Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"
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eff.org
Uber is worried.
[1] https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheproc...
[2] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/platform-work-eu...
Uber was banned here in Denmark because the taxi companies saw a threat to their easy money. Drivers wanted to drive independently and for a brief period where Uber was allowed to operate, competition flourished and prices came way down.
I'm not saying Uber is a good thing but pretending or even suggesting that the taxi companies are somehow an ethical or good alternative is absurd.
My experience from other countries made me feel like hey, these Danes sure do use the cabs quite a bit.
As a general rule I find the cabs in Denmark more reliable and better maintained than UK, Italy, and any region in the U.S I've lived in.
>As a result, taxis in Denmark are some of the most expensive in the world.
Everything in Denmark is some of the most expensive of that thing in the world. Suggesting that taxis are somehow different than all the other expensive stuff in Denmark is absurd.
I think other companies have similar apps, but I always use this company as they usually have more competent drivers and reasonable prices
Even if the price is the same I rather get a cab because taxi industry is heavily regulated and they have to respect a lot of rules as opposed to ride sharing. And I rather have most of the money stay in the local economy.
There have been competing apps for that here for a long time.
That's a huge part of it. Finding good stats is hard, but take Denmark and Sweden, it more likely that not that the person you're messaging also have an iPhone. Still most countries, from the statistics I've seem, have around 20 - 33% iMessage usage. Sure some of these people also have Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, but 30% is still a massive number.
The thing Apple has going for it is that people can't switch, or they can, but the alternative is SMS. Some seem to think that if iMessage goes away, people will just switch to WhatsApp or Signal. NO, they'll fallback to SMS/MMS.
In the US? Maybe. In Europe, where many people have Android phones and iPhone users need WhatsApp/Messenger anyway? I doubt it.
I know many iPhone users here who don’t even use iMessage. It’s activated, so it would show in the stats, but they’ll message everyone through WhatsApp.
Switching is super hard when your primary platform just fallback to SMS.
If there's interop between the chat applications - and be honest, do any of them have a unique selling point that makes them significantly better to the average user? - then that restriction is lifted.
It improves competition, which is healthy in a free economy (something corporate liberals really push for), forcing the chat apps to innovate instead of benefit off of critical mass / first mover advantage.
Sure, but "the old one is no longer available" is absolutely going to get everyone to switch in the approximately 60 seconds it takes to go from the notification to having a new account.
I mean, Google basically does this every time they change the default Android messaging app (though in fairness they do get a huge advantage of already knowing all your contacts): https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
WhatsApp, OTOH, is huge, and that’s an app that’s not installed by default and automatically consists of your entire address book as contacts but instead you have to go ahead and download it and explicitly add contacts to it, and yet it’s almost certainly bigger than imesssage outside the U.S. and is growing rapidly within the U.S.
… which has become a privacy issue now. If WhatsApp has been granted full access to the contact list, the contacts are passed onto Meta that uses numbers to track users, build out shadow profiles and whatever else they are not telling us about. It can be easily seen, e.g. if you add a new phone number that trickles through into WhatsApp, and if that new person happens to have an Instagram account, their Instagram profile will appear in the Instagram suggestions feed pretty much the next moment.
Meta has been agressively pushy in recent years with its attempt to monetise WhatsApp where they can't glean into the actual messages due to them being encrypted (unlike in Facebook Messenger). So they use the metadata and contacts (phone numbers, email, physical addresses etc) that Meta sells to third-parties, data brokers and businesses including. Messages on WhatsApp from South African, or Malaysian, or similarly remote locations offering jobs (!) or business opportunities are now a fairly regular occurence.
Considering the scale, the reach and popularity, the best option for WhatsApp would be to divest it from Meta (not that they would agree to it), however, the cost of running the platform, plus overall maintenance and feature development would be a substantial expenditure that has to be somehow funded since WhatsApp users will never agree to pay for WhatsApp, and many (who comprise a substantial to very large cohort) will not be able to afford paying for it.
So, what is actually needed is an interoperable standard so that people have choices to go and leave as they please depending on the behavior of the developers/companies.
Which is exactly what is being done, so that's convenient.
Now I wish we could legislate a way to make a new standard for email and allow people to run it from their home (just like personal mailbox) to remove that power from big tech. The technical solution is probably not that hard but getting adoption without some sort of leverage is almost impossible...
You do realise that, don't you?
I have no say in how Google, for example, does their business. I'm way too poor for that. I'd need literal billions of stock to get Satya Nadella's phone number =)
All the GDPR is asking is: "if you want to use some PII, you have (1) to ask consent (2) to accept user decision"
Others implementations may have included: respecting "Do Not Track" signal implemented in browser or just... not using PII at first to sell personal datas to advertiser to make more money than selling untargeted ads (so no popup needed)!
It’s literally malicious compliance.
I find it very useful on firefox for android, since those buttons are often tiny.
If the EU Commission were influenced by voters, their priorities would follow what people say they care about in the EU's own opinion polls:
https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3218
"Europeans tend to think that the most important issues facing their region at the moment are the cost of living (31%), the economic situation and unemployment (26%), and health (26%)."
No surprises there. People are feeling poor. They want more jobs and more money. A normal democratic government response would be trying to woo companies to Europe to create jobs, train locals and create economic success. It would also be lowering taxes and encouraging the creation of local startups in any way possible. That's a standard recipe that's been used many times throughout the world in response to economic discontent. But the EU isn't a normal democratic government so it spends its time on fiddling with iOS, something that doesn't even show up on polls at all because nobody cares.
It's for this kind of reason that French voters are likely to send the RN to the European Parliament in large numbers in the next election, mirroring the same pattern seen all over Europe:
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/france/
The RN is an explicitly Eurosceptic party whose only specific policy on the EU is to oppose it. Sending it to Brussels will change nothing because the European Parliament doesn't matter, but it does send a strong message of discontentment and a desire to use whatever meagre powers the Parliament has to slow the Commission down.
