Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"
pluralistic.net
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And of course everybody forgets about the Chinese market where Apple has been playing by Chinese rules for many years (which isn't great for privacy, obviously). So that's three separate markets where they are treating users very differently.
Japan is also in the process of making similar laws[1].
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-to-crack-d...
I don't know how they got there, but small companies have certainly come a long way from being treated like partners.
I've created some iOS apps, and you can really feel this in every single interaction. From their crummy badly written out of date documentation without code samples, to the painfully slow developer portals, to the random app rejections.
Gotta keep those sheep toeing the line.
Why did they choose to rub it in the EU's face that not a shred of lawmakers' intentions was going to be implemented?
This can't be an accident. So what's the plan?
Also really like that he hosts his blog on his own site so I don't have to go to that terrible crap that medium is to read it.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Comics_f...
Yeah, that's the motto of modern techno-fascists as well
The gloves are off and I fully expect for Apple to not come out unscathed.
That’s a high risk manoeuvre if the EU courts decide to make an example though.
And the EU courts absolutely should.
Doesn't mean Apple won't still come out the relative winner.
Will it suck for consumers? Yup, some people will be screaming out loud about how the non-democratic EU bureaucrats are stifling innovation (as we usually see in HN comments about EU regulations against huge corporations), at the same time Apple will capitulate if a ban on the sale of their products in the EU goes on for more than a few weeks. They capitulated on the Apple Watch sales ban in the US and the US is much more pro-business.
I can't see what's the case where they end being a relative winner though, if there's one thing the EU is good at is on enforcing commercial regulations since it's still its main raison d'être.
John Gruber, writing on “Apple’s Plan for DMA in the European Union” [1]:
> I’ve emphasized throughout this piece the word proposals. That’s key, because no one, including Apple, knows whether the European Commission is going to find any or all of them compliant with the DMA. Apple has met with EC representatives dozens of times across several years regarding the DMA, but the way the EC works is that (1) they pass laws; (2) companies do all the work to attempt compliance with those laws; and only then (3) does the EC decide whether they comply. Companies like Apple don’t get to run ideas past the EC and get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. They have to build them, then find out.
I loved this ending in that post:
> The delicious irony in Apple’s not knowing if these massive, complicated proposals will be deemed DMA-compliant is that their dealings with the European Commission sound exactly like App Store developers’ dealings with Apple. Do all the work to build it first, and only then find out if it passes muster with largely inscrutable rules interpreted by faceless bureaucrats.
[1]: https://daringfireball.net/2024/01/apples_plans_for_the_dma
This is idiotic beyond measure, but so Apple, trying to claw every inch of monopolistic abuse as long as they can get away with it. They should be punished with fines in billions for this. May be that will teach them a thing or two.
Nothing about what he wrote refutes the GDPR being a "compliance moat".
In fact, he even spells it out himself: "And that's why Google and Facebook haven't been extinguished by the GDPR while their rivals were. It's not compliance moats – it's impunity. Once a corporation attains a certain scale, it has the excess capital to spend on phony relocations that let it hop from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, chasing the loosest slots on the strip."
He has the idea that a requirement is only a compliance moat if a small player can't comply (because of complexity, costs, etc), but a big one can.
But it's fine for the "compliance moat" purposes that the small player can't comply and the big player can just ignore compliance. It's still a great moat, and it can still be consciously created as a moat: "Let's put out a law that makes it difficult for small players to do this shit, and we big players have avenues to bypass").
The Author starts with a inherently flawed argument around the concept of duty-free - holding it as some sort of totem indicating a cultural proclivity for the Irish towards large-scale tax evasion. The concept of things like bonded warehouses and Tourist Refund Schemes are ignored, despite him linking to the Wiki page detailing all of this (which he has either neglected to read or disingenuously ignored). Nor is there acknowledgement that U.S. citizens receive substantially higher duty exemptions than normal when they visit or transit through US Protectorates. But I digress.
Lets move on to the more overt racism - where he decries the concept of MNCs setting up in Ireland as 'Potemkin Villages', or removes all artifice of balance using pulp-fiction phraseology like 'Ireland is a made town, where the cops are all on the take'.
