> Under the DMA, app developers distributing their apps via Apple's App Store should be able to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative offers outside the App Store, steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases.
To me, this is the most easily agreeable part of what the EU has been after. It is unfair that Apple restricts Netflix from telling it's users that they can sign up and pay for Netlifx on their own website. It's unfair that Netflix can't even tell its users the rules that Apple enforces on them.
It's telling that Gruber is pretty staunchly against EU/DMA interferance in Apple, and broadly thinks they're wrong. But this is the one thing he agrees on
> If Apple wants to insist on a cut of in-app purchased subscription revenue, that’s their prerogative. What gets me, though, are the rules that prevent apps that eschew in-app purchases from telling users in plain language how to actually pay. Not only is Netflix not allowed to link to their website, they can’t even tell the user they need to go to netflix.com to sign up
> The Commission takes the preliminary view that Apple failed to comply with this obligation [to allow third party app stores] in view of the conditions it imposes on app (and app store) developers. Developers wanting to use alternative app distribution channels on iOS are disincentivised from doing so as this requires them to opt for business terms which include a new fee (Apple's Core Technology Fee). Apple also introduced overly strict eligibility requirements, hampering developers' ability to distribute their apps through alternative channels. Finally, Apple makes it overly burdensome and confusing for end users to install apps when using such alternative app distribution channels.
This is great to hear. It sounds like they've just found Apple non-compliant in making alternate app stores as discouraging for both developers and user as possible. I guess it'll take another 12 months for any fines or changes from Apple.
I don't think so - they’ve only been fined for the in-app anti-steering provisions.
For the second App Marketplace issue, I think that’s just a preliminary finding and is going to take longer to work out
> Apple now has the possibility to exercise its rights of defence by examining the documents in the Commission's investigation file and by responding to the preliminary findings
The orders in question here are 1 for Apple (the one that made circumventing Apple payments super difficult) and 1 for Meta (their ad-free subscription service). Meta and Apple have to comply with those within 2 months.
The preliminary finding on sideloading apps isn't subject to that 2 month compliance deadline from what I can tell.
>the most easily agreeable part of what the EU has been after
It's also probably the most dangerous for Apple. It creates a cash incentive to push people outside of Apple's walled garden and show them what's outside.
I really really hope Apple gets its act together, they are the greatest "the user experience comes first" company and they actually have great hard tech but they show signs of rent seeking behavior which can destroy them.
If Apple just play nice with EU, open up and focus on bringing the greatest experience possible they will keep winning. If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.
The Apple's AI blunder is mostly a blunder only because they insist to do it all by themselves so to have higher margins on the services revenues. IMHO those blunders will be more damaging as the Americans no longer have the higher moral grounds than Koreans or Chinese.
"Show signs of rent seeking behaviour" seems like an extremely generous position. Forbidding your customers from even mentioning The Outside is full-on rent seeking behaviour, since its inception.
To steel man the policy, one thing it helps avoid is the free rider problem. Apples store terms are than free apps don’t pay a commission to Apple. But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform. We no longer live in an age where Apple or Microsoft gets away with charging for multi thousand dollar per year per seat developer license for their platforms, but that doesn’t mean those platforms don’t cost money to develop and maintain. So the idea is, if you make money on the platform, so does Apple. But free apps + in app downloads is a giant loophole in that plan. Sure we all think of Netflix or Kindle apps when we think of this, but without a policy that charges for IAP and discourages or outright forbids steering off the platform, we would see a new category of “freemium” apps where the app is “free” on the App Store, but is effectively just an empty downloader shell that you then have to buy the “real” app through. Unscrupulous devs steer you to their own outside store or put some ridiculous inside the App Store price (think 300x+ markup) with a link to the outside store with the cheaper price and all those customers are transacting, and Apple gets no money for funding their platform.
And yes I know we can all scoff and say “oh poor multi-billion dollar Apple can’t get paid but getting paid is exactly how Apple is a multibillion dollar company. So if they don’t get it from IAP and app sales fees then they’re going to extract it either from hardware prices, or for charging those per seat per year dev licenses again.
Personally I think Apple is big enough now and the App Store is popular enough now they can revisit this but somehow they are going to want to solve the free rider problem, and whatever they pick, people won’t be happy (see also core technology fee)
> But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform.
The business model Apple has used since the Macintosh is that the hardware subsidizes the software. I paid for the platform when I bought the device. The only reason why there's even a "free rider problem" is that Apple believes itself entitled to a 30% cut of half of mobile, forever.
Furthermore, we've known since the failure of OS/2 (at least) that expensive development tools almost guarantee zero software uptake. The platforms that win are the ones where the developer tools are affordable or free. In other words, it is not the third party developer's job to pay for the platforms they rely upon. It is the platform's job to pay (in a roundabout way) for the third-party software.
In fact, that's why Apple even has a reader app exception. They know Netflix doesn't have 30% to give and they know nobody's going to buy an iPhone that won't play Netflix.
The reality of Apple's business model is that they absolutely could give away the platform, make money off the phones and the OS, and remain profitable. But investors don't invest into profitable companies. They invest into growing companies. Tim Cook has to treat developers' bank accounts as his own because that's the only thing that makes Apple stock valuable.
Nothing "ostensible" about PC being an open platform.
Any PC will run any number of game stores. Steam is large despite not being the one owned by the platform maker and installed by default (Microsoft Store and the XBox app).
Steam does not prevent publishers from selling in other stores too, nor does it enforce pricing outside its store. (E.g. there are games that are cheaper on other stores, citing Steams larger cut as the reason)
It also allows publishers to force users to install the publishers store to play games sold on Steam. (See e.g. Ubisofts launcher, being required to install games and selling you additional subscriptions without a cut to Steam)
To a limited degree Steam even lets publishers use Steam infrastructure for sales outside Steam, for free. (Publishers can sell Steam keys for free on other platforms, but the number is limited and here pricing has to roughly match Steam pricing)
Even on Steam Deck, the only PC hardware where Steam is actually the preinstalled default store, running games from other stores is supported and the main inconvenience to it is that most stores don't have a supported version for it and you need to use third-party workarounds.
Being an open platform doesn't ensure a market doesn't have other weirdness going on (in this case, there being a strong consumer preference towards Steam, certainly in part due to Steams existing large position, but not only), but its a different thing and most of the usual competition law approaches don't apply. Steam is popular because Steam is popular, not because Steam is using its strong position in another business to push its app store business.
The best case is 15% for subscription apps after the first year of service, or if you're a "small business" developer under a certain sales threshold. The latter goes away after you reach a certain size, after which you pay 30%; the former requires you to adopt a subscription business model.
I still think calling it a "30% cut" is accurate, even though there are discounts now. 30% is the base rate. You mentioned Steam, which also has discounts too, except they're the opposite ones of Apple. The cut starts at 30% and goes down the more sales you make. This "costs game developers more" only in the sense that it would be incredibly difficult to qualify for both Apple and Steam discounts at the same time. But the base rate is the same.
This framing just doesn't register. You want developers to develop apps for your product, app availability is what makes users choose to buy the hardware/use the OS. They're not "free riding", they're what makes your product worth buying.
The "free riders" aren't developers in general, they're the developers not paying for their portion of the upkeep. Like I said, someone has to pay for the dev work that goes into making the platform, building the SDKs and maintaining the whole thing. No one works for free. So Apple can get that paid for either by charging more for hardware, charging for access to the dev kits, or taking a cut of sales for products produced with those dev kits. Apple chose the later.
So now they have a problem, not all software is monetized. You want to have the ability for people to choose to distribute software for free. Open source projects, educational, charity, and also "accessory apps" (think your bank app). But you don't want to charge developers money that they're not making. Imagine the shit storm Apple would stir up if they just started charging free apps a monthly fee to be listed in the app store at all. You also want to have young and new developers without a lot of capital to have access (that's why so many companies used to offer student discounts). But the problem becomes how do you allow that, and also allow in app downloads and purchases without every developer just having a "free" downloader app that then downloads the real application code that you pay for separately?
Let's say you sell a dev tool. And you decide you want to support open source projects, so you offer free licenses to any open source project. Would it satisfy your licensing if some company that had an "open source" curl wrapper that downloaded and executed binary blobs for which there was no source code? I doubt it. You'd rightfully say that an app that does nothing except download and launch closed source binary blobs is not in and of itself an open source project for the purposes of your license. It's the same basic idea for Apple. An app that only serves to download or unlock the "real" app after you pay the developer in a separate external transaction is not a "free" app of the sort Apple intends to allow. So they don't allow external transactions at all except for a narrow set of circumstances, and in those cases they don't allow steering. This maximizes the number of developers who are funding the costs of the platform, reducing the overall cost for all the developers who are paying and subsidizing a limited set of developers who are distributing free applications.
Or to try one other way of thinking about it, everyone hates the "freemium" business model. How much crappier would it be knowing that all the "freemium" games were paying absolutely nothing, but everyone who chooses not to engage in the freemium model still had to pay 15-30% to apple on their revenue?
> The person who paid for the sdk is the person who bought the iphone.
Are they? Then why did companies previously charge per seat annual licenses for their SDKs? Were the people who bought the computers and products back then not also paying for the SDK?
Clearly the answer is "who is paying" depends on the model you set up. You can take your income stream from the initial hardware sales, or you can take it from subscription fees, or you can take it in revenue sharing models. Apple chose the latter, and so every developer that finds some way to use the platform and not share their revenue is a "free rider" relative to the other developers who are now subsidizing them.
>If apple made $0 off the app store, would they still make iphones? I would assume yes since they are profitable devices. Hence this isn't free riding.
It's not "would they still make phones" they might. It's "would they still make phones that 3rd parties can develop applications for at the same price they currently charge and without per seat annual $1k+ up front license fees to prospective developers."
> It's not "would they still make phones" they might. It's "would they still make phones that 3rd parties can develop applications for at the same price they currently charge and without per seat annual $1k+ up front license fees to prospective developers."
The answer still seems like a very obvious yes. Certainly in the modern context where most of the value of the phone comes from apps and app devs can go to android if ios becomes to onerous.
Which is probably exactly why apple chose this model instead of per seat.
> You can take your income stream from the initial hardware sales, or you can take it from subscription fees, or you can take it in revenue sharing models. Apple chose the latter
I missed the part where they give iPhones away for free, and only make money from revenue sharing
> But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform.
Like their customers who happily pay a premium of $hundreds on every device sold? Talking about a free-rider "problem" in connection with literally the richest corporation in the world is diabolical. They develop the SDKs and the platform because that's the foundation of their business, nobody would buy an iPhone that doesn't have any 3rd party apps.
What's the cost of developing the SDK and the platform amortized over the number of devices that Apple sells? Is it $0.50, $5, $50, or $500?
> oh poor multi-billion dollar Apple can’t get paid
Apple is 1000x richer than that, they're a multi-trillion dollar company.
Ultimately all the money Apple is making from the store comes from the pockets of people. If apps won't have to pay a cut to Apple, people would be left with more money in their pockets.
If all apps were free and no sales would be forced to go through those apps, Apple still sells the phones and makes money from them. Would it be left with less money? Not my problem. Would it increase the cost of phones (maybe only in the EU) to compensate the missing revenues? Fair. Let's see how it affects sales.
> Would it increase the cost of phones (maybe only in the EU) to compensate the missing revenues?
Probably not "fair" since the EU seems opposed to their "core technology fee", which is (supposedly) a fee to the developers to compensate for the missing revenues. And if the EU allowed raising prices in EU counties to offset that lost revenue, but didn't allow the core tech fee, that would effectively be the EU outlawing making your money on software rather than on hardware. It seems more likely the EU would just demand continued subsidized access to the same services, like they already did with facebook.
> And yes I know we can all scoff and say “oh poor multi-billion dollar Apple can’t get paid but getting paid is exactly how Apple is a multibillion dollar company.
The entire discussion there could be summed up as people have become convinced that Apple the multi-billion dollar company should shift revenue to Facebook or Netflix (or whoever), the other multi-billion dollar company. Fantastic marketing by them to convince people this is a moral thing to do and must be done. It has nothing to do with small developers or better experiences for customers, just an increase in X for Netflix.
Yes charging rent does stop the free rider problem. The cost of maintenance is infinite if Apple says it is cause nobody else is allowed to maintain Apple services.
When people and universities are allowed to maintain Unix services it turns out the cost isn't infinite, and is easily manageable under a public budget and charity. Apple chooses to burn money to create a smokescreen here and you are falling for it.
> But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform
I really do not want to use the iOS SDK which is utter garbage quality. The reason people use the Apple tooling is because they have no choice, in reality xcode is 10 years behind any modern web or native tooling.
> But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform.
This is included in the price of the hardware that their customers and all the developers who develop for the platform have bought, many times over.
Don't believe me? Look up Apple's financial statements and compare iPhone sales to the measly amount they spend on R&D (which includes the development of SDKs for all their platforms).
It used to be that Apple charged for MacOS. And then they said: nope, our hardware pays for that. And made it free.
They've been hard rent-seeking since iTunes and iPod. They aggressively eliminated and made inconvenient other ways for getting music onto iPods. Hardware was great, but hard dependence on iTunes killed it for me.
What if that software is trying to sell you stuff? And what if it's discouraging or preventing by technical means alternatives from that?
What do people do with ipods if not play music? And where do they get that music if not paying Apple? Apple's official recommendation at the time if you wanted to ingest arbitrary audio like your own recordings was to burn a CD and then rip it with iTunes. That cost about a dollar an hour to get access to your own audio rather than just... making a reasonable process.
It is the definition of rent. The cost is that I have to run your software on my device. I could create value for myself by running software of my choice, instead Apple destroys that value to create a percentage of it for themselves.
Apple pretends to value user privacy and artist rights as these values often conveniently align with taking away user and partner control. The mask has slipped multiple times but their control over users never will until they are legally required to treat their users like humans.
> The cost is that I have to run your software on my device. I could create value for myself by running software of my choice
This is an outright Orwellian redefinition of the term.
> Apple pretends to value user privacy and artist rights as these values often conveniently align with taking away user and partner control. The mask has slipped multiple times but their control over users never will until they are legally required to treat their users like humans.
Ah, so you have an axe to grind against Apple and could not care less about the stone, got it.
> If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.
But what alternative? There is no European smartphone OS. Windows and Steam OS and XBox are US-american, too.
The alternatives are Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo and others. Already the dominant brands in Europe. It doesn't have to be European, it has to be good and those are pretty good at much cheaper prices. They also offer premium models that Apple doesn't have a match.
People pay a lot extra for the feelings the brand invokes in them. Tesla was like that when it was about the values it used to represent, right after Musk dropped those values they had to start pricing their vehicles based on the specs to compete with similarly specced alternatives.
If Apple goes into fight with EU and becomes the "anti-european tech giant" they will have to start selling 300 euro iPhones.
American brands should tread carefully: while America is willing to ban their (cheaper, sometimes better) competitors, Europe is much less willing to — especially now as America itself has taken a much more bullying tone towards its allies.
America overestimates its economic strength on the world stage because they have an unmatched military, but when all books are closed its only 300M people and most of em are broke. That's a market the same size as Brazil, Australia and the UK combined - it's a lot but it's not enough to start unilaterally declaring yourself the boss. USA is playing a losing strategy here.
Android is Linux based, although you'd have to build a shitton of replacements for all the stuff Google took out of AOSP and locked behind GMS. And you'd probably have problems getting anyone to manufacture EUDroid devices given that they'd lose access to Google Play if they did.
Alternatively, you could liquidate Apple.
That is: confiscate Apple's EU subsidiaries, repeal DMCA 1201 equivalents in EU law, strip iOS of copyright protection, crack the DRM, replace iCloud's deep integration into iOS, set up a task force for cloning Apple's hardware, and put everything you steal online so other countries can steal iOS too.
Do the same to Microsoft as well. Actually, that would be easier than stealing iOS but I don't think the EU wants to try to revive Windows Mobile as an escalation to a trade war.
The core idea to keep in mind is that trade wars are stupid, but also that America's business tyrants will crumble easily if one were to happen. Globalized trade and supply chains mean that basically nobody is self-sufficient in everything; but in America's case, we're mainly self-sufficient in agriculture. Our comparative advantages in tech and cultural exports are a function of us convincing every other country to actually pay us whatever we want for our culture; which is a deal that countries can trivially reneg on.
I know it would leave a lot of money on the table, but if Apple had set the app store fee at 5% (enough to cover credit card fees and running the service) and been content with a 50% margin on hardware, it never would have been in this mess.
I would imagine that getting the user out of the in-app purchase payment screen and attempt to redirect them at the website for payment, have them figure out how to enter credit card details etc would result in a drastically decreased conversion rate though.
Companies don’t make laws (unless you live somewhere like the US); people do. If the people say “stop fucking around and rent-seeking” then companies should have to do that. It’s pretty simple, really. Just because you build your own hardware and software doesn’t give you the right to do whatever you want.
Imagine a major streaming service: Subscription through Apple 30USD/Month or 25USD/Month if you do it through this one click fintech app.
The fintech app can even pay the streaming service for every customer they bring.
So for the users who already have the fintech app its a no-brainer, click once and get a free coffee each month. For those who don't have the app already it can push them to create an account as they see it on every app as a cheaper alternative. In Europe at least, even traditional banks are able to create a new customer account through a few steps in the in the app. It's usually just about entering your name, taking a photo of your ID and then scanning your face by looking left and right on the camera. You can have a grace period to add the funds for the subscription.
Banks already pay a lot of money for new customers, its pretty common in some places to offer interest-free loans or give cashbacks when you create a bank account through the app. They can partner with those services to offer months of free use or upgrades and then suddenly the value for the trouble of a few click and a scan goes up substantially.
Apple has its act together. Those, who are not Apple, do not in comparison. They are Big Mad that Apple does.
You don't understand the term "rent seeking". Because in this case, it's Apple's competitors that are rent seeking by utilizing the force of the government to make Apple give competitors access to its private but non-monopolistic ecosystem.
I think that Apple should call that bluff and leave the EU.
Which in turn will increase public pressure on the EU, but not as functionally as it would in a democratic system.
All hollow talk. It will lose all of its aggression the moment that Apple leaves the EU, and EU citizens are left with the remaining options.
Totally, the Spaniards are on the edge against EU for forcing Apple to allow competing services on %25 of the smartphones they use. Madrid is pouring police force into Barcelona as we speak as the Catalans started burning cars on the streets against the unelected bureaucrats threatening them to give App Store alternatives to every 4th smartphone. Unjustified violence by the police is being reported against people who don't want to know about cheaper payment options. The situation is considered stable at this point but I don't think that EU will survive if Apple pulls out of EU. The president of the EU commission was caught mumbling at the mic "Ich hoffe, Apple ruft nicht an oder blufft, sonst ist alles verloren." which roughly translates to "I hope Apple doesn't call or bluff or all is lost" in Bavarian.
> All hollow talk. It will lose all of its aggression the moment that Apple leaves the EU, and EU citizens are left with the remaining options.
People in Europe (and everywhere else that isn't the US) are already using these "remaining options" more than they use Apple products by a massive margin. Apple products are not nearly as popular in Europe as they are in the US because more people realize that the price tag is not proportional to the quality you get.
That might be a very risky bet. Currently a lot of people are looking for alternatives of US products, if Apple gets out of the EU, it might not be that easy to get back as the market might have drastically shifted.
People like you keep forgetting that the EU is the single largest consumer market in the world. This does not mean that Apple gets most of it revenue from the EU, but it's still a sweet $90B in 2024.
In which world does a company give up on close to $100B in revenue out of spite?
> It's telling that Gruber is pretty staunchly against EU/DMA interferance in Apple, and broadly thinks they're wrong. But this is the one thing he agree on
I’ve stopped seeing Gruber as any sort of authority on Apple for a while now. He’s just a single guy with an opinion like everyone else, and it’s, more times than not, clearly biased in favor of Apple.
Some of his analysis of objective data is informative, but when he gets into subjective material, I tune out. I don’t really care any more about what he says than most others sharing their opinion on the internet — it’s just one more data point to consider collectively alongside everyone else’s.
I agree with your overall comment, but I think this is basically what OP was getting at: it's not surprising that Gruber is against EU/DMA interference, yet even he has issues with this particular point.
Usually the user should heavily penalize such behavior, but Apple has users and apostles. To a degree that some believe Daddy Apple should shield them from temptation by evil Netflix.
It ridiculous and also comes with costs for other customers of that ecosystem. I believe brands really make some people stupid.
Technically, the first amendment applies only to state actors, not private entities. See Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, Hudgens v. NLRB, and many other cases that upheld this interpretation. Private companies like Apple can restrict free speech on their platforms legally (at least as far as the first amendment is concerned).
That said, I believe in the principle of free speech, especially as envisioned by Tim Berners Lee for the Web. I wish more Americans could adhere to those principles even when the speech is not to their taste. Certainly feels like a lot of cultural backsliding happening.
> Technically, the first amendment applies only to state actors, not private entities.
That's probably not what the person you're responding to is talking about.
Americans have this unfortunate tendency to harp on and on about 'free speech' in contexts where the first amendment obviously does not apply, or, even more intriguingly/ironically, where the first amendment pretty clearly states the exact opposite.
For example, if some non-government-owned platform (such as a social network) bans a user, and that user says "My free speech rights are being infringed".
Whereas what the 1A actually states is the exact opposite: That platform has the right to ban that user, and the government is constitutionally restrained: If the government were to make a law that forces this social network to unban this user, that'd be the 1A violation.
Then there are only 3 options:
1. That user wildly misunderstands free speech. And given how common this is, 'most americans' is perhaps [citation needed] but the sentiment is understandable. It's not just that "My free speech!" is so common, it's also that articles about some incident pretty much never talk about this. Lawyers, legal wonks, legal podcasts that sort of thing - they talk about it, but, niche audience.
2. The meaning of 'free speech' in the sentence 'this social network has banned me; my free speech is being infringed' is not referring to 1A but to the concept as a general principle; a principle that is orthogonal, or even mutually exclusive with, the definition of 'free speech' the way 1A intends it.
3. They know exactly what 1A means but they are lying through their teeth in order to get some internet group ragin' going on.
If we make a habit of assuming good intentions, the nicest choice is option 2.
The somewhat famous "Section 230" covers part of this, and explains some of the pragmatic reasoning behind MCAC v Halleck: If you hold private companies responsible for having infringed free speech rights, then private companies are going to bend over backwards making clear they are not going to moderate. Anything. For any reason. Legal reasons, you see.
There's a lot of nuance lost when the Bill of Rights is being taught in US grade schools. Most kids read each of the amendments but then are given a simplified interpretation. "The first amendment guarantees a right to free speech" would have been correct enough for a test answer when I was in school, although it loses enough nuance to frequently be incorrect, because people often presume that equates to "I can say what I want without consequence and the government will protect my ability to do it", when it more accurately should probably be taught as "the government has a limited ability to meddle in other's speech"
The net effect is both that people misunderstand the 1st amendment, and they also believe that what they thought it meant is an important value.
> Whereas what the 1A actually
> states is the exact opposite:
> That platform has the right to
> ban that user, and the
> government is constitutionally
> restrained: If the government
> were to make a law that forces
> this social network to unban
> this user, that'd be the 1A
> violation.
If I build a bridge and offer it for public use for a toll, and I overhear you saying something I don't like as you travel across in your car, you think the government stepping in if I ban you from traversing the bridge solely for that reason is a 1A violation?
This principle is obvious if I was running a newspaper and printing user-submitted comments. I can have whatever inclusion policy I deem fit, or my own speech would be curtailed.
But this is now being applied by private companies in cases wildly removed from that. Meta er whoever can ban two users having a private conversation on their platform.
It seems to me that the private bridge builder in the example above has a stronger case than these companies in such cases.
Perhaps I overhear that you dislike fast-food, and I only sell billboard space to fast-food companies.
Or perhaps you think that would be just fine, and we just need to close the technological gap of being able to embed hypersensitive microphones into asphalt.
4. Americans believe companies too frequently do the government's bidding, and by allowing corporations to suppress speech, they're allowing the government to exploit that and indirectly violate their direct 1A rights.
Likewise, I think we have a miscommunication here because I agree with everything you wrote.
I'm not making a legal argument about free speech at all. I agree with your analysis on the legality there. Now that said, I do think the Biden admin crossed the line of legality with their collaboration (and a little implied threatening) Twitter and Facebook, and their whole establishing an office whose job it was to report "disinformation" on social media to the tech giants.
I'm speaking culturally. To go back to the Lab Leak Theory example when Youtube was taking down any videos that even mentioned it (even if the mentioner was a well-respected Evolutionary Biologist) wasn't illegal, but it was a total abandonment of free speech principles. It feels like it's abated quite a bit in the last year or two, but for a while there, there were ideological rakes all over the place that any mention of would get your content taken down by big tech.
Now all that being said, I do think there's a point at which the line between private corp and government starts to blur, and I do think big tech is approaching that line. For most of history, no corporation could even approach the level of power over our lives as government, but increasingly they are getting so powerful that we can't even function in society without them. I think we're approaching or past the point where regulation and/or breaking them apart is necessary to reduce the amount of power that they have over us.
> To go back to the Lab Leak Theory example when Youtube was taking down any videos that even mentioned it (even if the mentioner was a well-respected Evolutionary Biologist) wasn't illegal, but it was a total abandonment of free speech principles.
Not really, this is a case where two cooperating parties, who both have speech rights, have a dispute about which speech they collectively want to espouse.
Unless you're saying that people should lose their speech rights when they form a business?
> Unless you're saying that people should lose their speech rights when they form a business?
I tried to make clear I wasn't making a legal argument, but since you mentioned it I will address it, but first I'll just say that no I'm not saying that people should lose their free speech rights when they form a business. I'm not sure how you got that from what I wrote, but no, legally they don't and shouldn't (with maybe one exception, mentioned next). What I have a problem with is the lack of cultural appreciation for free speech. Culturally, the powerful people at Youtube decided that free speech was not important, at least not as important as controlling the narrative and preventing the spread of ideas they considered "dangerous" (or whatever description they might provide). I think that's the mainstream cultural attitude in the USA today, and I think that's unfortunate. I wish that everyone would believe as I do, that free speech as a cultural value is important and should be honored and respected, especially when it's speech you disagree with.
But to the legal argument: When that "business" gets to be the size and scope of a company like Youtube, yes I do think some regulations (i.e. restrictions) on what they are allowed to impose on their users are reasonable. If we had a dozen small providers then I don't think there's any need for regulation there because the market competition will provide a powerful check on potential abuse, but Youtube is an entrenched behemoth with a giant moat. At that scale, the amount of power they have over the people is immense, and IMHO approaches that of the government, and therefore there need to be some checks on that power.
I do also think the "compelled speech" defense for Youtube et al is a bit of a stretch. I agree that compelled speech is not ok and is just as bad as restricted speech. However, I do see a difference between being a communication service and someone being compelled to say certain speech. I would strongly oppose an attempt to compel Youtube the company to say something, but I don't think somebody having a channel that is clearly attributed to themselves and not to the parent company, is the equivalent of forcing Youtube the company to say something specific.
