I don't think I agree with all of his points but I do agree with his point that other countries outside the EU will try to persuade Apple that they want Apple to play by those rules. They'll be under a lot of pressure to roll out what they do there elsewhere. And the argument that they can't goes away the second they show that they can in the EU.
And of course everybody forgets about the Chinese market where Apple has been playing by Chinese rules for many years (which isn't great for privacy, obviously). So that's three separate markets where they are treating users very differently.
This went out the window the moment that developers weren't rare anymore. Nowadays there is so many people all over the world willing and able to do the work to produce apps, apple is free to exersize their duopoly power and treat them as expandable.
I've created some iOS apps, and you can really feel this in every single interaction. From their crummy badly written out of date documentation without code samples, to the painfully slow developer portals, to the random app rejections.
In some way I secretly hope that the EU is waiting for DMA to come into effect in March to declare Apple as non compliant and hit them as hard as they can.
What surprises me a little bit is that Apple didn't choose a model that is viable at least for some smaller competitors or special situations while keeping competing mainstream app stores out.
Why did they choose to rub it in the EU's face that not a shred of lawmakers' intentions was going to be implemented?
I'm in the same boat. While his writing is clearly ideological, it aligns with my world view and opened my eyes to the extent of these abuses. For example with this article, I was aware of some of the points, but didn't realize the million dollar fee thing for alternative app stores. Looking at this press post by Apple https://www.techpowerup.com/318370/apple-announces-changes-t... we can see them patting themselves on the back. They are so arrogant they literally put out marketing material that says, we believe our compliance with the DMA is so malicious that less than 1% of developers would want to chose it, even when the alternative means sticking to the outlandish 30% fees.
I doubt it’s going to be an awakening, unless Apple’s execs have taken to huffing paint on a musk scale, I would assume it’s more of a cynical ploy: while the EU doesn’t like companies ignoring the spirit of the laws it usually takes limited action until it’s refined the word to match, so they’re trying out ignoring the spirit in case it either works out or gives them more time, even if the odds are low.
That’s a high risk manoeuvre if the EU courts decide to make an example though.
Depends, if the EU wants to set an example that corporations trying to skirt the law by malicious compliance will be heavily penalised we might see Apple's products being barred from commercialisation in the entire EU until they comply.
Will it suck for consumers? Yup, some people will be screaming out loud about how the non-democratic EU bureaucrats are stifling innovation (as we usually see in HN comments about EU regulations against huge corporations), at the same time Apple will capitulate if a ban on the sale of their products in the EU goes on for more than a few weeks. They capitulated on the Apple Watch sales ban in the US and the US is much more pro-business.
I can't see what's the case where they end being a relative winner though, if there's one thing the EU is good at is on enforcing commercial regulations since it's still its main raison d'être.
EU has the ultimate regulatory leverage in EU. Hence I feel like I'm missing something with Apple giving EU the fuck you. It feels so brazen. Apple capitulating in US/home market is one thing, but no telling what geopolitics goes behind the scenes for US to protect their monopoly / ecosystem capture abroad while weakly regulating at home. It's HN/US centric reaction to EU bureaucrats that suggests this could be more than EU vs Apple affair. Real money is on the line, not charging cable money.
Whether Apple is non-compliant and if yes, to what extent, will be known weeks or months after this is rolled out.
John Gruber, writing on “Apple’s Plan for DMA in the European Union” [1]:
> I’ve emphasized throughout this piece the word proposals. That’s key, because no one, including Apple, knows whether the European Commission is going to find any or all of them compliant with the DMA. Apple has met with EC representatives dozens of times across several years regarding the DMA, but the way the EC works is that (1) they pass laws; (2) companies do all the work to attempt compliance with those laws; and only then (3) does the EC decide whether they comply. Companies like Apple don’t get to run ideas past the EC and get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. They have to build them, then find out.
I loved this ending in that post:
> The delicious irony in Apple’s not knowing if these massive, complicated proposals will be deemed DMA-compliant is that their dealings with the European Commission sound exactly like App Store developers’ dealings with Apple. Do all the work to build it first, and only then find out if it passes muster with largely inscrutable rules interpreted by faceless bureaucrats.
