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Apple vs the Law

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Re: Apple vs the Law

#101

Post by bzzzt »

idle_zealot wrote: post #14
interpol_p wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s extremely complex. I’m not debating whether they should comply - they should. But it’s gonna cost them years of engineering effort, and maintenance far into the future. See, for example, BrowserEngineKit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/browserenginekit They needed to engineer, maintain, document and support a whole class of APIs so that third parties can create their own competitive browser engines (th…

Or, they could just let their pocket computers run the software users download and install, like every single other computer ever made and sold, rather than special-case engineer padded cells for every use-case, application class, or bit of interoperability.

You mean those users that don't even know what an application is? And you mean that software that only has the users best interests in mind and is not spying on them, trying to scam or confuse them into buying unnecessary stuff?

I think Apple has done a great job of protecting non-technical people from a lot of the possible harms of malware. There's a lot of incentive for them to make sure security is handled right. I'm convinced going back to the 90s and giving every software developer full access to users phones would create a lot more problems than it would solve.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#102

Post by rickdeckard »

jb1991 wrote: post #23
EMIRELADERO wrote: post #19

The greatest gem is found in the footnote, IMO > "They managed to convince the courts that iPadOS is a separate operating system to iOS (it's not), which delayed iPadOS being designated as a gatekeeper for almost a year. They are currently challenging all of the rest: the iOS, Safari, and App Store designations, and successfully managed to avoid iMessage being designated at all. They have taken the DMA law to court f…

I am certainly not surprised that Apple is employing a lot of legal tricky to work around judgments. But what does surprise me is that there’s a very common attitude in forums that somehow Apple is the only company doing this, or they’re doing it worse than any other company.

> But what does surprise me is that there’s a very common attitude in forums that somehow Apple is the only company doing this, or they’re doing it worse than any other company.

Apart from being irrelevant and whataboutism, this is the narrative Apple is playing, particularly towards its userbase.

The EU regulation doesn't focus on Apple in any way, the purpose of the DMA is to have objective criteria to identify a scaled market of digital goods with an uneven playing field for all players.

The EU DMA has identified that Apple created a closed market of significant size, made themselves the gatekeeper and invited companies to compete there. But Apple participates in the market also as a player, and skews the playing field in their favor.

So it's an unjust market where forces are unable to flow freely, and the EU is attempting to rectify that.

The reasons why Apple is in such public focus on this are #1 because they operate an unusual amount of closed markets and #2 because they WANT this: it is part of Apple's strategy to rally publicly against the regulation and shape a different perception of it.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#103

Post by mattlondon »

grishka wrote: post #3

> "...unfortunately, it's impossible to do all the complex engineering to comply with the Commission's current interpretation of the DMA..." There's nothing complex and impossible about removing some "if" statements responsible for code signature enforcement.

I suspect it goes a lot deeper than just a single if-statement somewhere, and hundreds of thousands of lines of code and various interfaces and all the rest are built on the core assumption of the signatures being there and the packages etc being signed.

These sort of things can be tricky to refactor and more complex than they first seem. For example I recently spent the past 12 weeks or so just moving some fields around on a CRUD app (not adding or removing - just changing their order!) because there were assumptions built on assumptions built on assumptions about what order things are in and what comes first and what has already been done or not and so on. What ostensibly seemed trivial, actually required almost a complete rewrite of whole parts of the CRUD app to overcome the assumptions and implied behavior of what happens when and how.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#104

Post by bzzzt »

jjcob wrote: post #57

I think at this point we should change the law so that Gatekeepers aren't just required to enable competition, but are somehow forced to actually support competition. I'm not sure how we could enforce that, but maybe the law could stipulate that a certain minimum percentage of users must use 3rd party app stores, or use web apps. They should pay a fine if less than say 5% of apps are distributed outside the app store…

First they have to enable competition, you're saying they have to support it but seemingly you want to enforce it. Where does it stop? Should Apple just pay out a part of their profits to their competitors?

If a competitor wants market share they have to build a better service. Forcing users to go with a bad deal gets the incentives all wrong and is actually bad for consumer choice.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#105

Post by planb »

Y-bar wrote: post #97
planb wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former European, I agree with your first statement. I love that the EU is taking this seriously, and I like how they introduced the "gatekeeper" term to apply regulations only to the "big ones" and not small businesses (even though I don't agree with many of the individual laws in the DMA). That said, you can't argue that this isn't protectionist - we simply don't have any gatekeepers here, so if we're fair the…

European companies I could find which the European Commission has taken action against with the Digital Services Act: Zalando has three enforcement actions against them since June 2023 Booking.com has one Technius (mainly streaming) has two WebGroup CZ (Adult entertainment) has five

Wow, I did not know that, thanks for making me aware of this. I guess the tech press only covers the big cases? I didn't even know there were so many cases already.

edit: I looked it up - you are talking about the DSA (digital services act) while I was talking about the DMA (the one including the gatekeeper specification) - so that's not really what I meant....