For example, imagine a world where the telephone system operators got to decide which speech was permitted on their phone lines. They had people listening in the conversation and "moderating" by cutting off the live feed if the topic veered into something they disagreed with, and any voicemails/recordings made were also deleted and scrubbed so the recipients wouldn't hear the wrong think. In that scenario would you defend the rights of the phone company not to host "compelled" speech that they disagree with? Compelled speech would be forcing the company themselves to say something. Them passing the electricity on the wire (aka being a "dumb pipe") is not the same thing.
I also think the argument falls apart when taken to it's logical extent. Who decides what speech they are "compelled" to host? If I make a Youtube video and say "I support <presidential candidate not favored by the company>" are they being compelled to say that? I don't think so.
> I tried to make clear I wasn't making a legal argument
I know which is why I used the word "should" to indicate moral hypothetical and not existing law.
>I'm not sure how you got that from what I wrote
Because you said that a situation in which YouTube exercised the right to moderate their own platform was a "total abandonment of free speech principles".
But as you recognize, compelled speech is also a violation of free speech principles, and that is, whether either of us agree with it (I also don't entirely), it is also factually a free speech principle that is in balance here.
> For example, imagine a world where the telephone system operators got to decide which speech was permitted on their phone lines.
And we're back to the common carrier argument, which I think is more relevant to this conversation than a vague appeal to "free speech". Ultimately when the government grants monopolies to businesses, they start to become an effective arm of the government and should be regulated more in line with the rules that apply to government. I think we need to start classifying more of these platforms as common carriers and require them to carry all speech equally -- or break them up until the point they don't hold effective monopolies and/or wrongfully crush competitors.
Indeed, sounds like we're largely in agreement then.
> Because you said that a situation in which YouTube exercised the right to moderate their own platform was a "total abandonment of free speech principles"
True I did say that, and I'll definitely walk that one back a little bit. I didn't mean their moderation as a whole was the abandonment, I mainly meant their philosophical approach to it. (i.e. deciding that anything that goes contrary to the CDC/WHO narrative may not be discussed)
As an American who thinks free speech is one of the most important rights we have, I wish the answer to your question would be a collective "yes" but unfortunately it is not.
I don't understand what you're on about. The only laws that the USA has on the books that says anything about this are either [A] recently written state laws written as vehicles to virtue signal, particularly by DeSantis in Florida, or [B] the exact opposite.
For example, the first amendment indicates that apple doesn't just have the right to tell its users of its app store to say nothing about alternate payment methods. It goes further than that: The government must not tell Apple anything else. That's stretching 1A a bit; more likely 1A says nothing at all about what Apple is doing here.
"Free Speech" is a thing americans are fond of saying, but unfortunately, considering that 1A is often called 'the free speech amendment', what that actually means is usually unclear, and in this day and age, that means it gets weaponized: Folks start harping on about free speech and pick whatever of the many conflicting definitions so happens to suit their needs at that exact moment.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall was british, not american. She's the author of "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
The thing about 1A and free speech in general: Forcing somebody to say something is just as bad as forcing somebody not to say something. And, once you start talking about non-governmental entities and 'free speech', those two things are at odds. After all, if the government tells some social network that they MUST NOT ban some user or delete some posting, that is compelled speech, and that's what I meant with '1A means the opposite of what you / this case / most americans think it means'. 1A protects the right of private companies to restrict your speech. It does not protect your right to have your speech protected from being suppressed, deleted, or otherwise restrained by private actors.
In America free speech is always limited to what "I find acceptable". There's an infinite number of things that lots of Americans will find unacceptable. Swearing is beeped/censored everywhere (even on youtube), songs release "explicit" and "clean" versions, nipples are blurred on TV, some words you can't say even in an educational or karaoke setting (N-word, R-word, etc.)
I don't disagree with you, but I do think it's important to distinguish between a censored swear word or nipple, and taking down an entire video because it mentions the Lab Leak Theory at a time when that was politically unacceptable. The former may be suppressing a small element of the "speech" but it's not (for the most part) restricting the expression/transmission of ideas. It's also a very firm and defined standard that is unambiguous (i.e. here is a list of words you can't say, use substitutes to convey meaning v. here is a list of opinions you aren't allowed to express). The latter on the other hand is absolutely the suppression of ideas, which IMHO is what "free speech" is really about and why it's so important.
If you extend "speech" to "any kind of action an individual or company can do", then no. There's plenty of laws regulations that restrict what you can do in USA.
Most people who go on about free speech are the ones who clamp down the most on it and are massive snowflakes when people decide not to buy their stuff because of their speech.
Sure it is. Lots of us also go on about private property rights and freedom of association. Apple is restricting the behavior of entities doing business through them on a platform they own. The logic is that you remain free to speak - elsewhere. Meanwhile Apple remains free not to do business with you if you can't or won't accept their terms.
(Well really the legal argument is that Apple isn't the government and so the first amendment doesn't bind their policies but there's an ideological aspect in addition to the legal one.)
The issue missed by such an analysis is the outsized impact the megacorp has. Without strong competition (ie not a duopoly or even an oligopoly) regulation is required to protect consumers against practices that otherwise would be financially discouraged.
There are also a few other blindspots people here tend to have regarding regulation. In particular that sometimes detrimental behaviors exist that are perversely incentivized rather than discouraged by the market despite being obviously worse for consumers. A lot of people here seem to conveniently forget that such things are even within the realm of possibility.
US officials and businessmen keep on repeating the same thing:
> The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards.
But this is wildly untrue. The EU isn't hand-picking individual organisations and fining them because they're American, they're fining them because they're in breach of existing legislation. The same legislation applies to local companies.
Ironically, it's the US who takes stances like the one they claim the EU is taken. E.g.: The US required that TikTok be sold, without actually proving that TikTok was in breach of any actual law.
But repeating the same claims gets those claims out into the media, and that's what people hear. So we see a dissonance between what the media says (and many people believe) and what's really happening.
Agreed with your first point. Regarding TikTok though the argument was never (AFAIK) that they were actively breaking the law but rather that their structure and ownership posed a threat to US interests. That's pretty reasonable and largely mirrors China's stance against the US.
If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations. They seem to prioritize free trade above all else.
The US is lying about tiktok, the only reason is to mirror China's strategy towards American app. After watching the tit-for-tat video of Veritasum[1] I agree with America's strategy of banning Chinese apps until China allows American apps. That being said, I wish the US was more transparent about why they're doing this instead of lying.
I'm guessing the reason why they're lying is that they don't want to scare ALL Chinese companies.
I find this so confusing. Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk are foreigners who are both demonstrably influencing American politics through media they control. What makes Tiktok different?
The same thing that would make a platform with ties to Russia different. It falls under the influence of a sophisticated geopolitical adversary.
Tesla is headquartered and has most operations based in the US. Murdoch's ventures are similar AFAIK.
Given how much surveillance modern vehicles do I wouldn't be surprised if imports start being subjected to additional scrutiny at some point. But at least most vehicles can't be used to subtly and intentionally manipulate the owner's perception of the world so I guess the stakes are a bit lower.
Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk are both American citizens. In fact, one of Murdoch's primary reasons for becoming an American citizen in 1985 was to comply with the Communications Act of 1934, which prevented him (or any non-citizen) from owning more than 25% of a broadcasting company.
Well... Though I agree with you in principle, the DMA does target specific gatekeeper companies and the criteria for these were set conveniently to ensure no EU company is regulated by it. So I can see their point a little
My mistake. While Booking.com is HQ'd in Amsterdam, Booking Holdings is indeed a US company (also responsible for Priceline, Kayak, and OpenTable.)
> There are zero European companies, including Spotify - the #1 music streaming marketplace in the world.
This still doesn't answer the actual question of whether the gatekeepers were selected because they are US companies, or because they are are Internet gatekeepers. I don't find it surprising that the US's legal and economic culture resulted in more conglomerate gatekeepers than other nations.
That's not really true. You can easily switch to Deezer, Apple Music, Tidal, Qobuz, YouTube Music, etc. You'll have access to just about the exact same library of music.
You can't just ignore YouTube, TikTok, Facebook Marketplace and still have access to the content they gatekeep.
The DMA doesn't care how easy for final customers to switch. If it did, Chrome wouldn't be designated a gatekeeper given how easy it is to switch to Firefox or brave or a dozen other browsers.
The DMA is about disintermediation of businesses from customers on large platforms with business and non-business users and durable user bases.
The problem with Chrome and the DMA has to do with the fact that Alphabet does these "don'ts":
- treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
- prevent users from un-installing any pre-installed software or app if they wish so (Chrome on Android can be disabled but not uninstalled)
- track end users outside of the gatekeepers' core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent having been granted.
None of that is used to determine who is a gatekeeper.
The assessment for whether Chrome qualified as a gatekeeper is less than 3 pages long. All they care about is whether they qualify as a platform and that they are over the threshold for active non-business users, active business users, revenue in the EU for enough time.
At no point did they concern themselves with potential anti-competitive practices in making the determination.
It's only after they're designated a gatekeeper that they're required to avoid things like self-preferencing or negotiating MFN terms with business. This conveniently allows the EU to pick and choose who the restrictive rules apply to on a company by company and product by product basis.
That regulation is very much concerned with anti-competitive practices. What we're seeing now is the application (or execution) of those regulations.
When I look at Regulation (EU) 2022/1925, it's pretty clear to me that Spotify does not have, for example, "very strong network effects, an ability to connect many business users with many end users through the multisidedness of these services, a significant degree of dependence of both business users and end users, lock-in effects, a lack of multi-homing for the same purpose by end users, vertical integration, and data driven-advantages."
Spotify most certainly does have strong network effects (your friends are all on it, the party you go to with collaborative playlists uses it, etc), data driven-advantages (Spotify's personalized recommendations are built on vast historical playing data), lock-in effects (your playlist/history and all your friends' playlists are there), dependence of businesses users (Spotify is the go-to platform for music labels for promotion and only way to reach certain customers) and end users (because of network and lock-in effects).
I think we might have a fundamental disagreement that we'll have to agree to disagree on.
From a brief search, Facebook and Google are responsible for ~60-80% or more of digital advertising spend. This is because of their data-driven advantages that come from the multisidedness of their services, forcing a dependence of business users.
While Spotify does have social features, I don't really know anyone who joined Spotify because that's "where their friends were." The social features consist primarily of playlists (which can be viewed without an account) and a feed showing what friends are listening to, if you connect to Facebook - which many don't. Additionally, Spotify has very open APIs that make it easy to move a playlist to another service: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
Facebook requires an account to access Marketplace, even to view it (lock-in effects), and many communities and neighborhoods have made Facebook the sole source of online discussion / information sharing (strong network effects.) Eschewing Facebook means missing information you can't get any other way. And it's literally impossible to avoid Google online.
Simply having a product and customers ("your friends are all on it, the party you go to with collaborative playlists uses") or an audience ("Spotify's personalized recommendations are built on vast historical playing data") is not the same as being a gatekeeper.
> I don't really know anyone who joined Spotify because that's "where their friends were." The social features consist primarily of playlists (which can be viewed without an account)
Former Apple Music user here. I switched because of Spotify’s collaborative playlists. Technically, I could have used a sync solution to sync changes between platforms. In reality, it was just cheaper all around to switch to Spotify instead, and be on the same platform as my partner and friends. Being able to open Spotify links being sent to me without having to run it though some translation shortcut was wonderful.
Apple deleting all my playlists immediately after my subs lapsed was the icing on the cake to never return.
I'd argue this style of concentrating power under a single giant company is mostly American style.
EU companies tend to keep group entities separate instead of running for absolute synergies. For instance the AOL-Time-Warner-Direct-Dish kind of merger is pretty much unheard of.
thats only kinda right. The DMA does include booking.com as a gatekeeper, which is european. But most gatekeepers (except booking and tiktok) are US-based
There are plenty of EU companies that buy into new markets or opportunities, they just fall outside of these laws; Siemens is a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens
US corporations are too used to breaking laws as they see fit and getting away with a slap on the wrist, so being asked to follow the rules feels like an attack to them.
That is not my experience. Every US company I have worked in spent a lot of time training employees to follow the relevant laws. I have even been on teams which had to do work to comply with the European GDPR. The message I have always received is follow the law and don’t break it.
I think you make many good points. Slight tangent: Why isn't EU more concerned about TikTok? While it is very difficult to prove, various studies have demonstrated that TikTok pushes more content favoring the Chinese Government (CCP).
In my anecdotal experience of one, American platforms are way faster in pushing far-right content on me even though it has to be clear to the algorithm that I don't want such content.
The timeline doesn't align for that at all. National security concerns were raised before the Pentagon banned in in 2019, then Trump ordered it to divest in 2020.
No doubt that it became an argument by some more recently, but it was just another straw on the already broken camel's back.
it's not difficult to prove. In the wake of the tarrifs, everyone in the US got Chinese manufacturing videos pushed to their feed so customers can buy direct from factories and avoid huge markups by a middleman.
I don't think Occam's razor applies here. Before the tarrifs, Donghua Jinlong glycine going viral was a silly Internet thing, but the tarrifs are big business and it might come off as a tin foil hat theory that the CCP exerted control over TikTok to push videos that undercut American companies in the face of American tarrifs, but geopolitics is very big business. Believing that those videos came up organically seems naive because this shit is a big deal with far reaching global ramifications.
> But this is wildly untrue. The EU isn't hand-picking individual organisations and fining them because they're American, they're fining them because they're in breach of existing legislation. The same legislation applies to local companies.
The iPhone App store existed before this legislation, and I suspect the rest of the targetted things did too.
This legislation only applies to companies that have a certain marketshare, which includes no European companies unless you count one that's a subsidiary of a US company.
Maybe it's the case that it is reasonable to handicap successful businesses, but this is a handicap that only applies to some businesses, most of which are US (but one is Chinese).
That's called gaslighting, and it's a hostile act. Truth is the first casualty of war. If someone is trying to deceive you (or deceive others and ruin your reputation), they are actively exposing you to some kind of risk, usually for their own benefit, which is a hostile act. Recommend you act accordingly.
There is no irony. The EU is targeting US companies. The US is targeting Chinese companies. The US is or soon will be targeting EU companies. China is targeting US companies. China will probably soon be targeting EU companies if they aren't already, which is probably already debatable. And this is not a complete list, it's not even a complete list of the highlights.
If they're doing it by legislation, well, the EU has been passing "legislation clearly designed for US companies to be in infringement of" for a while. Maybe you like that. Maybe it's a good thing; after all, the things they're passing laws about are basically just actions only US companies are capable of taking right now. Nevertheless it is clearly targeting. It's just targeting you like. The US has passed such legislation. China does it both with formal legislation and with de facto rules.
Free trade is a dead letter. Whether you like that or not is not very relevant to whether or not it is dead. It's dead. Maybe it'll swing back around in a few decades but right now even that is a distant prospect, we're not even done accelerating into the current merchantalist phase of the cycle, let alone decelerating, let alone heading back.
(Note "whataboutism" would be an inappropriate response to my point here; that's about "it's ok for us because they do it". My observation is not normative, merely descriptive... everyone is doing it, and they're doing it more rather than less right now.)
>So we see a dissonance between what the media says (and many people believe) and what's really happening.
This thing right here terrifies me. The entertainment-information media oligopoly has a tight grasp on public conversations. It feels like a hydra that can't be defeated.
It can be defeated by talking to people about things. If you are known to be an expert in topic X, and you are saying something different to what the media says about topic X (and which makes more sense), people (who know you and your reputation) are inclined to believe you over the media.
This only has a local impact, but global is made of local.
I do this as much as I can. Between chatrooms and local meets, I spend a significant portion of my time attempting to politely dispel misinformation.
It's exhausting, but it's worth it.
I want to organise with other people that do this, but I'm not sure how to do that. It feels like our efforts would be multiplied if we started to publish or otherwise spread information.
Ah, they said the T-word, presumably to invoke some political fire support from across the Atlantic. I wonder how that will go. Of course, this is not a tariff, for two reasons: firstly, it does not involve money (the UK's digital services tax does, but that's not this), and secondly, the same rules would apply to EU native competitors .. if there were any. It's what's knows as a "non tariff trade barrier". Of course those are all over the place, and many of them are there to protect consumer and public interests.
> The EU regulator also dropped Meta's Marketplace's designation as a DMA gatekeeper because the number of users fell below the threshold.
Now that's interesting. I think the threshold is 45 million? Falling EU userbase?
"the same rules would apply to EU maybe competitors... if there were any."
That can actually be an example of a tariff, though. Basically every country specializes in something, and imports things they're not good at making. For example: cheese, or luxury watches, or GPUs. If you have a special law that charges companies money only for the categories you import and you carve out exceptions for "small" (aka domestic) markets, a la the DMA, you have effectively created a tariff.
eBay's listings are no longer free. They are now extorting their pound of flesh via a so-called "Buyer Protection Fee" which forces buyers, rather than sellers, to pay extra when purchasing items from private sellers.
eBay is very different across countries. In Germany, eBay listings are free again for private sellers after they noticed the exodus to other platforms. I know this is not the case in other countries, so talking about eBay as a general platform is very difficult.
I'm a bit surprised usage was ever that high; that would imply that almost 10% of the population was using _Facebook Marketplace_!
I think I've looked at it maybe twice since it launched, to admire all the weird scams. Maybe it's gotten better since? It used to be sub-ebay levels of complete nonsense.
Remember that you're probably in a bubble. Marketplace was incredibly popular back in the days when I was at FB, and I'd have expected it to get more popular based on the people I see around me (kids stuff is all over it).
Maybe the gatekeeper thing is a reflection of less people in the EU using FB at all, rather than specifically Marketplace.
That bubble is the EU, which this law is about. I know a bunch of European countries have their own Ebay/Craigslist websites. Marketplace has never been even somewhat popular in my country.
Yeah fair. I guess I forget that Ireland is now the largest English speaking country in the EU, so I guess I'm in a bubble. I am still really surprised that Marketplace is no longer big enough to count as a gatekeeper.
> What surprises me is how much people on this site underestimate facebook.
It’s the classic disconnect between engineering and product management: When engineers don’t want a product and therefore conclude that nobody wants the product.
When I’ve brought up Facebook active user stats here in the past I got flooded with responses suggested Facebook was lying or manipulating their user counts to pump up the stock.
Yeah, I often see claims online that Facebook is dead, Facebook is just Boomers posting pictures of their grandkids, etc. Maybe it's a regional thing, because where I live, everyone's on Facebook. Most small businesses, organizations, and communities here use it as their primary (or only) online presence for promoting themselves and staying in contact with their customers/members. Marketplace has completely replaced the old newspaper classified ads. That's unfortunate since the search in Marketplace sucks, but it's happened.
My family uses its messenger for organizing things because everyone has it, even if some of us rarely use it except for that. If I wanted to draw attention to something locally, whether it was promoting a service or running for office, I'd be a fool not to use Facebook.
Part of the disconnect is that these days, a lot of the Facebook use is concentrated in places you don't necessarily see from the outside.
Like, fifteen years ago, if you happened upon the Facebook page of a random person, you'd usually see a handful of vacation pictures, a meme or three, some updates from their latest Clash of Cookie Farm Kitchen Dash session, and whatnot.
These days, all that stuff - if it's even still being posted - is likely siloed away to Friends-only posts. That random person might still be there, might still be logging in every day, but you don't see the Messenger group chats and the Marketplace offers/haggles.
Likewise for small businesses - a lot of the "look at this thing we're selling now, come check it out" posts now go to Instagram. They might still be auto-logging in, still responding to PMs on Facebook, still clicking a few news posts here and there, but that's just not visible on the outside, and creates the perception of Facebook the Ghost Town.
> Apple faces a €500 million fine for breaching the regulation’s rules for app stores, while Meta drew a penalty of €200 million for its "pay or consent" advertising model,
> The procedural fines fall short of the two giant penalties issued by the EU executive under its antitrust laws last year: €1.8 billion to Apple for abusing its dominant position while distributing music streaming apps, and €797 million to Meta for pushing its classified ads service on social media users.
Really honest questions: are those fines actually paid, in practice ? Is there a way for a citizen to know ? (As in, do they appear in the public budget of the UE ?) Or are they somehow deducted from subsidies, added to taxes, etc... ?
I know who collects taxes in France ("Le Tresor Public"). I don't know of a EU version of a treasury. Is it collected by one of the member states (Ireland, I would guess ?)
> Fines imposed on undertakings found in breach of EU antitrust rules are paid into the general EU budget. This money is not earmarked for particular expenses, but Member States' contributions to the EU budget for the following year are reduced accordingly. The fines therefore help to finance the EU and reduce the burden for taxpayers.
This quote is re: anti-trust, but likely generalizes.
>You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.
This is always a bit frustrating to me, in that, if someone doesn't like personal data collection, they likely have enough blocked that the attempts at targeted advertisements are likely to be very ineffective. And even in spaces where there is little personal data available, online advertising still seems to desperately cling to targeting rather than context.
I remember being struck by the contrast between the printed Times Literary Supplement, with advertisements for new book releases, conferences, cultural events, and so on, which all seem quite relevant to the audience, are often enjoyable and informative, and have directly motivated me to buy things, and the automated advertisements that were added to their podcast, for things like... a football-themed advertisement for a car dealership vaguely located near some rough geolocation of my IP address.
Try not using Wechat in China. Facebook's Whatsapp is going in that direction in the Netherlands and probably other European countries: I don't yet need it for daily life, but a lot of services are moving to supporting WhatsApp and turning off things like regular phone support, website chat, etc. The only things where it was a requirement so far, were things I didn't yet care about (like sending in voice messages to be used in a podcast, or being part of the neighborhood gossip and tool-sharing community chat) but I bet it won't stay that way forever and sooner or later a company will discontinue email support in favor of "just message us on Whatsapp". Between going back to the 80s and writing/printing letters and sending them in the mail, and installing WhatsApp, any reasonable person will begrudgingly click that agree button no matter if they really agree. I'd say they were extorted at that point and it is not voluntarily/freely given consent, even if they technically have made that choice themselves
This is a totally foreign idea to the EU. Offensive and crass, even.
There's something I've learnt from some time in the EU. There is not an innovative, risk-taking, freedom-loving bone in the EU culture -- they exported all those folks to the US. Their homegrown risk takers and innovators inevitably leave because of their suffocating culture around innovation, entrepreneurship, and progress. This is one of the reasons for the staggering amount of brain drain in the EU.
Most ironically, they sneer on our concept of entrepreneurship/innovation while they lag development by decades and having total and complete dependence on our technology. It is this weird moral high-horse position that amounts to a tactical foot-gun.
No. They just made it illegal for Meta specifically to do it, and they’re reserving judgment for anyone else on their hit list covered by the DMA. The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles despite the PR and the extra layers of indirection, it targets American and Chinese companies specifically because that’s what it was designed to do.
Not Meta specifically, although Meta as a monopoly on being apple to infrige this rule. (A long time ago, in a capitalism far, far way, America was against monopolies and cartels. Those days will come back.)
> The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles
What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ?
I can agree on some version of "not a neutral law" in that it is "objectively" targeted: the law makes a difference between smaller actors and bigger ones ("gatekeepers") (and it's not clear to me if the criterias (size, audience, revenues, etc...) are set in store, or arbitrary [1]).
It happens that they're all from the US except TikTok's ByteDance and Booking.com. It was probably _designed_ for that.
But I suspect the case here "Meta is offering you to pay, so that they don't have to respect your rights to privacy". I suspect it would be illegal for even the smaller data collectors. But IANAL.
However, the "neutral principles" don't make sense. All laws are principled, except the laws of physics.
In this case, yes, the "principle" is that personal data is something to be treated with care.
As often, you can state that something is a "principle" when someone can have the opposite version. So the "opposite" version of this is that personal data is a commodity that can be sold at will.
None of those version is neutrally "true" or "false".
However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter.
The shame is that it never was directly settled in a democratic debate - it's entirely the work of the legislative bodies of the EU, which, though elected and representative, are not exactly well know of famous. Maybe the debate is too technical to be popular.
> Not Meta specifically, although Meta as a monopoly on being apple to infrige this rule. (A long time ago, in a capitalism far, far way, America was against monopolies and cartels. Those days will come back.)
I’ve been asking for years here and nobody has made a solid argument to me how Facebook has a monopoly in anything or how a social networking monopoly even could exist. It’s a competitive market out there. Some of their competitors are on the DMA’s hit list too.
> What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ?
Sure it does. A law against murder is a law applied to everyone. That’s a neutral law, and it’s not targeted, and it’s a fairly neutral principle to state that “murder is intolerable in our society”.
> However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter.
The bad people doing bad things with extensive databases were European governments.
Antitrust doesn't mean monopoly, but monopoly is a part of antitrust. Monopoly also doesn't mean you're the only one, but you're the one capable of fixing prices, or doing something else anti competitive.
It's a complex thing in practice, don't take the linguistic definition of the word itself as the sole interpretation of the law.
Please note not only what I wrote but what I was directly responding to when I wrote it.
> It's a complex thing in practice, don't take the linguistic definition of the word itself as the sole interpretation of the law.
I am aware; however I am still waiting for the solid argument that Facebook is a monopoly to be made in either an EU legal context (not “gatekeeper”, not “very large online platform”, monopoly) or an American legal context.
Facebook being a monopoly is irrelevant to EU competition laws. These laws are strictly interested in fostering competitive markets and broadly cares about all sorts of anticompetitive behaviours. They are in no way interested in monopolies and I don’t think being a monopoly is a prerequisite for any of them. The closest notion will be dominant position but that’s a far weaker criteria itself irrelevant to the DMA.
Setting aside the DMA and DSA entirely as I already explained to someone else earlier why the DMA wasn’t an antimonopoly law and I don’t want these newer laws to get in the way of my questions: put another way, the EU does not have an antimonopoly law on the books? Article 102 of the TFEU seems to back that up, but I’m understanding you correctly here, the EU just doesn’t have an antimonopoly law?
So before I start telling EU citizens to sod off for dragging the word “monopoly” into these discussions regarding Facebook’s or any other company’s monopoly status within the EU which by your account doesn’t seem to have the means to even determine that nor a body of law built up around the concept, do any of the member nations have their own anti-monopoly laws? Or have all of their own competition laws up to and including any real or hypothetical antimonopoly laws been preempted by the TFEU?
> I’ve been asking for years here and nobody has made a solid argument to me how Facebook has a monopoly in anything or how a social networking monopoly even could exist. It’s a competitive market out there. Some of their competitors are on the DMA’s hit list too.
This seems pretty convincing to me, given that Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp: [1]
> Facebook leads the pack with 3.04 billion users, maintaining its position as the most extensive social networking site globally.
> YouTube follows with 2.5 billion users, reinforcing its status as the premier platform for video sharing and consumption.
> WhatsApp and Instagram are tied in the third position, each with 2 billion users. WhatsApp is renowned for its messaging services, while Instagram is a favorite for photo and video sharing.
> TikTok, with 1.5 billion users, rounds out the top five, showcasing its rapid rise as a leading platform for short-form video content.
