EU says Apple has serious issues for not complying with DMA | Hacker News Reader

EU says Apple has serious issues for not complying with DMA

9to5mac.com

56 pointslaktak78 comments

On one hand it was obvious, Apple surely did see it coming and decided to play the dumb strategy instead, so I'm so glad the EU didn't just give up. That would have been an horrible precedent from all perspective. And this is opening the way to the other legislation to pass reasonably close requirements (e.g. Japan) without undue burden on Apple.

On the other hand, I understand the process isn't supposed to be fast, but as a consumer it looks like it takes so much time. At least the regulators are willing to hint at where the discussion will be going instead of keeping it secret for a year just for an effect of surprise. If the dust settles in three years, I get the feeling the market will have half moved on to the next big thing and Apple will already have ripped most of their transgressions' benefits.

On the third hand, I can't deny some amount of schadenfreude looking at Apple having to deal with the same "do the work first, we'll judge if it meets our review standard afterwards" treatment as they do to developers.

PS: the weirdest part to me is, looking at this year's WWDC lack of bigger features, it's obvious Apple had to use significant resource to deal with the EU requirements, the APIs for alternate browsers for instance didn't come by magic. And obviously the replacement of the default apps on the lock screen is also in line with the DMA.

Why then play it dumb when it costs them so much to do needless back and forths.

I think the trick was to try to postpone it indefinitely so that the next CEO and board has to deal with it and not the current. Of course, after cashing out.

> On the third hand, I can't deny some amount of schadenfreude looking at Apple having to deal with the same "do the work first, we'll judge if it meets our review standard afterwards" treatment as they do to developers.

That's not really how the process was supposed to work. Apple has had a lot of discussions with the EC over the past year about this law and its implementation.

This is common and the goal is to help the company figure out how to implement it.

However, from the EU side, it seemed as if Apple completely misunderstood what the discussions with the EU were for.

Apple was mainly focused on trying to lobby against all restrictions, not realizing the EU already made up their mind. The EU was trying to prepare Apple, but instead Apple dragged their feet, remained in denial, and were then suddenly surprised that yes, indeed, they really can't lobby their way out of compliance.

This article does a good job talking about this: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...

I've been boycotting Apple for years for its a consumer-hostile stance, and it makes me feel very conflicted that the EU is forcing Apple to make changes that make the iPhone a very compelling alternative to Android.

So you must boycot android too. What do you use for a phone?

I can unlock the bootloader on Android.

That doesn't make them less inherently customer-hostile though.

Yeah, that's why I'm conflicted. They won't be less customer-hostile, but at least they'll be forced to let me do more things with the device I bought.

I hope they make an example out of them. One can't even call their behavior "malicious compliance", "malicious noncompliance" is more fitting.

[dupe]

Actual article: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/18/apple-issues-very-serious-un... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40725545)

And some more recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40681920

If ever there was a company who was actually a good candidate for the 10% of global revenue fines the EU have talked about in the past it would have to be Apple.

They have gone out of their way time after time after time to be as hostile as possible to any kind of oversight or compliance that was required of them.

I actually think this is no shit the ideal case study to finally use those powers.

As someone who disdains both Apple and EU, this is in a way a fun experiment to watch regarding whether corporate entities can actually overpower sovereign entities.

It's a setting oft seen in cyberpunk, but so far it has been more fiction than real.

> but so far it has been more fiction than real.

Is it though? We have a system with extremely powerful multi-national companies, and yet conveniently for them, no real system for multi-national regulations.

Even just domestically, auto manufactures have a lot of sway in Germany. Energy, telecom, and chemical giants seem to write their own regulations in the USA.

First they forced to change their own devices' charging ports, now they are forcing to make changes to their own platform again on their own devices.

What's next? Just force Tim Cook to sell the company to EU legislators?

I'm not a fan of Apple as a company but this is getting beyond ridiculous. A government or a similar body should not have a right over a company's own products' design and how things work, anyone can pick between buying an iPhone or not buying an iPhone if they prefer not to. It should be people's choice, not EU's.

Just a counter example. There is a huge list of things that you MUST have in a car to be able to sell it. So this is not something unthinkable and new that is happening to phones.

I guarantee you OP doesn't wear his seatbelt.

Well I do wear my seatbelt. However, I do it for my own safety, not because I'm forced to do.

And similarly these EU laws don't force end users into anything. They just force Apple to provide a minimum set of features as required by law.

But what if the car manufacturer insisted on not selling you a car with a seat belt?

Then I'd pick a car which does have a seatbelt in the free economy.

Anyone is free to buy Android.

