The EU has basically said that it's better to have a handful medium-sized companies in competition for customers than one or two mega-corps owning and dictating the market. And to resolve that they employ two things, one is the DMA/DSA and similar laws which mostly takes effect when your company reaches a certain large market penetration, the other is standardisations such as the Radio Equipment Directive (think "USB-C law" and similar ones) that make it easier for consumers to avoid vendor lock-in.

> just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead

Temu is under active investigation for breaching these laws, anyone operating within EU is subject to those laws, not just European companies (e.g. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-ope...)

> regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply

This is a very inaccurate view. I’ve worked with multiple SMEs and no such “complexities” ever become operational challenges. Even as a indie developer, my compliance is a default provided I’m not trying to do something shady.

Looking into the EU regulations, in most cases what they want you to do (or not do) is common sense.

DMA is applicable only to "gatekeepers" who markets with X amount of users. This is designed not to burden smaller businesses, but to limit monopoly of the large few corporations.

> It actually makes European businesses worth off by continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply.

The DMA (that this article is about) applies to gatekeepers (massive companies like big tech), not mom and pop startups

That is the western European way though. It's supposed to be a nice place to live, not a nice place to do business. If that leads to Chaebolification of the economy then so be it. There are other parts of the world that specialise in deregulation at the expense of living standards.

Massive companies typically smother small players anyway, especially in unregulated environments.

> Add to that feel-good green initiatives like a packaging initiative that might lower packaging waste from European companies, but more likely will just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead.

Does this actually happen or are you just making shit up?

Is Temu exempt of any packaging requirements?

> I would argue the opposite: It actually makes European businesses worth off by continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply.

Are you arguing that 27 different sets of laws was a better approach? That these countries would just gladly lie down and never regulate the societal-level harms, systemic lawbreaking, and massive infringement of privacy across the board? I don't think so.

For a moment the political system in the US seemed to get to the same conclusions as the EU under Bidens FTC and anti-trust cases. But the conclusions of that remain to be seen.

> continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex

To be fair, the regulations are there because companies are out-of-control paperclip maximisers. For example, the cookie banner didn't have to be obnoxious - companies choose to comply maliciously to adhere to the text and shit over the spirit of the regulations, which have to become more and more verbose and explicit.

... where is it easy to do business anyway? sure, there are degrees, levels, grades of this, the size of the barriers to entry matters, there are metrics about how easy it is to start a business for example, but that's just one aspect, and I'd argue mostly an unimportant one (if it takes 2 hours or 2 days or 1 weeks it's fine, what matters is how much does it cost to do it and how much does it cost to maintain the legal entity, and to do the filings, etc.)

> regulatory environment so complex

The DMA really isn't particularly complex though. And what complexity it has only becomes complex once you're a manager of a whole consumer platform (a "gatekeeper" in its jargon).

To wit: your point is backwards, the DMA is structured such that the only companies that need to bear its burdens are "big tech or Europe's legacy players". If you're a little company wanting to add a paid app store to your Tiny AI Robot Virtual Experience or whatever, go nuts. The DMA absolutely won't stop you.

Can you also expand on why? Especially in this case I do feel like it’s an (imperfect) proxy for power they wield.

European companies I could find which the European Commission has taken action against with the Digital Services Act:

Zalando has three enforcement actions against them since June 2023

Booking.com has one

Technius (mainly streaming) has two

WebGroup CZ (Adult entertainment) has five

> we simply don't have any gatekeepers here

Booking would love that to be the case. And last I heard, Zalando is currently fighting the EU over having to comply with the DMA.

Where would you place it? I'm curious because centre-right is quite spot on.

Quite right, yeah. See the map:

https://www.foiaresearch.net/sites/default/files/styles/body...

I would consider ALDE center-right still, and S&D the first left coalition.

Center right is spot on if you know anything about the EU's member states. Here left means some flavour of socialism. Running state monopolies to the ground and adding markets for essential services like electricity is not exactly that.

Yes, the EU as an institution is centre-right, its main purpose is to regulate a common market, it's a economic liberal institution, and liberal in this sense is a right-wing political philosophy, not the bastardised "liberal" usage in American politics meaning "progressive".

It also costs them my trust, though.

For me personally they seem to be more expensive than competitors and have a more aggressive stance on openness (ex: compare PWA support on Android vs iOS, not to mention the multiple other things like no multiple stores, the browser engine discussion, etc). So, I am not amazed that people think "on top of all the other things that you annoy us with you also try to avoid the law?!".