In terms of social media, the only "competitor" at the same scale as facebook is tiktok and snap.
We might leave in the bubble that uses twitter, bluesky, reddit, etc... but their small relative to the blue site, for better or for worse.
Break up Meta into differents, apps, and suddenly the monopoly becomes much less obvious.
> and it’s a fairly neutral principle to state that “murder is intolerable in our society”.
Do you mean it's "neutral" because there is no "arbitrage" in deciding if someone is a murderer ?
Or that the principle behind it is universal ?
In this case, is it still "neutral" once your start talking about, say, self defense ? death penalty ? assisted suicide ? war times ? (or, if you're going to stretch it a lot, abortion ?) I'm not bringing it to say there is an equivalence, I'm saying you _will_ have people making the equivalence, and different people will disagree. It's called principles - no law say they have to be universal, and they're usually not.
> This seems pretty convincing to me, given that Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp: [1]
>> Facebook leads the pack with 3.04 billion users, maintaining its position as the most extensive social networking site globally. > YouTube follows with 2.5 billion users, reinforcing its status as the premier platform for video sharing and consumption. > WhatsApp and Instagram are tied in the third position, each with 2 billion users. WhatsApp is renowned for its messaging services, while Instagram is a favorite for photo and video sharing. > TikTok, with 1.5 billion users, rounds out the top five, showcasing its rapid rise as a leading platform for short-form video content.
This tells only part of the story, believe it or not. You know the old phrase, lies, damned lies, and statistics? This is why statistics is on the list: statistics are a very easy way to mislead and even straight up lie to people.
So let’s start with your conception of the DMA: the DMA is not an anti-monopoly law. It is addendum to the EU’s competition policy, which defines a new entity type called a gatekeeper. Similarly, with the DSA (“Digital Services Act”) they defined another entity type: very large online platforms or VLOPs.
The reason why they were put in the position in the first place of writing new laws defining new entity types is because no matter how they tried to slice it, not even the EU could justifiably punish their targets, large mostly American tech giants, under anti-monopoly law, not even if they were to really stretch it by legally redefining what a monopoly even is.
Do you want to know what a monopoly looks like? It looks like AT&T in the 90s with long distance phone calls, where the only way to talk to someone across a long distance and hear their voice was to go through AT&T’s telephone lines that had long ago been laid coast-to-coast across the USA. It looks like railroads colluding because they’re all laying tracks across Kansas and they don’t want to do that anymore. That’s a monopoly.
Apple, Meta, et al. have not been charged as monopolies under the DMA or DSA. They have been defined, literally put on a list by the EC under a law it had written itself with specific targets in mind, as Gatekeepers and/or VLOPs and simply being on that list is enough to give the EC extra special authority over them, again, under the law it has written with them in mind.
So let’s go back to social networks and discuss whether Facebook is a monopoly. I’m going to assert no and here is why: Facebook does not control the free flow of information across society, provide a chokehold for communication, is not essential for communication, and is not essential in its form or function. The Blue App itself is actually a very old type of social network grounded in the early to mid-aughts with sites like MySpace and 1up.com as its peers. Some of the kids today that never grew up with that, but really only heard about it have found their home in this retro social network called SpaceHey, but you don’t really see more Facebook’s because nobody really wants that. There’s already Facebook.
What about Facebook’s suite? The Blue App, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Again, all very large social networks in their own right. There’s also Threads tied into Instagram. They only seem dominant if you ignore an incredibly important piece of information: people don’t use just one social network. They use several, and for different purposes and niches. Twitter/X, Reddit, WeChat, LINE, KakaoTalk, Blue Sky, WhatsApp, VSCO, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Mixi, iMessage, Badoo, Mastodon, TikTok & Douyin, Whisper, Yik Yak, VK, Xiaohongshu, Letterboxd, Truth Social and Bumble are all playing in the same space. I would even throw Hacker News in the mix. What differentiates them are things like niche, geography, audience or interest focus, and medium but there are only so many hours in the day and Facebook is competing against all of that, and Netflix and YouTube, and the time you spend IRL just chatting with your friends at the pub or whatever.
People are on Facebook at this point largely because they want to be, and the fact that they have 3 billion users or whatever is fucking irrelevant to a competition authority because there’s no country or bloc on Earth with that population. The United States Department of Justice is chiefly concerned with competition law inside its own borders, and the same for the relevant EU authorities, and the same for each other country on Earth.
> In this case, is it still "neutral" once your start talking about, say, self defense ? death penalty ? assisted suicide ? war times
Murder has a definition, and it’s not just a synonym for the killing of someone. It’s the unlawful and intentional act of killing someone without justification nor a valid excuse. Different legal systems may vary in the specifics, but most do tend to distinguish murder from other forms of killing. Either way, the applicability of the charge of murder, or the charge of being a monopoly to bring this discussion back a bit from the morbid, is founded in the rule of law.
> It happens that they're all from the US except TikTok's ByteDance and Booking.com. It was probably _designed_ for that.
Booking.com is owned by an American company.
> In the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases
Lack of databases didn't stop "people" from doing bad things. They built the databases, rather quickly, while they were doing bad things.
I find it bizarre that the response to trying to prevent the rise of another fascist European government was to avoid collecting data as if a populist fourth Reich wouldn't ignore the law and use neighbors to rat out neighbors again. Not that I believe for a second any European country doesn't keep far more extensive records on citizens than the Nazis did when they came to power.
> "This isn't just about a fine; the Commission forcing us to change our business model effectively imposes a multi-billion-dollar tariff on Meta while requiring us to offer an inferior service."
Meta complaining about getting tariff'd is objectively hilarious.
> the Commission forcing us to change our business model
This is total, utter, complete 100% grade A organic nonsense.
I worked at FB (but the same is true of basically all action driven advertising systems). Only a tiny proportion of users ever click, but they are incredibly lucrative for online advertising platforms.
The whole subscription was a really transparent attempt to get people to accept the tracking and it's honestly profoundly depressing that this is what they're reduced to.
At least, old school ads. Sensible ads. Like Coca-Cola. I have no idea how these ridiculous online gaming things stay in business but I'm sure it's much stupider.
Correct, but those ads (brand) are much, much less common online because Google (first) and Facebook (second) pushed DR advertising, which is what most SMBs and smaller businesses do.
Like, some of this is because they're easier to measure which makes it easier to sell, but lots more of it was due to smaller businesses that couldn't afford brand spending money on something more connected to their business outcomes.
> I have no idea how these ridiculous online gaming things stay in business
Mostly whales. A really small proportion of users spend absurd amounts of money on these games, and much of the competitive games just advertise for free users to get crushed by the whales.
How do you think those drinks get there? Beverage companies are paying for shelf space.
But, if you think ads for drinks don't work, take a look at Pepsi's Project Refresh of 2010, and what happened to their sales. TLDR, Pepsi took it's superb owl ad budget and used it to do community grants instead; sales dropped and a couple years later, Pepsi went back to advertising during the superb owl and stopped doing community grants.
No, like the rest of these power games it should be worrying. It's not about whether it's actually a tariff or not - it's not about objective truth. It's about getting the orange guy to do things that are beneficial for Mr Sugarhill's money pile. It might or might not work in this particular instance, but it should be very concerning that this sort of thing is the way to get money now.
Mr Sugarhill's ploy is presumably to get Mr Mango enraged about the tariffs so he tariffs them back 200%, and they back down to avoid the 200% tariffs.
I don't understand meta's statement that this handicaps american businesses while allows European and Chinese companies to operate under different standards.
It's not completely unwarranted. According to the article, Facebook was fined for their model of asking for pay or accept tracking. Which is exactly what almost all publishers do, e.g. all big German newspapers. It's absolutely clear that this is against the law - they could show ads, but can't invade the users privacy for that, so no tracking ads - but they do it anyway and got away with it in various decisions. And now Facebook gets a huge fine for the same behaviour.
Which is good in a way, maybe it will lead to a behaviour correction also for the smaller publishers. But it's of course not an equal treatment.
Apple on the other hand completely deserves its fine, without a question. They got clear rules and did everything to circumvent them. The Apple's Core Technology Fee was obviously illegal. Don't know why they expected to get away with that, there wasn't even a minimal chance of that working. Idiots.
Big German newspapers do not need to comply under DMA.
The EU focusses, rightfully, on EU macro dynamics with these laws, not how smaller outlets work.
This is very much reasonable. When a platform is big, it has bigger impact, but also bigger budgets to hire legal help and bigger budgets to stay compliant.
This is well established in accounting where there exists different rules depending on size (in many jurisdictions)
What’s another example of different rules depending on size? “Content Moderation” I think? Anything outside the DMA? I think small companies get some exceptions for documentation requirements?
It is a derivative of what is called the "Risk Based Approach" in compliance, and is widely adopted.
As for companies and accounting you can look into the directive 2013/34/EU that established micro, small, and medium sized companies based on their size. These types of companies have different reporting requirements.
in my part of Europe there are tons: companies over a certain size might have different rules for layoffs, have to have union representatives, must pay for safety courses for the employees, must employ a certain percentage of people with disabilities...
In the US, some laws specifically exclude small companies. For example, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 requires 15 employees, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 requires 4 employees.
It also means that not all US companies have to comply, and that the ones that do are the most competitive companies in the market, making their claim that they have trouble competing moot.
I agree, except the DMA specifically only applies to companies over a specific size. I think if the German newspapers were at FB/Apple scale, in terms of number of users, then the DMA would apply (i.e. they would be designated gatekeepers or similar) and they could also be fined. Although I think pay for no ads is also a violation of GDPR maybe?
Exactly. While DMA does not apply, GDPR does. But it gets ignored and weakened by decision against the letter and the spirit of the law - which does not surprise if you realize how much power those legacy publishers hold. Not so FB, not here at least.
So it's not exactly the same regulation but pretty much the same situation. I'd also be pissed.
GDPR does not purport to outlaw targeted advertising. It just purports to require that the target consent.
In pretty much every other area of law in most of the world (including Europe) consent can be bought--the party requesting consent gives the consenter something in exchange for consent, and will not give that thing unless consent is given.
But under the rulings from some regulators that doesn't work for GDPR. Consent is apparently only considered to be freely given if withholding it would not result in any detriment such as not getting the same level of service or having to pay money for service.
If regulators want to outlaw targeted advertising it would be a lot better if they just did that, instead of making consent in GDPR work differently from how it has worked for pretty much everything else pretty much everywhere for centuries.
That's not entirely fair. The concept of duress exists and is always at odds with consent in a transactional setting. The issue is where to draw the boundary between "you freely chose to do business" and "you were coerced into accepting unfavorable terms".
I'm inclined to think that "pay or be tracked" is usually the former. The issue was never that I shouldn't have to pay but rather that I wasn't given the choice in the first place.
That would probably work if it wasn't already such an established business model. The grocery store hires a bouncer to not let me in unless he can take a picture of my ID? Fine... I'll go across the street.
But since it already is established that the Internet works this way, all grocery stores in town are already doing this. I might not want to but I still have to. Moreover, it's been firmly impressed upon everyone that they have to show ID to enter a grocery store, so if I created a new one that didn't, people would just continue going to their closest one anyway. To improve this situation, something more drastic than free competition is needed (if that could work, it already would have).
In this analogy the grocery stores pretty much all started offering the option to pay a cover charge and not have your ID checked. They believed this complied with the new laws but the regulator is making noises that this isn't good enough - that they have to make ID checks optional even for customers that won't pay.
So the question is, does charging you to not have your ID checked count as coercion or is it a voluntary choice? Or alternatively, does it have a detrimental effect on society at large? Is it somehow unfair to the individual? I'd tend to think that the answer to those questions would depend a lot on motivations - the funding model, the size of the fee, and how much money they make if they track you.
In the case of a newspaper they have to make money somehow. If readers aren't willing to pay I don't immediately see how offering a free tier that has advertisements with tracking is detrimental to society or unfair to the individual.
> When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.
Don't blame the regulators, it's pretty clear that "paying" with consent is a no-go from the text itself.
The measures apply by size, not by country of origin. It happens that the companies over the threshold are American. So their statement is basically untrue, but that's politics these days.
Probably also important to note, is that ByteDance and TikTok are also currently being investigated by the European Commission. Although for different reasons under the Digital Services Act - so it's not like they are targeting US companies specifically with the law.
Also the commission is known to fine European entities all the time for various reasons, one of the recent ones I can think of is Pierre Cardin and it's partners for restricting cross border European sales.
Spotify conveniently falls outside of the scope of this law when any artist would tell you it should absolutely be covered.
The DMA is gerrymandered to exclude domestic businesses. Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
> EU are basically enforcing market capitalism by disallowing monopolistic practices.
Users are free to just not buy iOS devices. Users are free to just not use Meta services.
There is no monopoly here. This is all much ado about nothing.
No real-world user is meaningfully harmed by the current state of Apple App Store/Meta Ads, but plenty will be harmed once spyware/piracy sideloading becomes common. Many small businesses will collapse due to ineffective advertisement (large businesses will love it though - it becomes a winner-take-all market).
> The DMA is gerrymandered to exclude domestic businesses.
Except Booking (~EU, based in NL~*) falls under the DMA, and ByteDance (China? I think) does as well. All the same restrictions fall on them too.
> Users are free to just not use Meta services.
True in theory, not so much in practice. I work for a company that deals directly with WhatsApp in NL, and I guarantee you for businesses it's a death knell to not have a WA Business presence. Even the local gemeente (aka city council) and other gov't establishments are on WhatsApp too. Recently more people are moving onto Signal and Telegram, but that remains a minority.
Don't even get me started on Asia, especially India/Indonesia, where even despite the existence of Line and similar apps everything is still* almost exclusively on WA. A bit different in East Asia where Line and other apps are more predominant (hardly relevant for the EU though).
Spotify doesn't fall under the DMA because it's not gatekeeping anything and it does have plenty of competition, many of which pay artists better and have basically equal selections. YT Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, Bandcamp and I'm sure dozens and dozens of others all exist and are used.
> ... but plenty will be harmed once spyware/piracy sideloading becomes common
Interesting how this evil sideloading boogeyman hasn't happened on Android.
> ... Many small businesses will collapse due to ineffective advertisement
The same small businesses that are forced into paying 30% to Apple/Google for simply existing on their app store?
> (large businesses will love it though - it becomes a winner-take-all market).
So, the gatekeepers as listed under the DMA? Y'know, the giants that literally hold all the keys and can dictate how the entire market should work based on their rules? The very same ones that have opaque ad-bidding systems that they control inside-and-out and can do anything they want to with?
[**] Seems I'm wrong there (See andsoitis' reply to my comment), but didn't want to edit out my original comment.
Regardless, calling it gerrymandering of local businesses is simply incorrect, and I can speak for at least myself that if we even had any tech companies that big (and I hope we never do), we'd expect them be subject to the exact same rules and laws.
Spotify feels like a slightly marginal case, and it wouldn't be surprising to see it added to the list. It clearly wasn't big enough a few years back when all this was being defined, but it's gotten quite a lot bigger since.
I'm curious, what is your preferred financial regime? EU are basically enforcing market capitalism by disallowing monopolistic practices. Do you find that wrong in general?
Perhaps you prefer an industro-fascist regime where businesses are not bound by any tailored laws? Pretty sure there would already be alternative iOS app stores under such a regime - government controls (IPR system, computer security laws) seem necessary to enable these sorts of tech monopolies.
500 million sounds like a lot but that is just a drop in the ocean for first world nation states.
The Netherlands has a yearly budget of 300 billion for example.
> Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
The EU's budget is massive, no shortfall is covered by these fines since to collect them it takes another massive legal battle, that's just bullshit being regurgitated on the internet (especially on this forum). If that was the case the EU would be issuing GDPR fines all over the place to cover shortfalls, it doesn't happen in reality.
> Spotify conveniently falls outside of the scope of this law when any artist would tell you it should absolutely be covered.
Spotify does not behave like the most similar category covered by the DMA: video sharing like YouTube. Spotify does not hold exclusive access to the content and the audience, YouTube Music, Apple Music, and other players have almost the same catalogue as Spotify has so users are free to move between those services without penalty. Now try moving from YouTube to a competitor, a completely different beast.
The DMA exists to counter an imbalance in the power these massive tech companies have in detriment to competition, it's quite a simple prerogative, Spotify doesn't hold at all the same power as YouTube has, or Google Search, or any other platform under the DMA.
> Today, the Commission also found that Meta's online intermediation service Facebook Marketplace should no longer be designated under the DMA. The decision follows a request submitted by Meta on 5 March 2024 to reconsider the designation of Marketplace. Following a careful assessment of Meta's arguments and as a result of Meta's additional enforcement and continued monitoring measures to counteract the business-to-consumer use of Marketplace, the Commission found that Marketplace had less than 10,000 business users in 2024. Meta therefore no longer meets the relevant threshold giving rise to a presumption that Marketplace is an important gateway for business users to reach end users.
A good start, but far from enough regarding the societal damage (anti-competitive, anti-user, psychological harm especially of minors, proliferation of radicalisation) they did.
The EU made a serious point that these are the first time they are issuing those fines as as such have capped them as a signal to show that they are serious but also that they aren’t taking the maximalist approach some in the US are accusing them of.
They can legally go for 10% of global revenue if I’m not mistaken as the top level of fines and both Apple and Meta would be wise to not find themselves as repeat offenders as a result.
I hope this will make Apple finally comply with EU law and allow app side loading on iOS. Real side loading, not the joke they implemented since iOS 17.
That is not so clear. Appstore revenue is ~ $100 billion/y, but Apple makes less than 30% from that.
So the question is: Would more convincing compliance have cost Apple more than single digit percentage decreases in Appstore sales? Comparing the F-Droid vs Playstore situation, this seems unlikely to me.
If Apple is so bad at this that they have to charge 30%, they should have failed in the free market to a competitor that can do the same or better for 3%. However, Apple has prevented that, not by being better or cheaper, but by implementing DRM that locks users out from having a choice (and the market as a whole ended up being a duopoly with cartel-like pricing).
Whether Apple can be cheaper isn't really the point (they should be, digital services are a very high margin business). It's that they're anti-competitive to the point that the market for paid apps and in-app payments became inefficient (in a financial sense).
You are trying to tell me that credit card processing fees are negligible, software engineers work for free, advertising doesn’t require overhead, etc…
I guess that kind of thinking that everything is basically free is why alot of startups just fail so easily.
Your profit is whatever your revenue minus costs. Plenty of app stores have operated in the red that we know this isn’t trivial to get right. It definitely is nowhere near negligible as patent asserted. I’m frustrated by how dumb HN is getting lately.
The actual fines for this moving forward are up to 10% of a companies global revenue. The EU made a big point to say that this is the first time they are issuing those fines and as a result they are smaller than they otherwise would be especially in the case of repeat offenders.
Ie. "More than half of users have installed at least one app from a non-apple affiliated store by Jan 2026 or you shall pay a fine of $10 per month per iPhone in use in the EU".
That’s a terrible idea. How would they have any control over that. I think you are way overestimating the amount of iOS users that want to use software from outside the App Store.
If 3rd party stores didn't charge the Apple tax, I think you'd find plenty of apps moving to other stores, and within a matter of weeks more than half of users would have used a 3rd party store.
I want the equivalent of a shops in the real world. One shop doesn't carry everything. Even Spotify doesn't carry everything. For one, Apple doesn't allow adult content apps. Steam does. I'm sure there's a market for adult games on iPhone as Steam's success there would seem to suggest. I don't think Apple should be required to sell adult games but I also don't think they should get to dictate that people can't use their phones for adult games. So, more stores would great.
Yeah but these companies will force me to install their garbage third party app stores to install their apps. I really just want one good, properly vetted app store on my phone, is that so hard to understand?
If you ever tried out third party app stores on Android you’ll see what I mean. See also the crappy launchers/stores major game publishers try to force on you on PCs.
That really depends on the store. If Value made a Steam store, or Nintendo made a Nintendo store with Nintendo exclusives I'd expect millions of installs.
Generally, as a society, we hold that a contract cannot be modified without both parties’ agreement. When you bought that phone, it was with the completely clear, overt, and in no way uncertain understanding that it does specifically X Y Z, and does not do A B C. Now, without additional payment to the counterparty, you’re demanding your phone do A B C. What am I missing? According to accepted understandings of contracts, how are you possibly in the right? How are you possibly in a position to demand government use force to modify a contract you accepted before to somehow benefit you more at a cost to your counterparty?
You are of the opinion that it is reasonable for a company to expect you to read, understand and fully agree with a contract that consists of countless pages of opaque legalese and that you have no say in whatsoever, just in order to use a service that's arguably a necessity to participate in public life?
The EU does not seem to share that opinion, and puts some restrictions on these types of 'contracts'. Are you really concerned that this is somehow unfair towards these companies? Companies that retain whole teams of lawyers to create a contract that hardly any of its billion counter parties (individual consumers) can fully comprehend, let alone push back on?
My rant was about the rationale for government restricting ToS contracts in general. Apple is indeed not as unavoidable for participating in public life as some others. The only alternative being 'agreeing to' the Google contract of course.
The parent post said “service that's arguably a necessity to participate in public life”. I’m not sure what universe you live in, but in mine everyday life is entirely possible without iPhones.
I'm not sure what society you are referring to but contracts have to adhere to laws in the EU.
This is also about software that is being updated. So the transaction is not completed yet. Apple could probably go the route of not providing the update to phones that were sold before the law was voted on/in place. I would guess that would lead to other legal battles.
And is it reasonable that the laws are created after the contract was already agreed to and still apply to it? At least here in the United States, laws are not allowed to make things illegal that happened before the laws were written.
If I have a sales contract with you where I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today, and on Monday hamburgers are outlawed, I still owe you on Tuesday. If purchases or hamburgers on credit is outlawed on Monday, I most likely still owe you on Tuesday.
Otoh, if I pay you today for a hamburger on Tuesday, and on Monday hamburgers are outlawed, you can't perform your part of the contract, and we'll need to figure things out.
The rules can change, and when the rules change, continuing service may need to change (depending on how the rules were written); I'm sure part of the contracts involved also describe a) how to make changes in the services, b) what happens when parts of the contract are discovered to be unenforcable or illegal.
Laws can definitively be retroactive or affect existing contracts. Imagine a world where governments have no power to stop anti-social behavior if it was ever baked into private contracts ?
Also the DMA didn't fall from the sky one day and enforced the next. Every business impacted had years to do something about it, and they preferred to play chicken race instead.
There's a range of anti-competitive behavior which can subvert that ideal, and as such there's regulation aimed to prevent it. Apple used to forbid apps from telling users about Apple's 30% cut or cheaper places to buy the app, for instance, hindering users from making an informed choice.
Many of the policies in question are intentionally not publicized to end-users, often requiring first paying to be part of the developer program before you can even see what you need to agree to to publish an app.
> Apple allows no-questions-asked full-refund returns for two weeks.
That's the bare legal minimum in the EU. Many anti-competitive practices are not things consumers find out about within some short fixed period of time, if at all, and others are not solved by a refund even when the customer is aware of the issue.
True that it does now all (including schedules 2/3 and the guidelines) appear to be publicly available. Looks as if this was done on June 7th 2021, shortly after the EU Commission had sent the Statement of Objections on April 30th 2021.
The EU is using populist claims to introduce laws with ideological bias (big corp bad, America bad, America corp super bad). Everyone knows the digital act was never meant to be a fair set of rules, it was introduced to punish US companies at will.
At the same time, most governments, public offices, agencies and businesses in Europe would not be able to operate normally without access to American software.
The problem is that it is way easier to (over)regulate and tax, than to create a strong environment for business and innovation to thrive, in order to grow your own tech giants.
I don't see how your comment is adding value to the discussion besides claiming emotionality and an absurd reference to FOX news, which implies that my opinions are not welcome here and I should go elsewhere with them.
My post is my opinion, offering an entry point for a discussion to those who might have a different opinion from mine.
The opinion is so detached from reality that it’s not going to result in a useful discussion.
There’s nothing about America in the consumer protection laws. It doesn’t matter if the service provider is a corporation or a non profit.
You can have any opinion you want but if you don’t ensure the quality of it, people will call it out for what it is.
In some circles you can defend lack of intellectual rigor with „any opinion is valid” and „you just don’t like my politics”, but that’s useful for electoral politics, not for intellectual inquiry.
> The opinion is so detached from reality that it’s not going to result in a useful discussion.
Maybe you should try.
> There’s nothing about America in the consumer protection laws. It doesn’t matter if the service provider is a corporation or a non profit.
Thierry Breton and his "the sheriff is in town".
Jean-Noël Barrot: "Apply with the Greatest Firmness"
Axel Voss, German MEP, called for the EU to use the DSA against (what he calls) fake news and platform owners like Elon Musk interfering in elections. This explicitly links the DSA to regulating US tech companies (particularly X).
Pedro Sánchez (Spanish Prime Minister) proposed using the DSA to regulate social media, fight bots, fake profiles, and go after tech barons undermining democracy - US platforms, of course.
You may agree or disagree with my views being right or wrong, but it is clear that the leitmotif seems to be EU politics vs US big tech here.
When it comes to election interference it’s more like EU vs Russia. Who owns the platforms is secondary, it’s not like TikTok should be allowed to do election interference because it isn’t American.
You’ll learn in the course of your future experience that not every discussion will introduce a new perspective into your life. And you usually can tell very early when that’s the case.
Can't deny that some EU politicians (mostly conservative ones, surprise, surprise) have a hidden agenda behind it.
The statement that gov & businesses in Europe would not be able to operate normally without American software is easy to disprove. Just look at how easy the Chinese or the Russians could shed or avoid their dependency on crappy Microsoft or expensive US cloud providers. The problem is just that many European politicians are so technically inept they believe it themselves.
Are you saying that if a business (or individual) wants to pay the lowest tax possible (legally, that is) it should be a reason for more taxation? Is that what taxation is about, revenge?
The real problem was that Silicon Valley was flooded with capital and bought out all competitors. Or undercut with free. Or all kinds of other Microsoftlike practices. So nobody was left in the EU to advocate for better rules.
That's just a US propaganda myth people can't stop parroting.
The SV ecosystem is definitely better funded, but there is no lack of digital start-ups in the EU.
Consider what happened to Nokia. The first business blunder caused it to be sold to US and gutted. Now if someone else wants to make smartphones in EU, has to start from scratch. But if that happens to US company, everything(at least the IP) stays in the US.
Nokia is a strange story. I remember when it happened, and absolutely everybody knew it would kill the company to sell it to Microsoft. So of course the leaders and owners of Nokia knew the same thing. My guess is that they decided that they couldn't compete with the iPhone and decided to cash out what they could. Maybe Microsoft could help them with shuttling money to offshore accounts or some other under the table services? Nokia was publicly traded, so it could have been a great robbing of small time investors. But did Microsoft really get anything out of the deal that was worth the price?
I had the Nokia N9 at the time, which was years ahead of its time and one of the most well designed smartphones so far, both in hardware and especially in software. Modern iOS and Android still look dated in comparison.
