The difference is that Apple is not a government.
That means they are not an organization which can legally stop, detain, arrest, charge, prosecute, convict, imprison, and kill you.
That means they are not an organization which can legally stop, detain, arrest, charge, prosecute, convict, imprison, and kill you.
Apple is a private organization with a corporate charter, owned by shareholders, controlled by its Board of Directors and with the ability to engage in lawful business activity, with none of the powers that governments have. They don’t have jurisdiction, they have stores. They don’t make laws, they write policies. They don’t levy taxes, they trade. The fees of the App Store are a known quantity, and you can take them or leave them.
So in that light, does it still make sense to try to control Apple like a government entity or treat them like some kind of pseudo-government or rhetorically refer to their business practices using language we use to describe governments? Why do we demand so much more accountability from governments including supranational intergovernmental treaty organizations controlled by governments than we do from private shareholder owned and controlled organizations? Honestly think about it.
Still doesn’t have any physical police authority.
Lastly unlike US countries can still leave EU. If they make it illegal to leave then I'd worry, but until then the local government always comes first, since if EU pressures them too much they'd just leave.
Who is collecting all of these GDPR fines if not the national governments?
It has limited executive functions but it does have some. It even has courts.
You sure about that? I’m open to the idea, but I don’t see it. A sui generis government that doesn’t perfectly fit the mold of prior systems is still a government. Maybe a more apt description is a government of governments? Sell me on your take.
For now, the EU does have indirect ways of enforcing EU-wide legislation, as individual member countries will implement EU directives and enforce them. Thus, laws written in Brussels could result in people getting arrested, even if it ended up being a Dutch or Polish police officer doing the actual arresting.
The EU does, however, tend to stick to things that result in economical sanctions and fines, rather than incarceration.
Apple, on the other hand, has no such legislative powers.
That means they are not an organization that is accountable to the public. That means they are an organization that cares more about profit and market share, than about human/civil rights.
Of course my local coffeeshop also represents their owner (no idea if they have share holders), so what's the difference with Apple? Size. I don't know what your local coffeeshop is like, but mine is not a trillion dollar company. Apple is. And Apple's products are used by millions of people all over the world. That means Apple wields a lot of power. They may not be able to lock you in prison, but they are able to block or restrict your usage of your electronic devices. They have a lot of power over other companies that want to provide services through those devices.
And without regulation, all of that power is unchecked; they wield that power for the profit of their shareholders, not for the public good. They have in the past harmed users and companies because Apple saw a way to make more money by monopolising certain functionality.
Each has one thing in common though: if you don’t like their crap, you don’t buy it. If the coffee sucks or you can’t install the software you want, you buy something else. Apple’s power is over the products they sold and the services they continue to provide after the purchase. You can install any kind of software that you can get working, what Apple doesn’t do is promise any kind of support for getting every type of software to run on the products they sold, nor are they obligated to. Those are the terms, they are fairly well known, you can take that information with you into the marketplace and choose from what’s available or try to scrape something together that will do the same thing from parts. Might not be as nice as Apple’s stuff, but it will have as much capability as you put into it.
I seriously don’t get the siren song of regulation as it is sung here. I see value in some laws, I don’t see value in laws as a reaction to every move a corporation makes to try to bend them to the public’s will. Corporations aren’t people, but they represent the private interests, time and money of real people, but that concept seems so abstract to people that they can treat large organizations as public bodies with all the responsibilities of something that has much more power over their lives and many more people under their employ which can abuse that power when in reality, Apple has no more power over your life than your coffee shop, just whatever power you choose to give it.
> You started by comparing Apple to a government.
I know these threads can run long and it is easy to list the thread but here is what I originally responded to:
>> Another interesting tidbit is the answer to the common trope that 'private platform can act as they wish since they are private' :
> Now the EU is saying the same thing to Apple. It is their market, and they dictate the rules. Which is perhaps a taste of Apple's own medicine?
> I wonder what those people who keep saying it is Apple's platform they can do what ever they want had to say?
I didn’t like the mindset this commentary reflected, in particular the idea that the EU or any of its member nations “own their markets” the way Apple owns the App Store, because that is dangerously close to saying governments own people. Markets are reflective of the individual choices of people. You can own the NASDAQ, but you can’t own the people trading on the NASDAQ and you don’t own the companies listed on the NASDAQ merely by owning the NASDAQ, but you can set the criteria by which you list companies on the NASDAQ.
