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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are, kinda.

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

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

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

The threshold is nowhere near close.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

$94B

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

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

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

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

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

Hopefully the EU countries choose to invest these fines into their military spending to get themselves up to their agreed upon 2% of GDP.

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

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

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

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

I mean, if you did a good job, then this is no extra work for you. But there's very little reason to trust any of you right? Especially after stunts Apple is constantly pulling, everyone in EU leadership would have to be a brain dead moron to believe whatever US corps are telling them without any kind of verification.

If you pass with flying colors, that doesn't diminish any of your work - it confirms that you did it well.

It's possible that both are true at the same time: 1. Google doesn't really give a shit and will do the very least they think can get away with, 2. They have some people working on it out of the 27k engineers they have.

I'm not even sure how it's controversial, I assume you are biased and emotional as a Googler, but every company will do the very least possible to loosen their grip on the market.

Ha! Just because you're only getting flack for this, I once upon a long ago worked on gdpr implementation and it was exactly the same thing.

Our entire team was working overtime and liaising with regulators to figure out what some of those pretty vague statements actually meant when it came down asking user permission for third party analytics and how to ensure we were compliant (what counts as essential, how many non-essential can you reasonably ask someone to review, who creates that list, what happens to the companies not in it, etc.etc.).

Nobody else knew either because they were all looking at us, as we'd be likely to get sued first anyway. Cue the articles after launch on how we either didn't care to do it right or we were actually being our usual evil selves in sneakily not implementing it in properly.

I feel your pain

This reminds me of a conversation from Dune, between Count Fenring and the Baron:

"The Emperor does wish to audit your books," the Count said.

"Any time."

"You... ah... have no objections?"

"None. My CHOAM Company directorship will bear the closest scrutiny."

The point is if everything is in order (or made to look as if it's in order), then Google has nothing to fear, no matter how many probes the EU launches. And the Baron didn't take it personally, and neither should Google. It's all in the game, after all.

"past several quaters". The DMA entered force November 1. 2022.

So are we all going to just trust your word? That ship has long sailed, the trust is not there anymore.

This is what tech companies deserve to get (not just Google) when they try to play the different laws and circumvent them.

How many other good engineers at Google are working on anti-competitive practice by pushing Google as default browser, providing a worse service on non-Chromium based browsers (like slowing YouTube for Firefox), etc? [Microsoft Edge does worse]

How many other good engineers at Google are working on ethically dubious practices, like tracking users that are in explicit do-not-track mode through browser fingerprinting?

How many other good engineers at Google are working on <insert any other terrible practices>?

Maybe paying a few engineers to clean up their reputation is not enough? Maybe you just picked a bad role and are looking for the wrong culprits?

I find this assumed-guilt and assumed-lack-of-giving-a-shit irritating

Web Environment Integrity.

Those three words burned up a lot of what little goodwill was left for google.

Google can spend a lot of money on it, and still be non-compliant. How much time has been spent on it, or how seriously it's being taken, is not really indicative of anything relevant.

Looks like the EU are investigating Alphabet for "Alphabet's rules on steering in Google Play and self-preferencing on Google Search".

Is it possible Alphabet has complied with some parts, but not all?

This might not be pedantic. Maybe they're missing important details?

Shows how NON compliant Alphabet was before DMA ;)

"Make infra compliant, but try to pull some shit with billing, to see how serious the EC is about DMA. That way, if they're serious, we're ready, but if not, we can still make money."

Google is one of the reasons why this law had to be created in order to protect the users from its systemic dark patterns. I'm glad they're spending significant effort on DMA compliance, it means the law is working.

Even on a law and implementation effort like this with such large impact there are maybe 10,000 people in the world involved who actually understand it in any significant sense, and they all have a strong reason not to post about it on a public forum, or even a private one.

And even those people will only understand a limited aspect or perspective.

So the people commenting can only comment based on their outside impressions and emotions about generalities and how the specific implementation details seem to affect they as an end user.

I try to take anything said with that in mind. There is information in the comments about user experience but anything else is at the level of bullshitting at the bar with your friends, and not to be taken personally.

Except Google isn't complying.

