Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
We are just at the tip of the iceberg stage on how dangerous and bad this could get.

Tech companies with any values whatsoever (as Apple likes to purport) better figure out where their red lines are, if they even have any, and get ready to hold the line.


View attachment 2566726
Which administration is Apply kowtowing to?

The one doing this
👇

View attachment 2566738
On a trip to Czechia. There was a protest in Prague, we watched it and went around the police escorting that protest march. No problem whatsoever. The police officers stepped back allow us through. Old world hospitality!
 
  • Love
Reactions: turbineseaplane
You don't need to be a genius or a mind reader to know why Uncle Don & Co wanted those apps gone.

And I sure wouldn't take anything ICE says as anything but lies. They are doing it non stop.

Screenshot 2025-10-12 at 07.21.26.png
 
This is a compelling read that all of this intertwined (EU stuff and capitulating to US Gov requests re: ICE)

Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate. Namely, selective exemption from tariffs and an end to the spectre of pro-competition regulation that might bring real browser choice in the US, the EU, and around the world.

Over the past few weeks, Tim Apple got a lot what he paid for,1 with the full weight of the US foreign and industrial policy apparatus threatening the EU over DMA enforcement. This has been part of a full-court press from Cupertino. Apple simultaneously threatened the EU while rolling out fresh astroturf for pliant regulators to recline on. This is loud, coordinated, and calculated.

...

Unlike tariffs, which present a threat to short-term profits through higher costs and suppression of upgrades in the near term, interoperability is a larger and more insidious boogeyman for Apple. It could change everything.


 
  • Love
Reactions: ProbablyDylan
This is a compelling read that all of this intertwined (EU stuff and capitulating to US Gov requests re: ICE)

Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate. Namely, selective exemption from tariffs and an end to the spectre of pro-competition regulation that might bring real browser choice in the US, the EU, and around the world.

Over the past few weeks, Tim Apple got a lot what he paid for,1 with the full weight of the US foreign and industrial policy apparatus threatening the EU over DMA enforcement. This has been part of a full-court press from Cupertino. Apple simultaneously threatened the EU while rolling out fresh astroturf for pliant regulators to recline on. This is loud, coordinated, and calculated.

...

Unlike tariffs, which present a threat to short-term profits through higher costs and suppression of upgrades in the near term, interoperability is a larger and more insidious boogeyman for Apple. It could change everything.


Absolutely. The elimination of vertical integration will destroy Apple and all tech companies. It will kill innovation and make every product the same.

I’m for let Apple close it up. Let them extract rents. As long as they dont break the law let the market speak. (And other companies as well)
 
Last edited:
  • Disagree
Reactions: ProbablyDylan
And I sure wouldn't take anything ICE says as anything but lies. They are doing it non stop.

View attachment 2566943
Appears to contradict? So I guess a court of law will sort this out.

I’m guessing these types of posts are part the reason the government asked Apple to remove the app.

But yeah there is a lot of law enforcement activity in the country. the ICE agents should have body worn cameras that get reviewed and should be available via FOIA.
 
... Apple really can do no wrong in your eye, can they?
is Apple supposed to follow government directives or not?
If Apple going to bat for the government, aiding them in their censorship campaign, you have to ask yourself what won't they do.
Is apple supposed to follow government directives, or not? I’m not a zealot. Apple has to do what it has to do.

Let the free market decide on it.
 
Apple is supposed to follow the law. In the United States, that means legislation written and passed by the Congress …
The laws are written by one of two parties in US, so how do you call that exactly legitimate? They have two different names, aren’t they the same? Rich people, or about get quite rich people…
 
If regulators forced manufacturers to hand over signing keys, firmware, and internal update tools, thieves wouldn’t need to smash windows anymore. They could make a digital key that the vehicle’s systems would trust, silently disable immobilizers and alarms, and then drive away with a car that still appears normal to the owner.
This, and all your other nightmare scenarios, only apply if they use the same key for all devices, and give that key to everyone: a device-specific key would satisfy the requirements I wrote.

For a car, the risk is further reduced: they need to already have root on the car to change the repository address, which for any remotely sensible design would imply being inside the car and logged into its system. Moreover, if the vehicle systems are separate to the infotainment systems (which they should be, because of the safety boundary, and because otherwise a bad android update could make your car undriveable), and they don't sell upgrades to the core vehicle software or profit off third-party vendors of tuning software etc., it wouldn't apply to the safety and security functionality.

the first thing that breaks is Secure Enclave protection. Its security depends entirely on the OS verifying that only Apple-signed firmware can talk to it. T
Only when it's combined with a hopelessly tiny key space for the password - if the contents are encrypted with a key generated from a worthwhile password, then regardless of what firmware you're using you're not going to decrypt it without first-class nation-level capabilities (and even then the one most likely to succeed can probably get the current master key more easily).
 
  • Love
Reactions: turbineseaplane
Companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon have massive first-party user data from their logged-in ecosystems, so advertisers would simply redirect their budgets there.
If the GDPR were fully enforced to the strictest interpretation used by various information commissioners, meta would have its revenue side almost entirely wiped out, because targeted advertising is not strictly necessary for all of the functionality that the user wants from Meta, and the content-targeted "suggestions" would also be a separate function to the communication with friends and family that attracts and retains users, and so the use of personal information would need separate consent too.

