is kinda shot at this point.
> I mean, probably not without being sued by their shareholders. As a public company, you cannot simply abandon 40bn revenue/year because you feel aggrieved.
What are the laws that Meta would be violating?
Someone here hazarded the hypothesis that Trump's tariffs are a stick aimed not towards other countries, but towards American corporations, who have to pledge fealty (and resources) to Trump in exchange for relief. I think it makes a lot of sense, if any of this is rational, which I'm not entirely sold on.
It's always funny when shit happens and everyone jumps over themselves to figure out what "5D chess" the people in charge are playing. There's never any chess. They are just incompetent.
That's not 5D chess at all. Very straightforward, in fact, and backed up by the documented strong-arming of law firms.
You gotta kick back to the big guy.
Look at 47's truth social some time. In between the posts 'destroying' liberals and lionising the worst actors in his party, he posts up a disturbing amount of 'settlements' with Law Firms that previously displeased him.
They were basically forced at gunpoint to make deals to provide pro bono services to the Trump administration, in return for regulators dropping investigations into their diversity practices.
The firms - including Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Allen Overy Shearman Sterling, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft – are among the most prestigious and recognized firms in the US.
Cadwalader is the former firm of Todd Blanche, who resigned his partnership there to represent Trump in criminal cases when the firm would not take on Trump as a client. Blanche is now the deputy attorney general – the number two official at the Department of Justice.
Overall the MAGA cabinet has now secured more than $900m in pro bono pledges from law firms threatened with either executive orders or investigations from the equal opportunity commission. How this isn't seen as a straight up RICO case or old-fashioned criminal shakedown is beyond me.
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It would be really cool if the EU managed to make a consumer tech industry on their own rather than rent-seeking from US tech via protectionist, gerrymandered laws.
It is absurd that websites are legally required to provide free services to EU users. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a "pay or get targeted ads" option - you are free to simply not use the site.
Same goes for iOS devices and the App Store. If you want to sideload, just get an Android device. There is no monopoly here.
US companies are free to not operate in Europe.
There's nothing special about US software engineering vs. software engineering made elsewhere from a purely technical and know-how point of view.
The key difference is availability of capital and appetite for risk that make US exceptional by enabling a speed of scaling and execution not possible anywhere else (well, other than China).
If US companies that can't be bothered to follow EU laws leave the +500M people market that is the EU, I'm positive some other equally competent alternative (local or otherwise) would appear sooner or later to fill in the gap.
Perhaps the same regulations that US companies keep running afoul of are the regulations that prevent European investors from putting money behind European startup competitors.
The EU has some extremely strong consumer protection laws, which is excellent for consumers, but it comes with downsides too.
> Perhaps the same regulations that US companies keep running afoul of are the regulations that prevent European investors from putting money behind European startup competitors.
Nah, it's all the capital which gets invested into the US caused by the dollar's role in international payments that drives the US exceptionalism is tech.
Like, 65% of world equity value relates to 4% of the world population. That's not sustainable long-term, and if something cannot go on forever, then one day it will stop (and we might be seeing that start to happen now).
Don't get me wrong, the US market has a bunch of advantages (large, one language, standard regulation) but it's mostly all the capital sloshing around that drives the outperformance of the US tech companies.
> If you want to sideload, just get an Android device. There is no monopoly here.
The Digital Markets Act is not about a user's right to sideload. It's about 100s of thousands of businesses' right to reach billions of users without Apple in the middle. That's why it's called the Digital Markets Act, not the Phone User Rights Act
They could equally make the whole thing subscription-only, but they're not going to do that.
> gerrymandered
This word doesn't simply mean 'I don't like this', you know.
Facebook is under no obligation to operate in Europe. Of course, they make about 40 billion revenue in Europe annually, so they will be inclined to want to stay in Europe. And they can do this! They just have to follow the rules.
I'll be generous and assume you're being disingenuous by accident: This isn't about the ads, it's about the tracking. Meta is free to put ads wherever it wants, but it's not free to track people who don't want to be tracked.