Replace "EU commissioner" with "government minister" and you've just described the UK, where we also don't elect the people who decide things (the cabinet).
Also if we are talking democracy and representation- it’s quite obvious you are mistaken. We have the European Parliament elections so… you know democratically elected representatives.
Feel free to share you view on democracy but it will be in conflict with that the real definition of word is given your comment.
As a european citizen, I really wonder what allows you to speak in my name. How arrogant can you get?
Could be that some of the people in here are fine with a "Parliament" that is not really a parliament and that they are fine with the unelected European Commission taking decisions that affect us all, but that has nothing to do with "arrogance", it's just them wanting to live under a non-democratic regime.
And facts speak for themselves, the technocrats in Brussels do not represent anyone because it was not the people of the EU who have put them there. Some of you may agree with their fiat decisions, but that is not "representation", it's just "sharing of interests".
The commission is appointed by the member states, which are all, supposedly, democratically elected (and I only make this caveat because Hungary exists). There's nothing "non-democratic" about it.
> And facts speak for themselves, the technocrats in Brussels do not represent anyone because it was not the people of the EU who have put them there. Some of you may agree with their fiat decisions, but that is not "representation", it's just "sharing of interests".
Please, enlighten me how it was not the people of the EU who put them there. I'll wait.
Yes, that's what they say, if that's "democracy" then we certainly have a different understanding of it.
> Please, enlighten me how it was not the people of the EU who put them there.
Take 8 out of 10 people (and I'm being generous here) off the street and ask them what party they represents them in the European "Parliament" (which is not really a parliament, the same way as the Democratic Republic of Korea is not all that democratic), they won't be able to tell you (I certainly won't be able). As per the European Commission, asking them that would be futile, see my point above.
More generally speaking, this policy of putting one's head in the sand and shouting "I can't hear you! This is a democracy! The European Commission actually represents the will of the European people! Saying otherwise is vile talk!" when the European electorate starts noticing facts for what they are wont' really help this "European" project going forward, but that's the bed that they've decided to sleep in so it's up to the technocrats in Brussels now.
So your argument for it being undemocratic is that randos don't care enough to understand who represents them in the EU?
It's not perfect, but it's the best we've come up with so far.
The predictions of all the bad things that'd happen on leaving were all incorrect. There was no 800k job losses, closed airspaces, trade wars etc.
Edit: forgot to mention this. Someone in my family has a vehicle in Ireland and in NI, we sort of live between the two countries, pre-brexit that was completely fine as their drivers licence was european so there was no issues, but post-brexit they cannot get insured in Ireland due to insurance companies refusing to give insurance to someone with a non-EU licence.
https://www.mobileworldlive.com/apple/china-forces-apple-to-...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apples-q1-phone-sales-chi...
The US based companies don't care about people's privacy that much either, which is why we have privacy protecting laws in place. Also, there's yet to be evidence that China is doing mass surveillance through electronics or tiktok or whatever; a lot of it sounds like unsubstantiated fearmongering. Don't get me wrong, I don't trust them either, but I don't trust the US either, and there's evidence of their mass surveillance thanks to whistleblowers like Snowden.
Or in other words, the US cannot claim the moral high ground when it comes to privacy and surveillance; most privacy-focused EU laws like the GDPR can be traced directly back to US companies taking liberties.
I don't think something can really hurt your income when you have that much money.
Stock buybacks are net neutral wrt the company's value. They're just one of the ways to return money to stock holders. It's not a magical perpetuum mobile kind of thing.
> I don't think something can really hurt your income when you have that much money.
Of course many things can hurt your income no matter how much money you have. The only entities whose income can't be hurt are the ones who don't have any!
If all you can do is sit on a pile of cash without any good ideas on how to turn that cash into larger profits, or you just burn it to buy stock back or give dividends, it is a way of saying “I have no vision for the future of this company, I don’t know what else we can do, we will not continue to grow aggressively, so might as well take the cash dear shareholder”
Not a great move in front of the board. Done marginally is fine, sends a “we made more that we can use” cocky statement. Doing it massively to keep stock afloat, means you are out.
Yet they'll pull out of EU. Sure.
So the commission or random EU MEP would be affected after 5 years or so.
Tim Cook would get backlash from stockholders the moment he announced he wanted to stop getting EU revenue rather than comply with regulations.
But I agree with you that this idea of an undemocratic EU is rather false and really dangerous. Everyone feels like this because nobody understands that the commission don’t represent the interests of their country but those of all the European countries which few people are capable of naming years after school.
So it has no power
> that this idea of an undemocratic EU is rather false and really dangerous
Of course it is false and dangerous. Any disturbance in lobby money, flowing to the corrupt, unelected politicians, is false and dangerous. /s
It is as (un-) democratic as the American Presidency, considering the Electoral College.
Yet you never hear complaints about the EC from the same types that love to rally against the Commission.
> The European Parliament has legislative power in that the adoption of EU legislation normally requires its approval, and that of the Council, in what amounts to a bicameral legislature. However, it does not formally possess the right of initiative (i.e. the right to formally initiate the legislative procedure) in the way that most national parliaments of the member states do, as the right of initiative is a prerogative of the European Commission.[7][8] Nonetheless, the Parliament and the Council each have the right to request the Commission to initiate the legislative procedure and put forward a proposal.[9]
What is your conclusion from this? What point do you want to make? Don't leave your readers guessing.
In modern politics, and history, a parliament is a legislative body of government.
The purpose of a parliament is to make decisions about what the law says. Something that cannot decide what the law is, is therefore not a parliament. The EU Parliament isn't really a parliament.