I wouldn’t argue that Apple is worse than any other company. They’re just the tip of the spear in the fight against EU competition regulation. Other companies would fight just as hard if they had as much to lose by following the rules.

> But what does surprise me is that there’s a very common attitude in forums that somehow Apple is the only company doing this, or they’re doing it worse than any other company.

Apart from being irrelevant and whataboutism, this is the narrative Apple is playing, particularly towards its userbase.

The EU regulation doesn't focus on Apple in any way, the purpose of the DMA is to have objective criteria to identify a scaled market of digital goods with an uneven playing field for all players.

The EU DMA has identified that Apple created a closed market of significant size, made themselves the gatekeeper and invited companies to compete there. But Apple participates in the market also as a player, and skews the playing field in their favor.

So it's an unjust market where forces are unable to flow freely, and the EU is attempting to rectify that.

The reasons why Apple is in such public focus on this are #1 because they operate an unusual amount of closed markets and #2 because they WANT this: it is part of Apple's strategy to rally publicly against the regulation and shape a different perception of it.

> But what does surprise me is that there’s a very common attitude in forums that somehow Apple is the only company doing this, or they’re doing it worse than any other company.

Apple creates vertically integrated devices. For many people, Apple dictates their entire digital life - far more so than any megacorporation on the mere level of, say Google, could ever hope to, considering Apple owns the hardware, software, and everything in between. So they are in a position shared by no other company - they are entirely unique in this. You cannot buy a device with entirely Google-designed hardware and software - Pixels with Android come close, Chromebooks come close, but nothing reaches Apple, even without custom silicon. I would say the closest company that exists in terms of vertical integration is Oxide Computer, but those aren't consumer devices.

So it's not that Apple is the only company doing this. It's also not that they're "doing it worse than any other company". It's that when they do this it affects people on a level not shared by any other company. It has a much larger impact than anybody else ever could.

For the record, I don't mind Apple's vertical integration, in fact that's one of their main selling points for me. It just gives them the greatest possible leverage to implement these sorts of practices.

Apple is a very stylish kind of company. Their public perception matters more because when you use an Apple product, it creates an image of you.

If I buy a Google phone, no one is going to comment on it. If I buy an Apple, or a Tesla, or luxury vehicle, people are going to comment on it.

If Apple is known to be scummy and you buy it, it makes you look bad. I think we are seeing that with Tesla now, I doubt too many liberals are buying a cybertruck.

Yes, the UI is so overloaded you can never tell what it's going to do. It might do two or three totally different things. Obviously you want to have the magnifying glass with a cursor. But then the cursor might just decide to jump to the end of the word. Sometimes it's impossible to get the cursor in front of the first letter if the UI is cramped. Maybe it will copy the text into a floating clipboard if your finger drifts a few pixels south. Maybe it will bring up a context menu? If you're using Safari, maybe it won't even let you select any text at all. Then you can take a screenshot and select text from an image to work around that.

I do more writing on my iPhone (it's the one with the largest screen) than I do on a computer. I can do about 40wpm. To move the cursor you just hold down on the space bar. These complaints kind of sound like someone from the 90's saying that the close window button is on the wrong side

if you hold down the space bar you can use that to slide the cursor around :)

I used to be an iPhone app dev before I ragequit around 2017. Took that skill off my resumé, got a new SWE job that paid more anyway. Besides Apple's rules, it wasn't enjoyable to develop for that platform. Everyone was constantly fighting the tooling. The worst thing ever was Swift 1.0 + Core Data, that was like Dark Castle on CD-i.

Tbh, if an iPhone dev job earned me significantly more money than the alternatives, I'd still do it. But it'd have to be like, +$30K after tax.

Because as a developer, you often don't get that choice, for example, if your product is an online service. Either you have an iOS app and play by Apple's stupid rules, or you don't, and your iPhone users go to a competitor that does have an iOS app, or at the very least complain quite loudly.

Because most people are not developers? Between ad-infested Google, enshittified Microsoft and still not ready for the desktop Linux the Apple ecosystem might be the most accessible and easy to use platform for most non-technical users. As a developer it's an annoyance but I have to admire the elegance in the way Apple uses their core software and hardware technologies over their entire stack. As a user I don't care about what developers feel about it. Apple's market share is big enough to draw lots of them.

