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Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

They were basically negotiating in public. I think the EC probably realized that the DMA as currently written is flawed and producing outcomes they don't want, and this episode basically highlighted it to them. They probably told Apple there won't be any enforcement against only Safari having it, because the alternative is worse. A basic principle is that you are very unlikely to compel Apple to engineer anything unless they choose to, and you would most likely lose in the EU courts if you tried to. Any regulation that doesn't factor that in is going to be doomed to fail.

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> A basic principle is that you are very unlikely to compel Apple to engineer anything unless they choose to, and you would most likely lose in the EU courts if you tried to. Any regulation that doesn't factor that in is going to be doomed to fail.

That sounds a bit like "Apple is beyond the law/regulations, regulators better accept that and move on" – is that what you mean?

It worked just fine for USB-C, fwiw.

There's a big difference between those cases. In the USB-C case there was no room for argument. It was either include the new port, or stop selling the iPhone.

In this case, they could just remove entire features and have the public do their lobbying for them.

It shouldn't be too hard to make the case for that being malicious compliance, though. It seems to have worked in this particular case, for example: People called Apple's bluff.

Malicious compliance and "spirit of the law" aren't real things when it comes to the legal system. You either comply with the law or you don't. And courts will ultimately decide if Apple's interpretation of the DMA complies or not.

They are, in Europe. We don't really like companies not following the spirit of the law. Companies usually learn via fines. Luckily for us, Apple is a slow learner.

>Luckily for us, Apple is a slow learner.

Why is that lucky for us? We want them to comply to the DMA. The fines are a drop in the bucket.

It’s lucky because to a lot of android fans it isn’t really about consumer outcomes, it’s about finally legislating a solution to the android-iOS war.

If you can’t win in the marketplace of ideas, just ban walled gardens entirely. Flip the table and ban your competitors’ business model, bioshock style.

Now of course, since obviously most android fans aren’t actually owners of a major company… they aren’t really “your competitor” unless you’re parasocially attached… this is a rather obvious commentary on the degree of parasocial attachment that so many people seem to have towards android and against apple… but here we are.

https://paulgraham.com/fh.html

In short: Freudian slip. They said the quiet part out loud. Hurting apple is the goal here.

> If you can’t win in the marketplace of ideas, just ban walled gardens entirely. Flip the table and ban your competitors’ business model, bioshock style.

But the DMA doesn't ban walled gardens. It requires the availability of competitive alternative marketplaces, which can certainly just lead to multiple walled gardens.

This is like saying "if you can't win the market, just ban slavery completely". Walled gardens are plain wrong, no need to invent a "market" justification.

They eventually will comply. In the meantime, they provide money via fines.

Spirit of the law is literally a thing and EU courts interpret in line with it. Each and every EU directive has first lines state the spirit.

Malicious compliance is totally a thing in this specific case and is expected to happen. The act itself is written in a very pointed way so to say.

To make matters worse, the executive is given powers to tell Apple what exactly they need do to comply if they start funny business.

Companies are compelled to develop features all the time. Mostly so far in the EU these features have been around accessibility, safety, and crime prevention, but there’s an awful lot of precedent for companies being required to develop something specific in order to be able to sell their product in the EU.

Companies comply with those regulations because, on balance, the incentives still make it logical to. That doesn't mean an unbalanced regulation that misunderstands the target's incentives would result in the outcome the regulator wants.

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