To be clear, I’m absolutely not against the European Parliament having legislative powers but that would require the UE to become a federation and we are still far from this.
You're thinking of EU Directives, which have to be transposed into national law by some deadline. EU Regulations (e.g. GDPR) are considered legally enforceable all on their own, though still have a delay.
> Something that cannot decide what the law is
Good thing the EU parliament decides what the law is, then.
It's not.
> It can only acquiesce to or slow down the Commission's decisions.
That's not all it can do.
I know the names of the leaders of all parliamentary groups in my country, and how the groups stand on all positions. I have no idea who such leaders are in the EU parliament, or how they stand in e.g. the upcoming changes to GMO regulations.
European Commission is nothing else than an unelected government controlled by a parliament like it happens in most countries.
Also, ultimately, the commission is nominated by elected representatives of each country so, depending on how you see the thing, we could even say that they are more democratically nominated than most governments.
The only major difference between EU and most countries is that the parliament don’t have legislative power.
This is because the main difference between the EU parliament and a country parliament is that the average European has only a vague inkling of who their MEP is, what groups or parties exist in the EU parliament, and how they stand on issues.
People do not (generally) change their vote for a MEP because they did good/bad in their last term, they change their vote because they agree/disagree with the national party they represent.
This was not a vote along party lines, all big European parties voted in favor, so nobody who matters can credibly campaign on an anti-DSA/DMA platform, so the issue is unlikely to become politicized to the point where it might influence careers.
Also imaging the marketing spin you'd have to create: No no, we can't do business in the EU do to it's consumer protection laws. China is fine, they just execute or forcefully re-educate people, much easier people to do business with.
This isn't how "responsibility to its shareholders" works.
While it's true activist shareholders often launch lawsuits over issues they don't like in the US, they are rarely successful and more often looking for a settlement involving a secondary, less significant issue.
US Courts have repeatedly given a large amount of freedom to management to do whatever they want in terms of "delivering shareholder value". They allow management so consider long term goals against next quarter (as they should).
Additionally there's an excellent precedent for this: Google withdrawing from the Chinese market. There are other precedents for threats like this: Both Facebook and Google threatened to withdraw from Australia in various forms during negotiations over payments for news.
(Not arguing this is a good idea, just that it's completely within the realm of what Apple could do).
That is because they have a responsibility to the current shareholders, not the future ones
As soon as Apple/Meta/Google/... sulk and leave, other companies would find the space to grow and fill that space with similar products which would respect the users.
Users outside of Europe would realise it's possible to have those kinds of products without abusive practices, and would start demanding Apple/Meta/Google/... for the same.
Also, the EU is really smart here because they are not doing protectionism. So if GAFAM decides to leave, they’ll take the risk of new competitors which would have no reason to be banned from the US market.
The evil EU forces us to give our customer choices, this will hit our profits so we derided we should lose even more money by just not participating in the market.
Though I REALLY want to find an Apple fanboy defending the policy where Apple does not allow an app to display some text like "if you buy or extend this subscription on our website it is cheaper, you have a choice dear Apple user". Informing Apple users is not allowed by Apple.
Also don’t want apps which are saying: visit this to get cheaper rates or completely not offer me to buy in-app as it is a waste of time to go their random website power by Y platform. You establish this go to website to subscribe and it will increase overall fraud.
These are my problems with the above. Very easily solved I think but I’m just worried that every greedy developer will try to get every single % they can (same as Apple) and I don’t believe this will create a “safer” world.
Competition COULD make Siri improve, competition could make the Store better etc.
You did not told me why you reading the text "if you buy your subscription from our website cheaper" is harming you? Are you having trouble with extra usefull information, I am not aware of this health issue.
We all know that if this is an option and developers are greedy (which they are as humans) then they will do everything they can to push ppl to the payment gateway with least fees regardless of the customer’s privacy or security.
The text on its own is fine but it also increases the attack vector for most people.
You have been properly brainwashed; you don't understand what you say.
Sure, information is dangerous, so Apple needs to keep the users uninformed.
Don't you see that this information can affect Apple\s profits and they hide it for that reason not to protect anyone? Their App Sore is filled with stuff that is not good for the users but if that makes money for Apple then it is allowed, including those shitty mobile games.
When Apple protects users only when they make money from it then some semi intelligent person would manage to figure out the truth.
I don't think Apple can and will exit the EU since it would upset the shareholders. Also, if Apple does, it just creates a vacuum that will be filled by other tech companies. Tech companies that can then come after Apple in the markets where they are still present.
It is also likely that other countries and trading blocks will make similar demands, at which point Apple will either have to comply or shrink further.
I want this to happen so much. And I want it to be binding, that Apple cannot back down from that threat afterwards.
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...
The conclusion they come to is: the EU will protect the single market even if it makes things harder for their own businesses, the single market is a totally existential issue for the EU, it is the reason it exists.
> For months, we’ve been hearing leaks about Apple’s talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were.
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...
The EU cannot allow a large business to mess around like this.
That's also a misconception. The EU single market is an important project, but there is a constant failure to understand the actual reason why the EU exists or also a purposeful misinterpretation. Countries joining the EU are requested not to join because of the single market, but because they want to join the political project of a more peaceful and an improving Europe.
At its core the EU is a project to bring Europe together, to cooperate instead of being in wars (... WW1, WW2, Cold War, ...).
The EU is even more a political project as it is an economic project. But there are many other projects. The market is not the EU, it's a large and important project, the EU can't be thought without it. But there is more. The main motive behind all that is the will to work together. Even the "single market" is at its core a political project.
We have seen it with Brexit. The UK never bought into the "political project". UK politicians also mislead the public about that. The EU is as much about social standards, political standards, environment, competition, building up the countries, joint research, joint infrastructure, a common law, common currency, being competitive in a larger world, ... and so on. During Brexit it was promised by some UK politicians for a short time that the UK would leave the EU, but not the single market. Misleading the public that this was a topic of economics, while the EU really is a political integration project, not just a project to build a single market.
