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Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

ca.finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#411

Post by vander_elst »

mrtksn wrote: post #405
mrangle wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Interested in learning more, do you have links to the sources?

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#412

Post by Aloisius »

radlad wrote: post #401
Aloisius wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) - trac…

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...

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#413

Post by mrtksn »

vander_elst wrote: post #411
mrtksn wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interested in learning more, do you have links to the sources?

It's joke :) It was impossible to give it a serious reply, so...

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#414

Post by kube-system »

rzwitserloot wrote: post #403
bloppe wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 exam…

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.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#415

Post by akaij »

dehrmann wrote: post #410
mrtksn wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#416

Post by etiennebausson »

Arkanum wrote: post #140
onli wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#417

Post by SllX »

phtrivier wrote: post #375
SllX wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#418

Post by switch007 »

xandrius wrote: post #351
alexfromapex wrote: post #346

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

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#419

Post by tonyedgecombe »

jader201 wrote: post #229
madeofpalk wrote: post #11

> 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…

> 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 wh…

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.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#420

Post by tonyedgecombe »

jerf wrote: post #386
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #238

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.…

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 ha…

>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.

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