On DMA eve, Google whines, Apple sounds alarms, and TikTok wants out
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
https://spotify.link/kfll23o7LHb
Even linking specific products with specific releases. I only wish they supported more vendors than Shopify. But they state the feature is currently in beta.
There are probably more that did not make the first round:
Telegram
Spotify - Sweden
OLX - Netherlands
Ryanair - Ireland
Are some possibilities for the next round.
[0] https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/the-digital-markets-act-i...
What's so wild about this is when large companies DO lose your data, the best they offer is an apology and a message saying : "We take privacy very seriously"
The companies are not being asked to take on extra risk. They're being asked to reduce the gatekeeping.
> Some critics of the DMA, including ITIF, have urged countries to "carefully consider the full implications before copying the EU’s digital regulatory system," warning of potentially burdensome restrictions possibly hampering innovation and distorting competition.
Because more competition always leads to less innovation ? /s
The arguments against this are ridiculous. Especially coming from companies who like to "Move fast and break things". I guess they forgot the "once it doesn't hurt our monopolozation".
I love living in the EU.
And that is always such a patronising, stupid argument. Apple is not my dad. Apple is a hardware and OS provider and should serve me. It is not their responsibility.
Let me bring out my violin for all you poor unknowing Europeans, whose lives are about to be ruined for eternity. You may not know it, but you have been enjoying a life of happiness and innocence, not because the world is peaceful, but because of a mysterious protector in the shadows, standing outside your window in the rain, thanklessly defending you against the horrors of the world, such as.. objectionable content. The gates of hell are about to open, and there’s nothing you can do! All I want you to know, dear user, is that a whatever happens, don’t blame Apple Incorporated. They fought until the very end, for the right to protect you.
By what exactly?
> objectionable content?
What are you talking about? Do you even know what the DMA is about?
The objectionable content are other app stores and apps not subject to Apple's draconian controls due to the European regulations.
It's just such a nakedly bad argument because Apple already does a garbage job at maintaining the App Store against these supposed external threats.
[0]: A "long con" scam, where the victim (the "pig") is lulled into a false sense of trust for an online stranger (making them fat and ready to for slaughter) and then convinced to spend large sums of money on dubious trading platforms ("being butchered") at a vulnerable moment. https://youtu.be/pLPpl2ISKTg
At the risk of getting off-topic and/or being pedantic, is it really "losing" data? Usually the data remains on their servers and is duplicated to another location rather than the sole copy being moved from one spot to another.
"Inadvertently duplicated your data to some nefarious actors" might be better.
While I do envy you this, it’s not for the EU’s digital rules.
Why is that? It’s because the rest of the world will inevitable copy the EU rules within a few years like happened with the GDPR.
So I'm not concerned about missing out on EU digital rules without living in the EU.
I do, however, greatly miss the EU food regulations. It’s astonishing how foods that my wife and I are allergic to in the U.S. are completely ok with us when traveling in the EU. A friend that is absolutely unable to tolerate gluten/wheat in the U.S. had absolutely no problem scarfing down pasta in Italy and croissants in France. The U.S. at least appears nowhere near implementing EU like food rules anytime soon and I genuinely envy you for that.
But they also monopolized the market and prevented alternatives.
DMA is about fair markets.
Without Google, Apple, or Tiktok, we'd have other platforms. Maybe fairer platforms? It's not like there'd be zero innovation in every category without those companies.
Yes, GNU/Linux phones are strongly disadvantaged at the moment due to the duopoly. Sent from my Librem 5.
I don't even want to think about what a ghetto the mobile experience probably is.
Sure, if something is great for you stick to it, but assuming things about "every day persons" seems exaggerated. I also heard macOS <=> Windows switching experience is "bad" so for me it is more "what people are used to/how much they want to improve" than an inherent "quality".
When exactly do you think google was founded?
You know what? That actually sounds pretty cool.
Edit: I'm hardly one to care about karma, but it's funny that I'm getting downvoted just for thinking that that idea is neat. Differences of opinion are okay, no? If there's something you don't like about something I say, I'm open to feedback rather than silent disapproval. :)
After all, what's so terrible about thinking that life without smartphones and Google Search wouldn't be so bad? Haven't a sizeable chunk of us posting here lived without those three things even existing for a good chunk of our lives?
I am absolutely not surprised by the whining and am in no way giving these companies a pass. Something absolutely must be done to better protect user data and privacy.
