Many of them will tank their company and their client if they get their ego bruised and feel publicly humiliated. Those are hyper competitive people which see live as zero sum game and are trained in life to never, ever, lose a challenge or competition for domination. ESPECIALLY in public.
The myth of a rational businessman is just that - a myth.
Being publicly regulated is exactly that scenario for Apple. There's execs in that very company that are frothing at their mouth in irrational anger ready to throw their weight around and WIN. Stomp on the opponent. SPLAT the unimportant fly that DARED challenge them.
(I'm exaggerating... but not by much. This seems more of an emotional than thoughtful response Apple is doing here.)
You want to send an executive to jail for cancelling a contract?
I’d be curious for a jurisdiction to try this. In my opinion, I wouldn’t want to do business in a place where commercial disputes can be twisted by a political insider into jail time.
Why does the concept of personal responsibility for decisions insult you so deeply?
If you believe figurative and actual violence are identical, this analogy makes sense.
This is a bogus modernist interpretation that dilutes the meaning of violence. Fortunately, it’s being rejected after having a moment that peaked during lockdown.
How should this be treated? Fining the company for someone’s actions that caused deaths doesn’t seem enough.
Again, why does personal responsibility for harm to others bother you?
Personal responsibility is irrelevant. You’re constructing a lower threshold for criminality. I know the first thing I’d be trying to figure out is how to put my competitors in jail.
Let’s take Epic v Apple. Epic went to court. It lost. This entire saga has cost Epic’s shareholders billions. Should Sweeney go to jail? Would the world be better if an Apple-friendly prosecutor could take up that challenge?
If we have a cultural failing in America, it’s having a reflexive urge to turn outrage into jail time.
Provide an incentive for companies to regulate each other! Let rational self-interest clean up the market while the state steps back and looks on!
Do you think there is a reason every modern democracy resists privatising criminal prosecution? (They had it in Rome. We probably need a history of law section in the basic high-school curriculum.)
We already have private enforcement of many rules. Environmental ones, for example. We’re specifically discussing criminality, putting people in jail.
I agree with this, and it could be constructed out of shareholder rights. Perhaps it could only be applied past a certain threshold of compensation, say, 100x the median wage. ($4.6mm [1].)
I’d argue the threshold should be final, unappealable regulatory penalty or criminal conviction of the corporation.
[1] https://usafacts.org/data/topics/economy/jobs-and-income/job...
Sort of good and sort of bad - some percentage of the time this would lead to zero money changing hands as the executive is bankrupt or has no assets.
And that's rather the point. Apple earns a lot of money in the EU and much of that seems to be through abusing their position.
So yes, if you're the executive who signs off on something that is so clearly anticompetative, you should own the penalty. Ignorance of the law is not a defense.
That, or leave.
It changes the risk appetite, sure, but that’s the point.
Anything you do —atomically legal or not— becomes illegal if it smothers the chance of competition by using you market dominance.
The thing I'm arguing here is that the person taking those decisions faces consequences.
No - you seem to be assuming such a law would only be invoked in cases where the company legitimately did something wrong. But that's not what's at stake here. We're talking about what happens when someone with political clout and a vendetta is able to use that law to wrongfully get a a CEO tossed in prison. Because sometimes laws get twisted for personal gain, and you're raising the stakes pretty high.
I wouldn't want to do business under those conditions, not because I might violate the law, but because it could be used wrongfully against me.
Yes, and we do. That’s well below the threshold of commercial disputes.
It’s much better for a shareholder too, as I for example don’t want to pay with my money for ceo’s ego trips.
I fail to see the difference?
My response to that is: we should change the laws.
Nobody ever asks this question thinking about multi-generation family businesses where the executive is the head of household and if everything works out, the business will be passed down to their progeny.
Of course, it also begs the question why do we accept this?
[0] https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3253705/c...
I think you'd rather prefer Sunday gala of past where convict would be covered with oil soaked rags and then set on fire. So while that person ran crying, howling it provided tons of entertainment to hardworking folks gathered there. And in that process of course justice prevailed.
This is what one call win-win proposition.
> Many of them will tank their company and their client if they get their ego bruised and feel publicly humiliated. Those are hyper competitive people which see live as zero sum game and are trained in life to never, ever, lose a challenge or competition for domination. ESPECIALLY in public.
… I thought you were going to name Sweeney as the petulant man-child chafing at rules and being told "no".
From an observation standpoint seeing how Microsoft behaved in the 90's and onward, they (Apple) are behaving very similarly - almost exactly with what MS did for Windows back then. I have a growing distaste for Apple corporate/mgmt each day even though I am surrounded by their devices.
And had a device end connector that didn’t change every other model. Some phones used standard connectors for that but plenty didn’t, and manufacturers would sometimes change the connector without rhyme or reason.
2012 Lightening 480Mb/s
2023 USB 80,000 Mb/s
2023 Lightening 480 Mb/s
They were quite happy knowing once you bought Apple, you kept Apple or you lost all your accessories.
They're still playing the same game now. My Airpods work grate on iPhone, but they only connect to some non-apple devices over bluetooth (not PS5), and when they do connect, if the mic is on the audio is awful.
They will get away with this, we let them. They have no incentive to be better.
Sweeney allegedly tweeted that he would breach his contract with Apple. Apple reached out and asked if he was being hysterical for public display. He didn’t clarify. At that point, Epic credibly threatened breach of contract.
This is a commercial dispute between multi-billion dollar companies, both of whom charge outrageous platform fees, both of whom seem to enjoy being dramatic, and both of whom are being maximally aggressive. It’s fair to remain emotionally uninvolved.
A threat of a breach of contract is not a breach of contract, which will be a sticking point if the EU gets involved again.
I don’t know EU law. But anticipatory breach is enough to trigger damages under American law, and “is an excuse for non-performance by the non-breaching party” [1].
There are laws other than the DMA?
(Anticipatory breach is incorporated into EU law through the UN CISG [1].)
Schiller emailed Sweeney asking for assurances and Sweeney responded with:
> Epic and its subsidiaries are acting in good faith and will comply with all terms of current and future agreements with Apple, and we'll be glad to provide Apple with any specific further assurances on the topic that you'd like.
Without reply, Apple summarily terminated their developer account a week later. It seems obvious, in retrospect, that Schiller's email's goal was to establish a fig leaf of Apple having reached out before doing this.
It is indeed true that Sweeney has tweeted many criticisms of Apple's DMA plans but there haven't been any threatening noncompliance.
Do we have neutral sources for these claims and emails?
Apple said Sweeney threatened to breach contract and didn’t repudiate in private. Epic claims it didn’t threaten and did repudiate. We’re in a he said she said absent independent sourcing.
The source for the tweets (from your original comment: "Sweeney allegedly tweeted that he would breach his contract with Apple") are Sweeney's Twitter feed which you can read as well as I did. Did you find any threatening non-compliance?
Even with screenshots, and assuming no false claims (which IIRC are entirely legal so long as you don't swear under oath), there's plenty of ways to mislead by omission while saying only true things.
Let’s not forget that Epic has previously breached contract with Apple in the past. That’s why Fortnite isn’t in the store today.
Surely this must be the true source of Apples suspicion?
Epic’s fee is global. Once you sign with them, you pay that on every install. There is also the 5% royalty, which brings the actual fee to 17% since we’re comparing non-small developer figures.
That increases consumer choice and weakens the market power of both.