Breach. Get sued. Pay Fine. Rinse. Repeat. At this point it looks like governments want the money and companies are gleefully willing to pay.
All in agreement behind closed doors with the EU bureaucrats
Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law
421–430 of 635 posts
Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with Chrome and the DMA has to do with the fact that Alphabet does these "don'ts": - treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform - prevent users from un-installing any pre-installed software or app if they wish so (Chrome on Android can be disabled but not uninstalled) - trac…
None of that is used to determine who is a gatekeeper. The assessment for whether Chrome qualified as a gatekeeper is less than 3 pages long. All they care about is whether they qualify as a platform and that they are over the threshold for active non-business users, active business users, revenue in the EU for enough time. At no point did they concern themselves with potential anti-competitive practices in making th…
I think the document you really want to look at is this one, which is the actual regulation the DMA is operating under: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/1925/oj/eng
That regulation is very much concerned with anti-competitive practices. What we're seeing now is the application (or execution) of those regulations.
When I look at Regulation (EU) 2022/1925, it's pretty clear to me that Spotify does not have, for example, "very strong network effects, an ability to connect many business users with many end users through the multisidedness of these services, a significant degree of dependence of both business users and end users, lock-in effects, a lack of multi-homing for the same purpose by end users, vertical integration, and data driven-advantages."
Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I wouldn’t install software unless it were from a really trusted person doing something extremely unique and useful that doesn’t have an alternative on the Apple Store (think UTM with JIT for iPad). Please don’t take that as a negative comment but I suspect most people source their software from conveniently centralized repos whether it be App Store, Steam or even the main package manager on a Linux distri…
Great, and you are free to do so and will continue to be free to do so. The point is that the OP is not free to do so.
>Great, and you are free to do so and will continue to be free to do so.
Not necessarily, once other channels are available developers could choose to force their clients down that road.
Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law
#424Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interested in learning more, do you have links to the sources?
It's joke :) It was impossible to give it a serious reply, so...
They're being facetious.
But here's a source for future readers: https://justpaste.it/jog4v
Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Of course Meta could just withdrawn from the EU. I mean, probably not without being sued by their shareholders. As a public company, you cannot simply abandon 40bn revenue/year because you feel aggrieved. But yeah, the "you'd better be nice to us, EC, or Trump might be angry" tactic is kinda shot at this point.
> I mean, probably not without being sued by their shareholders. As a public company, you cannot simply abandon 40bn revenue/year because you feel aggrieved. What are the laws that Meta would be violating?
>As a public company, you cannot simply abandon 40bn revenue/year because you feel aggrieved.
The fines need to get bigger then.
Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not my comparison. It's yours, and just as meaningless as your previous one about McDonald's. This one's no better, either, as Costco's terms for its wholesale suppliers aren't anywhere close to Apple's, even though the agreement is structured more or less similarly -- but sure, let's entertain it: Costco's terms for its suppliers aren't public, but at least the ones that are on public record (via the SEC: https…
The root of your confusion is you think when you've installed and run the app you are no longer in "Costco", but you never left. You can buy any number of in game items on iOS and then go and use those same items in the Play Store version of the games, and vice versa.
The root of yours is that you keep trying to make this about McDonalds, Amazon, Ebay, Costco or some other contraption instead of the App Store, which is what this is actually is about. Not that the argument matters, because the exact moment when you leave Costco has no bearing on the fact that Costco doesn't restrict what payment processor are used in the digital goods that it sells.
But even if it did, Apple's ToS clearly distinguish between the App Store and the licensed application, and between interactions in the App Store and interactions from within the application. You may not want to make the same distinction in order to be right about some imaginary system that you're thinking about, but this is about the actual App Store, not whatever iMcCostco-Amazon marketplace you've dreamed up.
Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law
#428> The EU fines could stoke tensions with U.S President Donald Trump who has threatened to levy tariffs against countries that penalise U.S. companies. Mark Zuckerberg, in his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, specifically noted this as his goal for falling in behind Trump. That Trump would be the big-stick man that would protect Meta and other cos from foreign interference. Where "interference" is anything restricti…
Most Canadian small businesses rely on Meta to get customers. If you think these companies don't add value, you are totally oblivious to the millions of small businesses that rely on these platforms to reach customers and niche audiences around the world.
Yeah, because small businesses didn't exist before Facebook arrived.
Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically, the first amendment applies only to state actors, not private entities. See Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, Hudgens v. NLRB, and many other cases that upheld this interpretation. Private companies like Apple can restrict free speech on their platforms legally (at least as far as the first amendment is concerned). That said, I believe in the principle of free speech, especially as envisioned…
> Technically, the first amendment applies only to state actors, not private entities. That's probably not what the person you're responding to is talking about. Americans have this unfortunate tendency to harp on and on about 'free speech' in contexts where the first amendment obviously does not apply, or, even more intriguingly/ironically, where the first amendment pretty clearly states the exact opposite. For exam…
> I don't understand what you're on about.
Likewise, I think we have a miscommunication here because I agree with everything you wrote.
I'm not making a legal argument about free speech at all. I agree with your analysis on the legality there. Now that said, I do think the Biden admin crossed the line of legality with their collaboration (and a little implied threatening) Twitter and Facebook, and their whole establishing an office whose job it was to report "disinformation" on social media to the tech giants.
I'm speaking culturally. To go back to the Lab Leak Theory example when Youtube was taking down any videos that even mentioned it (even if the mentioner was a well-respected Evolutionary Biologist) wasn't illegal, but it was a total abandonment of free speech principles. It feels like it's abated quite a bit in the last year or two, but for a while there, there were ideological rakes all over the place that any mention of would get your content taken down by big tech.
Now all that being said, I do think there's a point at which the line between private corp and government starts to blur, and I do think big tech is approaching that line. For most of history, no corporation could even approach the level of power over our lives as government, but increasingly they are getting so powerful that we can't even function in society without them. I think we're approaching or past the point where regulation and/or breaking them apart is necessary to reduce the amount of power that they have over us.
Re: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics. But what alternative? There is no European smartphone OS. Windows and Steam OS and XBox are US-american, too. I suppose Linux, Playstation, and Nintendo, then?
Wouldn't be sad about a Linux smartphone.
My dream is to run NixOS in all my devices…