167 replies
1d12h
The EU will win this if they want. Their trump card is that, actually, making the EU not a viable market for the most annoying US tech companies would be a huge win for many of their constituents.
30 replies
1d12h
Very valid points. In my view they miss the mark however.
Blaming Apple for optimizing their platform model isn’t the problem, it became a problem. Imagine 2007 and the following years already with the EU act in full effect. AppStore would be dead on arrival.
In my view Apple’s AppStore went from feature some people have when they buy a smartphone to necessity. 2007 and even 2016 was a perfect time to opt for a live without smartphones.
Not so 2024.
So EU should change Apple’s and Google’s status from producer to provider of essential service like electricity for example.
Some often overlooked fact is, that Apple decides at will who is allowed to publish apps via AppStore and who is not.
This is an area where regulation is needed in my opinion. In other areas of life you simply cannot take down businesses at will, while Apple can.
7 replies
1d12h
AppStore would be dead on arrival.
Yes, exactly! That's the point. The mobile ecosystem would look heaps better without it.
4 replies
1d12h
We have the world without it available for inspection. The Android ecosystem is a shambling mess compared to the quality that is availabe in the Apple Playstore. It does look heaps better on many dimensions.
0 replies
1d10h
Not anymore. These days PlayStore is roughly on the same level. Source: I have both.
0 replies
1d11h
You can search for a specific name on appstore and get mostly a screen of spam. I'm not sure where you see the quality difference.
0 replies
1d5h
I don't really see a difference in quality between the two. There is bottom feeding trash in both.
0 replies
1d11h
I worked for a guy who made a fortune on an iOS app named "Ugly Meter".
Any difference in quality stems from the fact that Apple product users are more willing to pay for things. The free apps are equally bad in both stores.
Meanwhile Android allows for alternative stores like F-Droid, where you won't see the usual spam, as the apps are FOSS.
0 replies
1d12h
Please elaborate.
0 replies
1d11h
Honestly I don't think most users care, at all. The complaints regarding the AppStore comes from a few tech companies and a small percentage of highly technical users. For everyone else it's fine. The EU mandating alternative stores or side-load won't significantly hurt Apples bottom line.
The most valid complaint, and this is something Apple needs to address world view, is the move towards in-app purchases and subscriptions. I believe that is due to a limitation in the AppStore, where Apple isn't allowing upgrade pricing, but allowing subscriptions to enable features. In-app purchases is destroying the AppStore. You could say: Well that would be fixed with an alternative store, but I have serious doubts about other app store operators not being tempted by the recurring revenue as well.
7 replies
1d12h
There's also the argument that they made enough money with these monopolistic practices and it's now time to stop or share their stash with the EU.
How could have the legislator forseen all of these practices in order to codify them into laws? Regulation usually comes after abuse.
6 replies
1d12h
What do you even mean? There's no payments to EU in this case. How would they share the stash?
3 replies
1d11h
Apple - and the rest of the large companies manage to order their payments so that their profits are offshored out of Europe. Which means they are not paying the corporate tax an EU resident company would. So EU is not getting their fair share.
1 replies
1d10h
Don't they send the profits to Ireland which is within the EU?
0 replies
1d6h
Yes first. But the company is in the US and Ireland pays to the main company for various things - so the parent company makes the most profit
0 replies
1d10h
Corporate tax doesn't go to the EU, it goes to the government of the country you're incorporated in. Countries like Ireland and the Netherlands have very low tax rates, and big tech companies benefit from that.
1 replies
1d11h
Through the huge fines they are subject to if they violate the the law.
0 replies
1d8h
The EU fines are typically fairly small. Every time one is given, you can see someone on HN commenting it's spare change for the company. Those fines in practice are set to "pay this symbolic amount and fix things, or the next fine will be huge". I don't think anyone refused to implement the required fixes yet.
3 replies
1d11h
Imagine 2007 and the following years already with the EU act in full effect. AppStore would be dead on arrival.
App stores on platforms where competition is allowed still thrive, I'm sure you heard of Steam?
1 replies
1d10h
Xbox, Sony and Nintendo each has its own e-store plus physical copies (first and second hand) in many retailers.
Epic, Rockstar, EA, Paradigm, etc each have their own e-Shops too.
Any dev can choose to sell direct too (your Mac, Win or Linux will happily install third party software)
And Steam has GoG and other competitors (I often used Humble Bundle)
You
0 replies
1d8h
(I often used Humble Bundle)
Do note that Humble Bundle keys are often Steam keys provided to the developers by Steam at no extra cost IIRC.
0 replies
1d11h
And funny enough, Steam has some competition, namely GoG.
Speaking of game stores, how about an "alternate iOS app store" that only has hand curated pay once games? Might entice me to actually check mobile games again and even buy some.
2 replies
1d11h
Apple and Google are not the same thing.
Google is a ponzi scheme propped up by trapping everyone in a War for finite Attention. They tell content creators/advertisers+marketers(corporations that pay)/politicians we can get you eyeballs, no matter how much content explodes, not matter how many people are competing for finite attention. Its basically Fraud. People will work it out in their own sweet time cause its the largest ponzi scheme of all time. (Google subprime attention crisis)
Apple benefits from the Attention War just like anyone who has more cash benefits, cause they can outspend anyone to capture Attention.
1 replies
1d11h
Bud, are you OK? You seem to be raging against everything. Capitalist companies exist to make money, and they make money by providing a service that users want. Sometimes they are bad for uses (alcohol, cigarretes, gambling) but nobody is forcing anyone to buy any of these things.
Just because a user likes to spend $1500 every year on latest iPhone because it makes him "feel cool" or "have self worth" isnt fraud. Apple is just catering to that person.
0 replies
1d10h
It’s not a fraud, but it’s scummy.
1 replies
1d12h
Imagine 2007 and the following years already with the EU act in full effect. AppStore would be dead on arrival.
No, it wouldn't have been, as the DMA only applies to 'gatekeepers' and if you're new, you're simply not a gatekeeper. You need at least 45 million monthly active users and 7,5 billion of revenue for three years.
So EU should change Apple’s and Google’s status from producer to provider of essential service like electricity for example.
That's the whole point of the DMA: designate these parties as 'gatekeepers', providing essential services ('core platform services' in terms of the DMA). Once you are, you have certain obligations that should allow proper interoperability with other/smaller parties.
0 replies
1d5h
You need at least 45 million monthly active users and 7,5 billion of revenue for three years
Minor nitpick that does not really changes the point but might provide context: these are the criteria to automatically be classified as gatekeeper. You can be a gatekeeper even if you do not meet them, but the EU needs to prove that you meet some other more detailed criteria.
0 replies
1d12h
Fun fact: Apple originally didn't want an app store and wanted to go with web apps. It was only when third party apps installed after jailbreaking got super popular, that Apple opened their own app store (and then made it a huge commercial success).
So it actually shows that a third party app store would thrive, even if there is no first party app store. Especially if there were no barriers for using such a third party app store, such as requiring a jailbreak.
0 replies
1d9h
The problem is not just the app store, it's the lack of sideloading, the fact that as a developer, you HAVE to go through the app store to have an iOS app at all. The fact that Apple forcibly inserts itself between you and your users and acts as if they had a role in you earning this relationship.
While in real life, app stores themselves hardly earn apps any users. Most of the time, people install an app thanks to the app developer's own marketing efforts.
If you want a real-world example of an app store on a platform where there are alternative methods of app distribution, just look at macOS. Same idea, same rules, but there is sideloading as an alternative. It turns out neither users nor developers are having any of it.
0 replies
1d5h
AppStore would be dead on arrival
Certainly not. PMF was already established via the jailbreaking scene and Installer.app / Cydia. Millions of people went through the annoying processing of jailbreaking their phone to get apps.
0 replies
1d12h
Imagine 2007 and the following years already with the EU act in full effect. AppStore would be dead on arrivaL.
Why do you think so? I think it would be different, but not dead. Giving their users a simple means to discover selected apps would still be win-win for both Apple and their customers, even if users had other means to obtain the apps.
Apple could also charge companies for having their apps in that store.
0 replies
1d11h
Some often overlooked fact is, that Apple decides at will who is allowed to publish apps via AppStore and who is not.
Overlooked? It's the key issue the EU is bringing up around appstores isn't it?
22 replies
1d11h
I always scratch my head about articles that lump Meta, Apple, and Google together when it comes to regulations. They all have different problems that require different solutions.
Apple - consumers give the company for hardware which is locked into a closed ecosystem. Apple extracts extra revenue by enforcing this closed ecosystem. There can be no competition other than not purchasing their hardware in the first place.
Google - consumers sometimes give them money (for both hardware and services) which Google then uses to push their other products to the detriment of their competitors. Due to Google's size, the competition is at a massive disadvantage. Also, given that most consumers don't give them money, Google needs to make money off of their consumers and the most profitable method is to monetize PII.
Meta - consumers basically never give them money (excluding Oculus) so Meta needs to make money off of their consumers. The most profitable method is to monetize PII.
I have a little more sympathy for Google and Meta's situation as the EU wants them to maintain their free services while simultaneously reducing their ability to monetize their most valuable asset, consumers' PII (note that PII ultimately belongs to the consumer but it's still the thing that the companies use to make money). There needs to be some sort of happy medium here when people want something without paying for it but also don't want what's valuable about them being a user - their PII - to be monetized.
To be clear, these multi billion/trillion dollar companies don't need anyone defending them. However, it would be interesting to see what the EU's position would be if Meta started as an EU company.
7 replies
1d11h
I, on the other hand, have a lot more sympathy for Apple: Many highly successful people and many businesses have never owned any of there products. They are not a monopoly. Why can't market forces just regulate them ??
2 replies
1d11h
Because personal computer market (let’s face it: the primary or only personal computing device of most people today is a phone or a tablet) are a duopoly, with the other actor also being one of the monopolistic tech giants.
1 replies
1d11h
Just to emphasise, the mobile device market IS a duopoly because you may have multiple sources for Android phone hardware, but for software you have exactly two options: iOS and Android.
0 replies
1d10h
Yes, thanks. I thought that was clear because the HW is not relevant in any way to the concerns at hand, but apparently a clarification was in order.
1 replies
1d11h
What choices do you have as an iPhone user to download apps from? Or as an iOS developer what choices do I have to distribute the said app?
0 replies
1d10h
As a developer, sure, I have no choice in this.
As a user, I was quite happy with my personal Android phone while developing for iOS, both for hardware and software, because absolutely nothing is requiring consumers to buy Apple in the first place as basically every App you care about is shipped to both platforms anyway.
