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Comment by EMIRELADERO | Hacker News Reader

Here's some context which a lot of people, including most news media, seem to have missed:

The reason Apple is still playing games with the EC is that they're waiting on an EU Court's ruling[1] on whether Article 6 (7), the provision that mandates free of charge iOS APIs for all developers, is "constitutional" within the EU framework itself.

Most people who call out the Core Technology Fee use that provision as one of their main arguments, and it's one of their strongest, because the "free of charge" language throws away the general idea that the law doesn't want to interfere with Apple's monetization strategies. Since Apple could very well have chosen to monetize certain local API access in the past, the fact that this provision put a stop to that effectively nullifies Apple's argument (to the courts) that the law could never have meant to actually control how they make money.

[1] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/fiche.jsf?id=T%3B1080%3B23%3BR...

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The problem is that apple is going to continue malicious compliance while the EU is trying to be reasonable: "the EU hopes ongoing dialogue will lead to compliance rather than sanctions."

That’s one whole year of free money from Apple’s perspective.

So... what's Apple's argument here? Do they just think the DMA was badly drafted, or do they want to strip competition law out of the EU? Or is this the same "we have a right to monetize our IP[0]" argument they used in the Epic lawsuit?

[0] Intellectual property, in the Doctorowian sense of "thing that lets us tell our competitors what to do"

The DMA was badly drafted, and it's quite protectionist. The EU does not write good tech legislation overall, because it does not understand tech industry at a cultural level, having never built out its own.

Generally wondering: how to you look at US imposing 100% tariffs on EVs from China?

That it's an absolutely insane thing to do to a trading partner and calling prices "artificially low" is just "our glorious government investment their savage government trade war subsidies." Go read the whitehouse announcement, it's blatant. The best part is that is centers around IP literally proving that any country that ignores the insanity of western IP laws will outcompete. Big no no, it's the children that are wrong energy.

Absolutely do not support the US artificially limiting EV adoption by forcing prices higher to prop up a domestic auto industry that got caught with their pants down. If they're gonna sell us EVs below cost we would be stupid not to buy them all up and make them lose money. But there's the rub, they're not actually doing that, they are just able to make them cheaper.

If they're selling below cost, who's the "we" that should buy them all up? Because if it's US consumers, then the domestic auto companies could fail in the while that's happening. If it's the US government - isn't that kind of what the tariff accomplishes, without having to take ownership of a bunch of inventory?

> ...it does not understand tech industry at a cultural level, having never built out its own

Consumer products are only a subset of tech. ASML, Siemens, ABB, Bosch have been tech industry bellwethers for ages. Europe is also no slouch in consumers/web/apps either (Spotify, booking.com)

Man forgets the industrial era was started in Europe. There are plenty of European tech companies behind all of the big American ones, the difference is really just the size of the market.

Face ID tech is old Kinect tech, Apple bought...an Israeli company for it (not EU, I know). But probably the biggest and most obvious example is ARM.

This just seems like deflection. The EU does not have an understanding for modern consumer tech products, period. That they have old giants still producing sub components has no bearing on this discussion, it's not like their industry actually has to worry about making viable end-user products.

They do not have any meaningful companies that actually have to worry about the end-user viability of tech.

Spotify, Indeed, and Booking are maybe the only real examples of consumer web apps from the EU, there are literally hundreds larger examples from the US.

Yes obviously it’s protectionist, the whole point of the DMA is to protect the EU internal market from entities that aren’t EU state apparatus from having too much control.

I’m not entirely sure how you say the DMA is badly drafted, what do think its objectives are? It’s not a “tech law” at all, it’s a market competition law that designed to deal with the unique imbalances created by large tech companies that historical competition law hasn't adequately dealt with.

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