Why isn't Microsoft on this list?
i wonder how much these changes are costing Apple vs how much they make in Europe. would be interesting to know if there's an amount of compliance costs and complexity that could see Apple leave the EU market!
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.
China isn’t threatening Apple’s entire App Store model though.
The point of the EU is to protect consumers and small businesses, not the business of multi trillion dollar market leaders who engage in anti-competitive practices.
Maybe Apple should focus back on making money through innovation instead of coasting on rent seeking.
If EU is so good at promoting innovation and competition, why couldn’t they compete at all in hardware, software, and AI?
If they’re so good at dissuading gate keepers, then why is LVMH everywhere and so dominant in luxury goods? Why is it that every single glasses shop in every mall is owned by Luxottica no matter the brand.
The truth is that EU is not good at promoting competition. They’re good at preventing innovation. They’re good at protectionist policies.
How many more cookie prompts do people have to click because of idiotic EU laws?
Cookie prompts is the best example of bad faith compliance. Please inform yourself and don't spread this narritive further.
I am once again posting the EU official site using cookie pop-ups https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en
The 3 types of first-party cookie we use are to: >(...) >gather analytics data (about user behaviour).
Well they do collect user data using third party services. A bit disappointing, but banners seem to be necessary in this case.
https://gdpr.eu is an interesting site to visit on the matter, surely they have the best and most compliant implementation.
IMO if anything it's the opposite. EU could have made law to respect DNT header if they wanted privacy but they won't because it would hurt "their" companies. Instead they tried to be super vague and preferentially sue companies who they have qualms with and the companies which they could get money from.
My previous company hired a lawyer from EU for sorting out GDPR, and even according to him the law didn't prevented all things which hurts privacy like a normal person will assume.
why couldn’t they compete at all in hardware,
Like Arm? Or raspberry pi? (Both existed pre-exit)
software,
Too many companies to list.
and AI?
Like Mistral?
How many more cookie prompts do people have to click because of idiotic EU laws?
It's up to the companies. Every time you see a banner it means the company values selling your information more than pissing you off. We could have no banners right now.
I recommend the article “Facing reality about the EU is a core requirement for good management”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39602417
They kind of do with WeChat.
Example?
Anyone can make an app like WeChat with mini programs inside. No one has exceeded because people in the west simply don’t want that ui.
Virtually all Meta and Google services are blocked in China. Only Apple has significant consumer presence (and manufacturing) there.
Not for a lack of trying (at least on the google side). Took google getting hacked and IP stolen to fully move out of china
The EU is a huge market of people with deep pockets, I conjecture the break even point is not anywhere on the horizon.
At some point control of one's own business future balances out a certain level of profit.
I also wonder if personel/talents/headcount to handle all that crap can become an issue. VPs (CEOs even) distracted with compliance etc.
When all they need to do for compliance is to enable EU users to install apps without Apple as a middle-man then not much in the way of "personell/talents/headcount to handle all that crap" is actually necessary. What's costing them resources (and eventually money in the form of fines) is not complying.
You are vastly oversimplifying the issue. It’s not like there’s a bit that Apple can flip to just let EU citizens sideload apps.
I’d argue you’re vastly over complicating it.
There’s already mechanisms to side load, and install IPAs..
Why would it be more complicated?
Ones crap is anothers feature.
Have you seen how much they all bend over backwards for China?
Meta doesn’t. Their products have never been available in China.
Probably because the Chinese market is already full of Chinese social media companies. How do they expect to compete if they enter? It's not 2004 anymore where starting a social media on Harvard campus was a big ticket.
As far as I know, only Apple and Microsoft operate in China.
At least iCloud is run by a third party and not Apple (GCBD). Similar to how Blizzard does with their games and why World of Warcraft disappeared over night. Important distinction to make when it comes to privacy and security (there’s none) and how Apple washes their hands clean while keeping the Chinese government happy.
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.
Android is already the dominant mobile OS in Europe by market share. Why would quality increase by going from dominant to more dominant?
Companies might decide to stop bothering with ios apps altogether, which could have an effect in USA as well eventually.
Two things: iOS has been eating into Android marketshare in Europe since 2019:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/639928/market-share-mobi...
However, more importantly, iPhone users have more disposable income [1][2]. So, if Apple would pull from the EU, all those iPhone users with a lot of disposable income would be in the market for Android phones and apps, creating a lot of opportunities in the Android market.
[1] There are various studies, e.g.: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/iphone-users-spend-...
[2] If you look at the most popular Android phones, they are often dominated by cheaper models, e.g. Samsung's A lineup. See e.g. current Android usage in France: https://www.appbrain.com/stats/top-android-phones-tablets-by...
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
We had 50 years of freedom
More “Wild West gold rush” than “freedom”
I think for many people that is the same ;). But I agree with your differentiation.
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, ...)
This is an odd reading of the history, tbh. The US regulators were generally more active on competition in the industry in the 90s than today; see the Microsoft and Intel investigations, for instance.
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.
New players emerging in the high-end smartphone space? You seriously believe that a comparable player to *Apple* is going to emerge any time in the next decade? Lol
Normally, no. But in the hypothetical situation of Apple leaving the EU up for grabs for new players, maybe.
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.
They mass hired too many unqualified people in 2021.
Think about all of the innovations those terminated people will bring to the market when they are no longer shackled in golden handcuffs.
Did the math, 24.5% of their global 2023 revenue.
And Apple's iPhone market share in Europe (yes, the EU is not Europe) has been steadily growing since 2019:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/639928/market-share-mobi...
Apple would be crazy for leaving the EU. Even the suggestion would probably lead to a shareholder revolt and the removal of some executives.
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.
You also have to consider how much it costs to actually comply. The board would probably much rather Apple comply and keeps selling iPhones and services in the EU vs not getting ANY profits at all from their currently second largest region in the world.
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.
And that would literally mean that the probe was warranted.
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.
Throwaway account for obvious reasons:
As a SRE SWE at Alphabet/Google, I find this assumed-guilt and assumed-lack-of-giving-a-shit irritating.
For the past several quarters we have spent a significant proportion of our effort on DMA compliance, right down to the infrastructure & RPC level. It is top priority mandate level stuff and getting absolute top billing from managers and TLs in planning and day-to-day activities.
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.
Don't get me wrong, I think the DMA is a good thing and it is totally the right thing to do. But this assumption that Google don't care and are ignoring it or whatever is just exasperating when myself and many other good engineers are working their hearts out to implement it.
</rant>
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.
You've very clearly never participated in an audit if you believe this. Audits are a ton of work, to prove in excruciating detail that things actually work the way you claim they do.
I have participated in such audits (and actually worked on things like GDPR compliance on rather large corporations). Yes, they're a ton of work. But that's what the job is, sorry if now developers need to work to undo anticompetitive crap they pulled in their products.