But babies and bath water come to mind when I read comments like yours.
[0] https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...
yeah sure, but also bet on the one that can pass legislation regarding the other one.
If the eu had taken a more ambitious route then I could see this actually working for apple, who operates, imo opinion, under the principle of balancing what is best for the customer against what the developer can tolerate. This has created the apple ecosystem as the only one that is profitable, precisely for the same reason the author argues the eu seeks to regulate businesses.
So by more ambitious I meant there needs to be a convention that governs technology along a framework akin to a technology user’s bill of rights. No stealing information, no antipatterns, cancel subscriptions with a single click, etc…
Single-market perspectives only apply to EU member-states. There is no expectation of "singleness" outside the EU borders, any extra-EU standardization is just an occasional side-effect.
This is the same as talking about "free trade" inside and outside the US: outside US borders there is no obligation for the US government to obey "free trade" principles, which is why they will happily apply import tariffs that would be illegal to have between US states.
> apple, who operates, imo opinion, under the principle of balancing what is best for the customer against what the developer can tolerate
Big lolz. Apple operates under the principle of balancing what is best for Apple against what the market will tolerate. The rest is just advertising.
> convention that governs technology along a framework akin to a technology user’s bill of rights. No stealing information, no antipatterns, cancel subscriptions with a single click, etc…
What you're suggesting is exactly what the EU is doing through GDPR and now the DMA. The balancing act is them recognizing that these big powerful tech companies derive their value partly from their scale, network effect, etc. and trying not to, for example, try and break them up, but instead lay out a set of principles that a sufficiently big tech company has to comply with. These rules are designed to promote consumer interests and limit what is perceived as abuse of market power by forcing the companies to be more open to competitors.
I can see your point, and when as I was reading I was definitely finding myself understand better the EU's POV, however at the end, when I tried to apply the same example given in the article to the present circumstances, I had a hard time seeing how DMA furthered those goals. But to see what I mean, let's look at an example:
> The single market means unifying the different national European markets.
This is the general thrust of it, and I agree with it and it makes sense to me. The article even went to great lengths to say that the EU would do this even at the expense of their own industries, because the outcomes would ultimately be better for everyone. The example given was roaming, and I think that makes a lot of sense. Another example given was standardizing on 230v AC, while still allowing each country to maintain their regional outlet shapes.
Ok, so far I think we should be in agreement and I haven't said anything that doesn't come directly from the article. In summary the single market means unifying the national markets, and this is done by making one set of rules, even if it's at the expense of their own industries. So nothing thus far should be controversial.
Now in the case of Apple, the question is what being regulated. They're not requiring iOS and android apps to be cross platform, as that would be intractable and is akin to the example in the article of requiring countries to change their plugs. It's basically "infrastructure" at the point, and the cost doesn't justify the benefits. So in this case, the "what" means iOS apps.
To that end, what remains is defining a set of rules that applies to all iOS apps so they can be some uniformity of regulations, similar to the example of standardizing on voltage or charger format. So what are these things in particular? That would be where apps can be found, how they're downloaded, how people pay for stuff, how they cancel subscriptions, etc...
Ok, so now we've reached the point. All of these things actually were already standardized in a single, predictable way, just that they were done by apple. This was done even at the "expense of industry", which in the case would be the developers. I'm sure developers, like cell phone carriers would love to do bad stuff to their users if it makes them more money, but it's ultimately better for the industry as a whole to forbid it. This only works when your competition can't do the bad stuff either.
There are legitimate complaints that I believe can and should be guided towards apple's stewardship of the App Store, but I don't think requiring multiple app stores was the solution. My point is I think the ethos of what the EU is doing is correct, and I wholly support the effort, as I indicated in my ancestral comment. However, I just don't agree that they chose the right unit of abstraction. They should be forcing apple and Google as app stores to abide by a single set of guidelines, but the implementation therein should be left to those companies. Google allows multiple app stores, great. Apple doesn't want to. That should also be fine.
So if you disagree with me, or if I still don't understand the article, can you explain to me better how? As I see it there are multiple levels they could have chosen to enforce the one market principle. I just don't agree with where they chose it. By the same token, forcing iOS and android to be cross platform would also be incorrect.
Ok, and finally I say this mostly from the pserpsective of an iOS user. I like the platform and I feel like I can trust it, however it really only works if developers don't have alternatives where they can do bad stuff. So if there's another App Store where they're free to do shady stuff then it puts all the developers distributing their apps through the apple App Store at a disadvantage.