At least they seem to have their own system in place for displaying those share buttons, as there are no requests to 3rd party domains on page load, everything loads from *europa.eu. Could have been worse :)
> while Meta drew a penalty of €200 million for its "pay or consent" advertising model, which requires that European Union users pay to access ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram
Wait, isn't pretty much all web content is like this nowadays? You have to buy youtube premium to avoid ads, how is it different?
"Harvested and processed to add cohort tags to include in advertisement real-time bidding contests so advertisers can know how much to bid", while more precise, isn't as punchy as "harvested and sold".
I've been confused about this for a while. Given data is what allows them a unique advantage for their advertising product, it seemed odd that Facebook would sell that data to others.
But to hear people talk, a company could literally buy personal information from Facebook.
Yeah, that makes sense. Facebook wants the data so they can provide more accurate advertising "cohorts". The accuracy is the value that other people see, hence "selling" the data even though they're really selling an ad view.
It’s not about being shown ads, it’s about collecting (and sharing to third parties) private information that goes beyond the technically required amount to use the service. GDPR says companies need to get my consent in order to do that, that I am free to not give this consent and that a service can’t not be provided to me just because I don’t give this consent.
Facebook and a bunch of other companies said “aha! We’ll just create a paid alternative!” but this doesn’t comply with the law. It just took a while to take this through the courts but if you read the law it’s clear they just stalled for time on this one.
Not really. If citizens see "fines" and think "whew, they got their just deserts", it's almost worse than no fines.
But the EU is frequently performative, so it doesn't surprise me. It wouldn't surprise me if they agreed in advance with the EU the fines, behind some closed doors.
Nothing less than a billion these days even registers
It could look performative if you only look at citizens.
From other businesses POV though
- this becomes the final decision on this given behavior under the DMA. A precedent is set, that will guide any further enforcement.
- it also sets a stake in the ground for other back and forth litigations: the EU will actually fine the companies. We can argue whether this amount is too low, but on any further fines the question will never be whether the EU will actually do it (compare to the current US tariffs situation and you see why this matters)
- it's easier to expand to DMA adjacent companies as needed. If Bluesky ever had to be scrutinized, this would be a reference point.
I met a member of an EU pact
Who said: two vast and fruitful suits of law
Prevail in the courts. Near them, in their acts,
Half won, a shattered victory lies, whose maw
And wrinkled smile, a sneer of bitter spite,
Tell that its makers well those voters fed
Which yet survive, in those politic corps,
The lips that lied, the hearts that bled
And on the cover these words, in bold, underlined
“My name is Brussels, Home of Kings:
Look on my rules, ye Mighty, and be fined!”
No thing beside remains. Around the court
Of that great parliament, in open plans, Aerons reclined
The ever mighty FAANGs endure.
The "EU over-regulation" argument is pathetic. The exact opposite is true, 2-3 decades of zero regulation has led to Big Tech empires that can get away with anything.
It harms the free market, harms the freedom to compute, creates an asymmetrical extractive relation between mega-corp and average internet user, and omnipresent surveillance. It's anti-American if "American" still means a love of freedom, personal privacy and fair competition.
But I do understand the "new" American perspective. These companies are money printers some of which produce as much as $30B of pure profit in a single quarter. If such companies are to exist, they best be American I guess.
> The "EU over-regulation" argument is pathetic ... It's anti-American ... I do understand the "new" American perspective.
"American" means being able to make your own decisions without government overreach in every aspect of your life.
"American" means being able to decide if you want to engage with a business or not, without getting the government involved.
"American" means being able to reach the highest highs or risk the lowest lows on the power of your tenacity and skill alone, without having the government shoot you down when you succeed, or put meaningless performative roadblocks in your way.
"American" means understanding that the government is not your friend and it doesn't need to replace your own decision making capability or ability to make choices.
From your dismissive sneering tone you do not understand the American perspective. Honestly, I am not sure the typical European even could. You have not grown up in our culture, so ideas like personal responsibility, self-reliance, and the American spirit are foreign to you - or at least heavily deprioritized.
You simply sneer and scoff at these concepts. You do you - this is why the EU is three decades behind and totally, utterly dependent on foreign tech - yet still somehow convinced it could catch up "if it really wanted to."
The context is is Big Tech regulation. Of which there is barely any, allowing these monopolies to exist in the first place.
Everything you claim to be American, responsibility and choice, is harmed by having monopolies. You're so anti-government that you miss that monopolies remove even more choice.
As for dependencies, the US is the biggest importer in the world.
You're not that special. While the American special snowflake syndrome has been useful in giving its citizens a sense of purpose, freeing them of apprehension and bringing it where it is, it's ultimately baseless. Things get dangerous when people start believing in their own bullshit. The same is true for Europeans as well. There's a lot of navel gazing going on and I'm very annoyed at European leaders sweeping increasing authoritarian behaviour under the rug or proclaiming with great confidence, as did von der Leyen, that we don't have oligarchs.
Would looove to distribute an app without it having to be in the App Store, and not paying the App Store fee (direct download of signed binary). Happy to pay a yearly fee or fee per update to cover code review if it’s crucial. But 30% of revenue for doing bugger all… cmon, they’re squeezing the lemon a bit too hard.
Personally I wouldn’t install software unless it were from a really trusted person doing something extremely unique and useful that doesn’t have an alternative on the Apple Store (think UTM with JIT for iPad).
Please don’t take that as a negative comment but I suspect most people source their software from conveniently centralized repos whether it be App Store, Steam or even the main package manager on a Linux distribution.
But I'd still like to be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my iPhone, should I decide to based on my own criteria, without going through Apple or even a fucking "alternative app store" that is still Apple censored.
The point is that it becomes your choice. For example some people might choose to use a different web browser instead of Safari on their Apple device so they can use some web apps fully and not have to install similar local apps at all.
You mentioned linux package managers, these existing are proof enough that a 30% cut isn't required for ensuring the safety of what you install. In fact, I'd wager there is that much more dangerous garbage in the app store than in pacman's database.
As much as I think Apple's cut is unreasonable, I think all this shows is that people are making a lot more dangerous software for apple's larger less tech savvy userbase than for arch's.
I can install Jetbrains via most linux package managers, launch it, and pay money. I can install steam and pay for games. I can install sublime text and give em cash.
Arch linux doesn't try to take 30% of all the games I buy on steam, nor does it prevent steam from asking me for my credit card.
Apple reviews all apps to make sure they don't ask for your credit card, don't tell you where you can buy the same good online, and make sure that if you do sell anything, apple gets its 30% cut, even if it's a virtual store like steam. That's the reason you can't buy kindle books on iOS (even though you can buy apple books? Weird? Isn't that illegal anti-competitive behavior?)
It would absolutely not be reasonable for linux package managers to demand that I pay 30% more for all games on steam if I did "pacman -Sy steam" vs downloading steam from valve's website and figuring out how to get it working on arch-linux (taking the deb, extracting it with 'ar', and installing some dependencies)
> cmon, they’re squeezing the lemon a bit too hard
They got hooked on the lemon juice. Nobody at Apple making millions a year to write emails and sit in meetings wants to be out on the street for putting up their hand and saying "hey lets just take 10% and have a healthy ecosystem long term, which will let us continue to sell phones to people every year with a profit margin of $500".
Phil Schiller has actually made some comments about being less greedy, like possibly ratcheting down the 30% cut once the App Store started making serious revenue or not shaking down developers if they use external payment methods. Not that Schiller has actually made any changes at Apple to do any of the less greedy things.
> “You download the app and it doesn’t work, that’s not what we want on the store,” says Schiller. This, he says, is why Apple requires in-app purchases to offer the same purchasing functionality as they would have elsewhere.
A little caveat of Web Bluetooth API is that it's like WebUSB and mostly available on Chrome. I don't think Chrome for iOS is using blink yet so you'll probably not have access to this API on iOS.
There isn’t a default on iOS, you’re prompted for each new app when it requests notification permissions. People have found that users hit no a lot more when the app prompts with no explanation than when it clearly explains what benefit it has to the user.
PWAs offer support for push notifications [1], but apparently they are not as seamless as in native apps, especially on iOS.
If you've never heard of PWAs [2], they allow you to add native mobile app functionality to a mobile website, including the ability to install your website as though it were an app, and ability to cache resources for offline use. I haven't worked on app development for a while, but when I did several years ago, all that was required to turn a mobile website in to a PWA was a service worker file (a JS file to define resource caching rules), and a manifest.json file (essentially metadata used by the home screen icon, including title and icon image).
Apparently PWAs still aren't on par with native apps in terms of capability and UX. Nonetheless I hope PWAs become popular for their simplicity, and for being decoupled from platforms. It's a bit insane to me that native app development usually requires heavy platform specific IDEs (Android Studio, Xcode), both of which have steep learning curves, and after all that development effort, you only have an app that works on 1 platform. Building a basic mobile app shouldn't require anything more than HTML, JS and CSS, and it shouldn't be tied to any specific platform.
The barrier of entry for me is having to pay $99/year just to notarize and sign my macOS applications that me and maybe three other people use. Just a lot easier to link to instructions on how to bypass Gatekeeper or make them compile it themselves from source.
Frankly, the whole "it's pointless, so this is stupid" response to some things is more tiring to me than anything. What exactly is the end-game for these people? All or nothing? That is just delusional. It is simply not how progress is made. So let's be appreciative of what little is done, and push for more?
Not to mention the amount of people in here just focusing on the fine - by the way, I don't know how people can square the belief that these companies are endlessly greedy and will do anything for more money, with the belief that half a billion euros lost profit will just sit well with them - while completely ignoring the bit where these companies either comply or face even more fines.
> The EU fines could stoke tensions with U.S President Donald Trump who has threatened to levy tariffs against countries that penalise U.S. companies.
Mark Zuckerberg, in his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, specifically noted this as his goal for falling in behind Trump. That Trump would be the big-stick man that would protect Meta and other cos from foreign interference. Where "interference" is anything restricting that American exceptionalism "do anything we want, however we want".
Only then Trump started a trade war with quite literally the entire world -- aside from, predictably, Russia -- and now he holds, as he likes to say, no cards. The EU and anyone else can do whatever they want and Zuck and co can cry about the millions they wasted trying to buy a protection racket.
Of course Meta could just withdrawn from the EU. I wish they would withdraw from Canada. Their garbage misinformation platform is a massive net negative for humanity and has offered nothing but harm for the planet.
Someone here hazarded the hypothesis that Trump's tariffs are a stick aimed not towards other countries, but towards American corporations, who have to pledge fealty (and resources) to Trump in exchange for relief. I think it makes a lot of sense, if any of this is rational, which I'm not entirely sold on.
It's always funny when shit happens and everyone jumps over themselves to figure out what "5D chess" the people in charge are playing. There's never any chess. They are just incompetent.
Look at 47's truth social some time. In between the posts 'destroying' liberals and lionising the worst actors in his party, he posts up a disturbing amount of 'settlements' with Law Firms that previously displeased him.
They were basically forced at gunpoint to make deals to provide pro bono services to the Trump administration, in return for regulators dropping investigations into their diversity practices.
The firms - including Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Allen Overy Shearman Sterling, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft – are among the most prestigious and recognized firms in the US.
Cadwalader is the former firm of Todd Blanche, who resigned his partnership there to represent Trump in criminal cases when the firm would not take on Trump as a client. Blanche is now the deputy attorney general – the number two official at the Department of Justice.
Overall the MAGA cabinet has now secured more than $900m in pro bono pledges from law firms threatened with either executive orders or investigations from the equal opportunity commission. How this isn't seen as a straight up RICO case or old-fashioned criminal shakedown is beyond me.
> Of course Meta could just withdrawn from the EU.
I mean, probably not without being sued by their shareholders. As a public company, you cannot simply abandon 40bn revenue/year because you feel aggrieved.
But yeah, the "you'd better be nice to us, EC, or Trump might be angry" tactic is kinda shot at this point.
> I mean, probably not without being sued by their shareholders. As a public company, you cannot simply abandon 40bn revenue/year because you feel aggrieved.
Fiduciary duty. It's a high bar, but "we abandoned 25% of our revenue in a fit of pique over our being required to follow the law on consent" probably gets you there.
That gets thrown around a lot but those folks are masters at corporate messaging. All you need to do is tie a bow and back the decision up with a long term strategy. I don't accept "fiduciary duty" being the pretext for any shitty behavior.
Most Canadian small businesses rely on Meta to get customers.
If you think these companies don't add value, you are totally oblivious to the millions of small businesses that rely on these platforms to reach customers and niche audiences around the world.
They keep doing that to try to paint this as a loss for users. Users have much to win with this, as it will give some real competition to the Apple ecosystem, and potentially saving users money. So it's only natural Apple will pull all the cards like saying it threatens users privacy.
They called it on themselves. Were so greedy with access to unlimited capital, bought everything out or undercut with free. And now there are no EU competitors left to lobby for more favorable regulations.
Genuine question for debate: iPhone app store is a private club to which businesses can choose to belong, if they want to sell their product to certain customers. Membership in the club comes with the condition that you not talk about alternative ways to buy the same product, while selling via the club. Membership in the club is not a monopoly; there are many other channels through which to sell a company's products.
The EU's regulatory stance on antitrust does not require a monopoly, it requires a dominant position in a market meeting use of certain criteria marked as abuse. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... From there when they tell a company they are breaching criteria for abuse and the company doesn't change the EU issues according fines.
As for "why" this is against the law, I assume that more to mean "why did the EU make this against the law" (since the other answer is simply "because the EU law was written as so". The arguments are largely the same as for why monopolies should not be allowed to operate: to ensure free market competition by preventing a few dominating companies from unduly pressuring the market. There are, of course, some who feel the freest market is one with no governmental regulations at all but they are not the majority (at least in the EU).
They do, in several areas, at least according to the definitions of EU law. This may not meet your individual definition of dominant position of course (e.g., one might hold you need 50% market share in certain markets to be dominant, but the EU definition does not hold this requirement).
They also meet the definitions of a gatekeeper (as defined by the DMA) in several areas, which is the related law this fine actually came from.
Apple has always allowed anyone into their club. You have to pay dues and follow some strict (but non-discriminatory) rules, but the result was a place which people liked going to.
Analogies aside, the REAL question is whether Apple is entitled to charge money for access to their developer APIs. Or whether Apple is entitled to place software license terms upon use of their intellectual property, e.g. when you link against Apple libraries which are then compiled into your binary.
We get up in arms about GPL violations, but also want Apple to suck shit. I don't think it's right to want it both ways.
The people of EU decided it will be law that Apple must allow for alternate app distribution means - you must be able to side load and/or install alternate app marketplaces. That is the law, like how other countries have different laws for parental leave, for example.
The EU regulators have found that Apple has not complied with this law because it makes using alternate app marketplaces purposefully unattractive and burdonsome for both developers and users. EU is clamping down on Apple's 'malicious compliance'.
It's not malicious compliance. If you want to distribute binaries which contain Apple intellectual property, you need a license, and the EU is not in a position to force Apple to abandon their intellectual property rights.
I am a hard-core fan of the GPL and I recognise that the GPL license requires intellectual property rights in order to work. You want copyleft worth a damn? You need copyright. And that means you get copyright. Apple has intellectual property rights over their software and that doesn't give anyone else the right to "do whatever they want" with it.
If you want to cancel all intellectual property rights with respect to software, that's an interesting argument to make. But cancelling it under a few rare circumstances when some software irritates you seems like the height of absurdity.
Ignoring at first whether limiting distribution license terms actually relates to abandoning IP rights outright, the local government is the one who defines what rights businesses operating in their jurisdiction have. This, however, does not actually give the EU the ability to force Apple to do anything, as you insist. Apple is able pull out of the market if they feel the market's regulations are too heavy handed, at which point they no longer need to comply with local law. What the foreign company would like to enforce only layers on under the restrictions of local law, not above it.
As for IP license rights over all other law, I think most people are in alignment with a circumstance basis (or, more succinctly, "local law has priority" basis). E.g. most are indeed happy to declare a software license claiming women are not allowed to distribute the software is invalid in the jurisdiction - a company's "IP rights" be damned over a person's human rights, as an example.
If the club owner wants to have a fancy seat at the nicest table in the restaurant, that's not discrimination. It's their club. They built it. Everyone knows they built it, and they can think whatever they like about that fancy seat. If they want a similarly fancy seat, they can build their own club.
(Analogies aside, while I understand their rationale, it was wrong for Apple to lump the likes of Spotify and Netflix within their in-app purchase umbrella. And I also find it hilarious how people think 30% is highway robbery when 10+ years ago it was widely regarded as a fantastic deal for developers.)
> Under the DMA, app developers distributing their apps via Apple's App Store should be able to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative offers outside the App Store, steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases.
To me, this is the most easily agreeable part of what the EU has been after. It is unfair that Apple restricts Netflix from telling it's users that they can sign up and pay for Netlifx on their own website. It's unfair that Netflix can't even tell its users the rules that Apple enforces on them.
It's telling that Gruber is pretty staunchly against EU/DMA interferance in Apple, and broadly thinks they're wrong. But this is the one thing he agrees on
> If Apple wants to insist on a cut of in-app purchased subscription revenue, that’s their prerogative. What gets me, though, are the rules that prevent apps that eschew in-app purchases from telling users in plain language how to actually pay. Not only is Netflix not allowed to link to their website, they can’t even tell the user they need to go to netflix.com to sign up
https://daringfireball.net/2019/01/netflix_itunes_billing
https://daringfireball.net/2020/07/parsing_cooks_opening_sta...
(I think Apple now has their 'reader app' carveout for apps like Netflix, but it's still pretty obtuse and inconsistent)
Also, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
> The Commission takes the preliminary view that Apple failed to comply with this obligation [to allow third party app stores] in view of the conditions it imposes on app (and app store) developers. Developers wanting to use alternative app distribution channels on iOS are disincentivised from doing so as this requires them to opt for business terms which include a new fee (Apple's Core Technology Fee). Apple also introduced overly strict eligibility requirements, hampering developers' ability to distribute their apps through alternative channels. Finally, Apple makes it overly burdensome and confusing for end users to install apps when using such alternative app distribution channels.
This is great to hear. It sounds like they've just found Apple non-compliant in making alternate app stores as discouraging for both developers and user as possible. I guess it'll take another 12 months for any fines or changes from Apple.
The two companies have two months to comply, or there will be daily fines.
I don't think so - they’ve only been fined for the in-app anti-steering provisions.
For the second App Marketplace issue, I think that’s just a preliminary finding and is going to take longer to work out
> Apple now has the possibility to exercise its rights of defence by examining the documents in the Commission's investigation file and by responding to the preliminary findings
Hm, maybe, I'm just going by what the article says:
> The companies have two months to comply with the orders or risk daily fines.
Maybe they got it wrong, though.
I think you're both sort of right.
The orders in question here are 1 for Apple (the one that made circumventing Apple payments super difficult) and 1 for Meta (their ad-free subscription service). Meta and Apple have to comply with those within 2 months.
The preliminary finding on sideloading apps isn't subject to that 2 month compliance deadline from what I can tell.
Will the fines be large enough to matter? The headline number of 570M looks like pocket change.
It only costs 570MM a year to retain my iron grip monopoly on the AppStore? Let me find my checkbook…
>the most easily agreeable part of what the EU has been after
It's also probably the most dangerous for Apple. It creates a cash incentive to push people outside of Apple's walled garden and show them what's outside.
I really really hope Apple gets its act together, they are the greatest "the user experience comes first" company and they actually have great hard tech but they show signs of rent seeking behavior which can destroy them.
If Apple just play nice with EU, open up and focus on bringing the greatest experience possible they will keep winning. If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.
The Apple's AI blunder is mostly a blunder only because they insist to do it all by themselves so to have higher margins on the services revenues. IMHO those blunders will be more damaging as the Americans no longer have the higher moral grounds than Koreans or Chinese.
I hope Apple is treading carefully.
"Show signs of rent seeking behaviour" seems like an extremely generous position. Forbidding your customers from even mentioning The Outside is full-on rent seeking behaviour, since its inception.
To steel man the policy, one thing it helps avoid is the free rider problem. Apples store terms are than free apps don’t pay a commission to Apple. But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform. We no longer live in an age where Apple or Microsoft gets away with charging for multi thousand dollar per year per seat developer license for their platforms, but that doesn’t mean those platforms don’t cost money to develop and maintain. So the idea is, if you make money on the platform, so does Apple. But free apps + in app downloads is a giant loophole in that plan. Sure we all think of Netflix or Kindle apps when we think of this, but without a policy that charges for IAP and discourages or outright forbids steering off the platform, we would see a new category of “freemium” apps where the app is “free” on the App Store, but is effectively just an empty downloader shell that you then have to buy the “real” app through. Unscrupulous devs steer you to their own outside store or put some ridiculous inside the App Store price (think 300x+ markup) with a link to the outside store with the cheaper price and all those customers are transacting, and Apple gets no money for funding their platform.
And yes I know we can all scoff and say “oh poor multi-billion dollar Apple can’t get paid but getting paid is exactly how Apple is a multibillion dollar company. So if they don’t get it from IAP and app sales fees then they’re going to extract it either from hardware prices, or for charging those per seat per year dev licenses again.
Personally I think Apple is big enough now and the App Store is popular enough now they can revisit this but somehow they are going to want to solve the free rider problem, and whatever they pick, people won’t be happy (see also core technology fee)
> But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform.
The business model Apple has used since the Macintosh is that the hardware subsidizes the software. I paid for the platform when I bought the device. The only reason why there's even a "free rider problem" is that Apple believes itself entitled to a 30% cut of half of mobile, forever.
Furthermore, we've known since the failure of OS/2 (at least) that expensive development tools almost guarantee zero software uptake. The platforms that win are the ones where the developer tools are affordable or free. In other words, it is not the third party developer's job to pay for the platforms they rely upon. It is the platform's job to pay (in a roundabout way) for the third-party software.
In fact, that's why Apple even has a reader app exception. They know Netflix doesn't have 30% to give and they know nobody's going to buy an iPhone that won't play Netflix.
The reality of Apple's business model is that they absolutely could give away the platform, make money off the phones and the OS, and remain profitable. But investors don't invest into profitable companies. They invest into growing companies. Tim Cook has to treat developers' bank accounts as his own because that's the only thing that makes Apple stock valuable.
> Apple believes itself entitled to a 30% cut of half of mobile, forever.
1. This isn't the number. Worst case, the after first year number is half that, and even less for most.
2. App store platforms on ostensibly "open" PC such as Steam cost game developers more. Why?
Nothing "ostensible" about PC being an open platform.
Any PC will run any number of game stores. Steam is large despite not being the one owned by the platform maker and installed by default (Microsoft Store and the XBox app).
Steam does not prevent publishers from selling in other stores too, nor does it enforce pricing outside its store. (E.g. there are games that are cheaper on other stores, citing Steams larger cut as the reason)
It also allows publishers to force users to install the publishers store to play games sold on Steam. (See e.g. Ubisofts launcher, being required to install games and selling you additional subscriptions without a cut to Steam)
To a limited degree Steam even lets publishers use Steam infrastructure for sales outside Steam, for free. (Publishers can sell Steam keys for free on other platforms, but the number is limited and here pricing has to roughly match Steam pricing)
Even on Steam Deck, the only PC hardware where Steam is actually the preinstalled default store, running games from other stores is supported and the main inconvenience to it is that most stores don't have a supported version for it and you need to use third-party workarounds.
Being an open platform doesn't ensure a market doesn't have other weirdness going on (in this case, there being a strong consumer preference towards Steam, certainly in part due to Steams existing large position, but not only), but its a different thing and most of the usual competition law approaches don't apply. Steam is popular because Steam is popular, not because Steam is using its strong position in another business to push its app store business.
The best case is 15% for subscription apps after the first year of service, or if you're a "small business" developer under a certain sales threshold. The latter goes away after you reach a certain size, after which you pay 30%; the former requires you to adopt a subscription business model.
I still think calling it a "30% cut" is accurate, even though there are discounts now. 30% is the base rate. You mentioned Steam, which also has discounts too, except they're the opposite ones of Apple. The cut starts at 30% and goes down the more sales you make. This "costs game developers more" only in the sense that it would be incredibly difficult to qualify for both Apple and Steam discounts at the same time. But the base rate is the same.
> solve the free rider problem
This framing just doesn't register. You want developers to develop apps for your product, app availability is what makes users choose to buy the hardware/use the OS. They're not "free riding", they're what makes your product worth buying.
The "free riders" aren't developers in general, they're the developers not paying for their portion of the upkeep. Like I said, someone has to pay for the dev work that goes into making the platform, building the SDKs and maintaining the whole thing. No one works for free. So Apple can get that paid for either by charging more for hardware, charging for access to the dev kits, or taking a cut of sales for products produced with those dev kits. Apple chose the later.
So now they have a problem, not all software is monetized. You want to have the ability for people to choose to distribute software for free. Open source projects, educational, charity, and also "accessory apps" (think your bank app). But you don't want to charge developers money that they're not making. Imagine the shit storm Apple would stir up if they just started charging free apps a monthly fee to be listed in the app store at all. You also want to have young and new developers without a lot of capital to have access (that's why so many companies used to offer student discounts). But the problem becomes how do you allow that, and also allow in app downloads and purchases without every developer just having a "free" downloader app that then downloads the real application code that you pay for separately?
Let's say you sell a dev tool. And you decide you want to support open source projects, so you offer free licenses to any open source project. Would it satisfy your licensing if some company that had an "open source" curl wrapper that downloaded and executed binary blobs for which there was no source code? I doubt it. You'd rightfully say that an app that does nothing except download and launch closed source binary blobs is not in and of itself an open source project for the purposes of your license. It's the same basic idea for Apple. An app that only serves to download or unlock the "real" app after you pay the developer in a separate external transaction is not a "free" app of the sort Apple intends to allow. So they don't allow external transactions at all except for a narrow set of circumstances, and in those cases they don't allow steering. This maximizes the number of developers who are funding the costs of the platform, reducing the overall cost for all the developers who are paying and subsidizing a limited set of developers who are distributing free applications.
Or to try one other way of thinking about it, everyone hates the "freemium" business model. How much crappier would it be knowing that all the "freemium" games were paying absolutely nothing, but everyone who chooses not to engage in the freemium model still had to pay 15-30% to apple on their revenue?
That logic doesn't work for me.
The person who paid for the sdk is the person who bought the iphone.
Typically the definition of free riding requires that if everyone behaved like the free riders, then the system would cease to exist.
If apple made $0 off the app store, would they still make iphones? I would assume yes since they are profitable devices. Hence this isn't free riding.
> The person who paid for the sdk is the person who bought the iphone.
Are they? Then why did companies previously charge per seat annual licenses for their SDKs? Were the people who bought the computers and products back then not also paying for the SDK?
Clearly the answer is "who is paying" depends on the model you set up. You can take your income stream from the initial hardware sales, or you can take it from subscription fees, or you can take it in revenue sharing models. Apple chose the latter, and so every developer that finds some way to use the platform and not share their revenue is a "free rider" relative to the other developers who are now subsidizing them.