You're again assuming remediation work. Just the work required for an audit that you end up passing can take weeks.
Yes, I know. What of it? Comes with the size and money.
Just like when we were building medical stuff that came with it's own audits and how banking also does.
Cost of earning all that sweet cash.
I'm sure a trillion dollar company can manage to do that. Why should the EC trust these companies? My local government will go through any plan I make for modifications to my house. Why should trillion dollar companies get a pass? Because some engineer will feel bad about a probe that is a mile over their head?
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.
I book flights with Google Flights. It’s way better than anywhere else. I’d be annoyed if it isn’t the #1 result when I do a search for flights.
I book flights with Google Flights and other options (Kayak, my credit card’s travel portal, airlines directly), and Google Flights is kind of mid. It’s annoying that Google pushes it to the #1 result for lots of searches that it shouldn’t be.
I guess it depends on what you look for. I haven't bought a flight in a while, but I just looked at kayak and google flights for comparison. Google flights is a much simpler, more direct UI, and it feels a lot more responsive. In particular, kayak violated one of my huge personal pet peeves: page content moving around while it's loading.
That said, the gap is a lot smaller than it used to be. There was a time in the past where google flights was light years ahead of priceline, kayak, etc. in bloat, bugginess, responsiveness, etc. That gap has shrank considerably and it's more a matter of preference today.
I don’t see what is better about google flights. Sometimes I get the cheapest price on the airline’s website and sometimes on Expedia. Google flights’ price is almost always the same as the airline website’s price.
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
Sorry for being cynical, but from your message it sounds like you were working hard with regulators to comply as little as possible not to get sued. Which makes sense - I mean it was probably just business - but doesn't mean you were not being "your evil selves" (whoever your were).
Maybe I'm underestimating the complexity at scale, but I've read GDPR in original (it's not long), and the intentions and what's required seem pretty clear. I only have practical experience with it from a regulator side, though.
Genuinely not, though I can understand that you're cynical. How do you prove intention anyway?
As context with these kind of regulations it's not always bad for the big players when it gets implemented across the market. Many smaller companies will not have the regulatory bandwidth to figure out compliance, and as the regulation acts as a way to level or cap what everyone can do, it's not like you will lose customers to someone else.
Complexity was mostly either definitional, e.g. some markets (ironically Germany's big publishers in particular) were absolutely convinced that almost anything they did on their sites fell under legitimate interest, even though we tried to convince them many times that would not fly.
Or it would be on specifics such as how many non-essential data providers can you reasonably ask a user to review? Keep the number too small and you'll be accused of favoring the big players, make it too big and you'll swamp users. Who decides?
By the way I agree that GDPR is pretty well written. Just that implementing these type of things and getting stakeholders to agree to it can be extremely complex. Fun days
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.
Thinking of your last paragraph it's rather interesting to see how, when corporations hurt people, a lot of people just say "it's business, they're making profit"... but when it comes to these laws, it gets strangely emotional instead of just saying "well, it's business".
"past several quaters". The DMA entered force November 1. 2022.
There are multiple parts to it --
"The 2 May 2023, 6 months later, the regulation started applying and the potential gatekeepers had 2 months to report to the commission to be identified as gatekeepers. This process would take up to 45 days and after being identified as gatekeepers, they would have 6 months to come into compliance, at the latest the 6 March 2024.[8][32] From 7 March 2024, gatekeepers must comply with the DMA. [33]"
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
All sounds great. I'm quite curious what their objection to Apple's browser choice screen is though:
The Commission is concerned that Apple's measures, including the design of the web browser choice screen, may be preventing users from truly exercising their choice of services within the Apple ecosystem, in contravention of Article 6(3) of the DMA.
Looks relatively reasonable to me:
https://preview.redd.it/ios-17-4-db1-new-default-browser-pop...
Is it because they always put Safari at the top and then try to randomise in a mix of browsers most people won't have heard of?
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.
Isn't having the 5 top choices always be the same kind of the same violation?
It entrenches the big guys.
The idea that any of this is or ever was a problem to the end user is laughable honestly, this is political theater. End users want to be able to browse the web, that’s the point of a web browser. Most of them are based on the same underlying technology and implementations. Throwing around political power to force OS teams to spend engineering resources on the illusion of choice is actively harmful for basically zero benefit to the end user.
Indeed, outside Hackernews hardly any user cares about the browser.
However it becomes relevant once a dominating vendor uses the monopoly to limit the capabilities of the browser to benefit their app store etc. and that is hard to notice. For good competition the EU tries to limit that early.
Yeah, and what they’ve done here will result in a Chrome monopoly everywhere. They needed to break Chrome before going after Safari and Apple.
Apple really shouldn't have used a monopoly strategy to block another, more theoretical monopoly from happening.
And inside hackernews nobody cares what the outside people care about.
It's not a problem for the end user to be unable to pick which browser they want to use?
Speak for yourself, I would consider being forced into a single browser choice a huge problem, to the point that I will not buy a device that does it.
The fact that alternate browser engines were banned on iOS was indeed a huge problem, but I think the current legislation goes too far. As the GP said, many users won't care. I think trying to force them to care by presenting a randomized list of a dozen different options at setup time is misguided. I don't see the issue with merely having a default so long as there's an easy way to change it and Apple isn't applying any rules or restrictions to competing browsers that they don't apply to their own.
When Microsoft was made to do a browser choice screen for the EU in 2010 they had a two tier system and it seemed to go well with the EU. On one hand, sure - it is an advantage for the popular browsers. On the other hand the goal is more that the manufacturer not be using their position to force the browser so heavily not necessarily to put every Joe Schmoe Browser in front of the same number of eyes. From a practicality perspective it solves the main problem without becoming a complication in itself.
I can see that some people would think that, but it's a design that was converged on after several iterations and seems to have worked for both the regulators and the companies. I think both of the previous examples actually started with just enough entries for a single screen, and were later expanded to include more entries in a second tier.
From the user's perspective, having to make a choice from an unsorted list of hundreds or thousands of items would not work. That's why the regulators seem to accept the idea that not every product has the right to be on those choice lists, and not every listed product needs to be equally prominent. What's important is that the criteria are objective and don't give an unfair advantage to the platform owner.
From all the comments in the Reddit thread and from Apple's documentation it's entirely random.
Thanks, I was going just by the OP. Then I'd have to imagine that the problem is with the "not now" button.
Safari is not hardcoded to the first position, it is fully randomized.
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)
Is it Safari first then randomized names? It doesn't look alphabetical order to me.Chrome doesn't even show up, Firefox is almost hidden.