0 replies
1d10h
They’re a monopoly on Apple *platform*.
0 replies
1d10h
Apple may not have a monopoly, but they have enormous market power. By themselves, monopoly or market power are neither illegal or even undesirable.
However, they become undesirable when they are abused to undermine cometition in other markets. For example: Apple has successfully prevented competition to Apple Pay for a long time, by only allowing their own products access to NFC. This meant that parties that were already specialized in handling payments, had no chance to compete, despite them being in an excellent position to do so.
If this behaviour is left unchecked, over time we will end up with one single company dominating most markets. I feel that's undesirable. Given the number of dystopian novels on that premise, most of society considers that future to be undesirable.
Preventing that future is a major part of DMA.
5 replies
1d10h
Google and Meta could behave like normal companies and require users to pay them money and not sell PII. If that makes them far less successful that's good news for competitors.
4 replies
1d10h
You actually can pay Meta €9.99/month for ad-free Facebook+Instagram in the EU. I would hope this also causes them to track and use much less PII, but I couldn't find anything substantiating that.
3 replies
1d9h
As far as I understand the problem with that scheme is that by not paying you not only agree to see the ads but also to the tracking.
1 replies
1d8h
That is certainly the case, but seems to be perfectly legal. This scheme is implemented by a number of companies, but most charge only €2/mo or so.
0 replies
1d8h
That is certainly the case, but seems to be perfectly legal.
I don't think its legal, considering that not too long ago even here on HN there was a post about "Pay or Okay" not being considered legal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38458660
Some further articles/document about it:
https://noyb.eu/en/statement-edpb-pay-or-okay-opinion
https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2024-04/edpb_opinion...
0 replies
1d9h
Ads on the internet are worth a lot less these days if they don’t come with measurement of whether they are causing conversions (aka tracking). Apparently this measurement is a human rights violation when Google or Meta sell the ads but not when Apple or the NYT do.
4 replies
1d9h
To be clear, these multi billion/trillion dollar companies don't need anyone defending them. However, it would be interesting to see what the EU's position would be if Meta started as an EU company.
I absolutely agree on this point. I do have the… bias, that in my formative years Apple was very much the plucky underdog in danger of bankruptcy.
This may be why I am less concerned about what Apple does. I am aware that, net, most people here very much disagree with my position that if you don't like Apple's software policies, you can simply not buy their hardware. (Indeed, they are priced such that many people who would actually like to have those things, cannot afford them).
Google and Facebook, however, are much harder to avoid — yes, you can in theory replace Gmail with Yahoo, Google.com with DuckDuckGo.com, Google Maps with OpenStreetMap, but people who try this report that it's harder than it seems to totally cut that particular cord.
Facebook Messenger is my only way to remain in contact with some people. I've stopped logging into the main site because their feed is, approximately: [real post from an actual connection but 75% chance I've already seen it on a previous visit, advert, list of people it thinks I might know but I don't, then a repeating pattern of {advert, 3 example posts from a group it thinks I might want to join but don't}].
But yeah, Apple aren't the plucky underdog any more.
3 replies
1d2h
Facebook Messenger is my only way to remain in contact with some people.
This is always an exaggeration. You mean to tell me there are people out there for whom the only way to get in touch with them is through Facebook? They don't have a phone number, SMS, an E-mail address (note you need an E-mail address to sign up for Facebook in the first place), a postal address, and ears for word of mouth conversation?
I found Facebook to be the easiest company to voluntarily avoid. One day, about ten years ago, I simply changed my password to a random string and threw it away, and that was it. It was scary at first (FOMO) but ultimately it didn't even slightly affect my social life or ability to keep in contact with people. I told everyone what I was doing and that I would not be accessing the company's products anymore, and we just switched over to other means of communication. No big deal.
2 replies
1d1h
This is always an exaggeration. You mean to tell me there are people out there for whom the only way to get in touch with them is through Facebook? They don't have a phone number, SMS, an E-mail address (note you need an E-mail address to sign up for Facebook in the first place), a postal address, and ears for word of mouth conversation?
Yup.
Three people in particular come to mind. For them, with regard to phone/SMS/e-mail, even though they necessarily have those things, they never bothered to give them to me, and/or they change them often, and/or they don't check those modes.
For postal address… these three regularly (and from my perspective randomly) change continents, not merely street or city. One of the countries they often go to is Kenya, where the addresses of the places they live in seem to often be something of the form "third on the left in the gated community next to the Blue Sky Petrol Station".
This also makes "ears and mouth" rather challenging.
Extra irony points, they all self-identify as somewhere between socialist and communist. And still insist on using Facebook.
1 replies
11h23m
If all of that is true, I don't see why you would bother keeping in contact with them. At some point if someone makes it so hard to be contacted it sends a message that he doesn't want to be contacted.
On top of that, I know some people like that and I think there is an ambivalence about them, a form of intellectual dishonesty that makes it not very worthwhile to frequent them. You can have fun at parties with them but that's pretty much the extent of the relationship a self-respecting person should allow.
But we all know that's not the actual reason you keep a Facebook account, because that's technically bullshit in the first place. If you don't change your stuff, they have a way to contact you and that's all that's needed.
0 replies
3h36m
If all of that is true, I don't see why you would bother keeping in contact with them. At some point if someone makes it so hard to be contacted it sends a message that he doesn't want to be contacted.
Because FB messenger isn't that painful. Facebook the news-feed is, and if they only used that then I would indeed not bother, but the messenger app isn't.
Well, not yet, anyway. Ads creeping in, a "stories" tab I can't get rid of. I may drop it eventually, but today it has a monopoly on my connection with them, and I'm using it because it's less painful than losing touch.
But we all know that's not the actual reason you keep a Facebook account, because that's technically bullshit in the first place. If you don't change your stuff, they have a way to contact you and that's all that's needed.
Just because I'm technically apt, doesn't mean everyone else is, or cares. Back when they were still around, I had to turn on "parental controls" to stop my dad from accidentally moving apps out of the dock and losing them (as in couldn't find, not deleted), and he needed me to write down instructions for him to be able to use webmail (and he forgot that his password was "XXXX", so complained that the instructions had a placeholder and I had to explain no, that's what your password actually is). One time my mum asked me to change her password by sending me a postcard with the desired new one written on it. My gran held the mouse rotated 90° and didn't know why it wasn't working.
2 replies
1d11h
As a consumer, I am particularly unsympathetic to what what Apple is doing to developers.
The developers do the same to me when they have the opportunity.
0 replies
1d8h
You're painting with an awfully wide brush there. Apple is screwing everyone, but especially developers who want to develop truly free/transparent apps without ads, tracking, or other predatory monetization models (i.e. the "good" ones).
0 replies
1d2h
With that attitude I ain't implementing special hacky workarounds for Safari anymore /s but in all seriousness why? barring developers with malicious intent most developers would just want cross-platform tooling, open systems and less friction in making apps all of which modern web provides and with PWA the experience is even more pleasant as long as relevant API's are available. But when you have a single browser engine preventing this experience it's simply not right. I don't want to code my app twice especially since I don't need the native performance.
20 replies
1d11h
I'm in favour of opening up platforms and interoperability, but not the GDPR. Maybe in this case, "an enemy is an enemy of a friend".
17 replies
1d11h
I feel the same. The GDPR appears super difficult to comply with, even impossible in some cases, and very restricting.
I just hope negative effects of (in my opinion) overregulation wont hurt the EUs economy too badly, but that wont be visible for another couple of decades
10 replies
1d11h
The GDPR is trivial to comply with: don't track (let alone process) personal data.
8 replies
1d11h
Yes I agree its a good idea to not track personal data, but thats by far not the only rule in GDPR
6 replies
1d11h
What other rule do you find impossible?
Data portability?
The users right to delete data?
Data processing agreements?
Data security?
Article 30?
They are all fairly trivial unless you do shady stuff really. Step one if is really looking at what you process as stipulated by article 30, a lot of the other stuff is much easier after that.
One of my roles is as a DPO in a bank in Europe, and it's far from impossible to comply.
1 replies
1d10h
The users right to delete data?
In practice that becomes the "right to rewrite history". Which should never be a good thing, for obvious reasons.
0 replies
1d10h
It's not a universal rule that you have to delete personal data on request. If there's a "legitimate interest", you don't need to delete it even if asked to. But you will need to have that legitimate interest documented.
What exactly do you envision being the bad outcome here where you are asked to remove personal information and don't have a legitimate interest to keep it for?
1 replies
1d10h
I understand you are an expert on the field, and I am sure it's trivial for you. IMO the complexity arises from the many small things, imagine a smallish startup without having someone hired full time to deal with it.
I am not an expert on the field, I tried a couple of times to get into the topic but found it difficult to navigate and left me with more questions than answers personally. What exactly does deleting user data mean? Do I have to search the weblogs for the users IP? Do I have to search the mail servers for his emails - of all employees? What if he used multiple emails to communicate? Am I in breach if an ISP decides to route internet packets through the US? If I put people on CC in a mail, I am leaking everyone's email, probably without their consent - is that a breach? What if my mail provider decides to replicate their servers to another country?
If you have resources to read up on this and how to handle all of it, I would really appreciate it! Happy to be convinced that it actually is trivial
0 replies
1d5h
There is a ridiculous amount of material to read online and you can answer all those questions fully in about 30 minutes of searching and you could have relevant the policies written up by lunchtime.
Do I have to search the weblogs for the users IP?
No, because you don't keep web logs with any PII in them longer then you have to, right? The time you need to keep them for is a legitimate interest that you need to be able to justify.
Do I have to search the mail servers for his emails - of all employees? What if he used multiple emails to communicate?
Write an Email Retention Policy, there are templates. Follow that.
Am I in breach if an ISP decides to route internet packets through the US?
Isn't it encrypted?
If I put people on CC in a mail, I am leaking everyone's email, probably without their consent - is that a breach?
You said it yourself: it's a data leak, so yes, it is (assuming this is some bulk email list). Depending on the sensitivity of the list, you may need to disclose the leak to the affected parties.
If you want to profit from being a data controller you really should already have done this homework, even before the GDPR and friends required it by law. A responsible company would already be taking care of it's customers' (and employee) data and at most just needs make sure the existing processes are documented. Demonstrably, companies don't do this, through laziness, incompetence or malice, and that's how we end up with these regulations. Just like how companies injuring people in unsafe workplaces is how you get H&S regulation.