France and Germany at war for many centuries, now have a common integration project (in a larger EU), free movement, no physical border, an EU passport, a single currency, joint projects, ... these are the things which moved us forward.
Just because something started as X doesn’t mean that evolution didn’t happen. The reasons for the bureaucracy are a lot and different but come down to power sharing between the stakeholders.
The EU is the European Union. 500 million humans.
This legislation is a win for the common person. Trying to portray as foisted upon the public from on high = a propaganda twist too far.
Of course, lots of things seem portentous in retrospect, if we look back on the path we took, of course it turns out we passed lots of signposts pointing in our current direction.
Germany has the idea of "Wandel durch Handel" (change through trade)[1], which is essentially that you can prevent and make war non-viable and eventually even change countries to follow democratic norms. The EU is the most extreme version of this.
"By pooling basic production and by instituting a new High Authority, whose decisions will bind France, Germany and other member countries, this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation indispensable to the preservation of peace."
The European Federation was the goal.
It's worth noting that they didn't just do that in 2016. They were doing it for the entire history of Britain's membership of the EU. During the referendum campaign I talked to quite a few older people (my mother included) who remembered the original Brexit referendum in the 1970s, one that most people outside the UK aren't aware ever existed. It happened just a couple of years after entering the EU, which was done unilaterally by the Labour government of the time and never subjected to a referendum. Many people of that generation say they voted Remain the first time because they were explicitly promised that the EU (or EEC as it was then known) was merely a free trade zone with no ambitions to be more. In that era, without the internet, it was much harder to fact check these sorts of claims and although there were campaigners telling the truth, the public mostly believed the government.
Later it turned out that not only was it untrue but it had never been true, that Labour knew it wasn't true and that the plan right from day one had always been to abolish European governments by merging them together into one superstate. This is often claimed to be a federalist project, but there is no specific philosophy in the EU project as to what rights should remain delegated to the individual states like in the USA. In fact the opening of the EU "constitution" equivalent says that the goal is ever closer union - without limits.
This feeling of betrayal and deception was a big driver of why the older generation went so conclusively for Leave. Most common feedback I got on talking to these people: I haven't changed my opinion from the 70s, but now I know the truth.
That wasn't the goal of the EU. Even now it isn't the goal. Nations and governments still exist.
This is absolutely not true! I can't believe how many people repeat this. The people who tell you this are either misremembering, or they've fooled themselves into believing it, or they're lying to you.
The entire argument against joining the EEC at the time was based on the threat to UK democracy because it was well known the project was a political one, not merely a common market.
The leaflet the government sent out to every household in the UK stated this explicitly but chose to reason about why this wasn't a bad thing.
Here: https://civitas.org.uk/content/files/1975ReferendumGov.pdf
And there is a lot more material out there with various viewpoints on both sides expressed, almost all of them talking about the political side of the EEC.
It's just a nonsense that this wasn't known about.
> Whenever I point out on social media that the single market is the purpose of the EU, I get bombarded by replies saying: “No you’re wrong. The EU was founded to preserve peace in Europe. Gotcha!”
> What mechanism do you think they used to preserve that peace? Cozy feelings about elections for the EU parliament? Happy thoughts about student exchange programs?
> The single market is the EU peace project, which makes protecting it an existential issue to many involved in the EU.
This is what Britain got right, the political projet is not going anywhere, there is just too much difference in heritage (in different meanings of the term) and I believe it is unreasonable to ask the citizens of each country to let go of those heritages. The differences exist for a reason and are keys to keep an equilibrium in power.
As for the economic project, it makes sense in a way it's much more efficient, but since monetary creation gives so much power in ou current system it is problematic in many ways. The standardization efforts are useful but forcing everyone into a dominant economic ideology is not serving everyone equally. Funniest thing is that Germany who was the one dominating the conversation, found a way to fuck up politically. Fiscally conscious but socially inept that is the way of the Germans.
All that being said, I'm all for the EU regulations concerning the DMA but it's just because our interests align and that's pretty much it. France has an history of calling out Apple on their bullshit, so it's not like if there is no precedent.
At this point the GDPR is something you have to consider whether you’re in the EU or not because several non EU countries have similar laws and many more are thinking of implementing them, and to the extent many haven’t already it’s because it’s unnecessary since tech companies are following GDPR already.
Essentially GDPR has become a de facto global law at this point.
It wouldn’t be surprising if the same would also be true of other legislation coming out of the EU considering that most tech products are global.
This is called the "Brussels Effect" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect ) and much like the California Effect, leads to most everything being made to the more stringent standard because the market requiring it is so big.
Same reason most of your electronics are RoHS2 too.
Though it would be wise for countries to also implement these laws. For example, companies could ignore your data deletion request if you were in a state without.
It was worst with Jose Manuel Barroso at the head of the EU commission, who needed to hide ... well, why don't I just say it. He spent a big part of his youth being a violent communist protestor (he wasn't even a now-fashionable Marxist, he was a Maoist. He protested IN FAVOR OF the "cultural revolution" in China, in favor of the killing of between 80 and 300 million people. He was explicitly anti-Marx, though I don't understand why), and has more than a few convictions and arrests for destruction of property, beating up people, assault, ...
Frankly, he is THE stereotype of what is wrong with leftists. Turns out, surprise! It's not about communism, or rights, or ... At least, it isn't for him. He was offered power through what, though people don't often think of them this way, is one of THE most capitalist institutions on this planet, the EU commission (used to be named "The European Union of Coal and Steel producers", and hasn't forgotten). He of course, immediately and totally forgot his "conviction" and took the power (of course there were many steps in his rise to power, but ...). For Barroso leftism was, and presumably is, nothing but a way to amass power, to maximize what he accidentally got thrown into at university.