I don't know how the list is generated. But as others have pointed out, there seems to be established precedent that hardcoding Safari first would not be compliant. And alphabetizing would create bad incentives (Calling dibs on "Aardvark" as a browser name, BTW).
The problem I see with randomization is that with all the browsers that are skins on Chromium nowadays, this would be likely to steer users into a Chromium based browser.
Calling dibs on "Aardvark" as a browser name, BTW
It's ok, I'm naming mine after Aachen
AABrowser is mine.
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.
More:
- you can't uninstall Safari. The DMA clearly requires Apple to allow uninstalling it.
- the Share Sheet for in-app webview privileges Safari (Safari-specific "Add to Reading List", "Add Bookmark" at the top) regardless of default browser.
- apps with in-app webviews can roll out a custom engine, but otherwise it uses WebKit regardless of default browser. It should obviously use the webview facility provided by the default browser, if it offers one.
- confusing to change defaults. There's no central "Default Apps" screen in Settings. You have to go in the Settings app, scroll way down to a given browser, and then you can change the default. So the default browser setting is weirdly treated as an app-specific setting rather than a system setting.
- If Safari is not the default, you can change your default browser within "Settings.app >> Safari". If Safari is the default, you can't change your default browser there at all. Whereas the default browser selection menu will always be shown in the Settings.app submenu of third-party browsers.
The default browser has no technical ability in iOS (currently) to supply an in-app component to replace WKWebView or SFSafariViewController, and frankly as an app developer I shudder at the idea of having to test our use of in-app browsers against every browser, every release.
I think that in-app browsers that are solely used to render the app, and not separately accessible web pages, should be considered an implementation detail of the app. That also means that apps should be free to bring their own browser engine for that purpose (à la Electron). However, where apps provide access to web sites that are also accessible outside the app, the user should be able to configure the browser for that (possibly different from the system default). That should pose no particular problem for app developers, as those external web sites need to work under different browsers anyway.
“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.
Randomization is required by the regulation. Another instance of what a smart person wants out of a feature and what the EU wants being very different things.
It's being downvoted because randomizing something that is by its nature chronological is very obviously different from randomizing the order of something where you want to explicitly avoid giving the impression that one takes priority over another.
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.
But users are demanding choice in browsers, and they are picking the least private, most pro-advertising one en masse! What’s its biggest benefit? It offers a suite of native-replacement, in-the-standards-process-but-not-finalized APIs so developers can write slow, bloated applications once and run them everywhere! This is what users want!
Are those real browsers or just reskins of Safaris inner web components?
For now they're all WebKit. Apple now allows other browser engines to be used but they'll probably take a while to come out, if ever.
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?
It's a good idea to regulate and examine companies with over a certain share of the market and over a certain size since it's almost guaranteed they will abuse their market position one way or another.
These companies pose a general threat to the proper functioning of a healthy market due to network effects and compatibility issues, things that regulators should always be working to counteract.
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.
I don't think that's necessarily the answer. Often these things arise out of market failure.
For instance Apple couldn't sell its ARM processors even if it wanted to because ARM's licence agreement with Apple forbids it. The problem is that the market for CPUs lacks choice. Hopefully RISC-V will alleviate that, eventually.
For instance Apple couldn't sell its ARM processors even if it wanted to because ARM's licence agreement with Apple forbids it.
First time i hear that. Isn't Apple a founding member and can do whatever it wants?
No they sold their ARM stock decades ago, they have no special rights.
They bought an architectural licence, but those always come with limitations, or you just don't get one. See Qualcomm's litigation against ARM.
Okay, but hell will still freeze over before Apple sells even a resistor they make to a 3rd party. Let alone a CPU.
It’s about choice. I want a tightly integrated experience on my iPhone and Mac. I don’t want regulators as designers.
iPhone and Macs own a small fraction of their markets around the world. Clearly there are alternatives and you don’t need to choose an iPhone or a Mac.
It’s about choice. I want a tightly integrated experience on my iPhone and Mac. I don’t want regulators as designers.
if you are from outside EU then you are fine for now, you will not have this freedoms.
If you are from EU then keep calm, nobody will force you to use a better application or service then the default ones from Apple. Side loading was available on Android and facebook Messenger and whatsapp are still on the official store despite all the FUD from Apple extremist fanboys, you can continue sitting inside the Apple walls.
Even so Apple shouldn't be able to use its position to disadvantage users. I believe being able to run whatever software you want on the hardware you buy is a basic right. If you want to forgo that, fine, but you should have the choice.
The fact that they have a small market share is not relevant when they have many millions of users.
This kind of thing leads to oligopolies that disadvantage consumers, which is what we have with phone app stores on Android and iPhone.
This comment is pretty ignorant of the history of computing.
Apple tried to allow competition in their ecosystem. And all that happened is that vendors like Power Computing went straight for Apple's most profitable markets and nearly bankrupted the company.
The only reason Apple is successful is because people like the console-esque experience of having one vendor do everything.
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.
I think you can replace "can be" with "are".
If Google, Apple or Meta feel like what you're saying is not in their interest for the public to hear it, you just... can't say it. Apple can remotely disable your iPhone. Google can remove you from search results. Meta can nuke your social media presence from orbit.
This is by no means an endorsement of the guy because he's a complete piece of shit, but the one thing Alex Jones got right during his temper tantrum when he got deplatformed is that getting deplatformed is not a thing that only happens to people you don't like; theoretically, and in fact quite regularly, large multinationals can simply decide that someone should cease to exist in the public sphere, and they can legally disappear people more effectively than the CIA. Today it's anti vax loonies and racist conspiracy theorists, tomorrow it's folks reporting on Apple's Foxconn factories in China or Meta's content moderation staff or Google's spying on people's private communications.
We live in a world where we've created the marketplace of ideas, which necessarily means that those who hold the marketplace have to give everyone a stall, almost regardless of how vile their ideas are. Not doing so is a great way for large corporations to silence their critics on a scale never before imagined. I'm not exaggerating when I say these three companies can erase you from existence. Losing your Google account, Apple ID, and Meta accounts all at once would be an excellent way to prevent a corporate dissident from accessing the info they need to keep these companies accountable. It's terrifying, and it's also a mundane kind of terrifying that requires what might seem like overly aggressive government regulation, but I really don't see another way forward.
And before someone comes in and says something to the effect of "well, isn't all of the above still true if you replace Google, Apple and Meta with $COUNTRY?" and of course the answer is yes, but at the very very least, countries are theoretically accountable to their citizens. Corporations are effectively accountable to no one, which is certainly worse.
in fact quite regularly, large multinationals can simply decide that someone should cease to exist in the public sphere, and they can legally disappear people more effectively than the CIA
This also happens jointly, I think. E.g. Russell Brand after sexual assault allegations came out was demonetised on YouTube following a letter from the House of Commons media committee to YouTube. I can't be bothered to find an exact article, but Rumble got the same letter, but didn't comply, in this BBC article[0].