And really all you have to do is just actually make a decent effort. If you find that extremely onerous it's usually because you actually want to use the data for something that you know deep down is not something the information owner would want you to use it for.
0 replies
1d11h
What other rule do you find impossible?
you will never get specifics out of these guys. They will lead you down a circuitous thread of unspecified fears until it's clear that their business model is to abuse customer data even as they'll avoid actually saying so.
0 replies
1d10h
The users right to delete data?
Hacker news, please, think about being GDPR compliant! You're breaking the law, hacker news!
0 replies
1d11h
Correct, but “not tracking personal data” is in fact not a rule in the GDPR. “Only store personal data you really need” is, qualified with “and don’t share it with others”.
Cookie walls exist because companies insist on handing over their visitor data to external ad networks.
0 replies
1d10h
It applies to all data. So it amounts to building a force delete and export feature to any platform you build. I've worked on a few data platforms where the product is literally.. customers give you data, you store it and process it for then. It's not hard to comply, but it does cost quite a bit of money which if you're small you might not have.
2 replies
1d11h
It's not that hard for any competent organization: document what PII you store, who has access to it, and what you do with it. Also have an internal procedure to scramble someone's PII on request.
If you have a direct or indirect contractual relationship with the person whose PII you are storing, there is nothing more to do. If you don't, ask for permission and store the timestamp of the authorization.
That's all. Really it's that simple.
1 replies
1d5h
I must say you really do make it sound simple, and I generally like it. I think the part where I struggle most are the details though.
document what PII you store
that part seems doable, the hardest part here are probably figuring out what PII is, and then take care of numerous services logging IP addresses. That's PII, isnt it? What about IPs of phone calls over IP? Or phone numbers stored in phones of numerous employees? Do companies delete those, or is it not necessary?
who has access to it
I personally try to self-host as much as possible with as little third-parties involved as possible. But I think here are edge cases too, a lot of people might not think about, such as time tracking tools, calendaring, accounting software etc. What happens if employees just use online tools the employer doesn't know about? I am sure it's defined, but it's not entirely clear to me
what you do with it
that's probably the easiest part, if you do something with it you probably know it
Also have an internal procedure to scramble someone's PII on request.
I think that sounds good. It's just not entirely clear to me what that procedure should look like? How deep do we go with that? I could be nitpicking and say that physically information can not be destroyed. What if a SQL Server uses MVCC and doesn't delete data but just marks it as such? What about event sourcing architectures with kafka that rely on keeping the data? Or how about backups? Probably no deletion needed, but how to handle cases where backups are restored and previously deleted data reappears? I just think a clear set of rules would be great here, and a lot of people like to oversimplify things (or me, overcomplicating things here, probably)
0 replies
11h0m
The answer to most of these is the same: companies have to show that they are making a reasonable, good faith attempt to comply. If they can show that they have policies, that they have processes to implement the policies, and that their users have read the policies, understand the processes, and are aware of their own responsibilities then there's a strong likelihood that they will not run afoul of the directive.
0 replies
1d11h
Not only is the GDPR not difficult to comply with (just use only the personal data you need to provide your service - and don’t share it with others), it’s also nothing new: it’s just a bunch of previously existing privacy laws bundled together.
Not all those laws applied to all EU countries before, but, basically, if you were doing business across the entire EU all the laws that you had to conform to together looked a lot like the GDPR.
0 replies
1d10h
GDPR is mostly only excessively onerous when the business model involves gathering and processing information of people who haven't actually consented to what you want you do with it, or you don't have secure storage for the information.
If a business can only survive by extracting and processing against the wishes of the owner, or by storing it unsafely, maybe that's not actually a desirable business.
0 replies
1d11h
UK sysadmin here. I assure you that the GDPR is not hard to comply with at all - unless your business is to abuse your customers' data.
The main technical thing is that all data stores containing Personal Data must be redactable.
For years I've read bizarre GDPR fanfic from panicked Americans claiming that the world will end if they have to pay the slightest attention to data protection. I assure you literally from personal experience that this is not the case.
I wrote this up several years ago: https://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/606812.html
1 replies
1d11h
The GDPR is a nightmare. So much paperwork, so much money down the drain. Only for the receptionist still yelling your diagnosis through the doctors office.
0 replies
1d10h
please detail the nightmares you personally found!
I detailed my personal experience here: https://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/606812.html
tl;dr no it isn't, unless your business model is to abuse customer data.
15 replies
1d11h
I’m an Apple fan and I keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in Apple stock, and I still hope we at least get side loading out of all this. I do not believe this would be in any way detrimental to Apple - most people don’t give a shit. But for me and others like me it’d be pretty neat to do on my iPhone and iPad what I can already do on my Mac: install my own software that is not arbitrarily time limited.
7 replies
1d11h
I do not believe this would be in any way detrimental to Apple
They wouldn't be ropped in kicking and screaming if that really was the case.
5 replies
1d11h
Much like my 8 year old, I think they lack the perspective to behave like an adult here.
Several companies have fought what they thought were unwanted regulations only to view them as useful later on. Time will tell if they were right to kick and scream or not.
3 replies
1d10h
Yeah. Especially in Apple’s case, I don’t understand how they can’t see that a more open iOS could easily dominate the market.
2 replies
1d10h
It already dominates the market though, at least in the US, the wealthiest market there is.
1 replies
1d9h
They actually have to put effort into competing in Europe, lol.
0 replies
11h36m
And they have been rather uncompetitive lately. Nowadays, the only thing they do better than others is their own silicon but since it's not that relevant for phones anymore they need to do better. The worst is that because of greed they find a way to purposefully limit the phone usefulness to artificially force higher price poing (RAM/storage).
Just as an example, you gotta be really into the ecosystem to choose an iPhone 15 over a Pixel 8. But I think most stick with Apple because it is complicated to switch and all the software "investment" is lost.
Previously as an Apple "believer" I was against cross-platform apps but now I feel like a transferable licence is almost a requirement. It is very worth the small performance cost.
0 replies
1d10h
They have a fiduciary responsibility to kick and scream as much as possible, then turn around and pitch it as a new feature once the rule is passed. If they really thought that they'd lose tons of money they would avoid drawing attention to it, and quietly pour money into bribing officials and sabotaging Android.
0 replies
1d10h
Isn't this standard door-in-face technique? Throw an absurd proposal in your face to make the next proposal look reasonable even if it is not even close to the original demand?
2 replies
1d9h
This sounds like a bad idea for diversification unless you're extremely wealthy and have tens of hundreds of thousands in other things.
0 replies
1d4h
Probably an Apple employee that hasn’t vested
0 replies
1d2h
It's of course not the only thing in my portfolio, nor is it even the main security in it. Parking all the money in a single stock would be an extremely bad idea indeed.
1 replies
1d9h
What we'll most likely get is a backdoor to iPhone encryption in the name of "security".
0 replies
1d8h
What makes you so sure there isn't one already? The FBI's whining?
It's like that scene at the end of Sneakers: "they just don't want to share with the other children..."
0 replies
1d10h
Hope? You should demand it. You’ve already dipped money into it.
0 replies
16h18m
arbitrarily time limited.
I think this statement is unclear. You can currently sideload applications on ios, but you have to agree to terms from apple, have an appleid, and then you can compile and run an app for a few days. Then the app stops working. lather, rinse, repeat.
Honestly, I think apple is back to the wandering misguided apple before steve jobs returned. There seems to be no leadership, just the 1984 commercial, maybe with bright art-deco colors added. leadership would cut through all this nonsense and straighten things out.
13 replies
1d10h
The EU is also grinding forward towards classifying all gig workers controlled by "platforms" as employees, with the platform subject to all employment laws. See "Improving working conditions of persons working through digital labour platforms "[1] Background: [2] Last vote in the European parliament: 554 votes in favour, 56 votes against and 24 abstentions. This is somewhat weakened but still stronger than anything in the US.
Uber is worried.
[1] https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheproc...
[2] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/platform-work-eu...
10 replies
1d10h
Uber should be worried, but also because they are no longer cheaper than the established competition (taxis) that already had the labour laws in place.
7 replies
1d10h
For me at least it’s not actually the price of the Uber but that I know what it will be up front. I wasn’t really taking cabs until uber was ubiquitous though so maybe that’s not the same for everyone.
2 replies
1d9h
In Denmark taxis are great and are used all the time, but I think Uber is illegal here anyway so...
1 replies
1d9h
Taxis are not great here in Denmark, I don't know why you'd think to state this. They are also not "used all the time", instead used sparingly because of how outrageously expensive they are. Taxis are run by cartels here who have carved up Denmark amongst themselves. Drivers wait in queues, idling, and are paid to idle, sometimes dozens of cabs at a time. As a result, taxis in Denmark are some of the most expensive in the world.
Uber was banned here in Denmark because the taxi companies saw a threat to their easy money. Drivers wanted to drive independently and for a brief period where Uber was allowed to operate, competition flourished and prices came way down.
I'm not saying Uber is a good thing but pretending or even suggesting that the taxi companies are somehow an ethical or good alternative is absurd.
0 replies
1d7h
hmm, ok so maybe things changed in the last 15 years as I do not go out on the weekends anymore but basically all I remember was everyone taking cabs everywhere.
My experience from other countries made me feel like hey, these Danes sure do use the cabs quite a bit.
As a general rule I find the cabs in Denmark more reliable and better maintained than UK, Italy, and any region in the U.S I've lived in.
As a result, taxis in Denmark are some of the most expensive in the world.
Everything in Denmark is some of the most expensive of that thing in the world. Suggesting that taxis are somehow different than all the other expensive stuff in Denmark is absurd.
1 replies
1d9h
Taxis have apps now too you know. Like the experience is exactly the same as Uber. At least in european countries.
0 replies
1d8h
Apps yes, but still mostly metered.
0 replies
1d8h
In Oslo, Norway, one of the major taxi companies has an app called Taxifix. You reserve a maximum price in advance. If it ends up cheaper, you only pay the actual price. If it ends up more expensive, the taxi company covers it. You can also see where your taxi is on a map while you are waiting
I think other companies have similar apps, but I always use this company as they usually have more competent drivers and reasonable prices
0 replies
1d9h
Fortunately for us customers, it seems Uber catalyzed a transition among most other taxi companies as well to improve this. A bunch of local taxi companies here have apps that have the same features as Uber, where you can pay in the app and see where the cab is on its way to you etc. There are "OEM" taxi callcenter cloud services that small taxi companies can rent to get the uber experience for their fleet without any IT knowledge, each car gets an iPad with an ODB connection and you're ready to go.