Google charges 12-17% for "linking out" to a web purchase screen (aka "external offers").

has opened proceedings to assess whether the measures implemented by Alphabet and Apple in relation to their obligations pertaining to app stores are in breach of the DMA. Article 5(4) of the DMA requires gatekeepers to allow app developers to “steer” consumers to offers outside the gatekeepers' app stores, free of charge

Don't get me wrong, I think the DMA is a good thing and it is totally the right thing to do.

This is the part that you and Google don't agree. If you look at your comment from that perspective, you can see why probe makes sense.

I find this assumed-guilt and assumed-lack-of-giving-a-shit irritating.

Europe's probes works differently w.r.t. US. It's not "assumed guilt", it's "we want a clearer picture".

If you did everything alright, there's nothing to be afraid or be irritated of. You answer your questions and move on.

If you tried to work your way around, then, well...

I have spent a long time over the past few months working almost entirely on DMA projects so it is pretty aggravating to then see these "probes" into if we are taking it seriously.

Well just because you take it seriously does not mean you have done a good job in implementing the changes? I dont know about google but apple certainly flaunted the rules completely so its a good thing that they are not letting it go.

You rant feels unnecessarily emotional and victim assuming.

"WAH! WAH! The EU doesn't apreciate the job at Google I signed up for and getting paid $400k+ to do."

If you don't like your job, quit and find something you'll find fulfilling because you're not gonna get any sympathy for you not getting public government appreciation for the very well paid job you singed up to do at a private company. Go out and get some perspective, there's people out there with real problems in their lives, breaking their backs and barely scraping by. Seriously, the entitlement of some well paid big-tech workers is astonishing.

The EU hasn't got any beef with you or your job. Nobody at EU said that Google engineers aren't working hard on DMA compliance.

It's Google's (management's) responsibility to prove to regulators that they're DMA complaint, not their employee's to go public under burner accounts to say this.

"Trust AND verify".

Blame your management for lack of (proactive) action and lack of communication to the authorities, not the EU for looking into your employer.

Google only cares about DMA compliance because they don't want to get in trouble. Otherwise you wouldn't be so busy with it right now, you'd already be compliant.

I have sympathy for you as a SWE, but I have no sympathy for megacorporations - they should never be trusted.

If there wasn't a DMA, and no prospect of probe or accountability, google, and the likes, wouldn't give a shit. As we can see from the current state of affairs (that led to DMA and all that)

Alphabet is under investigation for, among things:

Whether Google preferences the firm's own goods and services in search results

Are you saying that Google doesn't preference it's own goods and services on the 'Google' platform ahead of it's other competitors on that platform?

And yet all the gatekeepers have publically taken action to actively try to undermine the DMA. Admittedly Google is nowhere near as bad as Apple, but it's still happening. So of course investigations have been launched

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

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

Thanks for sharing.

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

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

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

Criticism I have seen:

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

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

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

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

You wouldn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

It might be that Apple enforces the use of webkit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's moreso that all major gatekeepers under investigation (note that not all Gatekeepers are under investigation - Amazon and ByteDance aren't) didn't even try to be compliant with the proposed legislation - they attempted to lobby against it, take overly literal interpretations to make the legislation seem crazy and so on and so forth.

They had 2 years to be compliant with the DMA. All of them waited until the last second and all of them have attempted some degrees of malicious compliance with it. Apple is the most outstanding horrible one, but they're all trying to avoid proper compliance as much as possible because they think it'll allow them to squeeze out just the slightest amounts of more profits.

Doesn't it just mean the companies affected are flaunting the law?

"I love the DMA."

It might strengthen oligopolies on mobile. And even cement them.

Or there is a difference between RFCs and laws - and possibly between american and european law culture.

Realistically, unless a law is so targeted that it's basically an act of attainder, you're going to need an investigation, and if the target of the investigation is a multinational, that investigation is going to be long and complex.

The length of the investigation is so far less than 24h, no? And how sprawling can it be, after less than 24h.

If it eventually takes two years, yeah, it will be proof somebody didn't do their homework. But it seems a bit early to tell.

Also, I guess some of the size of the investigation is correlated with the size of the company being investigated. And especially with the size of the company's legal team.

Oh, is there a fast way of collecting the needed evidence instead? ;)

What does checking whether companies actually complied with a law that's been published for years have to do with precision?

