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EU Approves Landmark Legislation to Regulate Apple and Other Big Tech Firms

And here ends consumer choice… It was nice while it lasted, but we’re now back to having to waste our time figuring which apps are legit and safe and which payment systems we can trust because some bureaucrats government I have no influence over decided to make that choice for me.

I’m curious how many European companies are being declared gatekeepers. How many consumer tech companies have flourished under the regulatory regime of the EU?

And fines of 20% percent of corporate global revenue? Way to respect your jurisdiction, EU. And because iPhone doesn’t meet your standards you’re going to fine the Mac business too?


GermanSuplex said:
essentially "tech socialism".
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That’s as good a term as I can think of. They’ve essentially nationalized iOS and declared it a European utility.
 
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I’ll mention here that if Apple global annual revenue is about $380B, 20% of that is more than the individual GDPs of 9 EU nations.

That’s quite a little revenue source Brussels has set up for themselves.
 
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Robert.Walter said:
.....
The size of the penalties are shocking, by way of comparison, here are the EU’s penalties for other offenses like fraud and collusion:

1. The Directive seeks to harmonise the definitions and sanctions related to fraud offences, including corruption and bribery, affecting the ‘Union’s financial interests’ as defined.

The penalty for corporate offenders is a fine of not less than EUR20,000 and not more than EUR20 million.

2. The fines for this issue are more closely related to those for anti-competition law as seen in this fact sheet:

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As to the information sharing component, maybe it reads wrong, but it would seem to significantly erode that as well.

Just in the practical sense, if an App Store can’t set privacy standards and suspend an app for violating them, because the app can ignore them due to the possibility of sideloading, the apps will ignore the rules to increase their benefits with no fear of consequences.

Goodwill compliance, on the honor system, is not only enforcement against bad apps, it’s an actual incentive.

This is frightening.
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It would seem the iOS ecosystem is about to become the Wild West, because the governor is allowing the renegades to come into town, and is willing to fine the sheriff to keep him from keeping things safe, all in the hopes of having a couple more saloons on Main Street.
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That's because corruption and bribery are (the only) "European values"
truepublica.org.uk

Corruption in the European Union - TruePublica

EU corruption has historically taken a wide range of forms demonstrated so vividly with successive scandals in banking, tax avoidance, a host of malpractice
truepublica.org.uk truepublica.org.uk
 
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Wildkraut said:
To the ones saying Apple should leave the EU 🤣, the same will come to the US, stay tuned you heard it here first.
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Well, currently NOTHING has come to the EU, just electronic words on electronic paper. I’m waiting to see the response from Apple as, as near as I can tell, as of today, the sideloading available yesterday (through Xcode) is STILL the only sideloading available in the EU. :)
 
Remember how much better Windows became after the EU intervened? I don't.

I can hope for interoperability, but the rest seem to go too far for any company. They'll need whole departments to develop procedures for compliance.
 
iDento said:
what if these regulations are made just to make Apple and other companies pay.
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It sounds like they just want some more money. 10% of their worldwide revenue? They just can’t do that if the company is not based in Europe. Why do they feel entitled to the revenue that a non European company made outside of Europe? Ridiculous. Pathetic.
 
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Some of this makes sense, some of it is total overreach.

Something like interoperability between messaging platforms surely stifles innovation, as well as damaging up take of third party apps. If Messages can accept WhatsApp or FB Messenger messages, where is the incentive to download those apps? Meta won’t like that.

Expect this to get tied up in the courts sooner or later as tech giants refuse to adopt these requirements.
 
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I agree with a lot of the consumer protections that exist in Europe, but this is grossly ignorant overreach.

Not to mention that it hurts Apple the most of all, when Apple is the least offensive of "big tech." The continual lumping of Apple in with Google and Meta shows you how ignorant legislators are. OH NOES, Apple locks down their app store. Whoop dee doo. Apple is not shaping the entire Internet experience the way Google and (for some retrograde noobs) Facebook do, providing a conduit for fraud, lies, and data mining.

Has Apple earned scorn from developers? Yep. Have they lied to developers? Yep. But that's a pretty small community (of which I'm a member), and not the BILLIONS of people potentially screwed by Google and Meta. I say "potentially" to be fair about "billions," but the fact is that thousands or hundreds of thousands are actually screwed by these companies by having their business or personal online presence deleted from those platforms with no excuse or recourse... and that's just one example of their misdeeds.
 
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Michael Scrip said:
Or how about this...

McAfee pays Dell to include McAfee Anti-Virus on their laptops.

Alright... why doesn't ProtonMail and Spotify pay Apple to have an icon on the homescreen?

Like I said... no free rides. If those companies want a leg up... they gotta pay for it.
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That is often how agreements have historically worked one way or another in the past. Companies may pay to have their app included/pre-loaded on a device or pay to be the default, etc.

Google, for example, pays Apple many billions to be the default search on Safari. These agreements can potentially get a little complicated from a regulatory standpoint if one or both parties dominate in their respective market segments. I have to wonder how much longer the Apple/Google deal will be allowed to continue.
 
Tanax said:
The law legislation said it must ensure end-to-end encryption between all parties, so no.
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And it's going to be extremely difficult to achieve. I don't think the politician in EU even know all the difficulties every operator of a messaging service have to go through to make this successful.

The biggest problem as I see it, is where do you store the public keys for all devices for all messaging services?

This have been tried with email with very little success.
 
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CTHarrryH said:
why bother innovate if you aren't allowed to take advantage of your innovations? Will they force Mercedes to allow Chevy software or something I write myself to run their cars.
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They might if Chevrolet and/or Mercedes-Benz were among few dominating their industry but they aren’t. Regulators tend to focus on industries or industry segments with too few players having too much control. Mobile OS (Android and iOS having nearly 100% share) and desktop/laptop OS (Windows and OS X/macOS having around 91% share) are a couple of examples.
 
EU market GDP is 16 trillion, 15% of the world... just stating the obvious. No, they are not giving up on it to leave it for google in a plate.

They are smart, they will probably create some sort of license (?) for other app stores? Just loose warranty if you sideload, would be safer for Apple.
 
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Michael Scrip said:
That's not the point.

I'm saying it's ridiculous and unnecessary to have all those ballots.

I get it. You think it's unfair that Apple "bundles" their own services that gives them an unfair advantage over other 3rd-party services.

Alright. Maybe ProtonMail should make a phone and don't let Apple get onto the onboarding screen. Or a Spotify phone.
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The fact that the EU is using a company’s trademarked product in the name of their market definition (iOS App Store) lets one know that they’re not even attempting to make a show of being serious. For anything else, a company’s trademarked product name is “a thing they sell or provide as a service” (I’m sure they don’t have a problem with Airbus having a ‘monopoly’ on the market of Airbus planes).
 
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