Ah, the title point at something I said in an earlier thread that was misunderstood or I probably explained it wrong : the way apple played it, it was not about the actual regulation anymore, and anyone who kept arguing "but it's a bad regulation bla bla" where missing the point.
By playing it the way they did, with their public statement against the regulator, and half implementation clearly done to be non cooperative on purpose and all, they put themselves in a very different fight, now the question has nothing to do with this or that regulation, it becomes does Apple need to respect EU law to sell product in the EU. That's all there is to it anymore, by making it about compliance and who has a stronger grip, they forced themselves there; and it's obviously a fight the EU is not going to back down from (nor is it going to lose it).
I compare that to many moves from Meta, Google, Microsoft, ... Who played the same but knew when to back down and either do it or argue in a more court and legalese oriented manner.
I'm not sure why Apple leadership played it that way, maybe they have a stronger belief in the US administration ability to strongarm the EU into accepting a loss there, but at the point it's at, it has very little to do with the content of the regulation.
While signature verification could be disabled with a few code changes, the real challenge is maintaining security boundaries when opening up previously controlled interfaces - it requires rebuilding permission models, API stability guarantees, and sandboxing mechanisms that were designed with closed-system assumptions.
I really hope the EU keeps up the pressure. The level of control the gatekeepers have is beyond ridiculous. Sure there’s the “take your money elsewhere” option but we’re at a point where that’s just not realistic to be a normal person. (My sons nursery for example requires an app that only exists on iOS/Android).
EU looks set to be the only big enough institution with any spine or willingness to take this on. Will probably take years if it ever happens due to all this legal dance bullshit, but I really hope they win eventually, even if it’s just for the benefit of EU citizens (of which I am, sadly, not).
> Normally when the EU regulates a given sector, it does so with ample lead time and works with industry to make sure that they understand their obligations.
> Apple instead thought that the regulatory contact from the EU during the lead time to the DMA was an opportunity for it to lecture the EU on its right to exist. Then its executives made up some fiction in their own minds as to what the regulation meant, announced their changes, only to discover later that they were full of bullshit.
> This was entirely Apple’s own fault. For months, we’ve been hearing leaks about Apple’s talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were. Talks like those are to help companies implement incoming regulations, with some leeway for interpretation on the EU’s side to accommodate business interests.
> Remember what I wrote about electrical plugs? The EU is pro-business – often criticised for being essentially a pro-business entity – and not in favour of regulation for regulation’s sake.
> If Apple had faced reality and tried to understand the facts as they are, they would have used the talks to clarify all of these issues and more well in advance of the DMA taking effect.
> But they didn’t because they have caught the tech industry management disease of demanding that reality bend to their ideas and wishes.
Note: I know some folks working in big tech won't like this comment, but it's time we talk about the elephant in the room.
Tim Sweeney is the only billionaire and computer scientist who's actually fighting against inequality. The big difference between him and folks like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Marc Benioff, is that while those billionaires talk about universal basic income to make up for the mass layoffs their tech is going to cause, Tim's out there fighting monopolies, hiring people, building tools for developers, and making games. That's why his HQ isn't in San Francisco. He's the only one who hasn't been brainwashed by VCs or sold out to greed.
He speaks for millions of computer scientists who don't live in the Valley and are using their knowledge of maths and physics to build things that help people, not hurt them. Because let's be honest, a future where billionaires keep getting richer and computer scientists are out of work, scraping by on UBI, begging billionaires for $10 more bucks a month, is a feature no one wants. And when I say "we" I mean myself, my colleagues, and all my students.
Tim, thank you. You inspired a whole generation. Keep fighting against Apple, Google and corporate greed!
> "They managed to convince the courts that iPadOS is a separate operating system to iOS (it's not), which delayed iPadOS being designated as a gatekeeper for almost a year. They are currently challenging all of the rest: the iOS, Safari, and App Store designations, and successfully managed to avoid iMessage being designated at all. They have taken the DMA law to court for an apparently ambiguous comma in article 5(4) - the payment one, and for somehow infringing on human rights law in article 6(7) - the interoperability one."
Looking at the actual filing[1], Apple says:
> "First plea in law, alleging that Article 6(7) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 is inconsistent with the requirements of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and the principle of proportionality, and that Article 2(b) of the European Commission Decision of 5 September 2023 is unlawful insofar as it imposes the obligations under Article 6(7) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 on Apple in relation to iOS."
