Maybe they should be. Our societies are ostensibly consumer-centric. It's about time our laws and organisations strongly sided with consumers against any opposition, especially against business.
As a really specific example in the case of Apple, I really hope the DMA causes wider availability of browser choice on iOS so that we as a business that ships a web app can offer our customers features like notifications and other PWA benefits. Our customers are somewhat willing to switch browsers to get the best experience when using our app. But switching to Android? Not a reasonable ask from us.
Most consumers also have jobs right? Making their lives better and easier at work, increasing competition to give their employers more opportunity to thrive, is just as important as making their groceries cheaper.
I can't remember the last time I saw a "this site only works in XYZ" message. Some of that is a lot of modern sites are all built on big frameworks, but some of that is also because only supporting Safari, or only supporting Chrome or only supporting IE is going to lose you huge swaths of customers.
What if I don't want to switch browsers for the "best experience" when using your app? What if I want you to make your app the best experience on my browser of choice?
As always these things are tradeoffs and balances.
What if I cannot do that due to there being no incentive for Apple to support web standards in Safari?
We don't want our users to have to switch browsers, but that leaves us with no ability to use lots of the features that make modern web apps competitive at all with native apps.
Several years ago I wouldn't have even bothered trying to do that on my phone. There is some benefit to Safari being so ubiquitous.
Then all websites would be designed for the one browser!!
After that, Google leverages its other service monopolies, Chrome goes to 95%+ market share, standards fall by the wayside, and nobody has any choice.
I guess the answer to that is antitrust against Google, but I’d rather do that first than go through the Chrome domination phase.
It will be a sad day in the near future when the web becomes “Chrome”, even on mobile, much as it was “IE” not that long ago, alas, we seem to never learn.
Everybody who says “Safari is the new IE” seems to be too young to know what IE and front-end web development were really like during the 00s. I’d take WebKit on iOS over a Blink monoculture any day, and so should any web developer.
I don’t know what the solution would be, not like you can mandate the existence of a web browser engine into existence and making one gets harder for every new thing added.
Google Chrome, Google Search, Google Play, Google Maps, Google Shopping, YouTube, Android, Alphabet's online advertising service.
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
And here's what that designation means for them:
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
If Chrome wins on merit and Chromium remains a viable option to build competing browsers then that is fine.
I don't want Apple to prevent that by forcing an inferior browser down peoples' throats to make sure the web can't win against native apps.
Isn’t chromium still bloated with tracking? Last time I read about it, it was far from a “clean Chrome” at least, now if it was truly open sourced and not mainly controlled by Google I would be much more hopeful.
As someone who’s heavily invested in web I don’t see it being a competition with apps at all, different sports altogether, but sure, supporting notifications are nice, allowing websites to scan networks and Bluetooth, not so much.
I don't think Chromium based browsers such as Brave, Vivaldi or Edge have to send data to Google.
Chromium development is highly dependent on Google of course. Google could theoretically do to Chromium what they have done to AOSP, i.e make sure it's not longer a viable platform for competitors. But I think that's exactly what the DMA could prevent.
>As someone who’s heavily invested in web I don’t see it being a competition with apps at all
I think it's an empirical fact that they do compete. Almost all the installed apps I use could be web apps if it wasn't for arbitrary restrictions.
>but sure, supporting notifications are nice, allowing websites to scan networks and Bluetooth, not so much.
How about not randomly deleting or arbitrarily restricting local data?
Chrome is such a complicated piece of software that the “forks” are highly dependent on Google and when Google unilaterally makes decisions they have to follow suit. Brendan Eich explains that Brave will continue to support Manifest V2 as long as Google doesn’t remove the underlying code paths: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1534893414579249152
I think a lot of people don’t appreciate how delicate the balance of web standards is right now. We have it so good (three high-quality implementations of an open spec) and I’m not willing to throw that away just to run Chrome on my iPhone.
Agitation for consumer rights might actually be an easier way to get benefits to small business.
Because when you try to lobby for small business it becomes lobbying for all business and in the end it's the big business that benefits because somewhere in the process they outlobbied every other interested party and the end form of legislation or action benefits them the most.
Like the right to repair. If it was focused on helping small business it would have been defanged way easier.
An example being Intel, which is currently getting billions in government subsidies via the CHIPS Act, because their business fell behind because it was impeded by the government suing them for antitrust issues.
While the business in US was content to sit on their throne and milk the consumers, US consumers uplifted the entire country of China. Consumers are way more economically powerful than the business. Seeing economy through business and workers lens is as misguided as it is traditional.
This is the easiest way to tell someone is wrong about politics. This doesn't happen, but everyone who doesn't know how anything works thinks it does. You just can't handle the truth that other voters actually believe different things than you.
> While the business in US was content to sit on their throne and milk the consumers, US consumers uplifted the entire country of China.
Think you forgot every other country exists here.
The alternative is that either supporting largest business is completely accidental or that it's done for the good of the voters.
Both alternatives are completely rudiculous. You can be sure that money is flowing. You can see some of the money flowing in the form of lobbying and cosy retirements if government officials in corporate boards. You can be sure there's more. US is incredibly overtly and covertly corrupt at every level.
> Think you forgot every other country exists here.
All other countries that are running trade deficit for decades without much issue?
I've had some great conversations with folks about why this form of "American Capitalism" is the most efficient economic engine with regard to an industrial economy. As a system, this, and a graduated taxation that provides a damping function on "infinite wealth" and feeds it into government services has the potential to create an economy where everyone has a chance to get rich, and everyone's basic needs are met. That combination maximizes participation in the economy and thus GDP.
The macroeconomics class I took spent several weeks on this relationship and the "Great Courses" economics class also talks about it.
The challenge is that rich men (typically its men) don't like being told they can't do something, or told they have to do something which will reduce their total wealth, and they respond by corrupting legislators into changing the rules.
It isn't "good" or "bad" per se, some people always eat all the cookies if they think they can get away with it. As a systems analyst though the system is an excellent study in 'tuning.' In theory, as a government maximizing GDP is a goal because the more GDP the more gets done the happier people are, etc etc. Technology strongly affected the rate of change of wealth, people who were middle class at a startup suddenly being in the top 10% in terms of wealth over the course of a few years, rather than a life time of work and savings. Others leveraging their wealth in technology startups having it rocket them into the 1%.[1] Something that the US system of laws does not do well is respond to changes "quickly" (my lawyer friends tell me that is a design feature not a bug). But as we saw with Microsoft's antitrust case they do respond eventually.
[1] Back in the dot com days there was an article in Wired about the "Billionaire Boys Club" which talked about members of the several VC firms whose net worth had ballooned to over a billion dollars.
I think if the system could limit the ability of rich guys to corrupt legislators, then regulation would just work. I think "Citizen's United VS FEC" kind of broke regulation in that sense. It probable had a positive effect on the economy for some years, but imo it broke American politics. We've even started to see regulators like the EPA and SEC lose high profile court cases.
I'm no lawyer and I think this looks like a great case, but I'm not too confident.