The answer here is not necessarily for the govts to force big $$ platforms to act like neutral carriers, but for govt to enact and encourage policies to stop/slow the centralization and monopolization of information and entertainment around centralized $$ platforms, and to prevent such behemoths from sucking all the air out of the room in the first place.
(Which, frankly, includes not using said platforms for their own communications. Not sure why Twitter is treated like a generic newswire and announcement system by schools, community groups, governments, etc ... after everything that's happened.)
That's the vision we had of the Internet in the 90s: decentralized, publish your own content and link-out to other's. Not sure why we let that get derailed into the closed boxes we have today.
Asshats like Alex Jones or Russel Brand wouldn't even be a concern and we wouldn't be talking about "deplatforming" as a thing really if the "platform" hadn't grown so unreasonably big and powerful in the first place. The Age Of Narcissism is entirely our own fault.
If you build a huge giant megaphone and leave it lying in the middle of the playground, inevitably some jerk is going to "misuse" it.
As a non-American looking in from outside:
"De-platformed" and "cancel culture" seem to be the names given when the it's done by a left-associated corporations or governments.
"Black-listed", "not renewed for another season", "banned from VISA/PayPal etc. payment providers due to ToS violations", and "violating public decency" seem to be the names for the same actions when taken by right-associated corporations or governments.
(${team}-associated because this is about perceptions rather than any actual political preference).
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.
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
I dont think anybody expects them to reduce their market share. Thats what competition is for.
In the hypothetical that the OP shared, they mentioned scrutiny for firms above a certain market share.
Yes, because you can't abuse (substantial) market share unless you have it.
It's like having a gun. Perfectly fine unless you go around threatening people with it.
Market share is fine, honestly earned. Abuse of market share or product is not.
You might make a world beating product and achieve 100% market share. That's great!
If you then use that market share, or your product, to resist competition, or if that happens naturally, so that by doing nothing you are guaranteed 100% market share, then regulators have to step in to ensure a healthy market going forward.
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.
Actually it's better than that: medium corp will go against buying small player to avoid being subjected to DMA ! It will slow or stop growth because it will lower or cancel the advantage of being so big as having no competitor
In the end, markets will optimize to have 2 or 3 big players in each fields to avoid that kind of problem...
These rules already exist, it's just enforcing them that is the issue.
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.
The best thing the EU can do is demonstrate that there are other ways to do things, often as a counterpoint to the US.
Both a large liberal democracies (for now) but they live on opposite sides on the (center) left/right spectrum.
There is a real benefit to humanity with competing ideas being put into practice at scale.
I love the DMA. But if you have to launch a long, sprawling compliance investigation the minute the law enters in force, it might mean you didn’t write it with enough precision…
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.
Malicious compliance appears more focused on increasing the pain to the point that users will demand the law be overturned.
That's because management of these companies is all based in the US, and they apparently don't understand that these tactics just don't work at all in the EU.
It convinced me not to buy a new Iphone because Apple is acting like a big baby.
Their campaign is effective when people like OP say they are innocent victims of regulation which must be tossed
The presumption of innocence shouldn't be extended to trillion dollar companies. You don't get there by being wholesome.
My statement only applies to the court of public opinion, not legal courts.
Doesn't it just mean the companies affected are flaunting the law?
I think you mean flouting (ignoring or defying) the law.
Flaunting means to display or show off, like going to the beach in a bikini after working so hard to get in shape.
Well they kinda do that. "Look at what we can do, normal laws don't apply to us"
That’s flaunting their sense of impunity though, not flaunting the law itself which they didn’t draft.
Wow, I've said flaunting (the law, rules, et c.) the whole time. Thanks!
"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
Awesome!
https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/1772207590212063397
~~
I wish they would also push forward with cookie consent pop-up - 1) enforce easy reject (as it should be but dumb websites hide it away, which is illegal) and better yet 2) enforce it on a browser config level like we have do-not-track config but should be with 3 levels and enforceable.
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!
A browser setting would be binary - yes or no.
A per site consent dialog, with per "partner" option, with easy to use "Decline all" / "Allow all" buttons, is much more granular. Maybe you're OK with a random community website "tracking" you because you know it makes them more money from ads; but you're not OK with Meta tracking you across the whole web.
Other settings are per site and this one can be as well - you can select "reject all", "accept all" (or "reject non-essential") and be done with that... or use "ask each time" like with mic/camera and there would be small, tiny, browser-ui pop-up in usual place...
A browser setting would be binary - yes or no.
Many other browser settings are specific per site. This can also be.
The biggest browser manufacturer is not interested in making it easy to opt out of tracking cookies for some reason, wonder why that is…
And because of that it should be _forced_ to do so...
They're literally working on a feature to disable third party coookies by default:
https://blog.google/products/chrome/privacy-sandbox-tracking...
How does that fit in with your conspiracy theorizing?
should just be a browser setting that has to be abided by
It should be a browser setting that is enforced by the browser.
If I open something in private mode, or use the multi-account containers extension (Firefox), cookies are isolated or forgotten without any involvement from the remote party. The site doesn't need to know or care.
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.
The supporters don't seem to understand how much of their lifetime gets wasted with clicking through those popups. This should be a once for all setting in the browser that the websites can access.
It’s called uBlock
281? Peanuts, try 1,609: https://www.allrecipes.com/
Cookies in 2024 is kinda irrelevant, more important is to prevent fingerprinting of veriest kind (CSS, fonts, GPU, screen size etc).
They're also on the way out because Google is moving to turn Chrome into a massive tracking black box on it's own.
There's no need to use cookie-based fingerprinting if you control ~97% of the browser market and you can just install the tracking tools directly in the software used and keep them active with maliciously crafted (dark pattern) popups.
The actual law is about any kind of personal data, including but not limited to fingerprinting web/app users, which can be associated with a real human.
European fear of harms caused by malicious use of databases of personal data go back to actual harms caused by such databases when they were still paper-based and the first transistors had not even been demonstrated.
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...
I'd say that Firefox would be even on board with the idea (weird they haven't proposed it themselves).
Besides - EU could create a law saying: "website should obey browser setting and if such setting is not present allow user to consent to tracking"
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...
This sounds awesome! Comission is again a step ahead ;)
Simpler rules on cookies: the cookie provision, which has resulted in an overload of consent requests for internet users, will be streamlined. The new rule will be more user-friendly as browser settings will provide an easy way to accept or refuse tracking cookies and other identifiers. The proposal also clarifies that no consent is needed for non-privacy intrusive cookies that improve internet experience, such as cookies to remember shopping-cart history or to count the number of website visitors.
basically what I mentioned before
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...
