Apple rejects Valve’s Steam Link game streaming app over ‘business conflicts’
theverge.com
theverge.com
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-wont-sell-nest-product...
Sounds like the same behavior. Google has been known to replace whole other start-up services or de-list them.
"Yelp And TripAdvisor Team Up To Pile On Google Over Search Monopoly"
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/05/yelp-and-tripadvisor-team...
Android is a little better, but it's by no means totally free.
This sounds minor, but its absolutely a major reason why the stores aren't monopolies. I find it startling how few people on HN remember the fact that stores have a right to decide what they want to sell and not. We don't live in communist Russia. Walmart doesn't have to sell Whole Foods-branded food, H&M doesn't have to sell Mossimo clothes, Amazon doesn't have to sell Nest thermostats, Apple doesn't have to sell Pixel devices in their stores, and Google doesn't have to sell Adblocking software.
In every single one of these cases, its because the companies managing the stores have a business interest against selling the items.
Apple's case is different in a significant way. When they block a product from their store, they establish that none of the users on their systems are able to get the item legally. However, they can still use the argument that iOS is only one platform among any mobile platforms, they don't have a massive marketshare, and they aren't taking any actions in the realm of mobile platform adoption which could be construed as hostile against competition.
Moreover, the ad blocking features you get without root are a strict superset of the features that are possible at all on iOS.
You can do it without "circumventing the system software." Unlocking the system partition is a supported operation. Then just install a program that lets you run other programs as uid 0. This is not possible for normal apps to do because running as uid 0 means you are no longer subject to the permissions system.
Also, it's irrelevant because the whole point is that Google can't block the user from running whatever apps they like by blocking the app from the Play Store. Requiring root access is orthogonal to Play Store availability.
Users running their own apps as uid 0 goes directly against the security model. Nothing stops them from changing or completely discarding the security model on their own devices, but once again, that is completely orthogonal to blocking apps on the Play Store.
It is perfectly legal for Amazon to decide they don't want to carry Apple products in their store. If they decide they don't want to carry Apple products because they're releasing their own lines of phones and tablets, that may not be legal. Intent and context do matter.
To your first point, assuming Sherman is used, I believe US v Alcoa [1] is still the controlling case law. And you'd have a very hard time convincing a court that "smartphones made by Apple" constitute a product category over which it could have a 75%+ market share.
Or are there other laws under which action could be brought in this situation?
[0] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/articles/culture/total-share.med...
The day we give a person the right to sue a private company over their policies, we will essentially kill the free market.
Apple may own their property, but iOS-device owners own their devices, and Apple have no right to prevent them from running the software they wish to run on the devices they own.
Specifically it states: " The software (including Boot ROM code, embedded software and third party software), documentation, interfaces, content, fonts and any data that came with your iOS Device (“Original iOS Software”), as may be updated or replaced by feature enhancements, software updates or system restore software provided by Apple (“iOS Software Updates”), whether in read only memory, on any other media or in any other form (the Original iOS Software and iOS Software Updates are collectively referred to as the “iOS Software”) are licensed, not sold, to you by Apple Inc. (“Apple”) for use only under the terms of this License. Apple and its licensors retain ownership of the iOS Software itself and reserve all rights not expressly granted to you."
If a person has agreed to these terms, I don't see how they can complain about Apple's policies in the future. The same software that isn't owned by the person, but is Apple's, now refuses to run Steam Link. The person who agreed to such terms had it coming, you can't blame Apple for that.
Is this contract written in a way that provides equitable consideration to the user for the provisions that solely benefit Apple?
Doesn't seem like it.
The ability of Apple to include those take-it-or-leave-it terms suggests a dominant market position (strong market power) held by Apple, regardless of other mobile device platforms.
The license is a "Contract of Adhesion" "where the terms and conditions of the contract are set by one of the parties, and the other party has little or no ability to negotiate more favorable terms and is thus placed in a "take it or leave it" position.