For context, here are the full contents of Article 6(7):
"The gatekeeper shall allow business users and alternative providers of services provided together with, or in support of, core platform services, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features, regardless of whether those features are part of the operating system, as are available to, or used by, that gatekeeper when providing such services."
> Unintentionally installing something from the app store is all good though, because App Store review absolutely ensures that nothing could go wrong, that there's no scam apps, and more than makes up for the web's "orders of magnitude" stronger sandboxing, more stringent permissions model, and better phishing prevention. And so, web apps logically require a convoluted 4-step process including "share" and "add to homescreen" to locate the install button, meaning that all but the most technical users can't find it.
Written with sarcasm.
I am sorry but the argument that an app store and browser are comparable in terms of amount of spam is a deluded take. The core argument seems to be that since app store allows installing anything, so should browsers. The kind of changes that would benefit a smaller % of smart population, to the detriment of anyone else who can be convinced by a text to download any kind of content on their phone. The ones who push it would want it, but these are the kind of "features" on android that prevents me from giving my parents an android phone.
All arguments invoking privacy and security coming from Apple when faced with loss of control over the iDevice software aftermarket should be discarded as nothing more than bad faith excuses.
Why am I being so absolutist? Well, because we know this to be the case thanks to the Epic injunction compliance brouhaha. Employee slack chats show quite clearly that the "scare screens" were deliberately worded in a way that would deter any users from pursuing the linkout payment option, while we now know that it was all a ruse to prevent that option from ever being competitive with Apple's 30% IAP, only for economic (monopolistic) reasons.
We now have court-affirmed precedent of Apple intentionally using privacy and security as a veneer for darker, anticompetitive motives. After that, there's not much more to honestly debate.
As a European, I have to say I am generally impressed with the EU in these cases. I'm from a country that's rich and capable, but with a GDP a fraction of Apple's market cap. There is no chance that national laws and entities would be sufficient to protect my consumer rights from corporations this size.
The EU is fundamentally a centre-right, liberalist, pro-business coalition, but what that means is that it is pro-competition. What's really impressive is that it seems to mostly refrain from devolving into protectionist policies, giving no preferential treatment to European businesses against international (intercontinental?) competitors, despite strong populist tendencies in certain member states.
I'd argue that it doesn't go far enough at this point. There are imaginable scenarios now where the US uses AWS/Microsoft like China currently uses rare earth exports or even further and AWS/Microsoft + Android/iOS are critical infrastructure. Having some "sovereign cloud" etc. won't help since this needs continuous monitoring and improvements from the mothership.
Merely doing monopoly regulation won't help. We have to actually destroy the monopolies.
Good luck with that. Even when Standard Oil has being broken up, it just resulted in a bunch of smaller but more profitable companies. Following the breakup of Standard Oil, the government created the Oil Division of the US Fuel Administration and the Federal Oil Conservation Board, effectively making the oil industry a government-protected monopoly.
With the JEDI contracts ect that is basically what is happening to Google, MS and AWS.
Don’t overestimate Apple versus your economy. Its real value (book value) is about 60 billion. It might have a speculative value in the trillions, but speculative value is just well… speculative.
As a developer for apple platforms, it's extremely difficult to keep a positive mindset to all this. Year after year, Apple finds ways to continue unbounded fuckery. Making apps for iPhones is not that profitable anymore either, at this point is more about addressing a painful necessity - Apple is the phone company and you have to make it work if you want access to that "unmovable" infrastructure.
I finally gave up and pulled all my iOS apps from the store after receiving yet another app update rejection from a reviewer that clearly hadn't spent 5 minutes trying to understand what the app is for. I'm tired of begging for having access to my users restored every time something like this happens and I'm through feeling that powerless.
From now on I'm an Android user and only building PWAs.
I think at this point we should change the law so that Gatekeepers aren't just required to enable competition, but are somehow forced to actually support competition.
I'm not sure how we could enforce that, but maybe the law could stipulate that a certain minimum percentage of users must use 3rd party app stores, or use web apps. They should pay a fine if less than say 5% of apps are distributed outside the app store, or if less than 5% of people use a 3rd party browser engine.
I'm not sure if you are serious or not with that proposition that would treat gatekeepers more strict than monopolies.
Regardless, I wanted to point out the obvious: each new broad regulation increases the cost of operating in the market where said regulation applies. The gatekeepers of today might not leave, but every new potential newcomer will calculate is it even worth it to operate in a market like that? Maybe it pays off to invest hundred of millions into lawyers and lobbying instead of technologies? Or maybe we'll skip EU market altogether (for reference, according to a courtroom statement Apple gets 7% of their revenue from Europe)
This entire thing is a convoluted mess that exists just to employ EU bureaucrats.