Imagine how much time will be wasted to comply with crazy demands like making the Photos app uninstallable which help basically nobody.
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.
Honestly, hard disk space is cheap. The thing that bothers me is when e.g. Norton is naggy and pops up UIs to make me interact with it despite opting out over time. Things like the Photos app sit there and occupy space but zero percent of my brain and perhaps some gigs of storage I personally am not missing.
The Apple Music app makes my 32GB iPad unusable. It takes up 10GB of my 32GB, despite having 0 songs downloaded. I have no idea what takes up that space (album art alone can't account for 10GB). There's no option to clear that "Documents & Data" cache in the "iPad Storage" settings menu. Uninstalling the Music app does not remove this data. I could reset the iPad but I can't be bothered. I'm also stuck with Safari because I can't afford Chrome's 200MB, and with Mail because the Gmail app is 500MB.
Something is very wrong with your iPad storage. My Apple Music (also mostly unused) takes up a grand total of 28 MB, of which 23.5 MB is the app.
Honestly, hard disk space is cheap.
Not on Apple's laptops. They also markup hundreds of dollars for +8 GB of RAM, which probably costs them 10-20 USD.
hard disk space is cheap
Are we referring to the same Apple company right now?
This is apples to oranges - the stock Photos app isn’t shareware/demo ware etc. it’s a basic photo gallery app with a really solid search feature, and it integrates into the camera app just liked you’d expect on any other mobile OS.
And just for both of you, you can indeed tap and hold the Photos app and then choose “Remove Application”. I’d be surprised if this did anything beyond hiding the app, and also the Photos app is completely innocuous imo.
Norton preinstalled on a Windows XP machine is more like if your phone came with Weather Underground preinstalled.
The commenter apparently can't tell the difference between a best in class photo management app made by the creators of Aperature with bloatware. I don't fault them: most users can't either which is why giving them a "choice" is extremely overrated!
Your reply is a non-sequitur bordering on rude.
It is also ironic because the EU-mandated browser choice screen offers users such stalwart top browsers such as "Aloha", "Web@Work", "You.com AI Search and Browse". Bloatware lovers rejoice!
It is extremely difficult to make someone understand something, when their salary depends on their not understanding it.
This is HN and surveillance capitalism rules the internet, of course we will see commenters here whose wealth depend on it.
Now I will garrison for the next brigade... :^)
People buy Apple products because they don’t have that crap. What are you talking about?
If there’s one company that DOESN’T bloat your computing device with worthless junk from third parties, it’s Apple.
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.
I’m sorry, but what was that? The economy will collapse due to bottle cap directives? You know that these arguments have been thrown around by anti-EU interests since the 90s and its never ever panned out
"step off the multi-billion dollar corporation, bully!"
seriously though, it never ceases to amaze me the level people repeat corporate propaganda and conflate corporate success with their own self-worth. These companies literally spend billions in lobbying the government to "influence" their decisions and run rigorous ad campaigns that smear any sentiment that isn't vehemently pro-billionaire, pro-corpoate, pro big-tech etc... so its not all that surprising that people fall for it but it is truly astounding.
conflate corporate success with their own self-worth
I think that's what happens when you become a stockholder.
not understanding that the government apparatus is the most powerful and dangerous institution of them all
OK, but we can vote government out at regular intervals, meanwhile we're supposed to just accept anything corporations do because... they're not government? Cherry picking and misrepresenting EU regulations doesn't make your argument any clearer.
But where your argument really fails is that you don't really have one beyond ideological claptrap, taken solely on faith, or perhaps with specious arguments about out of control government and how markets and corporations are innately good and cannot be "interfered" with, lest the economy and "innovation" collapse. Please give us all a break.
Business don't get started and fail not because of government regulation, but because of huge corporations that crush competition, withhold access, promote incompatibility, etc. They use their size to ignore regulation and warp markets to their benefit.
Of course not all corporations are bad but some are, and that's why we have regulations.
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").
Are you seriously asking why Apple offers its users a built-in app to view the photos taken with their phone? You'd prefer if users had to choose and install a photo management app before they could take a picture?
Imagine how much time could have been saved if they had just made Photos a normal app from the beginning?
In reality it would play out a lot more like the Web Apps episode: if the barrier to entry for any new idea was it had to meet the EU's extensive list of arbitrary rules, most new ideas would never be realized. I guess it's time saved, but not in the sense you think.
I wish Discord was affected by the DMA so we could get some kind of official interoperability.
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.
i was there, i was developing on those systems.
i think you're romanticising things.
the whole situation with interoperability was not sustainable, as evidenced by the fact that it was dropped by every player as soon as possible.
one of the reasons why it was not sustainable was that the standards at that time were conceived for a different era, and everyone wanted special features not available in the standards.
it does seem like we're having much better success with interoperability nowadays, but only because the standards are much better today.
No, people left because a large enough percentage of their friends and coworkers did. That's how walled gardens work: exclusivity demands participation.
you're describing the "network effect". but it only happens once people actually move away from certain platforms. why did they move away? features that couldn't be implemented using a shared standard.
"move away" is a tenuous assertion. If someone puts the majority of new content on another platform, is that "moving away"? What if they only use the old platform once a week? What if they only use the new platform once a week, but that's when an important discussion happens?
No one moved away from email.
Players always drop it to trap their users to their service.
See how google closed hangouts to being able to communicate with other XMPP servers, or how slack dropped IRC and XMPP when they felt they had enough adoption to be able to do that.
So in the beginning you want interoperability so it's "just the same", then you drop it so the users are stuck.
Players always drop it to trap their users to their service.
i understand what you're writing and i agree. but in my case all our enterprise clients were demanding features that had us circumventing interoperability since the features they were asking for would never make it into the standards.
i think you're romanticising things.
I don't think I am. As a user, I could use Pidgin or Gaim and talk to my friends across every service I used. This only stopped when companies started consciously working against these efforts. Discord explicitly and openly banned third party clients. They didn't have to do so. It has nothing to do with standards and everything to do with companies becoming aggressively and openly hostile towards anything that isn't directly under their control.
You could use almost every messaging service with a third party client
Not because of open-standards - but because that was when IM protocols were straightforward to reverse-engineer and interop with, and this was before mass-adoption of SSL/TLS (let alone certificate-pinning).
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?
1) It used to work that way. You didn't even have to put in special effort. It takes more effort to do what these companies do today to ensure nobody can interface with their service.
2) Apparently we need regulation to make companies do it today, and that will force these companies to allow interoperability.
What would it take to get gcc to export its AST so that greater interoperability could be achieved with other FOSS packages (like Emacs)?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8861360 (one of the indexes of the issue)
Because one day We The People will pass Apple Laws which levy a 100% final point of sale sales tax on products (containing at least one universal machine) and services which reduce owner sovereignty.