>If apple made $0 off the app store, would they still make iphones? I would assume yes since they are profitable devices. Hence this isn't free riding.
It's not "would they still make phones" they might. It's "would they still make phones that 3rd parties can develop applications for at the same price they currently charge and without per seat annual $1k+ up front license fees to prospective developers."
> It's not "would they still make phones" they might. It's "would they still make phones that 3rd parties can develop applications for at the same price they currently charge and without per seat annual $1k+ up front license fees to prospective developers."
The answer still seems like a very obvious yes. Certainly in the modern context where most of the value of the phone comes from apps and app devs can go to android if ios becomes to onerous.
Which is probably exactly why apple chose this model instead of per seat.
> You can take your income stream from the initial hardware sales, or you can take it from subscription fees, or you can take it in revenue sharing models. Apple chose the latter
I missed the part where they give iPhones away for free, and only make money from revenue sharing
> But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform.
Like their customers who happily pay a premium of $hundreds on every device sold? Talking about a free-rider "problem" in connection with literally the richest corporation in the world is diabolical. They develop the SDKs and the platform because that's the foundation of their business, nobody would buy an iPhone that doesn't have any 3rd party apps.
What's the cost of developing the SDK and the platform amortized over the number of devices that Apple sells? Is it $0.50, $5, $50, or $500?
> oh poor multi-billion dollar Apple can’t get paid
Apple is 1000x richer than that, they're a multi-trillion dollar company.
> But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform.
According to APPL's own marketing, that's what the yearly 100$ fee is for.
Ultimately all the money Apple is making from the store comes from the pockets of people. If apps won't have to pay a cut to Apple, people would be left with more money in their pockets.
If all apps were free and no sales would be forced to go through those apps, Apple still sells the phones and makes money from them. Would it be left with less money? Not my problem. Would it increase the cost of phones (maybe only in the EU) to compensate the missing revenues? Fair. Let's see how it affects sales.
> Would it increase the cost of phones (maybe only in the EU) to compensate the missing revenues?
Probably not "fair" since the EU seems opposed to their "core technology fee", which is (supposedly) a fee to the developers to compensate for the missing revenues. And if the EU allowed raising prices in EU counties to offset that lost revenue, but didn't allow the core tech fee, that would effectively be the EU outlawing making your money on software rather than on hardware. It seems more likely the EU would just demand continued subsidized access to the same services, like they already did with facebook.
> Personally I think Apple is big enough now and the App Store is popular enough now
This isn't a steelman. These aren't real problems as you well know and they know. There's no motivation (no argument needed) other than rent seeking.
> And yes I know we can all scoff and say “oh poor multi-billion dollar Apple can’t get paid but getting paid is exactly how Apple is a multibillion dollar company.
The entire discussion there could be summed up as people have become convinced that Apple the multi-billion dollar company should shift revenue to Facebook or Netflix (or whoever), the other multi-billion dollar company. Fantastic marketing by them to convince people this is a moral thing to do and must be done. It has nothing to do with small developers or better experiences for customers, just an increase in X for Netflix.
>the free rider problem
Yes charging rent does stop the free rider problem. The cost of maintenance is infinite if Apple says it is cause nobody else is allowed to maintain Apple services.
When people and universities are allowed to maintain Unix services it turns out the cost isn't infinite, and is easily manageable under a public budget and charity. Apple chooses to burn money to create a smokescreen here and you are falling for it.
> But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform
I really do not want to use the iOS SDK which is utter garbage quality. The reason people use the Apple tooling is because they have no choice, in reality xcode is 10 years behind any modern web or native tooling.
> But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform.
This is included in the price of the hardware that their customers and all the developers who develop for the platform have bought, many times over.
Don't believe me? Look up Apple's financial statements and compare iPhone sales to the measly amount they spend on R&D (which includes the development of SDKs for all their platforms).
It used to be that Apple charged for MacOS. And then they said: nope, our hardware pays for that. And made it free.
> show signs of rent seeking
They've been hard rent-seeking since iTunes and iPod. They aggressively eliminated and made inconvenient other ways for getting music onto iPods. Hardware was great, but hard dependence on iTunes killed it for me.
Requiring dedicated software available for free is not rent seeking, there is no rent, and it was not exactly rare in the more lifestyle pmp space.
What if that software is trying to sell you stuff? And what if it's discouraging or preventing by technical means alternatives from that?
What do people do with ipods if not play music? And where do they get that music if not paying Apple? Apple's official recommendation at the time if you wanted to ingest arbitrary audio like your own recordings was to burn a CD and then rip it with iTunes. That cost about a dollar an hour to get access to your own audio rather than just... making a reasonable process.
It is the definition of rent. The cost is that I have to run your software on my device. I could create value for myself by running software of my choice, instead Apple destroys that value to create a percentage of it for themselves.
Apple pretends to value user privacy and artist rights as these values often conveniently align with taking away user and partner control. The mask has slipped multiple times but their control over users never will until they are legally required to treat their users like humans.
> It is the definition of rent.
In no sense of “rent”, or “definition”.
> The cost is that I have to run your software on my device. I could create value for myself by running software of my choice
This is an outright Orwellian redefinition of the term.
> Apple pretends to value user privacy and artist rights as these values often conveniently align with taking away user and partner control. The mask has slipped multiple times but their control over users never will until they are legally required to treat their users like humans.
Ah, so you have an axe to grind against Apple and could not care less about the stone, got it.
> If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.
But what alternative? There is no European smartphone OS. Windows and Steam OS and XBox are US-american, too.
I suppose Linux, Playstation, and Nintendo, then?
The alternatives are Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo and others. Already the dominant brands in Europe. It doesn't have to be European, it has to be good and those are pretty good at much cheaper prices. They also offer premium models that Apple doesn't have a match.
People pay a lot extra for the feelings the brand invokes in them. Tesla was like that when it was about the values it used to represent, right after Musk dropped those values they had to start pricing their vehicles based on the specs to compete with similarly specced alternatives.
If Apple goes into fight with EU and becomes the "anti-european tech giant" they will have to start selling 300 euro iPhones.
American brands should tread carefully: while America is willing to ban their (cheaper, sometimes better) competitors, Europe is much less willing to — especially now as America itself has taken a much more bullying tone towards its allies.
America overestimates its economic strength on the world stage because they have an unmatched military, but when all books are closed its only 300M people and most of em are broke. That's a market the same size as Brazil, Australia and the UK combined - it's a lot but it's not enough to start unilaterally declaring yourself the boss. USA is playing a losing strategy here.
Most are not broke. The median household income is $79k; compare, say, to the UK where the median household income is $46k.
However, it's true that 300M isn't enough to call yourself boss...
Android is Linux based, although you'd have to build a shitton of replacements for all the stuff Google took out of AOSP and locked behind GMS. And you'd probably have problems getting anyone to manufacture EUDroid devices given that they'd lose access to Google Play if they did.
Alternatively, you could liquidate Apple.
That is: confiscate Apple's EU subsidiaries, repeal DMCA 1201 equivalents in EU law, strip iOS of copyright protection, crack the DRM, replace iCloud's deep integration into iOS, set up a task force for cloning Apple's hardware, and put everything you steal online so other countries can steal iOS too.
Do the same to Microsoft as well. Actually, that would be easier than stealing iOS but I don't think the EU wants to try to revive Windows Mobile as an escalation to a trade war.
The core idea to keep in mind is that trade wars are stupid, but also that America's business tyrants will crumble easily if one were to happen. Globalized trade and supply chains mean that basically nobody is self-sufficient in everything; but in America's case, we're mainly self-sufficient in agriculture. Our comparative advantages in tech and cultural exports are a function of us convincing every other country to actually pay us whatever we want for our culture; which is a deal that countries can trivially reneg on.
There is android. Works pretty well in China without any google services.
Wouldn't be sad about a Linux smartphone.
My dream is to run NixOS in all my devices…
With all apps being sandboxed, though, please!
Here you go: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5
(My daily driver)
I know it would leave a lot of money on the table, but if Apple had set the app store fee at 5% (enough to cover credit card fees and running the service) and been content with a 50% margin on hardware, it never would have been in this mess.
Even 15% would probably have been universally accepted.
I would imagine that getting the user out of the in-app purchase payment screen and attempt to redirect them at the website for payment, have them figure out how to enter credit card details etc would result in a drastically decreased conversion rate though.
So it should! Then Apple's App Store and IAP could compete on its own merits, rather than restricting competition from existing at all.
Apple does compete on its own merits. Its merits are that it built and controls the operating system and hardware that people choose to buy.
If other companies have an issue, then they can build their own software, their own hardware, and compete.
Companies don’t make laws (unless you live somewhere like the US); people do. If the people say “stop fucking around and rent-seeking” then companies should have to do that. It’s pretty simple, really. Just because you build your own hardware and software doesn’t give you the right to do whatever you want.
Apple is free to leave the European market if it doesn’t like the rules.
I bet the Robber Barons said something like “Don’t like it? Build your own railway!” too.
Imagine a major streaming service: Subscription through Apple 30USD/Month or 25USD/Month if you do it through this one click fintech app.
The fintech app can even pay the streaming service for every customer they bring.
So for the users who already have the fintech app its a no-brainer, click once and get a free coffee each month. For those who don't have the app already it can push them to create an account as they see it on every app as a cheaper alternative. In Europe at least, even traditional banks are able to create a new customer account through a few steps in the in the app. It's usually just about entering your name, taking a photo of your ID and then scanning your face by looking left and right on the camera. You can have a grace period to add the funds for the subscription.
Banks already pay a lot of money for new customers, its pretty common in some places to offer interest-free loans or give cashbacks when you create a bank account through the app. They can partner with those services to offer months of free use or upgrades and then suddenly the value for the trouble of a few click and a scan goes up substantially.
The money comes first (:
Apple has its act together. Those, who are not Apple, do not in comparison. They are Big Mad that Apple does.
You don't understand the term "rent seeking". Because in this case, it's Apple's competitors that are rent seeking by utilizing the force of the government to make Apple give competitors access to its private but non-monopolistic ecosystem.
I think that Apple should call that bluff and leave the EU.
Which in turn will increase public pressure on the EU, but not as functionally as it would in a democratic system.
All hollow talk. It will lose all of its aggression the moment that Apple leaves the EU, and EU citizens are left with the remaining options.
Totally, the Spaniards are on the edge against EU for forcing Apple to allow competing services on %25 of the smartphones they use. Madrid is pouring police force into Barcelona as we speak as the Catalans started burning cars on the streets against the unelected bureaucrats threatening them to give App Store alternatives to every 4th smartphone. Unjustified violence by the police is being reported against people who don't want to know about cheaper payment options. The situation is considered stable at this point but I don't think that EU will survive if Apple pulls out of EU. The president of the EU commission was caught mumbling at the mic "Ich hoffe, Apple ruft nicht an oder blufft, sonst ist alles verloren." which roughly translates to "I hope Apple doesn't call or bluff or all is lost" in Bavarian.
Interested in learning more, do you have links to the sources?
It's joke :) It was impossible to give it a serious reply, so...
They're being facetious.
But here's a source for future readers: https://justpaste.it/jog4v
> All hollow talk. It will lose all of its aggression the moment that Apple leaves the EU, and EU citizens are left with the remaining options.
People in Europe (and everywhere else that isn't the US) are already using these "remaining options" more than they use Apple products by a massive margin. Apple products are not nearly as popular in Europe as they are in the US because more people realize that the price tag is not proportional to the quality you get.
That might be a very risky bet. Currently a lot of people are looking for alternatives of US products, if Apple gets out of the EU, it might not be that easy to get back as the market might have drastically shifted.
>private but non-monopolistic ecosystem.
Isn't it a monopoly over Iphone users?
People like you keep forgetting that the EU is the single largest consumer market in the world. This does not mean that Apple gets most of it revenue from the EU, but it's still a sweet $90B in 2024.
In which world does a company give up on close to $100B in revenue out of spite?
In a hypothetical world where it threatens $1T of revenue.
The app store monopoly is being threatened everywhere that isn't America.
Dude the force of government is us, democratically voting, in a free society. Either respect our law, or don't do business here.
Amen. This American hatred for the government is very tiresome.
> It's telling that Gruber is pretty staunchly against EU/DMA interferance in Apple, and broadly thinks they're wrong. But this is the one thing he agree on
I’ve stopped seeing Gruber as any sort of authority on Apple for a while now. He’s just a single guy with an opinion like everyone else, and it’s, more times than not, clearly biased in favor of Apple.
Some of his analysis of objective data is informative, but when he gets into subjective material, I tune out. I don’t really care any more about what he says than most others sharing their opinion on the internet — it’s just one more data point to consider collectively alongside everyone else’s.
I agree with your overall comment, but I think this is basically what OP was getting at: it's not surprising that Gruber is against EU/DMA interference, yet even he has issues with this particular point.
I liked his piece on the Apple AI debacle, I figure if he is criticising Apple for that then there is something to the complaints.
What I really dislike and the reason I don't subscribe to his feed is the politics.
Usually the user should heavily penalize such behavior, but Apple has users and apostles. To a degree that some believe Daddy Apple should shield them from temptation by evil Netflix.
It ridiculous and also comes with costs for other customers of that ecosystem. I believe brands really make some people stupid.
Elon was very vocal about this, he asked subscribers to directly buy from the website. There’s a 30% discount.
And to the products that need the carveouts the most, small fledgling apps where the margin matters intensely, it’s not available.
Aren't Americans always going on about free speech?
Technically, the first amendment applies only to state actors, not private entities. See Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, Hudgens v. NLRB, and many other cases that upheld this interpretation. Private companies like Apple can restrict free speech on their platforms legally (at least as far as the first amendment is concerned).
That said, I believe in the principle of free speech, especially as envisioned by Tim Berners Lee for the Web. I wish more Americans could adhere to those principles even when the speech is not to their taste. Certainly feels like a lot of cultural backsliding happening.
> Technically, the first amendment applies only to state actors, not private entities.
That's probably not what the person you're responding to is talking about.
Americans have this unfortunate tendency to harp on and on about 'free speech' in contexts where the first amendment obviously does not apply, or, even more intriguingly/ironically, where the first amendment pretty clearly states the exact opposite.
For example, if some non-government-owned platform (such as a social network) bans a user, and that user says "My free speech rights are being infringed".
Whereas what the 1A actually states is the exact opposite: That platform has the right to ban that user, and the government is constitutionally restrained: If the government were to make a law that forces this social network to unban this user, that'd be the 1A violation.
Then there are only 3 options:
1. That user wildly misunderstands free speech. And given how common this is, 'most americans' is perhaps [citation needed] but the sentiment is understandable. It's not just that "My free speech!" is so common, it's also that articles about some incident pretty much never talk about this. Lawyers, legal wonks, legal podcasts that sort of thing - they talk about it, but, niche audience.
2. The meaning of 'free speech' in the sentence 'this social network has banned me; my free speech is being infringed' is not referring to 1A but to the concept as a general principle; a principle that is orthogonal, or even mutually exclusive with, the definition of 'free speech' the way 1A intends it.
3. They know exactly what 1A means but they are lying through their teeth in order to get some internet group ragin' going on.
If we make a habit of assuming good intentions, the nicest choice is option 2.
The somewhat famous "Section 230" covers part of this, and explains some of the pragmatic reasoning behind MCAC v Halleck: If you hold private companies responsible for having infringed free speech rights, then private companies are going to bend over backwards making clear they are not going to moderate. Anything. For any reason. Legal reasons, you see.
It's a combination of 1 and 2 for the most part.
There's a lot of nuance lost when the Bill of Rights is being taught in US grade schools. Most kids read each of the amendments but then are given a simplified interpretation. "The first amendment guarantees a right to free speech" would have been correct enough for a test answer when I was in school, although it loses enough nuance to frequently be incorrect, because people often presume that equates to "I can say what I want without consequence and the government will protect my ability to do it", when it more accurately should probably be taught as "the government has a limited ability to meddle in other's speech"
The net effect is both that people misunderstand the 1st amendment, and they also believe that what they thought it meant is an important value.
This principle is obvious if I was running a newspaper and printing user-submitted comments. I can have whatever inclusion policy I deem fit, or my own speech would be curtailed.
But this is now being applied by private companies in cases wildly removed from that. Meta er whoever can ban two users having a private conversation on their platform.
It seems to me that the private bridge builder in the example above has a stronger case than these companies in such cases.
Perhaps I overhear that you dislike fast-food, and I only sell billboard space to fast-food companies.
Or perhaps you think that would be just fine, and we just need to close the technological gap of being able to embed hypersensitive microphones into asphalt.
> Then there are only 3 options
I can imagine at least one more:
4. Americans believe companies too frequently do the government's bidding, and by allowing corporations to suppress speech, they're allowing the government to exploit that and indirectly violate their direct 1A rights.
> I don't understand what you're on about.
Likewise, I think we have a miscommunication here because I agree with everything you wrote.
I'm not making a legal argument about free speech at all. I agree with your analysis on the legality there. Now that said, I do think the Biden admin crossed the line of legality with their collaboration (and a little implied threatening) Twitter and Facebook, and their whole establishing an office whose job it was to report "disinformation" on social media to the tech giants.
I'm speaking culturally. To go back to the Lab Leak Theory example when Youtube was taking down any videos that even mentioned it (even if the mentioner was a well-respected Evolutionary Biologist) wasn't illegal, but it was a total abandonment of free speech principles. It feels like it's abated quite a bit in the last year or two, but for a while there, there were ideological rakes all over the place that any mention of would get your content taken down by big tech.
Now all that being said, I do think there's a point at which the line between private corp and government starts to blur, and I do think big tech is approaching that line. For most of history, no corporation could even approach the level of power over our lives as government, but increasingly they are getting so powerful that we can't even function in society without them. I think we're approaching or past the point where regulation and/or breaking them apart is necessary to reduce the amount of power that they have over us.
> To go back to the Lab Leak Theory example when Youtube was taking down any videos that even mentioned it (even if the mentioner was a well-respected Evolutionary Biologist) wasn't illegal, but it was a total abandonment of free speech principles.
Not really, this is a case where two cooperating parties, who both have speech rights, have a dispute about which speech they collectively want to espouse.
Unless you're saying that people should lose their speech rights when they form a business?
> Unless you're saying that people should lose their speech rights when they form a business?
I tried to make clear I wasn't making a legal argument, but since you mentioned it I will address it, but first I'll just say that no I'm not saying that people should lose their free speech rights when they form a business. I'm not sure how you got that from what I wrote, but no, legally they don't and shouldn't (with maybe one exception, mentioned next). What I have a problem with is the lack of cultural appreciation for free speech. Culturally, the powerful people at Youtube decided that free speech was not important, at least not as important as controlling the narrative and preventing the spread of ideas they considered "dangerous" (or whatever description they might provide). I think that's the mainstream cultural attitude in the USA today, and I think that's unfortunate. I wish that everyone would believe as I do, that free speech as a cultural value is important and should be honored and respected, especially when it's speech you disagree with.
But to the legal argument: When that "business" gets to be the size and scope of a company like Youtube, yes I do think some regulations (i.e. restrictions) on what they are allowed to impose on their users are reasonable. If we had a dozen small providers then I don't think there's any need for regulation there because the market competition will provide a powerful check on potential abuse, but Youtube is an entrenched behemoth with a giant moat. At that scale, the amount of power they have over the people is immense, and IMHO approaches that of the government, and therefore there need to be some checks on that power.
I do also think the "compelled speech" defense for Youtube et al is a bit of a stretch. I agree that compelled speech is not ok and is just as bad as restricted speech. However, I do see a difference between being a communication service and someone being compelled to say certain speech. I would strongly oppose an attempt to compel Youtube the company to say something, but I don't think somebody having a channel that is clearly attributed to themselves and not to the parent company, is the equivalent of forcing Youtube the company to say something specific.
For example, imagine a world where the telephone system operators got to decide which speech was permitted on their phone lines. They had people listening in the conversation and "moderating" by cutting off the live feed if the topic veered into something they disagreed with, and any voicemails/recordings made were also deleted and scrubbed so the recipients wouldn't hear the wrong think. In that scenario would you defend the rights of the phone company not to host "compelled" speech that they disagree with? Compelled speech would be forcing the company themselves to say something. Them passing the electricity on the wire (aka being a "dumb pipe") is not the same thing.
I also think the argument falls apart when taken to it's logical extent. Who decides what speech they are "compelled" to host? If I make a Youtube video and say "I support <presidential candidate not favored by the company>" are they being compelled to say that? I don't think so.
> I tried to make clear I wasn't making a legal argument
I know which is why I used the word "should" to indicate moral hypothetical and not existing law.
>I'm not sure how you got that from what I wrote
Because you said that a situation in which YouTube exercised the right to moderate their own platform was a "total abandonment of free speech principles".
But as you recognize, compelled speech is also a violation of free speech principles, and that is, whether either of us agree with it (I also don't entirely), it is also factually a free speech principle that is in balance here.
> For example, imagine a world where the telephone system operators got to decide which speech was permitted on their phone lines.
And we're back to the common carrier argument, which I think is more relevant to this conversation than a vague appeal to "free speech". Ultimately when the government grants monopolies to businesses, they start to become an effective arm of the government and should be regulated more in line with the rules that apply to government. I think we need to start classifying more of these platforms as common carriers and require them to carry all speech equally -- or break them up until the point they don't hold effective monopolies and/or wrongfully crush competitors.
Indeed, sounds like we're largely in agreement then.
> Because you said that a situation in which YouTube exercised the right to moderate their own platform was a "total abandonment of free speech principles"
True I did say that, and I'll definitely walk that one back a little bit. I didn't mean their moderation as a whole was the abandonment, I mainly meant their philosophical approach to it. (i.e. deciding that anything that goes contrary to the CDC/WHO narrative may not be discussed)
As an American who thinks free speech is one of the most important rights we have, I wish the answer to your question would be a collective "yes" but unfortunately it is not.
I don't understand what you're on about. The only laws that the USA has on the books that says anything about this are either [A] recently written state laws written as vehicles to virtue signal, particularly by DeSantis in Florida, or [B] the exact opposite.
For example, the first amendment indicates that apple doesn't just have the right to tell its users of its app store to say nothing about alternate payment methods. It goes further than that: The government must not tell Apple anything else. That's stretching 1A a bit; more likely 1A says nothing at all about what Apple is doing here.
"Free Speech" is a thing americans are fond of saying, but unfortunately, considering that 1A is often called 'the free speech amendment', what that actually means is usually unclear, and in this day and age, that means it gets weaponized: Folks start harping on about free speech and pick whatever of the many conflicting definitions so happens to suit their needs at that exact moment.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall was british, not american. She's the author of "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
The thing about 1A and free speech in general: Forcing somebody to say something is just as bad as forcing somebody not to say something. And, once you start talking about non-governmental entities and 'free speech', those two things are at odds. After all, if the government tells some social network that they MUST NOT ban some user or delete some posting, that is compelled speech, and that's what I meant with '1A means the opposite of what you / this case / most americans think it means'. 1A protects the right of private companies to restrict your speech. It does not protect your right to have your speech protected from being suppressed, deleted, or otherwise restrained by private actors.
In America free speech is always limited to what "I find acceptable". There's an infinite number of things that lots of Americans will find unacceptable. Swearing is beeped/censored everywhere (even on youtube), songs release "explicit" and "clean" versions, nipples are blurred on TV, some words you can't say even in an educational or karaoke setting (N-word, R-word, etc.)
I don't disagree with you, but I do think it's important to distinguish between a censored swear word or nipple, and taking down an entire video because it mentions the Lab Leak Theory at a time when that was politically unacceptable. The former may be suppressing a small element of the "speech" but it's not (for the most part) restricting the expression/transmission of ideas. It's also a very firm and defined standard that is unambiguous (i.e. here is a list of words you can't say, use substitutes to convey meaning v. here is a list of opinions you aren't allowed to express). The latter on the other hand is absolutely the suppression of ideas, which IMHO is what "free speech" is really about and why it's so important.
If you extend "speech" to "any kind of action an individual or company can do", then no. There's plenty of laws regulations that restrict what you can do in USA.
Most people who go on about free speech are the ones who clamp down the most on it and are massive snowflakes when people decide not to buy their stuff because of their speech.
There is also the freedom to engage in a contact.
The freedom of speech isn't restricted, apple just isn't providing a platform to speak on.
This is an anti trust issue balance against two parties ability to be bound by contract.
Sorry, Fox News changed its mind in January. Come back in 2 years and they'll be back to "pro free speech" (to mock minorities).
Every American is pro free speech for the kind of speech they like.
Just never in a logically consistent manner.
Sure it is. Lots of us also go on about private property rights and freedom of association. Apple is restricting the behavior of entities doing business through them on a platform they own. The logic is that you remain free to speak - elsewhere. Meanwhile Apple remains free not to do business with you if you can't or won't accept their terms.
(Well really the legal argument is that Apple isn't the government and so the first amendment doesn't bind their policies but there's an ideological aspect in addition to the legal one.)
The issue missed by such an analysis is the outsized impact the megacorp has. Without strong competition (ie not a duopoly or even an oligopoly) regulation is required to protect consumers against practices that otherwise would be financially discouraged.
There are also a few other blindspots people here tend to have regarding regulation. In particular that sometimes detrimental behaviors exist that are perversely incentivized rather than discouraged by the market despite being obviously worse for consumers. A lot of people here seem to conveniently forget that such things are even within the realm of possibility.
and usually in a context where the concept they are thinking of (the constitution) doesn't apply (anywhere that isn't the government)
Free speech isn't good because it's in the Constitution, it's in the Constitution because it's good.
US officials and businessmen keep on repeating the same thing:
> The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards.
But this is wildly untrue. The EU isn't hand-picking individual organisations and fining them because they're American, they're fining them because they're in breach of existing legislation. The same legislation applies to local companies.
Ironically, it's the US who takes stances like the one they claim the EU is taken. E.g.: The US required that TikTok be sold, without actually proving that TikTok was in breach of any actual law.
But repeating the same claims gets those claims out into the media, and that's what people hear. So we see a dissonance between what the media says (and many people believe) and what's really happening.
Agreed with your first point. Regarding TikTok though the argument was never (AFAIK) that they were actively breaking the law but rather that their structure and ownership posed a threat to US interests. That's pretty reasonable and largely mirrors China's stance against the US.
If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations. They seem to prioritize free trade above all else.
The US is lying about tiktok, the only reason is to mirror China's strategy towards American app. After watching the tit-for-tat video of Veritasum[1] I agree with America's strategy of banning Chinese apps until China allows American apps. That being said, I wish the US was more transparent about why they're doing this instead of lying.
I'm guessing the reason why they're lying is that they don't want to scare ALL Chinese companies.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
The reason they’re lying is because they’ve been lying for so long it just happens reflexively. It’s all they know anymore.
> that their structure and ownership posed a threat to US interests.
This is pretty much as vague as it gets "they're doing _something_ wrong".
The exact behaviour that is prohibited needs to be codified into law. Then you can go after organisations what break such law.
In this case, they've just been found guilty of an unwritten crime.