The solution is pretty simple: Apple is no longer allowed to run an "App Store" or distribute a pre-installed web browser. This part can be split apart as a separate company if they prefer that to shutting it down. When you look at Apple's taxable income, most of it goes to Ireland. It's very bizarre to call a company that makes everything in China and holds all of its IP in the EU a US company. It isn't.
Apple does what the Chinese government tells it to (see Apple in China by Patrick McGee.) If they pulled the EU stuff over there, Apple would cease to have new hardware to sell.
This is fascinating and troubling. Apple’s presentation felt more like a marketing defense than a compliance discussion. Their claim that meeting the DMA “current interpretation” is “impossible” really stood out, it’s almost like they’re banking on legal ambiguity to stall real change.
I’m curious: if Apple and Google are using workshops as delay tactics, what’s the EC’s real enforcement power here? Are small fines enough leverage or do we need tougher mechanisms, like mandatory timelines or public transparency on third-party integrations?
Rule of law also means, that fair process is given. which takes time. It is a problem, 100% agree, but I prefer a slow enforcement because of this than a unjust enforcement.
Apple's implementation is overtly malicious. This malice is a publicly-known, conscious effort on the part of some of their trashier employees to make it as malicious as possible to please their execs ("Ohh, keep going").
All you need for "rule of law" is an independent judicial entity to notice this. Why give them months and months "to comply", when everyone on Earth knows they have no intention to? Why turn up the fines slowly, when we all know we're headed all the way to the seizure of 10% of global turnover in 4 years? Why are we all pretending not to know the end-state?
The saddest part of this whole fiasco is that Apple itself is suffering from the lack of competition.
Apple Watch for example gets a huge boost from being the only wearable that integrates with iOS. But it has a lot of quality issues, and is by far the worst Apple product in my opinion. Apple would have a lot more incentive to improve it if they had to compete with other smart watches on a level playing field.
Yeah. I recently got a Garmin Watch after years of using an Apple Watch. On Android you can enable/disable notifications per app. On iOS you are stuck with all or nothing because Apple does not permit the same amount of integration as they permit their own products.
> I recently got a Garmin Watch after years of using an Apple Watch. On Android you can enable/disable notifications per app. On iOS you are stuck with all or nothing
Are you referring to notifications on the Apple Watch? If yes, you can control them by app and decide which ones you want (or don’t want) on the watch. The default is to “Mirror my iPhone”.
You can change the notification settings for Apple Watch by app in the Watch App, opening the Notifications menu (the very first one below the watch faces) and then scrolling down to the apps.
Apple’s DMA “compliance” feels less like opening the walled garden and more like planting hedges around the new gate. The irony is, for a company obsessed with seamless user experience, they’re making interoperability as convoluted as possible, unless, of course, you’re using Safari.
I basically stopped buying "apps" almost a decade ago when Apple unceremoniously removed an app i paid for with no refund because the in app browser defaulted to a certain website. Btw I have always hated their "app" branding. But the benefit of it, at least for me, is it's a strong reminder that it's a childish analog to an application.
The only exception to this is I bought the game, Vampire
Survivors, no wait. It was free. (because of clones in the app store) Anyway.
The funny thing is I do actually have like 100 (free) apps installed. I just never use any of them except for Brave. I basically immediately forget about them the second I install them because just using them is so awkward. They know they have a usability problem but they can't really square it with their massive app ecosystem except in the most slowest, methodical way possible. In the meantime, more UI annoyances are popping up twice as fast.
iPhone used to compete well a decade ago in usability for things like copying text from a webpage into an email. Despite the phone being much larger, I find it much more difficult to do today, perhaps because selecting text is just so unpredictable with the way web standards have become a pile of cruft. Despite whose fault it is, ultimately it's much worse now. I would only bother trying that on a desktop today unless absolutely necessary.
Sometimes text just becomes impossible to edit in certain circumstances. There's like three different things that can happen on a tap and hold and none of them are consistent. It feels absolutely random which one it does. I used to be able to select text from images, now I have to go through two to three cycles of "hold tap menu" -> "select text from image" until it works. It actually still works fine on my old iPad. How is the regression this bad?
I get the spirit of the DMA. I get the whole designation of gatekeepers and do agree Apple is a closed ecosystem. What I don't understand are the implementation details and I always hear "it is complex".