In the end, a population has the right to govern itself how it wants. There's absolutely NOTHING wrong with that - Meta is free to simply not operate in the EU.
Why shouldn't you allowed to track people across your own services if users consent? If they don't consent, they are free to simply not use your services. Problem solved.
There is no actual need for this law. No rights are being infringed on. Just don't use the website.
Because that's how we like it, and that's the end of it. The people of the EU have said that these are the rules for doing business there, and saying "I should be able to murder people in my own house, if you don't want to be murdered, just don't come here, there's no need for anti-murdering laws" is rather irrelevant.
> saying "I should be able to murder people in my own house, if you don't want to be murdered, just don't come here, there's no need for anti-murdering laws"
The Americans call this "stand your ground".
Well, half "touché", half "precisely".
Conversely, you can justify any authoritarian unjust law because "that's how we like it."
"Deporting brown people without due process? That's how we like it, who are you to complain? You're free to not work with the US, but we know you will!"
Obviously a nuanced and meaningful conversation goes much deeper than "that's how we like it." Why is it such an infringement on user rights to not be allowed to use a website if they don't follow the owner's terms of use? That is unaddressed.
Why doesnt this same logic apply to meta? They don't have to comply with this law if they don't want to, its their choice to operate in the EU
> across your own services
What are Facebook's own services? Or Google's for that matter.
Neither tracks you just when you're on facebook.com or google.com. They track you everywhere.
> Just don't use the website.
https://www.newsweek.com/heres-how-turn-off-tracking-faceboo... https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-stop-facebook-from-spyin... https://www.wired.com/story/ways-facebook-tracks-you-limit-i...
This logic works just the same applied to Meta, without the requiring the expectation that Meta should be able to operate without following the law.
Why shouldn't Meta be forbidden to track people? It's the law. If they don't want to follow the applicable law in the jurisdiction they operate in they can cease their operations there.
Blaming Europe for "rent-seeking" when enforcing basic consumer protections rules on those massive foreign-propaganda disinformation and wealth extraction engines really takes the cake. Fuck Meta, if it was up to me Facebook, Instagram and X would have been long gone from European soil. We gain nothing from them.
Apple should remove privacy from their vocabolary.
They keep doing that to try to paint this as a loss for users. Users have much to win with this, as it will give some real competition to the Apple ecosystem, and potentially saving users money. So it's only natural Apple will pull all the cards like saying it threatens users privacy.
They called it on themselves. Were so greedy with access to unlimited capital, bought everything out or undercut with free. And now there are no EU competitors left to lobby for more favorable regulations.
The EU is using populist claims to introduce laws with ideological bias (big corp bad, America bad, America corp super bad). Everyone knows the digital act was never meant to be a fair set of rules, it was introduced to punish US companies at will.
At the same time, most governments, public offices, agencies and businesses in Europe would not be able to operate normally without access to American software.
The problem is that it is way easier to (over)regulate and tax, than to create a strong environment for business and innovation to thrive, in order to grow your own tech giants.
The very idea of this regulation is that Tech Giants are not desirable, since they're mono- or oligopolies.
Any average EU politician would be far left in the US.
Can't deny that some EU politicians (mostly conservative ones, surprise, surprise) have a hidden agenda behind it.
The statement that gov & businesses in Europe would not be able to operate normally without American software is easy to disprove. Just look at how easy the Chinese or the Russians could shed or avoid their dependency on crappy Microsoft or expensive US cloud providers. The problem is just that many European politicians are so technically inept they believe it themselves.
That's a lot of emotional words without a single bit of context from the actual article. Your comment is better suited to FOX news' website.
I don't see how your comment is adding value to the discussion besides claiming emotionality and an absurd reference to FOX news, which implies that my opinions are not welcome here and I should go elsewhere with them.
My post is my opinion, offering an entry point for a discussion to those who might have a different opinion from mine.