A nation can have jurisdiction over its internal market, businesses, a place where their laws are enforced, and don’t get me wrong, their laws, good or bad, are still their laws. I won’t dispute that, but having jurisdiction is not the same as ownership, and the market is some kind of central body or organization you can own, it’s all the people in a market who trade with all the other people in a market, whether that market is a dozen people or all the people in the world.
Now there are some new regulations for bigger entities. What's the problem?
"Size" of business is an arbitrary and meritless distinction.
This is not a strong argument for the merits of “size” of business in the context of lawmaking. This demonstrates the privacy defects of what is a law enforcement tool intended for vehicle identification.
This is a baseless statement...
Apple owns 100% of the App Store, but they do not recognize 100% of the revenue from the App Store on their financials.
An arbitrary number of people like 45M EU citizens choosing to use your service or buy your products or shop in your stores? I don’t see the merits for this distinction.
Don’t get me started on antitrust laws.
Yes, and this is a key difference between Europeans and (at least the libertarian/SV type of) Americans.
We trust governments more than corporations because governments were elected by us. It's really a difference in culture.
I think we (Americans) don’t trust either without cause, and there’s more corporations than governments so there’s more opportunities to find corporations, actually scratch that, businesses, big or small, that we trust. But by default, I think we trust both about as far as we can throw them and businesses we do trust, maybe only slightly so and in a largely transactional manner. The question is whether we are getting value for the money, not whether the businesses and owners are trustworthy.
That said:
> The EU sees that it can effectively regulate corporations so they use their government the way it was intended to.
What is the basis for your claims on their effectiveness?
> Take minimum wage for example. Loads of economic research shows that federally mandated minimum of $15/hour would be good for the economy.
In what ways has it been shown it would be good for the economy?
How does it address the fact that the minimum wage is actually zero and unemployed is the real minimum wage? How does it help small retail stores that need a minimum number of bodies behind the counter when the store is open in order to stay in business?
I live in a place that did implement $15/hour minimum wage, and ultimately what is been slowly doing is making some businesses unviable. Even before the pandemic forced its closure, one of my favorite shops, one I used to work at in fact when I was younger and I’ve kept in touch since, was slowly going out of business because the owner needed two bodies behind the counter to ensure timely service and his costs were greater than >$30/hour once you factored in mandatory insurance costs and taxes in addition to the usual operational overhead of just being open 16 hours in the first place. What was once a perfectly viable business was already dying just from the extra labor costs alone, with the owner who had been in the business for over 30 years putting in longer hours and making less money just because he wanted to keep his crew employed. He also had to raise prices every single year to keep up with the additional costs. He kept it going, but by the end he was putting in more money than he was taking out, and the pandemic forced its closure when his insurance company wouldn’t pay out for the spoiled product.
The new owner changed business models, rather than freshly made on-site lunch, you get whatever was pre-made at her other business, no customizations, and the product and experience are completely different. The business under the original owner and the business under the new owner share a name, but they are essentially entirely different businesses.
And you know what? That’s business. That’s how things go sometimes, but could he have remained in business if his labor costs weren’t so high? I think he wanted to, and it’s not like he never issued raises. Each generation of staff typically had one or two people who were earning a lot more than the rest of the crew, greater than what the minimum wage eventually became even, because the earned it by making him more money.
The entire economy isn’t Walmart and Apple Stores, but the more costs you impose on businesses and the higher you raise the floor, the sooner it will be. It doesn’t matter if everyone ought to be able to afford 4oz of ice cream at $5, if fewer people are willing to pay for it at that price to cover the additional labor costs.
Small businesses will have to raise prices. But owning wage slaves isn’t justification enough for someone to run a small business.
Lastly, why this is good for the economy: you are free to do your own research but here is why this works. Give a billionaire an extra $1000/month and he will put it into his offshore account and never think about it again, let alone spend it. Give a poor person $1000/month and he will instantly put it back into the economy. This is why trickle down economy doesn’t work but stimulus programs do. If it was the other way around all the US government would have to do is hand over a few billion dollars to like five rich guys instead of negotiating stimulus deals every time there is a crisis. If you think that every time the working class is suffering the best thing to do is to prop up the rich then I, again, cannot understand for you why that’s wrong.