Let's stick with earbuds or watches, where the argument (e.g. Garmin) is that they can't create functionally equal devices to AirPod / Apple Watch, because not all APIs are open. I understand this point, since yes, Apple has a lot of internal implementation that only Apple can use for their devices. What I don't understand is the EU's standpoint of "just opening it up(!)". Let's say Apple would allow everyone to use all APIs to communicate with their AirPods/Apple Watches. Assume everything is open now - wouldn't that create chaos?
Another vendor could implement everything Apple does and release similar AirPods or Watch with whatever hardware quality - but what happens when Apple changes their internal implementation? Changes the implementation every week, because they optimize for THEIR devices. There is no official ISO standard, Bluetooth standard or whatever standard they are adhering to, they would just open up their implementation. I assume the EU would then say "this is against the spirit of the DMA, do not change your implementation so often", but this would seem like a very long cat and mouse game (it already is a very long process).
Why doesn't the EU define some interoperability requirements that gatekeepers need to adhere to in the EU market? This would make it easier for everyone. I don't get why it always is just the talk about "open it up" - that would be a start in terms of interoperability, no doubt, but that isn't the solution is it?
> Assume everything is open now - wouldn't that create chaos?
Yeah, but equal chaos to all. In the end the achievable experience for Samsung and Apple earbuds need to be the same. It does not need to be the best one.
If Apple wants to have the best experience, they should create for each improvement a new API version and tell it in reasonable advance to their competitors to allow them to equal the playing field.
That's a valid point. Equal chaos to all I haven't thought about. It would still mean that Apple would dictate the terms of any changes, but it would open up the possibility to implement changes for everyone.
I dream of an alternate reality where Steve Jobs makes snide remarks about politics, sets things right with the App Store (worldwide), Siri, Ai and the lackluster UI and quality control of software lately. Steve would get on top of things and speak his mind and we were all better off for it.
There's a severe lack of character in Tim Cook, I think the best thing to come out under his reign is the M-series hardware and return to sane computer design. He's timid, and his penny pinching fuckery is costing Apple a lot of goodwill that's a lot more precious and harder to gain back.
Maybe it's a shareholder problem, whatever—the early 2000's spirit of Apple was splendid.
I admire Steve Jobs as a visionary as much as everyone else, but I never thought it was fair for people to keep discounting Tim Cook as the “lesser” man between the two. He was the one who took the company to a trillion dollar valuation. He took on the operations and supply chain work that no computer nerd or product visionary ever wants to take. He did the hard, unsexy work that no one wanted to do and yet people see him as worse for it.
Timid? Dude seems pretty ruthless by all anecdotes and how his company has operated. But he has a quiet demeanor and Southern accent, so many will assume he is weak and stupid. He seems to use it to his advantage.
Steve Jobs was an asshat and the restrictions Apple puts on their software are exactly in line with what he would've done. He was firmly against third party apps on the iPhone in the first place and had to be convinced to permit it. Everything Apple is doing right now is in line with what Apple was doing when Jobs was still around. He would've had plenty to talk about, but none of it would be about no longer infringing users' rights.
Back in the early 2000's when Apple was still the cool, alternative, underdog computer company, it did things very differently, but for the same reason as it always did: make a profit.
" I called this article "Apple Vs The Law" primarily in reference to the rule of law, about how it should be applied equally and fairly against all, no matter the size and influence of your company. I think some of these gatekeepers - above all Apple, do a lot to undermine this process, in some places genuinely damaging trust in democracy. Going out of their way to paint the DMA law and the EU as overstepping and extreme hurts its reputation, as does the invented rhetoric about it being the "great risk to privacy ever imposed to government" (China?), or that they're "acting without experts in the field". Similarly for the number of covertly funded and supported lobbying groups that they bring to regulators all around the world."
I’m a bit conflicted: when I used to care more about this freedom stuff say 10 years ago, I would have been more in favour of these regulations. Today I care less about that and more about security and I mostly think that Apple’s preferred approach is better for security than what the EU proposes. That said, I am not super happy about the rate of scams or junk in the App Store.
I think even for Americans who like the anti-gatekeeper regulations, you might worry about the precedent for the powers European governments get over these tech companies as the other thing they want is removing as much encryption as reasonably possible, which you may not want. Those changes seem quite unavoidable though so maybe it’s not worth thinking about them together.
The more damning thing IMO is the whole ‘America innovates Europe regulates’ trend. I think it seems pretty important that the EU (and U.K.) work out how to escape the anti-innovation troughs they have found themselves in. Or perhaps by 2050 the EU will largely be a tourist destination where citizens watch ads for the American tech companies to make profits to be highly taxed by the EU to fund subsidies for the German auto industry to sell cars to Americans and Chinese.