While these types of contracts are not illegal per se, there exists a very real possibility for unconscionability." (Wikipedia)
with unconscionability being "a doctrine in contract law that describes terms that are so extremely unjust, or overwhelmingly one-sided in favor of the party who has the superior bargaining power, that they are contrary to good conscience. Typically, an unconscionable contract is held to be unenforceable because no reasonable or informed person would otherwise agree to it. The perpetrator of the conduct is not allowed to benefit, because the consideration offered is lacking, or is so obviously inadequate, that to enforce the contract would be unfair to the party seeking to escape the contract."
What do you mean? If one doesn't want to agree with such terms, there are quite many android alternatives, some of which even better than iPhone/iPad in certain aspects.
Take it or leave it...
The App Store is a service owned, operated and paid for by Apple, so they should certainly get to decide what they allow on it.
Apple is in a similar positon. A lot customers depend on iOS devices and I am not sure Apple should be allowed to exclude competitors from the App Store at its discretion.
The degree to which iOS is or isn't a "monopoly" has a lot to do with how much freedom Apple has to make decisions like this.
> If you don't like them, fine, quit using their services
Which, again, for companies with a dominant market position is an entirely unreasonable proposition. Hence, laws.
The fact is once a company reaches a certain size different rules do apply. Here Apple is definitely abusing their control over the ecosystem to lock out a competitor. The question is is this control great enough to prevent anyone from truly competing with Apple, which is what anti-trust law is designed to protect against.
Just like you can buy a cheap secondary phone for Steam Link, you can join another company's "free shipping membership program" to buy your Nest (or just pay shipping or get it locally, like you said).
Regardless, I think the distinction is less clear than you make out.
How does having prime lock you into Amazon, at all? You're not disallowed to shop elsewhere after signing up for Prime. You don't even have to sign up for someone else's "free shipping membership program" to buy your Nest.
You're argument doesn't work for me.
* Pay more for delivery because not using Amazon Prime
* Pay more to buy an Android phone
When making this argument it's obvious that buying a new phone is much more expensive than Amazon Prime but this raises an interesting question; what is the financial threshold at which point one has to be considered a monopoly?
To be clear, I think Apple is shortsighted in this decision and the Steam Link app isn't actually very competitive with native games. But I'm not its target audience either, even though I have a decent library of Steam games (50+).
My guess is that this move is not really about Steam Link but about the next company to come along with something like "play Android games on your iPhone" functionality.
This is seemingly worse since at least you could still install Netscape back then.
If Apple lets Amazon do this (presumably because Amazon is too big to ignore) and won't let Steam do it (because Steam isn't big enough), then this feels more like a cartel than monopoly.
The way this works with Amazon, is in the Amazon store app a user can buy ebooks/audiobooks (along with anything else Amazon sells), and then those books are sent to the Kindle app on iOS. There is no option to buy content directly in the Kindle app.
I also believe the apps cannot directly link to each other as that would circumvent the above.
EDIT
I just checked (it had been awhile) and it looks like you can no longer buy the books within the Amazon store app either, and can only get a sample.
A comment here said that Valve was open to disabling buying in the app and they are still banned. Hmm.
I can see how Apple's position to get some cut is reasonable, but we are talking multiplatform here. Was Valve unwilling to give Apple any cut at all? Was Apple insisting on too big a cut? What's going on?
In my other comment on this thread I've pointed out how this creates hilariously bad UX for iOS users.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#in-...
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#phy...
Admittedly it has been a few years since I was deeply in iOS development dealing with this.
Search for a book on Google. Click on an Amazon Kindle Search result. The Amazon iOS App launches and tries to find the book, realizes it's a Kindle result, launches Safari to show the result.
So the was trasitioned from Safari -> Amazon -> Safari pretty much because of petty politics from Apple. And all for what? A happy Kindle user isn't going to suddenly switch over to iBooks and you've just made life much worse for him.
The pettiness in the mobile platform wars is unbelievable.
Whoa there, consumers are not the only people who matter. Suppliers are often exploited by monopolies. Have you never heard of the Fair Trade movement? Please do not forget about the suppliers of your cheap shit you don't need.
"Microsoft has not made the browser upgrades necessary to enable a fully-featured YouTube experience, and has instead re-released a YouTube app that violates our Terms of Service - It has been disabled. We value our broad developer community and therefore ask everyone to adhere to the same guidelines"
https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/15/4624706/google-blocks-win...