The opinion is so detached from reality that it’s not going to result in a useful discussion.
There’s nothing about America in the consumer protection laws. It doesn’t matter if the service provider is a corporation or a non profit.
You can have any opinion you want but if you don’t ensure the quality of it, people will call it out for what it is.
In some circles you can defend lack of intellectual rigor with „any opinion is valid” and „you just don’t like my politics”, but that’s useful for electoral politics, not for intellectual inquiry.
> The opinion is so detached from reality that it’s not going to result in a useful discussion.
Maybe you should try.
> There’s nothing about America in the consumer protection laws. It doesn’t matter if the service provider is a corporation or a non profit.
Thierry Breton and his "the sheriff is in town". Jean-Noël Barrot: "Apply with the Greatest Firmness"
Axel Voss, German MEP, called for the EU to use the DSA against (what he calls) fake news and platform owners like Elon Musk interfering in elections. This explicitly links the DSA to regulating US tech companies (particularly X).
Pedro Sánchez (Spanish Prime Minister) proposed using the DSA to regulate social media, fight bots, fake profiles, and go after tech barons undermining democracy - US platforms, of course.
You may agree or disagree with my views being right or wrong, but it is clear that the leitmotif seems to be EU politics vs US big tech here.
When it comes to election interference it’s more like EU vs Russia. Who owns the platforms is secondary, it’s not like TikTok should be allowed to do election interference because it isn’t American.
You’ll learn in the course of your future experience that not every discussion will introduce a new perspective into your life. And you usually can tell very early when that’s the case.
>Maybe you should try.
If somebody claims the moon is made of cheese without joking, I'm not going to argue with them. I'm going to laugh them out of the room assuming.
Your opinion is like claiming the moon is made of cheese.
By that ridiculous argument the federal case against Al Capone showed that the US tax code was ideologically biased against Italian Americans.
"Over regulate and tax"? What? Have you done any reading on how almost all US tech companies go to extreme lengths to avoid paying tax?
Most companies in the world do exactly that. Prove me wrong.
Thanks for proving my point that they need more taxation.
Are you saying that if a business (or individual) wants to pay the lowest tax possible (legally, that is) it should be a reason for more taxation? Is that what taxation is about, revenge?
Of cause that is a reason for more taxation.
There are 2 types of taxes: Those we charge for revenue and those we charge for behavior.
We don't charge income tax to deter people from working. We charge income tax because we really need money to fund stuff.
If you can not raise enough money, because companies / individuals are optimizing their tax, then you change it such that the budget holds.
... Oh well, I reckon if you are in the US you just keep borrowing. In that case, sorry about my reasoning.
The real problem was that Silicon Valley was flooded with capital and bought out all competitors. Or undercut with free. Or all kinds of other Microsoftlike practices. So nobody was left in the EU to advocate for better rules.
If that is true, how come new competitors spring up all the time in Silicon Valley and other places in the US while the European sector lies dormant?
That's just a US propaganda myth people can't stop parroting. The SV ecosystem is definitely better funded, but there is no lack of digital start-ups in the EU.
Consider what happened to Nokia. The first business blunder caused it to be sold to US and gutted. Now if someone else wants to make smartphones in EU, has to start from scratch. But if that happens to US company, everything(at least the IP) stays in the US.
Nokia is a strange story. I remember when it happened, and absolutely everybody knew it would kill the company to sell it to Microsoft. So of course the leaders and owners of Nokia knew the same thing. My guess is that they decided that they couldn't compete with the iPhone and decided to cash out what they could. Maybe Microsoft could help them with shuttling money to offshore accounts or some other under the table services? Nokia was publicly traded, so it could have been a great robbing of small time investors. But did Microsoft really get anything out of the deal that was worth the price?
I had the Nokia N9 at the time, which was years ahead of its time and one of the most well designed smartphones so far, both in hardware and especially in software. Modern iOS and Android still look dated in comparison.