I think you are seeing it slightly skewed: in the past, for a variety of reasons, the US got at the forefront of tech and got even richer in some pockets of the country.
The EU and other countries had some pretty compelling competitors which got more or less slowly crushed by the US.
After over 30 years of this, a handful of the remaining US megacorps turned around and started fencing their own little profitable field, disallowing anyone else to even try to get in.
EU is the only non-purely adversarial entity to uphold laws also to these seemingly untouchable megacorps.
What I find weird is that there is a selective memory in people who are either from the US or pro-big businesses where on one side they are openly against these claims the EU makes (calling them anti-innovation) while also being a fervent supporter of "liberal" policies like medicaid, right to repair, warranties and such. As if they do not realise that they stem from the exact same place, and often they do come directly from Europe.
I'm at a point where I believe that if someone is against what the EU is doing against these megacorps (not saying everything the EU does is gold btw) has either A) vested interest in such companies, B) hates the concept of EU and anything it touches, C) they are rich and don't really care about anything, D) not very bright.
Today I care less about that and more about security and I mostly think that Apple’s preferred approach is better for security than what the EU proposes.
This is mostly a false dichotomy that Apple likes to push. macOS has strong security with sandboxing, code signing, malware scanning, etc. I have never encountered someone among my direct acquaintances who had their Mac compromised. Yet, it's perfectly possible to make an alternative app store, circumvent code singing, etc. on a Mac.
Even with the freedom of an EU iPhone, you can still choose to completely stay in the Apple ecosystem and pretend that the extra freedoms that you have gained aren not there.
The thing is that Apple knows that people will purchase from an alternative reputable store if the prices are lower because the margins are lower. Or that developers will move there because they can increase their margins. And then Apple will actually have to compete on price (app store fee) and features.
It has very little to do with security and mostly with Apple wanting to keep their 15%/30% because it's hugely profitable.
the precedent for the powers European governments get over these tech companies as the other thing they want is removing as much encryption as reasonably possible
This does not make any sense at all. Why would you remove encryption, you could just accept an additional root certificate as a user and be protected by the same encryption.
I think it seems pretty important that the EU (and U.K.) work out how to escape the anti-innovation troughs they have found themselves in.
We are doing fine, we just don't believe in profit over everything. Moreover, the current US tech feudalism makes it harder to innovate and develop competitors, because you only get to do what the feudalist overlord permits you to do. Regulation is necessary to make it a fair marketplace again.
No they aren't. They sync almost all of your data across the both of them; that's touted as a benefit of the Apple Ecosystem. Your juicy iPhone data is directly accessible via the linked Mac.
A better argument is that Macs are less popular and thus less targeted.
I dispute the data syncing somewhat: I think my phone somehow ‘knows’ more eg online banking credentials than my Mac. But also the different population sizes is the main reason that iPhones are juicier targets. I don’t think you’re really disagreeing with me. Perhaps I should have said that iPhone exploits are more valuable than Mac exploits.
FWIW, I was speaking yesterday with a friend who works on Big Tech antitrust at the European Commission, and he surprised me by telling me he considers Apple the worst of a rum lot, followed by Meta, Amazon then Google.
I attended the workshop remotely (one of my questions is in the recording, if you watched it) and IMO it was mostly a waste of time. I didn't even stick around past the App Store section. Partly because it was daytime CEST but mostly because the format was awful. Apple would spend half the time talking about how the EU was forcing them to make their OS worse and then the EC thought it was a good idea to make Q&A a batched thing so Apple could just talk for five minutes about none of the questions instead of actually being forced to answer anything. I was thinking the EC would ask questions like why nobody actually used the provisions that Apple so generously provided third party developers (obviously, because Apple designed them to be unworkable) but they mostly just stayed silent and let the Apple lawyers talk the entire time :(
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 79.3 ms ] threadBy playing it the way they did, with their public statement against the regulator, and half implementation clearly done to be non cooperative on purpose and all, they put themselves in a very different fight, now the question has nothing to do with this or that regulation, it becomes does Apple need to respect EU law to sell product in the EU. That's all there is to it anymore, by making it about compliance and who has a stronger grip, they forced themselves there; and it's obviously a fight the EU is not going to back down from (nor is it going to lose it).
I compare that to many moves from Meta, Google, Microsoft, ... Who played the same but knew when to back down and either do it or argue in a more court and legalese oriented manner.
