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

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

#51

Post by toyg »

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.

Careful with your glass houses. Without restrictions on Japanese companies selling chips in the US, Silicon Valley would have been very different.

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

#52

Post by Noe2097 »

mikhailt wrote: post #32

In case someone here knows but how is it even possible that EU can fine companies based on the whole world "turnover" (which I might incorrectly presume meaning profits) when their power is restricted to the EU space. Re: this: > The DMA says that gatekeepers who ignore the rules will face fines of up to 10 percent of the company's total worldwide annual turnover, or 20 percent in the event of repeated infringements,…

I see it this way: the EU may choose whatever way it wants to compute a fine -- they are making the law, they could have written a fixed amount, or an amount based on revenue made in the EU (which is probably a pain to define and certainly easy to "workaround"), or an amount relative to the average temperature in the Sahara over a year.

Whether it's "fair" is an entirely different topic. And I guess any company could try to fight that decision in court.

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

#53

Post by waffleiron »

mikhailt wrote: post #32

In case someone here knows but how is it even possible that EU can fine companies based on the whole world "turnover" (which I might incorrectly presume meaning profits) when their power is restricted to the EU space. Re: this: > The DMA says that gatekeepers who ignore the rules will face fines of up to 10 percent of the company's total worldwide annual turnover, or 20 percent in the event of repeated infringements,…

Same way you can be fined in another country while on holiday even though you don't earn any money there. They set the law, and if you (or Apple) doesn't like it don't go/have business there.

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

#54

Post by usrn »

I really hate having the government involved in regulating this sort of stuff but Apple has brought so much destruction in bad faith it's hard to feel sympathy.

They have nearly single-handedly killed open source chat software (people forget that before the iPhone you could actually send messages from Goolge talk to AIM thanks to XMPP, this still exists but Apple has made it nearly impossible to use comfortably on the iPhone.) Fuck them, I hope they go out of business. As for the "consumer tech industry" that's practically dead at this point anyway, no sense worrying about it.

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

#55

Post by M2Ys4U »

sph wrote: post #6

Happy that I might be able to install something else than Safari. I want the Gecko engine on iOS. Sad that being in UK probably means we'll ignore it because "Brexit." I got a text the other day telling me that, since we've left the EU, roaming charges are back. Hurray! Without making this about politics, this is a great step forward. Still unsure how Apple & co. will make their proprietary video and messaging platfo…

>Happy that I might be able to install something else than Safari. I want the Gecko engine on iOS. Sad that being in UK probably means we'll ignore it because "Brexit."

Specifically on this point, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority are taking action.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-plans-market-investig...

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

#56

Post by kmlx »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #25
kmlx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

depends on the company really. some might think a bit more about offering their products to eu countries considering (some of) these rules. which imo are quite serious, and some even ridiculous.

Which ones do you find ridiculous? They frankly diverge from the current status quo but to me they all go in the right direction.

i foresee a fiasco in general, but a few stand out:

> Share data and metrics with developers and competitors, including marketing and advertising performance data.

with competitors? :))

> Allow developers to integrate their apps and digital services directly with those belonging to a gatekeeper. This includes making messaging, voice-calling, and video-calling services interoperable with third-party services upon request.

could have been solved easily if they proposed a working group to come up with the next video and messaging standard. right now i foresee the discussions we had back in mid 00s: we use our own video encoder. they use h263. and those other guys use vp9. good luck to the team writing a transcoder that works real time :))

> The Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires platforms to do more to police the internet for illegal content, has also been approved.

“think of the children” legislation.

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

#57

Post by amelius »

988747 wrote: post #8
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.

I wonder if it would make more financial sense for Apple to withdraw from EU market, rather than complying. The numbers for 2021 are pretty much in line: $89B - Apple sales in Europe (including some non-EU countries, most notably UK) $85B - Apple AppStore revenue worldwide. The question is: which one has more potential for growth.

Then I wonder what would happen if Taiwan introduced the same legislation.

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

#58

Post by toyg »

kmlx wrote: post #27
dijit wrote: post #18

I'm personally very happy with Safari slowing down the over-arching progress of "Web browsers are an application distribution platform", but I definitely see the value in this. I am very excited about the prospect of having federation between communication platforms... imagine sending messages from iMessage to whatsapp?! great, just like in the mid-00's!

> 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,…

> the standards simply couldn’t keep up

Or rather: developers were so up their own backsides that effectively refused to cooperate. Obviously you go faster if you don't have to talk to anyone, and everybody loves lock-in. Which is why this legislation is welcome.

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

#59

Post by cm2187 »

darrenf wrote: post #42
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #24

Edit: It is clear that I was an idiot with this comment and my facts are quite wrong. Removed.

> They might choose to do so with a special version of iPhone that only works in the EU with EU languages and EU carrier bands (no English language strictly necessary because the UK left, remember?)... I think Ireland (and Malta) would like a word: " English remains an official EU language, despite the United Kingdom having left the EU. It remains an official and working language of the EU institutions as long as it…

And in all fairness it is the only common language anyway. I read a study that compared the percentage of a generation in the EU that studied a particular foreign language that is not their native language in high school or university. English is north of 95%. The second largest are I think French and Spanish at around 30%. So when you have 27 nationalities in a room, there isn’t really any other practical alternative right now. English is the modern latin, whatever you think of the US, UK or Roman empire.

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

#60

Post by kitsunesoba »

amelius wrote: post #13

It will be interesting to see what dark patterns Apple will come up with to resist this. I imagine every time you open Firefox you will get a popup window saying "Do you want to use Safari instead?"

Google already does this in its iOS apps. When tapping a link in e.g. Gmail, it won’t just open your default browser, but instead open a menu asking you to choose your default browser or Chrome. It has a “remember this choice” toggle but it shouldn’t be there at all… just obey the OS default browser setting.
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