If a product could conceivably do X and steps were taken in R&D to keep it from doing X (not that it wasn't implemented, but was specifically designed to prevent owners from doing X even though otherwise it could if steps weren't taken), or if the product maker does not publish protocols, formats, standards, etc, or designs those with the intent to thwart interoperability; or if the owner is prevented from changing programming code on a universal machine regardless of the product's function (phone, PC, microwave, washer, blood sugar monitor, automobile) with well-known interface hardware and communication protocols; or anything else in this spirit I have missed, will be in violation of Apple Laws and must have a 100% final point of sale sales tax levied so that philosophically highly anti-Stallman products can't compete easily against near-Stallman compliant products.
Closed source proprietary software and hardware are huge national security problems. Even if USGOV can sign an NDA to inspect source code and chip design, it's still a national security issue that you and I can't. It is a national security issue when decade-old idiot-TVs and idiot-cameras long out of software updates pwn computers and/or get turned into remote surveillance devices for digital voyeurs paying top dollar to collect private feeds into peoples' lives (don't ask).
Phew! I hate mobile keyboards!
Because clients expect it to?
Imagine if you had to own the same phone brand to call someone else…
What product do you work on? Let’s make that DMA as well.
I work on an opensource ssh server, so I don't think that it really matters if it were to somehow be affected by the DMA, as its an open standard and interoperates with opensource options, which hasn't killed the company I work for.
If discord cant compete with email because its too hard to comply with open standards, maybe that particular rent seeking chat app wasn't actually all that innovative
In turbulent times, the tallest grass gets chopped first.
But also, a few megacorps increasingly occupy increasingly numerous facets of lives of billions of people and should be carefully monitored so that they don't abuse their power.
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.
And I would appreciate it if those companies currently getting away with paying too little in taxes paid more, perhaps commensurate with the amount they benefit from existing infrastructure.
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?
Indeed, why would you avoid shortest straw, if the tallest grass gets chopped first?
I think he meant "The tallest blade of grass is the first to be mowed down", but that's not during "turbulent times", it's when you are mowing your lawn. I guess that's turbulent for the grass.
Now imagine if TTIP was signed, EU would most likely be forced to abolish DMA or GDPR altogether.
That is not a good thing.
A terrible thing in fact. We should instead hope for a trade treaty that abolishes the DCMA. It's policies like these that make it clear that the government only serves special interests and not the average voter.
I guess my bad for sounding ambiguous, of course it's very good that EU is not obliged to bow to US "investors".
Does someone know what the minimum fine is gatekeepers face? All sources I find only talk about the maximum fine of 10%
EDIT: Or maybe rather an expected fine, we saw with GDPR that the maximum fine isn't really used much, if at all.
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.
After “EU launches probes..” i was hoping to read planet names
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.
The web as designed by Tim Berners-Lee was a decentralized system where you could host a website and others could see it.
Google came along and made finding these websites much more convenient and accessible. Along the way Microsoft IE began using monopoly advantage to make the web in Microsoft’s image. It was a clunky unstandardized mess for many years as only Microsoft could officially push a standard. You could build for Netscape/Firefox, but you would be breaking 90% of your users due to undocumented and tailored code.
Now Google has the market share. The standards are much more aligned amongst the major players, and it would be a stretch to call it a monopoly. That’s the goal.
Google unofficially pushes the new browsers standards towards Google’s image, just as Microsoft had before. Just look at Chrome extensions for an example. It’s not a coincidence ad blockers are becoming weakling in the name of “security”.
Apple has their entrenched user base, solidifying with every iOS app unavailable to other ecosystems. Compound the issue when people have paid real money for useful apps that they don’t wish to sink the cost for.
It’s better than before, but companies will never have your best interests at heart. Profit is incentivized first, then product (including you).
A decentralized web is possible, we have the technology. There is no reason a static site server couldn’t be implemented with a proxy hiding feature, even using IPFS potentially. Large plates can still cache and serve data to get paid, but your data doesn’t have to be centralized.
Moreover, serving up a web server from your local machine could be as easy as opening a custom pinned tabbed and sharing it out. CRDTs and homomorophic tech open worlds of possibility with secure p2p applications at scale.
But this is not what a cloud provider wants. It is not the direction we are heading. We are trained to be paranoid (rightful so unfortunately), and cloud providers tout themselves as the panacea. In some ways they are, but at what cost?
We no longer trust the user to have a direct connection. All of your services should be on the cloud if you’re “enterprise” enough, and you’ll pay for it accordingly.
What I want to see: Governments recognize that the internet is a public utility at this point, and reduce the roadblocks to hosting your own data. Allow all GUA IPv6 addresses to be static if requested. Don’t allow carriers to give special preference to business accounts vs personal for static assignment. There is no technical reason for this if a customer requests it. We’re not running out of IPv6 addresses.
This fixes the STUN/TURN debacle created by NAT, and opens up the field for new possibilities. It also allows for real decentralized competition with cloud providers.
It used to be that I got excited about the random blog posts I could find. Simple HTML sites from interesting people, which I mostly get on Hacker News now. Search engines filled with ads and SEO/AI garbage only exist because of the profit structure and centralized control.
With ID verification a certainty due to AI advances, we’re going to be even more locked into these monopolistic systems. We need competition, and as long as they hold the search screen, we’re only going to move towards higher profits for them. Yet something tells me our governments have something to do with it. Data collection isn’t just profitable, it’s potent.
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.
The Commission is concerned that Alphabet's and Apple's measures may not be fully compliant as they impose various restrictions and limitations. These constrain, among other things, developers' ability to freely communicate and promote offers and directly conclude contracts, including by imposing various charges.
Oh that hurts Apple. "directly conclude contracts". That goes deep.
The most interesting thing here to me is this bit
Apple's new fee structure and other terms and conditions for alternative app stores and distribution of apps from the web (sideloading) may be defeating the purpose of its obligations under Article 6(4) of the DMA
because, well, yeah, that's exactly what they do! When Apple users complain about the DMA forcing Apple to allow other stores and sideloading they often predict that Meta and other nefarious corporations will launch their own distribution as the exclusive source of their popular or near-required apps in order to skirt Apple's privacy rules. That is a possibility (though it hasn't happened on Android), but I feel that the benefit of sideloading community-made apps that break Apple's rules by interoperating with services unofficially would more than offset any losses to privacy. However, as Apple's implementation stands the fees and agreements necessary to distribute apps would keep most FOSS or community-maintained apps from being distributed, while allowing rich bad actors an avenue of further abusing their users. It's the worst possible world; a free-for-all for rich corporations to distribute whatever garbage they want and no balancing pressure from unofficial apps keeping their behavior somewhat in check. Moving from a world where Apple gets to decide what code runs on your phone to one where anyone with sufficiently deep pockets makes the call. I hope that the EC finds that the spirit of the DMA is that users decide what runs on their phones, and that Apple's proposed changes are not in that spirit.