Re: Apple vs the Law

#106

Post by FinnLobsien »

Y-bar wrote: post #87
FinnLobsien wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue the opposite: It actually makes European businesses worth off by continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply. Add to that feel-good green initiatives like a packaging initiative that might lower packaging waste from European companies, but more likely will just make European goods more expensive and…

The EU has basically said that it's better to have a handful medium-sized companies in competition for customers than one or two mega-corps owning and dictating the market. And to resolve that they employ two things, one is the DMA/DSA and similar laws which mostly takes effect when your company reaches a certain large market penetration, the other is standardisations such as the Radio Equipment Directive (think "USB…

> The EU has basically said that it's better to have a handful medium-sized companies in competition for customers than one or two mega-corps owning and dictating the market. And to resolve that they employ two things, one is the DMA/DSA and similar laws which mostly takes effect when your company reaches a certain large market penetration, the other is standardisations such as the Radio Equipment Directive (think "USB-C law" and similar ones) that make it easier for consumers to avoid vendor lock-in.

Then show me the handful of European, medium-sized companies competing for customers. The problem is that you pass DMA, DSA, GDPR, etc. which Google, Apple etc. can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it.

Instead what's happening is that European alternatives (the kind that's actually good, not the kind that's European and half as good) don't exist and the incentives to build one shrink because any scaling company is instantly hamstrung.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#107

Post by agust »

jeroenhd wrote: post #49
vladms wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me personally they seem to be more expensive than competitors and have a more aggressive stance on openness (ex: compare PWA support on Android vs iOS, not to mention the multiple other things like no multiple stores, the browser engine discussion, etc). So, I am not amazed that people think "on top of all the other things that you annoy us with you also try to avoid the law?!".

While I hate Apple's anti-consumer practices as much as anyone, the PWA platform is a system set up by Google first and foremost. Take-up has been limited outside of Google Chrome. I wouldn't say Apple's PWA approach is necessarily an example of Apple's fuckery. This wouldn't be much of an issue, of course, if Chrome would just run on iOS like it does on any other OS, so Google can implement PWAs themselves.

Mobile web apps that can be installed on device were invented by Apple.

This was the way developers were supposed to develop apps for the iPhone when it was released, before Apple introduced the App Store.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#108

Post by FinnLobsien »

zarzavat wrote: post #76
FinnLobsien wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue the opposite: It actually makes European businesses worth off by continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply. Add to that feel-good green initiatives like a packaging initiative that might lower packaging waste from European companies, but more likely will just make European goods more expensive and…

That is the western European way though. It's supposed to be a nice place to live, not a nice place to do business. If that leads to Chaebolification of the economy then so be it. There are other parts of the world that specialise in deregulation at the expense of living standards.

True! And I generally empathize with this. The core point of the EU and its member states' governments should be to enable high quality of life.

But that model you describe is cracking: Cost of living is going through the roof in Europe, taxes/social contributions going up every year, etc.

The problem is that Europe is like an old, rich person who now lives off of the principal of their wealth. For a person that's fine because they'll eventually die. For a government, you should strive for an environment that lets you keep growing wealth.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#109

Post by rickdeckard »

shuckles wrote: post #59
lmm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This wouldn't be much of an issue, of course, if Chrome would just run on iOS like it does on any other OS, so Google can implement PWAs themselves. You do understand that the reason it doesn't is because Apple won't let it, not that Google don't want to?

This is a fantasy. No customer wants PWAs. They exist to make developers' lives easier, not consumers' lives.

The consumer doesn't care which method is used to serve an application. PWAs could easily be presented to the end user like a native App.

The problem is rather that PWAs would prove a viable path for universal cross-platform applications, taking away the gatekeeper role the OS-vendors have.

Paradoxically PWA-support is also part of the "we're no gatekeeper" narrative, so it's in the OS-vendor interest to keep it maintained as a hampered alternative to native apps.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#110

Post by FinnLobsien »

dotandgtfo wrote: post #95
FinnLobsien wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue the opposite: It actually makes European businesses worth off by continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply. Add to that feel-good green initiatives like a packaging initiative that might lower packaging waste from European companies, but more likely will just make European goods more expensive and…

> I would argue the opposite: It actually makes European businesses worth off by continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply. Are you arguing that 27 different sets of laws was a better approach? That these countries would just gladly lie down and never regulate the societal-level harms, systemic lawbreaking, and…

The problem is that those 27 sets of laws basically still exist. Regulation is certainly not the only reason. Fragmentation is another massive problem.

There's the EU-Inc initiative that the EU has basically made pointless (by wanting to introduce 27 new standards, not one, just making things more complex).

Note that I'm not arguing for zero regulation.

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