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Comment by deminature | Hacker News Reader

In combination with the 'Core Technology Fee' that financially cripples any developer that tries to release a popular app outside the official app store, this is pathetic behavior. Hopefully the EU smacks them down for this temper tantrum at being forced to adhere to the DMA. They are trying to flex their market power and should be reminded they operate within a system of laws that doesn't bend for anyone, regardless of their size.

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Yeah, this isn't a parlor game, I have no idea why they think the antitrust pressure will abate by such bad faith nonsense moves. Next step for the EU is to make Tim Cook choose whether he wants to be CEO of the device side or service side of the broken up Apple. It's clear that fining them is useless.

Ah yeah man EU is totally gonna break up apple.

Some of y'all need to be reminded to be realistic.

On the contrary, this tantrum by no means works to lessen the growing idea that control of the platform should be put into the hands of a independent third party.

While not European in origin, the platform holds and manages tremendous value for us, to the extent where small changes can cause mayor economic disruption, and Apple has not been managing it fairly.

And for a state actor, which exists to serve the common good, it is not acceptable that a single company holds and abuses this kind of power.

The EU is economically meaningless on the grand scale. They are only 7% of Apple's revenue, and similarly low for other companies. And every day they become a less profitable market to operate in. The EU holds power only as long as the rest of the world is willing to deal with its BS.

Trying to "break up Apple" is simply not within the EU's power as Apple is worth more than the EU's whole tech industry combined. Apple would simply leave and the whole region would be left with shiny bricks.

If the EU pursues this with big tech at large it will find itself in the 80s. It needs US big tech far more than US big tech needs it.

Last time I checked, Apples holdings are all based in Ireland. So from a legal standpoint, it's a Irish company, held accountable by EU law. It can't "simply leave".

If you think the US will let it's shiniest company be destroyed by the EU I don't even know what to say.

How long do you think it would take them to move?

Remember Brexit and how long it took corporations to move their entities? It’s 12-36 months, from my experience in investment banking at the time.

The EU's single market is the second largest economy (GDP nominal) in the world after the US and before China.

> [EU] are only 7% of Apple's revenue

*citation needed.

Looking at [0] it seems to be around 25%.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/382175/quarterly-revenue...

If US big tech doesn't need the EU, then why do they keep on bending to its will?

As long as the opportunity cost is positive it will stay. The EU is trying its hardest to make the opportunity cost negative.

Not really. If this goes on, EU will simply cozy up to China a bit more. Let's see how Washington will react to that.

The US might. Microsoft narrowly avoided a company breakup over web browser policies, it seems entirely feasible that Apple's App Store could lead down the same path.

Or any of their embedded features. Apple Pay, for example.

That’s getting “fixed” in upcoming release, in EU at least.

The DMA has potential fines of 20% of global annual revenue for non-compliance. Apple is playing with fire here. Laws like GDPR and DMA are designed to be just as scary for big entities as small.

No, not break them up, but fine the heck out of them

This IS adhering to the DMA. Every browser engine is treated the same.

I think that's very unlikely.

I interpret 6 (a) as basically requiring you to be able to install whatever software you like and to provide no mechanism whereby any fee can be demanded for such installation to be possible.

Apple tries to get around this by this core technology stuff, but APIs aren't even subject to copyright protection, and it's also basic interoperability stuff. I don't think the courts will see it the way I interpret your comment.

Deliberately removing useful features from your own product so that you don't have to let other people implement the same features may be technically conforming to the letter of the law, but is clearly violating it in spirit. The spirit of the law is platform interoperability: your control over the platform shouldn't restrict what other people can make it do (be it "run an app store" or "run a web app").

When did it become illegal to take features away from a products or create derivative products with different features? The “spirit of the law” most certainly is not what you’re imagining.

If they wanted, they could remove the App Store from iOS in EU, or pull the iPhone from the EU market entirely. Apple isn’t required by the DMA to part of a digital market at all.

> When did it become illegal to take features away from a products

A long time ago? You can't sell a product under the pretense that it does X and then remove X after the fact, at least not in any country with decent consumer protections.