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
Also Windows is comparably open to other environments. The Windows and Xbox stores exist, but you are not forced to use them or does MS take a cut on software sold.
Only potential issue I see is bundling of Office 365 and Teams. And they already fixed that one. So they are the least worst player on market.
Can you install a game on an Xbox with no disc drive without using their store?
No... Same goes for Sony. And Nintendo just stopped running their OS on not their hardware... I hope EU gets around to fix those later...
That would destroy the console industry as we know it.
Consoles are sold at close to break even with money made back through game sales.
If EU allowed third party stores and stripped their commissions it would trigger a mass consolidation where Sony, Nintendo etc would buy developers, game engine vendors etc en masse and force exclusivity.
Indie developers in particular would have no way to compete. And consumers would be forced to buy multiple consoles.
I don't know how you arrive at those conclusions. None of this make sense to me. The thing you fear is already reality. Console manufacturers have always been trying to force exclusivity. Which they can because they own the store. For a long time exclusives were the only thing carrying console sales, and forcing customers to buy multiple consoles.
Why would anyone want to be bought? There would be nothing to gain for devs. No one would need to accept any deals to get on a platform since they wouldn't need to use the manufacturer's store. Currently the deal is "Money + Access to the platform". Third party stores would cut this deal down to just "Money". Thus exclusivity deals would get a lot more expensive for Sony, Nintendo etc. Thus they would be able to buy less "developers, game engine vendors etc en masse".
Indie devs would have a much easier time competing without having to bow to the gatekeepers demands. I really don't get your reasoning.
The info you're missing is: game dev companies already get bought.
The question you should answer is: how much would an unsubsidised console cost?
That is what i am saying. It already happens. Opening more markets makes it less attractive for games companies to accept getting bought, doesn't it? If manufactures had the money to buy all the devs on masse they would already. Third party markets would only lessen their negotiation power. Devs could just go somewhere else. Especially with your other point below.
More and they would sell less of them? Making it less attractive for game devs to develop for said console. So what am i missing?
Not really, unless it suddenly becomes easy to develop and market a game for all platforms. Pushing your code to a shop instead 3 shops won't be an amazing saving.
Well - if fewer consoles exist, each with 10 different store fronts you have to now push to, presumably that means games cost more, as they're selling fewer units, and (less important, but still painful) they have to figure out which store should have which integrations / price / deals/ etc.
(I'm not the person you replied to, but)
About as much as a gaming PC, because that's exactly what it is these days. Except actual gaming PCs of the same price would have lower TCO, since you don't need to pay for an Xbox Live/PSN subscription.
Gaming PCs should still cost a bit more, because:
1. they aren't sold in vast quantities with the same spec, and so supplier can't negotiate vast discounts
2. they often don't have games nearly as optimised for them, because different PCs have different configurations, so you need to buy much specs for the same performance
3. consoles likely factor in total procurement costs over the lifetime of the console, and so they can be cheaper initially and lower price more slowly than they lower costs, to recoup some of the deficit
However of course in practice if you can't subsidise your game console with game sales, then (2) and (3) probably vanish.
Things have pretty visibly been getting pushed away from exclusivity by the console makers. MS commits to bringing all first party Xbox games to PC and Sony has ported over a lot of its most popular titles as well.
Mandating consoles be opened up would destroy the console industry as we know it, but that would be a good thing - the only reason consoles were a good thing in the first place was because they were specialist devices that drove hardware innovation that simply wasn't feasible otherwise. Nowadays consoles aren't specialist hardware; they're PCs that have been slightly modified. The value proposition for consoles have almost nothing to do with new hardware capabilities like the N64 or PS3 promised (PS3 promised; the PS3's launch flopped due to Sony's arrogance and failure to cater to devs, not due to lack of power in the hardware itself - as later PS3 games demonstrate).
So suppose consoles were forced to open up - if Sony and Nintendo bought devs en masse, then 1) that sounds like an end-run and could easily open them up to a product-tying suit, 2) that would lose them tons of money, because now they're losing money on their hardware and their devs (because forcing exclusives loses more than half of your potential sales base), and 3) indies wouldn't give a shit, because Steam already exists and in fact could be one of those third-party stores that the EU specifically forced consoles to allow, in this hypothetical.
This wouldn't catch the industry completely flatfooted either, because back in the Windows 8 era Microsoft managed to scare Valve enough that they started investing in Linux as a backstop. The Steam Machines were a flop, but they've since released the Steam Deck to fill the portable console niche, and they've kept working on SteamOS and Big Picture mode to fill the gaming HTPC niche.
Also, you're claiming that Microsoft might buy Unreal Engine or Unity in order to force it to be Xbox-exclusive; that would bring the antitrust hammer down like nothing else. The only result of consequence in the 0.0002ns before the EU carpetbombs Redmond, would be a huge upsurge in suppport for Godot. Godot isn't ready for primetime just yet (especially in 3D) and games can't practically switch engine mid-development, but people are already on edge from Unity's recent "charge per download" (scandal? controversy? worrying incident? whatever you call it.)
Also, there are entire markets where game consoles don't have all that much penetration. China, in particular, who had banned consoles entirely until 2015, and restricted them until at least 2018. Convincing the Chinese market to buy even one console, let alone multiple, is unrealistic and platform holders know it.
Not just that. They're a standard spec that people build to, and wring performance out of, and consult to game/engine manufacturers, and they sponsor tournaments and do marketing. They're also sold below cost, both because they can order in bulk, but also because they can assume future components will be cheaper for the same spec, and they might be able to lower their internal costs eventually.
You can already buy a PC and play games on it. Consoles are an additional thing you can buy, and removing them removes choice.
It won't be this simple. It'll just be better support on Microsoft platforms, and cross-play between PC and Xbox, to drown out Steam a little and Playstation a lot.
Instead of just raising the price of the console so it makes a profit?
The EU can't fix what isn't broken. They can break what's working, perhaps, but I doubt they'll do it as the results would be too obviously bad in this case.
My real point is in asking: why are people not allowed to sell what they want, without massive fines coming their way (that don't come the way of others doing what they do)?
AFAIK, MSFT still takes 12% of PC game sales in the windows store, and 30% of sales in the xbox store.
Which is fine because there is ample competition on Windows and MS does very little to hamper it (as far as the DMA is concerned).
Apple would also be allowed to charge whatever they want in the app store if there were actual competition on the platform.
Since there isn't they have to play by the rules.
In store yes, on platform no. Like Steam makes what hundreds of millions with no cut to MS.