My impression was Microsoft being arrogant. Besides, Windows 8/10 users could still access YT via web.
Having been a FF/NS/Mozilla browser user since the 90s, I know it's not nice to be treated like a 2nd class citizen. However, unlike the current Edge/IE users, I made a choice.
Not voting is a choice. Not educating yourself is a choice.
Choices have consequences.
However, I believe this instance was more a case of Microsoft scraping/ripping the youtube site, rather than continuing to collaborate with Google.
I'm sure if you or I did something like that, it would be blocked.
I really (at least used to) like Google but as a web developer/user who cares about competition who cares about the web ecosystem I'm starting to hope that relevant EU and US authorities will issue them a non-trivial fine for:
- intentionally working to destroy the third option on mobile phones as described above
- time and time again make their products feel slow in competing browsers
- abuse their position as the worlds most visited (?) website && ad reseller to advertise their own browser in a misleading way
No offense, but I won't support Edge on some stuff I build because very few people use it, and it's too much of a snowflake in some areas.
Note that this doesn't apply to general apps and sites, which should work with Edge more or less out of the box. I'm speaking specifically to cases where the Edge team has decided to ignore a standard and choose their business priorities over consistency.
When I calm down and think about it a bit, the original commenter's assertion that apple controls the app market is also flawed. I haven't checked the data lately myself, but I believe that most people use apps on android phones. (It's probably just that not many people on android like to PAY. Which can't really be said to be apple's fault.)
A better example is the amazon-google kerfuffle over chromecast/amazon devices. Can't recall who "started" it, but the end results is that amazon doesn't sell chromecast/google home, and google blocks youtube from amazon devices. Yes amazon initially did like MS, but eventually had a proper implementation and google still blocked it.
For example, none of the Google apps I have on my iPad support split-screen.
> a significant share
If it's only "a significant share" it's by definition not a monopoly.
That's not really true, things like the abundance of counterfeit goods on Amazon (the result of Amazon's policies and its position) are really bad for consumers.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/13/ios-and-samsung-market-sha...
[2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/05/02/apples-iphone-buc...
So Apple locks-in users to their platform (as is everyone else) then they are using the control they have over their user base to lock out competition.
This is the very definition of anti-competitive behavior.
If there was then patents, copyrights, trademarks, and fit of licensing, etc would all be wrong to the same degree.
Until a monopoly (or a collaborative effort by members of an oligopoly - in the case of price fixing) abuses these things we don’t care - and rightly so.
Plus, when it comes to media like movies, you really should complain about the movie studios & their licensing. That’s why Apple locks down videos - they have to or they wouldn’t be able to offer the content. You can see their free & easily shareable approach to music purchasing as a counter example to movies.
Patents and copyright exist novel and interesting works and ideas for a limited amount of time. It's an obvious argument that it would be anti-competitive to allow a giant competitor to steal novel ideas from their creators without recourse. It's not obvious to me how protecting serendipity is clearly anti-competitive.
Trademarks are in no way anti-competitive. They exist to support fair business practices, in particular to prevent malicious actors from falsely claiming they represent a business. It would be anti-competitive to allow anyone to steal your trademark and sell products under it.
If Apple had an open platform then they'd be required to compete on quality and services. Instead they lock-in users and lock-out competing services from even being able to exist in their platform. This is anti-competitive.
Note that I say this as a user with a MBP, iPhones, AppleTV, iPad, etc... I admit I would probably be fine switching to Android (for example) if I felt the quality of the platform was better without fear of not having access to other services (but IMO the quality isn't there).
Let's look within the platform itself, though. This is a platform en-composing millions upon millions of users across over a billion active devices (https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/26/10835748/apple-devices-ac...).
Apple leverages its control of the platform to give Apple services an advantage over the competition. If Apple is not careful this will almost certainly end in anti-trust litigation.
Apple does not make their services available on anything other than Apple devices, nor do they allow other providers on their devices.
Regardless of an open format for the content, I cannot choose to use another service without also completely changing platforms, and if I change platforms I cannot use Apple's service.
