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Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

ca.finance.yahoo.com

471–480 of 635 posts

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#471

> while Meta drew a penalty of €200 million for its "pay or consent" advertising model, which requires that European Union users pay to access ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram Wait, isn't pretty much all web content is like this nowadays? You have to buy youtube premium to avoid ads, how is it different?

Pay or have your information harvested and sold. Its extortion.

Nobody was holding a gun up to my head forcing me to open Facebook or give them money

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#472
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…

> Then there are only 3 options

I can imagine at least one more:

4. Americans believe companies too frequently do the government's bidding, and by allowing corporations to suppress speech, they're allowing the government to exploit that and indirectly violate their direct 1A rights.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#473
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would collapse millions of small businesses How? And do they have the right to exist if their only income is targeted ads?

How do you expect small businesses to acquire customers? Spending tens of millions of dollars competing in generalized ad space to reach the same audience they can reach today with $1000? Most small businesses that exist today would become nonviable overnight , and that is a huge chunk of the economy. Sure, you can say "they shouldn't have the right to exist" because they use targeted ads, but I have yet to hear a so…

Do you seriously think that ? My experience is so dissociated that I think it unbelievable. I don't remember ever seeing an ad for a small business on the web, even less discovered one through them.

I discovered most small businesses that I use through word of month, seeing them while traveling or active search through google or google maps. The ones that I may have discovered through ad where through local physical add such as any box fliers or fliers/posters in other local businesses.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you expect small businesses to acquire customers? Spending tens of millions of dollars competing in generalized ad space to reach the same audience they can reach today with $1000? Most small businesses that exist today would become nonviable overnight , and that is a huge chunk of the economy. Sure, you can say "they shouldn't have the right to exist" because they use targeted ads, but I have yet to hear a so…

Do you seriously think that ? My experience is so dissociated that I think it unbelievable. I don't remember ever seeing an ad for a small business on the web, even less discovered one through them. I discovered most small businesses that I use through word of month, seeing them while traveling or active search through google or google maps. The ones that I may have discovered through ad where through local physical…

in order for to see small business ads you really have to have your browser fully exposed in order to be targeted - small business are local and feeding ads for a massage parlour in sam diego to me 3,000 miles away is not a good allocation of marketing money. I am 50 and have never, not once discovered a small business through an online ad

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not so clear. Appstore revenue is ~ $100 billion/y, but Apple makes less than 30% from that. So the question is: Would more convincing compliance have cost Apple more than single digit percentage decreases in Appstore sales? Comparing the F-Droid vs Playstore situation, this seems unlikely to me.

Apple’s take is 30%, but they have expenses that have to be covered by that. The profit if any would be much less than $30bn.

If Apple is so bad at this that they have to charge 30%, they should have failed in the free market to a competitor that can do the same or better for 3%. However, Apple has prevented that, not by being better or cheaper, but by implementing DRM that locks users out from having a choice (and the market as a whole ended up being a duopoly with cartel-like pricing).

Whether Apple can be cheaper isn't really the point (they should be, digital services are a very high margin business). It's that they're anti-competitive to the point that the market for paid apps and in-app payments became inefficient (in a financial sense).

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you expect small businesses to acquire customers? Spending tens of millions of dollars competing in generalized ad space to reach the same audience they can reach today with $1000? Most small businesses that exist today would become nonviable overnight , and that is a huge chunk of the economy. Sure, you can say "they shouldn't have the right to exist" because they use targeted ads, but I have yet to hear a so…

Let me guess, there were no small businesses in the whole world before the advent of digital automated targeted ads?

More like targeted ads enabled hundreds of thousands of small businesses to exist.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, you can justify any authoritarian unjust law because "that's how we like it." "Deporting brown people without due process? That's how we like it, who are you to complain? You're free to not work with the US, but we know you will!" Obviously a nuanced and meaningful conversation goes much deeper than "that's how we like it." Why is it such an infringement on user rights to not be allowed to use a website i…

Funny choice of example considering that it is the US that is currently deporting people without due process.

Yes, that is the precise example I used to demonstrate why "we like it that way" is not good policy. I don't get what's so funny.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#478
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the EU has made it illegal to extort payment before allowing people to opt-out of data collection or profiling.

Extortion is a stretch. Nobody is being forced to use these services.

Try not using Wechat in China. Facebook's Whatsapp is going in that direction in the Netherlands and probably other European countries: I don't yet need it for daily life, but a lot of services are moving to supporting WhatsApp and turning off things like regular phone support, website chat, etc. The only things where it was a requirement so far, were things I didn't yet care about (like sending in voice messages to be used in a podcast, or being part of the neighborhood gossip and tool-sharing community chat) but I bet it won't stay that way forever and sooner or later a company will discontinue email support in favor of "just message us on Whatsapp". Between going back to the 80s and writing/printing letters and sending them in the mail, and installing WhatsApp, any reasonable person will begrudgingly click that agree button no matter if they really agree. I'd say they were extorted at that point and it is not voluntarily/freely given consent, even if they technically have made that choice themselves

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple’s take is 30%, but they have expenses that have to be covered by that. The profit if any would be much less than $30bn.

> The profit if any would be much less than $30bn. It doesn't cost that much to maintain and run the appstore, it is almost all profits.

You are trying to tell me that credit card processing fees are negligible, software engineers work for free, advertising doesn’t require overhead, etc…

I guess that kind of thinking that everything is basically free is why alot of startups just fail so easily.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#480
post #221

> 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…

>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…

> show signs of rent seeking

They've been hard rent-seeking since iTunes and iPod. They aggressively eliminated and made inconvenient other ways for getting music onto iPods. Hardware was great, but hard dependence on iTunes killed it for me.

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