On the other hand, if the EU wants to manage and regulate all the app stores with a consistent set of guidelines, then I don't understand what are even the points of other app stores. So help me understand, because to me it just seems like what the EU wants we already had when apple was curating the App Store, and it wasn't even really that bad for anyone besides developers, which the EU seemed to be fine with if it was for the good of the industry.
If there is only one company, it's not a standard - it's a monopoly.
> They should be forcing apple and Google as app stores to abide by a single set of guidelines
They are. It's just that what Apple does simply won't fit in those guidelines.
> but the implementation therein should be left to those companies.
It is. The DMA doesn't tell Apple how to run their servers or what APIs to allow. It just tells everyone, including Apple, that some behaviors in the market are ok and some are not. It just so happens that Apple falls in the not-ok bin.
> Google allows multiple app stores, great. Apple doesn't want to. That should also be fine.
According to whom, you?
The fact is that European society, as represented in the EU Parliament, EU Council, and EU Commission, determined that such behavior is NOT fine in the market. It strangles competition to Apple in the digital-services arena and effectively allows them to extract rent from the whole industry. Hence, Apple should stop what they are doing or face consequences. This is a side-effect of issuing guidelines for acceptable behavior in the digital marketplace.
If you don't like the directive, go vote for some party in European elections (hey, this year) and national elections (possibly this year, depending on the country) to change it. If you're not in Europe, well, you are not affected by the directive, so you don't really get a say about it.
"App Stores let private companies subdivide and control the single market to their own financial gain. When much of the digital economy is taking place on phones, tablets, and various other devices that are largely limited to App Stores, this is effectively ceding the single market to a fragmented market that’s entirely under corporate control.
This is against the core operating theory behind the EU."
[1] https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...
Google and Apple are not thinking "ah let's figure out how to work with these people to make a sustainable system" they are thinking what the most extractive operation they can get away with is, they do not deserve our regard because we also got blinky toys.
Commission a statue for them if you want. What is this parasocial relationship some people have with fiscal entities?
It's all incredibly sad.
There's nothing "high status" in having advertisements in the Settings app.
Apple Music and Apple TV+, sure.
But the 30% from Spotify and Netfix, and other shenanigans... not so much :/
New technology, unbridled, inevitably reaches a point where its negatives become clear to society at large. The printing press is regulated, cars are regulated, nuclear energy is regulated - because society recognized that we can't just let anyone build reactors in their sheds. Internet tech has probably reached that point.
Nor do I care about greasing up anybody on here; you're all strangers to me and I'd like to keep it that way.
My opinions are well thought out and principled; yours are obviously just the product of greedy self interest.
I can’t stand that kind of rhetoric.
There is the same problem with NVIDIA, all NVIDIA threads eventually devolve into "people too dumb to buy AMD like me" as well, but, with apple there isn't even a slope, it's right into it from the outset.
We have just utterly normalized this sort of conduct from some of these fanboys to the point where it doesn't even register with most people. We just have taken it as the inherent nature of Android fans to be offensive like this.
Perhaps it is their nature. People with poor social skills self-selecting to the nerdy phone, etc. I have been leaning more and more to this theory after seeing it in thread after thread after thread - people simply cannot restrain themselves even here on HN. But oh gosh you can't say those things back! how uncivil! how dare I soil our sacred discourse of "brainless sheeple buying it for the blue bubbles" etc.
But there's no reason for the rest of us to tolerate it. It's shitty discourse. But it's so utterly normalized that everyone just shrugs and looks past it.
And I'm not suggesting I have a relationship with any of them, parasocial or otherwise.
I wasn't trying to suggest we treat them like people or put them above us or give them a pass... I simply meant that getting rid of them completely could possibly eliminate the problem being discussed, but would also throw out a lot of value that they created and I didn't think that was the best solution.
America’s relationship with the tech giants is distinct from Europe’s. We can directly regulate them, if we want to. And our cities are littered with buildings and institutions named after their founders and senior leadership, as well as start-ups seeded by their cash and alumni. We see tremendous side-channel benefits, in other words, from that wealth.
Europe, not as much. Because the founders aren’t there. That is in part due to Europeans’ aversion to big business—if you don’t like big businesses you won’t have them homegrown. (Exception for industrial companies in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands.) But it’s also because American companies have been taking advantage of its until-recent regulatory weakness.
