Commission opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta | Hacker News Reader

Commission opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta

ec.europa.eu

579 pointsimpish9208621 comments

The most interesting thing here to me is this bit

> Apple's new fee structure and other terms and conditions for alternative app stores and distribution of apps from the web (sideloading) may be defeating the purpose of its obligations under Article 6(4) of the DMA

because, well, yeah, that's exactly what they do! When Apple users complain about the DMA forcing Apple to allow other stores and sideloading they often predict that Meta and other nefarious corporations will launch their own distribution as the exclusive source of their popular or near-required apps in order to skirt Apple's privacy rules. That is a possibility (though it hasn't happened on Android), but I feel that the benefit of sideloading community-made apps that break Apple's rules by interoperating with services unofficially would more than offset any losses to privacy. However, as Apple's implementation stands the fees and agreements necessary to distribute apps would keep most FOSS or community-maintained apps from being distributed, while allowing rich bad actors an avenue of further abusing their users. It's the worst possible world; a free-for-all for rich corporations to distribute whatever garbage they want and no balancing pressure from unofficial apps keeping their behavior somewhat in check. Moving from a world where Apple gets to decide what code runs on your phone to one where anyone with sufficiently deep pockets makes the call. I hope that the EC finds that the spirit of the DMA is that users decide what runs on their phones, and that Apple's proposed changes are not in that spirit.

CTF is waived for nonprofits, which is how a lot of FOSS projects are structured.

lots is doing a lot of work here. the overwhelming majority of FOSS projects have no structure at all much less non profit corporations behind them. more accurate would be to say "a small number of FOSS projects" or "a lot of the top several FOSS projects".

> That is a possibility (though it hasn't happened on Android)

Android as a platform has far fewer default privacy controls as iOS. Meta doesn't need an alternate App Store to slurp up Android users' data. They would need one on iOS which gives them and everyone else impetus to create alternate stores which allow them to slurp up more data. Apple's opt-out by default data policies cost Meta billions of dollars the quarter it was introduced in the OS update. Meta would assuredly restrict their apps to a Meta store to get back those billions.

> Meta would assuredly restrict their apps to a Meta store to get back those billions

Unless, of course, the friction introduced by requiring users leave the App Store they're comfortable with costs them more.

This.

Plus Meta can't leave the store since they need it to address non-EU markets, and Apple can definitely force them to keep being available in store in the EU if they want to be available elsewhere.

> Apple's opt-out by default data policies cost Meta billions of dollars the quarter it was introduced in the OS update. Meta would assuredly restrict their apps to a Meta store to get back those billions.

How would a different app store change these OS policies and features?

Because, as has already been explained ad nauseam, Apple's control measures are partly technological and partly contractual. If Apple catches you tracking users after users opt out of tracking, Apple will de-list you from their store.

If Meta can simply set up a different storefront (or directly side load), they merely have to follow the EU laws (which are less restrictive than Apple's).

It seems broken if the following things are true at once:

1) we agree that it is good for society that Meta (or others) aren’t allowed to violate your privacy

2) those rules are enforced by a megacorp (like Apple) as part of an everything-bagel of rules that they also profit from (some % cut of app revenue)

If (1) is true then privacy rules should be enforced by governments, not by a megacorp everything bagel power grab.

If (2) were true alone but (1) wasn’t true then it would make Apple’s enforcement of those rules even more obviously bad.

Meta has already been forced to offer non-ad access to Facebook. I assume that is tied to a privacy guarantee (or it wouldn't make much sense - ads can be obnoxious but it is the unconsented surveillance that needs to be reigned in).

The question is about the level of entitlements alternate app stores have and whether Apple has any oversight of those entitlements. If the EU decides anyone can make an App Store and Apple has no say, then iOS would need to trust the entitlements (and signature chain) from those alternate stores. If the alternate store allows entitlements to suck up user data with no say from Apple, then the mechanisms to prevent access to that data are toothless on the device. ACLs aren't effective without controlling the underlying authentication mechanism.

Things like accessing the address book and photos are behind entitlements. If the app's entitlements (from the App Store) don't even permit usage the API will throw an error. A third party store that Apple has zero input on could just allow all API access with super loose entitlements.

If there's no control of who can start a store and Apple is forced to allow that, then it's trivial for big vendors like Meta but also vendors like Epic to start stores with zero access controls to data on the device.

It gets even worse with web views apps use. A web view has access to the unencrypted data that goes through the view. If Meta launches Meta Browser that backs web views inside apps they can see all the traffic from all third party apps.

If Apple puts additional protections at the OS level to gate access to sensitive data the same complaints will be leveled against them as today. By forcing consumer choices into the system the very likely end result will be less consumer privacy. If a person buys an iPhone that's an affirmative signal they trust Apple. If they then have to make additional choices about browsers and app stores they're not necessarily going to be able to make informed choices.

Access to sensitive data an features is gated behind entitlements and user permission. What any reasonable sandbox needs to do is make it difficult for an sandboxed app to tell whether it actually has a permission it has asked for or not by providing the user an option to provide scoped or fake data. Oh, Facebook won't run without me giving it access to my contacts? Ok, here you go, but gee, it looks like I don't have any contacts outside of the iPhone defaults.

I agree. No company can be trusted with such a great amount of user data. Our phones are with us 24/7 and some companies want to not only listen and track but also change our behavioral patterns to suit them. The store analogy doesn’t work anymore. It’s like a store manager is living in my room and looting my personal belongings for valuable things because I once glanced at their storefront. The amount of power these mega corporations gained over the last two decades must be curbed or else they will shape the fabric of our society in their own image.

> Meta and other nefarious… in order to skirt Apple's privacy rules

This isn’t hypothetical, it is precisely what Meta (then Facebook) and Google both already did.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/

https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/news/252456835/Fac...

>Apple's opt-out by default data policies cost Meta billions of dollars the quarter it was introduced in the OS update. Meta would assuredly restrict their apps to a Meta store to get back those billions.

This conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. Look at Meta's revenue since the roll out of ATT. They're essentially back to where they were. They've figured out ML based probability targeting. If anything, they're in a better position than they were pre-ATT, because now they really have some secret sauce in there, because no one else seems to have been able to figure it out.

You are suggesting Facebook doesn't mind valuable information restrictions because they have found other sets/means of valuable information.

That just doesn't follow. Facebook wants everything.

It is a near certainty that yesterday's restricted information is even more valuable today, since they can also increase its value via machine learning systems.

And high profits today don't dampen the need for growth, they accelerate the need by iteratively raising the baseline for next year. The year after. And onward. For the shareholders. For Zuckerberg.

Similarly to GDPR - ATT is bad for Meta but much worse for Meta's competitors.

Facebook lobbied against ATT because it was a massive pain in the ass. Plus, they might not have known if the ML based targeting worked out. At this point, they've spent the capital to work around it, and it's a new moat. I doubt they'd want it to be reverted.

Good point. They are going to lean into their advantages in any situation.

But given their lead, customer base, tech and capital, they can monetize and leverage surveillance information better than anyone in their space. More information creates more advantages for them than anyone else.

Any Facebook killer isn't going to out ad monetize them. The opposite. It is going to be something that provides a better but different experience - and likely to be incompatible with Facebooks surveillance-ad business model. A reverse moat Facebook won't/can't cross.

But outside of Europe people still won't be able to use alternative app stores, so Meta has to provide their app through Apple store, where it will be available to EU users too.

You can restrict which countries your app is available in the App Store. Is there something in the policy that states your app can't be outside the App Store in EU but in the App Store elsewhere?

Good news is that Apple can completely enforce a rule against it in their own store, and this one wouldn't bring any scrutiny from the Commission.

Two questions I have - which may not have answers as of now:

1. Will new app stores be able to sell iPad and Vision apps too? I.e. or just iPhone apps? Apple would obviously restrict this to iPhone apps if it can. But given apps can be cross platform/device, new app stores and their developers are going to want to sell to all devices.

2. If alternate app stores can sell to all Apple devices, will that mean as a practical matter, that the memory allocation/permissions API used for JIT on Macs, and by Apple on its other devices, will now be available to developers for all Apple ecosystem devices?

Among other things, JIT API availability is required for alternate web browser, Javascript, and WebAssembly implementations.

If JIT access becomes universal on iOS devices, then more serious development tools, as well as development friendly interfaces, and third party APIs, are going to be possible. Lots of barriers to serious computing on other devices will be gone.

I am particularly interested in this in terms of Vision Pro + keyboard + trackpad/mouse as a complete Mac replacement for serious work. As apposed to requiring a Mac as it does today.

I don't see a lot of discussion of the Meta "pay or consent" investigation. Why wouldn't giving users the option to pay for tracking-free, ad-free service meet the requirement? Is the concern that the $10/month price too high? Would this kind of model be acceptable at a more reasonable price point?

Ya I am also not following what the problem is with this approach. Is that not the entire point of options? Do people feel entitled to have all free services with no obligations of their own?

So from the articles I can find about the complaints filed against Meta [1] I can't find any explanation of what would be an acceptable price for non-consent besides free.

I mean like it's their right as a government to say 'you can't charge for consent. either charge everyone or no-one', but I wonder how it'll all pan out.

[1](https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/28/meta-consent-or-pay-consum...)

I think the idea is that you cannot have these options like denying access to content only if user pays with $ or personal data.

But the issue I find here is that Meta has not premiered this technique, the first offenders were Italian digital newspapers either requiring your data or a subscription.

I'm never fond of these sort of comparisons, because size does matter. Meta services billions of customers around the globe - a sizable chunk of the entire human species, with a defacto monopoly in terms of raw reach and scale. For them to be held to a higher standard than e.g. an Italian newspaper is not at all unreasonable.

In an ideal world the rules and regulations companies have to follow would be strongly correlated against their size, with penalties growing increasingly harsh for violations. In reality, it's the exact opposite. Small companies can get destroyed by even minor rule violations, whereas massive corporations will endlessly litigate out even absolutely overt violations, and even when they lose the cases after dragging them out endlessly, the penalties they face are entirely inconsequential - a few days of revenue at worst. That's just so wrong on so many levels.

Yes but Italian newspapers which started the trend have faced so far no consequences and they should be more aware of our law than a US company.

Meta's EU business is orders of magnitudes larger than any Italian newspaper. They should be able to afford much better legal counsel.

Meta is free to charge money and/or run ads, but what it can't do is do mass tracking of EU people unless they somehow really want to and freely opt in to that. Charging for an ad-free experience is fine, but charging so that you don't get tracked is not a legal option in EU, privacy is an unalienable human right that's not for sale no matter what contracts they write.

If the policy is "you can't sell you privacy" that would be pretty cool. It would require tech companies to come up with a business model that doesn't profit from pervasive surveillance. It is well within our rights as a society to deem such a model unacceptable.

>"It is well within our rights as a society to deem such a model unacceptable"

Do societies have rights? Where are these rights defined, and how are they limited (if they are at all)? Are you talking about constitutions (and therefore states), or 'international law'?

The right I am referencing is that to self-governance.

Self-governance of what? As a person?

The reason I think it's reasonable to limit your right to sell yourself as a slave is because if it wasn't limited then a lot of people in very precarious economic situations would sell themselves and there would be a very real interest in creating those situations to force more people into slavery. You can see that with the usurious interest charged by payday loan companies. Usury is also usually illegal in civilized societies for a similar reason.

Similarly you shouldn't be allowed to abrogate your right to privacy because it creates an incentive to force other people to do so as well.

Are you genuinely, in good faith, asking if societies can define rules?!

Anyone or any group can make a rule; highwaymen and pirates can make rules. The parent comment was about a “right” to do so, which begged the question as to the origin of the right.

‘We hold these truths to be self evident’

The bottom line is that all rights are an invention.

Obviously within the context of this discussion, we are talking about states (in this case the EU) making laws.

As to whether or not, they have a right to make laws? I think that’s outside of the scope of this discussion because they clearly already made the law and meta isn’t challenging their right to do so.

I did not think it was obvious, and thought that the parent's definition of 'society' was significant to the discussion. The EU is not a state, though it does make laws. As to whether it has a 'right' to make laws, that depends on your view of rights, and may involve Political Authority (which is somewhat problematic).

I was replying to a comment, not directly addressing Meta.

> It is well within our rights as a society to deem such a model unacceptable.

Then... pay for it?

No one is saying it's illegal for companies to demand pay as cost of access. What they can't legally do is take your privacy in lieu of payment. So "pay or don't use" is legal, and always has been. "Surrender your data to use" is not, and following that "Surrender your data or pay to use" isn't either.

Aren’t there actually three options?

1. Pay

2. Give them data

3. Do not use

Why are people not allowed to consent to (2)?

The same reason they're not allowed to choose a phone with a walled-garden ecosystem: A few bureaucrats in Brussels don't like it.

It's more that two sets of elected representatives (the Council and the Parliament) have passed laws that forbid this.

If you're an EU citizen then you can lobby both sets of representatives. If you're not then this isn't really any of your business.

Like, I hate that the NSA can slurp up all my data, but as a non US citizen I have limited ability to prevent this.

Because basically everyone giving up all privacy for a modicum of convenience makes the world a worse place. It's a seatbelt situation; people consistently make the wrong decision, so the option is removed. In the abstract it's distasteful to remove autonomy like that, but on occasion we need to make collective calculated decisions like this.

I don't get how it makes me worse off if someone else voluntarily consents to give up their privacy?

It is much easier for your government to institute a repressive regime if most of your fellow citizens have given up their privacy. Once instituted, the regime can prevent you from leaving the country and harm you in many ways even if you personally were very careful to preserve your privacy.

Maybe you'll understand it when I replace one inalienable right with another in that sentence: "I don't get how it makes me worse off if someone else voluntarily consents to selling themselves to slavery?"

Same reason you can't sell your organs or sell your physical freedom / time in prison (falsely admit guilt because someone paid you to do so in order for them to avoid prison) or even end your own life. The country you live has citizens who have banded together to created laws and regulations that say these various freedom-y things, if engaged in at scale by people who might have individual reason themselves to do it, are considered harmful to society and so prohibited.

Although the decision sounds so simple the underlying principle cannot be accepted. Privacy is an inalienable human right, just like being a free person. We, as a modern society, decided that some things are illegal regardless of my much both parties agree to do so. One cannot own another person, or work without compensation, or sell their organs to evade prison time. What EU is saying is that such a transaction is illegal. And just like the slavery, numerous companies are doing everything in their power to keep it.

That is exactly what EU laws say — privacy is a right. You cannot give up your rights in exchange for money, just like you cannot legally sell yourself as a slave to someone, as that would be illegal for both parties.

Ad tracking has nothing to do with privacy. The app is already tracking your every move to serve relevant content. Serving relevant ads is the same thing and is no more of an infringement on your privacy.

> Ad tracking has nothing to do with privacy.

It has; it directly violates my privacy by tracking me against my will. This implies collecting data about me without my consent.

> The app is already tracking your every move to serve relevant content.

Which is also illegal under the GDPR: An app may not track anything it doesn't immediately require to provide a value to the user, it may not track anything it didn't get explicit consent to track, and must disclose why it is tracking what, how, why, as well as where and how long it keeps that data.

> Serving relevant ads is the same thing and is no more of an infringement on your privacy.

Serving relevant ads is fine, if you can do it within the boundaries I described in the previous paragraph. If you cannot, you cannot do this legally in the EU. There is no wiggle room here; apparently some people refuse to understand that some American business practices are simply not feasible in the EU - period.

I'm saying that the app looks at what you like in order to serve you content in the feed. Do you dispute this?

If you pay, you have to be being tracked surely?

I think tracking-free and ad-free are different concerns here. Basically you can offer ad-free for $X/month, but tracking consent should be separate ( basically anyone would be able to deny tracking )

Same issue on the Apple side will play out probably similar; either they can charge every developer some technology fee, or they cannot charge to anyone.

> I think tracking-free and ad-free are different concerns here

Maybe in theory, but in practice they are one and the same. The CPM on ads where you don't know the audience is so low that you might as well skip the ads entirely.

> Same issue on the Apple side will play out probably similar; either they can charge every developer some technology fee, or they cannot charge to anyone.

Yes, and the result for both will be that there is no free tier in the EU anymore. All EU developers will pay the CTF and all EU users will pay $10/month for for ad-free FB.

I know you’re not the person to ask about this. Just asking out of curiosity and frustration: Why do advertisers think that they are entitled to everything about my life, family, habits, and other private information? Being able to collect and correlate data from various resources to identify everything about me doesn’t change the fact that I am entitled to my own privacy.

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."

– Banksy

> Yes, and the result for both will be that there is no free tier in the EU anymore. All EU developers will pay the CTF and all EU users will pay $10/month for for ad-free FB.

And that's a good thing! If people really get value out of Facebook, they'll pay for it. If Facebook cannot deliver value without invading their users privacy and selling their data, maybe their business premise was flawed in the first place. Is it so alien to accept that the era of "free" online services might end after all?

Regarding the CTF specifically: I don't think Apple will get away with this after all, but we'll see.

I think as long as they don't discriminate, they can get away with it. But will they choose to go this way is another question.

> Maybe in theory, but in practice they are one and the same. The CPM on ads where you don't know the audience is so low that you might as well skip the ads entirely.

Your case only valid with "zero consent" case. This is proved with Apple's tracking protection for apps already; given that you have some x% of users consenting to tracking, CPM value for non-tracking users are within 85-95% range.

> The CPM on ads where you don't know the audience

Contextual Advertising is also a thing, see CarbonAds and others

I wrote about it months ago when they did it. Why wouldn't it? Because... it's illegal (under EU law)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38192620

But the answer is: pay or consent "does not achieve the objective of preventing the accumulation of personal data by gatekeepers". See https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_... (also linked via the tweet elsewhere in this discussion)

My understanding, and the understanding of the EU commissioner [0], is that any amount is too high.

Consent must be freely given under EU law, not given in exchange for not having to pay money. You can't give a discount on the services for consenting.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/apple-google-and...

If that's the case, several European newspapers are also in breach. The latest iteration of paywalls typically state something like "we need money to survive, so you either buy a subscription or you agree to being tracked for advertising purposes".

On a certain level I agree with you: it goes against the spirit of the law and it's downright rude (effectively blackmailing readers).

This said, the alternative is that they go full-paywall (and risk death, when less than 1% of readers will actually bother to sign up).

Although I agree with the sentiment, I also would like to point of that newspapers existed before the internet and we had to pay for them despite having ads on them.

I don’t know how but at some point as a society we decided that we must tip a restaurant 25% after tax, but the newspapers aren’t worth a dime. I also don’t understand why they have to be all $25 per month now. I don’t think they were ever so profitable to being with.

> we had to pay for [newspapers] despite having ads on them

Absolutely. The main difference is that I could decide, day by day, whether I wanted to read newspaper A or B, or nothing at all; now I have to pledge monthly contributions to one paper, which are often very hard to cancel.

The industry cannot get their act together to solve microtransactions, and that's their doom; if a few major newspapers pooled together to, say, subsidize a browser feature that gives us back that model, they wouldn't be in the dire shape they're in now.