> If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations
Corporations in general rather. I do agree that we should be stricter of foreign corporations, and on non-foreign ones equally so.
I find this so confusing. Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk are foreigners who are both demonstrably influencing American politics through media they control. What makes Tiktok different?
The same thing that would make a platform with ties to Russia different. It falls under the influence of a sophisticated geopolitical adversary.
Tesla is headquartered and has most operations based in the US. Murdoch's ventures are similar AFAIK.
Given how much surveillance modern vehicles do I wouldn't be surprised if imports start being subjected to additional scrutiny at some point. But at least most vehicles can't be used to subtly and intentionally manipulate the owner's perception of the world so I guess the stakes are a bit lower.
TikTok probably didn’t make friends and pay bribes to the right people.
Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk are both American citizens. In fact, one of Murdoch's primary reasons for becoming an American citizen in 1985 was to comply with the Communications Act of 1934, which prevented him (or any non-citizen) from owning more than 25% of a broadcasting company.
Here's a piece of history from 1985 that talks about it: https://archive.ph/HlHrx
Rupert Murdoch has exclusively been a US citizen for 40 years.
But really, what makes Tiktok different is China.
The idea that Murdoch and Musk are not really American and are instead foreigners is a disgusting anti-immigrant sentiment.
Well... Though I agree with you in principle, the DMA does target specific gatekeeper companies and the criteria for these were set conveniently to ensure no EU company is regulated by it. So I can see their point a little
Isn't the question whether they were set because they were US companies, or because they are dominant gatekeepers on the Internet?
5/7 designated gatekeepers are US companies: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
I thought Booking Holdings Inc was also American.
There are zero European companies, including Spotify - the #1 music streaming marketplace in the world.
My mistake. While Booking.com is HQ'd in Amsterdam, Booking Holdings is indeed a US company (also responsible for Priceline, Kayak, and OpenTable.)
> There are zero European companies, including Spotify - the #1 music streaming marketplace in the world.
This still doesn't answer the actual question of whether the gatekeepers were selected because they are US companies, or because they are are Internet gatekeepers. I don't find it surprising that the US's legal and economic culture resulted in more conglomerate gatekeepers than other nations.
What exactly does Spotify gatekeep though?
They're a gatekeeper in the same way YouTube or TikTok is.
They control access of businesses, in this case music labels, to the final customer.
That's not really true. You can easily switch to Deezer, Apple Music, Tidal, Qobuz, YouTube Music, etc. You'll have access to just about the exact same library of music.
You can't just ignore YouTube, TikTok, Facebook Marketplace and still have access to the content they gatekeep.
The DMA doesn't care how easy for final customers to switch. If it did, Chrome wouldn't be designated a gatekeeper given how easy it is to switch to Firefox or brave or a dozen other browsers.
The DMA is about disintermediation of businesses from customers on large platforms with business and non-business users and durable user bases.
The problem with Chrome and the DMA has to do with the fact that Alphabet does these "don'ts":
- treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
- prevent users from un-installing any pre-installed software or app if they wish so (Chrome on Android can be disabled but not uninstalled)
- track end users outside of the gatekeepers' core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent having been granted.
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/about-dma_en#what-d...
None of that is used to determine who is a gatekeeper.
The assessment for whether Chrome qualified as a gatekeeper is less than 3 pages long. All they care about is whether they qualify as a platform and that they are over the threshold for active non-business users, active business users, revenue in the EU for enough time.
At no point did they concern themselves with potential anti-competitive practices in making the determination.
It's only after they're designated a gatekeeper that they're required to avoid things like self-preferencing or negotiating MFN terms with business. This conveniently allows the EU to pick and choose who the restrictive rules apply to on a company by company and product by product basis.
https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
I think the document you really want to look at is this one, which is the actual regulation the DMA is operating under: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/1925/oj/eng
That regulation is very much concerned with anti-competitive practices. What we're seeing now is the application (or execution) of those regulations.
When I look at Regulation (EU) 2022/1925, it's pretty clear to me that Spotify does not have, for example, "very strong network effects, an ability to connect many business users with many end users through the multisidedness of these services, a significant degree of dependence of both business users and end users, lock-in effects, a lack of multi-homing for the same purpose by end users, vertical integration, and data driven-advantages."
What?
Spotify most certainly does have strong network effects (your friends are all on it, the party you go to with collaborative playlists uses it, etc), data driven-advantages (Spotify's personalized recommendations are built on vast historical playing data), lock-in effects (your playlist/history and all your friends' playlists are there), dependence of businesses users (Spotify is the go-to platform for music labels for promotion and only way to reach certain customers) and end users (because of network and lock-in effects).
I think we might have a fundamental disagreement that we'll have to agree to disagree on.
From a brief search, Facebook and Google are responsible for ~60-80% or more of digital advertising spend. This is because of their data-driven advantages that come from the multisidedness of their services, forcing a dependence of business users.
While Spotify does have social features, I don't really know anyone who joined Spotify because that's "where their friends were." The social features consist primarily of playlists (which can be viewed without an account) and a feed showing what friends are listening to, if you connect to Facebook - which many don't. Additionally, Spotify has very open APIs that make it easy to move a playlist to another service: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
Facebook requires an account to access Marketplace, even to view it (lock-in effects), and many communities and neighborhoods have made Facebook the sole source of online discussion / information sharing (strong network effects.) Eschewing Facebook means missing information you can't get any other way. And it's literally impossible to avoid Google online.
Simply having a product and customers ("your friends are all on it, the party you go to with collaborative playlists uses") or an audience ("Spotify's personalized recommendations are built on vast historical playing data") is not the same as being a gatekeeper.
> I don't really know anyone who joined Spotify because that's "where their friends were." The social features consist primarily of playlists (which can be viewed without an account)
Former Apple Music user here. I switched because of Spotify’s collaborative playlists. Technically, I could have used a sync solution to sync changes between platforms. In reality, it was just cheaper all around to switch to Spotify instead, and be on the same platform as my partner and friends. Being able to open Spotify links being sent to me without having to run it though some translation shortcut was wonderful.
Apple deleting all my playlists immediately after my subs lapsed was the icing on the cake to never return.
I'd argue this style of concentrating power under a single giant company is mostly American style.
EU companies tend to keep group entities separate instead of running for absolute synergies. For instance the AOL-Time-Warner-Direct-Dish kind of merger is pretty much unheard of.
thats only kinda right. The DMA does include booking.com as a gatekeeper, which is european. But most gatekeepers (except booking and tiktok) are US-based
Booking Holdings is American. They bought booking.com in 2005.
Booking.com was European, is not any more. It is now a subsidiary of Booking Holding (formerly Priceline), based in Connecticut.
That’s of course the reason these types of companies are American - Americans are rich and can buy out foreign companies which are successful.
There are plenty of EU companies that buy into new markets or opportunities, they just fall outside of these laws; Siemens is a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens
US corporations are too used to breaking laws as they see fit and getting away with a slap on the wrist, so being asked to follow the rules feels like an attack to them.
They're also very used to lobbying to get what they want, as soon as that's not possible, they have a tantrum.
That is not my experience. Every US company I have worked in spent a lot of time training employees to follow the relevant laws. I have even been on teams which had to do work to comply with the European GDPR. The message I have always received is follow the law and don’t break it.
I think you make many good points. Slight tangent: Why isn't EU more concerned about TikTok? While it is very difficult to prove, various studies have demonstrated that TikTok pushes more content favoring the Chinese Government (CCP).
In my anecdotal experience of one, American platforms are way faster in pushing far-right content on me even though it has to be clear to the algorithm that I don't want such content.
TikTok never does that.
> TikTok pushes more content favoring the Chinese Government (CCP).
Does that violate EU law? (Serious question, I really don't know)
no, and as far I know it doesn't violate any US law either. the thing against tiktok is not based on law, but based on suspicions.
Actually, the problem the US had with Tiktok that was it did not censor people from talking about Palestine
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-tiktok-ban-linked-isra...
The timeline doesn't align for that at all. National security concerns were raised before the Pentagon banned in in 2019, then Trump ordered it to divest in 2020.
No doubt that it became an argument by some more recently, but it was just another straw on the already broken camel's back.
it's not difficult to prove. In the wake of the tarrifs, everyone in the US got Chinese manufacturing videos pushed to their feed so customers can buy direct from factories and avoid huge markups by a middleman.
Or, you know, Chinese businesses acted like businesses and capitalized on the orange man's stupidity and naturally went viral.
The tinfoil hats come out pretty quickly when China is mentioned but Occam's razor still applies here.
I don't think Occam's razor applies here. Before the tarrifs, Donghua Jinlong glycine going viral was a silly Internet thing, but the tarrifs are big business and it might come off as a tin foil hat theory that the CCP exerted control over TikTok to push videos that undercut American companies in the face of American tarrifs, but geopolitics is very big business. Believing that those videos came up organically seems naive because this shit is a big deal with far reaching global ramifications.
> But this is wildly untrue. The EU isn't hand-picking individual organisations and fining them because they're American, they're fining them because they're in breach of existing legislation. The same legislation applies to local companies.
The iPhone App store existed before this legislation, and I suspect the rest of the targetted things did too.
This legislation only applies to companies that have a certain marketshare, which includes no European companies unless you count one that's a subsidiary of a US company.
Maybe it's the case that it is reasonable to handicap successful businesses, but this is a handicap that only applies to some businesses, most of which are US (but one is Chinese).
This is a side note but I don't understand why you called out the media when your quote wasn't from them but reporting a person's opinion
> The same legislation applies to local companies.
It doesn't matter what applies, only what's enforced matters.
Laws being selectively enforced for an agenda is a tale as old as the existence of laws.
Another irony is that the biggest (business) beneficiaries of applied DMA would be other US-based digital services companies like Netflix or Epic.
That's called gaslighting, and it's a hostile act. Truth is the first casualty of war. If someone is trying to deceive you (or deceive others and ruin your reputation), they are actively exposing you to some kind of risk, usually for their own benefit, which is a hostile act. Recommend you act accordingly.
There is no irony. The EU is targeting US companies. The US is targeting Chinese companies. The US is or soon will be targeting EU companies. China is targeting US companies. China will probably soon be targeting EU companies if they aren't already, which is probably already debatable. And this is not a complete list, it's not even a complete list of the highlights.
If they're doing it by legislation, well, the EU has been passing "legislation clearly designed for US companies to be in infringement of" for a while. Maybe you like that. Maybe it's a good thing; after all, the things they're passing laws about are basically just actions only US companies are capable of taking right now. Nevertheless it is clearly targeting. It's just targeting you like. The US has passed such legislation. China does it both with formal legislation and with de facto rules.
Free trade is a dead letter. Whether you like that or not is not very relevant to whether or not it is dead. It's dead. Maybe it'll swing back around in a few decades but right now even that is a distant prospect, we're not even done accelerating into the current merchantalist phase of the cycle, let alone decelerating, let alone heading back.
(Note "whataboutism" would be an inappropriate response to my point here; that's about "it's ok for us because they do it". My observation is not normative, merely descriptive... everyone is doing it, and they're doing it more rather than less right now.)
>The US is or soon will be targeting EU companies.
They already do, lookup how many European banks have been fined by the US and by how much then compare that to US banks.
Everybody plays these games.
I mean I understand they are doing, but also why aren't they fining European and Chinese companies for the same thing?
>So we see a dissonance between what the media says (and many people believe) and what's really happening.
This thing right here terrifies me. The entertainment-information media oligopoly has a tight grasp on public conversations. It feels like a hydra that can't be defeated.
It can be defeated by talking to people about things. If you are known to be an expert in topic X, and you are saying something different to what the media says about topic X (and which makes more sense), people (who know you and your reputation) are inclined to believe you over the media.
This only has a local impact, but global is made of local.
I do this as much as I can. Between chatrooms and local meets, I spend a significant portion of my time attempting to politely dispel misinformation.
It's exhausting, but it's worth it.
I want to organise with other people that do this, but I'm not sure how to do that. It feels like our efforts would be multiplied if we started to publish or otherwise spread information.
Ah, they said the T-word, presumably to invoke some political fire support from across the Atlantic. I wonder how that will go. Of course, this is not a tariff, for two reasons: firstly, it does not involve money (the UK's digital services tax does, but that's not this), and secondly, the same rules would apply to EU native competitors .. if there were any. It's what's knows as a "non tariff trade barrier". Of course those are all over the place, and many of them are there to protect consumer and public interests.
> The EU regulator also dropped Meta's Marketplace's designation as a DMA gatekeeper because the number of users fell below the threshold.
Now that's interesting. I think the threshold is 45 million? Falling EU userbase?
"the same rules would apply to EU maybe competitors... if there were any."
That can actually be an example of a tariff, though. Basically every country specializes in something, and imports things they're not good at making. For example: cheese, or luxury watches, or GPUs. If you have a special law that charges companies money only for the categories you import and you carve out exceptions for "small" (aka domestic) markets, a la the DMA, you have effectively created a tariff.
I wonder if eBay's free listings is taking marketshare back?
eBay's listings are no longer free. They are now extorting their pound of flesh via a so-called "Buyer Protection Fee" which forces buyers, rather than sellers, to pay extra when purchasing items from private sellers.
eBay is very different across countries. In Germany, eBay listings are free again for private sellers after they noticed the exodus to other platforms. I know this is not the case in other countries, so talking about eBay as a general platform is very difficult.
Which is ironic, as both Ebay and PayPal tends to automatically side with buyer 99.9999% of the time in disputes.
I'm a bit surprised usage was ever that high; that would imply that almost 10% of the population was using _Facebook Marketplace_!
I think I've looked at it maybe twice since it launched, to admire all the weird scams. Maybe it's gotten better since? It used to be sub-ebay levels of complete nonsense.
Remember that you're probably in a bubble. Marketplace was incredibly popular back in the days when I was at FB, and I'd have expected it to get more popular based on the people I see around me (kids stuff is all over it).
Maybe the gatekeeper thing is a reflection of less people in the EU using FB at all, rather than specifically Marketplace.
That bubble is the EU, which this law is about. I know a bunch of European countries have their own Ebay/Craigslist websites. Marketplace has never been even somewhat popular in my country.
Yeah fair. I guess I forget that Ireland is now the largest English speaking country in the EU, so I guess I'm in a bubble. I am still really surprised that Marketplace is no longer big enough to count as a gatekeeper.
Facebook Marketplace is extremely popular depending on the city you’re in.
It has taken the place of Craigslist for younger generations.
What surprises me is how much people on this site underestimate facebook.
Facebook literally is the internet for millions of people.
Facebook marketplace is far larger than craigslist and ebay combined, even if you take both of those at their respective peaks.
The open web might seem huge, but it's actually dwarfed in size by Facebook.
> What surprises me is how much people on this site underestimate facebook.
It’s the classic disconnect between engineering and product management: When engineers don’t want a product and therefore conclude that nobody wants the product.
When I’ve brought up Facebook active user stats here in the past I got flooded with responses suggested Facebook was lying or manipulating their user counts to pump up the stock.
Yeah, I often see claims online that Facebook is dead, Facebook is just Boomers posting pictures of their grandkids, etc. Maybe it's a regional thing, because where I live, everyone's on Facebook. Most small businesses, organizations, and communities here use it as their primary (or only) online presence for promoting themselves and staying in contact with their customers/members. Marketplace has completely replaced the old newspaper classified ads. That's unfortunate since the search in Marketplace sucks, but it's happened.
My family uses its messenger for organizing things because everyone has it, even if some of us rarely use it except for that. If I wanted to draw attention to something locally, whether it was promoting a service or running for office, I'd be a fool not to use Facebook.
Part of the disconnect is that these days, a lot of the Facebook use is concentrated in places you don't necessarily see from the outside.
Like, fifteen years ago, if you happened upon the Facebook page of a random person, you'd usually see a handful of vacation pictures, a meme or three, some updates from their latest Clash of Cookie Farm Kitchen Dash session, and whatnot.
These days, all that stuff - if it's even still being posted - is likely siloed away to Friends-only posts. That random person might still be there, might still be logging in every day, but you don't see the Messenger group chats and the Marketplace offers/haggles.
Likewise for small businesses - a lot of the "look at this thing we're selling now, come check it out" posts now go to Instagram. They might still be auto-logging in, still responding to PMs on Facebook, still clicking a few news posts here and there, but that's just not visible on the outside, and creates the perception of Facebook the Ghost Town.
*US city. I think people in my country would be able to name Craigslist (not in use) over fb marketplace.
> the same rules would apply to EU native competitors .. if there were any.
By this same logic, I guess we can say that the EU isn't trying to build a trade barrier favoring local competitors. So, while, as you say,
> It's what's knows as a "non tariff trade barrier".
...It's also not that, since the goal isn't prevent them from competing equally in the market, where they have no competition.
> Apple faces a €500 million fine for breaching the regulation’s rules for app stores, while Meta drew a penalty of €200 million for its "pay or consent" advertising model,
> The procedural fines fall short of the two giant penalties issued by the EU executive under its antitrust laws last year: €1.8 billion to Apple for abusing its dominant position while distributing music streaming apps, and €797 million to Meta for pushing its classified ads service on social media users.
Really honest questions: are those fines actually paid, in practice ? Is there a way for a citizen to know ? (As in, do they appear in the public budget of the UE ?) Or are they somehow deducted from subsidies, added to taxes, etc... ?
I know who collects taxes in France ("Le Tresor Public"). I don't know of a EU version of a treasury. Is it collected by one of the member states (Ireland, I would guess ?)
> Fines imposed on undertakings found in breach of EU antitrust rules are paid into the general EU budget. This money is not earmarked for particular expenses, but Member States' contributions to the EU budget for the following year are reduced accordingly. The fines therefore help to finance the EU and reduce the burden for taxpayers.
This quote is re: anti-trust, but likely generalizes.
https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/index/fines_en#:~:te...
> "pay or consent" advertising model,
Wait, so the EU has made it illegal to sell a paid service while also offering an alternative where the user pays via seeing ads?
It's not the ads you are consenting to, its the personal data collection and targeting.
You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.
>You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.
This is always a bit frustrating to me, in that, if someone doesn't like personal data collection, they likely have enough blocked that the attempts at targeted advertisements are likely to be very ineffective. And even in spaces where there is little personal data available, online advertising still seems to desperately cling to targeting rather than context.
I remember being struck by the contrast between the printed Times Literary Supplement, with advertisements for new book releases, conferences, cultural events, and so on, which all seem quite relevant to the audience, are often enjoyable and informative, and have directly motivated me to buy things, and the automated advertisements that were added to their podcast, for things like... a football-themed advertisement for a car dealership vaguely located near some rough geolocation of my IP address.
> You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.
This is a lie that has been perpetuated for a very long time.
1. There's no definite proof they are much less effective
2. Even if they are less effective, is it a bad trade-off when weighed against life-long pervasive and invasive tracking?
> 2. Even if they are less effective, is it a bad trade-off when weighed against life-long pervasive and invasive tracking?
You're talking benefits to society and/or the consumer; the only thing that matters is (often short-term) profits.
"Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
Sadly, this comic lives rent-free in my head all the time
No, the EU has made it illegal to extort payment before allowing people to opt-out of data collection or profiling.
Extortion is a stretch. Nobody is being forced to use these services.
Try not using Wechat in China. Facebook's Whatsapp is going in that direction in the Netherlands and probably other European countries: I don't yet need it for daily life, but a lot of services are moving to supporting WhatsApp and turning off things like regular phone support, website chat, etc. The only things where it was a requirement so far, were things I didn't yet care about (like sending in voice messages to be used in a podcast, or being part of the neighborhood gossip and tool-sharing community chat) but I bet it won't stay that way forever and sooner or later a company will discontinue email support in favor of "just message us on Whatsapp". Between going back to the 80s and writing/printing letters and sending them in the mail, and installing WhatsApp, any reasonable person will begrudgingly click that agree button no matter if they really agree. I'd say they were extorted at that point and it is not voluntarily/freely given consent, even if they technically have made that choice themselves
Tell that to the embedded Facebook trackers ubiquitous throughout the web
> embedded Facebook trackers
And most social trackers and google analytics, and adsense, and most captcha alternatives or stripe anti fraud scripts.
People have sold their audience to FAANG for 2 decades now.
And let's not think too much about the Android and iOS ecosystems (phone, TV, "assistants" etc.).
One of they key points of DNA is exactly that you likely can not avoid these services.
Keeo in mind, it is only the largest 7 tech companies in the world that has to comply.
It is incredibly few companies.
s/DNA/DMA/
Yes, DMA hasn't gone into autocorrect yet!
it's okay, your acquaintances will share their contact loss lists and so you can't miss out
but only in the context of the DMA (since facebook is a giant). this rule does not apply for smaller sites (like most news outlets)
Except for newspapers
right, that seems to be the model for German newspapers online, haven't seen it other places.
It seems to have become common at least in several European countries
Under the GDPR, it’s illegal to treat PII like currency. You can’t gate a service behind PII consent.
Whack. Let consumers and sellers decide what to do with their own data
This is a totally foreign idea to the EU. Offensive and crass, even.
There's something I've learnt from some time in the EU. There is not an innovative, risk-taking, freedom-loving bone in the EU culture -- they exported all those folks to the US. Their homegrown risk takers and innovators inevitably leave because of their suffocating culture around innovation, entrepreneurship, and progress. This is one of the reasons for the staggering amount of brain drain in the EU.
Most ironically, they sneer on our concept of entrepreneurship/innovation while they lag development by decades and having total and complete dependence on our technology. It is this weird moral high-horse position that amounts to a tactical foot-gun.
or maybe they just don't think automated mass surveillance is a worthwhile innovation.
Like the atom bomb, you know - you shouldn't get to drop one in the middle of the city just because you invented it. Not even if it's very profitable.
The atom bomb ushered an unprecedented era of peace between nuclear armed countries.
The number of men dying or getting wounded in war as a percentage of population has gone down dramatically post-nuclear.
Conventional meat-grinder warfare is all but over in nuclear countries, and we can probably thank it for not being sent to war ourselves.
We also got atomic energy out of it which is cool.
No. They just made it illegal for Meta specifically to do it, and they’re reserving judgment for anyone else on their hit list covered by the DMA. The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles despite the PR and the extra layers of indirection, it targets American and Chinese companies specifically because that’s what it was designed to do.
Not Meta specifically, although Meta as a monopoly on being apple to infrige this rule. (A long time ago, in a capitalism far, far way, America was against monopolies and cartels. Those days will come back.)
> The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles
What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ?
I can agree on some version of "not a neutral law" in that it is "objectively" targeted: the law makes a difference between smaller actors and bigger ones ("gatekeepers") (and it's not clear to me if the criterias (size, audience, revenues, etc...) are set in store, or arbitrary [1]).
It happens that they're all from the US except TikTok's ByteDance and Booking.com. It was probably _designed_ for that.
But I suspect the case here "Meta is offering you to pay, so that they don't have to respect your rights to privacy". I suspect it would be illegal for even the smaller data collectors. But IANAL.
However, the "neutral principles" don't make sense. All laws are principled, except the laws of physics.
In this case, yes, the "principle" is that personal data is something to be treated with care. As often, you can state that something is a "principle" when someone can have the opposite version. So the "opposite" version of this is that personal data is a commodity that can be sold at will.
None of those version is neutrally "true" or "false".
However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter.
The shame is that it never was directly settled in a democratic debate - it's entirely the work of the legislative bodies of the EU, which, though elected and representative, are not exactly well know of famous. Maybe the debate is too technical to be popular.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...
[2] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en#book...
> Not Meta specifically, although Meta as a monopoly on being apple to infrige this rule. (A long time ago, in a capitalism far, far way, America was against monopolies and cartels. Those days will come back.)
I’ve been asking for years here and nobody has made a solid argument to me how Facebook has a monopoly in anything or how a social networking monopoly even could exist. It’s a competitive market out there. Some of their competitors are on the DMA’s hit list too.
> What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ?
Sure it does. A law against murder is a law applied to everyone. That’s a neutral law, and it’s not targeted, and it’s a fairly neutral principle to state that “murder is intolerable in our society”.
> However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter.
The bad people doing bad things with extensive databases were European governments.
Antitrust doesn't mean monopoly, but monopoly is a part of antitrust. Monopoly also doesn't mean you're the only one, but you're the one capable of fixing prices, or doing something else anti competitive.
It's a complex thing in practice, don't take the linguistic definition of the word itself as the sole interpretation of the law.
Please note not only what I wrote but what I was directly responding to when I wrote it.
> It's a complex thing in practice, don't take the linguistic definition of the word itself as the sole interpretation of the law.
I am aware; however I am still waiting for the solid argument that Facebook is a monopoly to be made in either an EU legal context (not “gatekeeper”, not “very large online platform”, monopoly) or an American legal context.
Facebook being a monopoly is irrelevant to EU competition laws. These laws are strictly interested in fostering competitive markets and broadly cares about all sorts of anticompetitive behaviours. They are in no way interested in monopolies and I don’t think being a monopoly is a prerequisite for any of them. The closest notion will be dominant position but that’s a far weaker criteria itself irrelevant to the DMA.
Setting aside the DMA and DSA entirely as I already explained to someone else earlier why the DMA wasn’t an antimonopoly law and I don’t want these newer laws to get in the way of my questions: put another way, the EU does not have an antimonopoly law on the books? Article 102 of the TFEU seems to back that up, but I’m understanding you correctly here, the EU just doesn’t have an antimonopoly law?
So before I start telling EU citizens to sod off for dragging the word “monopoly” into these discussions regarding Facebook’s or any other company’s monopoly status within the EU which by your account doesn’t seem to have the means to even determine that nor a body of law built up around the concept, do any of the member nations have their own anti-monopoly laws? Or have all of their own competition laws up to and including any real or hypothetical antimonopoly laws been preempted by the TFEU?
> I’ve been asking for years here and nobody has made a solid argument to me how Facebook has a monopoly in anything or how a social networking monopoly even could exist. It’s a competitive market out there. Some of their competitors are on the DMA’s hit list too.
This seems pretty convincing to me, given that Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp: [1]
> Facebook leads the pack with 3.04 billion users, maintaining its position as the most extensive social networking site globally. > YouTube follows with 2.5 billion users, reinforcing its status as the premier platform for video sharing and consumption. > WhatsApp and Instagram are tied in the third position, each with 2 billion users. WhatsApp is renowned for its messaging services, while Instagram is a favorite for photo and video sharing. > TikTok, with 1.5 billion users, rounds out the top five, showcasing its rapid rise as a leading platform for short-form video content.
In terms of social media, the only "competitor" at the same scale as facebook is tiktok and snap.
We might leave in the bubble that uses twitter, bluesky, reddit, etc... but their small relative to the blue site, for better or for worse.
Break up Meta into differents, apps, and suddenly the monopoly becomes much less obvious.
> and it’s a fairly neutral principle to state that “murder is intolerable in our society”.
Do you mean it's "neutral" because there is no "arbitrage" in deciding if someone is a murderer ?
Or that the principle behind it is universal ?
