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EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

politico.eu

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Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#181

Post by Isinlor »

igorkraw wrote: post #49

I pray that this, especially the interoperability requirements comes through not only with teeth, but with claws and a ravenous hunger. I believe one of the key things that allow innovation to foster is beating down the rentseekers,i.e. enabling adversarial interoperability https://www.eff.org/fr/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interop... and making it easy for individuals to tinker and innovate without needing capital…

Digital Markets Act give very broad executive powers to EU Commission to make sure that it will get implemented.

Specifically:

- article 7: Compliance with obligations for gatekeepers

- article 10: Updating obligations for gatekeepers and

- article 11: Anti-circumvention

Fines are up to 10% of annual global turnover, or daily fines up to 5% of average daily annual global turnover.

In more detail:

Article 11, Anti-circumvention

1. A gatekeeper shall ensure that the obligations of Articles 5 and 6 are fully and effectively complied with. While the obligations of Articles 5 and 6 apply in respect of core platform services designated pursuant to Article 3, their implementation shall not be undermined by any behaviour of the undertaking to which the gatekeeper belongs, regardless of whether this behaviour is of a contractual, commercial, technical or any other nature.

2. Where consent for collecting and processing of personal data is required to ensure compliance with this Regulation, a gatekeeper shall take the necessary steps to either enable business users to directly obtain the required consent to their processing, where required under Regulation (EU) 2016/679 and Directive 2002/58/EC, or to comply with Union data protection and privacy rules and principles in other ways including by providing business users with duly anonymised data where appropriate. The gatekeeper shall not make the obtaining of this consent by the business user more burdensome than for its own services.

3. A gatekeeper shall not degrade the conditions or quality of any of the core platform services provided to business users or end users who avail themselves of the rights or choices laid down in Articles 5 and 6, or make the exercise of those rights or choices unduly difficult.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#182

Post by cesarb »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #17
hrnnnnnn wrote: post #2

> Parliament also succeeded in convincing the Council of interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms. For group chats, this requirement will be rolled out over a period of four years. This would be great. I remember using pidgin back in the day and it was really convenient…

> meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms The way i read it, they're calling for open standards, which can be a good thing. Sadly, open standards also slow down the development of new features, as everybody needs to be "on board" for new features to roll out. Take email (SMTP, IMAP, etc) as an example, where no major progr…

> Sadly, open standards also slow down the development of new features, as everybody needs to be "on board" for new features to roll out. Take email (SMTP, IMAP, etc) as an example, where no major progress has been made in 25+ years, despite the platform being hopelessly insecure.

The usual answer for avoiding the need for everybody being "on board" with the changes is capability negotiation. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for email since it's a unidirectional, store-and-forward protocol: the sender has no way to negotiate capabilities with the recipient (or recipients, in case of a mailing list). If for instance I invent a new rich-text format for email, I have to include a fallback format on every message, since I cannot know whether the recipient can read my new format.

> Feel free to replace email for TCPv4/v6.

With TCP, there's another issue: middleboxes. While TCP does have working capability negotiation, unrelated third parties (which were not part of the negotiation) interfere with things they don't understand. If for instance I introduce a new TCP option which when negotiated changes the meaning of the sequence number field, a stateful firewall would drop the data packets even though they're valid for both endpoints. Due to the large amount of middleboxes in the wild, the design of TCP has been effectively "frozen", in that any enhancement will break unexpectedly for a large subset of users.

> The only successful open standard i can think of would be HTTP.

What saved HTTP was SSL/TLS. By making it hard for middleboxes to interfere without actually acting as an endpoint (with negotiation), it allowed the protocol to evolve. The best example is HTTP2: while there is a cleartext version of HTTP2, nobody uses it because it would get broken by middleboxes.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#183

Post by spiffytech »

hackerfromthefu wrote: post #165
chockchocschoir wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sadly, open standards also slow down the development of new features, as everybody needs to be "on board" for new features to roll out. Take email (SMTP, IMAP, etc) as an example, where no major progress has been made in 25+ years, despite the platform being hopelessly insecure. A more successful example of open standards would be the various standards that browsers use. Would you say that browser innovation has sl…

Yeah sure, but messaging apps don't need new features - they need to simply send messages to each other. Walled gardens suck as a user experience for messaging apps.

> messaging apps don't need new features - they need to simply send messages to each other.

Messaging apps have evolved in very pro-user ways over the years. Reactions, threads, voice/video/screenshare, and more are all popular with users. Stuff that we didn't have at all in the AIM era, or maybe only had on one chat platform.

And under the hood, I read that an important reason everyone left XMPP is it fundamentally requires an active connection, but that means your phone's radio can never enter low power mode, hurting battery life.

I miss Pidgin. I really liked having all my chats in one place. I sort of have that now with Beeper.