> at some point as a society we decided that we must tip a restaurant 25%

As an American society maybe, tips in Europe are not as common nor expected.

a) Not all newspapers were paid.

b) If someone handed me a newspaper I was not expected to pay for it as well.

c) The newspaper dosn't fucking track you.

The news sites I frequent are doing something slightly different though. Some of them are detecting adblockers and give a similar popup saying "either you subscribe or turn off adblocker". This is fine as they don't force you to allow tracking, just seeing ads.

What you described may be out there as well, I just haven't stumbled on it personally.

It is indeed different, the interesting nuance is that the difference is permitting advertising interest based tracking vs non-personalized lower yield ads if you decline the cookie banner. It’s interesting to see that the money without serving personalized ads is not enough to keep publishers afloat, grim, at least for websites trying to offer ad supported content AND user choice

I've just tested a few (gazzetta.it, repubblica.it, corriere.it) and they all trigger without adblockers. The text explicitly mentions profiling cookies.

In Germany, it is nearly never like that, and always about accepting profiling. You don't even get ad-free. You pay 3€ a month to not get profiling on one site, it's completely absurd.

> This said, the alternative is that they go full-paywall (and risk death, when less than 1% of readers will actually bother to sign up).

Good. They'll be replaced with others that can either provide enough value that people don't mind paying for them or can reduce their costs to survive without tracking like they did before the Internet. Win/win either way.

Newspapers aren't gatekeepers, unlike Meta.

I’ve long promoted this. Many others did, too. I went as far as suggesting they charge above the per-user profit of the surveillance business just to increase odds it would be profitable. I wanted that for Google apps on alternative Android’s and Facebook.

That they won’t release such products despite the demand shows they’re just evil. They believe they can squeeze more money and power out of ever-increasing surveillance.

Perhaps there is another incentive/coercion to encourage this behavior that we are not aware of.

All sounds great. I'm quite curious what their objection to Apple's browser choice screen is though:

> The Commission is concerned that Apple's measures, including the design of the web browser choice screen, may be preventing users from truly exercising their choice of services within the Apple ecosystem, in contravention of Article 6(3) of the DMA.

Looks relatively reasonable to me:

https://preview.redd.it/ios-17-4-db1-new-default-browser-pop...

Is it because they always put Safari at the top and then try to randomise in a mix of browsers most people won't have heard of?

When you look at the list you have to be concerned about the state of the browser market.

Chromium is going to dominate desktop and mobile and entrench pro-advertising measures eg. browser fingerprinting, long term first party cookies etc for years to come. Meta and Google must be thrilled.

Of course it makes a mockery of GDPR and other privacy measures EU has been pushing.

But users are demanding choice in browsers, and they are picking the least private, most pro-advertising one en masse! What’s its biggest benefit? It offers a suite of native-replacement, in-the-standards-process-but-not-finalized APIs so developers can write slow, bloated applications once and run them everywhere! This is what users want!

It is only good for Google. Not for the web.

Thanks for sharing.

I'm curious about the sorting of that list. From the image (mirror: https://i.imgur.com/pjo78lS.png):

   Safari
   Vivaldi
   Opera
   Web@Work
   Edge
   Onion Browser
   Seznam.cz
   Brave
   Firefox? (cut in half)

Is it Safari first then randomized names? It doesn't look alphabetical order to me.

Chrome doesn't even show up, Firefox is almost hidden.

I don't know how the list is generated. But as others have pointed out, there seems to be established precedent that hardcoding Safari first would not be compliant. And alphabetizing would create bad incentives (Calling dibs on "Aardvark" as a browser name, BTW).

The problem I see with randomization is that with all the browsers that are skins on Chromium nowadays, this would be likely to steer users into a Chromium based browser.

> Calling dibs on "Aardvark" as a browser name, BTW

It's ok, I'm naming mine after Aachen

AABrowser is mine.

Dibs on !0A Aangstrom.

Green and eco, go for it.

This screen has already so much dark history by Microsoft on Windows.

Having Safari hardcoded to the first position in the list certainly won't fly. The Windows browser choice ballot and the Android search engine choice screens eventually settled on a two tier with the five most popular options in a random order at the top, and a second tier was shown after them also in a random order.

But the other problem is the "not now" button, because it's what the large majority of users will click. Does it by any chance have the effect that Safari is kept as the default, and the question is never asked again? The Windows browser choice ballot and the Android search engine choice screens forced the user to make a choice.

Isn't having the 5 top choices always be the same kind of the same violation?

It entrenches the big guys.

The idea that any of this is or ever was a problem to the end user is laughable honestly, this is political theater. End users want to be able to browse the web, that’s the point of a web browser. Most of them are based on the same underlying technology and implementations. Throwing around political power to force OS teams to spend engineering resources on the illusion of choice is actively harmful for basically zero benefit to the end user.

It's not a problem for the end user to be unable to pick which browser they want to use?

Speak for yourself, I would consider being forced into a single browser choice a huge problem, to the point that I will not buy a device that does it.

The fact that alternate browser engines were banned on iOS was indeed a huge problem, but I think the current legislation goes too far. As the GP said, many users won't care. I think trying to force them to care by presenting a randomized list of a dozen different options at setup time is misguided. I don't see the issue with merely having a default so long as there's an easy way to change it and Apple isn't applying any rules or restrictions to competing browsers that they don't apply to their own.

Indeed, outside Hackernews hardly any user cares about the browser.

However it becomes relevant once a dominating vendor uses the monopoly to limit the capabilities of the browser to benefit their app store etc. and that is hard to notice. For good competition the EU tries to limit that early.

Yeah, and what they’ve done here will result in a Chrome monopoly everywhere. They needed to break Chrome before going after Safari and Apple.

Apple really shouldn't have used a monopoly strategy to block another, more theoretical monopoly from happening.

I agree, I’m not on Apples side in this stuff, and actually think the App Store strategy tax is killing Apple as a worthwhile company. I wish they’d just dump the whole thing. But the monopoly of Chrome is getting to be as bad as the IE6 days, and is worth prioritising in my opinion, because it affects everyone, not just those who buy into Apple products.

Except that Apple monopolistic behavior would have stayed limited to iOS devices, which they make and maintain. If users were staunchly opposed to this “monopoly,” they had the option to switch to any of a huge selection of highly comparable choices.

Google wins in this situation, because now their dominance expands to far more devices.

> they had the option to switch

Let's not mince words; the "option" you are referring to is to throw away your iPhone and buy a different device. The fact that this is the only path of recourse is the obvious reason why Apple is being investigated multinationally.

Users don't have to be opposed to a monopoly for one to exist. Customers loved Bell telephone's monopoly, because Bell gave their users free long-distance calling. That love did nothing to stop what the government did next.

Users "throw away [their phone] and buy a different device" basically every 2 years, anyway. Apple's policies haven't changed significantly, and their market share among mobile devices has stayed between 11 and 25% for 10 years now. Their "monopoly" is limited to what runs on the devices they sell, and its impact on the web is at worst a wash, and at best good for maintaining diversity among web engines.

Were iOS to represent an impactful plurality of mobile devices, I'd agree that there's monopolistic potential, but right now this is just a case where everyone (users, competitors, and government representatives interested in "sticking it to uber corporations") are all incentivized to push for legislation/regulations of this sort.

> Users "throw away [their phone] and buy a different device" basically every 2 years

If the DOJ's accusations of lock-in are true, then it's kinda a moot point. Perhaps even more criminal on Apple's behalf.

> its impact on the web is at worst a wash, and at best good for maintaining diversity among web engines.

It is not. Apple deliberately ignored PWA functionality for a decade until regulators threatened them enough to add it. They have dragged their feet supporting actual third-party browser options[0] and undeniably harm user freedom in the browser market.

"at best", Apple is using an illegal double-standard to prevent Google Chrome from competing with their underpowered browser. It is a pathetic plea to avoid competition, which is inexcusable no matter how powerful Google is. Realizing user harms to prevent a theoretical problem is not an excusable pattern of behavior - the DOJ and EU are absolutely correct in their judgement. They'll likely be right when they implicate Google too - but that's a different discussion, and entirely different harmful business strategy.

[0] https://mozilla.github.io/platform-tilt/

And inside hackernews nobody cares what the outside people care about.

I can see that some people would think that, but it's a design that was converged on after several iterations and seems to have worked for both the regulators and the companies. I think both of the previous examples actually started with just enough entries for a single screen, and were later expanded to include more entries in a second tier.

From the user's perspective, having to make a choice from an unsorted list of hundreds or thousands of items would not work. That's why the regulators seem to accept the idea that not every product has the right to be on those choice lists, and not every listed product needs to be equally prominent. What's important is that the criteria are objective and don't give an unfair advantage to the platform owner.

When Microsoft was made to do a browser choice screen for the EU in 2010 they had a two tier system and it seemed to go well with the EU. On one hand, sure - it is an advantage for the popular browsers. On the other hand the goal is more that the manufacturer not be using their position to force the browser so heavily not necessarily to put every Joe Schmoe Browser in front of the same number of eyes. From a practicality perspective it solves the main problem without becoming a complication in itself.

Safari is not hardcoded to the first position, it is fully randomized.

From all the comments in the Reddit thread and from Apple's documentation it's entirely random.

Thanks, I was going just by the OP. Then I'd have to imagine that the problem is with the "not now" button.

> But the other problem is the "not now" button, because it's what the large majority of users will click

Yeah, because not now, dammit. I am not ready to choose the browser, I have no clue. Geezus, give me an option if you really insist on me to have options but don’t FORCE me to make my mind up when I’m not ready, right there on the spot. How do I even know if this is the best choice I am about to make? Just imagine that every time someone taps “not now” they simply say “I don’t care”. Why do I need to feel the breath of a bureaucrat on my neck when settling up my phone? Just because the bureaucrat had some beef with Apple I’m now forced to make some possibly uneducated decisions. Does your 70 year old mother or 3rd uncle knows which browser is the best and the implications of making the choice are?

Go and sort out more pressing matters. Leave my walled garden alone.

You are entirely free to just choose Safari, in that case.

Sure, but how does a person not fluent in tech know what the good choice is. Think from the perspective of a tech illiterate for a moment. They won’t know and the law will forbid making recommendations, and Safari cannot be put as first choice because the bureaucrat doesn’t like it.

I’m curious. Why isn’t Microsoft forced to present a similar screen for browsers?

Microsoft has been forced to show the Browser Choice screen way before DMA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

I presume that was only visible when the region is Europe. But also the obligation expired in 2014. Weird.

> Microsoft's obligation to display the Browser Choice screen to Windows users expired in December 2014.

Interesting! When I got presented this list Safari wasn't even "above the fold" which surprised me, so I assumed it was randomised.

When I clicked Safari it also opened an App Store sheet for Safari, which I thought was weird but probably done to keep it consistent with the other options (more like "see more details" before making the choice definitive/installing)

“Select your birthdate from this randomized list of possible dates.”

You wouldn’t.

Cannot imagine why this is being downvoted. Presenting users with a randomized list is a dark pattern that discourages use of the associated feature.

Randomization is required by the regulation. Another instance of what a smart person wants out of a feature and what the EU wants being very different things.

It's being downvoted because randomizing something that is by its nature chronological is very obviously different from randomizing the order of something where you want to explicitly avoid giving the impression that one takes priority over another.

It might be that Apple enforces the use of webkit.

Are those real browsers or just reskins of Safaris inner web components?

For now they're all WebKit. Apple now allows other browser engines to be used but they'll probably take a while to come out, if ever.

Oh, that's good news.

I'm excited for Firefox to appear there using its own engine.

Criticism I have seen:

- Safari will always still be installed and have its icon on the first page of your home screen by default, even if you choose another browser.

- Choosing another browser doesn't actually select it - it brings you to their app store page, where you still have to tap the (relatively tiny) install button.

- If you already have other browsers installed that are not included in the choice screen (e.g. Firefox Nightly, I believe), then you're still forced to install/pick a different browser.

- you can't uninstall Safari. The DMA clearly requires Apple to allow uninstalling it.

- the Share Sheet for in-app webview privileges Safari (Safari-specific "Add to Reading List", "Add Bookmark" at the top) regardless of default browser.

- apps with in-app webviews can roll out a custom engine, but otherwise it uses WebKit regardless of default browser. It should obviously use the webview facility provided by the default browser, if it offers one.

- confusing to change defaults. There's no central "Default Apps" screen in Settings. You have to go in the Settings app, scroll way down to a given browser, and then you can change the default. So the default browser setting is weirdly treated as an app-specific setting rather than a system setting.

- If Safari is not the default, you can change your default browser within "Settings.app >> Safari". If Safari is the default, you can't change your default browser there at all. Whereas the default browser selection menu will always be shown in the Settings.app submenu of third-party browsers.

The default browser has no technical ability in iOS (currently) to supply an in-app component to replace WKWebView or SFSafariViewController, and frankly as an app developer I shudder at the idea of having to test our use of in-app browsers against every browser, every release.

I think that in-app browsers that are solely used to render the app, and not separately accessible web pages, should be considered an implementation detail of the app. That also means that apps should be free to bring their own browser engine for that purpose (à la Electron). However, where apps provide access to web sites that are also accessible outside the app, the user should be able to configure the browser for that (possibly different from the system default). That should pose no particular problem for app developers, as those external web sites need to work under different browsers anyway.

> as those external web sites need to work under different browsers anyway

You say that but many sites essentially only support Chrome (and Edge by extension). If you install Firefox, or keep Safari, and the external sites just continues to assume everyone downloads Chrome you get nice broken web views. Or if a user changes the default browser (and thus web view engine) after the fact.

> many sites essentially only support Chrome

Yes, but they shouldn’t, and it’s not that difficult, so I have no sympathy. It’s also not that many.

"It’s fixable so it should be fixed, and even if it’s not fixed, it doesn’t matter," is a pretty good summary of how much thought the pro-regulators are bringing to the topic.

I'm not saying sites can't or shouldn't be fixed to support browsers other than Chrome. The fact of the matter is these sites exist and aren't incentivized to support anything but Chrome. When an overwhelming proportion of visits are through Chrome they only support Chrome, just like when those visits were IE6 and sites only supported IE6. Their advertisers love all of Google's web API proposals because they feed fingerprinting mechanisms.

Sites that only support Chrome and have no need to support Safari (WebKit) will continue to support Chrome. Users that want to have a third party browser handle web views in apps or web apps won't have meaningful options as WebKit won't be a requirement so every site will code only to Chrome. The status quo at least requires a vendor support WebKit if for no other reason is to support web views in their iOS apps.

I don’t see why the situation for viewing public websites from within apps should differ from the situation on the desktop. People choose which browser they use on the desktop, and live with any difficulties that may or may not bring. (E.g. I’m using Firefox and have few problems.) So the same would be the case for browsers in mobile apps.

Firefox isn't a transitive dependency on the desktop. If an app uses a WebView[0] control on Windows, Firefox has no effect on its behavior and performance. It uses the Edge engine to power WebViews. On iOS WKWebView currently uses WebKit.

The EU apparently wants to change this behavior on iOS. A WKWebView would be backed by the system's default browser selection if it made claim to support WKWebKit views. So your third party app with no direct connection to Firefox that uses a WKWebKit view now depends on Firefox handling the loaded pages in the view. If they don't work in Firefox or whatever browser the user has selected the third party app is affected by the choice of browser. This also has an affect on web apps on the Home Screen.

The issue with Chrome is it already dominates the web. App vendors will drop Safari WebKit support as soon as WKWebKit no longer mandates the site work in Safari WebKit. Without iOS enforcing support for Safari WebKit by being the only option for the non-trivial number of iOS users of the web, Chrome will be the only supported browser in apps and the wider web.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/?f...

...apps don't use WebViews on Windows (or MacOS really, for that matter) because they are unstable APIs that Microsoft and Apple both break in nonsensical ways. It's why Electron is king, in many respects. The only desktop software that use WebViews afaik are the "native apps" which really ought to be handled with a leaner library anyways.

> App vendors will drop Safari WebKit support as soon as WKWebKit no longer mandates the site work in Safari WebKit.

Some will. Wanna guess why?

> It should obviously use the webview facility provided by the default browser

Android doesn't do that either. You get Android System WebView which is always WebKit/Blink.

Windows didn't provide any browser engines apart from Trident through mshtml.dll either.

It would make iOS development harder - instead of getting a web view working just for WKWebView, you would need to get it working for every WebView out there. Given that they are not full browsers, it's not as simple as following web standards/caniuse. For example, service worker support in in-app browsers is limited.

If this actually gets implemented, every app out there will most likely pin the in-app browser engine to WKWebView OR bundle a binary blob with their own browser engine directly into .ipa. Bundled browser engine in .ipa has privacy implications - the app will be able to fully read secure HTTPS cookies of the sites that user visits - something that's currently protected.

> Android doesn't do that either. You get Android System WebView which is always WebKit/Blink.

Not if the application uses Custom Tabs to start a web browsing activity.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/android/custom-tabs/

Firefox fully supports this and if you set it as a default browser you will many apps open content in a Firefox powered webview. (Activity)

Apple can do the same. Not trivial but definitely possible.

> [...] if you set [Firefox] as a default browser you will many apps open content in a Firefox powered webview. (Activity)

This is great because the Firefox webview allows to break it out in to a proper Firefox tab in the app. Also, the Firefox webview also uses extensions installed in Firefox app, e.g. uBlock Origin.

Thanks to you and others for pointing these out. I want to make clear that this isn't the EU's list and is just stuff I could observe disregarding my default browser choice. But if there's good reasons, by all means, don't make developers' lives hell.

> apps with in-app webviews can roll out a custom engine, but otherwise it uses WebKit regardless of default browser. It should obviously use the webview facility provided by the default browser, if it offers one.

This has massive potential to break an unbelievable number of things, first-party and third-party alike. WebKit is used in all sorts of places people wouldn’t expect, for example at one point UILabel (the native control responsible for displaying non-scrolling text and labels) used WebKit under the hood for rendering attributed strings.

Users want to truly exercise their choice of browser screen so badly that a list of nitpicks about the ordering of options in the share sheet and the prominence of an "Open" button which works the same way for every other app install flow is thwarting them from doing so.

The DMA is not (directly) about what users want; it's about markets having level playing fields, where all competitors have the same opportunities and thus have to win based on merit, rather than based on dominance in a different market.

Of course, the idea behind that is that that competition will then lead to things that users really want, without having to mandate what that is specifically through central planning.

If users can be lost in meaningful numbers to such comparatively tiny frictions, it seems like the market will never sufficiently be a level playing field.

I agree that it's a hard problem (like fair markets regulation in general - e.g. it's not straightforward how to define a particular market either). Unfortunately I'm also not sure what the better solution would be - at least trying to make them as fair as possible seems to be the somewhat reasonable choice, compared to full central planning or a free-for-all market.

Arguments on the margin make sense, but DMA compliance has huge resource costs and will surely come with eye watering penalties. And yet if small barriers are indeed so insurmountable then the benefits will be limited. So: is it worth it?