> For one thing, Apple will only allow European customers to run alternative browser engines
This is idiotic beyond measure, but so Apple, trying to claw every inch of monopolistic abuse as long as they can get away with it. They should be punished with fines in billions for this. May be that will teach them a thing or two.
>But there was a curious pattern to GDPR enforcement: while smaller, EU-based companies were swiftly shuttered by its provisions, the US-based giants that conduct the most brazen, wide-ranging, illegal surveillance escaped unscathed for years and years, continuing to spy on Europeans. (...) One (erroneous) way to look at this is as a "compliance moat" story. In that story, GDPR requires a bunch of expensive systems that only gigantic companies like Facebook and Google can afford. These compliance costs are a "capital moat" – a way to exclude smaller companies from functioning in the market. Thus, the GDPR acted as an anticompetitive wrecking ball, clearing the field for the largest companies, who get to operate without having to contend with smaller companies nipping at their heels. This is wrong. (...) A harder look at what happened with the GDPR reveals a completely different dynamic at work. The reason the GDPR vaporized small surveillance companies and left the big companies untouched had nothing to do with compliance costs. The Big Tech companies don't comply with the GDPR – they just get away with violating the GDPR
Nothing about what he wrote refutes the GDPR being a "compliance moat".
In fact, he even spells it out himself: "And that's why Google and Facebook haven't been extinguished by the GDPR while their rivals were. It's not compliance moats – it's impunity. Once a corporation attains a certain scale, it has the excess capital to spend on phony relocations that let it hop from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, chasing the loosest slots on the strip."
He has the idea that a requirement is only a compliance moat if a small player can't comply (because of complexity, costs, etc), but a big one can.
But it's fine for the "compliance moat" purposes that the small player can't comply and the big player can just ignore compliance. It's still a great moat, and it can still be consciously created as a moat: "Let's put out a law that makes it difficult for small players to do this shit, and we big players have avenues to bypass").
This is the epitome of ill-informed and emotive polemic, written in a tabloid-esque fervour worthy of The National Inquirer.
The Author starts with a inherently flawed argument around the concept of duty-free - holding it as some sort of totem indicating a cultural proclivity for the Irish towards large-scale tax evasion. The concept of things like bonded warehouses and Tourist Refund Schemes are ignored, despite him linking to the Wiki page detailing all of this (which he has either neglected to read or disingenuously ignored). Nor is there acknowledgement that U.S. citizens receive substantially higher duty exemptions than normal when they visit or transit through US Protectorates. But I digress.
Lets move on to the more overt racism - where he decries the concept of MNCs setting up in Ireland as 'Potemkin Villages', or removes all artifice of balance using pulp-fiction phraseology like 'Ireland is a made town, where the cops are all on the take'.
Much like the rabid UK Tabloids pre-Brexit, the conversation re: corporation tax is simplified to focus on the headline rate. It’s never been about the headline rate - France amongst other EU countries has a far lower effective corporate tax rate than Ireland.
e.g. The French Agency for International Investment cited an effective tax rate of 8.2 per cent in advertising literature aimed at attracting foreign business to the country. The agency’s promotional documents note various tax mechanisms reduce the effective tax rate significantly from the nominal rate, citing a PricewaterhouseCoopers report (2011)
They're also non-English speaking, have layers of bureaucracy around employing people or setting up any sort of business, effectively close down on Sundays and have a storied history of industrial action, striking without warning, and other non-corporate aligned things like the gilet jaune movement.
Ireland is heavily criticised because we encourage large US businesses to trade in Europe but use specific accounting and corporate formation practices to ensure that the majority of their European businesses pay as little tax as possible in Europe.
Other countries though, particularly France and Germany would have quite substantial tax incomes if Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, PayPal, EBay and most of the major drug manufacturers based in Ireland had to pay more local taxes in those countries. We don’t benefit by the setting of ECB rates like Germany does, so we take what we can as a Service Based economy isolated on an Island on the Western Periphery of Europe with a highly-educated English Speaking Workforce.