Re. effectiveness, see below. The EU has imposed a large number of regulations, some quite severe like the GDPR, and yet it didn’t fall apart. Not saying the GDPR is good as implemented or anything, just that despite its flaws it didn’t kill the economy or the EU, the perennial fear of right wing fear mongers.
I think you’re mixing cause and effect here. The government is a vehicle of power because it has power vested in it and it represents people who wield that power.
Voting is one such power, we vote on laws, sheriffs, representatives at many levels, senators, district attorneys, even for some damned foolish reason, judges. Not just POTUS. Whatever government we have at any point in time is pretty much the government we deserve because we put it there with our choices.
It’s naïve to think power will not be exploited though, and because the difference between the lawful powers of a government and the lawful powers of a private company are so vast and disparate, we’re a lot more concerned with curbing government power.
Any elected official is a person, not a mindless automaton, and people have interests which they can and do put above the public good almost all the time. It’s the exception when they do not, not the rule, even when it is only their own family. If an elected official or a bureaucrat employed by them can use the knowledge and experience and power they have to save a member of their own family or protect them, they bloody will. Similarly many will find ways to profit from their positions, I don’t know why we expect they won’t.
But hey, maybe all the elected officials and bureaucrats of the EU and it’s member nations are actually Angels sent down from Heaven to show the world how it is done. Great if that’s the case, but I wouldn’t put money on that.
Even when elected officials are not involved, people vote for bad laws all the time. California is one such place, San Francisco is another. We have the power to hang ourselves here, and we exercise that right regularly. It gets even worse because elected officials have realized they can punt anything remotely controversial onto the ballot box rather than exercise discretion and judgement in their own decision making, because doing so would make them accountable to their constituents.
You can rapidly substitute one corp for another in America which is probably preferable to being permanently ruled by 51% of the people.
And trust me, being ruled by the 1% would give you way better chances than you got with the 51%. The 1% took money and gave us sci-fi technologies, the 51% took absurdly more money and gave us many problems.
Who's your coronavirus counter-strike leader - Gates or Trump?
The rich don't want to eat you. They don't care about you. They want profit, just like you. They will spend a lot of it on pleasure, just like you. Nobody makes profit in the world you're talking about, it grinds to halt, without pleasure (and freedom is connected with that) there is no point in working.
You can also avoid the 1%. They don't care, and if you're saying there are no other options then you didn't look. Actually I recommend to try - you'll find out that small and middle businesses exist, and they need your support now.
Even where only profit is concerned, there are downsides to concentrating the power in the 1%. Tax laws getting optimized for growth of capital over redistribution, loopholes large enough to allow for intergenerational dynasties over equal opportunity, copyright getting extended to a hundred years with free-use exceptions getting killed left and right.
I see your point and the likes of Gates (post-Microsoft) would make a positive difference. On the other hand, I'd prefer Joe Biden over Peter Thiel. It's very much a case-by-case kind of thing.
French people have a long history of revolting against the political establishment, dating back to at least the French revolution, that makes them somewhat different than, say, Germany, where I live. So this is a fair point.
On the other hand, I would still think that throughout most of French history, and also now with the yellow vests, people rarely went to the streets to protest for "less regulation", and especially not in order to advocate for the interests of big corporations over those of the state. Yes, there was (is?) a French brand of anarchism, but that was always more of a "property is theft" kind of anarchism, and not a US-style libertarian anarcho-capitalism.
So, I think what I rather meant to say is the following: Most people in Europe trust the idea of a powerful government (even if they violently disagree with its current incarnation) much more than the idea of equally powerful private corporations.
Yes, it's true, we'd rather have a big government that runs the show than big corps (from overseas).
In fact Facebook threatened to leave the EU over a ban of sharing data with the US. I shall toast to the EU if this ever happens.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/889pk3/facebook-threatens-to...
I 100% agree but quite frankly i'm starting to feel like I'm missing out.
A lot of FAANG people are going to agree with most left-wing arguments but they won't renounce their fat paychecks.
Their argument is usually "if I'm not working for a FAANG company somebody else will do anyway" which looks quite shallow to me.
So in the meantime they get to look cool and forward-looking, actually contribute to the growth of many problems, and bring home a fat paycheck.