Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 930 posts

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#111

Post by ParksNet »

superb-owl wrote: post #5

This is huge. Forcing Apple to allow app side-loading, third-party payments, etc is going to wrest away control of the iOS ecosystem (and eat pretty heavily into their revenues [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/10/apple-implies-it-generated-r... I hope some of these regulations spill over into the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Apple's greed (in maintaining the egregious 30% commission for so long) is going to undermine their entire ecosystem.

If Apple moved voluntarily to 10% or 15% for all, there never would have been the industry pressure for this sort of regulation.

The EU would have been better to just mandate a maximum % commission for all digital marketplaces above a certain level of revenue. This new solution will get poked full of holes by Apple and lead to an inferior experience for consumers.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#112

Post by wccrawford »

oneoff786 wrote: post #94
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #85

I really hope Sony and Nintendo are classified as gatekeepers as well because this > Allow users to install apps from third-party app stores and sideload directly from the internet. would be huge for Playstation and Switch owners.

It might kill off consoles entirely tbh

It would certainly fundamentally change their business model.

XBox already seems to be changing, though, with the majority of their games also on PC and even supporting streaming to mobile devices, without a console at all.

I could see Playstation moving towards that model as well, focusing on the games rather than the hardware.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#113

Post by bildung »

kmlx wrote: post #34
nojito wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine thinking that punishing success is the way to go. Europe loves propping up failing companies and industries. Not very surprising that they would go after a company with barely a 30% share of the market.

protectionism is not new, but it’s definitely in the eu’s dna. there are huge lobby groups that constantly want more protection in europe. and they almost always get what they want.

> protectionism is not new, but it’s definitely in the eu’s dna.

This is actually the opposite. The EU here is enforcing market competition in segments that became entrenched by monopolies (remember this is not specifically about Apple).

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#115

Post by Apocryphon »

philliphaydon wrote: post #86
toyg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually opens a race to be the best mobile browser, which might well see new entrants. As people increasingly use their mobiles as primary devices, they are more likely to move to a new browser on mobile platforms and then adapt their desktops to that choice, rather than the other way around as they did in the past. Current mobile browsers have historical baggage that a new entrant would not need to carry.

> This actually opens a race to be the best mobile browser, which might well see new entrants. Hahhahahhahahahaha. We will end up with chrome. And developers targeting chrome and safari users being left out because “works best in chrome for my text based website that doesn’t do anything safari can’t do”.

Sounds like Apple needs to work harder to make Safari into a better mobile browser, if you're so sure that Chrome would win.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#116

Post by giantrobot »

weberer wrote: post #90
kmlx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> great, just like in the mid-00's! funnily enough i was working on apps that did this back in the mid 00s. it was horrible. the standards simply couldn’t keep up. the clients couldn’t keep up. in the end it was better for the end user not use those standards and instead we rolled our own. could be different story today but i don’t think so. just the video call feature would be an absolute mess to standardise. hell,…

>it was horrible. the standards simply couldn’t keep up. the clients couldn’t keep up. The best chat application I ever used was Pidgin circa 2008. It was so easy to be able to talk to all my friends across several different protocols in a single program.

Pidgin existed not because IM services provided interoperability but because someone wrote libgaim and equivalents for other protocols. Keeping those up to date was a massive effort.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#117

Post by ajaimk »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #85

I really hope Sony and Nintendo are classified as gatekeepers as well because this > Allow users to install apps from third-party app stores and sideload directly from the internet. would be huge for Playstation and Switch owners.

While I want this to be true, consoles only exist because of game revenue.

Not sure a $2000 PS5 is as appealing

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#118

Post by izacus »

s1k3s wrote: post #89

I can't make up my mind if this is good or bad. On one hand, FAANG has a huge advantage over anyone else on the market, but they did build that product and they did spend their own money to do it. I'd be curious if there are any other occurrences in history of something so big ending up regulated by the government?

Market competition is pretty much the only thing that keeps capitalism in check and benefits people. Without it, it breaks in such a horrible manner that it almost degenerates into feudalism with corporations replacing aristocracy.

And moves like this are way overdue to kinda brings us back in balance where we (as users, consumers) actually can again mix and match products that compete for our choice and aren't just chosen because we're forced into using a certain corporations whole ecosystem due to some unrelated wishes.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#119

Post by chris_st »

ParksNet wrote: post #111
superb-owl wrote: post #5

This is huge. Forcing Apple to allow app side-loading, third-party payments, etc is going to wrest away control of the iOS ecosystem (and eat pretty heavily into their revenues [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/10/apple-implies-it-generated-r... I hope some of these regulations spill over into the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Apple's greed (in maintaining the egregious 30% commission for so long) is going to undermine their entire ecosystem. If Apple moved voluntarily to 10% or 15% for all, there never would have been the industry pressure for this sort of regulation. The EU would have been better to just mandate a maximum % commission for all digital marketplaces above a certain level of revenue. This new solution will get poked full of…

I see this, and it just makes me think that if they had, we'd be seeing posts that say, "Apple's greed (in maintaining the egregious 10% commission for so long) is going to undermine their entire ecosystem. If Apple moved voluntarily to 5% or 3% for all, ...".

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#120

Post by _the_inflator »

superb-owl wrote: post #5

This is huge. Forcing Apple to allow app side-loading, third-party payments, etc is going to wrest away control of the iOS ecosystem (and eat pretty heavily into their revenues [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/10/apple-implies-it-generated-r... I hope some of these regulations spill over into the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Never underestimate the creative genius of Apple. They will come up with new solutions to keep their walled garden.

"Allow users to install apps from third-party app stores and sideload directly from the internet"

I bet this is going to be a horrible user experience. "Are you really sure?", "Apple takes no responsibility not warranty" whatsoever.

What sound usually easy on paper...

Post reply on HN