That's not true. If you look at a list of largest US companies (e.g. by revenue) this list is quite diversified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...
Spans retail, petroleum, tech, healthcare, insurance, automotive, telecommunications, financials, food, transportation, media, consumer products, etc.
> The biggest chemical and pharmaceutical industry is in Europe
Top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the world:
1) Pfizer (US)
2) Merck (US)
3) AbbVie (US)
4) Janssen (US)
5) Novartis (Switzerland)
6) Roche (Switzerland)
7) Bristol Myers Squibb (US)
8) Sanofi (France)
9) AstraZeneca (UK)
10) GSK (UK)
https://www.drugdiscoverytrends.com/2023-pharma-50-largest-c...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by...
Apple was revitalized by the iPod and later the iPhone? Great, let them sell as many iPods and iPhones as they possibly can. But when they sell it, do not let them keep control of everything. If they are saying the only they can make money is by keeping the iPhone closed and being the gatekeeper of the app store, it means that they are not really making money on the device, so we shouldn't be rewarding them.
Google search was incredible? Ad sense let publishers earn money online? Great. Then let's reward them for that instead of letting them take 60-70% of the ad publishing market.
Does Facebook want to innovate on the communication space by developing an application on XMPP? When was it even working with Google Talk? Amazing, let's reward them for that instead of letting close things down and please let's not them have WhatsApp to feed their endless appetite for user data.
This one sticks out among your examples - that dominant position and the profits from it is the reward. How else would you have a reward work?
This isn't an idle question. Right now companies are doing things that generate their own financial rewards. What other way would you have it work, beyond just some notion of differently?
The absence of a major punishment is not a strong reward. It provides no incentives except to avoid the specific things that produce that punishment.
Because it’s not clear you’re limiting your ideas to the jurisdiction where the DMA applies, I’m only marginally less uncertain about what terms the US would use to nationalize TikTok, and wondering whether the proposal for nationalizing the others - that is to say, taking private property for a public use - would be attached to just compensation (because the trillions involved would surely dent the deficit), or whether there’s some refined subtlety of the case law on Constitutional principles that I have missed or has yet to happen (e.g. trashing the whole takings clause? hard to be certain).
That is to say: this proposal is quite difficult to take seriously, as it implies, but does not identify or engage with, some rather striking changes to the world that would have far reaching consequences.
But they are both huge issues for the companies we're discussing and I absolutely agree with your thoughts on rewarding them for what they do well but not assuming that everything they do must be just as great and giving them a pass for when they get it wrong or actively hostile to their customers.
Perhaps I'm parsing this wrong, but it sounds a lot like "past successes are a license for future abuses." Which is not something I think we should, or can, allow.
I took it as “they have developed products that deliver value to some people every day, so summary execution would not be an unmitigated good”
Sure Instagram is great for discovery of events, but we came from a world where local bars would list those events on their own sites for free. Now the data is locked behind Insta, or FB which I consider a real step backwards for true discovery.
We need some kind of ecosystem-agnostic hardware vendor that provides/supports:
- a Linux-based GUI OS with minimal telemetry
- Web Apps unencumbered by the whims of monopolistic browser vendors
- a RISC-V desktop-class processor (one day...)
- repairable, swappable components
- some sort of local LLM interface for those who need it
Fairphone, Framework laptops and the to-be-released MNT Pocket Reform 7" laptopnprobably come closest to this, minus the RISC-V.
Desktop Linux has made progress over the years in being a great substitute for Win/Mac thanks to webappification and Win/Mac emulation.
Mobile Linux still needs a lot of work on both hardware and software. Ubuntu Touch, Phosh, PostmarketOS, etc need every bit of help.
Nowadays OSS only seems to provide fodder for the big companies to pick up and chew on. Better Linux ain't gonna get many non tech people to not buy laptops from Apple, Dell, etc
I think we are in this phase where we realise that we are increasingly dependent on infrastructure and that we need to regulate it in order for it to be in line with the societal values.
This has happened several times before: Roads, train tracks, phone communications, etc. And it will probably continue on happening in the future.
In the same time we are also deregulating. As a consequence Postnord (postal service operating in Denmark and Sweden) has been relieved from obligations and regulations as we don't send too many letters more - they are more free to price themselves and can act in the market.
The EU represents one sixth of the global economy - why do you find its power surprising?