0 replies
1d3h
In Ireland, where Uber has its headquarters for Europe (also support staff), unlicensed taxis have been banned since 2004 or so. They recently started doing taxi booking and payment via the app, but it's all regular taxis. All taxis also have an identical pricing structure, so you can easily tell what one will cost ahead of time.
There have been competing apps for that here for a long time.
0 replies
1d4h
Where I live taxis are generally cheaper than Uber and other ride sharing services. So I tend to avoid ride sharing. The fact that there is an app used by many taxi companies also helps.
Even if the price is the same I rather get a cab because taxi industry is heavily regulated and they have to respect a lot of rules as opposed to ride sharing. And I rather have most of the money stay in the local economy.
1 replies
1d9h
Another angle: pension contributions. Pay as you go social security systems are of course extremely desperate for every cent they can get, and making self-employed people retroactively employees brings in big bucks.
0 replies
19h15m
And gives them access to pensions when they retire. Governments are so selfish, aren't they?
9 replies
1d11h
Imagine a world in which the EU instead funded research & implementation of public protocols to undermine US big tech? IE, they mention chat clients in the text, why not create something in the spirit of XMPP (or even revive it if the technical merits remain relevant?) I can almost feel it in my bones that there's a protocol behind "feed" websites like twitter & linkedin. Break the walled garden with open standards.
I mean we know the real answer is. The EU hates innovating especially when it could be regulating. But it's a fun thought experiment.
2 replies
1d11h
The irony of your statement is that many of the core tech, protocol and software systems underpinning these big tech companies were developed in the EU.
1 replies
1d8h
In the EU != by the EU. By EU I'm referring to the governing bodies, ie my reference to the EU regulating things.
If you re-read what I said with that in mind, does it make more sense to you?
0 replies
7h16m
The EU is not a tech company. Then yet, they are funding these kinds of things. Check for instance https://gaia-x.eu/
However, these projects don't really have good results and generally are better made in the private sector. Same in the US actually
1 replies
19h34m
It is always bizarre to see people advocating for boondoggles like flat out reinventing the wheel but fully government funded this time.
0 replies
11h21m
Yeah, but they're simultaneously missing the fact that some of the protocols that underpin things like WhatsApp etc. were developed in the EU, and probably with funding from the EU.
0 replies
1d9h
Are you saying that the problem of monopolies should not be solved through regulation, but by tax-funded public service alternatives?
Regulation tries to restore a free market by reducing barriers and allowing other companies to participate, such as in the app store market. Especially where limitations are not warranted, i.e. iPhone being hardware, the coupling with Apple's App Store is arbitrary and self-serving.
0 replies
1d2h
WhatsApp is built on a hodge-podge of open standards (including XMPP) already. It's also closed off to everyone else. Good luck with your "open standard" XMPP client competing when everyone in your country uses WhatsApp.
Part of the DMA is that they must open this up for others so competition can actually happen in the first place (which in my reading they're not really doing in good faith by the way; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39635948)
Also WhatsApp isn't really "innovative" in the sense that it does something spectacularly new or brilliant. Most of the "innovation" comes from scaling it to the number of users they have, but that's a bit of a different thing. This is actually true for quite a bit of these Big Tech companies (especially the software-only companies).
0 replies
1d10h
XMPP never died. A more modern open standard is Matrix. The problem with open/alternative chat apps is the network effect — everyone is already on iMessage/WhatsApp/Messenger/etc and they aren't going to install Element and figure out the entire decentralised network thing to talk with one weirdo.
0 replies
1d10h
Imagine a world in which the EU instead funded research & implementation of public protocols to undermine US big tech?
That was tried, decades ago. Machines Bull. Plan Calcul. Cyclades. Minitel. Didn't win.
8 replies
1d11h
Does anyone know if the DMA would apply to Playstation? Shouldn't I be allowed to boot whatever software I want (Linux) on my PS5?
3 replies
1d9h
Consoles aren't generally seen by people as general-purpose computers, neither are they marketed as such by their manufacturers. They're seen by most people as appliances for playing video games.
2 replies
1d8h
I don't see cellphones as general purpose computers either. For exactly the same reason why I don't see game consoles as general purpose computers: neither one will run arbitrary programs. They only run programs that are blessed by their manufacturer. Both are appliances.
I'm really failing to see the distinction here.
Big tech will simply declare that phones aren't "general purpose computers". There is no reasonable endgame here in which: (a) this is enforced against cellphones and (b) this is not enforced against game consoles and (c) the EU doesn't end up looking completely ridiculous and arbitrary.
I'm betting that they cave on (b). It's the least painful option. The EU is going to have to enforce this against game consoles in order to be taken seriously.
0 replies
11h14m
I need to have an app on my phone to manage my health care payment. I don't need a console for anything in particular.
It's hardly the same thing. Some services are not even available on a traditional computer FinTech started as mobile apps and they added website support later. It's stupid but that's how things are, the majority has chosen...
0 replies
1d2h
Video Consoles are a semi-luxury product, not essentials to modern society like smartphones are.
1 replies
1d9h
No, it doesn't. It was designed to work on more general purpose devices. And even then the EC is not investigating MS Sony or Nintendo as gatekeepers of their respective consoles.
0 replies
1d2h
IMHO, it should. And the same should apply to smart TV manufacturers. Should apply to anything that lets one install software.
0 replies
1d2h
I don't think they've sold enough units in Europe to automatically qualify. Also wouldn't be surprised if games consoles have a dedicated carveout for the foreseeable future.
I'd expect the online stores on those consoles, and the resale of digital content, to be impacted well before running other OSs on consoles that didn't ship with that feature.
0 replies
1d9h
Well, AFAIK you're allowed to, but that doesn't mean Sony needs to make it possible for you.
That said, if Sony falls under the DMA, they may need to allow sideloading apps or 3rd party stores.
7 replies
1d11h
the eight-year-old General Data Protection Regulation
Wow. It's actually only been enforced for six years but that time absolutely flew by.
5 replies
1d11h
Remember when local US companies with zero EU presence were geo-blocking EU visitors in-case they were found to be in-violation of the GDPR? Presumably the fear was a crack team of EU secret service agents would kidnap and illegally extradite them to stand trial in Brussels.
2 replies
1d9h
Oh dear you're going to trigger the pro EU crowd who don't like being told EU law doesn't apply in the US
1 replies
1d8h
They'll send in Jean Claude van Damme
0 replies
19h50m
They'll send in Jean Claude Juncker
FTFY
0 replies
1d10h
in-case they were found to be in-violation of the GDPR
Oh, they definitely are.
Those geo-blocks still exist, not only for small mom-n-pop businesses.
0 replies
1d11h
You mean remember the thing that is still very much a thing?
I also occasionally get geo-blocked by Japanese websites too.
0 replies
1d10h
What really amazes me is how a random high-profile website has like 400+ "partners" listed in the cookie dialogs. Each one is building a profile of people in various ways based on the site usage, and internet usage in general.
Where does all that information go? What is the information used for in the end?
The tracking technologies enable many things, and the continuum from "to show you interest-based ads" to full-on Stasi is rather large.
But given the massive scale of tracking and profile-building, at least I have no idea exactly where we are now (though clearly we're not at the worst-case extreme).
3 replies
1d11h
Pay or Okay is reasonable to some extent (depending on the amount).
Do European countries hold themselves and the local companies to the same standards, respect their citizens and their privacy rights?
I remember a French institution could not buy our product, because they had a contract with a local manufacturer. They explained to us that they are obliged to buy from this company, or otherwise go through a complicated process of explaining to the government AND the company why that company doesn’t meet their needs. Sounded absurd! They had to sort of get the permission of the competitor company!
1 replies
1d11h
I remember a French institution could not buy our product, because they had a contract with a local manufacturer.
I doubt this is a EU thing. It's due to exclusive contracts/licenses. This happens everywhere?
0 replies
1d11h
It sounds a lot like like approved suppliers too, which is common in large orgs.
0 replies
1d11h
Just so you know, it's a common practice in the US. As europeans, we are almost required to open LLCs in your states, do a joint venture with a local US company, and hire US persons to sell to US people.
It's a matter of fact that the EU is still more open to commerce from US, than the US is with the EU.
1 replies
1d12h
Tried to post it 5 days ago but it never went anywhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40345656
0 replies
1d12h
it happens. Internet points are worthless
1 replies
23h19m
I wonder why the EU invented a new name to state the obvious:
tech gatekeepers = tech monopolies
0 replies
7h28m
Because of better and easier to prove legal definitions. It's not about the lack of competition, but just the number of users you have.
0 replies
8h37m
Apple appears to be playing a high-stakes game of chicken with EU regulators, effectively saying, “Yes, you have 500 million citizens, but we have three trillion dollars, so why should we listen to you?”
Retreat then and gift 500mil users to your competition, I am pretty sure nothing of value will be lost.
0 replies
1d3h
Am I the only one a bit weirded out by a headline that's basically "X said Y" where Y is in quotes, but it turns out that X is not a well-defined entity, and Y wasn't actually said by anybody? Regardless of the content of the article, it just doesn't seem like a good look. And I donate to the EFF! It's just... weird to me.
0 replies
1d9h
There's a spectrum from a ban on all innovation on one end, to your car collecting data about your sex life and selling it to insurers without your consent or an option to opt out on the other end (the sex life bit was in Kia's privacy policy, along with things like trade union membership).
Personally, I think the EU is a lot closer to a sweet spot than the vision of the FAANG. Apple is an odd case as they're actually ok on user privacy as far as I can tell, they just want to milk their closed ecosystem as much as they can. The EU has some ideas I personally disagree with like the whole EIDAS article 45 thing, but if I had to pick between the EU and Meta's vision for the future, I'm much closer to the EU's one.
0 replies
1d11h
I wish there could be added a signature to GDPR export, that can be validated.
This way you can transfer data to a new platform and the new platform can trust that the information is not manipulated.
Let me and a couple of friends move out of Facebook and bring all our prior interactions with us.
(The signature should be invalid after example one month to avoid the value of data breaches, with periodic signature key release)
0 replies
1d10h
Is this "Big Tech" or is it mainly just Apple throwing it's toys out of the pram because it's not getting it's own way after years of acting aloof?
Yeah Facebook are jerks but they've always been jerks... But what about Amazon or MS or Google or Netflix or others? Are they acting in the same way? The article seems fairly light on any details of the people we'd traditionally think of for "Big Tech"?