In this case, is it still "neutral" once your start talking about, say, self defense ? death penalty ? assisted suicide ? war times ? (or, if you're going to stretch it a lot, abortion ?) I'm not bringing it to say there is an equivalence, I'm saying you _will_ have people making the equivalence, and different people will disagree. It's called principles - no law say they have to be universal, and they're usually not.
[1] https://prioridata.com/data/social-media-usage/#Social_Media...
> This seems pretty convincing to me, given that Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp: [1]
>> Facebook leads the pack with 3.04 billion users, maintaining its position as the most extensive social networking site globally. > YouTube follows with 2.5 billion users, reinforcing its status as the premier platform for video sharing and consumption. > WhatsApp and Instagram are tied in the third position, each with 2 billion users. WhatsApp is renowned for its messaging services, while Instagram is a favorite for photo and video sharing. > TikTok, with 1.5 billion users, rounds out the top five, showcasing its rapid rise as a leading platform for short-form video content.
This tells only part of the story, believe it or not. You know the old phrase, lies, damned lies, and statistics? This is why statistics is on the list: statistics are a very easy way to mislead and even straight up lie to people.
So let’s start with your conception of the DMA: the DMA is not an anti-monopoly law. It is addendum to the EU’s competition policy, which defines a new entity type called a gatekeeper. Similarly, with the DSA (“Digital Services Act”) they defined another entity type: very large online platforms or VLOPs.
The reason why they were put in the position in the first place of writing new laws defining new entity types is because no matter how they tried to slice it, not even the EU could justifiably punish their targets, large mostly American tech giants, under anti-monopoly law, not even if they were to really stretch it by legally redefining what a monopoly even is.
Do you want to know what a monopoly looks like? It looks like AT&T in the 90s with long distance phone calls, where the only way to talk to someone across a long distance and hear their voice was to go through AT&T’s telephone lines that had long ago been laid coast-to-coast across the USA. It looks like railroads colluding because they’re all laying tracks across Kansas and they don’t want to do that anymore. That’s a monopoly.
Apple, Meta, et al. have not been charged as monopolies under the DMA or DSA. They have been defined, literally put on a list by the EC under a law it had written itself with specific targets in mind, as Gatekeepers and/or VLOPs and simply being on that list is enough to give the EC extra special authority over them, again, under the law it has written with them in mind.
So let’s go back to social networks and discuss whether Facebook is a monopoly. I’m going to assert no and here is why: Facebook does not control the free flow of information across society, provide a chokehold for communication, is not essential for communication, and is not essential in its form or function. The Blue App itself is actually a very old type of social network grounded in the early to mid-aughts with sites like MySpace and 1up.com as its peers. Some of the kids today that never grew up with that, but really only heard about it have found their home in this retro social network called SpaceHey, but you don’t really see more Facebook’s because nobody really wants that. There’s already Facebook.
What about Facebook’s suite? The Blue App, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Again, all very large social networks in their own right. There’s also Threads tied into Instagram. They only seem dominant if you ignore an incredibly important piece of information: people don’t use just one social network. They use several, and for different purposes and niches. Twitter/X, Reddit, WeChat, LINE, KakaoTalk, Blue Sky, WhatsApp, VSCO, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Mixi, iMessage, Badoo, Mastodon, TikTok & Douyin, Whisper, Yik Yak, VK, Xiaohongshu, Letterboxd, Truth Social and Bumble are all playing in the same space. I would even throw Hacker News in the mix. What differentiates them are things like niche, geography, audience or interest focus, and medium but there are only so many hours in the day and Facebook is competing against all of that, and Netflix and YouTube, and the time you spend IRL just chatting with your friends at the pub or whatever.
People are on Facebook at this point largely because they want to be, and the fact that they have 3 billion users or whatever is fucking irrelevant to a competition authority because there’s no country or bloc on Earth with that population. The United States Department of Justice is chiefly concerned with competition law inside its own borders, and the same for the relevant EU authorities, and the same for each other country on Earth.
> In this case, is it still "neutral" once your start talking about, say, self defense ? death penalty ? assisted suicide ? war times
Murder has a definition, and it’s not just a synonym for the killing of someone. It’s the unlawful and intentional act of killing someone without justification nor a valid excuse. Different legal systems may vary in the specifics, but most do tend to distinguish murder from other forms of killing. Either way, the applicability of the charge of murder, or the charge of being a monopoly to bring this discussion back a bit from the morbid, is founded in the rule of law.
> It happens that they're all from the US except TikTok's ByteDance and Booking.com. It was probably _designed_ for that.
Booking.com is owned by an American company.
> In the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases
Lack of databases didn't stop "people" from doing bad things. They built the databases, rather quickly, while they were doing bad things.
I find it bizarre that the response to trying to prevent the rise of another fascist European government was to avoid collecting data as if a populist fourth Reich wouldn't ignore the law and use neighbors to rat out neighbors again. Not that I believe for a second any European country doesn't keep far more extensive records on citizens than the Nazis did when they came to power.
> somehow deducted from subsidies
Do you think the EU subsidizes Meta/Apple.
Not necessarily Meta, but it's very much possible that a large company is the recipient of both EU subsidies and EU fines :)
This is a result of the severe neglect to enforce anti trust in the US. Now other countries need to kick in with diplomatic adverse effects... sigh.
> "This isn't just about a fine; the Commission forcing us to change our business model effectively imposes a multi-billion-dollar tariff on Meta while requiring us to offer an inferior service."
Meta complaining about getting tariff'd is objectively hilarious.
> the Commission forcing us to change our business model
This is total, utter, complete 100% grade A organic nonsense.
I worked at FB (but the same is true of basically all action driven advertising systems). Only a tiny proportion of users ever click, but they are incredibly lucrative for online advertising platforms.
The whole subscription was a really transparent attempt to get people to accept the tracking and it's honestly profoundly depressing that this is what they're reduced to.
Ads work even if nobody clicks.
At least, old school ads. Sensible ads. Like Coca-Cola. I have no idea how these ridiculous online gaming things stay in business but I'm sure it's much stupider.
> Ads work even if nobody clicks.
Correct, but those ads (brand) are much, much less common online because Google (first) and Facebook (second) pushed DR advertising, which is what most SMBs and smaller businesses do.
Like, some of this is because they're easier to measure which makes it easier to sell, but lots more of it was due to smaller businesses that couldn't afford brand spending money on something more connected to their business outcomes.
> I have no idea how these ridiculous online gaming things stay in business
Mostly whales. A really small proportion of users spend absurd amounts of money on these games, and much of the competitive games just advertise for free users to get crushed by the whales.
Did you buy coca cola because santa clause was drinking it or did you buy it because it was at eye level by the register in every store in America?
How do you think those drinks get there? Beverage companies are paying for shelf space.
But, if you think ads for drinks don't work, take a look at Pepsi's Project Refresh of 2010, and what happened to their sales. TLDR, Pepsi took it's superb owl ad budget and used it to do community grants instead; sales dropped and a couple years later, Pepsi went back to advertising during the superb owl and stopped doing community grants.
I knew what coca cola was and it kept it in my mind because SC was drinking it as opposed to pepsi or tab
No, like the rest of these power games it should be worrying. It's not about whether it's actually a tariff or not - it's not about objective truth. It's about getting the orange guy to do things that are beneficial for Mr Sugarhill's money pile. It might or might not work in this particular instance, but it should be very concerning that this sort of thing is the way to get money now.
Mr Sugarhill's ploy is presumably to get Mr Mango enraged about the tariffs so he tariffs them back 200%, and they back down to avoid the 200% tariffs.
Press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
Huh, so Facebook Marketplace is no longer designated as a Gatekeeper because it has not enough business users.
--
Other related PR: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
This rules that the "Core Technology Fee" is de facto illegal.
I don't understand meta's statement that this handicaps american businesses while allows European and Chinese companies to operate under different standards.
It's not completely unwarranted. According to the article, Facebook was fined for their model of asking for pay or accept tracking. Which is exactly what almost all publishers do, e.g. all big German newspapers. It's absolutely clear that this is against the law - they could show ads, but can't invade the users privacy for that, so no tracking ads - but they do it anyway and got away with it in various decisions. And now Facebook gets a huge fine for the same behaviour.
Which is good in a way, maybe it will lead to a behaviour correction also for the smaller publishers. But it's of course not an equal treatment.
Apple on the other hand completely deserves its fine, without a question. They got clear rules and did everything to circumvent them. The Apple's Core Technology Fee was obviously illegal. Don't know why they expected to get away with that, there wasn't even a minimal chance of that working. Idiots.
Big German newspapers do not need to comply under DMA.
The EU focusses, rightfully, on EU macro dynamics with these laws, not how smaller outlets work.
This is very much reasonable. When a platform is big, it has bigger impact, but also bigger budgets to hire legal help and bigger budgets to stay compliant.
This is well established in accounting where there exists different rules depending on size (in many jurisdictions)
What’s another example of different rules depending on size? “Content Moderation” I think? Anything outside the DMA? I think small companies get some exceptions for documentation requirements?
It is a derivative of what is called the "Risk Based Approach" in compliance, and is widely adopted.
As for companies and accounting you can look into the directive 2013/34/EU that established micro, small, and medium sized companies based on their size. These types of companies have different reporting requirements.
in my part of Europe there are tons: companies over a certain size might have different rules for layoffs, have to have union representatives, must pay for safety courses for the employees, must employ a certain percentage of people with disabilities...
In the US, some laws specifically exclude small companies. For example, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 requires 15 employees, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 requires 4 employees.
You could try to find some analogies but you probably won't succeed since this is clearly just targeting American big Tech
G-SIB banks for example
In practice it means that only American companies end up paying large fees to the EU.
It also means that not all US companies have to comply, and that the ones that do are the most competitive companies in the market, making their claim that they have trouble competing moot.
There are no fees.
I agree, except the DMA specifically only applies to companies over a specific size. I think if the German newspapers were at FB/Apple scale, in terms of number of users, then the DMA would apply (i.e. they would be designated gatekeepers or similar) and they could also be fined. Although I think pay for no ads is also a violation of GDPR maybe?
Pay for no tracking / Personal Information trade is illegal. Pay for no advertising is legal. That's what Youtube is doing.
It's meta's "pay or allow us to sell your personal informations that is the issue, not advertising by itself.
Exactly. While DMA does not apply, GDPR does. But it gets ignored and weakened by decision against the letter and the spirit of the law - which does not surprise if you realize how much power those legacy publishers hold. Not so FB, not here at least.
So it's not exactly the same regulation but pretty much the same situation. I'd also be pissed.
GDPR does not purport to outlaw targeted advertising. It just purports to require that the target consent.
In pretty much every other area of law in most of the world (including Europe) consent can be bought--the party requesting consent gives the consenter something in exchange for consent, and will not give that thing unless consent is given.
But under the rulings from some regulators that doesn't work for GDPR. Consent is apparently only considered to be freely given if withholding it would not result in any detriment such as not getting the same level of service or having to pay money for service.
If regulators want to outlaw targeted advertising it would be a lot better if they just did that, instead of making consent in GDPR work differently from how it has worked for pretty much everything else pretty much everywhere for centuries.
That's not entirely fair. The concept of duress exists and is always at odds with consent in a transactional setting. The issue is where to draw the boundary between "you freely chose to do business" and "you were coerced into accepting unfavorable terms".
I'm inclined to think that "pay or be tracked" is usually the former. The issue was never that I shouldn't have to pay but rather that I wasn't given the choice in the first place.
That would probably work if it wasn't already such an established business model. The grocery store hires a bouncer to not let me in unless he can take a picture of my ID? Fine... I'll go across the street.
But since it already is established that the Internet works this way, all grocery stores in town are already doing this. I might not want to but I still have to. Moreover, it's been firmly impressed upon everyone that they have to show ID to enter a grocery store, so if I created a new one that didn't, people would just continue going to their closest one anyway. To improve this situation, something more drastic than free competition is needed (if that could work, it already would have).
In this analogy the grocery stores pretty much all started offering the option to pay a cover charge and not have your ID checked. They believed this complied with the new laws but the regulator is making noises that this isn't good enough - that they have to make ID checks optional even for customers that won't pay.
So the question is, does charging you to not have your ID checked count as coercion or is it a voluntary choice? Or alternatively, does it have a detrimental effect on society at large? Is it somehow unfair to the individual? I'd tend to think that the answer to those questions would depend a lot on motivations - the funding model, the size of the fee, and how much money they make if they track you.
In the case of a newspaper they have to make money somehow. If readers aren't willing to pay I don't immediately see how offering a free tier that has advertisements with tracking is detrimental to society or unfair to the individual.
If regulators want to outlaw targeted advertising it would be a lot better if they just did that
Exactly. As it is now they're practically encouraging publishers to use dark patterns to trick users into "agreeing" to tracking.
GDPR Art. 7 section 4:
> When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.
Don't blame the regulators, it's pretty clear that "paying" with consent is a no-go from the text itself.
The measures apply by size, not by country of origin. It happens that the companies over the threshold are American. So their statement is basically untrue, but that's politics these days.
There are a couple of companies in the list[1] (of seven) that aren’t US-based. ByteDance are Chinese and Booking are EU (NL).
[1] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
Probably also important to note, is that ByteDance and TikTok are also currently being investigated by the European Commission. Although for different reasons under the Digital Services Act - so it's not like they are targeting US companies specifically with the law.
Also the commission is known to fine European entities all the time for various reasons, one of the recent ones I can think of is Pierre Cardin and it's partners for restricting cross border European sales.
Booking Holdings which Wikipedia has as the parent of booking.com seems to be US owned.
Yes. Booking Holdings Inc. is incorporated in Delaware, listed on the Nasdaq with principal executive offices in Connecticut. See SEC filing: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001075531/87dc4e5...
Had no idea booking.com was american. I always assumed it was euro-based.
Booking.com was founded in the Netherlands and is still headquartered there, but was bought by a US company (Priceline) well over a decade ago.
That makes sense. It just didn't have the energy of an American company and I say that as one. I love booking.com
Spotify conveniently falls outside of the scope of this law when any artist would tell you it should absolutely be covered.
The DMA is gerrymandered to exclude domestic businesses. Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
> EU are basically enforcing market capitalism by disallowing monopolistic practices.
Users are free to just not buy iOS devices. Users are free to just not use Meta services.
There is no monopoly here. This is all much ado about nothing.
No real-world user is meaningfully harmed by the current state of Apple App Store/Meta Ads, but plenty will be harmed once spyware/piracy sideloading becomes common. Many small businesses will collapse due to ineffective advertisement (large businesses will love it though - it becomes a winner-take-all market).
> The DMA is gerrymandered to exclude domestic businesses.
Except Booking (~EU, based in NL~*) falls under the DMA, and ByteDance (China? I think) does as well. All the same restrictions fall on them too.
> Users are free to just not use Meta services.
True in theory, not so much in practice. I work for a company that deals directly with WhatsApp in NL, and I guarantee you for businesses it's a death knell to not have a WA Business presence. Even the local gemeente (aka city council) and other gov't establishments are on WhatsApp too. Recently more people are moving onto Signal and Telegram, but that remains a minority.
Don't even get me started on Asia, especially India/Indonesia, where even despite the existence of Line and similar apps everything is still* almost exclusively on WA. A bit different in East Asia where Line and other apps are more predominant (hardly relevant for the EU though).
Spotify doesn't fall under the DMA because it's not gatekeeping anything and it does have plenty of competition, many of which pay artists better and have basically equal selections. YT Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, Bandcamp and I'm sure dozens and dozens of others all exist and are used.
> ... but plenty will be harmed once spyware/piracy sideloading becomes common
Interesting how this evil sideloading boogeyman hasn't happened on Android.
> ... Many small businesses will collapse due to ineffective advertisement
The same small businesses that are forced into paying 30% to Apple/Google for simply existing on their app store?
> (large businesses will love it though - it becomes a winner-take-all market).
So, the gatekeepers as listed under the DMA? Y'know, the giants that literally hold all the keys and can dictate how the entire market should work based on their rules? The very same ones that have opaque ad-bidding systems that they control inside-and-out and can do anything they want to with?
[**] Seems I'm wrong there (See andsoitis' reply to my comment), but didn't want to edit out my original comment.
Regardless, calling it gerrymandering of local businesses is simply incorrect, and I can speak for at least myself that if we even had any tech companies that big (and I hope we never do), we'd expect them be subject to the exact same rules and laws.
> Booking (EU, based in NL)
Booking Holdings Inc. is incorporated in Delaware, listed on the Nasdaq with principal executive offices in Connecticut. See SEC filing: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001075531/87dc4e5...
Thanks, edited my comment to reflect I was wrong there.
Spotify feels like a slightly marginal case, and it wouldn't be surprising to see it added to the list. It clearly wasn't big enough a few years back when all this was being defined, but it's gotten quite a lot bigger since.
I'm curious, what is your preferred financial regime? EU are basically enforcing market capitalism by disallowing monopolistic practices. Do you find that wrong in general?
Perhaps you prefer an industro-fascist regime where businesses are not bound by any tailored laws? Pretty sure there would already be alternative iOS app stores under such a regime - government controls (IPR system, computer security laws) seem necessary to enable these sorts of tech monopolies.
> Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
If that would be the case, the EU could be drowning in money by being more aggressive with GDPR enforcement and follow-through.
500 million sounds like a lot but that is just a drop in the ocean for first world nation states. The Netherlands has a yearly budget of 300 billion for example.
> Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
The EU's budget is massive, no shortfall is covered by these fines since to collect them it takes another massive legal battle, that's just bullshit being regurgitated on the internet (especially on this forum). If that was the case the EU would be issuing GDPR fines all over the place to cover shortfalls, it doesn't happen in reality.
> Spotify conveniently falls outside of the scope of this law when any artist would tell you it should absolutely be covered.
Spotify does not behave like the most similar category covered by the DMA: video sharing like YouTube. Spotify does not hold exclusive access to the content and the audience, YouTube Music, Apple Music, and other players have almost the same catalogue as Spotify has so users are free to move between those services without penalty. Now try moving from YouTube to a competitor, a completely different beast.
The DMA exists to counter an imbalance in the power these massive tech companies have in detriment to competition, it's quite a simple prerogative, Spotify doesn't hold at all the same power as YouTube has, or Google Search, or any other platform under the DMA.
From the article:
> The EU regulator also dropped Meta's Marketplace's designation as a DMA gatekeeper because the number of users fell below the required threshold.
The EU government explains this in their press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
> Today, the Commission also found that Meta's online intermediation service Facebook Marketplace should no longer be designated under the DMA. The decision follows a request submitted by Meta on 5 March 2024 to reconsider the designation of Marketplace. Following a careful assessment of Meta's arguments and as a result of Meta's additional enforcement and continued monitoring measures to counteract the business-to-consumer use of Marketplace, the Commission found that Marketplace had less than 10,000 business users in 2024. Meta therefore no longer meets the relevant threshold giving rise to a presumption that Marketplace is an important gateway for business users to reach end users.
A good start, but far from enough regarding the societal damage (anti-competitive, anti-user, psychological harm especially of minors, proliferation of radicalisation) they did.
*insert Mike Myers One Million Dollars meme
they made more than the fine, so it's just reduced profit a little. mere higher cost of business and continue as usual.
The DMA fines are not supposed to be punitive damages, they're a tool to correct behavior, like the GDPR.
If Apple & co don't comply there are higher amounts that can be imposed, but the idea is that the companies will comply before that.
The EU made a serious point that these are the first time they are issuing those fines as as such have capped them as a signal to show that they are serious but also that they aren’t taking the maximalist approach some in the US are accusing them of.
They can legally go for 10% of global revenue if I’m not mistaken as the top level of fines and both Apple and Meta would be wise to not find themselves as repeat offenders as a result.
I hope this will make Apple finally comply with EU law and allow app side loading on iOS. Real side loading, not the joke they implemented since iOS 17.
Isn't it just in the name of competition, i.e. alternative app stores? Or is sideloading an explicit goal of the EU's efforts?
I would not hold my breath. They are adept at malicious compliance. Cook will do a cost/benefit assessment and will come up with another workaround.
> They are adept at malicious compliance.
They just got fined 500 millions for failure to comply so I'm not sure adept is the adjective I would use.
How much additional profit have they made based on their malicious compliance? I bet it dwarfs this fine.
That is not so clear. Appstore revenue is ~ $100 billion/y, but Apple makes less than 30% from that.
So the question is: Would more convincing compliance have cost Apple more than single digit percentage decreases in Appstore sales? Comparing the F-Droid vs Playstore situation, this seems unlikely to me.
Apple’s take is 30%, but they have expenses that have to be covered by that. The profit if any would be much less than $30bn.
If Apple is so bad at this that they have to charge 30%, they should have failed in the free market to a competitor that can do the same or better for 3%. However, Apple has prevented that, not by being better or cheaper, but by implementing DRM that locks users out from having a choice (and the market as a whole ended up being a duopoly with cartel-like pricing).
Whether Apple can be cheaper isn't really the point (they should be, digital services are a very high margin business). It's that they're anti-competitive to the point that the market for paid apps and in-app payments became inefficient (in a financial sense).
> The profit if any would be much less than $30bn.
It doesn't cost that much to maintain and run the appstore, it is almost all profits.
You are trying to tell me that credit card processing fees are negligible, software engineers work for free, advertising doesn’t require overhead, etc…
I guess that kind of thinking that everything is basically free is why alot of startups just fail so easily.
None of them are close to 30 billion!!!
Your profit is whatever your revenue minus costs. Plenty of app stores have operated in the red that we know this isn’t trivial to get right. It definitely is nowhere near negligible as patent asserted. I’m frustrated by how dumb HN is getting lately.
You are trying to tell me that all of that stuff combined makes up more than a small fraction of $30 billion per year.
Whether it's adept or not depends on what would have happened if they actually complied.
Sure, a half a billion fine sounds like a lot, but if you don't have another number to compare against, you can't tell if it was clever or not.
Perhaps "compliance" is the wrong term, but surely such a tiny fine will do little to convince them to comply.
They have a couple of months (2? 6?) to comply, otherwise they get additional fines.
500 million is like half a days revenue.
The actual fines for this moving forward are up to 10% of a companies global revenue. The EU made a big point to say that this is the first time they are issuing those fines and as a result they are smaller than they otherwise would be especially in the case of repeat offenders.
The EU should instead set targets.
Ie. "More than half of users have installed at least one app from a non-apple affiliated store by Jan 2026 or you shall pay a fine of $10 per month per iPhone in use in the EU".
That’s a terrible idea. How would they have any control over that. I think you are way overestimating the amount of iOS users that want to use software from outside the App Store.
If 3rd party stores didn't charge the Apple tax, I think you'd find plenty of apps moving to other stores, and within a matter of weeks more than half of users would have used a 3rd party store.
That’s my worst nightmare. On my iPhone I want the equivalent of Spotify, not Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Max, etc.
I want the equivalent of a shops in the real world. One shop doesn't carry everything. Even Spotify doesn't carry everything. For one, Apple doesn't allow adult content apps. Steam does. I'm sure there's a market for adult games on iPhone as Steam's success there would seem to suggest. I don't think Apple should be required to sell adult games but I also don't think they should get to dictate that people can't use their phones for adult games. So, more stores would great.
Why can’t people just buy Android phones that allow for this? They should change, not Apple and their users that like the walled garden.
I mean, you realise nobody is going to point a gun at your head and force you to sideload apps right?
Yeah but these companies will force me to install their garbage third party app stores to install their apps. I really just want one good, properly vetted app store on my phone, is that so hard to understand?
If you ever tried out third party app stores on Android you’ll see what I mean. See also the crappy launchers/stores major game publishers try to force on you on PCs.
It's a bit of a false comparison, since you wouldn't have to pay monthly subscriptions to others stores as you have to for streaming services.
Yeah but I would have to deal with multiple app stores of varying security, quality control, resource usage, and other annoyances. No thanks.
That really depends on the store. If Value made a Steam store, or Nintendo made a Nintendo store with Nintendo exclusives I'd expect millions of installs.
Maybe but that is also not within Apple's control.
Agreed, the only realistic way they could hit such a target is to shut down their own app store...
Generally, as a society, we hold that a contract cannot be modified without both parties’ agreement. When you bought that phone, it was with the completely clear, overt, and in no way uncertain understanding that it does specifically X Y Z, and does not do A B C. Now, without additional payment to the counterparty, you’re demanding your phone do A B C. What am I missing? According to accepted understandings of contracts, how are you possibly in the right? How are you possibly in a position to demand government use force to modify a contract you accepted before to somehow benefit you more at a cost to your counterparty?
You are of the opinion that it is reasonable for a company to expect you to read, understand and fully agree with a contract that consists of countless pages of opaque legalese and that you have no say in whatsoever, just in order to use a service that's arguably a necessity to participate in public life?
The EU does not seem to share that opinion, and puts some restrictions on these types of 'contracts'. Are you really concerned that this is somehow unfair towards these companies? Companies that retain whole teams of lawyers to create a contract that hardly any of its billion counter parties (individual consumers) can fully comprehend, let alone push back on?
What service? You are free to use cellular service without your iPhone. There are other phones available. Apple is not gating your access to cellular
My rant was about the rationale for government restricting ToS contracts in general. Apple is indeed not as unavoidable for participating in public life as some others. The only alternative being 'agreeing to' the Google contract of course.
We're not talking about "other phones." We are talking about iPhones. The market is "iPhone users" not just "phone users".
The parent post said “service that's arguably a necessity to participate in public life”. I’m not sure what universe you live in, but in mine everyday life is entirely possible without iPhones.
Ah, didn't catch that line.
"iPhone users" isn't a market. Otherwise every company would be a monopoly. That is absurd.
Parts of the contract can be illegal, this is completely within the power of the EU to enforce a crackdown on illegal contracts.
I'm not sure what society you are referring to but contracts have to adhere to laws in the EU.
This is also about software that is being updated. So the transaction is not completed yet. Apple could probably go the route of not providing the update to phones that were sold before the law was voted on/in place. I would guess that would lead to other legal battles.
And is it reasonable that the laws are created after the contract was already agreed to and still apply to it? At least here in the United States, laws are not allowed to make things illegal that happened before the laws were written.
If I have a sales contract with you where I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today, and on Monday hamburgers are outlawed, I still owe you on Tuesday. If purchases or hamburgers on credit is outlawed on Monday, I most likely still owe you on Tuesday.
Otoh, if I pay you today for a hamburger on Tuesday, and on Monday hamburgers are outlawed, you can't perform your part of the contract, and we'll need to figure things out.
The rules can change, and when the rules change, continuing service may need to change (depending on how the rules were written); I'm sure part of the contracts involved also describe a) how to make changes in the services, b) what happens when parts of the contract are discovered to be unenforcable or illegal.
Laws can definitively be retroactive or affect existing contracts. Imagine a world where governments have no power to stop anti-social behavior if it was ever baked into private contracts ?
Also the DMA didn't fall from the sky one day and enforced the next. Every business impacted had years to do something about it, and they preferred to play chicken race instead.
There's a range of anti-competitive behavior which can subvert that ideal, and as such there's regulation aimed to prevent it. Apple used to forbid apps from telling users about Apple's 30% cut or cheaper places to buy the app, for instance, hindering users from making an informed choice.
