Hacker News Reader

Comment by darzu | Hacker News Reader

Yikes I hate that Thierry is using "#freefortnite". You can be completely on board with the DMA but still see Epic's behavior as entirely profit motivated and "freeing Fortnite" should not be any official's priority. Epic is not some oppressed minority that needs saving.

View on HN

> You can be completely on board with the DMA but still see Epic's behavior as entirely profit motivated and "freeing Fortnite" should not be any official's priority.

The Digital Markets Act is all about profit-motivated businesses. It regulates markets, not charities. It's not anti-profit at all, just pro-competition, and Apple was attempting to stifle competition.

Precisely! This all about market competition which may both spur new technologies and lower prices for consumers.

The entire point of DMA is to make sure platforms can’t use lock in to prevent others from joining the market for digital goods and services.

What terrifies Apple isn’t Fortnite, it’s that Epic will make a *better* AppStore.

I hope the folk at Valve have been busy working on this - Steam for iOS and Vision Pro could be great!

VisionOS is not consider a gatekeeper my the DMA, and despite the platform supporting it Valve has made no effort to expand their game store to Android. It is doubtful that they will work on an iOS game distribution platform.

Same AppStore, and it runs iPad apps.

"better"? You're giving Epic too much credit. Just see the Play Store competitors like Samsung or Huawei: Full of ads, and in general a terrible experience.

Not saying they can: saying that’s Tim Apples worst nightmare.

Isn't that the functional purpose of hashtags? So that people interested in a topic can find information about it? Wouldn't this tweet be highly relevant to people searching with that tag?

Every large company is, by nature, amoral. All the pro-social stances or whatever are generally just window dressing and PR. Individuals can be moral, but for-profit corporations past a certain size just are too abstract of an entity with too many people of competing interests to ascribe morality to. We shouldn't care about intentions, just whether they're doing something we agree with or not.

It's literally a Digital MARKETS Act. Markets are all about developing healthy profitable businesses. They certainly are not going to be bothered that Epic, a profitable business, wants a fair playing field to compete on.

It's not about Epic. It's about Apple wantonly violating EU laws. The target simply happened to be Epic.

That being said: it's probably a good thing it was Epic that Apple went after; Apple would probably have gotten away with going after a smaller company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com