It's not about free economy. Ok that you wear seat belts but someone else who is not inclined to wear seat belt does not even has a choice to go buy a car without seatbelts, because we collectively decided that seatbelts is a must (no mater the arguments). And even went further and made police enforce that everyone wears seat belts.

So is it difficult to imagine that some requirements from EU can be made mandatory even if you don't like them. We can not leave everything to be decided by "free market".

None of the cars had seat belts as it was never mandated.

You did not have that option.

EU is making up for the fact it sucks at producing anything of value. The EU is why you will never see a trillion dollar company come out of Europe.

The best measurement of success is making the already wealthy shareholders even wealthier.

Good? I mean why should we want trillion dollar companies anyway? What’s great about them? Isn’t much better if we get a multitude of billion dollar companies competing rather than a few trillion dollar ones running monopolies?

that more because the EU prefers a million companies worth $1Billion than one company worth a trillion, because socialism.

Trillion dollar companies shouldn't exist in the first place. At that point, they are entities way too powerful to be in private, undemocratic hands.

We have enough companies producing value, for a society that doesn't worship capitalism above anything else.

Apple can exit EU, it is like I invite you in my home but only if you remove your shoes, you can refuse and not enter.

What is next? American companies complaining they EU does not allow them to put Poisson in food or worse, getting forced to offer warranties.

Sure they can, but EU knows that they practically can't and plays their card just because they can't compete.

Putting poison in food is about human health, this has nothing to do with it.

Funny how you can understand that "Apple can't practically leave the EU", but don't understand that "citizens can't practically fight Apple on their own". Makes it pointless to have a discussion, with this kind of selective understanding of issues.

I do understand that some citizens are "fighting" Apple by supporting this legislation. Doesn't change the argument though.

This stuff is spreading, Japan is next, probably India , Apple is sucking as much as they can from the users, if you are from USA spend your energy protecting Apple abuses in USA, I would try FUD, like show how better USA iPhone users are now with their special ports, with their wall garden etc.

Apple is abusing people, there is no f way an Apple extremist fanboy can claim the next sentence is not abuse

"Developers are not allowed to inform the users that they have the OPTION to say pay less for a subscription directly on the official website"

I know Apple fanboys prefer to use Apple to pay for Youtube or other subscriptions even if is more expensive but how can informing the user that he has an OPTION is allowed.

Is the same with apps, EU protects the user right to own your device, if I want to write a script and run it on my device I should not pay Apple to give me the permission and on top of that have Apple decide for me what I can and what I can't run. What's next Apple protects their users by not allowing browsing websites that did not paid Apple to get an approval of "safety" and "Appleness"

That's not how it works in Europe, and for good reasons, too.

Yeah that's why almost all of the most successful big tech is in EU /s

Correlation is not causation.

Not to mention Big Tech got its start in the USA before the EU existed.

I never understood this line of reasoning.

What do you get in return from having “successful” big tech companies in your country?

It's not even my country. My point was regulations like these (not this particular one, in general) cripple innovation.

Regulations should be there for safety related issues, not company's designs and own policies.

It doesn’t answer my question though. What do we get, as member of a society, if one or two companies get to be huge and become monopolies? What’s the societal benefit of that?

I also don’t think regulations like these cripple innovation. They make it harder to compete against more unregulated markets, that’s for sure, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing overall.

Honestly, I'm a bit more regulation-friendly than you, I remember the whole 2000-2010 decade where you had one charger per phone, in a house with 4 people, some with work phone, all incompatible. The switch to one, maybe two kinds of charger was a clear improvement.

It's not false, but having "big tech company" isn't the only metric of success of a society.

Stuff like quality of life, workers rights, shared values are a bit more important, and that requires the ability to basically tell a company "Who the hell do you think you are?".

Have you heard of SAP? Probably not, most people haven't.

… which is funny because the entire corporate world runs on SAP. Including all of big tech.

> The company is the largest non-American software company by revenue and the world's third-largest publicly traded software company by revenue.

Phones are computers. They are for running software, according to the will of the user.

You can't allow people to make products with lock-in and control over the software etcetera. It was iffy even when it was gaming consoles, but people have these things with them all day and use them for communication, payments and all sorts of things, and they need to be able to control those things themselves.

This means standards, repairability, freedom to run whatever software your like, root access, etc.

If anything the EU measures don't go far enough, being so focused on the market aspects.

Why can’t people simply buy Android phones if they feel the restrictions are too invasive? I understand that the Apple ecosystem is compelling to most people, but isn’t this a choice? In the EU, people use WhatsApp and most apps are cross-platform.

I’ve never understood the argument that Apple’s platform is too restrictive when it operates in a free market, and has a minority in market share. If people truly cared about these issues, they would vote with their wallet, right?

