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Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

ca.finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#371

Post by carlosjobim »

rini17 wrote: post #222
carlosjobim wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is true, how come new competitors spring up all the time in Silicon Valley and other places in the US while the European sector lies dormant?

Consider what happened to Nokia. The first business blunder caused it to be sold to US and gutted. Now if someone else wants to make smartphones in EU, has to start from scratch. But if that happens to US company, everything(at least the IP) stays in the US.

Nokia is a strange story. I remember when it happened, and absolutely everybody knew it would kill the company to sell it to Microsoft. So of course the leaders and owners of Nokia knew the same thing. My guess is that they decided that they couldn't compete with the iPhone and decided to cash out what they could. Maybe Microsoft could help them with shuttling money to offshore accounts or some other under the table services? Nokia was publicly traded, so it could have been a great robbing of small time investors. But did Microsoft really get anything out of the deal that was worth the price?

I had the Nokia N9 at the time, which was years ahead of its time and one of the most well designed smartphones so far, both in hardware and especially in software. Modern iOS and Android still look dated in comparison.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#372

Post by sapphicsnail »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #329
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #238

US officials and businessmen keep on repeating the same thing: > The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards. But this is wildly untrue. The EU isn't hand-picking individual organisations and fining them because they're American, they're fining them because they're in breach of existing legislation.…

Agreed with your first point. Regarding TikTok though the argument was never (AFAIK) that they were actively breaking the law but rather that their structure and ownership posed a threat to US interests. That's pretty reasonable and largely mirrors China's stance against the US. If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations. They seem to prioritize free tr…

I find this so confusing. Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk are foreigners who are both demonstrably influencing American politics through media they control. What makes Tiktok different?

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#373

Post by Aloisius »

jakob_endler wrote: post #341
walkingthisquai wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... Though I agree with you in principle, the DMA does target specific gatekeeper companies and the criteria for these were set conveniently to ensure no EU company is regulated by it. So I can see their point a little

thats only kinda right. The DMA does include booking.com as a gatekeeper, which is european. But most gatekeepers (except booking and tiktok) are US-based

Booking Holdings is American. They bought booking.com in 2005.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#374

Post by Zopieux »

dwaite wrote: post #365
radlad wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the question whether they were set because they were US companies, or because they are dominant gatekeepers on the Internet? 5/7 designated gatekeepers are US companies: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en

I thought Booking Holdings Inc was also American. There are zero European companies, including Spotify - the #1 music streaming marketplace in the world.

What exactly does Spotify gatekeep though?

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#375

Post by phtrivier »

SllX wrote: post #298
judge2020 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "pay or consent" advertising model, Wait, so the EU has made it illegal to sell a paid service while also offering an alternative where the user pays via seeing ads?

No. They just made it illegal for Meta specifically to do it, and they’re reserving judgment for anyone else on their hit list covered by the DMA. The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles despite the PR and the extra layers of indirection, it targets American and Chinese companies specifically because that’s what it was designed to do.

Not Meta specifically, although Meta as a monopoly on being apple to infrige this rule. (A long time ago, in a capitalism far, far way, America was against monopolies and cartels. Those days will come back.)

> The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles

What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ?

I can agree on some version of "not a neutral law" in that it is "objectively" targeted: the law makes a difference between smaller actors and bigger ones ("gatekeepers") (and it's not clear to me if the criterias (size, audience, revenues, etc...) are set in store, or arbitrary [1]).

It happens that they're all from the US except TikTok's ByteDance and Booking.com. It was probably _designed_ for that.

But I suspect the case here "Meta is offering you to pay, so that they don't have to respect your rights to privacy". I suspect it would be illegal for even the smaller data collectors. But IANAL.

However, the "neutral principles" don't make sense. All laws are principled, except the laws of physics.

In this case, yes, the "principle" is that personal data is something to be treated with care. As often, you can state that something is a "principle" when someone can have the opposite version. So the "opposite" version of this is that personal data is a commodity that can be sold at will.

None of those version is neutrally "true" or "false".

However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter.

The shame is that it never was directly settled in a democratic debate - it's entirely the work of the legislative bodies of the EU, which, though elected and representative, are not exactly well know of famous. Maybe the debate is too technical to be popular.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...

[2] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en#book...

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#376

Post by pbiggar »

sapphicsnail wrote: post #372
fc417fc802 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed with your first point. Regarding TikTok though the argument was never (AFAIK) that they were actively breaking the law but rather that their structure and ownership posed a threat to US interests. That's pretty reasonable and largely mirrors China's stance against the US. If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations. They seem to prioritize free tr…

I find this so confusing. Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk are foreigners who are both demonstrably influencing American politics through media they control. What makes Tiktok different?

[flagged]

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#377

Post by madeofpalk »

superzamp wrote: post #367
mrtksn wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the most easily agreeable part of what the EU has been after It's also probably the most dangerous for Apple. It creates a cash incentive to push people outside of Apple's walled garden and show them what's outside. I really really hope Apple gets its act together, they are the greatest "the user experience comes first" company and they actually have great hard tech but they show signs of rent seeking behavior which…

I would imagine that getting the user out of the in-app purchase payment screen and attempt to redirect them at the website for payment, have them figure out how to enter credit card details etc would result in a drastically decreased conversion rate though.

So it should! Then Apple's App Store and IAP could compete on its own merits, rather than restricting competition from existing at all.

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#378

Post by pbiggar »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #325
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #238

US officials and businessmen keep on repeating the same thing: > The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards. But this is wildly untrue. The EU isn't hand-picking individual organisations and fining them because they're American, they're fining them because they're in breach of existing legislation.…

I think you make many good points. Slight tangent: Why isn't EU more concerned about TikTok? While it is very difficult to prove, various studies have demonstrated that TikTok pushes more content favoring the Chinese Government (CCP).

Actually, the problem the US had with Tiktok that was it did not censor people from talking about Palestine

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-tiktok-ban-linked-isra...

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#379

Post by baby »

freedomben wrote: post #334
Yeul wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't Americans always going on about free speech?

As an American who thinks free speech is one of the most important rights we have, I wish the answer to your question would be a collective "yes" but unfortunately it is not.

In America free speech is always limited to what "I find acceptable". There's an infinite number of things that lots of Americans will find unacceptable. Swearing is beeped/censored everywhere (even on youtube), songs release "explicit" and "clean" versions, nipples are blurred on TV, some words you can't say even in an educational or karaoke setting (N-word, R-word, etc.)

Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

#380

Post by bojan »

jakob_endler wrote: post #341
walkingthisquai wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... Though I agree with you in principle, the DMA does target specific gatekeeper companies and the criteria for these were set conveniently to ensure no EU company is regulated by it. So I can see their point a little

thats only kinda right. The DMA does include booking.com as a gatekeeper, which is european. But most gatekeepers (except booking and tiktok) are US-based

Booking.com was European, is not any more. It is now a subsidiary of Booking Holding (formerly Priceline), based in Connecticut.
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