Making quality software is usually a business, and if you distribute it in walled gardens even more so. That said, I have a number of iOS apps installed that I know are developed and sold by specific individuals or small businesses: myNoise, NetNewsWire, The Iconfactory (Bitcam, Tapestry), Sun Seeker, Rarevision VHS are some examples. I am sure there are plenty more, but there are reasons someone would not want to publish an app under own name—same as why you would create an LLC: liability, not having people stalk you personally if they did not like what you make (especially true if you distribute it for free or for a very low price), appearing more professional, etc.

I believe iOS App Store has been groundbreaking specifically in how it allowed a solo developer to start distributing work to millions of people across the entire globe with very little friction, taking care of things that are not just boring but actually not in reach of an individual—pricing in different currencies, accounting under different legal and tax systems, zero friction installation, discovery (at least before it, thanks to the aforementioned qualities, became ultra competitive and overwhelmed by businesses who outsource development and/or by less than scrupulous people wanting to earn a quick dollar), etc.—and just getting you paid. If there was a comparable precursor that I am not aware of, I would be keen to know.

> Apple is a company with limited means, only bringing in the GDP of a small country

For reference, in 2023, Apple produced a little less than Romania or Hong Kong, and a little more than Egypt or the Czech Republic.

Hong Kong is small (though not a lot smaller than the Czech Republic); Egypt is big.

--- edit ---

I accidentally compared Apple's revenue in 2023 to the IMF forecast of GDP for 2025. For 2023: Apple produced very slightly more than Hong Kong or Nigeria, and a little less than Malaysia or Iran.

Nigeria is even bigger than Egypt. It still produced less than Hong Kong.

They share a lot of "AMFI" infrastructure between iOS and macOS, with macOS having a much more permissive security model (you can run self-signed code) while still retaining "private" entitlements for sensitive private APIs, only available to Apple-signed apps. Unless you disable SIP, then you can just do whatever.

(Disclaimer: I may be wrong, I haven't done much of my own research, it's just things I read in various articles over the years)

It turns out it's very easy to not know things when your salary depends on you not knowing them.

I didn't follow the case with Meta, but isn't it different ? Because you talk about both the GDPR and DMA, which are different regulations.

I agree that a lot of websites (mostly news websites) have the "ad tracking or subscription" model, and I'm not sure if there has been a clear ruling in it yet, but maybe the DMA makes this stricter for Meta since it is a Gatekeeper

That is exactly why the EU offers consultation workshops like the one mentioned in the article - so that companies can discuss this sort of thing and figure out a way that is workable for both them and the legislator.

It's unfortunate that Apple thinks of these as opportunities to lecture them on their own laws instead and unsurprising that approach doesn't work.

Or, they could just let their pocket computers run the software users download and install, like every single other computer ever made and sold, rather than special-case engineer padded cells for every use-case, application class, or bit of interoperability.

Somehow, Android manages to do it. Not only for browsers; all apps have JIT access without any entitlement/review needed.

It doesn't seem like the average Android user is worse-off because of that, security-wise.

> He was the one who took the company to a trillion dollar valuation.

Are you comparing Cook to Jobs as an Apple investor or as an Apple customer? As an Apple customer, not an investor, I don't care at all about the company's stock market valuation.

Investors seem to love Tim Cook. Warren Buffett recently said that Tim Cook made more money for Berkshire Hathaway than Buffett himself did. But as an Apple customer, I don't give a crap about Buffett or Berkshire either.

The difference between Cook and Jobs is that Cook is a money person and not a product person. According to his biographer, Jobs lamented that Cook was not a product person. And IMO the products have suffered under Cook: not in terms of profit, but in terms of design and functionality, the things a discerning customer cares about.

I think what's special about Jobs was that, ironically, he had no special training. Of course he was smart, ambitious, and charismatic, but he wasn't an engineer (before Apple, Jobs outsourced some of his work to Woz and took credit for it), wasn't even a professional designer, and he certainly wasn't an MBA. He had no qualifications whatsoever to start a tech company. Jobs was simply a computer enthusiast who had the great luck of meeting a computer genius, Steve Wozniak. Since Jobs was ordinary in many respects, he was able to empathize with ordinary computer users; that was one of his primary roles within Apple. Jobs cared deeply about the user experience, from a first-person perspective. Few if any other massive tech companies have been built by such a founder.

It's easy to assume that Apple is where it is today because of Jobs. But when you look back, there are actually a number of key decisions made by Tim Cook since Job's death that led Apple here.