I'm not sure why Apple leadership played it that way, maybe they have a stronger belief in the US administration ability to strongarm the EU into accepting a loss there, but at the point it's at, it has very little to do with the content of the regulation.
There's nothing complex and impossible about removing some "if" statements responsible for code signature enforcement.
EU looks set to be the only big enough institution with any spine or willingness to take this on. Will probably take years if it ever happens due to all this legal dance bullshit, but I really hope they win eventually, even if it’s just for the benefit of EU citizens (of which I am, sadly, not).
From the conclusion:
> Normally when the EU regulates a given sector, it does so with ample lead time and works with industry to make sure that they understand their obligations.
> Apple instead thought that the regulatory contact from the EU during the lead time to the DMA was an opportunity for it to lecture the EU on its right to exist. Then its executives made up some fiction in their own minds as to what the regulation meant, announced their changes, only to discover later that they were full of bullshit.
> This was entirely Apple’s own fault. For months, we’ve been hearing leaks about Apple’s talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were. Talks like those are to help companies implement incoming regulations, with some leeway for interpretation on the EU’s side to accommodate business interests.
> Remember what I wrote about electrical plugs? The EU is pro-business – often criticised for being essentially a pro-business entity – and not in favour of regulation for regulation’s sake.
> If Apple had faced reality and tried to understand the facts as they are, they would have used the talks to clarify all of these issues and more well in advance of the DMA taking effect.
> But they didn’t because they have caught the tech industry management disease of demanding that reality bend to their ideas and wishes.
Tim Sweeney is the only billionaire and computer scientist who's actually fighting against inequality. The big difference between him and folks like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Marc Benioff, is that while those billionaires talk about universal basic income to make up for the mass layoffs their tech is going to cause, Tim's out there fighting monopolies, hiring people, building tools for developers, and making games. That's why his HQ isn't in San Francisco. He's the only one who hasn't been brainwashed by VCs or sold out to greed.
He speaks for millions of computer scientists who don't live in the Valley and are using their knowledge of maths and physics to build things that help people, not hurt them. Because let's be honest, a future where billionaires keep getting richer and computer scientists are out of work, scraping by on UBI, begging billionaires for $10 more bucks a month, is a feature no one wants. And when I say "we" I mean myself, my colleagues, and all my students.
Tim, thank you. You inspired a whole generation. Keep fighting against Apple, Google and corporate greed!
Inequality matters.
> "They managed to convince the courts that iPadOS is a separate operating system to iOS (it's not), which delayed iPadOS being designated as a gatekeeper for almost a year. They are currently challenging all of the rest: the iOS, Safari, and App Store designations, and successfully managed to avoid iMessage being designated at all. They have taken the DMA law to court for an apparently ambiguous comma in article 5(4) - the payment one, and for somehow infringing on human rights law in article 6(7) - the interoperability one."
Looking at the actual filing[1], Apple says:
> "First plea in law, alleging that Article 6(7) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 is inconsistent with the requirements of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and the principle of proportionality, and that Article 2(b) of the European Commission Decision of 5 September 2023 is unlawful insofar as it imposes the obligations under Article 6(7) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 on Apple in relation to iOS."
For context, here are the full contents of Article 6(7):
"The gatekeeper shall allow business users and alternative providers of services provided together with, or in support of, core platform services, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features, regardless of whether those features are part of the operating system, as are available to, or used by, that gatekeeper when providing such services."
[1] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsession...
I'm starting to think about legal battles as a way to refine and improve laws/practices.
Expensive, though, but necessary.
Written with sarcasm.
I am sorry but the argument that an app store and browser are comparable in terms of amount of spam is a deluded take. The core argument seems to be that since app store allows installing anything, so should browsers. The kind of changes that would benefit a smaller % of smart population, to the detriment of anyone else who can be convinced by a text to download any kind of content on their phone. The ones who push it would want it, but these are the kind of "features" on android that prevents me from giving my parents an android phone.
Why am I being so absolutist? Well, because we know this to be the case thanks to the Epic injunction compliance brouhaha. Employee slack chats show quite clearly that the "scare screens" were deliberately worded in a way that would deter any users from pursuing the linkout payment option, while we now know that it was all a ruse to prevent that option from ever being competitive with Apple's 30% IAP, only for economic (monopolistic) reasons.
We now have court-affirmed precedent of Apple intentionally using privacy and security as a veneer for darker, anticompetitive motives. After that, there's not much more to honestly debate.