We facilitate widespread tax reduction (again legally) which directly affects those countries denying them tax income which they would really prefer to obtain. That’s why our tax practices generate so much anger in the rest of Europe. It’s not the rate, it’s that we collaborate with those US firms to keep denying tax income to the rest of Europe.
Why a US Citizen would get angry at Ireland about this is another question entirely - e.g. Ireland gets the blame for Apple not paying its fair share of taxes but what it really boils down to is: Apple is a US company, yet the US won't force Apple to pay taxes on its foreign earnings. In contrast, if you're a US citizen who, perhaps lives anywhere else in the world for all your life, you're still expected to pay US taxes...
I agree that his attacks on Ireland's corporation tax arrangements are hyperbolic and unnecessarily inflamatory.
But I think his point about the Irish data commissioner is valid. While EU countries are allowed to compete on tax, competing on lax law enforcement or lax interpretation of the law is unacceptable.
It's not a case of lax enforcement, it's simply a case of David vs Goliath.
Ireland, as a country has a population of 5 million and is 1/8th the Size of Texas. The nearest comparable European capital, London, has a population of 9 million.
GDPR was only introduced in 2018. Since then the Irish DPC has transformed from a small regionally-based office of 27 staff into an independent pan-EU regulatory body of ~250 SMEs and support staff.
In 2022 the Irish DPC was responsible for more than €1bn in GDPR fines issued out of a European total of €1.64bn.
In May 2023 they charged Meta with a €405m fine for violations relating to children’s privacy on Instagram, in November 2023 they followed up with a €1.2bn fine for its Facebook data transfers between the EU and the US, which is the largest GDPR fine issued to date.
Not only has the Irish DPC leveraged the largest fines in GDPR history against US MNCs for egregious Data Protection breaches, each time they do so they're hauled out in front of the US media to justify their decisions:
While I'm an avid supporter of Max Schrems and NOYB in particular, and am very vocal about the failings of both Helen Dixon and the Irish government in terms of ramping up our Data Protectorate function to meet the role of Federal Overseer that we accidentally found ourselves in, it's simply a case of cutting our cloth according to our measure.
> the role of Federal Overseer that we accidentally found ourselves in
Not so accidentally since Ireland has pursued being the place for Big Tech to park their EU's HQs in through incentives provided by the Irish government. With that comes big responsibilities to the bloc as well, I just challenge the notion of "accidentally" since Ireland designed itself on tax schemes to be a hotspot for the HQs of international Big Tech.
The Irish DPC also had to be forced by the EUDPB to comply with GDPR enforcement, it wasn't out of goodwill that the Irish DPC got so active in 2023.
Dear newly-created "Irish" account, all of your critique misses the mark. The author is very obviously not racist, and has not mentioned headline corporate tax rates at all.
The eagerness of successive Irish goverments to facilitate zero corporate tax payments across the EU by US corporations in exchange for a few thousand jobs, via tax evoision schemes such as the Double Irish, the Single Malt and its current successor the CAIA is very well known. As is the deliberate sabotage of EU-wide GDPR legal enforcement by the Irish regulators at the DPC.
If you can't see why the Irish EU membership is a net liability for the bloc, you are blinkered.
I think you'll find the comment section of Junge Freiheit a more receptive forum for these sort of fantastical economic hot-takes.
As for your incredibly racist proposition that Irish EU membership is a net liability for the bloc, it was never an issue when Ireland’s supposed light-touch, low tax regulatory regime complemented German banking’s hunt for new, profitable opportunities - indeed Germany’s Schröder administration actively encouraged the internationalisation of German banks, inciting a two decade process of bank deregulation continued by the first Merkel government and a hybrid regulatory system that nearly bankrupted the EU.
As German economist Prof Henrik Enderlein of Berlin's Hertie School of Governance put it “For the bankers it was always clear: the German government would never allow big German banks go broke, there was an implicit guarantee for them. It was as if you gave a gambler multimillion loans and sent him into a casino.”
The problem is it wasn't multimillion. It was multibillion. The Irish state ended up guaranteeing €73 billion at the end of 2012 – for everything from senior unsecured bank bonds to deposits over €100,000 - under immense pressure from the ECB.
