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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

#541

Post by kmeisthax »

Derbasti wrote: post #345
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…

> If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics. But what alternative? There is no European smartphone OS. Windows and Steam OS and XBox are US-american, too. I suppose Linux, Playstation, and Nintendo, then?

Android is Linux based, although you'd have to build a shitton of replacements for all the stuff Google took out of AOSP and locked behind GMS. And you'd probably have problems getting anyone to manufacture EUDroid devices given that they'd lose access to Google Play if they did.

Alternatively, you could liquidate Apple.

That is: confiscate Apple's EU subsidiaries, repeal DMCA 1201 equivalents in EU law, strip iOS of copyright protection, crack the DRM, replace iCloud's deep integration into iOS, set up a task force for cloning Apple's hardware, and put everything you steal online so other countries can steal iOS too.

Do the same to Microsoft as well. Actually, that would be easier than stealing iOS but I don't think the EU wants to try to revive Windows Mobile as an escalation to a trade war.

The core idea to keep in mind is that trade wars are stupid, but also that America's business tyrants will crumble easily if one were to happen. Globalized trade and supply chains mean that basically nobody is self-sufficient in everything; but in America's case, we're mainly self-sufficient in agriculture. Our comparative advantages in tech and cultural exports are a function of us convincing every other country to actually pay us whatever we want for our culture; which is a deal that countries can trivially reneg on.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#542

Post by toast0 »

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.…

> 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. The same legislation applies to local companies.

The iPhone App store existed before this legislation, and I suspect the rest of the targetted things did too.

This legislation only applies to companies that have a certain marketshare, which includes no European companies unless you count one that's a subsidiary of a US company.

Maybe it's the case that it is reasonable to handicap successful businesses, but this is a handicap that only applies to some businesses, most of which are US (but one is Chinese).

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#543

Post by casey2 »

tpmoney wrote: post #500
sabellito wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Show signs of rent seeking behaviour" seems like an extremely generous position. Forbidding your customers from even mentioning The Outside is full-on rent seeking behaviour, since its inception.

To steel man the policy, one thing it helps avoid is the free rider problem. Apples store terms are than free apps don’t pay a commission to Apple. But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform. We no longer live in an age where Apple or Microsoft gets away with charging for multi thousand dollar per year per seat developer license for their platforms, but that doesn’t mean those platfo…

>the free rider problem

Yes charging rent does stop the free rider problem. The cost of maintenance is infinite if Apple says it is cause nobody else is allowed to maintain Apple services.

When people and universities are allowed to maintain Unix services it turns out the cost isn't infinite, and is easily manageable under a public budget and charity. Apple chooses to burn money to create a smokescreen here and you are falling for it.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#544

Post by EasyMark »

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.…

I mean I understand they are doing, but also why aren't they fining European and Chinese companies for the same thing?

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#545

Post by troupo »

tpmoney wrote: post #500
sabellito wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Show signs of rent seeking behaviour" seems like an extremely generous position. Forbidding your customers from even mentioning The Outside is full-on rent seeking behaviour, since its inception.

To steel man the policy, one thing it helps avoid is the free rider problem. Apples store terms are than free apps don’t pay a commission to Apple. But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform. We no longer live in an age where Apple or Microsoft gets away with charging for multi thousand dollar per year per seat developer license for their platforms, but that doesn’t mean those platfo…

> But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform.

This is included in the price of the hardware that their customers and all the developers who develop for the platform have bought, many times over.

Don't believe me? Look up Apple's financial statements and compare iPhone sales to the measly amount they spend on R&D (which includes the development of SDKs for all their platforms).

It used to be that Apple charged for MacOS. And then they said: nope, our hardware pays for that. And made it free.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#546

Post by troupo »

tpmoney wrote: post #533
bawolff wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That logic doesn't work for me. The person who paid for the sdk is the person who bought the iphone. Typically the definition of free riding requires that if everyone behaved like the free riders, then the system would cease to exist. If apple made $0 off the app store, would they still make iphones? I would assume yes since they are profitable devices. Hence this isn't free riding.

> The person who paid for the sdk is the person who bought the iphone. Are they? Then why did companies previously charge per seat annual licenses for their SDKs? Were the people who bought the computers and products back then not also paying for the SDK? Clearly the answer is "who is paying" depends on the model you set up. You can take your income stream from the initial hardware sales, or you can take it from subs…

> You can take your income stream from the initial hardware sales, or you can take it from subscription fees, or you can take it in revenue sharing models. Apple chose the latter

I missed the part where they give iPhones away for free, and only make money from revenue sharing

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#547

Post by toast0 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #530
immibis wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads work even if nobody clicks. At least, old school ads. Sensible ads. Like Coca-Cola. I have no idea how these ridiculous online gaming things stay in business but I'm sure it's much stupider.

Did you buy coca cola because santa clause was drinking it or did you buy it because it was at eye level by the register in every store in America?

How do you think those drinks get there? Beverage companies are paying for shelf space.

But, if you think ads for drinks don't work, take a look at Pepsi's Project Refresh of 2010, and what happened to their sales. TLDR, Pepsi took it's superb owl ad budget and used it to do community grants instead; sales dropped and a couple years later, Pepsi went back to advertising during the superb owl and stopped doing community grants.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#548

Post by troupo »

tantalor wrote: post #167
judge2020 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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?

It's not the ads you are consenting to, its the personal data collection and targeting. You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.

> You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.

This is a lie that has been perpetuated for a very long time.

1. There's no definite proof they are much less effective

2. Even if they are less effective, is it a bad trade-off when weighed against life-long pervasive and invasive tracking?

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#549

Post by masklinn »

recursive wrote: post #480
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…

> 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.

Requiring dedicated software available for free is not rent seeking, there is no rent, and it was not exactly rare in the more lifestyle pmp space.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#550

Post by dns_snek »

robertlagrant wrote: post #358
dns_snek wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you do if every car manufacturer does something that's a "deal breaker" Sane societies recognize the problem and regulate it out of existence.

I think it's more likely that insane societies do - elevate one person's consumer choices to national scale.

Sure, just one person's consumer choice to curb anti-competitive behavior which is artificially raising prices for everyone and restricting innovation. Among other fringe choices like having electrical appliances that don't kill us, paint that doesn't cause brain damage, cars that don't poison our air, and rivers that aren't full of toxic chemicals.
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