I think cookie banners have not meaningfully changed users’ ability to exercise privacy preferences, but they have probably cost the economy many tens of billions of dollars to implement, enforce, and litigate. As far as I can tell, there isn’t much reflection on what that says about effective legislation.

Chrome is the most popular browser and Apple’s largest competitor and isn’t on the first page?

What changed that caused all this? They can do this now because of the passage of the DMA but was there some specific event that triggered the creation and passage of that?

I’m surprised that so little happened for such a long time in terms of regulation (EU or US) and then suddenly it feels like the EU really jumped in to the fray.

The DMA came into full effect this month. The EC looked at the big companies targeted by the DMA and the state of their compliance, had questions about several of those companies' compliance and so opened investigations.

> was there some specific event that triggered the creation and passage of that?

Not really, but the DSA package has been in the works for quite a while now even though it seems very recent. The DMA may have only really come into effect May last year and the compliance deadline was only three weeks ago, but it was first proposed by the Commission all the way back in 2020, and building off proposals from the previous Commission. In a sense, they've been working on it since GDPR in 2016.

Ok that’s what I was missing, that this back in some ways to 2016.

Does someone know what the minimum fine is gatekeepers face? All sources I find only talk about the maximum fine of 10%

EDIT: Or maybe rather an expected fine, we saw with GDPR that the maximum fine isn't really used much, if at all.

The DMA does not specify a minimum fine for violations.

I'm not a lawyer, but I guess that would be zero.

The maximum in absolute numbers would be ~40B USD or ~80B USD for repeated violations, as I read it.

There is no minimum fine. But: “In fixing the amount of a fine, the Commission shall take into account the gravity, duration, recurrence, and, for fines imposed pursuant to paragraph 3, delay caused to the proceedings.” (Article 30 paragraph 4)

So you might compare the actual noncompliance to the worst conceivable noncompliance with respect to those factors and make a guess.

Edit: There’s also this quote by Thierry Breton, Commissioner for Internal Market, on the linked page: “[…] Should our investigation conclude that there is lack of full compliance with the DMA, gatekeepers could face heavy fines.” This would imply that anything but full compliance could already incur “heavy” fines.

Thank you. I think Big Tech is already quite close to the worst perceivable non compliance, but I guess we'll see.

Why isn't Microsoft on this list?

Good point. I guess the world recognizes that MS isn't quite as dominant as it was before - aleast on the operating systems side with Apple and Linux gaining reasonable share

Also Windows is comparably open to other environments. The Windows and Xbox stores exist, but you are not forced to use them or does MS take a cut on software sold.

Only potential issue I see is bundling of Office 365 and Teams. And they already fixed that one. So they are the least worst player on market.

Can you install a game on an Xbox with no disc drive without using their store?

No... Same goes for Sony. And Nintendo just stopped running their OS on not their hardware... I hope EU gets around to fix those later...

That would destroy the console industry as we know it.

Consoles are sold at close to break even with money made back through game sales.

If EU allowed third party stores and stripped their commissions it would trigger a mass consolidation where Sony, Nintendo etc would buy developers, game engine vendors etc en masse and force exclusivity.

Indie developers in particular would have no way to compete. And consumers would be forced to buy multiple consoles.

I don't know how you arrive at those conclusions. None of this make sense to me. The thing you fear is already reality. Console manufacturers have always been trying to force exclusivity. Which they can because they own the store. For a long time exclusives were the only thing carrying console sales, and forcing customers to buy multiple consoles.

Why would anyone want to be bought? There would be nothing to gain for devs. No one would need to accept any deals to get on a platform since they wouldn't need to use the manufacturer's store. Currently the deal is "Money + Access to the platform". Third party stores would cut this deal down to just "Money". Thus exclusivity deals would get a lot more expensive for Sony, Nintendo etc. Thus they would be able to buy less "developers, game engine vendors etc en masse".

Indie devs would have a much easier time competing without having to bow to the gatekeepers demands. I really don't get your reasoning.

The info you're missing is: game dev companies already get bought.

The question you should answer is: how much would an unsubsidised console cost?

>The question you should answer is: how much would an unsubsidised console cost?

(I'm not the person you replied to, but)

About as much as a gaming PC, because that's exactly what it is these days. Except actual gaming PCs of the same price would have lower TCO, since you don't need to pay for an Xbox Live/PSN subscription.

> Except actual gaming PCs of the same price would have lower TCO, since you don't need to pay for an Xbox Live/PSN subscription.

Gaming PCs should still cost a bit more, because:

1. they aren't sold in vast quantities with the same spec, and so supplier can't negotiate vast discounts

2. they often don't have games nearly as optimised for them, because different PCs have different configurations, so you need to buy much specs for the same performance

3. consoles likely factor in total procurement costs over the lifetime of the console, and so they can be cheaper initially and lower price more slowly than they lower costs, to recoup some of the deficit

However of course in practice if you can't subsidise your game console with game sales, then (2) and (3) probably vanish.

> game dev companies already get bought.

That is what i am saying. It already happens. Opening more markets makes it less attractive for games companies to accept getting bought, doesn't it? If manufactures had the money to buy all the devs on masse they would already. Third party markets would only lessen their negotiation power. Devs could just go somewhere else. Especially with your other point below.

> how much would an unsubsidised console cost?

More and they would sell less of them? Making it less attractive for game devs to develop for said console. So what am i missing?

> Opening more markets makes it less attractive for games companies to accept getting bought, doesn't it?

Not really, unless it suddenly becomes easy to develop and market a game for all platforms. Pushing your code to a shop instead 3 shops won't be an amazing saving.

> More and they would sell less of them? Making it less attractive for game devs to develop for said console. So what am i missing?

Well - if fewer consoles exist, each with 10 different store fronts you have to now push to, presumably that means games cost more, as they're selling fewer units, and (less important, but still painful) they have to figure out which store should have which integrations / price / deals/ etc.

Things have pretty visibly been getting pushed away from exclusivity by the console makers. MS commits to bringing all first party Xbox games to PC and Sony has ported over a lot of its most popular titles as well.

Instead of just raising the price of the console so it makes a profit?

Mandating consoles be opened up would destroy the console industry as we know it, but that would be a good thing - the only reason consoles were a good thing in the first place was because they were specialist devices that drove hardware innovation that simply wasn't feasible otherwise. Nowadays consoles aren't specialist hardware; they're PCs that have been slightly modified. The value proposition for consoles have almost nothing to do with new hardware capabilities like the N64 or PS3 promised (PS3 promised; the PS3's launch flopped due to Sony's arrogance and failure to cater to devs, not due to lack of power in the hardware itself - as later PS3 games demonstrate).

So suppose consoles were forced to open up - if Sony and Nintendo bought devs en masse, then 1) that sounds like an end-run and could easily open them up to a product-tying suit, 2) that would lose them tons of money, because now they're losing money on their hardware and their devs (because forcing exclusives loses more than half of your potential sales base), and 3) indies wouldn't give a shit, because Steam already exists and in fact could be one of those third-party stores that the EU specifically forced consoles to allow, in this hypothetical.

This wouldn't catch the industry completely flatfooted either, because back in the Windows 8 era Microsoft managed to scare Valve enough that they started investing in Linux as a backstop. The Steam Machines were a flop, but they've since released the Steam Deck to fill the portable console niche, and they've kept working on SteamOS and Big Picture mode to fill the gaming HTPC niche.

Also, you're claiming that Microsoft might buy Unreal Engine or Unity in order to force it to be Xbox-exclusive; that would bring the antitrust hammer down like nothing else. The only result of consequence in the 0.0002ns before the EU carpetbombs Redmond, would be a huge upsurge in suppport for Godot. Godot isn't ready for primetime just yet (especially in 3D) and games can't practically switch engine mid-development, but people are already on edge from Unity's recent "charge per download" (scandal? controversy? worrying incident? whatever you call it.)

Also, there are entire markets where game consoles don't have all that much penetration. China, in particular, who had banned consoles entirely until 2015, and restricted them until at least 2018. Convincing the Chinese market to buy even one console, let alone multiple, is unrealistic and platform holders know it.

> the only reason consoles were a good thing in the first place was because they were specialist devices that drove hardware innovation that simply wasn't feasible otherwise. Nowadays consoles aren't specialist hardware; they're PCs that have been slightly modified

Not just that. They're a standard spec that people build to, and wring performance out of, and consult to game/engine manufacturers, and they sponsor tournaments and do marketing. They're also sold below cost, both because they can order in bulk, but also because they can assume future components will be cheaper for the same spec, and they might be able to lower their internal costs eventually.

You can already buy a PC and play games on it. Consoles are an additional thing you can buy, and removing them removes choice.

> Also, you're claiming that Microsoft might buy Unreal Engine or Unity in order to force it to be Xbox-exclusive; that would bring the antitrust hammer down like nothing else. The only result of consequence in the 0.0002ns before the EU carpetbombs Redmond, would be a huge upsurge in suppport for Godot.

It won't be this simple. It'll just be better support on Microsoft platforms, and cross-play between PC and Xbox, to drown out Steam a little and Playstation a lot.

There are people out there - typically classed as "console warriors", who primarily having seen the Microsoft-Activision purchase - who genuinely believe console companies should buy major third-parties, to bolster their first party line-up, because first party titles typically meant console exclusivity. On other hand, I consider platform exclusives, including that coming as byproduct of being made by a first party dev, as well as exclusive sports/brand licenses[1] as anti-competitive.

[1] See Electronic Arts holding the exclusive Porsche license for several years, or how they were basically monopolizing American/gridiron football market by having the exclusive NFL license.

Also: (I originally replied this part only)

>Convincing the Chinese market to buy even one console, let alone multiple, is unrealistic and platform holders know it.

The greater Asian market is more of a mobile game continent, to be fair. Look at Japan with their "gacha" game subculture; on top of the standard stuff surrounding mobile games, there's also the parasocial aspect associated with them that makes them popular.

The EU can't fix what isn't broken. They can break what's working, perhaps, but I doubt they'll do it as the results would be too obviously bad in this case.

My real point is in asking: why are people not allowed to sell what they want, without massive fines coming their way (that don't come the way of others doing what they do)?

AFAIK, MSFT still takes 12% of PC game sales in the windows store, and 30% of sales in the xbox store.

Which is fine because there is ample competition on Windows and MS does very little to hamper it (as far as the DMA is concerned).

Apple would also be allowed to charge whatever they want in the app store if there were actual competition on the platform.

Since there isn't they have to play by the rules.

In store yes, on platform no. Like Steam makes what hundreds of millions with no cut to MS.

Because MS does not prevent me from anything like different stores or installing anything I want.

Because Microsoft does not have consumer facing products where they have the ultimate control over.

Here's the list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act#Sectors_...

Windows and LinkedIn should be covered.

Maybe there isn't anything that the commission wants to investigate there because they did a good enough job complying. But future can bring more probes.

Microsoft didn't really have much to change on Windows outside of restoring the ability to uninstall system apps in the EEA and turning things off, and making users aware of such ability.

They don't control distribution of software on Windows (no one uses MS Store), it already has major stores owned by different companies such as Steam, Epic etc that have as much access to the OS that the MS Store does.

I think it's because while Microsoft tries their hardest to nag people about their products (like Edge ads forcible injected into Chrome somehow), they don't prevent alternatives like Apple, as an example.

Microsoft is a very open platform regards many of the aspects of the DMA. There is app sideloading, alternative app stores, alternative browsers, alternative payment methods, alternative hardware, license-free ports, and there are now more laptops than ever offered without windows. In the cloud, they have valid competition (Google, AWS) in both IaaS, PaaS and SaaS (Office).

Microsoft got regulated since before Google was founded (to put in context).

The more uncharitable interpretation of this would be that Microsoft has enmeshed itself to such an extent such that the bundling of Office365+Entra+Azure+Teams isn’t worth the loss of these services to governments who may potentially want to launch an investigation.

Lots of governments in the EU uses Linux and non-Microsoft alternatives.

I'm guessing the EU is focused on consumer, not B2B focused companies

> Lots

Citation needed as they say. Even if it's true that's it more than 0, my estimate would be far in excess of 90% (of governmental employees who do their work inside of the Microsoft ecosystem).

But your other point about not focusing on B2B is probably more true. However recent stuff like the cloud egress fees (EU Data ACT) shows that they do care about B2B sometimes at least.

Not suggesting this is the reasoning, but interestingly same is true of Amazon which powers a lot of gov infrastructure.

For Amazon, they’ve been unable to enmesh themselves in the same way, and with the EU DATA act passed, I’d assume they’d make quick work of the egress fees which are the main barrier towards multi-cloud architectures.

Not at all. The EU announced just days ago that they're investigating MS Entra+365

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/22/eu_antitrust_microsof...

They started an investigation on 365+Teams a year ago:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...

And Microsoft complied by unbundling Teams in the EEA:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-unbundle-teams-...

and late last year, the EU asked Teams rivals whether they still thought there was an issue:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/microsoft-rivals-asked-...

whilst similar, an antitrust investigation is different than this one. Microsoft should be on both lists.

They are "on both lists". The DMA is about platform gatekeeping, and the EU did designate Microsoft a gatekeeper with Windows.

Microsoft's DMA changes include allowing Edge to be uninstalled, interoperability in Search and Widgets, asking users for consent before syncing content through the connected Microsoft account, and more strictly respecting browser defaults.

Mostly because Microsoft doesn't really gatekeep Windows and is actually compliant with the DMA; they were motioning to the same tricks as the other gatekeepers (main one is forced bundling), but the DMA caused them to retract on all of those changes.

Right now, you can properly remove all Windows apps from W11, which was really the big one that they started doing with Windows 10 alongside the Microsoft account push in OOBE (dunno if that one is still required). They also supposedly made actually disabling the Windows telemetry much more feasible than it used to be.

Not tryiing to be argumentative, rather I geenuinely have a serious question.

But doesn't MS gatekeep xbox?

They do, but Xbox isn't considered a large enough market to be considered a gatekeeper affected by the DMA. None of the major console makers are.

The platform must have any of the following to be a DMA gatekeeper:

* Market capitalization of at least €75 billion.

* More than €7.5 billion turnover from EEA residents.

* At least 45 million customers in EEA.

* At least 4.5 million business customers in EEA.

Once any of those criteria are met for 3 years, they qualify as a Gatekeeper. While the gaming market is massive, any individual console platform still sits pretty comfortably below those criteria. You can find the customer number by googling around a bit - Xbox only has around 3 million active customers if I'm not mistaken (counted by Xbox Live accounts that were active in the past year).

A platform truly needs to be collosal to be considered a Gatekeeper. This law is specifically for the large platforms, not small fry.

> Xbox only has around 3 million active customers

This seems very low given:

> As of 2022, Microsoft announced around 120 million monthly active users (MAUs).

Mind that Xbox is much smaller outside the US and the UK compared to the other console makers.

From the top of my head, the percentage counts for Europe in console market share are around 50/40/10 (Nintendo/Sony/Xbox).

So yes, they probably have 120 million MAUs globally, but the overwhelming majority of those will be coming from the US, where Xbox controls about half the console market. (Just for completeness sake: Xbox has almost no presence in Asia, South America or Africa - their failures in Asia are well documented and Xbox does no advertising whatsoever in South America whilst the African gaming market isn't large enough to be worth considering since there are other priorities there). And of course, those users aren't considered for EU legislation since the US isn't part of the EEA.

Interesting enough, back in the ps3/ps4 days everyone in my corner of Eastern Europe seemed to have gone for an xbox (and maybe even an xbox 360).

In the past few years, the xboxes were always in stock while people were joining waiting lists and lotteries * for the PS5.

* One large electronics chain actually had a lottery for the PS5 preorders at launch, because they weren't getting enough to cover what was already paid for! Some lucky people got a PS5 the rest got their money back :)

Every generation has the "most piracy friendly console" and that one often does quite well, for that and other reasons.

The Xbox was king there for awhile.

That too. I guess people have got used to paying for games now and are picking the console based on exclusives/general experience.

In my mind the xbox is for dudebro shooters and the playstation is for original, creative games. Things may have changed from the original xbox but it's too late for me.

Halo and XBMC really shaped (at least) my perception of the consoles even to this day; but I got an Xbox X because it plays blu-ray and was in stock.

Later I learned the PS5 can't even play CDs so maybe I dodged a tiny bullet.

Of course, most of the actual gaming happens on the Switch, but if it's cross-platform I'll probably get it on the Xbox (Hogwarts, for example).

> Halo and XBMC really shaped (at least) my perception of the consoles even to this day; but I got an Xbox X because it plays blu-ray and was in stock.

Sorry. I played the windows port of the first Halo until some level with a jeep. I got lost in it, didn't know where to go, and I abandoned it. I kinda weaned myself off shooters (except Serious Sam) about then, or with some return to castle wolfenstein game which i found about as boring. And that was even before cover based shooters...

As for XBMC... I don't like having a noisy power hungry box on when I watch a movie. Had different solutions, right now using a Chromecast.

> Of course, most of the actual gaming happens on the Switch

It's interesting from the outside how Nintendo has captured the minds of gamers everywhere where they grew up with those gameboys and NESes...

Me, I grew up with ZX Spectrum clones that were 'just a computer'. Then I got different computers. Fine. Not really a fan of a platform.

They seem to be going to PC, at least assuming few people are replacing consoles with mobile gaming. [1] I gamed on consoles for nearly 3 decades, but I don't understand the current appeal. 'Back in the day', consoles were heavily subsidized loss leaders, and launched with extremely high end hardware. The video card in the original XBox was not only a beast, but also worth substantially more than the entire console was sold for!

At the same time PC gaming was pretty tough. Steam didn't even exist until 2003, and in it's early days - it was little more than a DRM wrapper for Counterstrike. And that was also the era when a new PC was outdated in a few months, and completely obsolete in a few years. Now we're in the era where consoles launch with midrange PC hardware sold at a markup to hit profitability ASAP, console games have things like day 1 patches/ad-filled dashboards/pay to use your own internet/etc, PC gaming has become amazingly convenient, and a decent PC from 5 years ago can still run nearly all new games today, with no performance issues whatsoever.

[1] - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/50-years-gaming-history-rev...

> but I don't understand the current appeal.

Well I don't have a gaming video card atm. If i were to get one it would cost as much as i paid for the ps5.

So I play indies and strategy on my pcs and macs (amd APU and a M2) and i get the few AAAs I'm interested in on console. For one a good bunch of them are Sony stuff and either show up on the playstation first or the pc ports are problematic.

For two, if i ever got another Rockstar game, for example, I'll get it on console because Sony doesn't allow the mandatory account crap.

This is what I was getting at. You don't need anywhere even remotely near the cost of a PS5 video card to play AAA at high settings now a days. A quick search for 'ps5 equivalent video card' turns up a Radeon RX 5700 XT, with some people suggesting even less. An RX 5700 XT shows up for $230 on Amazon, so you can probably get it for much less. You can build an entire 'gaming PC' (which is IMO mostly an obsolete term, given what we're talking about here) for less than the cost of a PS5, because all consoles are now a days is midrange PCs at the time they launch.