0 replies
1d12h
Considering how restrictive third party app stores are on iOS the title should really be Apple to EU: Drop Dead. Google should do the same thing, I'd love to see them fine Google over it.
0 replies
1d11h
What's kind of weirdly ironic about this is it's governments upkeeping a Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. It's governments keeping vaster colossuses still from gobbling up our most personal devices & connectivities & keeping them bound forever. Apple has made itself sovereign king over a wide sector of cyberspace, and the governments have to play the part of tyrant smasher.
This is not how the DIS told it's story, but mercy heavens be do we need someone to prevent our closest tools from being bound forever against us. If that's governments so be it.
0 replies
1d7h
Kick them out of the EU. We need our own solutions. Big tech stifles innovation, steal data and use underhanded practices all around. Just look at youtube. It's the same (worse) in the last 10 years. No innovation whatsoever.
EU is not the wild west US people accustomed to. Bombard them malicious big tech entities back to the stone age.
0 replies
1d7h
>Meta’s answer to this is a “Pay or Okay” system, in which users who do not consent to Meta’s surveillance will have to pay to use the service, or be blocked from it. Unfortunately for Meta, this is prohibited (privacy is not a luxury good that only the wealthiest should be afforded).
I'm a bit torn on this one. If the EU decided to ban the use of personal data for advertising outright, it would be radical but consistent. But what they appear to be doing is to give people a choice to say yes or no while not allowing them to trade their personal data in exchange for services.
Justifying this with a slogan like "privacy is not a luxury" seems weirdly out of touch with any possible reality. If most users were declining the collection of personal data and more services switched to a subscription model, then the entire service would become a luxury for a large share of the world's population. On top of that, privacy would be lost for everybody as there is nothing that eradicates privacy more thoroughly than making a payment.
0 replies
1d10h
In this scenario Apple is the great dictator from the 1984 ad and the EU is the British woman with the hammer.
I can’t even get music I’ve bought, from Apple, off my iPhone and onto my mac without an extra recurring subscription.
Apple aren’t “curating” that experience they are gouging me.
0 replies
11h35m
I would love to see the EU to tell some US tech companies to drop dead and some new smaller corps emerge within a more customer friendly attitude. I would certainly sign up from across the pond if they extended the same customer friendly policies, even if it cost a bit more.
Apple should play their Trump card and threaten to pull out of the EU. The EU would blink first because the public backlash would be career ending.
You are taking the side of a 3 trillion dollor consumer goods company's bottom line, rather than 500 million people's right to choice and privacy.
You do realise that, don't you?
The ghouls in Brussels do not represent us all, they do not represent anyone, if we’re talking democracy. It’s a battle over clout and economic resources between whoever is backing these technocrats and some of the biggest corporations in the world, most of us EU citizens have a lot of more important worries on our minds.
As a european citizen, I really wonder what allows you to speak in my name. How arrogant can you get?
Could be that some of the people in here are fine with a "Parliament" that is not really a parliament and that they are fine with the unelected European Commission taking decisions that affect us all, but that has nothing to do with "arrogance", it's just them wanting to live under a non-democratic regime.
And facts speak for themselves, the technocrats in Brussels do not represent anyone because it was not the people of the EU who have put them there. Some of you may agree with their fiat decisions, but that is not "representation", it's just "sharing of interests".
The commission is appointed by the member states, which are all, supposedly, democratically elected (and I only make this caveat because Hungary exists). There's nothing "non-democratic" about it.
Please, enlighten me how it was not the people of the EU who put them there. I'll wait.
Yes, that's what they say, if that's "democracy" then we certainly have a different understanding of it.
Take 8 out of 10 people (and I'm being generous here) off the street and ask them what party they represents them in the European "Parliament" (which is not really a parliament, the same way as the Democratic Republic of Korea is not all that democratic), they won't be able to tell you (I certainly won't be able). As per the European Commission, asking them that would be futile, see my point above.
More generally speaking, this policy of putting one's head in the sand and shouting "I can't hear you! This is a democracy! The European Commission actually represents the will of the European people! Saying otherwise is vile talk!" when the European electorate starts noticing facts for what they are wont' really help this "European" project going forward, but that's the bed that they've decided to sleep in so it's up to the technocrats in Brussels now.
So your argument for it being undemocratic is that randos don't care enough to understand who represents them in the EU?
And those technocrats doesn't force anything, and their role is not to represent anything. Every law needs to be voted by the Council, and this is your real representation. If you don't like where EU is heading, complain to your government.
Agreed. I live in Europe and while it has its issues, in general I'm not too displeased with it. The comment above seems to have an unnecessarily vile tone.
They represent me and my fellow non-extremist citizens. Is the EU perfect? No. Is it better than any alternative? Yes.
Calling people you disagree with "extremist" is a step too far.
So is calling our representatives "ghouls".
I mean that's the basic flaw of democracy; what alternative are you suggesting? Dissolution of the EU and back to how it was? Have a look at the UK nowadays to see how that worked out.
It's not perfect, but it's the best we've come up with so far.
The UK is largely unchanged from before Brexit. Its economic performance is similar to the rest of Europe. It continues to trade with and cooperate with other European countries, whilst also building stronger links with the rest of the world too (see Aukus for an example).
The predictions of all the bad things that'd happen on leaving were all incorrect. There was no 800k job losses, closed airspaces, trade wars etc.
I'm guessing you live in GB. In NI tensions are higher due to it (unionist opposition to the protocol), shipping's often more expensive, or items won't be shipped to us (try putting a BT postcode into displate, or ordering batteries online), and it's more difficult for companies to operate on an all Ireland basis. We also have "only for Northern Ireland" items in shops which are items that can't legally be sold in Ireland or GB despite being identical, in a shop like Tesco that operates in all 3 areas, causing more difficulty to shops than necessary. Here we've only seen negatives, in an area with a complicated relationship with borders, where the single most effective thing we had to deal with that was a set of common laws and trade area (europe), and none of this was even considered by Westminster before the referendum.
Edit: forgot to mention this. Someone in my family has a vehicle in Ireland and in NI, we sort of live between the two countries, pre-brexit that was completely fine as their drivers licence was european so there was no issues, but post-brexit they cannot get insured in Ireland due to insurance companies refusing to give insurance to someone with a non-EU licence.
May I ask you to consider that possibly what you refer as ghouls are no more no less ghoulish than MBA's somewhere in the valley planning on maximum screen-addiction for ten year olds. At some point you have to face the possibility that the opposite of a bad thing may also be an equally bad thing...
Ummm like what? Tell me what are there problems that we need to worry about where a battle over “economic resources” is you know… not a part of the solution or problem.
Also if we are talking democracy and representation- it’s quite obvious you are mistaken. We have the European Parliament elections so… you know democratically elected representatives.
Feel free to share you view on democracy but it will be in conflict with that the real definition of word is given your comment.
It's governments vs corporations; the 500 million people aren't actually being represented in either camp. Being a subject is little better than being a consumer, and in some ways much worse.
I can vote for who decides things in the EU.
I have no say in how Google, for example, does their business. I'm way too poor for that. I'd need literal billions of stock to get Satya Nadella's phone number =)
Good for you, I can’t and now I have to deal with endless pop ups about cookies.
That was not mandated by the GDPR but implemented by companies trying to punish users in the hope of a backlash and cancellation of the law
All the GDPR is asking is: "if you want to use some PII, you have (1) to ask consent (2) to accept user decision"
Others implementations may have included: respecting "Do Not Track" signal implemented in browser or just... not using PII at first to sell personal datas to advertiser to make more money than selling untargeted ads (so no popup needed)!
As a European citizen, I am affected by plenty of American politics even though I can't vote.
Try this if you haven't already; https://consentomatic.au.dk/
I find it very useful on firefox for android, since those buttons are often tiny.
The cookie popups are just the dark pattern that companies decided to use to avoid using those sweet, sweet money from selling your private data. They were never prescribed by GDPR.
The only reason you get the pop ups about cookies is because the sites you visit that display those popups prefer to do that instead of respecting your privacy.
It’s literally malicious compliance.
Good luck getting the personal phone number of an EU Commissioner. You can't vote for who decides things in the EU. You can vote for MEPs but they don't decide things. The DMA represents the desires and priorities of the European Commission, a body carefully placed well beyond any form of democracy and whose membership isn't even close to representative of the actual continent.
If the EU Commission were influenced by voters, their priorities would follow what people say they care about in the EU's own opinion polls:
https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3218
"Europeans tend to think that the most important issues facing their region at the moment are the cost of living (31%), the economic situation and unemployment (26%), and health (26%)."
No surprises there. People are feeling poor. They want more jobs and more money. A normal democratic government response would be trying to woo companies to Europe to create jobs, train locals and create economic success. It would also be lowering taxes and encouraging the creation of local startups in any way possible. That's a standard recipe that's been used many times throughout the world in response to economic discontent. But the EU isn't a normal democratic government so it spends its time on fiddling with iOS, something that doesn't even show up on polls at all because nobody cares.
It's for this kind of reason that French voters are likely to send the RN to the European Parliament in large numbers in the next election, mirroring the same pattern seen all over Europe:
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/france/
The RN is an explicitly Eurosceptic party whose only specific policy on the EU is to oppose it. Sending it to Brussels will change nothing because the European Parliament doesn't matter, but it does send a strong message of discontentment and a desire to use whatever meagre powers the Parliament has to slow the Commission down.
Most are citizens rather than subjects and EU elections are at the start of June.
s/Most/All
EU is totally representing me by taking this stance, so there's that.
The EU's biggest money maker is enacting laws that can be used to sue American tech companies.
Not true, member state's contributions are the largest "money maker": https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/financing-the-eu...
No it wouldn‘t. Instead European Brands like Nokia, Fairphone, Gigaset and Nothing would grow.iMessage and other Apple specific services are not really popular, even if the iPhone sells good.
This comes up everything the EU/Europe and Apple comes up: iMessage is hugely popular, it is just not the most popular (or even third or second) messaging platform. Also the largest is Facebook Messenge, and in the top five is another Meta product, WhatsApp. So it's not like it's all Signal, Viper or Telegram, it's mostly platforms from another US tech giant.
Switching is easy
Switching yourself is easy, but you can't expect everyone you interact with to switch too when they don't have a reason for it (and they have the same problem of getting all of their contacts to switch).
If there's interop between the chat applications - and be honest, do any of them have a unique selling point that makes them significantly better to the average user? - then that restriction is lifted.