Much like the rabid UK Tabloids pre-Brexit, the conversation re: corporation tax is simplified to focus on the headline rate. It’s never been about the headline rate - France amongst other EU countries has a far lower effective corporate tax rate than Ireland.
e.g. The French Agency for International Investment cited an effective tax rate of 8.2 per cent in advertising literature aimed at attracting foreign business to the country. The agency’s promotional documents note various tax mechanisms reduce the effective tax rate significantly from the nominal rate, citing a PricewaterhouseCoopers report (2011)
https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/paying-taxes/pdf/paying-taxes-2011...
They're also non-English speaking, have layers of bureaucracy around employing people or setting up any sort of business, effectively close down on Sundays and have a storied history of industrial action, striking without warning, and other non-corporate aligned things like the gilet jaune movement.
Ireland is heavily criticised because we encourage large US businesses to trade in Europe but use specific accounting and corporate formation practices to ensure that the majority of their European businesses pay as little tax as possible in Europe.
Other countries though, particularly France and Germany would have quite substantial tax incomes if Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, PayPal, EBay and most of the major drug manufacturers based in Ireland had to pay more local taxes in those countries. We don’t benefit by the setting of ECB rates like Germany does, so we take what we can as a Service Based economy isolated on an Island on the Western Periphery of Europe with a highly-educated English Speaking Workforce.
We facilitate widespread tax reduction (again legally) which directly affects those countries denying them tax income which they would really prefer to obtain. That’s why our tax practices generate so much anger in the rest of Europe. It’s not the rate, it’s that we collaborate with those US firms to keep denying tax income to the rest of Europe.
Why a US Citizen would get angry at Ireland about this is another question entirely - e.g. Ireland gets the blame for Apple not paying its fair share of taxes but what it really boils down to is: Apple is a US company, yet the US won't force Apple to pay taxes on its foreign earnings. In contrast, if you're a US citizen who, perhaps lives anywhere else in the world for all your life, you're still expected to pay US taxes...
But I think his point about the Irish data commissioner is valid. While EU countries are allowed to compete on tax, competing on lax law enforcement or lax interpretation of the law is unacceptable.
Ireland, as a country has a population of 5 million and is 1/8th the Size of Texas. The nearest comparable European capital, London, has a population of 9 million.
GDPR was only introduced in 2018. Since then the Irish DPC has transformed from a small regionally-based office of 27 staff into an independent pan-EU regulatory body of ~250 SMEs and support staff.
In 2022 the Irish DPC was responsible for more than €1bn in GDPR fines issued out of a European total of €1.64bn.
In May 2023 they charged Meta with a €405m fine for violations relating to children’s privacy on Instagram, in November 2023 they followed up with a €1.2bn fine for its Facebook data transfers between the EU and the US, which is the largest GDPR fine issued to date.
Not only has the Irish DPC leveraged the largest fines in GDPR history against US MNCs for egregious Data Protection breaches, each time they do so they're hauled out in front of the US media to justify their decisions:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/24/irish-data-regulator-defends...
While I'm an avid supporter of Max Schrems and NOYB in particular, and am very vocal about the failings of both Helen Dixon and the Irish government in terms of ramping up our Data Protectorate function to meet the role of Federal Overseer that we accidentally found ourselves in, it's simply a case of cutting our cloth according to our measure.
Not so accidentally since Ireland has pursued being the place for Big Tech to park their EU's HQs in through incentives provided by the Irish government. With that comes big responsibilities to the bloc as well, I just challenge the notion of "accidentally" since Ireland designed itself on tax schemes to be a hotspot for the HQs of international Big Tech.
The Irish DPC also had to be forced by the EUDPB to comply with GDPR enforcement, it wasn't out of goodwill that the Irish DPC got so active in 2023.
The eagerness of successive Irish goverments to facilitate zero corporate tax payments across the EU by US corporations in exchange for a few thousand jobs, via tax evoision schemes such as the Double Irish, the Single Malt and its current successor the CAIA is very well known. As is the deliberate sabotage of EU-wide GDPR legal enforcement by the Irish regulators at the DPC.
If you can't see why the Irish EU membership is a net liability for the bloc, you are blinkered.