I also think the era of terribad ports is largely over. PC used to be a relatively small market, and consoles used to run on relatively esoteric hardware which really reached peak weird at the PS3, which greatly complicated ports, even for skilled teams. But since the PS4 era PCs now have more marketshare, and consoles are running lightly customized generic PC hardware, and so porting is much less of an issue. There can definitely be lazy ports, where the devs do things like keep the frame-rate rocked at 30 or whatever, or fail to support ultra-wide resolutions. But in the worst case scenario, you're generally just getting the 'console experience' there.

> An RX 5700 XT shows up for $230 on Amazon, so you can probably get it for much less.

You forgot the noise and maintaining drivers. I'm the kind that used to replace video card fans with passive radiators when that was still possible. If you can't hear the vacuum cleaner because you play with headphones, good for you :)

> I also think the era of terribad ports is largely over.

There are a few gaming companies that "have console in their DNA". No matter if the port does 15 or 1500 fps, they clearly designed for the controller and the 10ft distance on the couch. And there's always some quirk on PC that annoys you if you know how things work on a playstation. I'm not talking about frame rate here.

For example soulsbornes and kojima games. Clearly best enjoyed on a console (Bloodborne is still a Playstation exclusive, and their best IMO), unless you have the 1200 fps fetish.

Edit: hey, looky what I was just reading:

Some of the Nvidia GPUs we tested initially showed rather poor performance, and if you experience serious stuttering you might want to try a full driver clean (we use Display Driver Uninstaller) followed by a reinstall of the latest drivers. We also tested in exclusive fullscreen mode, which seemed to give slightly better performance than the default fullscreen setting.

A review on Tom's Hardware of the Horizon Forbidden West PC port. Needless to say, I've finished it ages ago and had no problems... on the PS5.

The 5700XT seems to do 54 fps average at 1080p, so no 1200 fps fetish for me either if i get one.

Again I think you're going on a bit dated stuff - a lot has changed. Most video cards now a days pretty much silent most of the time - they generally just run a lot cooler than in the past, even when being pushed pretty decently. NVidia has also really dropped the ball in the gaming domain, perhaps because both Sony and Microsoft both use AMD now a days. So take everything I say to have a sort of implied [on AMD] attached at the end.

As for that game you mentioned, the 5700XT is doing 54FPS average on 'very high quality' settings at 1080p - so substantially better than a PS5! The PS4/PS5 uses a checkerboard upscaling to make their resolution claims. So half the pixels are 'real' and half are fudged. So for e.g. '1800p' the hardware itself is only directly rendering a 1600x900 image at well below 'very high' settings, and then interpolating the other half. In general, though, it seems like they did a top notch port - ultra wide resolution, multi monitor support, and more - all at much better performance, and for much less $$$.

One thing to remember is the PS5/Xbox get to play "on the big screen" which is much further from your eyeballs than the average computer monitor.

So it "looks better" just from that.

> So for e.g. '1800p' the hardware itself is only directly rendering a 1600x900 image at well below 'very high' settings, and then interpolating the other half.

I don't have a 4K TV yet :) That's how much I care about having larger numbers.

I can tell you what the appeal is - watching "normies" try to use the Xbox/PS5 compared to the Switch (and even the Switch is sometimes complicatedly annoying for them).

Consoles are still way closer to "plug and play" than even the best PCs. Phones have them beat, however.

> Phones have them beat, however.

But phones sadly don't have games. They only have predatory gambling apps with game skins.

genshin is fun on its own but a friend of mine spends so much money on it that it's honestly terrifying, puts me off of playing it all that much. i would love it if it were $60 and everything was unlockable with a reasonable time investment, or even if it were a sub model like a lot of MMOs

... which is exactly what I was saying.

i misread your intent then, to me at least "gambling apps with game skins" and "fun games with predatory monetisation" are distinct :>

In what way? Gaming on Steam is now: 'search for game', click buy, click play. In 'big picture mode' the entire system becomes console style and all of this can be completely controlled with a controller which is quite handy for couch play! Of course you still have the option of going and fidgeting with config files, installing mods, and tweaking things to your heart's content, but none of this is mandatory.

Most people don't even want to do that (and it is vastly improved from the old days).

I can't find exact numbers, but I would bet that Hogwarts Legacy sold more on consoles (combined) than on PC.

Xbox is rather unimportant in the EU. https://www.vgchartz.com/article/456571/ps5-vs-xbox-series-x...

This is not really Xbox, but also Minecraft, Roblox, windows game pass etc, and it is for the whole world.

Xbox the console is almost non existent among users and in stores here in Europe, it's all Nintendo and PlayStation

I believe the threshold for DMA is 45m MAU inside the EU.

I wonder if the monetary values will be regularly adjusted for inflation. If not, then it’s only a matter of time, waiting for money to be devalued and then the platforms qualify.

As far as I know game consoles live in a slightly different legal space where there's no assumption that they are supposed to be "open" systems.

Nope, they're just not big enough to be covered by the relevant parts of the DMA. Only "gatekeepers" are.

Xbox is a video game appliance, not a general-purpose computing platform.

iPhone is a mobile application appliance, not a general-purpose computing platform.

Yep, it can run general-purpose mobile applications. Which makes it a general-purpose computing platform.

Why can’t an Xbox run general purpose applications? Windows 11 can run both video games and general purpose applications on Xen 2 CPUs and RDNA2 GPUs. The current Xbox OS is a Windows NT kernel running under Hyper-V, same as desktop Windows 11. Microsoft even claims the Xbox OS is based on Windows (because why wouldn’t it be). It can even run Universal Windows apps installed from the Microsoft store.

So, what makes it not a general purpose computing platform? Unless you mean to argue that a computer with a Xen 2 CPU, RDNA 2 GPU, running an OS based off of Windows 11 that can run Universal Windows applications is not general-purpose.

> So, what makes it not a general purpose computing platform?

Public perception. An overwhelming majority of people who buy an Xbox (or a PlayStation, or a Switch) buy one just to play games. They don't expect it to do anything else. The manufacturers don't market their consoles as general-purpose devices either, they market them specifically as appliances for playing video games. Their SDKs also aren't publicly available.

If building iOS apps in 2008 was the same process as console games, would the iPhone be as successful as it is today? Imagine having to be a company, proving that your app idea is worthwhile, signing a million NDAs, and finally getting a devkit just so you could make a farting app (those were popular in the early days of the app store). The app review process back then was also much more forgiving and sensible than it is today. Things Apple does when it has to compete on its own merits!

Perhaps E-waste could be reduced if it were general purpose?

You can? Last I tried I couldn't remove Edge, could not change search engine used in the Windows search to anything other than Bing, every new windows update would default install new apps like Candy Crush and Amazon Prime I never wanted, and so on, and disabling Windows telemetery seems impossible without registry hacks. Ever installed a new Win11? Riddled with dark pattern UX to deceive you into extra telemetry.

I think they only allow all those things in the EU, and only in a very recent update.

The way MS did this was kind of dodge but fits the letter of the law.

On a new install of Windows 11, if you select an EU region, you will have the options to remove things like edge in the OS. You can move off that region because this flag is set only on install. If you install with a non-eu region, you don't have access to those options.

Being slightly late to the party with this comment, but according to XDA, the entire thing is just controlled by a JSON file in System32 (why it's not the registry is beyond me)[0].

Just for future reference if you want to disable it later.

[0]: https://www.xda-developers.com/enable-eea-restricted-feature...

To get Europe's protections, you need to be in Europe (or faking it somehow). If you live in the US or somewhere else outside of Europe, these companies will continue to screw you because you don't have Europe working on behalf of your privacy and choice.

It’s hard to buy windows without buying Teams along with it, that’s how they crushed slack.

That's easy. I think you mean it's hard to buy _Office_ without buying Teams, which is true.

I am unable to uninstall Edge although I see from news briefs it will be possible in April. I am unable to even see Defender listed although it is clearly separable and I do not think they are going to enable uninstallation; if not then I would say they are still not compliant, but I understand how browsers are more of a focus at the moment.

They are, kinda.

> The Commission has also adopted five retention orders addressed to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, asking them to retain documents which might be used to assess their compliance with the DMA obligations, so as to preserve available evidence and ensure effective enforcement.

So, they are not under active investigation at the moment, but they are being monitored.

source https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_... https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...

I’m not in support of the DMA and I’m not in favor of the US suit against Apple, and I too have been wondering how Microsoft - who I’d argue is the most anticompetitive of all, with the longest history of doing so - has escaped all of this lately. They really must be funding some important people’s pockets.

Its simple: Microsoft doesn't do the things that the DMA says companies can't do.

They may do other anti-consumer things, but they don't do these things.

Microsoft has been through this before. EU windows has a browser choice screen and you can buy it without windows media player (I think for the same price or darn near as with). Microsoft is good at painting in or near the lines, from decades of practice. They probably also respond to new regulations without an excess of foot dragging.

Also, they weren't able to turn their dominant position in desktops into anything in mobile.

Maybe the EU Commission hasn’t received DMA-related complaints from other companies about Microsoft. The Commission seems to be careful to base investigations on competitor statements.

For browser bundling, Chrome has beaten Edge out handily, so there's no case there. For Office bundling, they charge separately for it, so there's no real case their either

A lot of people are quick to lock themselves into a gatekeeper's walled garden, and throw away the keys.

That Linux has not only survived for so long, but thrived, is a true testament to the will, technical expertise, and product vision of community developers.

FOSS was founded on the principles of openness and collaboration, something that we need now more than ever, as the largest companies of the world have managed to weaken that resolve through slick marketing and anti-competitive practices.

Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades.

Think of the kids growing up now, forced to be consumers rather than producers. And compare them to the last century, the sense of wonder and expression that the internet and infinitely hackable devices brought.

It was revolutionary, and many of the giants that exist now were built literally on the backs of that openness.

> Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades.

Nothing is stopping anyone from making these devices, and I think many do in fact exist but are not popular.

> Nothing is stopping anyone from making these devices

Anti-competitive practices do. Example of a struggle: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/

That article is about how they weren't stopped, and there's nothing anticompetitive in it.

Purism almost went bankrupt due to challenges like this one. They had to choose a relatively outdated, slow hardware and reverse engineer many things to make them work, e.g., camera. All companies producing the required chips refuse to work with FLOSS -- if this isn't anti-competitive and destroying competition, I don't know what is.

Yeah, I mean you have to do the work. It doesn't seem like they refuse to work with FLOSS on principle, just that it's difficult to them.

>It doesn't seem like they refuse to work with FLOSS on principle, just that it's difficult to them.

Do you have anything to back that up? Only one manufacturer agreed, who doesn't even work in the smartphone industry (NXP).

> I mean you have to do the work

This is extremely dishonest. Do you imply that reverse engineering is a normal part of writing software? Do you imply that Apple or Google don't have detailed specifications of hardware they buy from other vendors?

> Do you have anything to back that up?

I'm saying you need to back up the claim that they refuse to work with FLOSS on principle, if you want to make it.

> This is extremely dishonest.

??? If you want to build a phone that works in a particular way, you have to do the work of finding suppliers and parts and such that fit your design goals. It's not someone else's responsibility to supply it to you in the exact way you want.

It's easy: If there was a good hardware with open specs, FLOSS drivers would be written quickly from the community. Case in point: Pinephone.

And yet there isn't, so if you want such hardware you must do the work to make it.

They say nothing of the kind in that article, the only challenge they talk about is that they couldn't use integrated chipsets like the rest of the industry does for various privacy reasons, and that various suppliers they chose didn't have open-source drivers for the OS they wanted. Nothing mentioned in this article is anti-competetive, and I would bet those manufacturers also didn't have drivers for iOS or Windows Mobile or what have you.

> couldn't use integrated chipsets like the rest of the industry does for various privacy reasons

"Various privacy reasons" is in fact the main point: You can't create a privacy-respecting device, owned by the user, with any of the available vendors.

> didn't have open-source drivers for the OS they wanted

No. They didn't want to provide specs in order to make FLOSS drivers possible at all. And they didn't provide good reasons for that. This is gate-keeping.

> Nothing mentioned in this article is anti-competetive

Again: There is no single company in the whole smartphone industry which agrees to provide specs to their hardware, so you could write free and open-source drivers. This is serious gate-keeping for the walled gardens.

> No. They didn't want to provide specs in order to make FLOSS drivers possible at all. And they didn't provide good reasons for that. This is gate-keeping.

Do you have a source for this claim? Because the article above definitely doesn't say this. Not that I'd be surprised if it's true, mind you.

> "Various privacy reasons" is in fact the main point: You can't create a privacy-respecting device, owned by the user, with any of the available vendors.

That is orthogonal to whether you can make a device with a FOSS OS, or whether you can compete with Apple and/or Google. If you want to make a device that doesn't trust the software your hardware vendors provide, you are going to face hurdles. This is not an anti-competitive thing - Apple or Google would face the exact same hurdles. Further, going with a non-integrated chip is a massive complication (and a significant performance loss) that they inflict on themselves.

>> > No. They didn't want to provide specs in order to make FLOSS drivers possible at all. And they didn't provide good reasons for that.

> Do you have a source for this claim?

This was said by one of the Purism employees on their forums, although not specifically about phones:

I have talked to many manufacturers over the course of the past years and in most cases not releasing more as open source has more to do with unproven fear of everything and less concrete risk assessment. Very often you also encounter the “Oh, then we loose our business advantage!” argument, which IMHO is plain false. I do not know of any case in the industry where open source would have been detrimental for a chip maker’s business. Not happening.

https://forums.puri.sm/t/free-firmware-for-intel-wifi-cards/...

That quote also mentions a very good reason for which radio hardware makers in particular must have firmware that users can't modify: they are not allowed to sell the hardware unless it is guaranteed to meet all radio regulations. Otherwise, if you use hardware they produced to emit radio in illegal ways, they will be held liable, if they didn't take steps to prevent this, at least in the USA. Libre radio firmware will never happen unless legislation in the area changes significantly.

I also would say, again, that I very much doubt any other manufacturer is getting the kind of specs you are hoping for. Android phones at least definitely use firmware blobs from component manufacturers. Apple does as well for the antennas, though maybe not for some other parts?

> a very good reason for which radio hardware makers in particular must have firmware that users can't modify

This is not a very good reason. By this reasoning, ordinary cars must be prohibited, since you can dangerously modify them. Also, it's not relevant for this discussion.

  ordinary cars must be prohibited, since you can dangerously modify them

I mean.. we're approaching a saturation point of corporate-locked cars. Granted the locks aren't very strong but they're trying.

Openness is about people being able to run their own software on hardware that they buy. It is a completely unreasonable argument to state that "if you want to run your own software, first build your own hardware".

I think it is a completely unreasonable argument to say I have to insert and support some kind of public API surface somewhere within any hardware product I want to make to satisfy your nebulous ideology. I think its okay if people make open or closed products and they should compete on the merits.

A parallel is Disney taking public domain stories and then dramatically manipulating copyright law to monopolize them.

The "pull the ladder up behind you" mentality is so pervasive in modern business it's amazing anything new gets built at all.

> FOSS was founded on the principles of openness and collaboration, something that we need now more than ever, as the largest companies of the world have managed to weaken that resolve through slick marketing and anti-competitive practices.

Some of the best open source software was developed, open sourced and maintained by the largest companies of the world.

>Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades.

Do you think an open source group could build an Apple watch?

> That Linux has not only survived for so long, but thrived, is a true testament to the will, technical expertise, and product vision of community developers.

That Linux is still mostly used as a server OS, and not as a viable OS by the general public is a true testament that there are things that matter to people that community developers don't care about.

>Think of the kids growing up now, forced to be consumers rather than producers. And compare them to the last century, the sense of wonder and expression that the internet and infinitely hackable devices brought.

Techie kids growing up now are on average an order of magnitudes better than their equivalent from last century. As a matter of fact, there are more great and creative coders nowadays compared to any time in history. Just look at the amount of open source projects on github.

Idealism that is as far disconnected from reality as yours is one of the issues plaguing FOSS today. I have no idea how your comment can be as upvoted as it is - maybe selection bias based on the nature of the article. It is still concerning though.

Idealism that is as far disconnected from reality as yours is one of the issues plaguing FOSS today.

Let's unpack this even more. A quite potent problem, is when something else is posing as or sneaking into activism and movements like Open Source and FOSS. This something else can take the form of cliques, hipsterism, or the use of movements to vent anger or aggression.

The best way to hurt a cause is to represent it badly.

Some of the best open source software was developed, open sourced and maintained by the largest companies of the world.

Scapegoating people and groups merely by taxonomy has had a bad record across history. Hold people and companies to account for the things they do, not for their characteristics. That's the only fair form of accountability.

> Do you think an open source group could build an Apple watch?

Surely not, but Apple could have worked on integrating and participating to the development of an open source software for the Apple watch.

In another world, MeeGo[1] would have take off and we would use it on every smartphones (no iOS/Android incompatibility), every car systems, every tablets, every smart watches and everything would work seamlessly. Hardware manufacturers would concentrate on hardware and we would be able to buy the hardware we want and it would connect every devices we already own.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo

Why not?

It's a question of resources. If you put the equivalent money into open source instead, why would they not do it?

I find these claims that only private entities can build quality completely unfounded. It's all about resources.

> That Linux is still mostly used as a server OS, and not as a viable OS by the general public is a true testament that there are things that matter to people that community developers don't care about.

Given the success of Android, I'm not sure how true that is, but ignoring that, the success of Chromebooks says something, but ignoring that, the fact that I can't wander into best buy and get a laptop with Ubuntu preinstalled is what makes the vast majority people end up with Windows laptops, and then some small percent with MacOS, not some holy testament against the viability of Linux as a desktop operating system.

From a quick google, here are the actual market share numbers: Windows ~70% MacOS ~15% Linux ~5%

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

The success of Android and Chromebooks is because of the investments of a for-profit multi-billion company.

That's no different from the success of Windows or iOS or Playstation or what have you.

I think it was originally VC-funded company whose code was copyleft. Google acquired them. It’s probably still a huge, open-source ecosystem because of the copyleft license.

The fact that Chromebooks are a success is, if anything, the true testament that there are things that matter to people that (desktop linux) community developers don't care about.

Personally I think it says more that community developers don't have the millions of dollars to outspend Microsoft and Apple to get products onto shelves and into customer's hands, but to each their own.

Dell and Lenovo both sell laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed.

The fact that they aren't making those SKUs available at Best Buy says more about the lack of interest among regular consumers in anything besides Windows, MacOS, and (I guess) Chromebook.

> Do you think an open source group could build an Apple watch?

Apple Watch? Depends on what you mean by that but they 100% could build a smartwatch, such as the open source $27 Pinetime watch:

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PineTime

https://pine64.com/product/pinetime-smartwatch-sealed/

Indeed, case in point. The Apple Watch was first released on 2015-04-24. The PineTime was announced on 2019-10-05. If it requires 4.5 years of commercial success for a FOSS competitor to be announced, well, FOSS certainly isn't pushing that product development envelope.

It's a common pattern. Linux GUIs only came about once other commercially successful GUIs existed. The Linux Desktop was a reaction to the commercial success of Windows and Apple desktops. FOSS often ends up cloning existing successful products. Of course there's nothing wrong with creating open alternatives after the fact, but to pretend that FOSS is driving product vision is disconnected idealism at its finest.