> If they wanted, they could remove the App Store from iOS in EU

Are they going to provide full refunds for anyone wanting to return their iPhone, along with any apps they have purchased on the App Store?

I doubt Apple wants to scam all their users by taking their money for a smartphone and then taking away the smart parts.

>When did it become illegal to take features away from a products or create derivative products with different features? The “spirit of the law” most certainly is not what you’re imagining.

Depends on the laws and advertising. Sony got dinged for removing the "Other OS" option on the PS3. A feature you can definitely argued "nobody used" (and as someone who tried, the experience for anything but basically headless Linux was atrocious. You had access to almost none of the hardware for this). Still lost the case.

I wouldn't bet on Apple losing on that specifically. But it sounds like this is all adding up towards another big slap in a future Case.

> When did it become illegal to [...]

That's a question for regulators and lawyers. But in general yes: trying to evade a law instead of complying with its intended application is generally not viewed as unquestionably legal. In criminal law it's sometimes even taken as evidence of guilt!

> If they wanted, they could remove the App Store from iOS in EU, or pull the iPhone from the EU market entirely. Apple isn’t required by the DMA to part of a digital market at all.

And if the EU wanted, they could ban Apple products entirely. The point is that no one does stuff like this because there's a general sense that healthy competetive markets are good for everyone, and that the capitalist market will enforce this by punishing actors that try to cheat (in this case, by "trying to make more money by making your product worse").

But sometimes that market enforcement breaks down, in the face of trust/monopoly activities like (in this case) control over a computing platform. And when that happens it's routine for regulators to step in to try to right the ship.

And that ship is listing pretty badly right now. Apple is dancing as close to the edge of predatory monopolism as is possible. Again, they literally think they'll make more money by deliberately breaking their own customer's web apps. There's no way at all that's a healthy market. QED.

> but is clearly violating it in spirit

Huh?

If the EU imposes additional requirements on aquarium lights, and a lighting manufacture decides not to product aquarium lights.....that's violating the spirit of the law?

That analogy doesn't make sense to me. Apple isn't pulling the iPhone from the market, they're breaking iPhones that were already sold. The equivalent would be if you said you couldn't sell green aquarium lights anymore, and aquarium light vendors turned all the green aquariums off remotely.

You can keep using your green aquarium lights all you want.

But if you install their newest version of aquarium lights, they won't have a green option.

No, you already bought the lights, and they've always been green. You don't "install the newest version" of lights. Just like you don't for hardware devices like phones. You install software updates, which clearly have a presumption of not removing features for which you paid. That's just straight up common law warranty stuff, come on.

Again, this kind of allegorical confusion is generally a sign that you're wrong and trying to cheat. Which Apple is, clearly.

> software updates which clearly have a presumption of not removing features

oof, that is not a good assumption

No one is obliged to obey anything but the letter of the law. If you want someone to obey the spirit of a law you need to put that in the letter.

That is completely wrong. Judges very much care about the spirit of the law, and frequently discuss it in their decisions, both in common law jurisdictions and in other systems.

The justice system is not a computer following logical instructions.

Judges can talk about the spirit of the law all they want. If they don't base decisions on the letter of it they'll set themselves up to be overruled on appeal. Prosecutors also can't bring up charges on violating the spirit of a law.

To many legal scholars, and to most lay people, the actual law is the spirit, the letter is just there to help note down what the spirit was.

If someone thinks they are safe to ignore the spirit of a law because of a quirk of how it is worded, they will often find they are wrong, and have charges brought against them anyway, and lose at trial and any number of appellate courts. Conversely, if someone is convicted based on a technicality where they broke the letter of the law, but not the spirit, that conviction is very likely to be overturned on appeal.

Of course, the spirit and the letter of the law can't be arbitrarily divorced from one another. One can't claim that the letter of the law says "you shall not kill", but the spirit of the law is that it's ok to kill but only on the full moon. But if a law says "don't lie to prosecutors", and they ask me what I did on some day, and I tell them X and Y and don't mention Z, I won't be able to claim that the law didn't techniclaly say not to omit information.