Secondly, you can absolutely use other services on Apple devices such as playing music bought from Amazon in the Amazon Music app, or using Pandora or Spotify. I use audible on my iPhone, and there's a perfectly usable kindle app. Apple Music works on Android, and you can transfer music bought in iTunes to any other device. Sure there are some limitations, there's no native iCloud client for Linux and it's support on Windows through iTunes is limited, but eh. There's a limit to what I think it's reasonable to expect them to do to make life more tolerable on other people's stuff.
Why do you think that? You are only arguing that "monopoly laws" should be called "oligopoly laws". These laws require abuse of a dominant market position, not a majority share.
What is monopolistic to you? Does it need to be over 50%? I don't think economists define it that way, they only argue that one company has excessive influence in a market, which means more power than the other companies in that market. That does seem to be true of Apple in the mobile app market.
Your statement reminds me of a reporter who said that Walmart can't possibly be a monopoly because it's revenues are "only" 5% of US consumer spending. It's scares me to death that a single company takes that much of the total, and it's silly to suggest that the largest company in the world by revenue can't possibly be a monopoly.
FWIW, the distribution of phones isn't the same as the distribution of revenue from apps. Apple brings in more app revenue than Google, even though more phones sold run Android.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/259510/revenue-distribut...
1) Market definition (to your point - in the tech world, this can get problematic very fast.) 2) Market share 3) Market share rank (i.e. 4% among a million competitors who all have <1% would be pretty significant) 4) Ease of entry into a market (i.e. Google gets a lot of scrutiny in the search market because of the consensus that to build a good search engine competitor, you need a lot of data for machine learning models, which a startup can't just get $ to buy and/or cleverly build with IP.) 5) Ease of customer switching 6) Pricing behavior ...among many others.
Historically, a lot of analysis & literature to demonstrate market dominance has been on elasticity of demand: e.g. if I as dominant company X adjust prices, and customer demand doesn't change (probably because there are no substitutes and/or the switching cost is too high,) then anti-trust regulators would probably be all on my ass. But in the tech world, new models are still being developed I think, as that concept is not 100% applicable.
It can have a local monopoly of course (and often does in many more rural areas) but that’s not the same.
I think I’ve been to a Walmart once in the last 10 years. I’m not even trying to avoid them: there’s no reason or need for me to go there and I have plenty of other (just as cheap) options.
That’s not a monopoly.
They’re a massive business and a dominant national brand but that’s also not a monopoly.
That said, your experience and you having other purchasing options isn't the only criteria, as @s3r3nity pointed out. Being on Hacker News probably means you're not in the lower 50% of the US population socioeconomically.
Being a massive business is precisely one way Walmart might be considered a monopoly. They're not a dominant national brand, they are the single largest global brand on the planet by revenue. The fact that if Walmart closed tomorrow, it would have a significant negative impact on the US economy is alone enough to warrant asking the question. When a company is "too big to fail" that automatically puts it in the potential monopoly category.
Also, there have been anti-trust cases against Walmart, some of which Walmart has settled. So it's really not super clear cut that Walmart isn't a monopoly.
Google regularly breaks their websites on browsers other than Chrome.
Amazon doesn't sell popular devices competing with their Kindle line, and doesn't make it easy to install apps using Google Play Services on their Kindle devices.
I'm suspicious of this given that both are shareholder-owned, eventually the shareholders are going to want a benefit too.
That's a strange thing to say in the context of digital games, where one of the biggest issues iOS game developers face is consumers not being willing to spend more than trifling amounts for games.
Google being the de facto gatekeeper to the web, able to enforce its own whims (such as AMP), "only benefits consumers"? Please.
There are enough alternatives to the iPhone.
Maybe if BMW or Toyota were the market leaders in infotainment hardware
I agree that these are monopolies, but it's interesting to me that the behavior in question is viewed as competitive and healthy when a company is small. The primary thing that makes the practice ridiculous is success; becoming so large that what were competitive behaviors become anti-competitive. The same things that people applauded Apple for when it was underdog 20 years ago, are now criticized.
The comparisons in other posts is not quite apples - to - apples (no pun intended) because you can't be a monopoly when you're not in a dominant market position.