Sure but for this discussion this feels like moving the goalposts. Is it possible for FOSS to make a smartwatch? The answer is yes. Apple tends not to lead product categories either, letting companies like Samsung and Meta try new features before they are proven. That’s more a development strategy than a limitation on what FOSS can do. Look at 3D printers, which exploded in popularity in the OSS world after the patents expired. Yes a commercial company made them first, but the wealth of experimentation on new price points and features happened in the FOSS world.

The root comment of this thread is all about demonising companies and lionising open source. That's why this discussion isn't moving the goalposts. You've moved them to "OSS can also do this" which is not where it started.

GP's claim is that corporate development is holding product development back. That's what I'm responding to. I have no doubt that FOSS can produce clones of existing products, occasionally even clones as good or better than the original. But FOSS is not driving any form of product development at all. The anti-corporate pro-FOSS thing is just disconnected online idealism.

FWIW I own a PineTime and enjoy hacking on it quite a bit but a commercial smartwatch it is not. For me that's fine as I don't use a smartwatch as a daily driver, but if I did a PineWatch would be a nonstarter. I do hope that the PineTime can drive an ecosystem of open smart watches that occupy different points in the cost, functionality, customizability, and reusability space than commercial smartwatches do, especially those that may not be profitable to tape out large runs for, but I'm also thankful for commercial product development to drive new innovative products into our hands.

Ah, sorry I was on the go and responding to the specific sentence I highlighted in my original comment, I must have missed the thrust of the thread.

> Linux GUIs only came about once other commercially successful GUIs existed.

X Windows predates Microsoft Windows by a year, if you count Windows 1.0 as “commercially successful”.

I have a PineTime. Two actually - one for me and one for my kid.

It’s the perfect “smart” watch for children who are too young to have a “real” smart device. It shows the time, the date, a basic step counter, and not a heck of a lot more.

I have an Apple Watch too. There is no comparison. It’s like the iPhone vs an old Motorola flip phone.

The same thing but Really Big so everyone knows I'm the biggest monkey in the room and I can watch TikTok on it? Sign me up, this thing sounds like it's from the future!

To be fair, the Pinetime is $27. Apple couldn’t make an Apple Watch for $27 retail either. Nicer screens and CPUs are readily available on aliexpress so I suspect Pine64 would be capable of making a nicer smart watch, and I have no information as to why they chose the low cost route.

>and I have no information as to why they chose the low cost route.

But we can guess. Software and Hardware are separate problems to solve here.

Having cheap hardware means more people can afford the devices and work on the software side.

Yes this makes sense.

I would totally buy a faster PineTime!

PineCube too, for that matter.

> >and I have no information as to why they chose the low cost route.

Try to replace the OS on Apple Watch with FLOSS. Or on any other watch.

The PineTime has 64kb memory and no MMU. It's a fine device considering its handicaps and design limitations, but comparing it to an Apple Watch is not even an apples vs. oranges comparison - it's apples vs. an orange seed.

> Do you think an open source group could build an Apple watch?

This is such a dishonest argument. Which part of the parent post talked about building hardware? It's all about the hardware being open to run any software without artificial limitations, and providing the documentation to interface with the hardware. An open source group could definitely build an operating system and software for an Apple watch. I can't believe you try to call someone else disconnected from reality and idealistic when you engage them in such a malicious, dishonest way.

Capitalism that is as far disconnected from reality as yours is one of the issues plaguing FOSS today. I have no idea how your comment can be as upvoted as it is - maybe selection bias based on the nature of the article. It is still concerning though.

As a long time Linux user, a long time Mac and iPhone user....

In terms of "capabilities that could exist" - I honestly have no idea what you are talking about! I use iOS and Mac because it has _more capabilities_ than anything from the FOSS arena. Last time an "open source competitor" to airdrop came around here it was hilariously unusable!

There are undeniable advantages to vertical integration. The miracle of apple bluetooth headphones is a stark example. The enhanced pairing/hand off that airpods have is insanely superior to the stock standard. Even iMessage has superior default encryption than anything short of Signal (maybe).

Alas the "product vision" of community developers is rather short sighted and stymied by lack of hardware manufacturing capability. Linux on the desktop is barely usable, so I really wouldn't get too excited about the product vision.

There's a lot to be said about Linux and such, but the idea that Apple/Google/etc are limiting innovation is just not based in reality!

iMessage does not have better encryption. If the recipient's phone dies and is unreachable, it will resend the text as a plaintext SMS, which is kind of a problem.

That's an option (and probably the default option), but it's also configurable to not do that.

An actual IM system designed for privacy would never default to plaintext on failure.

iMessage should never be recommended for privacy.

Most active FOSS are there just because big companies supports it with their multiple 6 digit salary employees. Only 3.9% of linux changes comes from developers without company attribution[1]. Pytorch and react and lot of other things came from company which is worst violator of their monopoly status. Same with unix, transistors, C etc.

[1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/775440/

This is a bit of a non-sequitur. Far and away the biggest ecosystem of apps ever created for everyday users existed on Windows, an infamously proprietary platform. Nothing on Linux or Unixes has ever compared (unlike server software, which is the opposite). But, of course, Windows was always open in a different sense, one in which non-PC devices have never been, even those built with open-source software (Android). So yes, I do agree that open-ness is important, but I don't think FOSS has much to do with that.

Also Android is very loosely considered as open.

Samsung and Google layer so many proprietary components on top that it's more of an open foundation rather than a true open platform.

But that's merely because of market share. If the majority started using Linux, you'd see the same growth of the app ecosystem.

But it's a chicken and the egg problem. Without more users, we don't have more apps/polish on Linux, but without polish, it's not going to get any more users.

Do you have stats to back that claim? Isn't the biggest ecosystem of apps ever created on Android (Linux)? We have way more smartphones than PCs.

By sheer number, probably either iOS or Android have the crown. If you remove all the identical games with different skins and all of the glorified web pages, I'm not as sure that they beat Windows - especially considering how much enterprise productivity software exists on Windows that IT teams built for a single company or two. But either way, they each beat Linux user apps by orders of magnitude.

While Windows itself may be proprietary, it mostly runs on fairly open hardware. Open in the sense that the manufacturer doesn't impose artificial limitations on what software is allowed to run on it, and also provides very thorough documentation for it, giving no advantage to any party in regards to information.

Also Windows itself is open in the sense that it doesn't restrict any software from running on it. You can write user-mode applications and run them on any architecturally compatible Windows system. You can write drivers to run kernel mode code on any Windows system (you can disable signature verification).

In the case of Windows, it being proprietary doesn't actually limit what anyone else can do on it nor is it artificially limited to only run on approved hardware. In many ways, it is open.

Yes, that was exactly my point at the end. You need an open system in the sense that no one controls access to it, but it doesn't have to be open in the sense of open source.

> companies of the world have managed to weaken that resolve through slick marketing

Ah yes. The only reason people chose “closed” source products over FOSS is because they’re less intelligent than you. All the dumb people (not you of course) got tricked by slick marketing!

It couldn’t possibly be that the companies behind “closed” products are invested far more in understanding and serving what their users actually need/want, since their users pay them. It couldn’t possibly be that “closed” products focus on actual product-market-fit instead of developer-enthusiasm-fit.

Open source has absolutely made some amazing contributions to the software ecosystem of today. But let’s not kid ourselves, we need those “evil” profit-seeking companies as well.

What has not been holding Linux etc back, but has been holding smartphones etc back?

To expect people to contribute their minds out of the kindness of their hearts and not deserve compensation feels a lot like "greed," too.

And let's not understate the value of vertical integration, something that open source fundamentally diverges from

FOSS has been a narrow and self-congratulatory group of people who, while making great core contributions, have done little in the way of product development required to actually help the world compute.

I'm going to reply here to provide a bit more context, since many of the threads are diving too deep into the specifics of linux/foss/openness/ideology, which was unfortunately not the point.

The main crux of my comment is about being able to "own" your own device. A hackable device is better than a closed device, more choice is better than no choice.

Is it so hard to believe that if Microsoft or Apple had a death grip on Windows and MacOs respectively, restricting completely the kinds of things you could do on these platforms unless individually blessed, that there would be a far less interesting ecosystem of apps / capabilities available than what we have today?

As an example, one cannot build AWS on an iPad. Like literally cannot - the tools are either not available or are significantly crippled, since you may use them to circumvent Apple's gatekeeper cut.

That's the main idea, make smartphones and tablets, smartwatches, vr headsets etc. more like traditional desktop devices.

Now imagine if TTIP was signed, EU would most likely be forced to abolish DMA or GDPR altogether.

That is not a good thing.

I guess my bad for sounding ambiguous, of course it's very good that EU is not obliged to bow to US "investors".

A terrible thing in fact. We should instead hope for a trade treaty that abolishes the DCMA. It's policies like these that make it clear that the government only serves special interests and not the average voter.

> We should instead hope for a trade treaty that abolishes the DCMA.

Trade agreements have weaseled more copyright and DMCA nonsense into just about every treaty now. Good luck going against the grain there.

Not only that, generative AI boom also likely means more copyright maximalization that ever before.

It's a good idea to regulate and examine companies with over a certain share of the market and over a certain size since it's almost guaranteed they will abuse their market position one way or another.

These companies pose a general threat to the proper functioning of a healthy market due to network effects and compatibility issues, things that regulators should always be working to counteract.

Especially because in a global market, these kind of companies can be more powerful than governments. So it’s a good thing that large countries, or unions of countries, attempt to push back a little bit on their power.

I think EU has an easier case, because the way I understand it, in the EU anticompetitive behavior in itself is illegal, while in the US, as long as you can argue the consumer benefits (eg Amazon selling stuff at a loss), it’s no problem.

I think you can replace "can be" with "are".

If Google, Apple or Meta feel like what you're saying is not in their interest for the public to hear it, you just... can't say it. Apple can remotely disable your iPhone. Google can remove you from search results. Meta can nuke your social media presence from orbit.

This is by no means an endorsement of the guy because he's a complete piece of shit, but the one thing Alex Jones got right during his temper tantrum when he got deplatformed is that getting deplatformed is not a thing that only happens to people you don't like; theoretically, and in fact quite regularly, large multinationals can simply decide that someone should cease to exist in the public sphere, and they can legally disappear people more effectively than the CIA. Today it's anti vax loonies and racist conspiracy theorists, tomorrow it's folks reporting on Apple's Foxconn factories in China or Meta's content moderation staff or Google's spying on people's private communications.

We live in a world where we've created the marketplace of ideas, which necessarily means that those who hold the marketplace have to give everyone a stall, almost regardless of how vile their ideas are. Not doing so is a great way for large corporations to silence their critics on a scale never before imagined. I'm not exaggerating when I say these three companies can erase you from existence. Losing your Google account, Apple ID, and Meta accounts all at once would be an excellent way to prevent a corporate dissident from accessing the info they need to keep these companies accountable. It's terrifying, and it's also a mundane kind of terrifying that requires what might seem like overly aggressive government regulation, but I really don't see another way forward.

And before someone comes in and says something to the effect of "well, isn't all of the above still true if you replace Google, Apple and Meta with $COUNTRY?" and of course the answer is yes, but at the very very least, countries are theoretically accountable to their citizens. Corporations are effectively accountable to no one, which is certainly worse.

> in fact quite regularly, large multinationals can simply decide that someone should cease to exist in the public sphere, and they can legally disappear people more effectively than the CIA

This also happens jointly, I think. E.g. Russell Brand after sexual assault allegations came out was demonetised on YouTube following a letter from the House of Commons media committee to YouTube. I can't be bothered to find an exact article, but Rumble got the same letter, but didn't comply, in this BBC article[0].

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-66875128

As a non-American looking in from outside:

"De-platformed" and "cancel culture" seem to be the names given when the it's done by a left-associated corporations or governments.

"Black-listed", "not renewed for another season", "banned from VISA/PayPal etc. payment providers due to ToS violations", and "violating public decency" seem to be the names for the same actions when taken by right-associated corporations or governments.

(${team}-associated because this is about perceptions rather than any actual political preference).

The answer here is not necessarily for the govts to force big $$ platforms to act like neutral carriers, but for govt to enact and encourage policies to stop/slow the centralization and monopolization of information and entertainment around centralized $$ platforms, and to prevent such behemoths from sucking all the air out of the room in the first place.

(Which, frankly, includes not using said platforms for their own communications. Not sure why Twitter is treated like a generic newswire and announcement system by schools, community groups, governments, etc ... after everything that's happened.)

That's the vision we had of the Internet in the 90s: decentralized, publish your own content and link-out to other's. Not sure why we let that get derailed into the closed boxes we have today.

Asshats like Alex Jones or Russel Brand wouldn't even be a concern and we wouldn't be talking about "deplatforming" as a thing really if the "platform" hadn't grown so unreasonably big and powerful in the first place. The Age Of Narcissism is entirely our own fault.

If you build a huge giant megaphone and leave it lying in the middle of the playground, inevitably some jerk is going to "misuse" it.

Consumers would be helped more if these large companies are broken up.

We could have so much more competition if Apple was divided into software, hardware and services companies.

And these companies (except perhaps the services company) would be more pro-consumer, making stuff that we actually want instead of stuff that Apple wants us to have (and vendor-locks us in).

It is also a bit ridiculous that some of the best CPUs out there are available only for consumer products.

This comment is pretty ignorant of the history of computing.

Apple tried to allow competition in their ecosystem. And all that happened is that vendors like Power Computing went straight for Apple's most profitable markets and nearly bankrupted the company.

The only reason Apple is successful is because people like the console-esque experience of having one vendor do everything.

You cannot make that final claim because there are plenty of alternative scenarios never tried that could have allowed Apple to be successful by other means. Also, your 90s era anecdote is mostly meaningless today, certainly not demonstrative that licensing couldn't work, just that Apple failed to make it work with their one potentially poor attempt 30 years ago.

It’s about choice. I want a tightly integrated experience on my iPhone and Mac. I don’t want regulators as designers.

iPhone and Macs own a small fraction of their markets around the world. Clearly there are alternatives and you don’t need to choose an iPhone or a Mac.

>It’s about choice. I want a tightly integrated experience on my iPhone and Mac. I don’t want regulators as designers.

if you are from outside EU then you are fine for now, you will not have this freedoms.

If you are from EU then keep calm, nobody will force you to use a better application or service then the default ones from Apple. Side loading was available on Android and facebook Messenger and whatsapp are still on the official store despite all the FUD from Apple extremist fanboys, you can continue sitting inside the Apple walls.

Even so Apple shouldn't be able to use its position to disadvantage users. I believe being able to run whatever software you want on the hardware you buy is a basic right. If you want to forgo that, fine, but you should have the choice.

The fact that they have a small market share is not relevant when they have many millions of users.

This kind of thing leads to oligopolies that disadvantage consumers, which is what we have with phone app stores on Android and iPhone.

> I believe being able to run whatever software you want on the hardware you buy is a basic right. If you want to forgo that, fine, but you should have the choice.

Ok, so then why do you support the EU denying me that choice?

> It’s about choice. I want a tightly integrated experience on my iPhone and Mac.

If it's about choice, then Apple performs very poorly at it. Apple is great if your requirements are average. A large minority of people still have to look elsewhere.

Apple performs poorly at giving you choice by... making something different to everyone else? Do you understand what choice means?

Yes locking products down means less freedom and less choice. And this is made worse by Apple buying up their supply chain and precious slots at semiconductor foundries. Not everybody is an average consumer looking for average products. But these products are using precious resources and outcompete more generally useful products just by market volume. Apple is behind the hardware version of Eternal September. First the internet got spoiled by the masses, and now our hardware too.

It works for me. If it didn’t, I would switch to Google’s Android, Samsung’s Android, Xiaomi’s Android, Windows, Linux, etc.

I don't think that's necessarily the answer. Often these things arise out of market failure.

For instance Apple couldn't sell its ARM processors even if it wanted to because ARM's licence agreement with Apple forbids it. The problem is that the market for CPUs lacks choice. Hopefully RISC-V will alleviate that, eventually.

> For instance Apple couldn't sell its ARM processors even if it wanted to because ARM's licence agreement with Apple forbids it.

First time i hear that. Isn't Apple a founding member and can do whatever it wants?

No they sold their ARM stock decades ago, they have no special rights.

They bought an architectural licence, but those always come with limitations, or you just don't get one. See Qualcomm's litigation against ARM.

Okay, but hell will still freeze over before Apple sells even a resistor they make to a 3rd party. Let alone a CPU.

Continuous examining for abuse is great and what a proactive regulator should be doing anyway. Question is, does it incentivize these companies to reduce their market share by different means - going low on a certain marketing campaign, release a subpar product, or make choices that alienate say bottom 10-20% of users and cause them to leave. Once they reduce the market share, would they not be examined till they attain that market share back? (that is after the market definition is clear)

In India, there is UPI which at it's core is dominated by 2-3 apps. Regulator is trying to reduce market share but to no avail. The thing is, service is free for end user, so the only way a service provider app (links user with banks on whose rails the tech works) earns money is via advertising. Others dont take it up because returns are only possible once you burn money to attain a certain scale. No one in the chain earns anything on a single transaction except banks(paid for by other banks). Think while regulator should be watching the apps (and banks) closely, they should instead also work on an incentive structure which could open the market further for newer entrants.

> Question is, does it incentivize these companies to reduce their market share by different means - going low on a certain marketing campaign, release a subpar product, or make choices

I dont think anybody expects them to reduce their market share. Thats what competition is for.

In the hypothetical that the OP shared, they mentioned scrutiny for firms above a certain market share.

Yes, because you can't abuse (substantial) market share unless you have it.

It's like having a gun. Perfectly fine unless you go around threatening people with it.

Market share is fine, honestly earned. Abuse of market share or product is not.

You might make a world beating product and achieve 100% market share. That's great!

If you then use that market share, or your product, to resist competition, or if that happens naturally, so that by doing nothing you are guaranteed 100% market share, then regulators have to step in to ensure a healthy market going forward.

It’s a bit too late for that. The big players just buy any competitor coming anywhere close to be relevant, a boat load of money for said company, peanuts for the ones buying. I’d say the market is defunct since decades ago.

I don’t think EU not the US is ready to implement rules against smaller companies being bought, I mean Microsoft could by Activision Blizzard.

These rules already exist, it's just enforcing them that is the issue.

Actually it's better than that: medium corp will go against buying small player to avoid being subjected to DMA ! It will slow or stop growth because it will lower or cancel the advantage of being so big as having no competitor

In the end, markets will optimize to have 2 or 3 big players in each fields to avoid that kind of problem...

Proper functioning of a healthy market is hardly the worst. These giants would sell people if they could get away with it and make money doing it. The people behind them would not think twice before damaging the society if there were few bucks in it for them to hoard.

It's making me sad that this world is full of so many people and massive states/corps and only the EU tries to navigate the new challenges of integrating technology in our lives responsibly. It feels like the world is full with idiots, cry babies, and evil geniuses and just the EU which is such a small fraction of the world acting like a grown up.