The android phones are basically as bad. They have the app stores, it's difficult to actually control what runs on them, etc.

People do care about these issues, but the market has been intentionally shaped to be as it is, because it's just a couple of big players (so what exists on the market isn't governed by consumer preference.

You can choose to buy an unlockable Android phone. You don't have that option with Apple.

And this isn't a counterpoint, it's agreement: yeah, a lot of Android is equally bad. Android isn't better in itself. But some Android vendors are.

Do you understand the argument that multiple people can vote for a government that deals with corporations from a position of power, as opposed to a single person dealing with Apple from an exceedingly disadvantaged position? It's also a kind of voting, even more so than voting with your wallet.

I don't want to use Android. My software ecosystem lives on iOS. It's also much less nice from a UX perspective.

App Store was always locked down, iPhones always had a non-USB port and was not repairable. People logically agree to this when buying a device.

> A government or a similar body should not have a right over a company's own products' design and how things work

They don't. They only have the right to create laws, and that's what they do.

If you didn't have a law saying that you can't kill people, maybe iPhone would come with a feature that discharges its battery so you get shocked and die. But it's forbidden by law, so they don't have this feature.

There's absolutely no difference with the charging port or the openness of the software.

> It should be people's choice, not EU's.

The people's choice to be... locked out of the most popular charging port? I guarantee you the people's choice aligns with EU for all matter related to Apple.

E-waste and monopoly power good.

The DMA is about competition law, and EU doctrine is about consumer benefits and market fairness. Apple can't be exempt from that.

The next line of thinking to this is that nobody is forcing Apple to sell their devices in the EU.

The people of EU have decided through their votes that they will delegate consumer devices compliance rules to bodies orchestrating manoeuvres like this one. This comes with the benefit of knowing that someone's forcing companies that want to sell you widgets to go through various hoops that will supposedly make the widgets better for you.

If consumers want to outsource less protections from widget vendors and let Apple do its thing, they can vote for it.

(Not arguing either way, just fixing flawed logic here).

> they can vote for it.

I don’t want third party App Stores since my family will need additional support as a result, costing me time. How do I vote against this?

> forcing to make changes to their own platform again on their own devices.

Last time I checked I own my phone, not its manufacturer.

And that manufacturer had things this way since day one. It's not like they locked down App Store afterwards you bought the device.

You can say that about seatbelts, lead in gasoline and paint and many other things. That isn't an argument. I can't know what my future needs of my phone are and I shouldn't be forced to buy a new one if my current one is perfectly capable of satisfying those needs but can't because the manufacturer put artificial barriers for it.

I'm pretty sure they stop being "Apple's own devices" when they sell them. Selling means change of ownership, no? Though I expect that both Apple and Apple fans don't agree with this definition.

As long as they don't sell them in the EU, of course they can put whatever they want in "their own devices".

Also, you're obviously a fan of Apple. Nobody neutral would frame the discusson this way, "their own devices". Like Tim Cook is building some phones in his garage for his own usage. The whole reason for all this is that the citizens that buy the devices don't get all the benefits of ownership.

I do use Apple devices, I'm not a fan of Apple as a company for many reasons.

Though just because I don't like a company doesn't mean that I can't agree with them at one point.

EU shouldn't have right to decide on a company's own design. (Unless it's medical, military etc.)

I wonder how well Apple would sell phones if radio spectrum was unregulated and anyone would be allowed to design and build devices that emit radio waves on any wavelength at any power. After all, this is the world you want, where governments aren't allowed to decide companies' designs.

My guess is cellular telephony would not exist at all in this world.

That example would pollute the EM spectrum, a public resource.

A company with its own ecosystem and design doesn't.

Proprietary charging cables lead to more e-waste, which is a public externality as well.

The reasoning is that apple's marketplace is such a central cornerstone to digital life that it becomes a public resource.

And proprietary chargers, particularly multiple revisions within a single product line, pollute the actual ecosystem.

Regulation at the EU level - outside of their moral crusade regarding e2e encryption - tends to be more about combatting planned obsolescence and promoting CSR at the expense of an increased BOM.

These are symptoms of the actual problem with US based MNCs which lies with at the US Federal level, characterised by rabid lobbying for deregulation and genuflecting at the altar of fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.

You pretend to have a principle that the government should not interfere, but you carve out an exception whenever the principle bothers Apple. You'll always find something, I'm sure.

What the EU should or should not have the power to do is up the citizens there (but they have to live with the consequences of that, too).

But the government/EU does seem to have those rights. The EU citizens could perhaps decide to remove those rights, but so far they have not. Societies have a lot of freedom in how they organise themselves.

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