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Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

reuters.com

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Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#391

Post by InTheArena »

From personal, separate experience with Europe. It's quite common that the market watchdog and the privacy watchdogs are at odds with each other and make it impossible to achieve a solution that satisfies both of them.

Another example here is Google Chrome - which still allows third party cookies because even thought the privacy regulator wanted them gone, the market regulator required them to architect a solution that was unworkable to not take advantage of their gatekeeper advantages when others didn't have the same rights as them. Google finally said fuck it, and walked away from the privacy features in order to satisfy the anti-trust regulators.

Not shipping this feature in Europe is a common way to deal with satisfying the balkanized regulators there.

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#392

Post by atraac »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #304

While I can sympathize with the desire for interoperability (I too pine for the days of Adium/Pidgin), the EU’s approach to all of this feels needlessly and potentially harmfully heavy-handed. They basically make it an existential risk to build your success on anything nicely and neatly tightly vertically integrated. Everything must be dragged down to mediocrity by the unavoidable slippage between mandated abstractio…

These laws only apply to megacorps. It's not an existential risk to them, as Apple is clearly proving now.

Who is saying that enforcing companies to open their systems to competition is making them mediocre? Maybe if that's the end result, they should put more time into designing systems that wouldn't become mediocre just by allowing third parties to do things with those said systems? We need to stop defending corporates for abusing their monopolies.

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#393

Post by KaiserPro »

eykanal wrote: post #38
afavour wrote: post #2

Apple said "hey, can we not comply with the law", the EU said no, so it didn't launch. Seems pretty straightforward to me. I can see why Apple might want to request an 18 month exemption, there's clearly extra work required to comply with EU regulations. But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy: let them get used to using it every day for 18 months, then pressure the EU to…

Google eng mgr here. I've worked on a few projects related to compliance with various government policies. This isn't "assign a two-pizza team to it, will be done in a quarter"; these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years. Su…

Meta research eng here

Yes, but also its much cheaper to build it in at the very start.

When we built pervert glasses research platform, if we'd just ignored the data privacy laws we could have built it much quicker. But, the only reason it took extra time is because

1) we had no idea what we were doing and

2) the lawyers had even less idea, so we had to do a bunch of reading and make a best guess.

Turns out the guesses were right, but it was painful getting the lawyers to understand.

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#394

Post by mirekrusin »

afavour wrote: post #2

Apple said "hey, can we not comply with the law", the EU said no, so it didn't launch. Seems pretty straightforward to me. I can see why Apple might want to request an 18 month exemption, there's clearly extra work required to comply with EU regulations. But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy: let them get used to using it every day for 18 months, then pressure the EU to…

They should use siri to code it quickly, no?

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#395

Post by vrganj »

bnj wrote: post #27
afavour wrote: post #2

Apple said "hey, can we not comply with the law", the EU said no, so it didn't launch. Seems pretty straightforward to me. I can see why Apple might want to request an 18 month exemption, there's clearly extra work required to comply with EU regulations. But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy: let them get used to using it every day for 18 months, then pressure the EU to…

As I follow the situation, it seems that regulatory uncertainty is a major issue though- the EU’s requirements are framed in terms of outcomes sought, rather than in terms that can be quantitatively shown as met or broken. So it’s not a matter of dedicating a team to meet a list of requirements, but instead navigating the worst case scenario of enforcement if post-launch the EU determines that the proscribed outcomes…

That is fundamentally how EU law works

The intent matters, not the letter of the law. No loopholes, no bad faith interpretation. Just do what the law wants from you, if you make a mistake in good faith, you'll be given leeway to fix it.

> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#396

Post by lifty »

andix wrote: post #329
jldugger wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By who? The only US people who seem to like the tarrifs are the ones front running trades on their announcement.

Such political statements never damage the brand for every citizen, but for some. Tesla is a good example. Elon Musk became political and anti-EU, which resulted in an irreparable damage of the Tesla brand in Europe. Not for everyone, but a big group of people would never again consider buying a Tesla. As a result Tesla lost market share in Europe. Apple seems to be on the same path now.

More like EU became anti-Musk. And Tesla had great sales in the first half of 2026 in the EU.

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#398

Post by xigoi »

spullara wrote: post #92
afavour wrote: post #2

Apple said "hey, can we not comply with the law", the EU said no, so it didn't launch. Seems pretty straightforward to me. I can see why Apple might want to request an 18 month exemption, there's clearly extra work required to comply with EU regulations. But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy: let them get used to using it every day for 18 months, then pressure the EU to…

Personally, I wouldn't want Apple to comply with this EU law and I hope that more companies refuse to release features with onerous requirements. Opening up all access to control the phone to some random app the consumer installed seems super dangerous.

> Opening up all access to control the phone to some random app the consumer installed seems super dangerous.

Do you never install software on your desktop computer?

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#399

Post by InTheArena »

afavour wrote: post #2

Apple said "hey, can we not comply with the law", the EU said no, so it didn't launch. Seems pretty straightforward to me. I can see why Apple might want to request an 18 month exemption, there's clearly extra work required to comply with EU regulations. But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy: let them get used to using it every day for 18 months, then pressure the EU to…

The market regulators don't give a fuck if companies screw over their customers privacy wise, as long as it's to the advantage of European companies and European customers.

This can lead to absolute insanity as companies try to satisfy both privacy and market conditions. It's not simple. How many years did google waste with Sandbox?

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#400

Post by sublimefire »

ErneX wrote: post #119

It would be nice if Europe had companies innovating at this level but it’s not happening. If you make a list of tentative companies that would integrate their stuff to the OS like Siri it’s very likely all those are major US companies, so I don’t even know at this point what the EU is trying to defend here. All I know is we are buying the same devices designed by the US but keep increasing the list of features we can…

> innovating at this level

At what level? Improve Siri which is lagging behind, then add llms?

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