I mean, many people would agree that the US is the face of the western world. How come such a massive group of people act so irresponsibly making the same mistakes over and over again, causing a significant amount of suffering, and then saying the east is evil. The EU is the only body that advocates socialism and democracy while the US doesn't live to its standard, which is a shame really. In these challenging times the west needs strong leaders, not the horrifying shit show there is now.

The best thing the EU can do is demonstrate that there are other ways to do things, often as a counterpoint to the US.

Both a large liberal democracies (for now) but they live on opposite sides on the (center) left/right spectrum.

There is a real benefit to humanity with competing ideas being put into practice at scale.

i wonder how much these changes are costing Apple vs how much they make in Europe. would be interesting to know if there's an amount of compliance costs and complexity that could see Apple leave the EU market!

The EU is a huge market of people with deep pockets, I conjecture the break even point is not anywhere on the horizon.

At some point control of one's own business future balances out a certain level of profit.

Have you seen how much they all bend over backwards for China?

As far as I know, only Apple and Microsoft operate in China.

At least iCloud is run by a third party and not Apple (GCBD). Similar to how Blizzard does with their games and why World of Warcraft disappeared over night. Important distinction to make when it comes to privacy and security (there’s none) and how Apple washes their hands clean while keeping the Chinese government happy.

It is pretty much a requirement if you want to do business in mainland China.

Firefox also had a set of China-owned servers to sync data from Chinese users to.

(“Had” because I think they officially stopped the relationship with Mozilla China)

Meta doesn’t. Their products have never been available in China.

Probably because the Chinese market is already full of Chinese social media companies. How do they expect to compete if they enter? It's not 2004 anymore where starting a social media on Harvard campus was a big ticket.

I also wonder if personel/talents/headcount to handle all that crap can become an issue. VPs (CEOs even) distracted with compliance etc.

Ones crap is anothers feature.

When all they need to do for compliance is to enable EU users to install apps without Apple as a middle-man then not much in the way of "personell/talents/headcount to handle all that crap" is actually necessary. What's costing them resources (and eventually money in the form of fines) is not complying.

You are vastly oversimplifying the issue. It’s not like there’s a bit that Apple can flip to just let EU citizens sideload apps.

I’d argue you’re vastly over complicating it.

There’s already mechanisms to side load, and install IPAs..

Why would it be more complicated?

It feels like some people don't imagine these companies to be ready for compliance. As if they don't have all the knobs ready to turn on a per-region/country/state basis as soon as the law changes and it becomes possible to lose even the smallest amount in stock value.

These DMA like changes are now coming from everywhere. It is just that EU has teeth, not to ignore and usually moves first.

California has adopted GDPR, there are ongoing probes in the US just last week, etc.

Time is up for regulation-free business in IT. We had 50 years of freedom (compared to let us say: drugs, medical devices, cars, airplanes, ...). It is normal cycle for a market

> We had 50 years of freedom

More “Wild West gold rush” than “freedom”

I think for many people that is the same ;). But I agree with your differentiation.

> Time is up for regulation-free business in IT. We had 50 years of freedom (compared to let us say: drugs, medical devices, cars, airplanes, ...)

This is an odd reading of the history, tbh. The US regulators were generally more active on competition in the industry in the 90s than today; see the Microsoft and Intel investigations, for instance.

That would be a net positive as we would all benefit from new players that would emerge and fill that void. Obviously your question was rhetorical and this won't happen.

New players emerging in the high-end smartphone space? You seriously believe that a comparable player to *Apple* is going to emerge any time in the next decade? Lol

Normally, no. But in the hypothetical situation of Apple leaving the EU up for grabs for new players, maybe.

The threshold is nowhere near close.

You forget that these companies already operate in China which is a massive pain in the backside for all involved.

The only reason why a company might threaten to pull out is if they wanted to stop other countries getting similar ideas.

China isn’t threatening Apple’s entire App Store model though.

The point of the EU is to protect consumers and small businesses, not the business of multi trillion dollar market leaders who engage in anti-competitive practices.

Maybe Apple should focus back on making money through innovation instead of coasting on rent seeking.

If EU is so good at promoting innovation and competition, why couldn’t they compete at all in hardware, software, and AI?

If they’re so good at dissuading gate keepers, then why is LVMH everywhere and so dominant in luxury goods? Why is it that every single glasses shop in every mall is owned by Luxottica no matter the brand.

The truth is that EU is not good at promoting competition. They’re good at preventing innovation. They’re good at protectionist policies.

How many more cookie prompts do people have to click because of idiotic EU laws?

I recommend the article “Facing reality about the EU is a core requirement for good management”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39602417

> why couldn’t they compete at all in hardware,

Like Arm? Or raspberry pi? (Both existed pre-exit)

> software,

Too many companies to list.

> and AI?

Like Mistral?

> How many more cookie prompts do people have to click because of idiotic EU laws?

It's up to the companies. Every time you see a banner it means the company values selling your information more than pissing you off. We could have no banners right now.

Cookie prompts is the best example of bad faith compliance. Please inform yourself and don't spread this narritive further.

IMO if anything it's the opposite. EU could have made law to respect DNT header if they wanted privacy but they won't because it would hurt "their" companies. Instead they tried to be super vague and preferentially sue companies who they have qualms with and the companies which they could get money from.

My previous company hired a lawyer from EU for sorting out GDPR, and even according to him the law didn't prevented all things which hurts privacy like a normal person will assume.

I am once again posting the EU official site using cookie pop-ups https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en

>The 3 types of first-party cookie we use are to: >(...) >gather analytics data (about user behaviour).

Well they do collect user data using third party services. A bit disappointing, but banners seem to be necessary in this case.

Quoting OP

> Cookie prompts is the best example of bad faith compliance

If cookie prompts are used by both by the official EU and GDPR sites then that was clearly the intent of the law.

You can’t argue with cookie prompt lovers. They love clicking on those useless buttons.

https://gdpr.eu is an interesting site to visit on the matter, surely they have the best and most compliant implementation.

https://i.imgur.com/Ftuv74P.png

They kind of do with WeChat.

Example?

Anyone can make an app like WeChat with mini programs inside. No one has exceeded because people in the west simply don’t want that ui.

Virtually all Meta and Google services are blocked in China. Only Apple has significant consumer presence (and manufacturing) there.

Not for a lack of trying (at least on the google side). Took google getting hacked and IP stolen to fully move out of china

Google didn't 'fully' move out of China; it still has offices there, doing some business as usual.

I mean, the US is also pursuing competition investigations into Apple; if the strategy is to just flee anywhere that the regulators ask them mean questions, then they're probably realistically looking at only operating in developing nations, and not all of those.

And that would literally mean that the probe was warranted.

$94B

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/

Did the math, 24.5% of their global 2023 revenue.

And Apple's iPhone market share in Europe (yes, the EU is not Europe) has been steadily growing since 2019:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/639928/market-share-mobi...

Apple would be crazy for leaving the EU. Even the suggestion would probably lead to a shareholder revolt and the removal of some executives.

If they leave the EU market, Android immediately becomes a much bigger focus for every app developer which can have an effect on the quality of apps available on the app store around the world.

Android is already the dominant mobile OS in Europe by market share. Why would quality increase by going from dominant to more dominant?

Companies might decide to stop bothering with ios apps altogether, which could have an effect in USA as well eventually.

Two things: iOS has been eating into Android marketshare in Europe since 2019:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/639928/market-share-mobi...

However, more importantly, iPhone users have more disposable income [1][2]. So, if Apple would pull from the EU, all those iPhone users with a lot of disposable income would be in the market for Android phones and apps, creating a lot of opportunities in the Android market.

[1] There are various studies, e.g.: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/iphone-users-spend-...

[2] If you look at the most popular Android phones, they are often dominated by cheaper models, e.g. Samsung's A lineup. See e.g. current Android usage in France: https://www.appbrain.com/stats/top-android-phones-tablets-by...

Remember how the US tech market went into layoff spree just for a slight dip in profits and slightly higher rates?

Think what does same investors will do to the company that leaves a 300mil people market over a legal spat.

Think about all of the innovations those terminated people will bring to the market when they are no longer shackled in golden handcuffs.

They mass hired too many unqualified people in 2021.

Yeah, and if Apple stops selling to EU suddenly bunch of Apple software artisans will be marked as "unqualified" as well for people that uncritically eat that kind of BS.

You would not only need to consider how much it brings in but also how much it would cost to pull back. They would have to unwind a ton of legal structures, get rid of employees and live up to contracts that are already in place. This would take years and would be more than enough time for competition to smoothly make a transition.

Then you are also thinking of Apple as some kind of US entity. It's a faceless shareholder owned business. The shareholders would somehow need to agree to leave a still very profitable region. They would only agree to that if they think the company can force other regions or the EU to not legislate Apple. It's a risky strategy that could work but I don't think you can get the majority of shareholders to try it. Even then it could fail and just bankrupt the company.

You also have to consider how much it costs to actually comply. The board would probably much rather Apple comply and keeps selling iPhones and services in the EU vs not getting ANY profits at all from their currently second largest region in the world.

I don't think it's that unusual for companies to have wildly different margins in different markets. Apple's margins leave quite a lot of room for a market to still be worth pursuing.

Apple would first have to determine if it’s worth continuing to act like petulant children instead of just complying. They could not reasonably classify what they’re taking on now as simply “compliance expenses”. They’re doing it BECAUSE they see the worth in fighting back.

I'd say that it's realistically not possible for any amount of cost or complexity of compliance to make them leave the EU market.

Apple has a vested interest in being able to offer their services worldwide. If one part of the world is not included, companies in that part will have a much easier time to develop and grow their own alternatives. If these alternatives gain enough traction in that part they might then be able to threaten Apples services globally.

Therefore I'd assume that even if they will only break even (or operate at a manageable loss) they would still stay in the EU.

A quarter of Apple’s total revenue comes from the EU (with Apple’s average profit margin of ~40%), but only 7% of the app store revenue. Which means that even if Apple gave up on all app store revenue from the EU, they wouldn’t lose that much. In any case, the resources they put into compliance is certainly much, much less than a quarter of their total resources.

I doubt they would leave the EU. I do think it is expected that they will design their products or features with the EU in mind and probably not even ship specific things in that region to avoid risk of being micromanaged / product managed by authorities.

Awesome!

https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/1772207590212063397

I wish they would also push forward with cookie consent pop-up - 1) enforce easy reject (as it should be but dumb websites hide it away, which is illegal) and better yet 2) enforce it on a browser config level like we have do-not-track config but should be with 3 levels and enforceable.

> cookie consent pop-up

The second you call it a pop-up it's just more hell, should just be a browser setting that has to be abided by. No popup, no constantly asking me for consent.

I should consent once, ONCE!

The biggest browser manufacturer is not interested in making it easy to opt out of tracking cookies for some reason, wonder why that is…

And because of that it should be _forced_ to do so...

They're literally working on a feature to disable third party coookies by default:

https://blog.google/products/chrome/privacy-sandbox-tracking...

How does that fit in with your conspiracy theorizing?

Tracking cookies != Third party cookies

A browser setting would be binary - yes or no.

A per site consent dialog, with per "partner" option, with easy to use "Decline all" / "Allow all" buttons, is much more granular. Maybe you're OK with a random community website "tracking" you because you know it makes them more money from ads; but you're not OK with Meta tracking you across the whole web.

> A browser setting would be binary - yes or no.

Many other browser settings are specific per site. This can also be.

Other settings are per site and this one can be as well - you can select "reject all", "accept all" (or "reject non-essential") and be done with that... or use "ask each time" like with mic/camera and there would be small, tiny, browser-ui pop-up in usual place...

> should just be a browser setting that has to be abided by

It should be a browser setting that is enforced by the browser.

If I open something in private mode, or use the multi-account containers extension (Firefox), cookies are isolated or forgotten without any involvement from the remote party. The site doesn't need to know or care.

a precedence in pay-or-consent would uproot a lot of news business. Overdue because this is illegal since GDPR but this is a tough cookie (oh the wordplay) for many organizations.

I guess they don't feel comfortable mandating how open source software is written?

Safari could be mandated to do something like this and honestly I think Apple would be very happy to do it, but it's a bit weirder with Firefox...

I'd say that Firefox would be even on board with the idea (weird they haven't proposed it themselves).

Besides - EU could create a law saying: "website should obey browser setting and if such setting is not present allow user to consent to tracking"

That's a good start for sure. And when Safari and Firefox implement it instantly, and if Chromium rejects a PR for it, then can make it a law.

Cookies in 2024 is kinda irrelevant, more important is to prevent fingerprinting of veriest kind (CSS, fonts, GPU, screen size etc).

The actual law is about any kind of personal data, including but not limited to fingerprinting web/app users, which can be associated with a real human.

European fear of harms caused by malicious use of databases of personal data go back to actual harms caused by such databases when they were still paper-based and the first transistors had not even been demonstrated.

They're also on the way out because Google is moving to turn Chrome into a massive tracking black box on it's own.

There's no need to use cookie-based fingerprinting if you control ~97% of the browser market and you can just install the tracking tools directly in the software used and keep them active with maliciously crafted (dark pattern) popups.

Yeah the ePrivacy Regulation, which would overhaul cookie consent, was supposed to pass alongside the GDPR. I don't think any real progress has been made on it for years. The last update on the text itself was in 2021.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eprivacy-r...

This sounds awesome! Comission is again a step ahead ;)

> Simpler rules on cookies: the cookie provision, which has resulted in an overload of consent requests for internet users, will be streamlined. The new rule will be more user-friendly as browser settings will provide an easy way to accept or refuse tracking cookies and other identifiers. The proposal also clarifies that no consent is needed for non-privacy intrusive cookies that improve internet experience, such as cookies to remember shopping-cart history or to count the number of website visitors.

basically what I mentioned before

Website: "We and our 281 partners value your privacy.. Click to accept and continue, or click here to waste your time with this massive list of checkboxes."

Me: Close tab.

281? Peanuts, try 1,609: https://www.allrecipes.com/

The supporters don't seem to understand how much of their lifetime gets wasted with clicking through those popups. This should be a once for all setting in the browser that the websites can access.

It’s called uBlock

NO MORE POP UPS

Non-Twitter link: https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission/112155867623...

Does anyone know of good online resources to teach yourself law. CS and engineering have great courses online, surely there are some hidden law gems.

By law here, you mean EU style civil law?

I mean any set of resources that after studying it will make you confident in reading material in law. It doesn't necessarily have to be a specific law system, or is that not how things work?

There's some overlap, but yea it's really not how things work.

If you're in the US, UK, Aus, Canada, etc, the common law system in use is fundamentally quite different.

> I mean any set of resources that after studying it will make you confident in reading material in law. It doesn't necessarily have to be a specific law system, or is that not how things work?

That's mostly not how things work, at least if you mean to imply “justifiably” before “confident”.

Law isn’t physics where there is a universal underlying truth; it is a social construct, and each system of law is its own construct.

I wish Discord was affected by the DMA so we could get some kind of official interoperability.

What product do you work on? Let’s make that DMA as well.

I work on an opensource ssh server, so I don't think that it really matters if it were to somehow be affected by the DMA, as its an open standard and interoperates with opensource options, which hasn't killed the company I work for.

If discord cant compete with email because its too hard to comply with open standards, maybe that particular rent seeking chat app wasn't actually all that innovative

Email is good for a very particular set of things. Those things (including the way it is open and standardized) also make it very very bad for a lot of other things.

For example, I don't need a spam filter on my discord. My signal is actually encrypted reasonably and provides reliably secure communication. I can send things like gifs and emoji in-line in a reliable, cross-platform way. Group communication isn't cursed, "top- or bottom- posting" isn't a thing people discuss.

Requiring people to build only on widely accepted standards prevents any kind of innovation in features, because before you can ratify anything, you have to get it approved by everyone else, which means that you're now in a land of super-ultra-waterfall design-by-committee that gives everyone the least-common-denominator communication features. That isn't good.

It's crazy how the 00s was this golden age of interoperability. You could use almost every messaging service with a third party client. Now all we have is walled gardens.

i was there, i was developing on those systems.

i think you're romanticising things.

the whole situation with interoperability was not sustainable, as evidenced by the fact that it was dropped by every player as soon as possible.

one of the reasons why it was not sustainable was that the standards at that time were conceived for a different era, and everyone wanted special features not available in the standards.

it does seem like we're having much better success with interoperability nowadays, but only because the standards are much better today.

No, people left because a large enough percentage of their friends and coworkers did. That's how walled gardens work: exclusivity demands participation.

you're describing the "network effect". but it only happens once people actually move away from certain platforms. why did they move away? features that couldn't be implemented using a shared standard.

"move away" is a tenuous assertion. If someone puts the majority of new content on another platform, is that "moving away"? What if they only use the old platform once a week? What if they only use the new platform once a week, but that's when an important discussion happens?

No one moved away from email.

> If someone puts the majority of new content on another platform, is that "moving away"?

yes.

> What if they only use the old platform once a week? What if they only use the new platform once a week, but that's when an important discussion happens?

you’re describing low usage.

My point is that it's still the network effect, even when the old platform still has active users.

Nobody left email, yet the network effect is still very present in that space.

Players always drop it to trap their users to their service.

See how google closed hangouts to being able to communicate with other XMPP servers, or how slack dropped IRC and XMPP when they felt they had enough adoption to be able to do that.

So in the beginning you want interoperability so it's "just the same", then you drop it so the users are stuck.

> Players always drop it to trap their users to their service.

i understand what you're writing and i agree. but in my case all our enterprise clients were demanding features that had us circumventing interoperability since the features they were asking for would never make it into the standards.

> i think you're romanticising things.

I don't think I am. As a user, I could use Pidgin or Gaim and talk to my friends across every service I used. This only stopped when companies started consciously working against these efforts. Discord explicitly and openly banned third party clients. They didn't have to do so. It has nothing to do with standards and everything to do with companies becoming aggressively and openly hostile towards anything that isn't directly under their control.

> They didn't have to do so. It has nothing to do with standards and everything to do with companies becoming aggressively and openly hostile towards anything that isn't directly under their control.

we tried to do it differently. it was impossible. every company had it’s own extensions on top of the standards because the standards were poor. those extensions only worked when chatting with someone on the same network using the same software. this was not sustainable. when we removed those standards we not only provided an incredible experience for the user but we also removed huge amounts of code that made everything much faster.

the casualty was interoperability.

> You could use almost every messaging service with a third party client

Not because of open-standards - but because that was when IM protocols were straightforward to reverse-engineer and interop with, and this was before mass-adoption of SSL/TLS (let alone certificate-pinning).

Where do people get this notion that every system has to work with their competitors’ system? Genuinely curious. Why would I spend resources making sure to accommodate connection to something that competes?

1) It used to work that way. You didn't even have to put in special effort. It takes more effort to do what these companies do today to ensure nobody can interface with their service.

2) Apparently we need regulation to make companies do it today, and that will force these companies to allow interoperability.