But the worst of it is, he is a suspect in an unsolved murder. Now that isn't QUITE as bad as that sentence makes it sound, but close. At one of the protests where he was, someone was murdered, and the police knows he was in the group where the death occurred. Hence, he is a suspect. Along with ~20 others. The murder was "never solved".
There's even more than a few reasons this information is hidden. First is that he's involved (as well as another famous Portugese politician). Second is that the police essentially let the murder go, and "that this might lead to copycat ...". Frankly, that second part is a genuine concern.
> used to be named "The European Union of Coal and Steel producers", and hasn't forgotten
The “European Coal and Steel Community” predates the European Economic Community, which it was separate from until the 1967 merger (a decade after the EEC was founded). The EEC is related to, but not the same as, the European Union.
You started well, missed the point that the EU commission is extremely capitalistic, protecting "their" own market, pro-immigration TO DEPRESS WAGES (not for any other reason), using money for policy targets, pro-free-trade otherwise (ie. when it comes to anyone but themselves), and generally extremely capitalistic in the usual deceitful way ...
As for "The EEC is related to, but not the same as, the European Union" ... suuure. In the same the the CPC is not China, it's related. The EU commission IS the EEC, and controls the EU. It has overriding power on any and all decision made and controls all 3 branches of EU government (Parliament, itself, and the EU courts)
Look, I get that people generally like the EU commission. On Hacker News, because of their Google and Apple actions. In the EU, because of them forcing democracies to accept the EU border situation and the Euro (both were rejected in democratic votes, both were forced through in less-than-democratic ways). Doesn't change their nature.
Look it up. Decide. Form your own fine opinion.
I mean, what opinion are you really espousing? And what does it really have to do with the European Commission, which is a far bigger entity than a single man?
Hundreds of words to say nothing at all.
In what way was he "anti-Marx", and is it really that common that leftists become traitors that join the higher echelons of capitalism that Barroso can be considered stereotypical?
Platforms will be at fault then, for not complying, and not the EU. Laws are made for a greater good (privacy, customers' rights) that I think will greatly offset not having tiktok.
They wouldn't be ropped in kicking and screaming if that really was the case.
Several companies have fought what they thought were unwanted regulations only to view them as useful later on. Time will tell if they were right to kick and scream or not.
Just as an example, you gotta be really into the ecosystem to choose an iPhone 15 over a Pixel 8. But I think most stick with Apple because it is complicated to switch and all the software "investment" is lost.
Previously as an Apple "believer" I was against cross-platform apps but now I feel like a transferable licence is almost a requirement. It is very worth the small performance cost.
It's like that scene at the end of Sneakers: "they just don't want to share with the other children..."
[0] https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/12/exploit-used-in-mas...
I think this statement is unclear. You can currently sideload applications on ios, but you have to agree to terms from apple, have an appleid, and then you can compile and run an app for a few days. Then the app stops working. lather, rinse, repeat.
Honestly, I think apple is back to the wandering misguided apple before steve jobs returned. There seems to be no leadership, just the 1984 commercial, maybe with bright art-deco colors added. leadership would cut through all this nonsense and straighten things out.
Apple - consumers give the company for hardware which is locked into a closed ecosystem. Apple extracts extra revenue by enforcing this closed ecosystem. There can be no competition other than not purchasing their hardware in the first place.
Google - consumers sometimes give them money (for both hardware and services) which Google then uses to push their other products to the detriment of their competitors. Due to Google's size, the competition is at a massive disadvantage. Also, given that most consumers don't give them money, Google needs to make money off of their consumers and the most profitable method is to monetize PII.
Meta - consumers basically never give them money (excluding Oculus) so Meta needs to make money off of their consumers. The most profitable method is to monetize PII.
I have a little more sympathy for Google and Meta's situation as the EU wants them to maintain their free services while simultaneously reducing their ability to monetize their most valuable asset, consumers' PII (note that PII ultimately belongs to the consumer but it's still the thing that the companies use to make money). There needs to be some sort of happy medium here when people want something without paying for it but also don't want what's valuable about them being a user - their PII - to be monetized.
To be clear, these multi billion/trillion dollar companies don't need anyone defending them. However, it would be interesting to see what the EU's position would be if Meta started as an EU company.
As a user, I was quite happy with my personal Android phone while developing for iOS, both for hardware and software, because absolutely nothing is requiring consumers to buy Apple in the first place as basically every App you care about is shipped to both platforms anyway.
However, they become undesirable when they are abused to undermine cometition in other markets. For example: Apple has successfully prevented competition to Apple Pay for a long time, by only allowing their own products access to NFC. This meant that parties that were already specialized in handling payments, had no chance to compete, despite them being in an excellent position to do so.
If this behaviour is left unchecked, over time we will end up with one single company dominating most markets. I feel that's undesirable. Given the number of dystopian novels on that premise, most of society considers that future to be undesirable.
Preventing that future is a major part of DMA.
The developers do the same to me when they have the opportunity.
I don't think its legal, considering that not too long ago even here on HN there was a post about "Pay or Okay" not being considered legal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38458660
Some further articles/document about it:
https://noyb.eu/en/statement-edpb-pay-or-okay-opinion
https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2024-04/edpb_opinion...
I absolutely agree on this point. I do have the… bias, that in my formative years Apple was very much the plucky underdog in danger of bankruptcy.
This may be why I am less concerned about what Apple does. I am aware that, net, most people here very much disagree with my position that if you don't like Apple's software policies, you can simply not buy their hardware. (Indeed, they are priced such that many people who would actually like to have those things, cannot afford them).