So... appellate reasoning is even more likely to be founded on spirit arguments and not loopholes or context-free text readings. "Intent of the framers" is, obviously, very much an argument about spirit and not text. As always, there's a good wikipedia page to start from when discussing this stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_and_spirit_of_the_law

But in this particular case it's sort of a silly argument anyway as it cuts better in the opposite direction: the DMA is a big and complicated law and can be interpreted in a zillion ways. If courts and regulators are allowed to read laws as strictly as they want, I can all but guarantee that Apple is in violation of something.

I’m going to be level with you: there is nothing so great about PWAs that they’re worth mandating or protecting by law in any jurisdiction and the EU doesn’t owe it to you to try.

Web developers like them. That’s it, and their PWA advocacy completely disregards what a privacy and security nightmare they can be without proper safeguards, because this little device I carry around in my pocket is 1) always with me and 2) stores a lot of information about me 3) has a full sensory array installed within it.

Every new feature browsers add for better hardware access gets immediately disabled on any system I manage: cameras, mics, USB access, sensors, location, notifications, local storage, the whole works because the alternative is letting every website access those or getting spammed with access requests on every site I visit and the more crap that is added, the longer it takes me every time I setup a new browser install from scratch. Why disable them at all? Because 99% of these new features are primarily used to build a better supercookie to track and profile people without their consent. The actual marketable reasons are a secondary use at best.

So if it’s not on Apple’s priority list to build out whatever they need to support and allow other browsers to support PWAs in a secure and privacy conscious manner, good for them. Web developers who want to circumvent Apple’s fees entirely don’t need to be anywhere near their top priority and can wait. For Apple: users come before developers, and App developers before web developers.

There is little difference on iOS between a PWA and a website which has a WebKit view and hosts a website.

The only reason PWAs were interesting on iOS was to get an app on iOS, while feeling relatively native, without paying Apple.

Apple can make security guarantees about their own rendering engine that they can’t for any other rendering engine.

It’s not about what PWAs are like in Safari, it’s about what they’re like in third-party browsers that have to by law be allowed to do whatever Safari can do with their own fully enabled rendering engines.

Apple could just say something like, "This app comes from a 3rd party browser engine, and it may not be secure. Are you sure you want to install this app?". Not too much effort, but still keeping the functionality.

I mentioned this in another comment but they built out over 600 APIs and a system of accompanying entitlements to comply with the DMA, they’re clearly not at this point just for PWAs going to throw up their hands and a scare sheet and say “good enough for government work, devs: do what you want now”. EU iPhone customers are still iPhone customers. The security and privacy considerations don’t go away just because a new law was passed.

Obviously, those considerations must be considered. However, as I said, adding a simple confirmation prompt would be plenty enough.

I think what is happening here, is that Apple is going like, "I don't get my market control, you don't get your shiny new features." Other phone platforms allow you to do things, that may be unsafe or insecure, but still plenty useful.

Also, running a PWA really isn't that unsecure/unprivate as visiting a website. They both can access and ask for the same information or permissions. Really not that different.

By your logic that PWAs are unsecure, then should iOS not support rendering webpages due to "security concerns"?

> However, as I said, adding a simple confirmation prompt would be plenty enough.

That would be enough for you. That is apparently not enough for Apple, and you can tell that isn’t enough for Apple by their actions because despite the fact that there were less expensive and time consuming ways they could have complied with the whole rest of the DMA, the only feature regression they’ve had is PWA support in the iPhone version of Safari.

> By your logic that PWAs are unsecure

That is not what I said. Here’s what I actually said not that long ago:

> Apple can make security guarantees about their own rendering engine that they can’t for any other rendering engine.

> It’s not about what PWAs are like in Safari, it’s about what they’re like in third-party browsers that have to by law be allowed to do whatever Safari can do with their own fully enabled rendering engines.

Yes, so rather than allowing other browsers to have PWAs with a warning, they instead don't allow anyone to do it.