As for your incredibly racist proposition that Irish EU membership is a net liability for the bloc, it was never an issue when Ireland’s supposed light-touch, low tax regulatory regime complemented German banking’s hunt for new, profitable opportunities - indeed Germany’s Schröder administration actively encouraged the internationalisation of German banks, inciting a two decade process of bank deregulation continued by the first Merkel government and a hybrid regulatory system that nearly bankrupted the EU.
As German economist Prof Henrik Enderlein of Berlin's Hertie School of Governance put it “For the bankers it was always clear: the German government would never allow big German banks go broke, there was an implicit guarantee for them. It was as if you gave a gambler multimillion loans and sent him into a casino.”
The problem is it wasn't multimillion. It was multibillion. The Irish state ended up guaranteeing €73 billion at the end of 2012 – for everything from senior unsecured bank bonds to deposits over €100,000 - under immense pressure from the ECB.
Sahra Wagenknecht, Economist and 14 year veteran of the Bundestag summed it up very succinctly "To this day many people in Germany believe, wrongly, that rescue plans in assist the populations in each respective country, paid for by German taxpayers. Things are the other way around: the Irish population will probably have to spend decades bleeding for the speculation of German banks."
Andres Veiel, the esteemed German film director and screenwriter, went so far as to crystallise the Issue in 'The Raspberry Reich'. As he bluntly and accurately puts it: "The problem is there's no readiness here in Germany to think things through to the end, such as how the link between risk and liability was broken in Ireland's case so that investors, including German banks and their shareholders, could get away without covering their own losses."
Setting a bunch of cookies isn’t something I would equate to murder.
If you want me to read your article please use less hyperbole. The author sounds like an unhinged lunatic who takes his pet issue way too seriously.
The author, in the context of an article talking about how big companies can bypass various monopoly and privacy laws, wrote how: "companies really do get away with both literal and figurative murder".
That's a general statement about what companies can get away with. He didn't assign cookie violations to "literal murder". It's obvious that "figurative murder" is the kind he abscribes to the violations he talks about, like GDPR.
As in the very common figurative idiom "getting away with murder", which is about doing bad stuff/breaking the law, and not having any serious consequence. Or do you pretend to never have heard of it?
As for the general statement, it still stands. Companies have historically also gotten away with literal murder too, and it's a valid point to raise when talking about how companies can often violate laws with impunity.
> Companies really do get away with both literal and figurative murder.
If you interpret that as corporations, sometimes commit literal murder. I think that's factually true, for example https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-securit... and https://lawblogs.uc.edu/ihrlr/2021/05/28/pipeline-of-violenc...
Taking that out of context and implying he equates setting cookies, I think that's in bad faith.
The truth is that decrying things like Apple's splash screen about the use of alternative stores, for example, is ridiculous. Apple has all the legal rights to do that, and formally that is not even incorrect. I personally don't let tech unsavvy people from the family use anything but the App Store and iPhone. Not because we couldn't find better Android phones for the same price, but because I know they would be easily scammed by shady apps that don't have to pass through the App Store's review process.
That is clearly a monopolistic advantage to Apple, but the alternative is equally bad and, admittedly, even worse for less tech savvy users, which are the majority.
Or is this new-found worry about people choosing wrong things something that is only limited to Apple? Because I could imagine other, worse markets with much more impact on people that are less regulated (e.g. food).
The duopoly in smartphones is an outcome of the underlying technologies. That doesn't mean it is efficient in the economic sense, compared to an ideal world, but the comparison has to be what we can actually implement.
They should not. Mobile computing is as fundamentally important as the right to free speech. They're taking over access to every part of life and are more important than cash. Two trillion dollar companies should not be allowed to gatekeep belonging to modern society.
> even worse for less tech savvy users, which are the majority.
We let people drive multi-ton vehicles with little training at 80mph. I think they'll be fine with web downloads.
I wish this were true, but in my experience, it's a very different skill than driving.
We won't even mention the decades of research and literal human millennia of engineering efforts that went into the best practices that can protect people.
Sandboxes, what are those? Surely only two companies lording over everything can protect us from ourselves. Free web installs are just as bad as speeding cars, chainsaws, electrocution, etc.
My entire family uses F-Droid on ungoogled Androids. They have much less chances to be scammed/exploited because F-Droid is community-run and is explicit about anti-features in the store UI. There just isn't any malware/scam on F-Droid to be scammed with, because the community decides what apps to add and the community server builds them.