Lastly, whether or not the examples you mention "benefit" customers today is irrelevant, as you need to consider the possibility that their dominant position would mean that they might not in the future (i.e. customers not acting in their best long-term interest, or companies leveraging their market dominance in the future for non-customer-centric behavior, etc.) Platitudes like "don't be evil" don't persuade me much.
Edit: don't know why folks are down-voting a comment about US anti-trust law.
Gaming in the apple eco system is horrible already but not even be allowed to stream?
Extremely stupid, Outright hostile
"Business conflict"? Now Apple suddenly becomes a real obstruction in my life and ultimately an enemy. This is switch to android level of bad.
I think I'll clip and save this comment to demonstrate to my students the definition of an "overreaction."
I don't think there's any "secret sauce" in the Steam in-home streaming that's actually proprietary/private. It's just a H264 video stream in one direction and controller button presses in the other, over a custom made low latency protocol.
Given Apple and Valve seemed to be working together to bring VR to the Mac recently, I'm surprised they weren't given any leeway at all.
Of course the angriest out there will simply claim it was the result of Apple buckling to public outcry rather than self-correcting over a mistake or misunderstanding, but then those people will always choose to see malevolence in any corporate actions they don't like.
I am guessing anyway
This is a very strange decision.
That alone isn't exactly competition against the first-party's store.
Or just the regular Steam app. Check the screenshot page on the AppStore and you'll see the store with prices and all.
So now it is totally possible, you just must avoid iPads (face palm)
Essentialy Apple want force me buy some android tablet, smart move...
Does iPad even support Xbox1/PS4/steam controllers? Last time I checked, at least PS4 gamepads did not work on ios. Without those (certainly Xbox and PS4 ones), I’m not sure I’d want to stream games onto an iPad anyway (not that this makes it better, if anything it makes it worse).
Adding the 3rd largest app store in the US to iOS was always going to be a seizmic shift on the App Store and could cannibalise large parts of the iOS game category.
https://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/john-carmack-steve-jobs...
Curated stores are a great idea but there has to be an alternative.
"Look at how loyal and useful I am to the company. I saw this revenue-threatening thing in the news and I killed it."
The lack of a premium "please give us a representative we can negotiate this with and get an actual explanation from" tier is a serious problem.
This is some creepy-[girl/boy]friend level of control.
Congratulations, you've succeeded in pissing off any Apple fan who enjoys gaming while thinking that a PC app running on the phone with some amount of latency and resolution loss (not to mention likely illegible onscreen UI elements depending on how things are rendered) is somehow going to compete with a native iOS app.
It's not like mobile games are competing with desktop games.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/24/17392470/apple-rejects-va...
Apart from not supporting googles effort to control the web, the amp page loads slower than the original and has a ridiculous “cookie agreement” with a button that doesn’t work.
Also, my understanding is that all amp pages have to load the required js from an amp project cdn, which is ultimately a google cdn.
And yes, it most definitely does load slower for me - I have nothing but a blank white page for several seconds.
This is quite obviously an error state, likely caused by an extension of yours. Have you tried using Amp in a fresh install of a different browser? Using different network settings?
It seems very likely that you are the reason amp doesn't work for you.
And this is coming from an amp hater.
I'm trying to find something similar for Chrome, but all I'm coming up with is extensions to redirect to AMP. Anyone up for some monopolistic behavior?
https://i.imgur.com/dK73MUi.png
Is this really GDPR compliant?
No, it's not.
I would think this would make my browsing experience even more cumbersome. Is there no alternative?
These purposes do not need Consent. You don't need to Consent to a retailer knowing your credit card number when you use the card to buy something. You don't need to Consent to Amazon knowing your delivery address when you buy stuff.
Consent comes in when you and the Subject both want to enable processing that isn't necessary. For example, if I buy a book from Amazon, it makes sense that I'd get a confirmatory email saying I ordered the book, and they're agreeing to sell it to me, and another one saying the book has been shipped and will be with me in 2-4 days. Those feel pretty necessary. But why would I get email about how great Amazon's new Fire tablet is? Well, Amazon could try asking me for Consent to send that sort of crap to me.