Google and Facebook, however, are much harder to avoid — yes, you can in theory replace Gmail with Yahoo, Google.com with DuckDuckGo.com, Google Maps with OpenStreetMap, but people who try this report that it's harder than it seems to totally cut that particular cord.
Facebook Messenger is my only way to remain in contact with some people. I've stopped logging into the main site because their feed is, approximately: [real post from an actual connection but 75% chance I've already seen it on a previous visit, advert, list of people it thinks I might know but I don't, then a repeating pattern of {advert, 3 example posts from a group it thinks I might want to join but don't}].
But yeah, Apple aren't the plucky underdog any more.
This is always an exaggeration. You mean to tell me there are people out there for whom the only way to get in touch with them is through Facebook? They don't have a phone number, SMS, an E-mail address (note you need an E-mail address to sign up for Facebook in the first place), a postal address, and ears for word of mouth conversation?
I found Facebook to be the easiest company to voluntarily avoid. One day, about ten years ago, I simply changed my password to a random string and threw it away, and that was it. It was scary at first (FOMO) but ultimately it didn't even slightly affect my social life or ability to keep in contact with people. I told everyone what I was doing and that I would not be accessing the company's products anymore, and we just switched over to other means of communication. No big deal.
Yup.
Three people in particular come to mind. For them, with regard to phone/SMS/e-mail, even though they necessarily have those things, they never bothered to give them to me, and/or they change them often, and/or they don't check those modes.
For postal address… these three regularly (and from my perspective randomly) change continents, not merely street or city. One of the countries they often go to is Kenya, where the addresses of the places they live in seem to often be something of the form "third on the left in the gated community next to the Blue Sky Petrol Station".
This also makes "ears and mouth" rather challenging.
Extra irony points, they all self-identify as somewhere between socialist and communist. And still insist on using Facebook.
On top of that, I know some people like that and I think there is an ambivalence about them, a form of intellectual dishonesty that makes it not very worthwhile to frequent them. You can have fun at parties with them but that's pretty much the extent of the relationship a self-respecting person should allow.
But we all know that's not the actual reason you keep a Facebook account, because that's technically bullshit in the first place. If you don't change your stuff, they have a way to contact you and that's all that's needed.
Because FB messenger isn't that painful. Facebook the news-feed is, and if they only used that then I would indeed not bother, but the messenger app isn't.
Well, not yet, anyway. Ads creeping in, a "stories" tab I can't get rid of. I may drop it eventually, but today it has a monopoly on my connection with them, and I'm using it because it's less painful than losing touch.
> But we all know that's not the actual reason you keep a Facebook account, because that's technically bullshit in the first place. If you don't change your stuff, they have a way to contact you and that's all that's needed.
Just because I'm technically apt, doesn't mean everyone else is, or cares. Back when they were still around, I had to turn on "parental controls" to stop my dad from accidentally moving apps out of the dock and losing them (as in couldn't find, not deleted), and he needed me to write down instructions for him to be able to use webmail (and he forgot that his password was "XXXX", so complained that the instructions had a placeholder and I had to explain no, that's what your password actually is). One time my mum asked me to change her password by sending me a postcard with the desired new one written on it. My gran held the mouse rotated 90° and didn't know why it wasn't working.
People have been saying that EU regulations are restricting EU companies forever, in fact it was one of the big arguments for Brexit to cut out piles of EU regulations that were "stifling innovation".
Blaming Apple for optimizing their platform model isn’t the problem, it became a problem. Imagine 2007 and the following years already with the EU act in full effect. AppStore would be dead on arrival.
In my view Apple’s AppStore went from feature some people have when they buy a smartphone to necessity. 2007 and even 2016 was a perfect time to opt for a live without smartphones.
Not so 2024.
So EU should change Apple’s and Google’s status from producer to provider of essential service like electricity for example.
Some often overlooked fact is, that Apple decides at will who is allowed to publish apps via AppStore and who is not.
This is an area where regulation is needed in my opinion. In other areas of life you simply cannot take down businesses at will, while Apple can.
Yes, exactly! That's the point. The mobile ecosystem would look heaps better without it.
Any difference in quality stems from the fact that Apple product users are more willing to pay for things. The free apps are equally bad in both stores.
Meanwhile Android allows for alternative stores like F-Droid, where you won't see the usual spam, as the apps are FOSS.
The most valid complaint, and this is something Apple needs to address world view, is the move towards in-app purchases and subscriptions. I believe that is due to a limitation in the AppStore, where Apple isn't allowing upgrade pricing, but allowing subscriptions to enable features. In-app purchases is destroying the AppStore. You could say: Well that would be fixed with an alternative store, but I have serious doubts about other app store operators not being tempted by the recurring revenue as well.
Why do you think so? I think it would be different, but not dead. Giving their users a simple means to discover selected apps would still be win-win for both Apple and their customers, even if users had other means to obtain the apps.
Apple could also charge companies for having their apps in that store.
How could have the legislator forseen all of these practices in order to codify them into laws? Regulation usually comes after abuse.
No, it wouldn't have been, as the DMA only applies to 'gatekeepers' and if you're new, you're simply not a gatekeeper. You need at least 45 million monthly active users and 7,5 billion of revenue for three years.
> So EU should change Apple’s and Google’s status from producer to provider of essential service like electricity for example.
That's the whole point of the DMA: designate these parties as 'gatekeepers', providing essential services ('core platform services' in terms of the DMA). Once you are, you have certain obligations that should allow proper interoperability with other/smaller parties.
Minor nitpick that does not really changes the point but might provide context: these are the criteria to automatically be classified as gatekeeper. You can be a gatekeeper even if you do not meet them, but the EU needs to prove that you meet some other more detailed criteria.
So it actually shows that a third party app store would thrive, even if there is no first party app store. Especially if there were no barriers for using such a third party app store, such as requiring a jailbreak.