Sahra Wagenknecht, Economist and 14 year veteran of the Bundestag summed it up very succinctly "To this day many people in Germany believe, wrongly, that rescue plans in assist the populations in each respective country, paid for by German taxpayers. Things are the other way around: the Irish population will probably have to spend decades bleeding for the speculation of German banks."
Andres Veiel, the esteemed German film director and screenwriter, went so far as to crystallise the Issue in 'The Raspberry Reich'. As he bluntly and accurately puts it: "The problem is there's no readiness here in Germany to think things through to the end, such as how the link between risk and liability was broken in Ireland's case so that investors, including German banks and their shareholders, could get away without covering their own losses."
Isolating a single word out of context isn't something I would equate with a good faith comment. The comment author sounds like an unhinged lunatic driven to irrelevant knee jerk reactions.
The author, in the context of an article talking about how big companies can bypass various monopoly and privacy laws, wrote how: "companies really do get away with both literal and figurative murder".
That's a general statement about what companies can get away with. He didn't assign cookie violations to "literal murder". It's obvious that "figurative murder" is the kind he abscribes to the violations he talks about, like GDPR.
As in the very common figurative idiom "getting away with murder", which is about doing bad stuff/breaking the law, and not having any serious consequence. Or do you pretend to never have heard of it?
As for the general statement, it still stands. Companies have historically also gotten away with literal murder too, and it's a valid point to raise when talking about how companies can often violate laws with impunity.
These issues need good unbiased reporting, and as much as I love Cory, his reporting is all but unbiased. It's activism.
Which is perfectly ok, and extremely important, but in this case it reeks of an extremism that is damaging to the cause itself.
The truth is that decrying things like Apple's splash screen about the use of alternative stores, for example, is ridiculous. Apple has all the legal rights to do that, and formally that is not even incorrect. I personally don't let tech unsavvy people from the family use anything but the App Store and iPhone. Not because we couldn't find better Android phones for the same price, but because I know they would be easily scammed by shady apps that don't have to pass through the App Store's review process.
That is clearly a monopolistic advantage to Apple, but the alternative is equally bad and, admittedly, even worse for less tech savvy users, which are the majority.
It's not reporting, it's a personal blog. It's an opinion piece. Activism is definitely ok there in my book, and it's clearly needed considering how this situation is getting out of hand.
> I know they would be easily scammed by shady apps that don't have to pass through the App Store's review process.
My entire family uses F-Droid on ungoogled Androids. They have much less chances to be scammed/exploited because F-Droid is community-run and is explicit about anti-features in the store UI. There just isn't any malware/scam on F-Droid to be scammed with, because the community decides what apps to add and the community server builds them.
Pretending There Is No Alternative ® to Apple monopolistic practices is misleading to say the least.
Debian and other distro repositories would like to disagree. When the packager doesn't provide the final build, it becomes much harder for malware/adware to reach end users. Not technically impossible, but much harder than direct-to-users stores such as Apple AppStore or Flathub where it is trivial because whatever binary the uploader provides ends up directly running on user machines.
You have laid out Apple's argument for them. Android offers a more open experience in the market, and the market should then decide which to use. Users have a choice today and in the EU, ~66% of users have chosen Android.
I think Apple is dumb for not adjusting here ahead of time, because they have pushed the government to come up with poorly thought out laws like the DMA.
The other users who already spent the money paying for Apple-made devices should also enjoy the experience without having Apple lock them in to charge 30% for services subsequently. That sort of leveraging market position to extort extra money from previous buyers is part of what antitrust is designed to forestall/fix.
How do you go about modern luxuries like opening and charging your car, controlling your home, paying, using public transport, chatting, using digital id, flying a drone...?
So more options are bad, because people might make choices that they don't understand? Is this the invisible hand of the market that people have been wanging on about for the past dekades?
Or is this new-found worry about people choosing wrong things something that is only limited to Apple? Because I could imagine other, worse markets with much more impact on people that are less regulated (e.g. food).