Allowing so may be insecure, but at least provide a way.

Correct. Maybe one day they’ll return, but probably not without a brand spanking new security and privacy architecture tailored for PWAs.

And yet Safari is often less secure than Chrome or Firefox. So this is all about control, not security.

I'm not a fan of PWAs either, but disabling them instead of allowing them to continue to run is an incredibly bad faith response to the DMA.

Not if the alternative is allowing other browsers to install them without a privacy and security architecture in place first.

Even if Apple thinks it’s worth doing, that takes time, and web developers aren’t worth prioritizing for them when they have a lot of other ground to cover building out a new system of APIs and entitlements to comply with the DMA’s other requirements.

The user is warned already on the App Store that installing apps from third-parties comes with certain risks via 'scare screens'. There's no reason they can't do the same for PWAs.

They probably will if they ever re-enable it in the EU, but they also built out over 600 new APIs and an accompanying system of entitlements to go with that scare sheet such that even if it’s “riskier”, they’re not just throwing up their hands and saying “alright devs, we scared them a little, so now go do whatever the hell you want”.

EDIT: I should also add that of those 600, that includes APIs Apple built out specifically for third-party browsers.

I think PWA developers are going to be pretty unsympathetic to 'your PWA is going be available again in the EU at some unspecified time in the future, when some Apple product manager decides to prioritize it for a given year's roadmap and it's all in the interests of protecting users from unspecified privacy and security threats that nobody seems to be able to define'. Most importantly, the EU may feel the same way.

Well to correct you, my position is more “Apple might re-enable this” more than “will”, which from their perspective I’m guessing is even worse and they will be more unsympathetic to it.

Personally I think Apple will, but I have enough doubts that I don’t want to make that claim.

> Most importantly, the EU may feel the same way.

That’s the rub. The EU has been arbitrarily writing new laws which mostly target foreign tech companies that don’t quite read “show me your bellies so we can pick out the choice cuts” but they’re pretty close. So the EU might do a lot of things, but if there’s an argument against them doing that, it’s what I said in my first comment above: it’s not worth any jurisdiction’s time to do so. That includes the EU.

You might need to support some technologies to get government contracts, but nobody ever mandated you had to support POSIX or J2ME or whatever to sell a computer or phone to regular people. That would be asinine, and a PWA mandate would also be asinine.

The arbitrary laws that the EU has been writing are the one of the last bulwarks consumers have against the creeping power of tech giants and these companies are making more money than ever in spite of regulation, so it doesn't seem to be affecting them too adversely.

The biggest abuses in tech come down on the adtech side of things where in order for them to make money, they need to know who you are, and they will do everything within their power to make sure that they do with or without your consent.

Telecoms companies (in which I am including carriers) also often fall within this because they are often envious of adtech companies and want what they have and can theoretically make better guarantees about who somebody is.

Not supporting PWAs isn’t in the same league, but I would also add to that: running a popular messenger, running a popular search engine, and controlling distribution of software on a popular phone platform. Spinning up new laws around terminology designed to have bad PR (“gatekeepers”) is pretty damn arbitrary as far as lawmaking goes.

No one meads “scare screens”.

I’m. It sure what I think about this yet, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to land on “allowing less privacy aware browsers to run web “apps” with heightened privileges seems like a recipe for disaster.

Maybe in the long term ther is a way to do it well. But for now I’m not sure.

Every app on iOS is sandboxed and the damage they can do is very limited. There's risks involved in opening up to third-party apps, and PWAs are only marginally more dangerous. Non-WebKit based browsers don't even exist today, this is not a real problem and won't be for some time.

The obvious solution for now is to enable WebKit PWAs and turn on PWAs for other as-yet uninvented custom browsers as they release, testing for privacy as they get released.

I think the pwa arch might be different. Running in the same app (safari) with multiple open screens, but with soft sandboxing like tabs have.

They would need new apis and architecture around PWA to support this for any browser I think.

Also, they are not allowed to have Safari-only OS features anymore due to DMA so allowing PWAs only in safari would be against the law

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