The EU is fundamentally a centre-right, liberalist, pro-business coalition, but what that means is that it is pro-competition. What's really impressive is that it seems to mostly refrain from devolving into protectionist policies, giving no preferential treatment to European businesses against international (intercontinental?) competitors, despite strong populist tendencies in certain member states.
Merely doing monopoly regulation won't help. We have to actually destroy the monopolies.
With the JEDI contracts ect that is basically what is happening to Google, MS and AWS.
From now on I'm an Android user and only building PWAs.
I'm not sure how we could enforce that, but maybe the law could stipulate that a certain minimum percentage of users must use 3rd party app stores, or use web apps. They should pay a fine if less than say 5% of apps are distributed outside the app store, or if less than 5% of people use a 3rd party browser engine.
Regardless, I wanted to point out the obvious: each new broad regulation increases the cost of operating in the market where said regulation applies. The gatekeepers of today might not leave, but every new potential newcomer will calculate is it even worth it to operate in a market like that? Maybe it pays off to invest hundred of millions into lawyers and lobbying instead of technologies? Or maybe we'll skip EU market altogether (for reference, according to a courtroom statement Apple gets 7% of their revenue from Europe)
The solution is pretty simple: Apple is no longer allowed to run an "App Store" or distribute a pre-installed web browser. This part can be split apart as a separate company if they prefer that to shutting it down. When you look at Apple's taxable income, most of it goes to Ireland. It's very bizarre to call a company that makes everything in China and holds all of its IP in the EU a US company. It isn't.
Apple does what the Chinese government tells it to (see Apple in China by Patrick McGee.) If they pulled the EU stuff over there, Apple would cease to have new hardware to sell.
I’m curious: if Apple and Google are using workshops as delay tactics, what’s the EC’s real enforcement power here? Are small fines enough leverage or do we need tougher mechanisms, like mandatory timelines or public transparency on third-party integrations?
Apple's implementation is overtly malicious. This malice is a publicly-known, conscious effort on the part of some of their trashier employees to make it as malicious as possible to please their execs ("Ohh, keep going").
All you need for "rule of law" is an independent judicial entity to notice this. Why give them months and months "to comply", when everyone on Earth knows they have no intention to? Why turn up the fines slowly, when we all know we're headed all the way to the seizure of 10% of global turnover in 4 years? Why are we all pretending not to know the end-state?
Apple Watch for example gets a huge boost from being the only wearable that integrates with iOS. But it has a lot of quality issues, and is by far the worst Apple product in my opinion. Apple would have a lot more incentive to improve it if they had to compete with other smart watches on a level playing field.
Are you referring to notifications on the Apple Watch? If yes, you can control them by app and decide which ones you want (or don’t want) on the watch. The default is to “Mirror my iPhone”.
You can change the notification settings for Apple Watch by app in the Watch App, opening the Notifications menu (the very first one below the watch faces) and then scrolling down to the apps.
The only exception to this is I bought the game, Vampire Survivors, no wait. It was free. (because of clones in the app store) Anyway.
The funny thing is I do actually have like 100 (free) apps installed. I just never use any of them except for Brave. I basically immediately forget about them the second I install them because just using them is so awkward. They know they have a usability problem but they can't really square it with their massive app ecosystem except in the most slowest, methodical way possible. In the meantime, more UI annoyances are popping up twice as fast.
iPhone used to compete well a decade ago in usability for things like copying text from a webpage into an email. Despite the phone being much larger, I find it much more difficult to do today, perhaps because selecting text is just so unpredictable with the way web standards have become a pile of cruft. Despite whose fault it is, ultimately it's much worse now. I would only bother trying that on a desktop today unless absolutely necessary.
Sometimes text just becomes impossible to edit in certain circumstances. There's like three different things that can happen on a tap and hold and none of them are consistent. It feels absolutely random which one it does. I used to be able to select text from images, now I have to go through two to three cycles of "hold tap menu" -> "select text from image" until it works. It actually still works fine on my old iPad. How is the regression this bad?
Let's stick with earbuds or watches, where the argument (e.g. Garmin) is that they can't create functionally equal devices to AirPod / Apple Watch, because not all APIs are open. I understand this point, since yes, Apple has a lot of internal implementation that only Apple can use for their devices. What I don't understand is the EU's standpoint of "just opening it up(!)". Let's say Apple would allow everyone to use all APIs to communicate with their AirPods/Apple Watches. Assume everything is open now - wouldn't that create chaos?
