> rump has already said that he wouldn't tolerate regulation that affects American companies
This lays bare the stupidity of applying the pay-or-consent law to only Facebook and not everyone. Every important newspaper in Europe has pay-or-consent. It does not matter that each one individually is smaller, the effect is the same.
The law was carefully crafted to ensure European businesses (newspapers) are not "gatekeepers" while ensuring American businesses (social networks) are. That fact did not go unnoticed in the rest of the world.
So? There is a fundamental difference. The app stores have effectively become utility companies through the Android-iOS duopoly and it is neigh-impossible to make a new competitive ecosystem. Utility companies are regulated because they can distort the market with their power otherwise. E.g. if the power lines are owned my a single company (which is the case in many countries), if they were not regulated, they could pretty much ask any price. What are you going to do to compete? Roll out a completely new power grid? The Android/iOS duopoly is the same, the fact that they could ask for an insane 30% (!) of every transaction before the regulatory squeeze started should tell you enough.
The newspaper market is very different, because there are many players and you can always go to a competitor. There are even newspapers that make all content available and ask an optional donation (e.g. Taz in Germany or to some extend The Guardian, who do not seem actively block ad blockers).
But what motivation has the EU to promulgate these regulations?
* Chat control is toothless if users can simply side-load an app without snooping.
* The EU companies who successfully lobbied for regulations against Apple now see that the 15% tax is worth it when they can A/B test the counterfactual. So those companies no longer care if Google will do the same thing.
* The EU is now in an awkward position that it is ok for a newspaper to sell your personal info via pay-or-consent, but not for a social network to do it. Some will keep yammering on about "gatekeepers", but it's sort of an emperor has no clothes moment.
* Declaring that iPadOs is a gatekeeper (after it failed to meet the quantitative criteria for such) was another such emperor has not clothes moment. The whole "gatekeeper" narrative has turned into a farce.
* The people commenting on this forum are not even a rounding error in the EU electorate.
> It's not reasonable to expect consumers to figure out if the meat they buy is tainted, just as it's not to figure out if their phone spies on them, manipulates information, or sells their data (especially when there's a duopoly).
Indeed! Neither would it be reasonable for the sellers of meat to demand anonymity! If one sells tainted meat, he should be held accountable! We should identify him!
Yet, the creators and sellers of software for a General Purpose Computer (remember, that is the argument why phones should be regulated) demand that they should be above the law, anonymous and unaccountable!
Schrodinger's computing device: The one which is so vital to everyday life that we must not prohibit the user to run whatever software he likes, yet so unimportant that we have not a care in the world to identify any fraudster who might wish to distribute software.
> They are forcing me to write a native app instead of just tell my customers to install Chrome to have access to the APIs my product needs (web bluetooth).
Why don’t you encourage them to get an Android? What makes you think that people who prefer an iOS device over Android would even install Chrome after you nag them with dark patterns?
> I also do not plan to sell anything through my webapp, which is why Apple wants to force developers to create a native app, where they can collect 30% (or whatever % it is now) of anything sold through the app.
Sorry, not following you: Apple is forcing you to give them 30% of nothing? How exactly is that a problem?
> Apple are just being greedy assholes and what they are doing is absolutely worse than what Microsoft did to get sued in an antitrust case when they simply bundled IE in Windows.
Yes, how dare Apple look after their [checks notes] customers by preventing devs from using the features that would most annoy their customers?!? Such a greedy thing for a company to do, to give customers what they want! The only true purpose of a company ought to make it easy to slurp up customer data and monetize eyeballs!
That people would use Firefox on iOS. That fact. Do you know English? It seems like you understood what I said, but still had a hard time comprehending it. Are you okay?
Truth is, apple didn't want to migrate their phones due to some internal decision not relevant for us, and the fact some other devices were on it doesn't change this. Users comfort was never part of the equation, its politics, sales projection, stabs at competition and similar.
Truth is, apple fought EU hard, we saw it from inside quite well. Backstabs, some cheap tricks trying to delay and evade this, even when it was clear how things will be. Not their best days to be polite.
Why giving some heartless mega corporation free moral credits if they are not well deserved?
After a different company detected it, figured out what it did, and reported it to Apple. The app was notarized on November 17, screenshots in the researchers' post are from December 16. That's a month of fully notarized distribution.
Well, I think you’ve argued yourself into a corner there. Shit parents aren’t going to deny access to video games which are too mature for their children, so a rating system should isn’t going to help
This lays bare the stupidity of applying the pay-or-consent law to only Facebook and not everyone. Every important newspaper in Europe has pay-or-consent. It does not matter that each one individually is smaller, the effect is the same.
The law was carefully crafted to ensure European businesses (newspapers) are not "gatekeepers" while ensuring American businesses (social networks) are. That fact did not go unnoticed in the rest of the world.
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