Food is highly regulated by the state, at least in the US and EU (probably too highly regulated). It is also a market with numerous platforms which compete to offer quality guarantees - i.e. supermarkets. The difference with Apple is just that the platform is more tied in to the hardware.
I understand the loss of being stuck with a single platform, but that's not quite right. You can have multiple devices, just as you can shop at multiple supermarkets. It's just that the price for doing so is higher (syncing multiple devices, carrying them around, the initial outlay), so most people don't. Nobody forces you to buy either Apple or Android. But the services they provide are indeed valuable: the walled garden protects me from certain kinds of harmful software, for example.
The duopoly in smartphones is an outcome of the underlying technologies. That doesn't mean it is efficient in the economic sense, compared to an ideal world, but the comparison has to be what we can actually implement.
> I personally don't let tech unsavvy people from the family use anything but the App Store and iPhone
Do you also make sure they can only access Apple-certified websites in the browser? No? Sounds pretty unsafe.
> I know they would be easily scammed by shady apps that don't have to pass through the App Store's review process
Both Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store have hosted malware in the past.
It's quite rare for the average user to even try installing Amazon's third-party appstore, let alone a random .apk from the internet, it's about having the option to be less dependent. Sure some users will be negatively affected, just like some people could be convinced to put their iPhone in the microwave to recharge the battery, but if you take that seriously you might as well ban knives.
> That is clearly a monopolistic advantage to Apple, but the alternative is equally bad
You need to be a lot more convincing to tell me that something is as bad as a monopoly.
If you were a designing an app store that provides apps that are safe for non technical users you would probably want to ensure:
excellent curation where human reviewers can have deep knowledge of all of the apps that have been reviewed/published,
clear provenance so you can be strongly confident of the source/supply of the applications in case of abuse or infra compromise (with a smaller problem blast radius for each app)
alternative app stores so that end users are never beholden to your app store and they can get similar or the same apps from elsewhere if your policies or practices change for the worse.
Some of these help ensure that no third party can maliciously update an app at the behest of a criminal actor without also compromising the app developer, or that no third party can gather invasively detailed information and fingerprinting surface concerning the apps people use and have in case of dissent.
Apple don't seem to have any interest in doing any of this, so I can't understand how their solution would be better for less tech-savvy users.
I can't see how you would interpret Apple's "compliance" other than contempt, no matter how unbiaised you try to be. Even Apple's own press releases aren't even trying to hide that.
They should not. Mobile computing is as fundamentally important as the right to free speech. They're taking over access to every part of life and are more important than cash. Two trillion dollar companies should not be allowed to gatekeep belonging to modern society.
> even worse for less tech savvy users, which are the majority.
We let people drive multi-ton vehicles with little training at 80mph. I think they'll be fine with web downloads.
Only in tech do we dismiss all of the absolutely deadly degrees of freedom in life to defend the entrenched positions of monopolies.
We won't even mention the decades of research and literal human millennia of engineering efforts that went into the best practices that can protect people.
Sandboxes, what are those? Surely only two companies lording over everything can protect us from ourselves. Free web installs are just as bad as speeding cars, chainsaws, electrocution, etc.
We need opinion pieces as much as (so-called) unbiased reporting. This one puts things into perspective, rather than merely summarizing facts and viewpoints.
I appreciate that it clearly does so and doesn't pretend to be unbiased. Nor does the so-called activism work behind the screen to manipulate politicians - like no doubt many paid by Apple lobbyists are currently doing.
You call it activism like it is a bad thing. If it is, then let us dump freedom of speech.
TL;DR: the "trust relation" that users have with Apple's review department could just as well (and often better) be filled by third party app stores or even independent entities.
I would agree the app store warning is pretty reasonable: "<site> would like to install an App Marketplace" is clear and to the point, sure (and the article doesn't disagree).
"This app doesn't support the App Store's private and secure payment system" as the main headline on a full screen warning with a huge long scary blurb every time you try to pay anybody who isn't Apple is not reasonable.
