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Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

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Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#121

Post by addicted »

mrweasel wrote: post #66
servus45678981 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it wouldn‘t. Instead European Brands like Nokia, Fairphone, Gigaset and Nothing would grow.iMessage and other Apple specific services are not really popular, even if the iPhone sells good.

This comes up everything the EU/Europe and Apple comes up: iMessage is hugely popular, it is just not the most popular (or even third or second) messaging platform. Also the largest is Facebook Messenge, and in the top five is another Meta product, WhatsApp. So it's not like it's all Signal, Viper or Telegram, it's mostly platforms from another US tech giant.

iMessage is “hugely popular” only because it essentially replaces SMS. No one actually goes out of their way to communicate through iMessage.

WhatsApp, OTOH, is huge, and that’s an app that’s not installed by default and automatically consists of your entire address book as contacts but instead you have to go ahead and download it and explicitly add contacts to it, and yet it’s almost certainly bigger than imesssage outside the U.S. and is growing rapidly within the U.S.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#122

Post by groestl »

frizlab wrote: post #96
davidgerard wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep. From Baldur Bjarnason: > For months, we’ve been hearing leaks about Apple’s talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e... The EU cannot allow a large business to mess around like this.

And yet they did and still allow google analytics to exist while it not being GDPR compliant.

Well, Google Analytics actually forbids it's users to send PII (sure, you can't avoid communicating the IP address as part of the request).

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#123

Post by Lio »

In this scenario Apple is the great dictator from the 1984 ad and the EU is the British woman with the hammer.

I can’t even get music I’ve bought, from Apple, off my iPhone and onto my mac without an extra recurring subscription.

Apple aren’t “curating” that experience they are gouging me.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#124

Post by simion314 »

kernal wrote: post #13
bee_rider wrote: post #8

The EU will win this if they want. Their trump card is that, actually, making the EU not a viable market for the most annoying US tech companies would be a huge win for many of their constituents.

Apple should play their Trump card and threaten to pull out of the EU. The EU would blink first because the public backlash would be career ending.

How Apple would justify the big financial hit?

The evil EU forces us to give our customer choices, this will hit our profits so we derided we should lose even more money by just not participating in the market.

Though I REALLY want to find an Apple fanboy defending the policy where Apple does not allow an app to display some text like "if you buy or extend this subscription on our website it is cheaper, you have a choice dear Apple user". Informing Apple users is not allowed by Apple.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#125

Post by pkaye »

pasc1878 wrote: post #61
viraptor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you even mean? There's no payments to EU in this case. How would they share the stash?

Apple - and the rest of the large companies manage to order their payments so that their profits are offshored out of Europe. Which means they are not paying the corporate tax an EU resident company would. So EU is not getting their fair share.

Don't they send the profits to Ireland which is within the EU?

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#126

Post by Kwpolska »

pasc1878 wrote: post #61
viraptor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you even mean? There's no payments to EU in this case. How would they share the stash?

Apple - and the rest of the large companies manage to order their payments so that their profits are offshored out of Europe. Which means they are not paying the corporate tax an EU resident company would. So EU is not getting their fair share.

Corporate tax doesn't go to the EU, it goes to the government of the country you're incorporated in. Countries like Ireland and the Netherlands have very low tax rates, and big tech companies benefit from that.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#127

Post by pjerem »

Kwpolska wrote: post #119
riffraff wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU commission and EU parliament are somewhat removed from public backlash, it's one of the reasons people complain about the EU being "undemocratic". So the commission or random EU MEP would be affected after 5 years or so. Tim Cook would get backlash from stockholders the moment he announced he wanted to stop getting EU revenue rather than comply with regulations.

There's an EU parliament election in a few weeks or so, how is that undemocratic?

The EU Parliament can’t make decisions, it can only veto the commission which acts as an unelected government (nominated by elected representatives of each country).

But I agree with you that this idea of an undemocratic EU is rather false and really dangerous. Everyone feels like this because nobody understands that the commission don’t represent the interests of their country but those of all the European countries which few people are capable of naming years after school.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#128

Post by GeoAtreides »

tyfon wrote: post #67
pheggs wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I agree its a good idea to not track personal data, but thats by far not the only rule in GDPR

What other rule do you find impossible? Data portability? The users right to delete data? Data processing agreements? Data security? Article 30? They are all fairly trivial unless you do shady stuff really. Step one if is really looking at what you process as stipulated by article 30, a lot of the other stuff is much easier after that. One of my roles is as a DPO in a bank in Europe, and it's far from impossible to c…

> The users right to delete data?

Hacker news, please, think about being GDPR compliant! You're breaking the law, hacker news!

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#129

Post by Animats »

The EU is also grinding forward towards classifying all gig workers controlled by "platforms" as employees, with the platform subject to all employment laws. See "Improving working conditions of persons working through digital labour platforms "[1] Background: [2] Last vote in the European parliament: 554 votes in favour, 56 votes against and 24 abstentions. This is somewhat weakened but still stronger than anything in the US.

Uber is worried.

[1] https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheproc...

[2] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/platform-work-eu...

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#130

Post by gravescale »

userbinator wrote: post #95
tyfon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other rule do you find impossible? Data portability? The users right to delete data? Data processing agreements? Data security? Article 30? They are all fairly trivial unless you do shady stuff really. Step one if is really looking at what you process as stipulated by article 30, a lot of the other stuff is much easier after that. One of my roles is as a DPO in a bank in Europe, and it's far from impossible to c…

The users right to delete data? In practice that becomes the "right to rewrite history". Which should never be a good thing, for obvious reasons.

It's not a universal rule that you have to delete personal data on request. If there's a "legitimate interest", you don't need to delete it even if asked to. But you will need to have that legitimate interest documented.

What exactly do you envision being the bad outcome here where you are asked to remove personal information and don't have a legitimate interest to keep it for?

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