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Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

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Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#281

Post by bee_rider »

lispm wrote: post #137
davidgerard wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep. From Baldur Bjarnason: > For months, we’ve been hearing leaks about Apple’s talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e... The EU cannot allow a large business to mess around like this.

> The purpose of is the EU single market That's also a misconception. The EU single market is an important project, but there is a constant failure to understand the actual reason why the EU exists or also a purposeful misinterpretation. Countries joining the EU are requested not to join because of the single market, but because they want to join the political project of a more peaceful and an improving Europe. At it…

I think he explicitly handled your objection.

> Whenever I point out on social media that the single market is the purpose of the EU, I get bombarded by replies saying: “No you’re wrong. The EU was founded to preserve peace in Europe. Gotcha!”

> What mechanism do you think they used to preserve that peace? Cozy feelings about elections for the EU parliament? Happy thoughts about student exchange programs?

> The single market is the EU peace project, which makes protecting it an existential issue to many involved in the EU.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#282

Post by bee_rider »

mrweasel wrote: post #51
kernal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple should play their Trump card and threaten to pull out of the EU. The EU would blink first because the public backlash would be career ending.

They can't, Apple management have a responsibility to its shareholders and pull out of the EU or even threatening to do so would hurt the stock price. Also imaging the marketing spin you'd have to create: No no, we can't do business in the EU do to it's consumer protection laws. China is fine, they just execute or forcefully re-educate people, much easier people to do business with.

They don’t have any responsibility to optimize the short term stock price. They could decide that long term the changes required to stay in the EU were too onerous on their business and pull out. I think they’d be wrong, but they could do it.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#283

Post by arp242 »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #60

Imagine a world in which the EU instead funded research & implementation of public protocols to undermine US big tech? IE, they mention chat clients in the text, why not create something in the spirit of XMPP (or even revive it if the technical merits remain relevant?) I can almost feel it in my bones that there's a protocol behind "feed" websites like twitter & linkedin. Break the walled garden with open standards.…

WhatsApp is built on a hodge-podge of open standards (including XMPP) already. It's also closed off to everyone else. Good luck with your "open standard" XMPP client competing when everyone in your country uses WhatsApp.

Part of the DMA is that they must open this up for others so competition can actually happen in the first place (which in my reading they're not really doing in good faith by the way; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39635948)

Also WhatsApp isn't really "innovative" in the sense that it does something spectacularly new or brilliant. Most of the "innovation" comes from scaling it to the number of users they have, but that's a bit of a different thing. This is actually true for quite a bit of these Big Tech companies (especially the software-only companies).

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#284

Post by bee_rider »

kernal wrote: post #13
bee_rider wrote: post #8

The EU will win this if they want. Their trump card is that, actually, making the EU not a viable market for the most annoying US tech companies would be a huge win for many of their constituents.

Apple should play their Trump card and threaten to pull out of the EU. The EU would blink first because the public backlash would be career ending.

They could. I think it would be a capital-t Trump card; a spiteful move, wrapped up in the pretext of business acumen, the type of strategic thinking that could bankrupt a casino.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#285

Post by dialogawesome »

icehawk wrote: post #62
Caligatio wrote: post #28

I always scratch my head about articles that lump Meta, Apple, and Google together when it comes to regulations. They all have different problems that require different solutions. Apple - consumers give the company for hardware which is locked into a closed ecosystem. Apple extracts extra revenue by enforcing this closed ecosystem. There can be no competition other than not purchasing their hardware in the first plac…

As a consumer, I am particularly unsympathetic to what what Apple is doing to developers. The developers do the same to me when they have the opportunity.