This is not the great danger Apple is pretending it is - literally every single one of their customers has paid money to somebody outside the App Store in the past. Being aware of the risks of that is a basic & essential skill that everybody who owns a credit card must have already. Apple has a responsibility to protect non-technical users against technical risks, but it does not (and should not) try to protect users from lack of very basic life skills.
> Apple has all the legal rights to do that
That's not necessarily true at all!
I'm sure there'll have a good lawyerly debate on this soon, but the DMA requirements generally seem to mandate no restrictions for these new features than those strictly required to preserve device integrity & security.
Given that the existing global payment system is very familiar to all their customers, far more widely used than App Store purchases, and _generally pretty good_ (yes, you can quibble on UX and subscription management, but we all use it all the time, there's plenty of anti-fraud backstops, and payments in the world outside the app store do work) I don't think this screaming warning can be justified as an essential measure required to protect user security. To me, it looks like a unnecessarily scary screen actively discouraging users away from their competition.
A small calm confirmation for "Pay outside the App Store? This payment will be handled by 'Example Dev' directly." would be far more justifiable.
Apple's European revenue for the App Store is only 7% of its global App Store receipts. At some point apple will just leave the market.
The EU is a bit bonkers to think that it can get global tech companies to comply with increasingly tech-hostile regulations without any push back or red lines. At some point it just stops being worth the hassle.
"Apple's most valuable intangible asset isn't its patents or copyrights – it's an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple's shareholders."
I would love for there to be a vibrant European tech scene. But these same sort of business-hostile behavior is exactly why there isn't a European version of Silicon Valley.
We don't need a silicon valley. No need for a ultra concentrated tech valley. We have many small tech valleys all over Europe. With many many good, honest, privacy respecting companies.
We just don't have that unicorn culture. But do we need highly overvalued tech businesses?
Vilnius is sometimes touted as new valley yet hosts all the shady VPN companies that engage in hacking your home cameras, routers and tv's so they can offer IP addresses at residential space!
They are just as privacy invasive as US albeit with less financing which means they are even more ruthless and hostile.
Not sure if you are sarcastic. But that is exactly the reason why we have such a abundance of high quality products and depend way less on mid quality products of big brands.
Alone food quality is on a whole different level in Europe, exactly because we have, allow and welcome small time players reinventing the market.
> I would love for there to be a vibrant European tech scene.
But there is ?
Go to Paris, Berlin, Lisboa, Barcelona, ... There is a lot of start-ups, incubator, investor, meet-ups, conference, etc. The EU has a very vibrant tech scene. It is probably more distributed than the U.S, by nature, and not on the same scale.
But acting as if the E.U is some sort of ludite, back water, hostile to business, is just plain wrong and huge exaggeration.
The issue to me is less about the existence of a tech scene and more about reliance.
A European app running on locked down hardware with permission of a megacorporation (US or not) doesn't make you much less dependent.
You're free to think otherwise, but this is what I've been repeatedly told by entrepreneurs in Europe (who mostly copy US ideas), and europeans living in Silicon Valley (who came here to innovate in ways they can't back home).
Yeah or it's just the capital that has been there in abundance.
Spawned from the defense industry, thriving through the money made in the 2000s and after by creating profits all over the world (ads!) and then evading taxation as much as possible while funneling the money back to the valley and hiring the world's best talent to keep that first place.
The small business owner pays taxes because what else can they do?
Big corps go through tax-havens and relocations and don't do so, while profiting off of the infrastructure paid for by taxes (=> enabling customers over seas to even buy iphones).
Traditional companies ship physical products and/or employ more people in the respective countries, while they also try to evade taxation I think those circumstances make them a much better subject to it though.
Really, the more I keep on talking to my friends in the Valley the more it boils down to the money factor. Salaries, VCs and all the likes.
I don't say Europe shouldn't be less business hostile, but one should see the Valley the way it is and realize that just buy changing the laws and trying to copy it Europe can't succeed. They should find their own path.
They can't make money like they do in the US, but I'd argue that good innovation
- that increases the welfare of the people and is meant to bring universal progress - still is more abundant in Europe than in SV.
I find it hilarious how certain people on HN are so pro-corpo. You get a feeling like Apple is part of their family, not a monopolistic giant just needing one excuse to permaban you from their services.