Cook has plenty of leadership vision. He's led Apple into the VR space with Vision Pro, and has pushed into services/content (Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+), and wearables (Beats acquisition, Apple Watch, AirPods). He's defined Apple as a company that cares about privacy, and it's because of him that Apple is so stubbornly fighting regulation in the EU and US.

If anything, you could criticize Cook for being too ambitious, if you thought that his attention to these areas came at the expense of iPhone & Mac quality.

I have no idea, as the two dumbest Macs, the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh and the "Trashcan" Mac, were before and after Jobs, respectively.

Not silly thin and overheating is the main way, your criticism is still valid though.

the keyboards on the laptops don't break in masses for one.

> If a competitor wants market share they have to build a better service.

Except when Apple ensures that it always comes out ahead when competing. It's not a level playing field.

Look at Apple Music vs Spotify - ignoring the self-preferencing iOS does to Appke Music, the App Store ensures that Spotify will always make less money than Apple Music. Spotify either has to hand over 30% to its competitor, raise its prices (and lose customers, while still paying its competitor), or just not offer in-app signups. Do you reckon Apple Music has to give away 30% of it's subscriptions?

It seems bonkers that the only option to have a competitive music streaming service is to make your own operating system or mobile phone. That's unhealthy.

I think the EU started with the correct intentions. They saw a need to increase the competition in the digital marketplace and reduce the power iOS-Android duopoly has.

However, instead of defining the market rules, the process has been more about competitors and companies (who’re not happy with Apple’s success) trying to take a chunk of their business.

An iPhone is not a general computation device, it’s not an open ecosystem. Neither PlayStation, but there’s enough competition in the gaming console sector so nobody comes up with complains about not being able to install any app they want.

Edit: spelling and clarity.

> Forcing users to go with a bad deal gets the incentives all wrong and is actually bad for consumer choice.

Nice bad faith strawman, where'd you buy it ?

Apple is trying to have its cake and eat it too, selling off their devices as general computing devices and opening it partly to external developers, taking away a massive portion of profits and threatening them when it's not advantageous to them. The entire point is that you _cannot_ build a better service because Apple is blocking you.

Sony isn't getting this treatment for the PS5, despite qualifying well for being a gatekeeper, because there's no pretenses of being an open market.

If Apple wants out of this, then let them close down the App Store.

[dead]

I think there is enough very good competition on the phone side. Google, Samsung, many other asian brands. The DMA (to my understanding) is about what happens on top of the phone once you are a (golden caged) user of that product and cannot move out.

[dead]

This is correct. Someone above commented this "Starting to feel like it'd be more sensible to just have the EU fund an independent phone OS/Hardware.". The sensible thing is much different; it's to start behaving like China, in the sense of "my way or the high way, and no you don't get to drag it out in our courts for years, we're not interested".

It would be a day of irony, if the CCP decides, that Apple in China should rather be owned by them, than a figure at Apple itself. A state owned company from now on. Imagine the outcry at Apple, when realizing they danced at too many parties at the same time.

There should be a case against Apple intentionally misinforming people in the EU coming up next then. They must be taught a lesson that every step against the law costs them dearly.

Not just their users, the US government too. They've successfully turned it into a geopolitical issue. Apple not being viewed in the same light as Microsoft in the 90s is one of the best marketing ploys ever seen.

That is a bad-faith argument and a false equivalency I will not engage in, lest I be warned by the mods for falling for obvious bait again.

That's your opinion, and I respect it. But let's look at the facts:

- He sued Apple and Google for monopolistic behaviour. He's been fighting for fair access and better deals for all developers, not just Epic Games Store.

- His fight's not about open source or open platforms, it's about fair access, lower fees, and giving developers more control.

- He speaks for millions of independent computer scientists who build games.

- He purchased 7,000-acre Box Creek Wilderness (about US$15 million), fought off a power company's attempt to run lines through it, and donated a conservation easement in 2016 so the land stays wild.

- He's actually walking the talk. While other billionaires post about saving the planet, he's out there buying forests to protect them.

Yeah, this affects everyone who isn't rich. Some billionaires are even running UBI trials, fully aware that the tech they're building or funding is going to cause social chaos:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-22/ubi-study...

My biggest fear is that UBI can turn into a tool for control, give people just enough to survive, to eat, keep the lights on, and afford some AI tokens to stay productive in the system.

> The same way state pensions in Europe are used by the government for control of the population.

It seems the other way around that governments need to bend backwards to the will of pensioners to get elected.