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Comment by bertman | Hacker News Reader

>[...]Alphabet, Microsoft and Samsung provided sufficiently justified arguments showing that these services do not qualify as gateways for the respective core platform services.

The mental gymnastics, corporate/lawyer double speak and lobbying efforts in those argumentations must have been absolutely insane.

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That's only for Gmail, outlook.com, and samsung browser. It is possible to argue that these are not gateways without mental gymnastics.

It is fairly easy to migrate out of Gmail and outlook to another email provider. Not self host, but that's a different issue.

Samsung browser... Don't know any sites which only work in Samsung browser.

Yes and no. Isn’t there an argument that Gmail and Outlook.com (combined with Microsoft 365/Exchange Online), while superficially interoperable, have enough market share that their actions make running other mail providers very difficult in practice?

> Isn’t there an argument that Gmail and Outlook.com (combined with Microsoft 365/Exchange Online), while superficially interoperable, have enough market share that their actions make running other mail providers very difficult in practice?

Yes, there is an argument to be made for that. I personally agree with that viewpoint. But that doesn’t mean arguing against it is “mental gymnastics”. It’s possible for reasonable people to disagree about things.

Indeed. I hope the EU revisits this soon.

The "as gateways for the respective core platform services" is the important part here.

The linked page states in its very first sentence:

> The European Commission has today designated, for the first time, six gatekeepers - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft - under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

That was about Gmail and Outlook. One obvious distinction is that they're already federated services that interoperate with a massive ecosystem of third parties, so there's not much need for regulation to force that interoperability.

Except for the problems self-hosters have with Gmail and Outlook silently rejecting their emails. They are not fully interoperable.

It's actually the first time I hear of "Samsung Internet Browser".

It's just a skin of Chromium that Samsung phones use as a default browser.

Samsung's Browser will very likely overtake Firefox in share this year.

It's just Chromium, but it's superior in performance and features IMO to Chrome itself.

An interesting take. I’m not a Samsung user, but these days I get enough bug reports about issues specific to Samsung browser that I had to buy a device just to reproduce the random weird stuff that happens. The latest one had to do with Samsung browsers’ dark mode which has some strange algorithm to make every website dark.

I understand why - quite important on Samsungs to use dark mode and not just at night, as their OLED screens draw a less power displaying dark colours, giving improved battery life

The fact it has a proper dark mode that doesn't require sites to support it is one of it's best features IMO. It is a lifesaver when trying to get a small child to sleep.

I, too, like dark mode. But, I've found several instances that required the site to make modifications to support dark mode. Most recent example was a QR code rendered as <svg> with a transparent background. The parent container had a white background. Samsung made the parent background black but didn't invert the QR code color. So as a result the QR code was unusable.

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