It improves competition, which is healthy in a free economy (something corporate liberals really push for), forcing the chat apps to innovate instead of benefit off of critical mass / first mover advantage.
Sure, but "the old one is no longer available" is absolutely going to get everyone to switch in the approximately 60 seconds it takes to go from the notification to having a new account.
I mean, Google basically does this every time they change the default Android messaging app (though in fairness they do get a huge advantage of already knowing all your contacts): https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
It's easier on Android where anyone can "become" the SMS app and integrate all your chats in one place. Apple does not allow that, so you're always going to end up going back to iMessage with some people if you just know their phone number and try to send an SMS.
For now, but that doesn't apply in the hypothetical where Apple is told "change your behaviour or stop operating in the EU", no matter which option they pick.
Hard, the only platform I could realistically get more than 50% of friends and family on is Facebook, but I don't have Facebook.
Switching is super hard when your primary platform just fallback to SMS.
Is iMessage actually popular or is it just "popular" because it automatically takes over if you try to send an SMS to a person with an iPhone?
That's a huge part of it. Finding good stats is hard, but take Denmark and Sweden, it more likely that not that the person you're messaging also have an iPhone. Still most countries, from the statistics I've seem, have around 20 - 33% iMessage usage. Sure some of these people also have Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, but 30% is still a massive number.
The thing Apple has going for it is that people can't switch, or they can, but the alternative is SMS. Some seem to think that if iMessage goes away, people will just switch to WhatsApp or Signal. NO, they'll fallback to SMS/MMS.
I have lived in Germany and The Netherlands. Not having iMessage would be a mild inconvenience. Not having WhatsApp would be social suicide. Everything, from sports to kids school stuff is arranged through WhatsApp.
I know many iPhone users here who don’t even use iMessage. It’s activated, so it would show in the stats, but they’ll message everyone through WhatsApp.
In the US? Maybe. In Europe, where many people have Android phones and iPhone users need WhatsApp/Messenger anyway? I doubt it.
I’ve never heard anyone using iMessage in NL. most use WhatsApp, Telegram and some Signal.
It's the same in Germany and France I think, but then you have Denmark where iMessage is like huge. The point is that the EU isn't particularly homogeneous in terms of messaging platforms. The only thing that is true across the EU is that Facebook/Meta is in control of most of messaging.
In the US, the regular message app (which is to say, the one you’d use to send an sms) automatically goes through iMessage if you send from one iPhone to another. The bubble turns blue, but I think most people just think of it as “a text,” generically, other than weirdos who are too into messaging protocols.
iMessage is “hugely popular” only because it essentially replaces SMS. No one actually goes out of their way to communicate through iMessage.
WhatsApp, OTOH, is huge, and that’s an app that’s not installed by default and automatically consists of your entire address book as contacts but instead you have to go ahead and download it and explicitly add contacts to it, and yet it’s almost certainly bigger than imesssage outside the U.S. and is growing rapidly within the U.S.
… which has become a privacy issue now. If WhatsApp has been granted full access to the contact list, the contacts are passed onto Meta that uses numbers to track users, build out shadow profiles and whatever else they are not telling us about. It can be easily seen, e.g. if you add a new phone number that trickles through into WhatsApp, and if that new person happens to have an Instagram account, their Instagram profile will appear in the Instagram suggestions feed pretty much the next moment.
Meta has been agressively pushy in recent years with its attempt to monetise WhatsApp where they can't glean into the actual messages due to them being encrypted (unlike in Facebook Messenger). So they use the metadata and contacts (phone numbers, email, physical addresses etc) that Meta sells to third-parties, data brokers and businesses including. Messages on WhatsApp from South African, or Malaysian, or similarly remote locations offering jobs (!) or business opportunities are now a fairly regular occurence.
Considering the scale, the reach and popularity, the best option for WhatsApp would be to divest it from Meta (not that they would agree to it), however, the cost of running the platform, plus overall maintenance and feature development would be a substantial expenditure that has to be somehow funded since WhatsApp users will never agree to pay for WhatsApp, and many (who comprise a substantial to very large cohort) will not be able to afford paying for it.
But any other app that would get big enough would end up just like that. All those behaviors are just what happens when power gets concentrated (in a single company/group/hand, whatever the case may be).
So, what is actually needed is an interoperable standard so that people have choices to go and leave as they please depending on the behavior of the developers/companies.
Which is exactly what is being done, so that's convenient.
Now I wish we could legislate a way to make a new standard for email and allow people to run it from their home (just like personal mailbox) to remove that power from big tech. The technical solution is probably not that hard but getting adoption without some sort of leverage is almost impossible...
Maybe you haven‘t heard about threema?
The EU commission and EU parliament are somewhat removed from public backlash, it's one of the reasons people complain about the EU being "undemocratic".
So the commission or random EU MEP would be affected after 5 years or so.
Tim Cook would get backlash from stockholders the moment he announced he wanted to stop getting EU revenue rather than comply with regulations.
There's an EU parliament election in a few weeks or so, how is that undemocratic?
The EU Parliament can’t make decisions, it can only veto the commission which acts as an unelected government (nominated by elected representatives of each country).
But I agree with you that this idea of an undemocratic EU is rather false and really dangerous. Everyone feels like this because nobody understands that the commission don’t represent the interests of their country but those of all the European countries which few people are capable of naming years after school.
The EU parliament can absolutely make decisions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament#Powers_and... This is middle school level knowledge...
Can it initiate legislation? Any examples of legislation that were drafted by meps?
I wasn't aware that "make decisions" meant exclusively "initiate legislation". You don't have to play coy, though: it is also middle school level knowledge that the parliament cannot formally initiate the legislative process. It's also written in the Wikipedia article I linked.
What is your conclusion from this? What point do you want to make? Don't leave your readers guessing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament
In modern politics, and history, a parliament is a legislative body of government.
The purpose of a parliament is to make decisions about what the law says. Something that cannot decide what the law is, is therefore not a parliament. The EU Parliament isn't really a parliament.
At first it was "making decisions", then it was "initiate legislation", and now it's "decide what the law is". It's tiring to argue against moving goal posts and bad faith. Besides, the first sentence of a Wikipedia article is not the ultimate, complete and exhaustive definition of what something is.
Good thing the EU parliament decides what the law is, then.
That's not a moving goal post. In the context of a parliament all three phrases mean (are supposed to mean) the same thing. "Initiating legislation" for example, is just another way to say "decide what the law is". The EU Parliament cannot make that decision, that's the point that keeps getting repeated. It can only acquiesce to or slow down the Commission's decisions.
The thing is, European Union isn’t a country. It’s an union of countries. The Union itself doesn’t have legislative powers. The Union dictates rules the countries must follow the laws are still written by national parliaments.
To be clear, I’m absolutely not against the European Parliament having legislative powers but that would require the UE to become a federation and we are still far from this.
You're thinking of EU Directives, which have to be transposed into national law by some deadline. EU Regulations (e.g. GDPR) are considered legally enforceable all on their own, though still have a delay.
The Comission is appointed by directly elected governments, e.g. with one proxy in-between.
It is as (un-) democratic as the American Presidency, considering the Electoral College.
Yet you never hear complaints about the EC from the same types that love to rally against the Commission.
Actually, you do, all the time. Yes, they are both undemocratic institutions and that should be changed.
So it has no power
Of course it is false and dangerous. Any disturbance in lobby money, flowing to the corrupt, unelected politicians, is false and dangerous. /s
it's not, that's why I put it in quotes, but it is removed from people's everyday lives which is why some people feel it like that.
I know the names of the leaders of all parliamentary groups in my country, and how the groups stand on all positions. I have no idea who such leaders are in the EU parliament, or how they stand in e.g. the upcoming changes to GMO regulations.
While the Commission have mostly free hands to govern, European Parliament, elected by Europeans can veto their laws and can even veto the commission itself.
European Commission is nothing else than an unelected government controlled by a parliament like it happens in most countries.
Also, ultimately, the commission is nominated by elected representatives of each country so, depending on how you see the thing, we could even say that they are more democratically nominated than most governments.
The only major difference between EU and most countries is that the parliament don’t have legislative power.
note I put "undemocratic" in quotes, I do not think it is actually undemocratic, but I do think it feels that way.
This is because the main difference between the EU parliament and a country parliament is that the average European has only a vague inkling of who their MEP is, what groups or parties exist in the EU parliament, and how they stand on issues.
People do not (generally) change their vote for a MEP because they did good/bad in their last term, they change their vote because they agree/disagree with the national party they represent.
The main thing that's isolating MEPs from backlash in this case is that "The Digital Services Act was adopted with 539 votes in favour, 54 votes against and 30 abstentions. The Digital Markets Act - with 588 in favour, 11 votes against and 31 abstentions." https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220701IP...
This was not a vote along party lines, all big European parties voted in favor, so nobody who matters can credibly campaign on an anti-DSA/DMA platform, so the issue is unlikely to become politicized to the point where it might influence careers.
Right, get rid of their 2nd largest market, at size ~⅔ of the US one. Yes, that will definitely show the EU who's the boss. /s
But what if they will though? Won't china happily replace the EU market? It's much bigger too and Winnie the Pooh doesn't care about ppl privacy that much
This assumes Apple has something to offer the Chinese market that it incumbents aren't already providing. I'm skeptical.
The iPhone is already the best selling phone in China...
Yeah? Where's it manufactured?
Mostly in Shenzhen, why?
No reason, just asking.
You underestimate the European Market. All safe systems are from Europe
Isn’t Apple already in China? There must be a reason why they are not selling much there already, but perhaps they could dump prices and increase marketing. Although China and US is in a trade war right now, so prices are more likely to increase as China increase import taxes to balance ones the US has put on imports from China.
I think it’s much more likely that China sees this as “Apple refuses to bend to local laws”, and in turn kick them out. Remember, China has its own online universe and Apple is just desperately trying to be part of it.
https://www.mobileworldlive.com/apple/china-forces-apple-to-...
Apple is losing market share in China and iPhone shipments are down almost 20%. What bold strategy is going to make Chinese sales make up for the entirety of the European Union?
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apples-q1-phone-sales-chi...
China already is, although it's Chinese manufactured goods (including iPhones) moreso than Chinese developed electronics.
The US based companies don't care about people's privacy that much either, which is why we have privacy protecting laws in place. Also, there's yet to be evidence that China is doing mass surveillance through electronics or tiktok or whatever; a lot of it sounds like unsubstantiated fearmongering. Don't get me wrong, I don't trust them either, but I don't trust the US either, and there's evidence of their mass surveillance thanks to whistleblowers like Snowden.