With that attitude I ain't implementing special hacky workarounds for Safari anymore /s but in all seriousness why? barring developers with malicious intent most developers would just want cross-platform tooling, open systems and less friction in making apps all of which modern web provides and with PWA the experience is even more pleasant as long as relevant API's are available. But when you have a single browser engine preventing this experience it's simply not right. I don't want to code my app twice especially since I don't need the native performance.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#286

Post by bee_rider »

wiseowise wrote: post #97
mrweasel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes up everything the EU/Europe and Apple comes up: iMessage is hugely popular, it is just not the most popular (or even third or second) messaging platform. Also the largest is Facebook Messenge, and in the top five is another Meta product, WhatsApp. So it's not like it's all Signal, Viper or Telegram, it's mostly platforms from another US tech giant.

I’ve never heard anyone using iMessage in NL. most use WhatsApp, Telegram and some Signal.

In the US, the regular message app (which is to say, the one you’d use to send an sms) automatically goes through iMessage if you send from one iPhone to another. The bubble turns blue, but I think most people just think of it as “a text,” generically, other than weirdos who are too into messaging protocols.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#287

Post by jimbobthrowawy »

detolly wrote: post #78

Does anyone know if the DMA would apply to Playstation? Shouldn't I be allowed to boot whatever software I want (Linux) on my PS5?

I don't think they've sold enough units in Europe to automatically qualify. Also wouldn't be surprised if games consoles have a dedicated carveout for the foreseeable future.

I'd expect the online stores on those consoles, and the resale of digital content, to be impacted well before running other OSs on consoles that didn't ship with that feature.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#288

Post by ryandrake »

ben_w wrote: post #203
Caligatio wrote: post #28

I always scratch my head about articles that lump Meta, Apple, and Google together when it comes to regulations. They all have different problems that require different solutions. Apple - consumers give the company for hardware which is locked into a closed ecosystem. Apple extracts extra revenue by enforcing this closed ecosystem. There can be no competition other than not purchasing their hardware in the first plac…

> To be clear, these multi billion/trillion dollar companies don't need anyone defending them. However, it would be interesting to see what the EU's position would be if Meta started as an EU company. I absolutely agree on this point. I do have the… bias, that in my formative years Apple was very much the plucky underdog in danger of bankruptcy. This may be why I am less concerned about what Apple does. I am aware th…

> Facebook Messenger is my only way to remain in contact with some people.

This is always an exaggeration. You mean to tell me there are people out there for whom the only way to get in touch with them is through Facebook? They don't have a phone number, SMS, an E-mail address (note you need an E-mail address to sign up for Facebook in the first place), a postal address, and ears for word of mouth conversation?

I found Facebook to be the easiest company to voluntarily avoid. One day, about ten years ago, I simply changed my password to a random string and threw it away, and that was it. It was scary at first (FOMO) but ultimately it didn't even slightly affect my social life or ability to keep in contact with people. I told everyone what I was doing and that I would not be accessing the company's products anymore, and we just switched over to other means of communication. No big deal.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#289

Post by ein0p »

RadiozRadioz wrote: post #189
ein0p wrote: post #34

I’m an Apple fan and I keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in Apple stock, and I still hope we at least get side loading out of all this. I do not believe this would be in any way detrimental to Apple - most people don’t give a shit. But for me and others like me it’d be pretty neat to do on my iPhone and iPad what I can already do on my Mac: install my own software that is not arbitrarily time limited.

This sounds like a bad idea for diversification unless you're extremely wealthy and have tens of hundreds of thousands in other things.

It's of course not the only thing in my portfolio, nor is it even the main security in it. Parking all the money in a single stock would be an extremely bad idea indeed.

Re: Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

#290

Post by SSLy »

karma_pharmer wrote: post #230
grishka wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consoles aren't generally seen by people as general-purpose computers, neither are they marketed as such by their manufacturers. They're seen by most people as appliances for playing video games.

I don't see cellphones as general purpose computers either. For exactly the same reason why I don't see game consoles as general purpose computers: neither one will run arbitrary programs. They only run programs that are blessed by their manufacturer. Both are appliances. I'm really failing to see the distinction here. Big tech will simply declare that phones aren't "general purpose computers". There is no reasonable…

Video Consoles are a semi-luxury product, not essentials to modern society like smartphones are.
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