A good proportion of these people have the majority of their multi-million dollar wealth tied up in a single on of the FAAMG megacorps, or in a stock portfolio heavily invested in them.
As they say, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it". Even the ones that are not outright shills and cheerleaders often exhibit motivated reasoning...
I don’t own any Apple stock. Nor is my finances in any way dependent on Apple or other big tech. I don’t even work in software.
I just think my life is genuinely improved by having access to Apple products, and find the blond hate and uncompromising takes in this thread to be just as baffling.
I do own some Apple stock, but agree. Maybe I'm old school, but if I don't like a companies product I just don't buy it. This isn't a situation where anyone has to buy Apple products. ~65% of the EU has done just that. The whole blind hate is very weird to me.
You have highlighted my issue with this whole DMA situation. Every Android phone I have used has felt like privacy invading garbage (except maybe the nexus 4), yet I don't think they should be off market. I simply use an iPhone instead.
Instead of the DMA being pro-consumer, I read it as anti-business (probably US business). It feels created out of EU jealously of the US tech industry, and secondarily a way to help EU companies. Consumers will likely end up worse off, which I reminded of every time I visit the EU have to dismiss cookie banners on every damn site.
There are a good number of "Android devices" which I can unlock the bootloader (or comes already unlocked from factory) and install another ROM. Done, no more "privacy invading garbage".
That is virtually impossible to be done with any Apple product.
> It feels created out of EU jealously of the US tech industry
If it feels like that for you I recommend checking your emotional state, the EU has a different approach to regulating businesses than the USA, it's not jealousy but different principles aiming for different outcomes than what the USA aims for.
> Instead of the DMA being pro-consumer, I read it as anti-business (probably US business).
You've criticised the DMA twice about being: a bad implementation, and now as anti-business. Yes, it is anti a specific case of business which in the EU's view is not aligned to the outcomes it wants in the economy, calling the EU anti-business is, at best, naïve, since it's an organisation focused first and foremost to deal with commerce and business in general. It is against business using leverages against citizens, something that the USA does not seem to care about, and that's fine for the USA just don't try to apply the same principles you live under to a different culture regarding businesses.
I completely don't mind. The people who still want to buy Apple can just do a direct import themselves. Probably AliExpress will even offer to do it for you, just like they do for other non-EU companies that refuse to play by EU rules, e.g. Xaomi.
Not just iDevices, but any device that can not be fully controlled by the owner. Hardware should only be allowed to be sold if we are free to install/reinstall the software as we see fit.
Apple are somewhat dependent on being able to use Ireland as a tax haven. It's also quite hard for a publicly traded company to abandon a multibillion dollar market out of spite alone without getting sued by shareholders.
There's no way Apple can justify leaving 100 million in revenue on the table to their board. They will do whatever it takes to remain in the EU market.
> The EU is a bit bonkers to think that it can get global tech companies to comply with increasingly tech-hostile regulations without any push back or red lines.
So... We in Europe would not be able to access anymore US huge advertisement networks and manufacturers of luxury tech toys?
Please, wake me up when those awful corporations do push back on red lines.
Global tech companies are a bit bonkers to think that they can get the voted political establishment to comply with increasingly human-hostile behaviours as well ;)
Apple reported 30bn net sales in Europe in the last quarter: the second biggest region after the US. Although some of that'll be driven by non iOS stuff, we know that's the main earnings driver.
In a future where Apple have withdrawn the app store, who in the EU is going to buy an iOS device?
Sorry, but the idea that they'd be able to justify pulling out to shareholders over this is pure fantasy.
Apple has shown with China that they're perfectly okay with localized rules in their systems. If you think they wouldn't make a few EU-only changes to preserve a whopping 7% of the revenue I don't know what to tell you. 7% is much more than you make it seem, and actually as someone else pointed out the real number is higher because without App Store the iPhones are worthless.
And of course everybody forgets about the Chinese market where Apple has been playing by Chinese rules for many years (which isn't great for privacy, obviously). So that's three separate markets where they are treating users very differently.