Or in other words, the US cannot claim the moral high ground when it comes to privacy and surveillance; most privacy-focused EU laws like the GDPR can be traced directly back to US companies taking liberties.
you seriously think the people of EU will accept policies that makes apple leave? the government will lose. People must have their retarded icrap and facebook, its the sedation the governments need to do all the crap they do. take their facebook away and they will dissolve the governments in 1 second
No, I'm saying Apple will not quit the market, because Europe provides too large portion of its revenue. None of the FAANG level companies will quit. Not only that, given the fun of the Brussels effect, in a while the US market will get similar benefits to the EU rules. (After Apple gets tired of acting grumpy and announces it as a positive thing, like they did with RCS)
How Apple would justify the big financial hit?
The evil EU forces us to give our customer choices, this will hit our profits so we derided we should lose even more money by just not participating in the market.
Though I REALLY want to find an Apple fanboy defending the policy where Apple does not allow an app to display some text like "if you buy or extend this subscription on our website it is cheaper, you have a choice dear Apple user". Informing Apple users is not allowed by Apple.
As a fanboy what I want to see is not this message because this means fragmentation. I’d like to be able to manage my subscriptions from the settings menu. Honestly the most important part I feel DMA should have tackled and not just forced stuff on big tech. Yeah they are gatekeepers but they also provide value as gatekeepers. Force everyone to use an API for subscriptions management and if they don’t participate allow me to chargeback and not have any legal repercussions and I would NEVER have a problem with any alternative stores.
Also don’t want apps which are saying: visit this to get cheaper rates or completely not offer me to buy in-app as it is a waste of time to go their random website power by Y platform. You establish this go to website to subscribe and it will increase overall fraud.
These are my problems with the above. Very easily solved I think but I’m just worried that every greedy developer will try to get every single % they can (same as Apple) and I don’t believe this will create a “safer” world.
Nobody forces you do not use the Apple Store, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Siri
Competition COULD make Siri improve, competition could make the Store better etc.
You did not told me why you reading the text "if you buy your subscription from our website cheaper" is harming you? Are you having trouble with extra usefull information, I am not aware of this health issue.
No, the problem is I’m sharing my card data with a randomly company on the internet. I trust Apple and I want to be protected by their platform and to be able to easily cancel and not go into dark patterns where I need to call someone.
We all know that if this is an option and developers are greedy (which they are as humans) then they will do everything they can to push ppl to the payment gateway with least fees regardless of the customer’s privacy or security.
The text on its own is fine but it also increases the attack vector for most people.
Sure, information is dangerous, so Apple needs to keep the users uninformed.
Don't you see that this information can affect Apple\s profits and they hide it for that reason not to protect anyone? Their App Sore is filled with stuff that is not good for the users but if that makes money for Apple then it is allowed, including those shitty mobile games.
When Apple protects users only when they make money from it then some semi intelligent person would manage to figure out the truth.
As they have shown repeatedly Apple is not more trustworthy than any other company. Do you also shop only at Amazon because of this irrational fear?
You have been properly brainwashed; you don't understand what you say.
They can't, Apple management have a responsibility to its shareholders and pull out of the EU or even threatening to do so would hurt the stock price.
Also imaging the marketing spin you'd have to create: No no, we can't do business in the EU do to it's consumer protection laws. China is fine, they just execute or forcefully re-educate people, much easier people to do business with.
This isn't how "responsibility to its shareholders" works.
While it's true activist shareholders often launch lawsuits over issues they don't like in the US, they are rarely successful and more often looking for a settlement involving a secondary, less significant issue.
US Courts have repeatedly given a large amount of freedom to management to do whatever they want in terms of "delivering shareholder value". They allow management so consider long term goals against next quarter (as they should).
Additionally there's an excellent precedent for this: Google withdrawing from the Chinese market. There are other precedents for threats like this: Both Facebook and Google threatened to withdraw from Australia in various forms during negotiations over payments for news.
(Not arguing this is a good idea, just that it's completely within the realm of what Apple could do).
Anything is in the realm of possibilities. Apple could shut down all of their business tomorrow - just because it’s possible it’s still extremely unlikely. Apple will 100% never turn its back on the EU and I’m willing to take any bet on that.
Sure. I'm certainly not arguing against that - just the limited point where the OP is misunderstanding what "responsibility to its shareholders" actually means under law and in practice.
They don’t have any responsibility to optimize the short term stock price. They could decide that long term the changes required to stay in the EU were too onerous on their business and pull out. I think they’d be wrong, but they could do it.
Modern power structures, especially for a publicly-traded company, incentivize short-term profit over long-term viability.
That is because they have a responsibility to the current shareholders, not the future ones
What? No, that is laughable. What would be career ending would be the massive reduction of income within Apple. That would end careers, and quickly change enough minds that they would change policies.
Excuse me for my nativity but can't they just buy back a trillion more stocks or something, keeping the stock price where it is no matter what?
I don't think something can really hurt your income when you have that much money.
Apple's cash reserves are not infinite. And any desperate attempt to "hold up" the price will be punished by the market. This is very different from usual $15B stock buyback, which you can explain but try doing it with $200B and you are seriously weakening the company.
The executives role is to increase share price and Company evaluation for shareholders.
If all you can do is sit on a pile of cash without any good ideas on how to turn that cash into larger profits, or you just burn it to buy stock back or give dividends, it is a way of saying “I have no vision for the future of this company, I don’t know what else we can do, we will not continue to grow aggressively, so might as well take the cash dear shareholder”
Not a great move in front of the board. Done marginally is fine, sends a “we made more that we can use” cocky statement. Doing it massively to keep stock afloat, means you are out.
Stock buybacks are net neutral wrt the company's value. They're just one of the ways to return money to stock holders. It's not a magical perpetuum mobile kind of thing.
Of course many things can hurt your income no matter how much money you have. The only entities whose income can't be hurt are the ones who don't have any!
So Apple preferring to reduce profit instead of complying to law? It will definitely be seen as a very bold move.
I have rarely seen a company go that far; Google did for a little bit, moving out of China because they refused to comply with their local laws... but a few years later they did anyway.
Is Google back in China then?
Apple shareholders have faster trigger fingers. Tim Cook would get fired before the EU population even realized what was up.
Not the population, but the commission would definitely notice
Yeah sure. Apple continue presence in Russia, paying fines and taxes there and comply with every murderous dictatorship demand. Like censoring political apps 2 years into full scale war.
Yet they'll pull out of EU. Sure.
Also, Apple feels less brave when it comes to China.
That would be a net win for Europe, European citizens and companies.
As soon as Apple/Meta/Google/... sulk and leave, other companies would find the space to grow and fill that space with similar products which would respect the users.
Users outside of Europe would realise it's possible to have those kinds of products without abusive practices, and would start demanding Apple/Meta/Google/... for the same.
I don’t think we need the GAFAM to leave to obtain this situation, strong and meaningful regulation (like the DMA) should be enough to make room for sane competition.
Also, the EU is really smart here because they are not doing protectionism. So if GAFAM decides to leave, they’ll take the risk of new competitors which would have no reason to be banned from the US market.
We have at least 10k worth of Apple hardware at home I fucking dare them to do it.
I want this to happen so much. And I want it to be binding, that Apple cannot back down from that threat afterwards.
Career ending for who? People barely know who works in the EU apart from the council president
100% agree, Apple should play their Trump card and end up in the positions where Trump is now, sued for their user hostile and ant-competitive practices. And if Apple does pull out of EU and let their competitors roam free in a market of 400 mil people, what could possibly go wrong for Apple?
They could. I think it would be a capital-t Trump card; a spiteful move, wrapped up in the pretext of business acumen, the type of strategic thinking that could bankrupt a casino.
I don't think downvoting this is very useful. You may agree or disagree with the statement, but raising the point provides an opportunity to investigate and discuss it.
I don't think Apple can and will exit the EU since it would upset the shareholders. Also, if Apple does, it just creates a vacuum that will be filled by other tech companies. Tech companies that can then come after Apple in the markets where they are still present.
It is also likely that other countries and trading blocks will make similar demands, at which point Apple will either have to comply or shrink further.
yep. From Baldur Bjarnason:
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...
The EU cannot allow a large business to mess around like this.
That's also a misconception. The EU single market is an important project, but there is a constant failure to understand the actual reason why the EU exists or also a purposeful misinterpretation. Countries joining the EU are requested not to join because of the single market, but because they want to join the political project of a more peaceful and an improving Europe.
At its core the EU is a project to bring Europe together, to cooperate instead of being in wars (... WW1, WW2, Cold War, ...).
The EU is even more a political project as it is an economic project. But there are many other projects. The market is not the EU, it's a large and important project, the EU can't be thought without it. But there is more. The main motive behind all that is the will to work together. Even the "single market" is at its core a political project.
We have seen it with Brexit. The UK never bought into the "political project". UK politicians also mislead the public about that. The EU is as much about social standards, political standards, environment, competition, building up the countries, joint research, joint infrastructure, a common law, common currency, being competitive in a larger world, ... and so on. During Brexit it was promised by some UK politicians for a short time that the UK would leave the EU, but not the single market. Misleading the public that this was a topic of economics, while the EU really is a political integration project, not just a project to build a single market.
France and Germany at war for many centuries, now have a common integration project (in a larger EU), free movement, no physical border, an EU passport, a single currency, joint projects, ... these are the things which moved us forward.
The EU started as the European Coal and Steel Community which explains most of the beurocracy its saddled with.
It’s like saying the US started as a colony and that explains the lack of its progressive democracy and having a static constitution.
Just because something started as X doesn’t mean that evolution didn’t happen. The reasons for the bureaucracy are a lot and different but come down to power sharing between the stakeholders.
There were two revolutions in the US that changed its politic course significantly. The EU has always been a beurocracy first.
Bureaucracy.
The EU is the European Union. 500 million humans.
This legislation is a win for the common person. Trying to portray as foisted upon the public from on high = a propaganda twist too far.
So why not hold a referendum on it?
Because most people have little knowledge about the EU and are easily influenced. Direct democracy doesn't work well because of that if you ask me
So you'd say it has to be foisted on the common woman from up high?
Wasn't there a war in the US because of leaving states? ;-) How was that "referendum"?
Advancements are always foisted upon the common man without their consent.
That's a very simplistic view.
I was answering another very simplistic view
You are simply confirming the parent's counter-take that the US starting as a colony was such a big influence that despite hundreds of years and 2 revolutions the US still lacks progressive democracy.