What would it take to get gcc to export its AST so that greater interoperability could be achieved with other FOSS packages (like Emacs)?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8861360 (one of the indexes of the issue)

I didn't remember AIM being able to send messages to MSNor ICQ.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/12/14/microsoft_opens_m...

This is what the internet used to be like. Nowadays, something like this would be unthinkable. But you could use Pidgin to connect to Facebook Messenger, AIM, ICQ and MSN. No, you couldn't necessarily use your AIM account to talk to somebody on FB, but that was only because the companies making these services didn't implement this. The fact is, it could've been done if they wanted. The technology was there, the environment was there, the open standard that almost everybody was using was there.

https://superuser.com/questions/717272/is-it-possible-to-tal...

Now you have Discord, Facebook, etc. banning third party clients and enforcing a walled garden when they don't have to. It's a conscious choice they're making.

I'm not sure why you're defending the current state of things. It's worse now.

Because clients expect it to?

Imagine if you had to own the same phone brand to call someone else…

Because one day We The People will pass Apple Laws which levy a 100% final point of sale sales tax on products (containing at least one universal machine) and services which reduce owner sovereignty.

If a product could conceivably do X and steps were taken in R&D to keep it from doing X (not that it wasn't implemented, but was specifically designed to prevent owners from doing X even though otherwise it could if steps weren't taken), or if the product maker does not publish protocols, formats, standards, etc, or designs those with the intent to thwart interoperability; or if the owner is prevented from changing programming code on a universal machine regardless of the product's function (phone, PC, microwave, washer, blood sugar monitor, automobile) with well-known interface hardware and communication protocols; or anything else in this spirit I have missed, will be in violation of Apple Laws and must have a 100% final point of sale sales tax levied so that philosophically highly anti-Stallman products can't compete easily against near-Stallman compliant products.

Closed source proprietary software and hardware are huge national security problems. Even if USGOV can sign an NDA to inspect source code and chip design, it's still a national security issue that you and I can't. It is a national security issue when decade-old idiot-TVs and idiot-cameras long out of software updates pwn computers and/or get turned into remote surveillance devices for digital voyeurs paying top dollar to collect private feeds into peoples' lives (don't ask).

Phew! I hate mobile keyboards!

Yeah my delivery is bombastic and maybe sounds a little schizo: sure you got me, probably why I am downvoted.

Then again how many salaries would my schizo-presented ideas impact (many), and what is their intersection here (at least moderate)?

Probably the former, the latter would mark me as paranoid schizophrenic. :^)

ActivityPub discord would be lit

A friend of mine is already working on such a project.

After “EU launches probes..” i was hoping to read planet names

After reading your comment, I really appreciate it. The thinking has a positive world spin (progress for all mankind) instead of the ugly truth of our word.

We all should think like that.

That's ESA. :)

(Next launch to another planet seems to be ExoMars 2 to Mars in 2028, carrying the Rosalind Franklin rover. Originally planned for 2022 on a russian rocket, now with a european launcher.)

The web as designed by Tim Berners-Lee was a decentralized system where you could host a website and others could see it.

Google came along and made finding these websites much more convenient and accessible. Along the way Microsoft IE began using monopoly advantage to make the web in Microsoft’s image. It was a clunky unstandardized mess for many years as only Microsoft could officially push a standard. You could build for Netscape/Firefox, but you would be breaking 90% of your users due to undocumented and tailored code.

Now Google has the market share. The standards are much more aligned amongst the major players, and it would be a stretch to call it a monopoly. That’s the goal.

Google unofficially pushes the new browsers standards towards Google’s image, just as Microsoft had before. Just look at Chrome extensions for an example. It’s not a coincidence ad blockers are becoming weakling in the name of “security”.

Apple has their entrenched user base, solidifying with every iOS app unavailable to other ecosystems. Compound the issue when people have paid real money for useful apps that they don’t wish to sink the cost for.

It’s better than before, but companies will never have your best interests at heart. Profit is incentivized first, then product (including you).

A decentralized web is possible, we have the technology. There is no reason a static site server couldn’t be implemented with a proxy hiding feature, even using IPFS potentially. Large plates can still cache and serve data to get paid, but your data doesn’t have to be centralized.

Moreover, serving up a web server from your local machine could be as easy as opening a custom pinned tabbed and sharing it out. CRDTs and homomorophic tech open worlds of possibility with secure p2p applications at scale.

But this is not what a cloud provider wants. It is not the direction we are heading. We are trained to be paranoid (rightful so unfortunately), and cloud providers tout themselves as the panacea. In some ways they are, but at what cost?

We no longer trust the user to have a direct connection. All of your services should be on the cloud if you’re “enterprise” enough, and you’ll pay for it accordingly.

What I want to see: Governments recognize that the internet is a public utility at this point, and reduce the roadblocks to hosting your own data. Allow all GUA IPv6 addresses to be static if requested. Don’t allow carriers to give special preference to business accounts vs personal for static assignment. There is no technical reason for this if a customer requests it. We’re not running out of IPv6 addresses.

This fixes the STUN/TURN debacle created by NAT, and opens up the field for new possibilities. It also allows for real decentralized competition with cloud providers.

It used to be that I got excited about the random blog posts I could find. Simple HTML sites from interesting people, which I mostly get on Hacker News now. Search engines filled with ads and SEO/AI garbage only exist because of the profit structure and centralized control.

With ID verification a certainty due to AI advances, we’re going to be even more locked into these monopolistic systems. We need competition, and as long as they hold the search screen, we’re only going to move towards higher profits for them. Yet something tells me our governments have something to do with it. Data collection isn’t just profitable, it’s potent.

There is one reason left: copyright.

A true decentralized content sharing platform cannot prevent copyright infringement. That's the guarantee that we have built our entire society around. Copyright isn't even about artists making money anymore. It's the tool we use to litigate fraud. It's the tool we use to demand privacy. It's the foundation for content-moderation.

If we want a decentralized web, we need to leave copyright out of it. The greatest challenge for that is moderation. I advocate that we replace moderation with curation.

Best bet is to build the network to be resistant to government, police, and (underlying layers 2/3) network censorship. You work to make protocols which make individuals and small groups as equally powerful as large groups when it comes to meeting physical/biological survival needs. You promote personal sovereignty even if it means some random nut can kill a bunch of randos as a negative six-sigma result.

Instead of building systems which try to subsume individual mental sovereignty into the group mind (all is one, all is god), promote technologies which enable minds to grow in capabilities and independence (you too can grow into a god). Governments are examples of the former.

It is better the government or any other powerful group not be able to handcuff the guy you don't like today, lest they come to handcuff you tomorrow. Everyday you give up your sovereignty like a currency for some form of benefit (try manufacturing methamphetamine while skipping property taxes, you are not sovereign): always evaluate if you are still getting a good deal, and build technologies which make it harder (NOT EASIER) to both give up or take away that sovereignty.

This is almost a religious thing.

(Caveat: I am big-A Atheist.)

Such networks already exist. There's a reason most people won't use them: moderation.

Most people don't want to spend their time on 4chan. If you want interesting content, then you want users, which means you want moderation.

The problem with moderation is that it's a hierarchy. That's exactly what a decentralized network exists to avoid. We need a decentralization-compatible moderation alternative. I think reframing top-down moderation as bottom-up curation could work.

Freenet's FMS+WoT seemed like a good moderation solution: subscribe to your moderator of choice.

4chan's problem isn't a lack of reputation system to game, its problem is a number of state actors and ideological groups pouring resources into bot campaigns meant to derail discussion and demoralize users. Psywar is afoot!

I strongly agree with the general gist of your post; I don’t use any social media and a piece of me dies anytime a twitter link is shared that I can’t read because I don’t have an account.

That said, I don’t think the technologies and solutions you’ve proposed will take flight unfortunately.

I’ve been very curious about IPFS for the longest time, but it seems to fit into the same category as blockchain: beautiful technology that could solve a lot of problems, yet the barrier to entry vs just doing it the status quo way is too high.

If the general public can’t be bothered having their own Wordpress blog, the jump to running a server or writing a single HTML tag is far too difficult.

I’d love to see a fully not-for-profit social media organization whose only goal is the wellbeing of users

Original https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_... see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39814690

Throwaway account for obvious reasons:

As a SRE SWE at Alphabet/Google, I find this assumed-guilt and assumed-lack-of-giving-a-shit irritating.

For the past several quarters we have spent a significant proportion of our effort on DMA compliance, right down to the infrastructure & RPC level. It is top priority mandate level stuff and getting absolute top billing from managers and TLs in planning and day-to-day activities.

I have spent a long time over the past few months working almost entirely on DMA projects so it is pretty aggravating to then see these "probes" into if we are taking it seriously.

Don't get me wrong, I think the DMA is a good thing and it is totally the right thing to do. But this assumption that Google don't care and are ignoring it or whatever is just exasperating when myself and many other good engineers are working their hearts out to implement it.

</rant>

If there wasn't a DMA, and no prospect of probe or accountability, google, and the likes, wouldn't give a shit. As we can see from the current state of affairs (that led to DMA and all that)

I mean, if you did a good job, then this is no extra work for you. But there's very little reason to trust any of you right? Especially after stunts Apple is constantly pulling, everyone in EU leadership would have to be a brain dead moron to believe whatever US corps are telling them without any kind of verification.

If you pass with flying colors, that doesn't diminish any of your work - it confirms that you did it well.

You've very clearly never participated in an audit if you believe this. Audits are a ton of work, to prove in excruciating detail that things actually work the way you claim they do.

I have participated in such audits (and actually worked on things like GDPR compliance on rather large corporations). Yes, they're a ton of work. But that's what the job is, sorry if now developers need to work to undo anticompetitive crap they pulled in their products.

You're again assuming remediation work. Just the work required for an audit that you end up passing can take weeks.

Yes, I know. What of it? Comes with the size and money.

Just like when we were building medical stuff that came with it's own audits and how banking also does.

Cost of earning all that sweet cash.

You started off with

> I mean, if you did a good job, then this is no extra work for you.

And now we're at

> What of it? Comes with the size and money.

which is quite the difference. It no longer matters if you did a good job, suck it up and take the audit?

It also wholly misses what the root-comment Googler was complaining about. You may feel that Google as a whole "deserves" this somehow, but the engineer was saying it feels like a slap in the face to everyone who was working hard on DMA compliance.

> Why should trillion dollar companies get a pass? Because some engineer will feel bad about a probe that is a mile over their head?

No, but this is a remarkably unsympathetic take to someone who is venting. You're looking to Google-bash, and that's fine, I'm usually happy to join you in that, but look past the megacorp to the person who is pissed that their hard work and that of their team seems pointless.

I'm sure a trillion dollar company can manage to do that. Why should the EC trust these companies? My local government will go through any plan I make for modifications to my house. Why should trillion dollar companies get a pass? Because some engineer will feel bad about a probe that is a mile over their head?

You rant feels unnecessarily emotional and victim assuming.

"WAH! WAH! The EU doesn't apreciate the job at Google I signed up for and getting paid $400k+ to do."

If you don't like your job, quit and find something you'll find fulfilling because you're not gonna get any sympathy for you not getting public government appreciation for the very well paid job you singed up to do at a private company. Go out and get some perspective, there's people out there with real problems in their lives, breaking their backs and barely scraping by. Seriously, the entitlement of some well paid big-tech workers is astonishing.

The EU hasn't got any beef with you or your job. Nobody at EU said that Google engineers aren't working hard on DMA compliance.

It's Google's (management's) responsibility to prove to regulators that they're DMA complaint, not their employee's to go public under burner accounts to say this.

"Trust AND verify".

Blame your management for lack of (proactive) action and lack of communication to the authorities, not the EU for looking into your employer.

Alphabet is under investigation for, among things:

> Whether Google preferences the firm's own goods and services in search results

Are you saying that Google doesn't preference it's own goods and services on the 'Google' platform ahead of it's other competitors on that platform?

"past several quaters". The DMA entered force November 1. 2022.

There are multiple parts to it --

"The 2 May 2023, 6 months later, the regulation started applying and the potential gatekeepers had 2 months to report to the commission to be identified as gatekeepers. This process would take up to 45 days and after being identified as gatekeepers, they would have 6 months to come into compliance, at the latest the 6 March 2024.[8][32] From 7 March 2024, gatekeepers must comply with the DMA. [33]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act

So are we all going to just trust your word? That ship has long sailed, the trust is not there anymore.

This is what tech companies deserve to get (not just Google) when they try to play the different laws and circumvent them.

Google can spend a lot of money on it, and still be non-compliant. How much time has been spent on it, or how seriously it's being taken, is not really indicative of anything relevant.

> I find this assumed-guilt and assumed-lack-of-giving-a-shit irritating.

Europe's probes works differently w.r.t. US. It's not "assumed guilt", it's "we want a clearer picture".

If you did everything alright, there's nothing to be afraid or be irritated of. You answer your questions and move on.

If you tried to work your way around, then, well...

It's possible that both are true at the same time: 1. Google doesn't really give a shit and will do the very least they think can get away with, 2. They have some people working on it out of the 27k engineers they have.

I'm not even sure how it's controversial, I assume you are biased and emotional as a Googler, but every company will do the very least possible to loosen their grip on the market.

I book flights with Google Flights. It’s way better than anywhere else. I’d be annoyed if it isn’t the #1 result when I do a search for flights.

I book flights with Google Flights and other options (Kayak, my credit card’s travel portal, airlines directly), and Google Flights is kind of mid. It’s annoying that Google pushes it to the #1 result for lots of searches that it shouldn’t be.

I guess it depends on what you look for. I haven't bought a flight in a while, but I just looked at kayak and google flights for comparison. Google flights is a much simpler, more direct UI, and it feels a lot more responsive. In particular, kayak violated one of my huge personal pet peeves: page content moving around while it's loading.

That said, the gap is a lot smaller than it used to be. There was a time in the past where google flights was light years ahead of priceline, kayak, etc. in bloat, bugginess, responsiveness, etc. That gap has shrank considerably and it's more a matter of preference today.

I don’t see what is better about google flights. Sometimes I get the cheapest price on the airline’s website and sometimes on Expedia. Google flights’ price is almost always the same as the airline website’s price.

Google only cares about DMA compliance because they don't want to get in trouble. Otherwise you wouldn't be so busy with it right now, you'd already be compliant.

I have sympathy for you as a SWE, but I have no sympathy for megacorporations - they should never be trusted.

Looks like the EU are investigating Alphabet for "Alphabet's rules on steering in Google Play and self-preferencing on Google Search".

Is it possible Alphabet has complied with some parts, but not all?

This might not be pedantic. Maybe they're missing important details?

> Don't get me wrong, I think the DMA is a good thing and it is totally the right thing to do.

This is the part that you and Google don't agree. If you look at your comment from that perspective, you can see why probe makes sense.

How many other good engineers at Google are working on anti-competitive practice by pushing Google as default browser, providing a worse service on non-Chromium based browsers (like slowing YouTube for Firefox), etc? [Microsoft Edge does worse]

How many other good engineers at Google are working on ethically dubious practices, like tracking users that are in explicit do-not-track mode through browser fingerprinting?

How many other good engineers at Google are working on <insert any other terrible practices>?

Maybe paying a few engineers to clean up their reputation is not enough? Maybe you just picked a bad role and are looking for the wrong culprits?

Do you have a source for any of these?

For the first point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858

For browser fingerprinting, there doesn't seem to be many sources. There is this post:

https://community.brave.com/t/new-version-youtube-fingerprin...

Yet this is very easy to reproduce, and there is no other way to explain the personalized video suggestions in private mode.

This reminds me of a conversation from Dune, between Count Fenring and the Baron:

"The Emperor does wish to audit your books," the Count said.

"Any time."

"You... ah... have no objections?"

"None. My CHOAM Company directorship will bear the closest scrutiny."

The point is if everything is in order (or made to look as if it's in order), then Google has nothing to fear, no matter how many probes the EU launches. And the Baron didn't take it personally, and neither should Google. It's all in the game, after all.

Thinking of your last paragraph it's rather interesting to see how, when corporations hurt people, a lot of people just say "it's business, they're making profit"... but when it comes to these laws, it gets strangely emotional instead of just saying "well, it's business".

> I have spent a long time over the past few months working almost entirely on DMA projects so it is pretty aggravating to then see these "probes" into if we are taking it seriously.

Well just because you take it seriously does not mean you have done a good job in implementing the changes? I dont know about google but apple certainly flaunted the rules completely so its a good thing that they are not letting it go.

Google is one of the reasons why this law had to be created in order to protect the users from its systemic dark patterns. I'm glad they're spending significant effort on DMA compliance, it means the law is working.

Except Google isn't complying.

Google charges 12-17% for "linking out" to a web purchase screen (aka "external offers").

> has opened proceedings to assess whether the measures implemented by Alphabet and Apple in relation to their obligations pertaining to app stores are in breach of the DMA. Article 5(4) of the DMA requires gatekeepers to allow app developers to “steer” consumers to offers outside the gatekeepers' app stores, free of charge

Ha! Just because you're only getting flack for this, I once upon a long ago worked on gdpr implementation and it was exactly the same thing.

Our entire team was working overtime and liaising with regulators to figure out what some of those pretty vague statements actually meant when it came down asking user permission for third party analytics and how to ensure we were compliant (what counts as essential, how many non-essential can you reasonably ask someone to review, who creates that list, what happens to the companies not in it, etc.etc.).

Nobody else knew either because they were all looking at us, as we'd be likely to get sued first anyway. Cue the articles after launch on how we either didn't care to do it right or we were actually being our usual evil selves in sneakily not implementing it in properly.

I feel your pain

Sorry for being cynical, but from your message it sounds like you were working hard with regulators to comply as little as possible not to get sued. Which makes sense - I mean it was probably just business - but doesn't mean you were not being "your evil selves" (whoever your were).

Maybe I'm underestimating the complexity at scale, but I've read GDPR in original (it's not long), and the intentions and what's required seem pretty clear. I only have practical experience with it from a regulator side, though.

Genuinely not, though I can understand that you're cynical. How do you prove intention anyway?

As context with these kind of regulations it's not always bad for the big players when it gets implemented across the market. Many smaller companies will not have the regulatory bandwidth to figure out compliance, and as the regulation acts as a way to level or cap what everyone can do, it's not like you will lose customers to someone else.

Complexity was mostly either definitional, e.g. some markets (ironically Germany's big publishers in particular) were absolutely convinced that almost anything they did on their sites fell under legitimate interest, even though we tried to convince them many times that would not fly.

Or it would be on specifics such as how many non-essential data providers can you reasonably ask a user to review? Keep the number too small and you'll be accused of favoring the big players, make it too big and you'll swamp users. Who decides?

By the way I agree that GDPR is pretty well written. Just that implementing these type of things and getting stakeholders to agree to it can be extremely complex. Fun days

Shows how NON compliant Alphabet was before DMA ;)

"Make infra compliant, but try to pull some shit with billing, to see how serious the EC is about DMA. That way, if they're serious, we're ready, but if not, we can still make money."

Heh, a lot of comments here make it clear they don't understand working at a megacorp, but I can actually believe this one.