For google, properly applying the GDPR and banning tracking would effectively split the data provided for search, mail, data storage, etc. from the advertising functionality, so they'd effectively just be hosting Adwords on their properties.
If, say, the EU completely banned tracking for advertising, the open web would collapse almost overnight. Ad revenue would crater because behaviorally targeted ads sell for several times more than generic contextual ones. Small and mid-sized publishers that rely on that revenue would struggle to survive, leading to site shutdowns, mass consolidation and paywalls across what used to be a free internet.
The independent forums, blogs, and wikis that make the web rich and weird would shrink dramatically.
The open web was a lot healthier before the rise of tracked advertising, especially considering the much higher cost of equipment and bandwidth back then and the lower number of users. Wanting to insert tracked advertising was also one of the drivers for web-based platforms replacing News, IRC, and so on, which was definitely a step in the wrong direction.
Newspapers, already on life support, would see digital ad margins collapse,
The big complaint from the dead-tree newspaper industry was that tracking-based advertising made their contextual and locational advertising uncompetitive. Banning tracking and abuse of user data would effectively wipe out all the advantages online advertising has over traditional advertising, apart from duplication and distribution costs.
Hobbyist sites would be hit hardest. Most rely on cheap targeted ads and affiliate links just to cover hosting.
Really? most of the ones I use rely on contextual advertising or (for forums etc.) selling status markers, because there's no money in generic ads without a huge volume.
 
Absolutely. The elimination of vertical integration will destroy Apple and all tech companies. It will kill innovation and make every product the same.

I’m for let Apple close it up. Let them extract rents. As long as they dont break the law let the market speak. (And other companies as well)
Now, now. Oh boy let me quote this real quick because i just caught a slippery slope on camera

How can tech companies (especially Apple, the over $3 trillion conglomerate) be destroyed by "eliminating virtual integration"? They will all figure out ways to adapt. They're just gonna poke holes into legislation at first but eventually they will slowly adapt to new legal realities. You're implying they don't have the resources to do so, which is just plain untrue...

Innovation has been around since the primordial times. Not banking on the EU being the entity to destroy this concept.
 
Now, now. Oh boy let me quote this real quick because i just caught a slippery slope on camera

How can tech companies (especially Apple, the over $3 trillion conglomerate) be destroyed by "eliminating virtual integration"?
This has been discussed ad-nauseum on this forum.
They will all figure out ways to adapt. They're just gonna poke holes into legislation at first but eventually they will slowly adapt to new legal realities. You're implying they don't have the resources to do so, which is just plain untrue...
Nope I’m implying Apple and others earn their business through vertical integration.
Innovation has been around since the primordial times. Not banking on the EU being the entity to destroy this concept.
Some of us are!
 
Why counter something that is obviously true? Some regulations have bad or unintended consequences. Even if they are done for good reasons.
Yeah, it goes against decades of reality, ESPECIALLY in the EU where the regulations had the unintended consequences of the EU depending broadly on non-EU companies for their tech infrastructure. I could make up a convoluted picture of how things could have been different. But, from the start, if the EU hadn’t forced the issue, Microsoft would not have, on their own, given kernel access to security companies and Crowdstrike would not have happened.
 
The inability of some to admit regulations can and do have negative consequences is very strange. I can admit when I think Apple is wrong (see recent "removals" of perfectly legal apps from the App Store, for a recent example). But anytime the EU regulations result in negative consequence it's always the regulated company's fault, not the regulation's fault.
Even if I were to take on the notion, “Microsoft’s incompetence led to Crowdstrike!”, that statement still begs the question, “But WHY would Microsoft even make changes in that area in the first place when everything was working fine?” Which still leads right back to the EU saying, “Make changes or we’ll fine you.”
 
But Vestager wanted to do something because she was fervently convinced big tech is bad, she was influential inside the EC, convinced EU politicians (and a good portion of those posting here) that “cheating” was why US companies were ahead, not the EU’s overbearing regulations, so here we are.
I’m surprised they got EU politicians to agree to a clause where a company could limit their product to two regions (and we all know those regions would be France and Germany, where most sales are anyway) and avoid gatekeeper scrutiny. That’s why it was rushed through, they knew if anyone got to look at the details of it, things like this would pop up as red flags and prevent passage before Vestager left. Without her pushing it (and the people that deferred to her to avoid having a powerful dangerous enemy in the future), it wouldn’t have passed.
 
I’m surprised they got EU politicians to agree to a clause where a company could limit their product to two regions (and we all know those regions would be France and Germany, where most sales are anyway) and avoid gatekeeper scrutiny. That’s why it was rushed through, they knew if anyone got to look at the details of it, things like this would pop up as red flags and prevent passage before Vestager left. Without her pushing it (and the people that deferred to her to avoid having a powerful dangerous enemy in the future), it wouldn’t have passed.
Talk about an odd brexit benefit for big tech!
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.