251–260 of 635 posts
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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.
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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
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.
> 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 f…
> "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?
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> iPhones are a status symbol in America whereas Europeans couldn't care less. Europeans absolutely could, they're just too tight fisted to actually spend money on things like protecting privacy which is a major part of the whole problem. They are perfectly fine spending money on luxury cars.
> Europeans absolutely could, they're just too tight fisted to actually spend money on things like protecting privacy which is a major part of the whole problem. Users in the US don't care about protecting their privacy either. Examples: 1. Google Chrome market share in the US 2. GMail market share in the US 3. Google Search market share in the US
They absolutely do, you just like to dismiss it as being about status.
It was similar when RIM were on top in north america. The status came because of their association with business because they provided secure messaging. High status people care about privacy and security.
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…
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> The EU would have a lot more sympathy for this if there were any non trivial digital markets that originated in the EU Why should that be a prerequisite? The EU is sovereign. They are free to do whatever they want with their law. Let's not forget we are talking about the second consumer market in the world. There will be a lot more space for homegrown solutions or companies ready to comply if the foreign companies…
> There will be a lot more space for homegrown solutions or companies ready to comply if the foreign companies currently profiting decide to leave. The core of what I'm trying to communicate is this is backwards. If you took the Europeans out of Apple and Google they'd never have been able to build the iPhone or Android, or their associated stores. (And you could say this about other regions where the staff came from…
WhatsApp would be displaced in a matter of days if not hours if made unavailable. You are far overestimating the amount of disruption a closure would provoke.
> They just want to punish the americans for having had the foresight that led to their success.
This is not about punishment. The DMA is about setting ground rules for a level playing field in the digital market space. It is at its heart a law about competition.
Europe wants the American companies to stop abusing their dominant positions and the closed markets they built. This is a prerequisite to a competitive market as it's basically impossible to foster competition when a few players have spent a decade entrenching themselves and building barriers to entry.
Thankfully, there are no rules which say American companies should reap unlimited benefits from their market manipulations and the overall laissez-faire attitude of the American regulator.
> As an example, just look at how the europeans have failed to come up with something equivalent to WhatsApp, Signal or even Telegram.
All of them have ready to use Asian competitors which would be more than happy to work with European regulators if American companies won't.
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I'll be generous and assume you're being disingenuous by accident: This isn't about the ads, it's about the tracking. Meta is free to put ads wherever it wants, but it's not free to track people who don't want to be tracked. In the end, a population has the right to govern itself how it wants. There's absolutely NOTHING wrong with that - Meta is free to simply not operate in the EU.
Why shouldn't you allowed to track people across your own services if users consent? If they don't consent, they are free to simply not use your services. Problem solved. There is no actual need for this law. No rights are being infringed on. Just don't use the website.
Why shouldn't Meta be forbidden to track people? It's the law. If they don't want to follow the applicable law in the jurisdiction they operate in they can cease their operations there.
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.
> 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".
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22418828/apple-app-store-c...
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/25/apples-phil-schiller-co...
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This is a recurring Russian propaganda point, now amplified by the new US Administration. I am curious about the basis for this. Could you explain further from your perspective how you came up with this conclusion?
Those pesky Russians and common sense of using #964B00 in your navbar then getting hit for 500 million is stupid.
The answer could simply be: "oh it's just ignorance at play, and some people just repeat what they heard and made them feel good because it helped them cope/made them resentful/.."
100% of the time I had these engagements, these folks didn't even know what the EU was. Donald Trump is a great example of this, he has no clue what the EU is, nor how it came to be lmao
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…
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.
Maybe the gatekeeper thing is a reflection of less people in the EU using FB at all, rather than specifically Marketplace.