I mean, the fact that part of the country was started as a resource extraction colony, and another part was started as an experiment in puritanical religious extremism seems in retrospect to have been a bad sign.
Of course, lots of things seem portentous in retrospect, if we look back on the path we took, of course it turns out we passed lots of signposts pointing in our current direction.
While this is true, the idea behind this was not merely to collaborate on coal and steel production. The intention from the very beginning was that such tight economic coupling would make war impossible.
Germany has the idea of "Wandel durch Handel" (change through trade)[1], which is essentially that you can prevent and make war non-viable and eventually even change countries to follow democratic norms. The EU is the most extreme version of this.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_durch_Handel
"Schumann declaration", 1950:
"By pooling basic production and by instituting a new High Authority, whose decisions will bind France, Germany and other member countries, this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation indispensable to the preservation of peace."
The European Federation was the goal.
"a European federation" != "The European Federation"
How do coal and steel production imply a high bureaucratic load?
How do coal and steel explain bureaucracy? Sounds non-sequitur-ish.
The ECSC (Treaty of Paris, 1951) started as one of the first projects for cooperation in post-WW2 Europe. The more important step towards as single market then was the EEC (-> Treaty of Rome, 1957).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Community
> UK politicians also mislead the public about that.
It's worth noting that they didn't just do that in 2016. They were doing it for the entire history of Britain's membership of the EU. During the referendum campaign I talked to quite a few older people (my mother included) who remembered the original Brexit referendum in the 1970s, one that most people outside the UK aren't aware ever existed. It happened just a couple of years after entering the EU, which was done unilaterally by the Labour government of the time and never subjected to a referendum. Many people of that generation say they voted Remain the first time because they were explicitly promised that the EU (or EEC as it was then known) was merely a free trade zone with no ambitions to be more. In that era, without the internet, it was much harder to fact check these sorts of claims and although there were campaigners telling the truth, the public mostly believed the government.
Later it turned out that not only was it untrue but it had never been true, that Labour knew it wasn't true and that the plan right from day one had always been to abolish European governments by merging them together into one superstate. This is often claimed to be a federalist project, but there is no specific philosophy in the EU project as to what rights should remain delegated to the individual states like in the USA. In fact the opening of the EU "constitution" equivalent says that the goal is ever closer union - without limits.
This feeling of betrayal and deception was a big driver of why the older generation went so conclusively for Leave. Most common feedback I got on talking to these people: I haven't changed my opinion from the 70s, but now I know the truth.
"abolish European governments by merging them together into one superstate"
That wasn't the goal of the EU. Even now it isn't the goal. Nations and governments still exist.
Sovereignty was part of it, another, pretty big, part was "to get rid of the bloody immigrants"
France and Germany are still at war, just not overtly but in a covert feminine way. They very much butt head politically and economically. And as a French I will say I wish Germany would just fuck off because the political power they gained because of the industriousness of their rules abiding citizens is not very well deserved. They keep making terrible choices and try to force everyone into them. It's not surprising to me that France is the country that created a revolution while Germany is the country that elected a dictator.
This is what Britain got right, the political projet is not going anywhere, there is just too much difference in heritage (in different meanings of the term) and I believe it is unreasonable to ask the citizens of each country to let go of those heritages. The differences exist for a reason and are keys to keep an equilibrium in power.
As for the economic project, it makes sense in a way it's much more efficient, but since monetary creation gives so much power in ou current system it is problematic in many ways. The standardization efforts are useful but forcing everyone into a dominant economic ideology is not serving everyone equally. Funniest thing is that Germany who was the one dominating the conversation, found a way to fuck up politically. Fiscally conscious but socially inept that is the way of the Germans.
All that being said, I'm all for the EU regulations concerning the DMA but it's just because our interests align and that's pretty much it. France has an history of calling out Apple on their bullshit, so it's not like if there is no precedent.
Small reminder: people in the eu, including governments, disagree on what the eu id about
In my view Europe as a political project vs Europe as neoliberal project is the main source of internal conflict.
I think he explicitly handled your objection.
And yet they did and still allow google analytics to exist while it not being GDPR compliant.
Well, Google Analytics actually forbids it's users to send PII (sure, you can't avoid communicating the IP address as part of the request).
I would like this to be true - that the big US tech companies leaving Europe would prompt Europeans to realise they never needed them in the first place, and either turn to local, privacy-respecting (maybe even open source) alternatives or just get their heads out of their phones altogether. But a lot of Europeans are obsessed with these platforms and would probably be extremely pissed off if they lost access to them. It would probably materially increase Euroscepticism amongst certain demographics.
well, not like the platforms currently promote European values :/
This is the EU. Like most governments, if they thought they could get away with it they would not just outlaw Tech Giants, they would outlaw the internet itself, along with any source of information that they cannot easily sue out of existence. Hell, they would outlaw people talking to each other without permission.
It was worst with Jose Manuel Barroso at the head of the EU commission, who needed to hide ... well, why don't I just say it. He spent a big part of his youth being a violent communist protestor (he wasn't even a now-fashionable Marxist, he was a Maoist. He protested IN FAVOR OF the "cultural revolution" in China, in favor of the killing of between 80 and 300 million people. He was explicitly anti-Marx, though I don't understand why), and has more than a few convictions and arrests for destruction of property, beating up people, assault, ...
Frankly, he is THE stereotype of what is wrong with leftists. Turns out, surprise! It's not about communism, or rights, or ... At least, it isn't for him. He was offered power through what, though people don't often think of them this way, is one of THE most capitalist institutions on this planet, the EU commission (used to be named "The European Union of Coal and Steel producers", and hasn't forgotten). He of course, immediately and totally forgot his "conviction" and took the power (of course there were many steps in his rise to power, but ...). For Barroso leftism was, and presumably is, nothing but a way to amass power, to maximize what he accidentally got thrown into at university.
But the worst of it is, he is a suspect in an unsolved murder. Now that isn't QUITE as bad as that sentence makes it sound, but close. At one of the protests where he was, someone was murdered, and the police knows he was in the group where the death occurred. Hence, he is a suspect. Along with ~20 others. The murder was "never solved".
There's even more than a few reasons this information is hidden. First is that he's involved (as well as another famous Portugese politician). Second is that the police essentially let the murder go, and "that this might lead to copycat ...". Frankly, that second part is a genuine concern.
Edit: This comment is wrong. I mixed up the EEC (direct predecessor to the European Union) and the EEA (like the EU, except it has Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein).
The “European Coal and Steel Community” predates the European Economic Community, which it was separate from until the 1967 merger (a decade after the EEC was founded). The EEC is related to, but not the same as, the European Union.
This is the internet. DON'T trust anything I've written. Look it up.
You started well, missed the point that the EU commission is extremely capitalistic, protecting "their" own market, pro-immigration TO DEPRESS WAGES (not for any other reason), using money for policy targets, pro-free-trade otherwise (ie. when it comes to anyone but themselves), and generally extremely capitalistic in the usual deceitful way ...
As for "The EEC is related to, but not the same as, the European Union" ... suuure. In the same the the CPC is not China, it's related. The EU commission IS the EEC, and controls the EU. It has overriding power on any and all decision made and controls all 3 branches of EU government (Parliament, itself, and the EU courts)
Look, I get that people generally like the EU commission. On Hacker News, because of their Google and Apple actions. In the EU, because of them forcing democracies to accept the EU border situation and the Euro (both were rejected in democratic votes, both were forced through in less-than-democratic ways). Doesn't change their nature.
Look it up. Decide. Form your own fine opinion.
I mean, what opinion are you really espousing? And what does it really have to do with the European Commission, which is a far bigger entity than a single man?
Hundreds of words to say nothing at all.
Dude, who hurt you? (An European I guess?)
I've never before heard those numbers mentioned in relation to the Cultural Revolution in China. These numbers are more common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Death_toll
In what way was he "anti-Marx", and is it really that common that leftists become traitors that join the higher echelons of capitalism that Barroso can be considered stereotypical?
What are those European values and why should bussineses promote them?
Platforms will be at fault then, for not complying, and not the EU. Laws are made for a greater good (privacy, customers' rights) that I think will greatly offset not having tiktok.
Well, so maybe /you/ do not need those companies, but “certain demographics” which could even be much more than 50% of the population, /do/ need them.
How do you measure this obsession? I only get these stories about regulators mostly—they seem obsessed with making the platforms work for Europeans, but then, that’s sort of their job.
Definitely not. If the entire issue is these companies creating closed ecosystems, then what point does it serve to make the EU a closed ecosystem? That would become like North Korea or the USSR technologically, your choice would be government EuroPhone or nothing.
The EU proposals are not THAT unreasonable as to completely kill competition. There are plenty of ways to compete outside of exploiting customers privacy and monopolistic platforms.
Comparing the EU to an authoritarian communist or Juche county doesn’t really seem like good faith engagement, but just in case — the EU is a wildly capitalist/liberal organization, their whole theory is that they can avoid another world war by having the countries that kept causing them totally entangled in a big heavily inter-dependent market. They aren’t going to make a government EuroPhone, they are going to publish standards and let private companies come up with compatible implementations.
The other problem for big tech is that most countries are modeling their tech legislation based on the EU.
At this point the GDPR is something you have to consider whether you’re in the EU or not because several non EU countries have similar laws and many more are thinking of implementing them, and to the extent many haven’t already it’s because it’s unnecessary since tech companies are following GDPR already.
Essentially GDPR has become a de facto global law at this point.
It wouldn’t be surprising if the same would also be true of other legislation coming out of the EU considering that most tech products are global.
Countries with similar laws: Isreal, South Africa, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, and more.
Though it would be wise for countries to also implement these laws. For example, companies could ignore your data deletion request if you were in a state without.
This is called the "Brussels Effect" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect ) and much like the California Effect, leads to most everything being made to the more stringent standard because the market requiring it is so big.
Same reason most of your electronics are RoHS2 too.
The cynical part of me says they are just complaining that they are not being offered juicy enough bribes compared to their American counterparts.
Elsewhere in the thread, someone linked this blog post, I think it describes the position of the EU well.
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...
The conclusion they come to is: the EU will protect the single market even if it makes things harder for their own businesses, the single market is a totally existential issue for the EU, it is the reason it exists.
I thought their trump card is that most people (not corporations) really want this.
It could be a big boon to US customers looking for other options if European companies step up. There are literally -dozens- of us who will sign up for their services that are more or less feature comparable to US with more privacy protections guaranteed by EU regulations.