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Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"

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Re: Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"

#41

Post by ysnp »

camillomiller wrote: post #3

These issues need good unbiased reporting, and as much as I love Cory, his reporting is all but unbiased. It's activism. Which is perfectly ok, and extremely important, but in this case it reeks of an extremism that is damaging to the cause itself. The truth is that decrying things like Apple's splash screen about the use of alternative stores, for example, is ridiculous. Apple has all the legal rights to do that, an…

If you were a designing an app store that provides apps that are safe for non technical users you would probably want to ensure:

excellent curation where human reviewers can have deep knowledge of all of the apps that have been reviewed/published,

clear provenance so you can be strongly confident of the source/supply of the applications in case of abuse or infra compromise (with a smaller problem blast radius for each app)

alternative app stores so that end users are never beholden to your app store and they can get similar or the same apps from elsewhere if your policies or practices change for the worse.

Some of these help ensure that no third party can maliciously update an app at the behest of a criminal actor without also compromising the app developer, or that no third party can gather invasively detailed information and fingerprinting surface concerning the apps people use and have in case of dissent.

Apple don't seem to have any interest in doing any of this, so I can't understand how their solution would be better for less tech-savvy users.

Re: Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"

#43

Post by coldtea »

>But there was a curious pattern to GDPR enforcement: while smaller, EU-based companies were swiftly shuttered by its provisions, the US-based giants that conduct the most brazen, wide-ranging, illegal surveillance escaped unscathed for years and years, continuing to spy on Europeans. (...) One (erroneous) way to look at this is as a "compliance moat" story. In that story, GDPR requires a bunch of expensive systems that only gigantic companies like Facebook and Google can afford. These compliance costs are a "capital moat" – a way to exclude smaller companies from functioning in the market. Thus, the GDPR acted as an anticompetitive wrecking ball, clearing the field for the largest companies, who get to operate without having to contend with smaller companies nipping at their heels. This is wrong. (...) A harder look at what happened with the GDPR reveals a completely different dynamic at work. The reason the GDPR vaporized small surveillance companies and left the big companies untouched had nothing to do with compliance costs. The Big Tech companies don't comply with the GDPR – they just get away with violating the GDPR

Nothing about what he wrote refutes the GDPR being a "compliance moat".

In fact, he even spells it out himself: "And that's why Google and Facebook haven't been extinguished by the GDPR while their rivals were. It's not compliance moats – it's impunity. Once a corporation attains a certain scale, it has the excess capital to spend on phony relocations that let it hop from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, chasing the loosest slots on the strip."

He has the idea that a requirement is only a compliance moat if a small player can't comply (because of complexity, costs, etc), but a big one can.

But it's fine for the "compliance moat" purposes that the small player can't comply and the big player can just ignore compliance. It's still a great moat, and it can still be consciously created as a moat: "Let's put out a law that makes it difficult for small players to do this shit, and we big players have avenues to bypass").

Re: Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"

#44

Post by newbie578 »

phatfish wrote: post #24
adastra22 wrote: post #17

Apple's European revenue for the App Store is only 7% of its global App Store receipts. At some point apple will just leave the market. The EU is a bit bonkers to think that it can get global tech companies to comply with increasingly tech-hostile regulations without any push back or red lines. At some point it just stops being worth the hassle.

I'm counting down the days like it's Christmas.

I find it hilarious how certain people on HN are so pro-corpo. You get a feeling like Apple is part of their family, not a monopolistic giant just needing one excuse to permaban you from their services.

Re: Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"

#45

Post by flgstnd »

adastra22 wrote: post #26
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At some point apple will just leave the market. maybe a good thing. yanis varoufakis said EU had become irrelevant in tech. more investment can go to local tech instead of US monopolies.

I would love for there to be a vibrant European tech scene. But these same sort of business-hostile behavior is exactly why there isn't a European version of Silicon Valley.

> business-hostile behavior

trying to regulate monopolies is business-hostile? maybe sometimes its needed to hurt a monopolist business in order to .. enable competition..

Re: Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"

#46

Post by FeepingCreature »

adastra22 wrote: post #17

Apple's European revenue for the App Store is only 7% of its global App Store receipts. At some point apple will just leave the market. The EU is a bit bonkers to think that it can get global tech companies to comply with increasingly tech-hostile regulations without any push back or red lines. At some point it just stops being worth the hassle.

At some point, the tech companies are gonna run out of globe.

But hey, maybe they can disband the government and elect another.

Re: Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"

#47

Post by aeurielesn »

adastra22 wrote: post #17

Apple's European revenue for the App Store is only 7% of its global App Store receipts. At some point apple will just leave the market. The EU is a bit bonkers to think that it can get global tech companies to comply with increasingly tech-hostile regulations without any push back or red lines. At some point it just stops being worth the hassle.

The US companies thinking the EU needs to bow down to them is what's bonkers.

Re: Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"

#48

Post by masklinn »

newbie578 wrote: post #39

I have zero doubt in my mind that Apple is in for a rude awakening. No way will the EU stand this level of malicious compliance. The gloves are off and I fully expect for Apple to not come out unscathed.

I doubt it’s going to be an awakening, unless Apple’s execs have taken to huffing paint on a musk scale, I would assume it’s more of a cynical ploy: while the EU doesn’t like companies ignoring the spirit of the laws it usually takes limited action until it’s refined the word to match, so they’re trying out ignoring the spirit in case it either works out or gives them more time, even if the odds are low.

That’s a high risk manoeuvre if the EU courts decide to make an example though.

Re: Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"

#49

Post by black_puppydog »

camillomiller wrote: post #3

These issues need good unbiased reporting, and as much as I love Cory, his reporting is all but unbiased. It's activism. Which is perfectly ok, and extremely important, but in this case it reeks of an extremism that is damaging to the cause itself. The truth is that decrying things like Apple's splash screen about the use of alternative stores, for example, is ridiculous. Apple has all the legal rights to do that, an…

> the alternative is equally bad

As others have pointed out, this isn't true for community curated FLOSS repositories like F-Droid.

But I want to point out that the french "pole expertise" for digital issues, PEReN, also wrote about this a while back: https://www.peren.gouv.fr/en/actualites/2022-02-18_eclairage...

TL;DR: the "trust relation" that users have with Apple's review department could just as well (and often better) be filled by third party app stores or even independent entities.

Re: Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"

#50

Post by pjc50 »

adastra22 wrote: post #17

Apple's European revenue for the App Store is only 7% of its global App Store receipts. At some point apple will just leave the market. The EU is a bit bonkers to think that it can get global tech companies to comply with increasingly tech-hostile regulations without any push back or red lines. At some point it just stops being worth the hassle.

Apple are somewhat dependent on being able to use Ireland as a tax haven. It's also quite hard for a publicly traded company to abandon a multibillion dollar market out of spite alone without getting sued by shareholders.
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