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.
Not tryiing to be argumentative, rather I geenuinely have a serious question.
But doesn't MS gatekeep xbox?
They do, but Xbox isn't considered a large enough market to be considered a gatekeeper affected by the DMA. None of the major console makers are.
The platform must have any of the following to be a DMA gatekeeper:
* Market capitalization of at least €75 billion.
* More than €7.5 billion turnover from EEA residents.
* At least 45 million customers in EEA.
* At least 4.5 million business customers in EEA.
Once any of those criteria are met for 3 years, they qualify as a Gatekeeper. While the gaming market is massive, any individual console platform still sits pretty comfortably below those criteria. You can find the customer number by googling around a bit - Xbox only has around 3 million active customers if I'm not mistaken (counted by Xbox Live accounts that were active in the past year).
A platform truly needs to be collosal to be considered a Gatekeeper. This law is specifically for the large platforms, not small fry.
This seems very low given:
Mind that Xbox is much smaller outside the US and the UK compared to the other console makers.
From the top of my head, the percentage counts for Europe in console market share are around 50/40/10 (Nintendo/Sony/Xbox).
So yes, they probably have 120 million MAUs globally, but the overwhelming majority of those will be coming from the US, where Xbox controls about half the console market. (Just for completeness sake: Xbox has almost no presence in Asia, South America or Africa - their failures in Asia are well documented and Xbox does no advertising whatsoever in South America whilst the African gaming market isn't large enough to be worth considering since there are other priorities there). And of course, those users aren't considered for EU legislation since the US isn't part of the EEA.
Interesting enough, back in the ps3/ps4 days everyone in my corner of Eastern Europe seemed to have gone for an xbox (and maybe even an xbox 360).
In the past few years, the xboxes were always in stock while people were joining waiting lists and lotteries * for the PS5.
* One large electronics chain actually had a lottery for the PS5 preorders at launch, because they weren't getting enough to cover what was already paid for! Some lucky people got a PS5 the rest got their money back :)
Every generation has the "most piracy friendly console" and that one often does quite well, for that and other reasons.
The Xbox was king there for awhile.
That too. I guess people have got used to paying for games now and are picking the console based on exclusives/general experience.
In my mind the xbox is for dudebro shooters and the playstation is for original, creative games. Things may have changed from the original xbox but it's too late for me.
This is not really Xbox, but also Minecraft, Roblox, windows game pass etc, and it is for the whole world.
Xbox the console is almost non existent among users and in stores here in Europe, it's all Nintendo and PlayStation
Xbox is rather unimportant in the EU. https://www.vgchartz.com/article/456571/ps5-vs-xbox-series-x...
I believe the threshold for DMA is 45m MAU inside the EU.
I wonder if the monetary values will be regularly adjusted for inflation. If not, then it’s only a matter of time, waiting for money to be devalued and then the platforms qualify.
As far as I know game consoles live in a slightly different legal space where there's no assumption that they are supposed to be "open" systems.
Nope, they're just not big enough to be covered by the relevant parts of the DMA. Only "gatekeepers" are.
You can? Last I tried I couldn't remove Edge, could not change search engine used in the Windows search to anything other than Bing, every new windows update would default install new apps like Candy Crush and Amazon Prime I never wanted, and so on, and disabling Windows telemetery seems impossible without registry hacks. Ever installed a new Win11? Riddled with dark pattern UX to deceive you into extra telemetry.
The way MS did this was kind of dodge but fits the letter of the law.
On a new install of Windows 11, if you select an EU region, you will have the options to remove things like edge in the OS. You can move off that region because this flag is set only on install. If you install with a non-eu region, you don't have access to those options.
I think they only allow all those things in the EU, and only in a very recent update.
It’s hard to buy windows without buying Teams along with it, that’s how they crushed slack.
That's easy. I think you mean it's hard to buy _Office_ without buying Teams, which is true.
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.
Not at all. The EU announced just days ago that they're investigating MS Entra+365
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/22/eu_antitrust_microsof...
They started an investigation on 365+Teams a year ago:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...
And Microsoft complied by unbundling Teams in the EEA:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-unbundle-teams-...
and late last year, the EU asked Teams rivals whether they still thought there was an issue:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/microsoft-rivals-asked-...
whilst similar, an antitrust investigation is different than this one. Microsoft should be on both lists.
They are "on both lists". The DMA is about platform gatekeeping, and the EU did designate Microsoft a gatekeeper with Windows.
Microsoft's DMA changes include allowing Edge to be uninstalled, interoperability in Search and Widgets, asking users for consent before syncing content through the connected Microsoft account, and more strictly respecting browser defaults.
Lots of governments in the EU uses Linux and non-Microsoft alternatives.
I'm guessing the EU is focused on consumer, not B2B focused companies
Citation needed as they say. Even if it's true that's it more than 0, my estimate would be far in excess of 90% (of governmental employees who do their work inside of the Microsoft ecosystem).
But your other point about not focusing on B2B is probably more true. However recent stuff like the cloud egress fees (EU Data ACT) shows that they do care about B2B sometimes at least.
Not suggesting this is the reasoning, but interestingly same is true of Amazon which powers a lot of gov infrastructure.
For Amazon, they’ve been unable to enmesh themselves in the same way, and with the EU DATA act passed, I’d assume they’d make quick work of the egress fees which are the main barrier towards multi-cloud architectures.
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.
Microsoft has been through this before. EU windows has a browser choice screen and you can buy it without windows media player (I think for the same price or darn near as with). Microsoft is good at painting in or near the lines, from decades of practice. They probably also respond to new regulations without an excess of foot dragging.
Also, they weren't able to turn their dominant position in desktops into anything in mobile.
Its simple: Microsoft doesn't do the things that the DMA says companies can't do.
They may do other anti-consumer things, but they don't do these things.
Because Microsoft does not have consumer facing products where they have the ultimate control over.
Here's the list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act#Sectors_...
Windows and LinkedIn should be covered.
Maybe there isn't anything that the commission wants to investigate there because they did a good enough job complying. But future can bring more probes.
Microsoft didn't really have much to change on Windows outside of restoring the ability to uninstall system apps in the EEA and turning things off, and making users aware of such ability.
They don't control distribution of software on Windows (no one uses MS Store), it already has major stores owned by different companies such as Steam, Epic etc that have as much access to the OS that the MS Store does.
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.
Microsoft is a very open platform regards many of the aspects of the DMA. There is app sideloading, alternative app stores, alternative browsers, alternative payment methods, alternative hardware, license-free ports, and there are now more laptops than ever offered without windows. In the cloud, they have valid competition (Google, AWS) in both IaaS, PaaS and SaaS (Office).
Microsoft got regulated since before Google was founded (to put in context).
They are, kinda.
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_...