The GDPR is clear that you can't insist on implied Consent, you can't have "By visiting this web page I consent" or "To stop receiving our marketing, just unselect the default-selected boxes in the marketing permissions sub-section of your user profile, this may take up to 400 years to take effect" or similar nonsense. It needs to be a clear informed choice to give you this extra permission.
Some of the specifics will get litigated. I'm sure somebody will try to claim it's "necessary" to their business to track people and sell everything they possibly can, and I expect European courts to decide that's laughable nonsense.
Is that a typo? Isn't GDPR the implementation of the right to be forgotten plus "left-the-fuck-alone after used your shitty site for 0.5 EUR to buy an emoji"? So you can request removal of all your personal information.
Yes, Amazon needs your delivery and billing address, but they don't need the delivery address after delivery. So you can request them to delete it pronto! And the billing stuff has to be kept for 5 years, and must be used for tax administration purposes only, no spam, etc.
EU probably won't give a big shit about a tracking cookie, because you can delete that. But if Data Controllers won't perform proper delete/anonymization, then shit will find and maximize the action potential, even if there's a rotating blade in the way.
Under the GDPR Amazon can't say "Oh, we told our customers we collected email addresses to send them stuff about their delivery, but now we've decided to use those to seed our Orbital Weapons Robots. So we'll just update our T&Cs and done, right?"
If they decide now they want email addresses for the Orbital Weapons Robots they're going to have to collect from scratch. Too bad, ask first.
https://www.tumblr.com/privacy/consent?redirect=https%3A%2F%...
They can block the EU entirely (after deleting all data they may have on EU subjects) or implement a compliant privacy policy. This is not. (if you click on the policy link, they will lie that it is in accordance with GDPR, but very clearly it is not).
Sorry.
Who pays the verge for the reporting that you wish to read?
Is this verge reporting on this article made for free, by a volunteer, etc?
Or were they paid?
OK, so the Verge is a business, who has to make money.
How do they make money? Are you paying them to read this article? No?
So they sell advertisements to make money to show you content.
" I'm sure somebody will try to claim it's "necessary" to their business to track people and sell everything they possibly can"
In this case, tracking you through cookies for advertising purposes seems to be a "necessary" part of the verge, as it is literally a core aspect of the monetization strategy to offer free content in exchange for tracked advertising, as they explain in the pop-up.
No ads = no content. I can't see a European court claiming that Europeans have a right to free content in violation of the monetization strategy of the author. At the end of the day, verges servers are private servers and you do have to agree to their terms of use before connecting to their servers. In this case, the terms of use of connecting to a verge server for free articles is advertising tracking.
Good luck suing them, but what would be the end game? Ruin their business model?
Newspapers and magazines charges a subscription. Are you suggesting we should now charge Europeans a subscriptions where we do not for others? I'm ok with that. Don't want tracking? Then give me your credit card and subscribe, or there's the door.
Plus, nearly all newspapers are in economic free fall, advertising was completely destroyed by the internet, and there are almost no newspapers which are in the "green" without having an internet product or being owned by a larger corporation.
I don't understand this type of thinking from some of the posters here on HN, as if GDPR is right now personally affecting you in a negative way. It's a very aggressive way of writing and I've seen a few posters comment in this way.
If you want an example of a company that does non-personalised advertising and is successful: DuckDuckGo.
That's very presumptuous.
b) If you are running a website and don't wish us 'thieving Europeans', then don't allows traffic from Europe.
This is the perplexing thing about your seemingly apoplectic rage on this topic. There are options available for these companies who still want to track people individually.
Calm down.
Newspapers and other sources of information ARE having a horrible time and it going to get worse.
BUT the solution to the revenue problem - aka advertising - is now a problem in its own right and driving the creation of content to keep itself going.
All of our major information problems trace back to 3 related things.
1) the makeup of our wetware
2) advertising as a way to subsidize/pay for content
3) the vicious cycle of increasingly louder techniques to grab audience attention, ranging from “sex sells”, partisan news, product placements, and invasive online ads.
That is not how GDPR defines "legimitate interest".
Even if it is less effective, you can serve ads without tracking users via cookies. Therefore it isn't legitimate.