Overlooked? It's the key issue the EU is bringing up around appstores isn't it?
App stores on platforms where competition is allowed still thrive, I'm sure you heard of Steam?
Speaking of game stores, how about an "alternate iOS app store" that only has hand curated pay once games? Might entice me to actually check mobile games again and even buy some.
Epic, Rockstar, EA, Paradigm, etc each have their own e-Shops too.
Any dev can choose to sell direct too (your Mac, Win or Linux will happily install third party software)
And Steam has GoG and other competitors (I often used Humble Bundle)
You
Do note that Humble Bundle keys are often Steam keys provided to the developers by Steam at no extra cost IIRC.
Google is a ponzi scheme propped up by trapping everyone in a War for finite Attention. They tell content creators/advertisers+marketers(corporations that pay)/politicians we can get you eyeballs, no matter how much content explodes, not matter how many people are competing for finite attention. Its basically Fraud. People will work it out in their own sweet time cause its the largest ponzi scheme of all time. (Google subprime attention crisis)
Apple benefits from the Attention War just like anyone who has more cash benefits, cause they can outspend anyone to capture Attention.
Just because a user likes to spend $1500 every year on latest iPhone because it makes him "feel cool" or "have self worth" isnt fraud. Apple is just catering to that person.
While in real life, app stores themselves hardly earn apps any users. Most of the time, people install an app thanks to the app developer's own marketing efforts.
If you want a real-world example of an app store on a platform where there are alternative methods of app distribution, just look at macOS. Same idea, same rules, but there is sideloading as an alternative. It turns out neither users nor developers are having any of it.
Certainly not. PMF was already established via the jailbreaking scene and Installer.app / Cydia. Millions of people went through the annoying processing of jailbreaking their phone to get apps.
I can’t even get music I’ve bought, from Apple, off my iPhone and onto my mac without an extra recurring subscription.
Apple aren’t “curating” that experience they are gouging me.
I'm a bit torn on this one. If the EU decided to ban the use of personal data for advertising outright, it would be radical but consistent. But what they appear to be doing is to give people a choice to say yes or no while not allowing them to trade their personal data in exchange for services.
Justifying this with a slogan like "privacy is not a luxury" seems weirdly out of touch with any possible reality. If most users were declining the collection of personal data and more services switched to a subscription model, then the entire service would become a luxury for a large share of the world's population. On top of that, privacy would be lost for everybody as there is nothing that eradicates privacy more thoroughly than making a payment.
Wow. It's actually only been enforced for six years but that time absolutely flew by.
I also occasionally get geo-blocked by Japanese websites too.
Oh, they definitely are.
Those geo-blocks still exist, not only for small mom-n-pop businesses.
FTFY
Where does all that information go? What is the information used for in the end?
The tracking technologies enable many things, and the continuum from "to show you interest-based ads" to full-on Stasi is rather large.
But given the massive scale of tracking and profile-building, at least I have no idea exactly where we are now (though clearly we're not at the worst-case extreme).
This is not how the DIS told it's story, but mercy heavens be do we need someone to prevent our closest tools from being bound forever against us. If that's governments so be it.
That said, if Sony falls under the DMA, they may need to allow sideloading apps or 3rd party stores.
I'm really failing to see the distinction here.
Big tech will simply declare that phones aren't "general purpose computers". There is no reasonable endgame here in which: (a) this is enforced against cellphones and (b) this is not enforced against game consoles and (c) the EU doesn't end up looking completely ridiculous and arbitrary.
I'm betting that they cave on (b). It's the least painful option. The EU is going to have to enforce this against game consoles in order to be taken seriously.
It's hardly the same thing. Some services are not even available on a traditional computer FinTech started as mobile apps and they added website support later. It's stupid but that's how things are, the majority has chosen...
I'd expect the online stores on those consoles, and the resale of digital content, to be impacted well before running other OSs on consoles that didn't ship with that feature.
(personally I'd totally support regulation opening up game consoles, but they are fairly insignificant compared to mobiles)
Retreat then and gift 500mil users to your competition, I am pretty sure nothing of value will be lost.
Personally, I think the EU is a lot closer to a sweet spot than the vision of the FAANG. Apple is an odd case as they're actually ok on user privacy as far as I can tell, they just want to milk their closed ecosystem as much as they can. The EU has some ideas I personally disagree with like the whole EIDAS article 45 thing, but if I had to pick between the EU and Meta's vision for the future, I'm much closer to the EU's one.
EU is not the wild west US people accustomed to. Bombard them malicious big tech entities back to the stone age.
tech gatekeepers = tech monopolies
This way you can transfer data to a new platform and the new platform can trust that the information is not manipulated.
Let me and a couple of friends move out of Facebook and bring all our prior interactions with us.
(The signature should be invalid after example one month to avoid the value of data breaches, with periodic signature key release)
Yeah Facebook are jerks but they've always been jerks... But what about Amazon or MS or Google or Netflix or others? Are they acting in the same way? The article seems fairly light on any details of the people we'd traditionally think of for "Big Tech"?
I just hope negative effects of (in my opinion) overregulation wont hurt the EUs economy too badly, but that wont be visible for another couple of decades
Cookie walls exist because companies insist on handing over their visitor data to external ad networks.
Data portability?
The users right to delete data?
Data processing agreements?
Data security?
Article 30?
They are all fairly trivial unless you do shady stuff really. Step one if is really looking at what you process as stipulated by article 30, a lot of the other stuff is much easier after that.
One of my roles is as a DPO in a bank in Europe, and it's far from impossible to comply.
you will never get specifics out of these guys. They will lead you down a circuitous thread of unspecified fears until it's clear that their business model is to abuse customer data even as they'll avoid actually saying so.