Another vendor could implement everything Apple does and release similar AirPods or Watch with whatever hardware quality - but what happens when Apple changes their internal implementation? Changes the implementation every week, because they optimize for THEIR devices. There is no official ISO standard, Bluetooth standard or whatever standard they are adhering to, they would just open up their implementation. I assume the EU would then say "this is against the spirit of the DMA, do not change your implementation so often", but this would seem like a very long cat and mouse game (it already is a very long process).
Why doesn't the EU define some interoperability requirements that gatekeepers need to adhere to in the EU market? This would make it easier for everyone. I don't get why it always is just the talk about "open it up" - that would be a start in terms of interoperability, no doubt, but that isn't the solution is it?
Yeah, but equal chaos to all. In the end the achievable experience for Samsung and Apple earbuds need to be the same. It does not need to be the best one.
If Apple wants to have the best experience, they should create for each improvement a new API version and tell it in reasonable advance to their competitors to allow them to equal the playing field.
There's a severe lack of character in Tim Cook, I think the best thing to come out under his reign is the M-series hardware and return to sane computer design. He's timid, and his penny pinching fuckery is costing Apple a lot of goodwill that's a lot more precious and harder to gain back.
Maybe it's a shareholder problem, whatever—the early 2000's spirit of Apple was splendid.
I still see unopenable devices, batteries glued to death and even more closed systems. Next they reverted to liquid glass UI, is that sane?
Back in the early 2000's when Apple was still the cool, alternative, underdog computer company, it did things very differently, but for the same reason as it always did: make a profit.
I think even for Americans who like the anti-gatekeeper regulations, you might worry about the precedent for the powers European governments get over these tech companies as the other thing they want is removing as much encryption as reasonably possible, which you may not want. Those changes seem quite unavoidable though so maybe it’s not worth thinking about them together.
The more damning thing IMO is the whole ‘America innovates Europe regulates’ trend. I think it seems pretty important that the EU (and U.K.) work out how to escape the anti-innovation troughs they have found themselves in. Or perhaps by 2050 the EU will largely be a tourist destination where citizens watch ads for the American tech companies to make profits to be highly taxed by the EU to fund subsidies for the German auto industry to sell cars to Americans and Chinese.
The EU and other countries had some pretty compelling competitors which got more or less slowly crushed by the US.
After over 30 years of this, a handful of the remaining US megacorps turned around and started fencing their own little profitable field, disallowing anyone else to even try to get in.
EU is the only non-purely adversarial entity to uphold laws also to these seemingly untouchable megacorps.
What I find weird is that there is a selective memory in people who are either from the US or pro-big businesses where on one side they are openly against these claims the EU makes (calling them anti-innovation) while also being a fervent supporter of "liberal" policies like medicaid, right to repair, warranties and such. As if they do not realise that they stem from the exact same place, and often they do come directly from Europe.
I'm at a point where I believe that if someone is against what the EU is doing against these megacorps (not saying everything the EU does is gold btw) has either A) vested interest in such companies, B) hates the concept of EU and anything it touches, C) they are rich and don't really care about anything, D) not very bright.
This is mostly a false dichotomy that Apple likes to push. macOS has strong security with sandboxing, code signing, malware scanning, etc. I have never encountered someone among my direct acquaintances who had their Mac compromised. Yet, it's perfectly possible to make an alternative app store, circumvent code singing, etc. on a Mac.
Even with the freedom of an EU iPhone, you can still choose to completely stay in the Apple ecosystem and pretend that the extra freedoms that you have gained aren not there.
The thing is that Apple knows that people will purchase from an alternative reputable store if the prices are lower because the margins are lower. Or that developers will move there because they can increase their margins. And then Apple will actually have to compete on price (app store fee) and features.
It has very little to do with security and mostly with Apple wanting to keep their 15%/30% because it's hugely profitable.
the precedent for the powers European governments get over these tech companies as the other thing they want is removing as much encryption as reasonably possible
This does not make any sense at all. Why would you remove encryption, you could just accept an additional root certificate as a user and be protected by the same encryption.
I think it seems pretty important that the EU (and U.K.) work out how to escape the anti-innovation troughs they have found themselves in.
We are doing fine, we just don't believe in profit over everything. Moreover, the current US tech feudalism makes it harder to innovate and develop competitors, because you only get to do what the feudalist overlord permits you to do. Regulation is necessary to make it a fair marketplace again.
A better argument is that Macs are less popular and thus less targeted.
This is the wish of a vocal, but powerless minority, not an actual law. It often gets misused as anti-EU FUD.