(Lack of precision tends to be a US legal weasel word actually meaning "you didn't leave us loopholes to exploit".)

…or it means that subjects didn’t take it seriously enough or are ready to die on this hill.

Huh? IMO it's much more indicative of the idea that the companies didn't actually make a good faith effort to comply and are trying to see what they can get away with.

Wouldn't a compliance investigation effectively just be the evidence collection phase before a charge is filed, assuming the evidence supports it?

I wouldn't expect them to write the law and immediately charge Google, for example, based only on public knowledge and no compiled evidence.

>But if you have to launch a long, sprawling compliance investigation the minute the law enters in force

"Trust but verify"

Or

"Trust AND verify."

Pick your answer, but how else do you want the EU to make sure that Google is now compliant with the law if they don't check. Should they just take Google's word for it?

If you go to a concert they always check everyone's tickets at entry. You can't complain they don't let you in by taking your word for it.

Or you wrote the law to address an obvious issue that needs immediate action

cookie consent pop-up

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

I should consent once, ONCE!

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

Me: Close tab.

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

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

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

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

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

NO MORE POP UPS

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

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

Do you enjoy pre-installed aware, shareware, demoware etc. in general? or is this only because it is Apple products and his is about?

like having a demo version of Norton installed on your new PC.

or having Facebook OEM installed with no way to remove it?

you are the first one I have ever heard of, who actively encourages and enjoys that.

impressive.

The EU has long lost the plot with all the bureaucracy and rules. People like it when the government cracks down on powerful corporations, not understanding that the government apparatus is the most powerful and dangerous institution of them all. I'm not fully against that part of the DMA, breaking up these walled gardens could be positive. But history has shown once they start meddling with the markets, governments rarely know when to stop. That's because people in positions of power generally think they're in control and know what they're doing.

Look at the recent bottle cap directive for a more insane example. There are sadly hundreds of such cases at this point and the number of rules keeps growing year by year. Doing business in the EU will become more and more difficult and especially the cost for starting a new business is growing massively because of what needs to get invested in compliance before you even get started. This will be devastating for innovation and their economy as a whole.

Please do tell us more about why the Photos "app" is unique and wasn't uninstallable to begin with, surely it's not a business decision made explicitly to increase vendor lock-in and introduce friction to consumer choice (like the rest of the Apple suite of "apps").

Imagine how much time could have been saved if they had just made Photos a normal app from the beginning?

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

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

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

These megacorps have been avoiding paying taxes in the jurisdictions where they make most of their money. It's only natural to expect govts. to claw some of that revenue back. People think it's about privacy but it's really about tax revenue.

In turbulent times, the tallest grass gets chopped first.

This is an incoherent metaphor. Why would turbulent times cause a change in grass-chopping behavior?

That is not a good thing.

The DMA does not specify a minimum fine for violations.

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

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

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

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

That's ESA. :)

(Next launch to another planet seems to be ExoMars 2 to Mars in 2028, carrying the Rosalind Franklin rover. Originally planned for 2022 on a russian rocket, now with a european launcher.)

After reading your comment, I really appreciate it. The thinking has a positive world spin (progress for all mankind) instead of the ugly truth of our word.

We all should think like that.

I strongly agree with the general gist of your post; I don’t use any social media and a piece of me dies anytime a twitter link is shared that I can’t read because I don’t have an account.

That said, I don’t think the technologies and solutions you’ve proposed will take flight unfortunately.

I’ve been very curious about IPFS for the longest time, but it seems to fit into the same category as blockchain: beautiful technology that could solve a lot of problems, yet the barrier to entry vs just doing it the status quo way is too high.

If the general public can’t be bothered having their own Wordpress blog, the jump to running a server or writing a single HTML tag is far too difficult.

I’d love to see a fully not-for-profit social media organization whose only goal is the wellbeing of users

There is one reason left: copyright.

A true decentralized content sharing platform cannot prevent copyright infringement. That's the guarantee that we have built our entire society around. Copyright isn't even about artists making money anymore. It's the tool we use to litigate fraud. It's the tool we use to demand privacy. It's the foundation for content-moderation.

If we want a decentralized web, we need to leave copyright out of it. The greatest challenge for that is moderation. I advocate that we replace moderation with curation.