And yet all the gatekeepers have publically taken action to actively try to undermine the DMA. Admittedly Google is nowhere near as bad as Apple, but it's still happening. So of course investigations have been launched

Even on a law and implementation effort like this with such large impact there are maybe 10,000 people in the world involved who actually understand it in any significant sense, and they all have a strong reason not to post about it on a public forum, or even a private one.

And even those people will only understand a limited aspect or perspective.

So the people commenting can only comment based on their outside impressions and emotions about generalities and how the specific implementation details seem to affect they as an end user.

I try to take anything said with that in mind. There is information in the comments about user experience but anything else is at the level of bullshitting at the bar with your friends, and not to be taken personally.

> I find this assumed-guilt and assumed-lack-of-giving-a-shit irritating

Web Environment Integrity.

Those three words burned up a lot of what little goodwill was left for google.

What's irritating is your pearl clutching. Google either turns the things it touches to shit or kills them. Guilt is assumed because it is fucking deserved. Seethe about it.

> to then see these "probes" into if we are taking it seriously

The probe is to determine if the effort was effective not if you are taking it seriously. If your work was effective then nothing will happen, if it wasn't effective than the fine or lack thereof would be sized appropriately to how serious they believe you are taking it. That is just effective regulation in action.

From the press release:

> The Commission has opened proceedings against Alphabet, to determine whether Alphabet's display of Google search results may lead to self-preferencing in relation to Google's vertical search services (e.g., Google Shopping; Google Flights; Google Hotels) over similar rival services.

I will admit to not having used google search for ages because of these practices and other modifications making it worse and worse, so off I go to search for "hotels paris" the sort of search I might make when planning a trip to Paris and I want to avoid booking.com for similar reasons.

And the top is google maps followed by some excerpt of google lodging links redirecting through google. So yeah, seems like google lodging is being preferenced over booking (which I also don't want) and tripadvisor, hotels.com, expedia etc. all prioritised over organic results that I would actually want.

So google search certainly preferences google maps and google lodging, maybe that is a preference consistent with the DMA but I feel like maybe it shouldn't be. If you were involved in a project to depreference google maps or lodging in a way consistent with the DMA, then I feel like you were targeting a little too deep into the grey area or didn't have enough time. As others pointed out, this is just a probe to determine if compliance has been achieved or not. There is no assumption of guilt.

> The Commission is concerned that Alphabet's and Apple's measures may not be fully compliant as they impose various restrictions and limitations. These constrain, among other things, developers' ability to freely communicate and promote offers and directly conclude contracts, including by imposing various charges.

Oh that hurts Apple. "directly conclude contracts". That goes deep.

Imagine how much time will be wasted to comply with crazy demands like making the Photos app uninstallable which help basically nobody.

The EU has long lost the plot with all the bureaucracy and rules. People like it when the government cracks down on powerful corporations, not understanding that the government apparatus is the most powerful and dangerous institution of them all. I'm not fully against that part of the DMA, breaking up these walled gardens could be positive. But history has shown once they start meddling with the markets, governments rarely know when to stop. That's because people in positions of power generally think they're in control and know what they're doing.

Look at the recent bottle cap directive for a more insane example. There are sadly hundreds of such cases at this point and the number of rules keeps growing year by year. Doing business in the EU will become more and more difficult and especially the cost for starting a new business is growing massively because of what needs to get invested in compliance before you even get started. This will be devastating for innovation and their economy as a whole.

I’m sorry, but what was that? The economy will collapse due to bottle cap directives? You know that these arguments have been thrown around by anti-EU interests since the 90s and its never ever panned out

"step off the multi-billion dollar corporation, bully!"

seriously though, it never ceases to amaze me the level people repeat corporate propaganda and conflate corporate success with their own self-worth. These companies literally spend billions in lobbying the government to "influence" their decisions and run rigorous ad campaigns that smear any sentiment that isn't vehemently pro-billionaire, pro-corpoate, pro big-tech etc... so its not all that surprising that people fall for it but it is truly astounding.

> conflate corporate success with their own self-worth

I think that's what happens when you become a stockholder.

> not understanding that the government apparatus is the most powerful and dangerous institution of them all

OK, but we can vote government out at regular intervals, meanwhile we're supposed to just accept anything corporations do because... they're not government? Cherry picking and misrepresenting EU regulations doesn't make your argument any clearer.

But where your argument really fails is that you don't really have one beyond ideological claptrap, taken solely on faith, or perhaps with specious arguments about out of control government and how markets and corporations are innately good and cannot be "interfered" with, lest the economy and "innovation" collapse. Please give us all a break.

Business don't get started and fail not because of government regulation, but because of huge corporations that crush competition, withhold access, promote incompatibility, etc. They use their size to ignore regulation and warp markets to their benefit.

Of course not all corporations are bad but some are, and that's why we have regulations.

Do you enjoy pre-installed aware, shareware, demoware etc. in general? or is this only because it is Apple products and his is about?

like having a demo version of Norton installed on your new PC.

or having Facebook OEM installed with no way to remove it?

you are the first one I have ever heard of, who actively encourages and enjoys that.

impressive.

Honestly, hard disk space is cheap. The thing that bothers me is when e.g. Norton is naggy and pops up UIs to make me interact with it despite opting out over time. Things like the Photos app sit there and occupy space but zero percent of my brain and perhaps some gigs of storage I personally am not missing.

The Apple Music app makes my 32GB iPad unusable. It takes up 10GB of my 32GB, despite having 0 songs downloaded. I have no idea what takes up that space (album art alone can't account for 10GB). There's no option to clear that "Documents & Data" cache in the "iPad Storage" settings menu. Uninstalling the Music app does not remove this data. I could reset the iPad but I can't be bothered. I'm also stuck with Safari because I can't afford Chrome's 200MB, and with Mail because the Gmail app is 500MB.

Something is very wrong with your iPad storage. My Apple Music (also mostly unused) takes up a grand total of 28 MB, of which 23.5 MB is the app.

> hard disk space is cheap

Are we referring to the same Apple company right now?

>Honestly, hard disk space is cheap.

Not on Apple's laptops. They also markup hundreds of dollars for +8 GB of RAM, which probably costs them 10-20 USD.

in my opinion it is about controlling "what you have in your fridge".

if I want to loose weight but cannot remove the chocolate from my fridge I am at the mercy of my supplier of fridges. it is the same here.

if I don't want to spend time on Facebook, gambling, etc. then I should be able to clear away these types of apps from my system.

It’s already possible to hide the Photos app from the system, so you are wrong on the facts. And the photos app is a lot more like the compressor in your fridge, not like the contents of it. But the point of reasoning by metaphor a lot of commenters on here employ is to obfuscate any assertions. So what do you think: should OS vendors not be allowed to supply default software beyond a kernel? The Settings app should also be customizable? And this is good for users how? Keeps them from getting fat?

> It’s already possible to hide the Photos app from the system.

Like putting the chocolate underneath the broccolis in the vegetable container?

You might argue that the photos app is required for normal functioning. And I would generally agree with you. However, you could use the same argument for a browser, but bundling Safari per default does not fly anymore.

The time will show what we need to do. So far, IMHO, regulators are able to manage these nuances.

People buy Apple products because they don’t have that crap. What are you talking about?

If there’s one company that DOESN’T bloat your computing device with worthless junk from third parties, it’s Apple.

It is extremely difficult to make someone understand something, when their salary depends on their not understanding it.

This is HN and surveillance capitalism rules the internet, of course we will see commenters here whose wealth depend on it.

Now I will garrison for the next brigade... :^)

This is apples to oranges - the stock Photos app isn’t shareware/demo ware etc. it’s a basic photo gallery app with a really solid search feature, and it integrates into the camera app just liked you’d expect on any other mobile OS.

And just for both of you, you can indeed tap and hold the Photos app and then choose “Remove Application”. I’d be surprised if this did anything beyond hiding the app, and also the Photos app is completely innocuous imo.

Norton preinstalled on a Windows XP machine is more like if your phone came with Weather Underground preinstalled.

The commenter apparently can't tell the difference between a best in class photo management app made by the creators of Aperature with bloatware. I don't fault them: most users can't either which is why giving them a "choice" is extremely overrated!

I am sure Norton also think they are best in class anti-virus software.

and luckily we don't govern by My Opinion™.

If Windows needs a best in class antivirus to use basic hardware features, it is pretty reasonable to bundle it in the OS!

Your reply is a non-sequitur bordering on rude.

It is also ironic because the EU-mandated browser choice screen offers users such stalwart top browsers such as "Browser" by Maple Media Apps, LLC. a holding company for category leading apps, "Web@Work", and "You.com AI Search and Browse". Bloatware lovers rejoice!

my comment might have sarcastic undertones, but it is definitely serious.

I understand that the original commenter might not have thought thiur argument through and the implications of it. That is fair, that is why we debate.

It’s not serious, as evidenced by nobody building an argument on your ridiculous comparison to bloatware. And the offensive part of it was not the poor, sarcastic metaphor but instead the fake indignation that someone could believe something different from you.

And you make yourself guilty of the exact same bad rhetorics here. Let's call it a day - it is OK to just let bad comments be and let them sink. Give them a down vote instead.

No actually I think HN works best when people call out bad behavior. Your original comment violates every other guideline for behavior in comments, most notably:

> Be kind. Don’t be snarky. Converse curiously.

> Please respond to the strongest possible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that’s easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

I disagree, and so does the community guidelines you so kindly refer to also.

> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

It is fair you didn't like my comment, and it might have been outside of the community guidelines. But you calling that out is simply just noise and equally outside the community guidelines. But you insist on keeping ruminating and circling around it. That is absolutely not approrpiate.

Imagine how much time could have been saved if they had just made Photos a normal app from the beginning?

In reality it would play out a lot more like the Web Apps episode: if the barrier to entry for any new idea was it had to meet the EU's extensive list of arbitrary rules, most new ideas would never be realized. I guess it's time saved, but not in the sense you think.

You can uninstall the photos app. And reinstall it from the App Store via https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/photos/id1584215428

Or you can install a completely alternative app to manage your photos.

The only thing iOS does in that case is provide the “Album” functionality.

I think you can hide it but not uninstall it. My understanding is the EU's objection is that Photos app still provides the default photo picker functionality when the app is gone; and they'd like Google Photos to satisfy that role if a user prefers. Of course, the EU's approach here is to be coy about what it wants and only make it explicit alongside a headline-grabbing fine.

Please do tell us more about why the Photos "app" is unique and wasn't uninstallable to begin with, surely it's not a business decision made explicitly to increase vendor lock-in and introduce friction to consumer choice (like the rest of the Apple suite of "apps").

Are you seriously asking why Apple offers its users a built-in app to view the photos taken with their phone? You'd prefer if users had to choose and install a photo management app before they could take a picture?

> Are you seriously asking why Apple offers its users a built-in app ...

As you may have already read in my comment, I'm asking why it wasn't uninstallable to begin with.

The burden of proof is on the people requesting the feature. The reason for not building any feature is simple: users don't care about it and there are more valuable other features to build. (As evidenced by system apps not being deletable on iOS for its first decade.)

> The burden of proof is on the people requesting the feature.

Fortunately there are other reasons why a business may be forced to do something, and not allowed to be the sole judge/jury/executioner.

One of those is anti-trust action - something that greatly benefits humanity as a whole, even though the alternative may (or may not) be cheaper for the business.

Other examples are employee protections, consumer protections, constitutional amendments etc.

Which goes back to my original point: there is literally no benefit besides navel gazing for requiring the photos app to be deletable. Just because there are many reasons one could compel a company to do something does not mean any of them are applicable to this request.

Many system apps that are bundled with iOS can already be uninstalled and reinstalled via the App Store.

Photos also has an “Uninstall” button. Won’t feel like trying out what that does.

In turbulent times, the tallest grass gets chopped first.

But also, a few megacorps increasingly occupy increasingly numerous facets of lives of billions of people and should be carefully monitored so that they don't abuse their power.

These megacorps have been avoiding paying taxes in the jurisdictions where they make most of their money. It's only natural to expect govts. to claw some of that revenue back. People think it's about privacy but it's really about tax revenue.

And I would appreciate it if those companies currently getting away with paying too little in taxes paid more, perhaps commensurate with the amount they benefit from existing infrastructure.

That doesn’t really stack up as an argument. From 2004 to 2014 Apple used the “double-Irish” tax arrangement to shield 110B USD of profits from taxation, EU corporation tax is about 20% (taken as an average over all the countries), which would amount to about 22B USD of “unpaid” taxes. Since 2014 Apple’s revenues have doubled, if their profits have done the same, and they’re following the same broad profit margin and tax avoidance schemes (and everything suggests they do), then Apple’s “unpaid” tax is at least 66B USD.

Apple’s global revenue for 2023 was about 400B USD, and the DSA caps the fines at 10% of global revenue, so 40B USD for Apple. It’s very unlikely that Apple will be hit with a maximum out of the gate, that’s not really how these regulators work (you want to make sure you can always issue a bigger fine later).

How is clawing back at most 57% of the unpaid taxes, in a one time fine, a good strategy for tax revenue? And of all the big tech companies, Apple has the lowest profit margin at a mere 25%, Facebook has higher margins of 30-35%, so the fines make even less sense a tax clawback mechanism there.

All of that is of ignoring the fact the EU and European Commission isn’t a federal government, and doesn’t have any tax revenue at all. Member states charge tax (or not in the case of Ireland), but the EU as an entity most certainly does not. Indeed countries like Ireland have been fighting tooth and nail against EU to avoid clawing back taxes.

So in reality, the idea the DMA is about tax revenue simple doesn’t stack up. It doesn’t stack up economically, it doesn’t stack up politically, and it doesn’t stack up practically either.

And yet they vote to fiddle with the choice of your browser rather than clawing taxes back.

> In turbulent times, the tallest grass gets chopped first.

This is an incoherent metaphor. Why would turbulent times cause a change in grass-chopping behavior?

Indeed, why would you avoid shortest straw, if the tallest grass gets chopped first?

I think he meant "The tallest blade of grass is the first to be mowed down", but that's not during "turbulent times", it's when you are mowing your lawn. I guess that's turbulent for the grass.

That's not how a lawnmower works. The first blade of grass taller than the lawnmower blade height encountered is cut first.

I suppose what it could mean is the field with the tallest grass gets the lawnmower first. Then again all that matters is if the grass is taller than the blade, not how much taller.

I love the DMA. But if you have to launch a long, sprawling compliance investigation the minute the law enters in force, it might mean you didn’t write it with enough precision…

…or it means that subjects didn’t take it seriously enough or are ready to die on this hill.

What does checking whether companies actually complied with a law that's been published for years have to do with precision?

(Lack of precision tends to be a US legal weasel word actually meaning "you didn't leave us loopholes to exploit".)

A company will obey the law _exactly_ to the point it's binding. Intentionally making the boundary of law fuzzy[1] with the hope of restraining actors to its _inner_ margin is foolish; they're going to push to the absolute _outer_ margin of plausible interpretations, and find out where the line really is when they get fined.

[1]: sorry sorry sorry, predicating an entire system of law on 'I mean when I mean not what I say'

Doesn't it just mean the companies affected are flaunting the law?

I think you mean flouting (ignoring or defying) the law.

Flaunting means to display or show off, like going to the beach in a bikini after working so hard to get in shape.

Wow, I've said flaunting (the law, rules, et c.) the whole time. Thanks!

You can probably continue doing so: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flaunt

Well they kinda do that. "Look at what we can do, normal laws don't apply to us"

That’s flaunting their sense of impunity though, not flaunting the law itself which they didn’t draft.

Huh. Interesting. I have never heard anyone say "flouting", but I have heard "flaunting" hundreds or thousands of times. Seems the confusion has been common enough for long enough that it's correct now: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flaunt

Similar to any word really.. if enough people use it a certain way, then that is the correct way by definition.

or the law is ill-specified enough that 'complying' is impossible.

Realistically, unless a law is so targeted that it's basically an act of attainder, you're going to need an investigation, and if the target of the investigation is a multinational, that investigation is going to be long and complex.

It's moreso that all major gatekeepers under investigation (note that not all Gatekeepers are under investigation - Amazon and ByteDance aren't) didn't even try to be compliant with the proposed legislation - they attempted to lobby against it, take overly literal interpretations to make the legislation seem crazy and so on and so forth.

They had 2 years to be compliant with the DMA. All of them waited until the last second and all of them have attempted some degrees of malicious compliance with it. Apple is the most outstanding horrible one, but they're all trying to avoid proper compliance as much as possible because they think it'll allow them to squeeze out just the slightest amounts of more profits.

Malicious compliance appears more focused on increasing the pain to the point that users will demand the law be overturned.

It convinced me not to buy a new Iphone because Apple is acting like a big baby.

That's because management of these companies is all based in the US, and they apparently don't understand that these tactics just don't work at all in the EU.

Their campaign is effective when people like OP say they are innocent victims of regulation which must be tossed

The presumption of innocence shouldn't be extended to trillion dollar companies. You don't get there by being wholesome.

My statement only applies to the court of public opinion, not legal courts.

>But if you have to launch a long, sprawling compliance investigation the minute the law enters in force

"Trust but verify"

"Trust AND verify."

Pick your answer, but how else do you want the EU to make sure that Google is now compliant with the law if they don't check. Should they just take Google's word for it?

If you go to a concert they always check everyone's tickets at entry. You can't complain they don't let you in by taking your word for it.

Or there is a difference between RFCs and laws - and possibly between american and european law culture.

Wouldn't a compliance investigation effectively just be the evidence collection phase before a charge is filed, assuming the evidence supports it?

I wouldn't expect them to write the law and immediately charge Google, for example, based only on public knowledge and no compiled evidence.

Yes. It's basically the reply to their (in my layman's view) offensive non-compliance.

They had plenty time to figure it out and now they may reap what they sowed. Not everybody tried to play games e.g. notice how Microsoft is not a subject of this specific investigation.

This is probably also a final warning shot. I'm certain that if they "suddenly" and "on their own" find ways to "correct" their software and business practices this investigation can be closed without charges brought forward.

The length of the investigation is so far less than 24h, no? And how sprawling can it be, after less than 24h.

If it eventually takes two years, yeah, it will be proof somebody didn't do their homework. But it seems a bit early to tell.

Also, I guess some of the size of the investigation is correlated with the size of the company being investigated. And especially with the size of the company's legal team.

Huh? IMO it's much more indicative of the idea that the companies didn't actually make a good faith effort to comply and are trying to see what they can get away with.

Or you wrote the law to address an obvious issue that needs immediate action

Oh, is there a fast way of collecting the needed evidence instead? ;)

"I love the DMA."

It might strengthen oligopolies on mobile. And even cement them.

> It might strengthen oligopolies on mobile. And even cement them.

Can you expand on this? This is the first time I've heard this claim.

These threads have been rife with the 'teleological interpretation' explanation i.e. the law means what it's intended to mean, not what it says, and firms just have to try their best to meet those expectations.

or, y'know, it might be good to try their least, and find out where the constraints of the law are _actually_ binding in the inevitable investigation and fine, since it seems like that's an essential part of figuring out what an EU law actually requires.

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