Pretending There Is No Alternative ® to Apple monopolistic practices is misleading to say the least.
That, but also because it's a niche that has not been targeted by malevolence. Enjoy it while it last.
I find it quite ironic that the discussion circles back to the level of lock down on "supported" app distribution channels.
I think Apple is dumb for not adjusting here ahead of time, because they have pushed the government to come up with poorly thought out laws like the DMA.
The article is talking about splash screens for 3rd party payments (like this: https://developer.apple.com/support/images/apps-using-altern...) not for 3rd party app stores (like this: https://developer.apple.com/support/images/alternative-app-m...).
I would agree the app store warning is pretty reasonable: "<site> would like to install an App Marketplace" is clear and to the point, sure (and the article doesn't disagree).
"This app doesn't support the App Store's private and secure payment system" as the main headline on a full screen warning with a huge long scary blurb every time you try to pay anybody who isn't Apple is not reasonable.
This is not the great danger Apple is pretending it is - literally every single one of their customers has paid money to somebody outside the App Store in the past. Being aware of the risks of that is a basic & essential skill that everybody who owns a credit card must have already. Apple has a responsibility to protect non-technical users against technical risks, but it does not (and should not) try to protect users from lack of very basic life skills.
> Apple has all the legal rights to do that
That's not necessarily true at all!
I'm sure there'll have a good lawyerly debate on this soon, but the DMA requirements generally seem to mandate no restrictions for these new features than those strictly required to preserve device integrity & security.
Given that the existing global payment system is very familiar to all their customers, far more widely used than App Store purchases, and _generally pretty good_ (yes, you can quibble on UX and subscription management, but we all use it all the time, there's plenty of anti-fraud backstops, and payments in the world outside the app store do work) I don't think this screaming warning can be justified as an essential measure required to protect user security. To me, it looks like a unnecessarily scary screen actively discouraging users away from their competition.
A small calm confirmation for "Pay outside the App Store? This payment will be handled by 'Example Dev' directly." would be far more justifiable.
excellent curation where human reviewers can have deep knowledge of all of the apps that have been reviewed/published,
clear provenance so you can be strongly confident of the source/supply of the applications in case of abuse or infra compromise (with a smaller problem blast radius for each app)
alternative app stores so that end users are never beholden to your app store and they can get similar or the same apps from elsewhere if your policies or practices change for the worse.
Some of these help ensure that no third party can maliciously update an app at the behest of a criminal actor without also compromising the app developer, or that no third party can gather invasively detailed information and fingerprinting surface concerning the apps people use and have in case of dissent.
Apple don't seem to have any interest in doing any of this, so I can't understand how their solution would be better for less tech-savvy users.
As others have pointed out, this isn't true for community curated FLOSS repositories like F-Droid.
But I want to point out that the french "pole expertise" for digital issues, PEReN, also wrote about this a while back: https://www.peren.gouv.fr/en/actualites/2022-02-18_eclairage...
TL;DR: the "trust relation" that users have with Apple's review department could just as well (and often better) be filled by third party app stores or even independent entities.
Isn't the question whether the EU thinks they have the legal right to do that, and how the law can be changed so that they don't do that?
Anyway, the article points out that certain companies are exempted from those alleged "Apple rules" already ..
I appreciate that it clearly does so and doesn't pretend to be unbiased. Nor does the so-called activism work behind the screen to manipulate politicians - like no doubt many paid by Apple lobbyists are currently doing.
You call it activism like it is a bad thing. If it is, then let us dump freedom of speech.
Law doesn't say what's morally right.
> I personally don't let tech unsavvy people from the family use anything but the App Store and iPhone
Do you also make sure they can only access Apple-certified websites in the browser? No? Sounds pretty unsafe.
> I know they would be easily scammed by shady apps that don't have to pass through the App Store's review process
Both Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store have hosted malware in the past. It's quite rare for the average user to even try installing Amazon's third-party appstore, let alone a random .apk from the internet, it's about having the option to be less dependent. Sure some users will be negatively affected, just like some people could be convinced to put their iPhone in the microwave to recharge the battery, but if you take that seriously you might as well ban knives.