For an explanation see: https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/legitimat...
> No ads = no content
True, but this isn't about serving ads or not, but about tracking individuals.
You can serve ads without user profiling, which is what TV stations have been doing since the invention of the TV. You can even infer certain demographics from the content, which should be enough to hit a target. Articles on publications like The Verge emit tons of signals about who their readers are. Consider just the profile of the website. You don't actually have to track individuals.
It's also true that tracking individuals can yield better profits, although I have my doubts about that. It's also true that, due to abuse, ads are less and less effective, but this is a race to the bottom so might as well stop it now, instead of permitting these companies to collect data that can be abused later.
But yes, if there has to be an end game, the end game IMO is for companies that are doing user tracking to fuck off and do something else.
Are you another American? We seem to keep having Americans who have this idea that the regulation is about lawsuits. I understand that in the US the law enforcement regime is so broken that you end up with "Sued for wrongful death" rather than "Prosecuted for murder" and "Sued for breach of constitutional rights" rather than "Prosecuted for rape" and so on ad infinitum, but everybody else with the rule of law didn't replace their courts with elected politicians and their cops with a violent gang so they still actually have criminal law.
The GDPR doesn't create a new civil tort or anything like that, its an EU regulation, disobeying is a crime so the relevant government agency could _prosecute_ if they can't get you to obey.
The European courts don't have to decide that Europeans have a "right to free content", only that this business model in which you track people without permission isn't legal.
Suppose I have a great idea for a business, I'm going to set up a stall, I'll sell bottles of Coca-Cola for 10¢ each. Obviously at this price I can't buy them wholesale, but no problem, per your agreement that I have "to make money" I will just take them from the bottling plant. Simple.
The court doesn't care about how I needed "to make money", they care that it's a crime to steal the bottles, and I'll go to jail. Oh my 10¢ Coke bottle stall doesn't work as a business if I have to pay wholesale costs instead of just taking the bottles? Well boo hoo.
For an explanation see: https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/legitimat...
Basically you can say that a company doing home deliveries needs your home address to do so, therefore that's a legitimate interest. But note the same company cannot use your address for sending marketing materials.
And publishers cannot claim to have a legitimate interest in tracking users, even if their revenue comes from serving ads and even if their performance improves by tracking. That is because you can serve ads and do optimizations without tracking users. Even if it is less effective, it's not legitimate.
And it's not that complicated, really. The question is, by providing the service, does the user expect you to use his data or not? In case of pizza delivery, the customer does expect you to use his address for delivering pizza, but at the same time the customer doesn't expect you to give his address to other companies or to use his address for sending marketing materials.
That's basically what CBSi are doing. They are claiming "Necessary Cookies are required for our sites, products, and services to function properly", where "necessary cookies" includes:
> Google Analytics / Adobe Analytics / comScore / Akamai / Nielsen / Evidon / Moat / Cedexis / Chartbeat / Index Tag Manager / Tealium Tag Manager / Google Ad Serving
Edit: Missing "
The imgur one that gets displayed is very good by comparison, except arguably some of those options shouldn't be pre-ticked.
For the time being I added these to uBlock:
www.theverge.com##.privacy-consent-notice
www.theverge.com###privacy-consent-ui
www.theverge.com###privacyConsent
Not sure if I'm now doing something illegal or they are, since I never consented but they're probably tracking my visits now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
/s
(though honestly it wouldn't surprise me if they tried that argument...)
www.theverge.com###privacy-consent-ui
www.theverge.com###privacyConsent
www.theverge.com##.privacy-consent-notice
It’s been upvoted at least 40 times, but appears at the bottom of the comments and is collapsed-by-default.
What’s the deal, HN?
"Troll" comments get removed with an explanation.
This is clearly different from a remote desktop app.
I'm 100% sure this would be allowed back in if they built it without the ability to make purchases...
Not saying I agree with it but a Company such as Valve should know this is going to happen.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-apple-steam/apple-blocks-s...
If they are blocking the app and there is absolutely no way for people to purchase and play games then I think apple are in the wrong.
You can then play that content within the iOS app. All in direct competition with iTunes.