In practice that becomes the "right to rewrite history". Which should never be a good thing, for obvious reasons.
What exactly do you envision being the bad outcome here where you are asked to remove personal information and don't have a legitimate interest to keep it for?
Hacker news, please, think about being GDPR compliant! You're breaking the law, hacker news!
I am not an expert on the field, I tried a couple of times to get into the topic but found it difficult to navigate and left me with more questions than answers personally. What exactly does deleting user data mean? Do I have to search the weblogs for the users IP? Do I have to search the mail servers for his emails - of all employees? What if he used multiple emails to communicate? Am I in breach if an ISP decides to route internet packets through the US? If I put people on CC in a mail, I am leaking everyone's email, probably without their consent - is that a breach? What if my mail provider decides to replicate their servers to another country?
If you have resources to read up on this and how to handle all of it, I would really appreciate it! Happy to be convinced that it actually is trivial
> Do I have to search the weblogs for the users IP?
No, because you don't keep web logs with any PII in them longer then you have to, right? The time you need to keep them for is a legitimate interest that you need to be able to justify.
Do I have to search the mail servers for his emails - of all employees? What if he used multiple emails to communicate?
Write an Email Retention Policy, there are templates. Follow that.
Am I in breach if an ISP decides to route internet packets through the US?
Isn't it encrypted?
If I put people on CC in a mail, I am leaking everyone's email, probably without their consent - is that a breach?
You said it yourself: it's a data leak, so yes, it is (assuming this is some bulk email list). Depending on the sensitivity of the list, you may need to disclose the leak to the affected parties.
If you want to profit from being a data controller you really should already have done this homework, even before the GDPR and friends required it by law. A responsible company would already be taking care of it's customers' (and employee) data and at most just needs make sure the existing processes are documented. Demonstrably, companies don't do this, through laziness, incompetence or malice, and that's how we end up with these regulations. Just like how companies injuring people in unsafe workplaces is how you get H&S regulation.
And really all you have to do is just actually make a decent effort. If you find that extremely onerous it's usually because you actually want to use the data for something that you know deep down is not something the information owner would want you to use it for.
Not all those laws applied to all EU countries before, but, basically, if you were doing business across the entire EU all the laws that you had to conform to together looked a lot like the GDPR.
If you have a direct or indirect contractual relationship with the person whose PII you are storing, there is nothing more to do. If you don't, ask for permission and store the timestamp of the authorization.
That's all. Really it's that simple.
> document what PII you store
that part seems doable, the hardest part here are probably figuring out what PII is, and then take care of numerous services logging IP addresses. That's PII, isnt it? What about IPs of phone calls over IP? Or phone numbers stored in phones of numerous employees? Do companies delete those, or is it not necessary?
> who has access to it
I personally try to self-host as much as possible with as little third-parties involved as possible. But I think here are edge cases too, a lot of people might not think about, such as time tracking tools, calendaring, accounting software etc. What happens if employees just use online tools the employer doesn't know about? I am sure it's defined, but it's not entirely clear to me
> what you do with it
that's probably the easiest part, if you do something with it you probably know it
> Also have an internal procedure to scramble someone's PII on request.
I think that sounds good. It's just not entirely clear to me what that procedure should look like? How deep do we go with that? I could be nitpicking and say that physically information can not be destroyed. What if a SQL Server uses MVCC and doesn't delete data but just marks it as such? What about event sourcing architectures with kafka that rely on keeping the data? Or how about backups? Probably no deletion needed, but how to handle cases where backups are restored and previously deleted data reappears? I just think a clear set of rules would be great here, and a lot of people like to oversimplify things (or me, overcomplicating things here, probably)
The main technical thing is that all data stores containing Personal Data must be redactable.
For years I've read bizarre GDPR fanfic from panicked Americans claiming that the world will end if they have to pay the slightest attention to data protection. I assure you literally from personal experience that this is not the case.
I wrote this up several years ago: https://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/606812.html
If a business can only survive by extracting and processing against the wishes of the owner, or by storing it unsafely, maybe that's not actually a desirable business.
I detailed my personal experience here: https://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/606812.html
tl;dr no it isn't, unless your business model is to abuse customer data.
Personally: No one actually cares about data protection. As I said: You sign documents. And three seconds later no one cares anymore. It's just to comply on paper - it didn't actually improve things.
I mean we know the real answer is. The EU hates innovating especially when it could be regulating. But it's a fun thought experiment.
If you re-read what I said with that in mind, does it make more sense to you?
However, these projects don't really have good results and generally are better made in the private sector. Same in the US actually
That was tried, decades ago. Machines Bull. Plan Calcul. Cyclades. Minitel. Didn't win.
Regulation tries to restore a free market by reducing barriers and allowing other companies to participate, such as in the app store market. Especially where limitations are not warranted, i.e. iPhone being hardware, the coupling with Apple's App Store is arbitrary and self-serving.
Part of the DMA is that they must open this up for others so competition can actually happen in the first place (which in my reading they're not really doing in good faith by the way; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39635948)
Also WhatsApp isn't really "innovative" in the sense that it does something spectacularly new or brilliant. Most of the "innovation" comes from scaling it to the number of users they have, but that's a bit of a different thing. This is actually true for quite a bit of these Big Tech companies (especially the software-only companies).
Do European countries hold themselves and the local companies to the same standards, respect their citizens and their privacy rights?
I remember a French institution could not buy our product, because they had a contract with a local manufacturer. They explained to us that they are obliged to buy from this company, or otherwise go through a complicated process of explaining to the government AND the company why that company doesn’t meet their needs. Sounded absurd! They had to sort of get the permission of the competitor company!
I doubt this is a EU thing. It's due to exclusive contracts/licenses. This happens everywhere?
It's a matter of fact that the EU is still more open to commerce from US, than the US is with the EU.