> That is clearly a monopolistic advantage to Apple, but the alternative is equally bad
You need to be a lot more convincing to tell me that something is as bad as a monopoly.
The EU is a bit bonkers to think that it can get global tech companies to comply with increasingly tech-hostile regulations without any push back or red lines. At some point it just stops being worth the hassle.
Good riddance.
maybe a good thing. yanis varoufakis said EU had become irrelevant in tech.
more investment can go to local tech instead of US monopolies.
The small business owner pays taxes because what else can they do? Big corps go through tax-havens and relocations and don't do so, while profiting off of the infrastructure paid for by taxes (=> enabling customers over seas to even buy iphones). Traditional companies ship physical products and/or employ more people in the respective countries, while they also try to evade taxation I think those circumstances make them a much better subject to it though.
Really, the more I keep on talking to my friends in the Valley the more it boils down to the money factor. Salaries, VCs and all the likes. I don't say Europe shouldn't be less business hostile, but one should see the Valley the way it is and realize that just buy changing the laws and trying to copy it Europe can't succeed. They should find their own path.
We just don't have that unicorn culture. But do we need highly overvalued tech businesses?
A market made up of clones and forks, all worse than the prop competition.
Alone food quality is on a whole different level in Europe, exactly because we have, allow and welcome small time players reinventing the market.
They are just as privacy invasive as US albeit with less financing which means they are even more ruthless and hostile.
trying to regulate monopolies is business-hostile? maybe sometimes its needed to hurt a monopolist business in order to .. enable competition..
But there is ? Go to Paris, Berlin, Lisboa, Barcelona, ... There is a lot of start-ups, incubator, investor, meet-ups, conference, etc. The EU has a very vibrant tech scene. It is probably more distributed than the U.S, by nature, and not on the same scale. But acting as if the E.U is some sort of ludite, back water, hostile to business, is just plain wrong and huge exaggeration.
I mean, I indirectly benefit from the grift, but I am not one to put some lipstick on this particular pig.
You have highlighted my issue with this whole DMA situation. Every Android phone I have used has felt like privacy invading garbage (except maybe the nexus 4), yet I don't think they should be off market. I simply use an iPhone instead.
Instead of the DMA being pro-consumer, I read it as anti-business (probably US business). It feels created out of EU jealously of the US tech industry, and secondarily a way to help EU companies. Consumers will likely end up worse off, which I reminded of every time I visit the EU have to dismiss cookie banners on every damn site.
That is virtually impossible to be done with any Apple product.
If it feels like that for you I recommend checking your emotional state, the EU has a different approach to regulating businesses than the USA, it's not jealousy but different principles aiming for different outcomes than what the USA aims for.
> Instead of the DMA being pro-consumer, I read it as anti-business (probably US business).
You've criticised the DMA twice about being: a bad implementation, and now as anti-business. Yes, it is anti a specific case of business which in the EU's view is not aligned to the outcomes it wants in the economy, calling the EU anti-business is, at best, naïve, since it's an organisation focused first and foremost to deal with commerce and business in general. It is against business using leverages against citizens, something that the USA does not seem to care about, and that's fine for the USA just don't try to apply the same principles you live under to a different culture regarding businesses.
Most of the people here would love to be Apple and to abuse the shit out of their users rights in order to make profit.
This is not Slashdot.
As they say, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it". Even the ones that are not outright shills and cheerleaders often exhibit motivated reasoning...
I just think my life is genuinely improved by having access to Apple products, and find the blond hate and uncompromising takes in this thread to be just as baffling.
In a future where Apple have withdrawn the app store, who in the EU is going to buy an iOS device?
Sorry, but the idea that they'd be able to justify pulling out to shareholders over this is pure fantasy.
edit: source - https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2024-q1/FY24_Q1_Consol...
But hey, maybe they can disband the government and elect another.
-- https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#i...
I live in Europe. And I truly hope so.
> The EU is a bit bonkers to think that it can get global tech companies to comply with increasingly tech-hostile regulations without any push back or red lines.
So... We in Europe would not be able to access anymore US huge advertisement networks and manufacturers of luxury tech toys?
Please, wake me up when those awful corporations do push back on red lines.