Many of the policies in question are intentionally not publicized to end-users, often requiring first paying to be part of the developer program before you can even see what you need to agree to to publish an app.
> Apple allows no-questions-asked full-refund returns for two weeks.
That's the bare legal minimum in the EU. Many anti-competitive practices are not things consumers find out about within some short fixed period of time, if at all, and others are not solved by a refund even when the customer is aware of the issue.
> They are all available right here, online, without any purchase requirement: https://developer.apple.com/support/terms/
True that it does now all (including schedules 2/3 and the guidelines) appear to be publicly available. Looks as if this was done on June 7th 2021, shortly after the EU Commission had sent the Statement of Objections on April 30th 2021.
> Apple allows no-questions-asked full-refund returns for two weeks.
This doesn't respond to what you quoted.
The EU is using populist claims to introduce laws with ideological bias (big corp bad, America bad, America corp super bad). Everyone knows the digital act was never meant to be a fair set of rules, it was introduced to punish US companies at will.
At the same time, most governments, public offices, agencies and businesses in Europe would not be able to operate normally without access to American software.
The problem is that it is way easier to (over)regulate and tax, than to create a strong environment for business and innovation to thrive, in order to grow your own tech giants.
That's a lot of emotional words without a single bit of context from the actual article. Your comment is better suited to FOX news' website.
I don't see how your comment is adding value to the discussion besides claiming emotionality and an absurd reference to FOX news, which implies that my opinions are not welcome here and I should go elsewhere with them.
My post is my opinion, offering an entry point for a discussion to those who might have a different opinion from mine.
The opinion is so detached from reality that it’s not going to result in a useful discussion.
There’s nothing about America in the consumer protection laws. It doesn’t matter if the service provider is a corporation or a non profit.
You can have any opinion you want but if you don’t ensure the quality of it, people will call it out for what it is.
In some circles you can defend lack of intellectual rigor with „any opinion is valid” and „you just don’t like my politics”, but that’s useful for electoral politics, not for intellectual inquiry.
> The opinion is so detached from reality that it’s not going to result in a useful discussion.
Maybe you should try.
> There’s nothing about America in the consumer protection laws. It doesn’t matter if the service provider is a corporation or a non profit.
Thierry Breton and his "the sheriff is in town". Jean-Noël Barrot: "Apply with the Greatest Firmness"
Axel Voss, German MEP, called for the EU to use the DSA against (what he calls) fake news and platform owners like Elon Musk interfering in elections. This explicitly links the DSA to regulating US tech companies (particularly X).
Pedro Sánchez (Spanish Prime Minister) proposed using the DSA to regulate social media, fight bots, fake profiles, and go after tech barons undermining democracy - US platforms, of course.
You may agree or disagree with my views being right or wrong, but it is clear that the leitmotif seems to be EU politics vs US big tech here.
When it comes to election interference it’s more like EU vs Russia. Who owns the platforms is secondary, it’s not like TikTok should be allowed to do election interference because it isn’t American.
You’ll learn in the course of your future experience that not every discussion will introduce a new perspective into your life. And you usually can tell very early when that’s the case.
>Maybe you should try.
If somebody claims the moon is made of cheese without joking, I'm not going to argue with them. I'm going to laugh them out of the room assuming.
Your opinion is like claiming the moon is made of cheese.
By that ridiculous argument the federal case against Al Capone showed that the US tax code was ideologically biased against Italian Americans.
The very idea of this regulation is that Tech Giants are not desirable, since they're mono- or oligopolies.
Any average EU politician would be far left in the US.
Can't deny that some EU politicians (mostly conservative ones, surprise, surprise) have a hidden agenda behind it.
The statement that gov & businesses in Europe would not be able to operate normally without American software is easy to disprove. Just look at how easy the Chinese or the Russians could shed or avoid their dependency on crappy Microsoft or expensive US cloud providers. The problem is just that many European politicians are so technically inept they believe it themselves.
"Over regulate and tax"? What? Have you done any reading on how almost all US tech companies go to extreme lengths to avoid paying tax?
Most companies in the world do exactly that. Prove me wrong.
Thanks for proving my point that they need more taxation.
Are you saying that if a business (or individual) wants to pay the lowest tax possible (legally, that is) it should be a reason for more taxation? Is that what taxation is about, revenge?
Of cause that is a reason for more taxation.
There are 2 types of taxes: Those we charge for revenue and those we charge for behavior.
We don't charge income tax to deter people from working. We charge income tax because we really need money to fund stuff.
If you can not raise enough money, because companies / individuals are optimizing their tax, then you change it such that the budget holds.
... Oh well, I reckon if you are in the US you just keep borrowing. In that case, sorry about my reasoning.
The real problem was that Silicon Valley was flooded with capital and bought out all competitors. Or undercut with free. Or all kinds of other Microsoftlike practices. So nobody was left in the EU to advocate for better rules.
If that is true, how come new competitors spring up all the time in Silicon Valley and other places in the US while the European sector lies dormant?
That's just a US propaganda myth people can't stop parroting. The SV ecosystem is definitely better funded, but there is no lack of digital start-ups in the EU.
Consider what happened to Nokia. The first business blunder caused it to be sold to US and gutted. Now if someone else wants to make smartphones in EU, has to start from scratch. But if that happens to US company, everything(at least the IP) stays in the US.
Nokia is a strange story. I remember when it happened, and absolutely everybody knew it would kill the company to sell it to Microsoft. So of course the leaders and owners of Nokia knew the same thing. My guess is that they decided that they couldn't compete with the iPhone and decided to cash out what they could. Maybe Microsoft could help them with shuttling money to offshore accounts or some other under the table services? Nokia was publicly traded, so it could have been a great robbing of small time investors. But did Microsoft really get anything out of the deal that was worth the price?
I had the Nokia N9 at the time, which was years ahead of its time and one of the most well designed smartphones so far, both in hardware and especially in software. Modern iOS and Android still look dated in comparison.
The EU Comission press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
It’s funny to see a “share this page on Facebook” option at the bottom of the press release.
At least they seem to have their own system in place for displaying those share buttons, as there are no requests to 3rd party domains on page load, everything loads from *europa.eu. Could have been worse :)
Which shows that they're not discriminating. TikTok is missing, though.
EU comission has been fined for breaching GDPR they designed themselves
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/first-eu-court-fines-eu...
A government that is not above its own laws. Surprisingly difficult for some people here to appreciate.
It shouldn't be funny, social media isn't doing the world any favor, they gotta behave
“Not funny haha, funny weird”
> while Meta drew a penalty of €200 million for its "pay or consent" advertising model, which requires that European Union users pay to access ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram
Wait, isn't pretty much all web content is like this nowadays? You have to buy youtube premium to avoid ads, how is it different?
Pay or have your information harvested and sold. Its extortion.
You’re missing a third option there, which makes it not extortion.
If the third way is "don't use the product" facebook have that covered too... they will harvest and sell your personal information.
I may be misreading it, but I believe the third option the EU is expects from Meta is non-targeted advertising.
Nobody was holding a gun up to my head forcing me to open Facebook or give them money
Who does Facebook sell data to?
"Harvested and processed to add cohort tags to include in advertisement real-time bidding contests so advertisers can know how much to bid", while more precise, isn't as punchy as "harvested and sold".
So it's not literally sold?
I've been confused about this for a while. Given data is what allows them a unique advantage for their advertising product, it seemed odd that Facebook would sell that data to others.
But to hear people talk, a company could literally buy personal information from Facebook.
Yeah, that makes sense. Facebook wants the data so they can provide more accurate advertising "cohorts". The accuracy is the value that other people see, hence "selling" the data even though they're really selling an ad view.
So not sold. Also not your data. It is Facebook's data. It belongs to Facebook. You don't own it just because it happens to be about you.
Does someone own the Wikipedia page about them?! No, Wikipedia does.
You must be either broke and/or paranoid. If it matters to you, pay up. If it doesn't, you get to use a service for free.
They are saying that there should be the option where you don't get your data harvested and are shown ads without your privacy being violated.
YouTube allows you to disable personalized ads.
https://www.youtube.com/intl/en_us/howyoutubeworks/user-sett...
It’s not about being shown ads, it’s about collecting (and sharing to third parties) private information that goes beyond the technically required amount to use the service. GDPR says companies need to get my consent in order to do that, that I am free to not give this consent and that a service can’t not be provided to me just because I don’t give this consent. Facebook and a bunch of other companies said “aha! We’ll just create a paid alternative!” but this doesn’t comply with the law. It just took a while to take this through the courts but if you read the law it’s clear they just stalled for time on this one.
Thanks for clarifying, it was confusing to figure that out from the article
> You have to buy youtube premium to avoid ads
Or you can block the ads in the browser for free. In this case, you have to consent being tracked (or pay) or otherwise the page will not display.
Millions is nothing for these companies. Just a cost of doing business.
Starting somewhere. The US ain't even doing that.
Not really. If citizens see "fines" and think "whew, they got their just deserts", it's almost worse than no fines.
But the EU is frequently performative, so it doesn't surprise me. It wouldn't surprise me if they agreed in advance with the EU the fines, behind some closed doors.
Nothing less than a billion these days even registers
It could look performative if you only look at citizens.
From other businesses POV though
- this becomes the final decision on this given behavior under the DMA. A precedent is set, that will guide any further enforcement.
- it also sets a stake in the ground for other back and forth litigations: the EU will actually fine the companies. We can argue whether this amount is too low, but on any further fines the question will never be whether the EU will actually do it (compare to the current US tariffs situation and you see why this matters)
- it's easier to expand to DMA adjacent companies as needed. If Bluesky ever had to be scrutinized, this would be a reference point.
Is this a fine the companies can appeal, or is this a final decision?
They can appeal.
They will appeal to Court so that they win another 2 years.
The "EU over-regulation" argument is pathetic. The exact opposite is true, 2-3 decades of zero regulation has led to Big Tech empires that can get away with anything.
It harms the free market, harms the freedom to compute, creates an asymmetrical extractive relation between mega-corp and average internet user, and omnipresent surveillance. It's anti-American if "American" still means a love of freedom, personal privacy and fair competition.
But I do understand the "new" American perspective. These companies are money printers some of which produce as much as $30B of pure profit in a single quarter. If such companies are to exist, they best be American I guess.
> The "EU over-regulation" argument is pathetic ... It's anti-American ... I do understand the "new" American perspective.
"American" means being able to make your own decisions without government overreach in every aspect of your life.
"American" means being able to decide if you want to engage with a business or not, without getting the government involved.
"American" means being able to reach the highest highs or risk the lowest lows on the power of your tenacity and skill alone, without having the government shoot you down when you succeed, or put meaningless performative roadblocks in your way.
"American" means understanding that the government is not your friend and it doesn't need to replace your own decision making capability or ability to make choices.
From your dismissive sneering tone you do not understand the American perspective. Honestly, I am not sure the typical European even could. You have not grown up in our culture, so ideas like personal responsibility, self-reliance, and the American spirit are foreign to you - or at least heavily deprioritized.
You simply sneer and scoff at these concepts. You do you - this is why the EU is three decades behind and totally, utterly dependent on foreign tech - yet still somehow convinced it could catch up "if it really wanted to."
The context is is Big Tech regulation. Of which there is barely any, allowing these monopolies to exist in the first place.
Everything you claim to be American, responsibility and choice, is harmed by having monopolies. You're so anti-government that you miss that monopolies remove even more choice.
As for dependencies, the US is the biggest importer in the world.
> You do not understand the American perspective.
Honestly, understanding the USA is a pretty high bar in this day and age.
You're not that special. While the American special snowflake syndrome has been useful in giving its citizens a sense of purpose, freeing them of apprehension and bringing it where it is, it's ultimately baseless. Things get dangerous when people start believing in their own bullshit. The same is true for Europeans as well. There's a lot of navel gazing going on and I'm very annoyed at European leaders sweeping increasing authoritarian behaviour under the rug or proclaiming with great confidence, as did von der Leyen, that we don't have oligarchs.
Would looove to distribute an app without it having to be in the App Store, and not paying the App Store fee (direct download of signed binary). Happy to pay a yearly fee or fee per update to cover code review if it’s crucial. But 30% of revenue for doing bugger all… cmon, they’re squeezing the lemon a bit too hard.
Personally I wouldn’t install software unless it were from a really trusted person doing something extremely unique and useful that doesn’t have an alternative on the Apple Store (think UTM with JIT for iPad).
Please don’t take that as a negative comment but I suspect most people source their software from conveniently centralized repos whether it be App Store, Steam or even the main package manager on a Linux distribution.
Great, and you are free to do so and will continue to be free to do so.
The point is that the OP is not free to do so.
>Great, and you are free to do so and will continue to be free to do so.
Not necessarily, once other channels are available developers could choose to force their clients down that road.
If they have sufficient market power to force consumers to do anything, they should also be subject to antitrust.
Most and mostly.
But I'd still like to be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my iPhone, should I decide to based on my own criteria, without going through Apple or even a fucking "alternative app store" that is still Apple censored.
The point is that it becomes your choice. For example some people might choose to use a different web browser instead of Safari on their Apple device so they can use some web apps fully and not have to install similar local apps at all.
You mentioned linux package managers, these existing are proof enough that a 30% cut isn't required for ensuring the safety of what you install. In fact, I'd wager there is that much more dangerous garbage in the app store than in pacman's database.
As much as I think Apple's cut is unreasonable, I think all this shows is that people are making a lot more dangerous software for apple's larger less tech savvy userbase than for arch's.
The Linux package repositories take a 30% cut of zero. If the software wasn't free, it would be entirely reasonable for them to demand a cut
I can install Jetbrains via most linux package managers, launch it, and pay money. I can install steam and pay for games. I can install sublime text and give em cash.
Arch linux doesn't try to take 30% of all the games I buy on steam, nor does it prevent steam from asking me for my credit card.
Apple reviews all apps to make sure they don't ask for your credit card, don't tell you where you can buy the same good online, and make sure that if you do sell anything, apple gets its 30% cut, even if it's a virtual store like steam. That's the reason you can't buy kindle books on iOS (even though you can buy apple books? Weird? Isn't that illegal anti-competitive behavior?)
It would absolutely not be reasonable for linux package managers to demand that I pay 30% more for all games on steam if I did "pacman -Sy steam" vs downloading steam from valve's website and figuring out how to get it working on arch-linux (taking the deb, extracting it with 'ar', and installing some dependencies)
On Android there's a repository called F-Droid which offers free software. Apple won't let anyone create a FOSS repo like that for iOS.
> cmon, they’re squeezing the lemon a bit too hard
They got hooked on the lemon juice. Nobody at Apple making millions a year to write emails and sit in meetings wants to be out on the street for putting up their hand and saying "hey lets just take 10% and have a healthy ecosystem long term, which will let us continue to sell phones to people every year with a profit margin of $500".
Phil Schiller has actually made some comments about being less greedy, like possibly ratcheting down the 30% cut once the App Store started making serious revenue or not shaking down developers if they use external payment methods. Not that Schiller has actually made any changes at Apple to do any of the less greedy things.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22418828/apple-app-store-c...
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/25/apples-phil-schiller-co...
That was a long time ago. Now,
> “You download the app and it doesn’t work, that’s not what we want on the store,” says Schiller. This, he says, is why Apple requires in-app purchases to offer the same purchasing functionality as they would have elsewhere.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/18/interview-apples-schiller-...
From what I hear, users are tired of installing apps. You can make a website and not face any gatekeepers or restrictions.
What if your app needs to send notifications and/or use bluetooth, for instance ?
All modern browsers support notifications:
https://caniuse.com/notifications
Bluetooth is limited to Chrome because Apple and Mozilla were concerned about privacy and security:
https://caniuse.com/web-bluetooth
From what I hear, most users disable notifications.
You can do like Airbnb and send text messages.
You can do Bluetooth in JavaScript through the Web Bluetooth API.
A little caveat of Web Bluetooth API is that it's like WebUSB and mostly available on Chrome. I don't think Chrome for iOS is using blink yet so you'll probably not have access to this API on iOS.
Both WebUSB and WebBluetooth is still a draft spec, and is doubtful to progress any further with both Mozilla and Webkit objecting to it
https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth
https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/#anti-fingerprinting
Essentially, these are proprietary that are a part of an embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy by Google Chrome.
> From what I hear, most users disable notifications.
Where’d you hear that? Surely most users don’t change defaults.
There isn’t a default on iOS, you’re prompted for each new app when it requests notification permissions. People have found that users hit no a lot more when the app prompts with no explanation than when it clearly explains what benefit it has to the user.
Then the flood of notifications gets ignored, with practically the same result.
PWAs offer support for push notifications [1], but apparently they are not as seamless as in native apps, especially on iOS.
If you've never heard of PWAs [2], they allow you to add native mobile app functionality to a mobile website, including the ability to install your website as though it were an app, and ability to cache resources for offline use. I haven't worked on app development for a while, but when I did several years ago, all that was required to turn a mobile website in to a PWA was a service worker file (a JS file to define resource caching rules), and a manifest.json file (essentially metadata used by the home screen icon, including title and icon image).
Apparently PWAs still aren't on par with native apps in terms of capability and UX. Nonetheless I hope PWAs become popular for their simplicity, and for being decoupled from platforms. It's a bit insane to me that native app development usually requires heavy platform specific IDEs (Android Studio, Xcode), both of which have steep learning curves, and after all that development effort, you only have an app that works on 1 platform. Building a basic mobile app shouldn't require anything more than HTML, JS and CSS, and it shouldn't be tied to any specific platform.
1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
AIUI Apple has deliberately kneecapped PWAs on iOS to stop them competing with their App Store.
Most apps that "need" to send notifications don't, in fact, need to.
Yeah but, what about apps that actually do ?
There are web APIs for both.
“Web Bluetooth” is a Blink-only API that both Mozilla and Apple rejected on security grounds.
What a weird thing to put in scare quotes.
Not on iOS. There’s no Bluetooth support in safari.
Web apps offer a subpar experience.
Meanwhile on Hacker News: "Web apps suck. Native apps are so much better. Why can't everything be a native app?"
The barrier of entry for me is having to pay $99/year just to notarize and sign my macOS applications that me and maybe three other people use. Just a lot easier to link to instructions on how to bypass Gatekeeper or make them compile it themselves from source.
Although I think my go-to instructions at https://disable-gatekeeper.github.io/ are not being kept up to date?
No, the barrier is to pay above 1m downloads. $99/yr is a o(everything your have to do to publish a safe app online and maintain it safe).
Breach. Get sued. Pay Fine. Rinse. Repeat.
At this point it looks like governments want the money and companies are gleefully willing to pay.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I get it that millions isn't much but it's something, and at least it sends a signal.
Frankly, the whole "it's pointless, so this is stupid" response to some things is more tiring to me than anything. What exactly is the end-game for these people? All or nothing? That is just delusional. It is simply not how progress is made. So let's be appreciative of what little is done, and push for more?
Not to mention the amount of people in here just focusing on the fine - by the way, I don't know how people can square the belief that these companies are endlessly greedy and will do anything for more money, with the belief that half a billion euros lost profit will just sit well with them - while completely ignoring the bit where these companies either comply or face even more fines.
All in agreement behind closed doors with the EU bureaucrats
> The EU fines could stoke tensions with U.S President Donald Trump who has threatened to levy tariffs against countries that penalise U.S. companies.
Mark Zuckerberg, in his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, specifically noted this as his goal for falling in behind Trump. That Trump would be the big-stick man that would protect Meta and other cos from foreign interference. Where "interference" is anything restricting that American exceptionalism "do anything we want, however we want".
Only then Trump started a trade war with quite literally the entire world -- aside from, predictably, Russia -- and now he holds, as he likes to say, no cards. The EU and anyone else can do whatever they want and Zuck and co can cry about the millions they wasted trying to buy a protection racket.
Of course Meta could just withdrawn from the EU. I wish they would withdraw from Canada. Their garbage misinformation platform is a massive net negative for humanity and has offered nothing but harm for the planet.
Someone here hazarded the hypothesis that Trump's tariffs are a stick aimed not towards other countries, but towards American corporations, who have to pledge fealty (and resources) to Trump in exchange for relief. I think it makes a lot of sense, if any of this is rational, which I'm not entirely sold on.
It's always funny when shit happens and everyone jumps over themselves to figure out what "5D chess" the people in charge are playing. There's never any chess. They are just incompetent.
That's not 5D chess at all. Very straightforward, in fact, and backed up by the documented strong-arming of law firms.
You gotta kick back to the big guy.
Look at 47's truth social some time. In between the posts 'destroying' liberals and lionising the worst actors in his party, he posts up a disturbing amount of 'settlements' with Law Firms that previously displeased him.
They were basically forced at gunpoint to make deals to provide pro bono services to the Trump administration, in return for regulators dropping investigations into their diversity practices.
The firms - including Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Allen Overy Shearman Sterling, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft – are among the most prestigious and recognized firms in the US.
Cadwalader is the former firm of Todd Blanche, who resigned his partnership there to represent Trump in criminal cases when the firm would not take on Trump as a client. Blanche is now the deputy attorney general – the number two official at the Department of Justice.
Overall the MAGA cabinet has now secured more than $900m in pro bono pledges from law firms threatened with either executive orders or investigations from the equal opportunity commission. How this isn't seen as a straight up RICO case or old-fashioned criminal shakedown is beyond me.
> Of course Meta could just withdrawn from the EU.
I mean, probably not without being sued by their shareholders. As a public company, you cannot simply abandon 40bn revenue/year because you feel aggrieved.
But yeah, the "you'd better be nice to us, EC, or Trump might be angry" tactic is kinda shot at this point.
> I mean, probably not without being sued by their shareholders. As a public company, you cannot simply abandon 40bn revenue/year because you feel aggrieved.
What are the laws that Meta would be violating?
Fiduciary duty. It's a high bar, but "we abandoned 25% of our revenue in a fit of pique over our being required to follow the law on consent" probably gets you there.
That gets thrown around a lot but those folks are masters at corporate messaging. All you need to do is tie a bow and back the decision up with a long term strategy. I don't accept "fiduciary duty" being the pretext for any shitty behavior.
>As a public company, you cannot simply abandon 40bn revenue/year because you feel aggrieved.
The fines need to get bigger then.
Most Canadian small businesses rely on Meta to get customers.
If you think these companies don't add value, you are totally oblivious to the millions of small businesses that rely on these platforms to reach customers and niche audiences around the world.
They need a platform, but it doesn't have to be Meta.
Yeah, because small businesses didn't exist before Facebook arrived.
These fines make sense. The EU is driving a pro-competition capitalist model. American companies will have to compete, and not just entrap users.
Apple should remove privacy from their vocabolary.
They keep doing that to try to paint this as a loss for users. Users have much to win with this, as it will give some real competition to the Apple ecosystem, and potentially saving users money. So it's only natural Apple will pull all the cards like saying it threatens users privacy.
They called it on themselves. Were so greedy with access to unlimited capital, bought everything out or undercut with free. And now there are no EU competitors left to lobby for more favorable regulations.
Genuine question for debate: iPhone app store is a private club to which businesses can choose to belong, if they want to sell their product to certain customers. Membership in the club comes with the condition that you not talk about alternative ways to buy the same product, while selling via the club. Membership in the club is not a monopoly; there are many other channels through which to sell a company's products.
Why is is against the law?
The EU's regulatory stance on antitrust does not require a monopoly, it requires a dominant position in a market meeting use of certain criteria marked as abuse. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... From there when they tell a company they are breaching criteria for abuse and the company doesn't change the EU issues according fines.
As for "why" this is against the law, I assume that more to mean "why did the EU make this against the law" (since the other answer is simply "because the EU law was written as so". The arguments are largely the same as for why monopolies should not be allowed to operate: to ensure free market competition by preventing a few dominating companies from unduly pressuring the market. There are, of course, some who feel the freest market is one with no governmental regulations at all but they are not the majority (at least in the EU).
But Apple doesn't have a dominant position in the EU.
They do, in several areas, at least according to the definitions of EU law. This may not meet your individual definition of dominant position of course (e.g., one might hold you need 50% market share in certain markets to be dominant, but the EU definition does not hold this requirement).
They also meet the definitions of a gatekeeper (as defined by the DMA) in several areas, which is the related law this fine actually came from.
Because EU law says they have let others into their club.
Apple has always allowed anyone into their club. You have to pay dues and follow some strict (but non-discriminatory) rules, but the result was a place which people liked going to.
Analogies aside, the REAL question is whether Apple is entitled to charge money for access to their developer APIs. Or whether Apple is entitled to place software license terms upon use of their intellectual property, e.g. when you link against Apple libraries which are then compiled into your binary.
We get up in arms about GPL violations, but also want Apple to suck shit. I don't think it's right to want it both ways.
I think the preliminary findings make this pretty clear. Read it straight from the Commission, rather than blog spam https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
The people of EU decided it will be law that Apple must allow for alternate app distribution means - you must be able to side load and/or install alternate app marketplaces. That is the law, like how other countries have different laws for parental leave, for example.
The EU regulators have found that Apple has not complied with this law because it makes using alternate app marketplaces purposefully unattractive and burdonsome for both developers and users. EU is clamping down on Apple's 'malicious compliance'.
It's not malicious compliance. If you want to distribute binaries which contain Apple intellectual property, you need a license, and the EU is not in a position to force Apple to abandon their intellectual property rights.
I am a hard-core fan of the GPL and I recognise that the GPL license requires intellectual property rights in order to work. You want copyleft worth a damn? You need copyright. And that means you get copyright. Apple has intellectual property rights over their software and that doesn't give anyone else the right to "do whatever they want" with it.
If you want to cancel all intellectual property rights with respect to software, that's an interesting argument to make. But cancelling it under a few rare circumstances when some software irritates you seems like the height of absurdity.
Ignoring at first whether limiting distribution license terms actually relates to abandoning IP rights outright, the local government is the one who defines what rights businesses operating in their jurisdiction have. This, however, does not actually give the EU the ability to force Apple to do anything, as you insist. Apple is able pull out of the market if they feel the market's regulations are too heavy handed, at which point they no longer need to comply with local law. What the foreign company would like to enforce only layers on under the restrictions of local law, not above it.
As for IP license rights over all other law, I think most people are in alignment with a circumstance basis (or, more succinctly, "local law has priority" basis). E.g. most are indeed happy to declare a software license claiming women are not allowed to distribute the software is invalid in the jurisdiction - a company's "IP rights" be damned over a person's human rights, as an example.
What if the exclusive club had one rule for owner operator and another for rest of the folks?
Would you say that's pretty discriminatory?
If the club owner wants to have a fancy seat at the nicest table in the restaurant, that's not discrimination. It's their club. They built it. Everyone knows they built it, and they can think whatever they like about that fancy seat. If they want a similarly fancy seat, they can build their own club.
(Analogies aside, while I understand their rationale, it was wrong for Apple to lump the likes of Spotify and Netflix within their in-app purchase umbrella. And I also find it hilarious how people think 30% is highway robbery when 10+ years ago it was widely regarded as a fantastic deal for developers.)