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EU Digital Markets Act, aimed at Google, Apple, Amazon, approved

consilium.europa.eu

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Re: EU Digital Markets Act, aimed at Google, Apple, Amazon, approved

#441

Post by colinmhayes »

foepys wrote: post #413
LeanderK wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much welcome this legislation (and I use an iPhone). How would you approach this otherwise? The EU probably can't break up Google or Apple (how would this even look like?) and the walled gardens are clearly a market failure, including apples fat margins. You mention details, but regulation can be well made and just continuing the status quo is also bad. All regulations open up questions but it's not the wild w…

Apple can be broken up in multiple ways. - smartphones - desktop/laptops - music and video streaming - App Store and payments with Apple Pay - chip design - physical stores All of those could stand on their own. Edit: I'm not saying that the EU can break them up but Apple is not a company with a single field where breaking it up is impossible. I misread the parent a bit.

How would the eu force apple to break up? It’s an American company. I guess they could lobby the US, but doesn’t seem close to happening.

Re: EU Digital Markets Act, aimed at Google, Apple, Amazon, approved

#443

Post by chis »

jarbus wrote: post #190

Why is the EU able to pass pro-consumer laws, but America unable to? Are big tech companies just unable to properly bribe the European Union like they do the American Government?

The U.S. government is pretty inept in general these days. It's hard to see how such an expansive govt regulation would get approved by the current Congress which gets deadlocked over pretty much anything.

Re: EU Digital Markets Act, aimed at Google, Apple, Amazon, approved

#444

Post by cm2187 »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #411
tirpen wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these rules apply only to companies above a certain size, both in number of users and revenue. Those get classified as "digital gatekeepers" and they are the companies that have to comply with extra requirements. So no, this will not affect startups and harm innovation, it will just force the monopolistic behemoths to play nice and cease actively harming innovation.

It also starts to bother me quite a bit when we go from treating everyone equal before the law to creating certain requirements based on other factors. Further it seems more like a moat to keep anyone else from getting as big as these "digital gatekeepers" are as suddenly when you get to a certain size you have an enormous expense. If these companies really are that large that they have to get special laws for them i…

How do you break up the iphone? You create one company with a separate model of iphone for each country?

Re: EU Digital Markets Act, aimed at Google, Apple, Amazon, approved

#445

Post by lukeschlather »

chrisfinazzo wrote: post #238
josephg wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how your walled garden is threatened by giving Melbourne Trams the ability to use the NFC chip in my phone to pay for rides. Or threatened by Amazon having the ability to add an in-app purchase button to their iPhone app which uses my saved Amazon payment options. I’m sure apple will fight this tooth and nail, but it’s my phone. I paid for it. I want to be able to do what I want with my device.

I'm not thrilled with their having to open up most of these areas, but it's doable. If the API's don't already exist (read: Private, for Apple's use only) they can be written - that's an item on the to-do list, but it's not crazy. However, the Apple Pay & NFC stuff just rubs me the wrong way. The only reason they have been begging for this is the ability to collect more data about riders, which isn't necessary and pr…

How does "pay for transit with NFC" work without the metro having access to the NFC hardware?

Re: EU Digital Markets Act, aimed at Google, Apple, Amazon, approved

#446

Post by colinmhayes »

visarga wrote: post #358
judge2020 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the first two are very important questions. For example, if I make $500 “unhackablePhone”, where it literally doesn’t run web apps and every app is vetted by top-talent security researchers for weeks, and then I sell billions of these devices, do I then have to open up the ecosystem to allow anyone to be able to take a phone, punch in the passcode, and install a third party App Store? This is synonymous with the curr…

The App Store is a garbage dump anyway. There are few apps you can pay upfront, the rest are ad-infested or require you to repeatedly do in app purchases to keep using them, to the point that I can't find games for my kids.

You can run DNS based ad blockers on iOS. It’s just a setting you change, mine is called adguard. Still get YouTube ads, but most others are blocked.

Re: EU Digital Markets Act, aimed at Google, Apple, Amazon, approved

#447

Post by zaik »

igorkraw wrote: post #144
hunglee2 wrote: post #121

all pretty sound, aside from 'interoperability on instant messenger', which would be incompatible with privacy / security obligations from the providers. Wonder how hard US govt will bat for the US tech, leverage is there vs the EU post Putin invasion of Ukraine

BS, XMPP federation has been around for decades now. Google messenger used to speak it before the removed it , maybe Facebook as well.

Hopefully this will be the re-birth of the XMPP standard. WhatsApp is built on it, has a huge market share and, when I read this correctly, will start federating in the near future.

Re: EU Digital Markets Act, aimed at Google, Apple, Amazon, approved

#448

Post by chis »

InTheArena wrote: post #384

This looks like bad news for Apple, much more so then for Google. It doesn't really address Google's ad-driven ecosystem, but goes hard after the app store and hardware differences where apple has prioritized privacy rather then ad-spend. I don't see a alternative to apple the to emulate Google and ditch privacy in favor of ad-tech after looking at the text.

Might end up being good for Goog if it expands the reach of Chrome on iOS. Google currently pays 10+ billion a year to be the default search provider on Safari.

Re: EU Digital Markets Act, aimed at Google, Apple, Amazon, approved

#449

Post by piaste »

judge2020 wrote: post #350
sfe22 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I am in the camp of apple allowing side-loading, i am not a fan of monopolistic regulations like this. It opens all kind of questions, like 1. What devices have to comply? 2. Who decides what device has to comply? Should playstation open their system too. What about a niche bank transaction signing device that internally uses an android capable hardware. Is this illegal now? 3. What about a car infotainment sys…

the first two are very important questions. For example, if I make $500 “unhackablePhone”, where it literally doesn’t run web apps and every app is vetted by top-talent security researchers for weeks, and then I sell billions of these devices, do I then have to open up the ecosystem to allow anyone to be able to take a phone, punch in the passcode, and install a third party App Store? This is synonymous with the curr…

> This is synonymous with the current iPhone situation as many people only buy it for the benefit of Apple screening everything that can run on their phone

I would love to read some surveys on this matter, because I highly doubt that security/privacy is a significant factor for more than a few percent points of iPhone buyers.

(I base this hypothesis on the fact that, in virtually every field of technology, end users have shown that they will overwhelmingly sacrifice privacy and security in exchange for convenience and cost savings.)

I expect that the main motivations for iPhone purchases are aesthetics, performance, ease of use, integration with the Apple ecosystem, and especially fashion/status symbol factor.

As for the rest of the comment, as other people have already pointed out, you can prevent evil maid attacks by putting the legally-required "open" mode behind a factory reset. Which is roughly what Android phones do with their unlockable bootloaders.

Re: EU Digital Markets Act, aimed at Google, Apple, Amazon, approved

#450

Post by Gareth321 »

enos_feedler wrote: post #351
Gareth321 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And yet, Apple can still charge software companies whatever they want to allow software to run on the phones. This is explicitly disallowed in the legislation. See page 131: >The gatekeeper shall allow providers of services and providers of hardware, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same hardware and software features accessed or controlled via…

The simple work around is to provide lower quality of service to all of the platforms features and claim it is the only way to achieve _effective_ interoperability without jeopardizing the user experience

They have lots of qualifiers around access and service standards. It's 230 pages and quite comprehensive. I'm sure Apple and Google will try to get creative, but these simple examples of potential malicious compliance are already covered.
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