But it's also clear that we're not done evolving the medium, and standardized protocols, for all their upsides, often crystalize a platform in whatever state it's in when the standard is written.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#184

Post by Hamcha »

Rayhem wrote: post #145
Hamcha wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scope at which those alternatives exist are different than where the monopoly is established. Ie. The App Store has a monopoly on iOS, but iOS does not have a monopoly in the mobile space. This is like saying a state-mandated ISP/Gas company wouldn't be a monopoly since you can just move to another country. You might wanna push the argument that nobody is forcing you to use iOS, but I think the problem runs deepe…

> the option for not having the official COVID green pass app here in Italy is to find an authorized place that will print you a green pass on paper, and it's hard to find one, let alone schedule everything and get there without a pre-existing pass Apple's pseudomonopoly does not strike me as the root cause issue here, developing processes and using tech to solve a people problem does.

When the public administration does things with pen and paper, it's blamed for being ancient and "should get with the times". Now they are getting on with the times, but the times are ones ruled by giant American companies with no regulation.

Also, it's the country's duty to protect citizens from themselves using laws and regulations. For an example of what kind of "far west" digital tech is living right now, I point you back to before TV was regulated as heavily as today, where companies used cartoons to advertise smoking cigarettes to children (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAExoSozc2c).

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#185

Post by ericmay »

microtonal wrote: post #180
ericmay wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it will once it happens on iOS. Large companies like Facebook (not picking on Meta, just an easy example) really don’t want to follow Apple’s privacy guidelines, don’t want to ask users for permission to track their location, and don’t want to tell users what info they gather and how it’s used. Once Apple has to allow third-party app stores, many major software companies will either create their own App Store (gr…

Yes it will once it happens on iOS. Large companies like Facebook (not picking on Meta, just an easy example) really don’t want to follow Apple’s privacy guidelines, don’t want to ask users for permission to track their location, and don’t want to tell users what info they gather and how it’s used. Note though that in the EU they have to ask for permission to track their location and tell users what info they gather,…

Sure but they’ll just outrun regulation and find ways around it. This is even a problem with the App Store now when it comes to technologically sophisticated companies, but there’s a balance because if they’re too aggressive Apple will give them the boot. Once XYZ Tech Company has its own App Store it’ll be able to hide more nefarious activity, create legal fictions to avoid responsibility, and hide how it circumvents GDPR. Using the third-party store might require consenting to location tracking even. So users who want to use XYZ app will agree to a bunch of terms and conditions before being able to even use the app, and then it’ll just be open season.

I do not trust GDPR to handle this effectively. It’ll be like a lion trying to squash ants, and now there’s no single company that the EU can go to and say “fix this”. Apple will say “not my problem”.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#187

Post by grishka »

humanrebar wrote: post #154
grishka wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one side supports a feature and the other doesn't, they're still interoperable, just without that feature.

Liked "If one side supports a feature and the other doesn't, they're still interoperable, just without that feature." -------- This is what my group chats look like when texting with iMessage users.

That's one way of doing it, a better one would be to hide the like button.

Group chats over SMS? What kind of madness is that?

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#188

Post by viccuad »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #17
hrnnnnnn wrote: post #2

> Parliament also succeeded in convincing the Council of interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms. For group chats, this requirement will be rolled out over a period of four years. This would be great. I remember using pidgin back in the day and it was really convenient…

> meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms The way i read it, they're calling for open standards, which can be a good thing. Sadly, open standards also slow down the development of new features, as everybody needs to be "on board" for new features to roll out. Take email (SMTP, IMAP, etc) as an example, where no major progr…

> The way i read it, they're calling for open standards, which can be a good thing. > > Sadly, open standards also slow down the development of new features,

No. They are asking for endpoints and public APIs. Nobody is forced to adopt a standard, that is a fallacy you have just built (and has powered a tangential thread of 20 messages and counting.. debating something that is not in the topic).

Services will be forced to provide public endpoints and public APIs. Nobody is forcing them to shape them in any way. Consumers can decide to interface with them, or not. The onus on implementing and interfacing with them lays on the consumers. You don't need an agreement between everybody.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#189

Post by Karunamon »

microtonal wrote: post #179
m101010 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to understand how this is affecting you. Do you think that the existence of other App-Stores is reducing the quality of the apps in the Apple-Store?

This will lead to fragmentation where apps can only be bought in some app stores. Some will stay in the Apple app store, because people trust it. Others will flock to other stores to pay a lower commission fee. Regardless, I am in favor of this legislation. The iOS and Android ecosystems have become crucial infrastructure in modern life. So either Apple and Google act more like they are a utilities companies with low…

This is the world that android already lives in, and there is no meaningful fragmentation in app stores. I think your fears are overblown.
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