Excuse me, but with that paragraph you are demonstrating that you don’t know how any of this works.
Corporations like Apple are the ones who deliberately (and understandably) make it as difficult as possible to switch systems/software to competitors (i.e. product stickiness, “walled garden”.
I do agree that corporations will do what is in the best interest of them first, that’s how capitalism works which is the base of our western economy.
If it were not for regulators like the EU that mandate interoperability, we as customers (Americans and Europeans) would be pretty much lost and economically squeezed out of every penny…
Cheers
While the regulators‘ job is to protect consumers’ rights, they are very often triggered by other corporations: given the point above on which we agreed, also the other corporations will do their best interest and not consumers’ interest.
In this case, Spotify (13+billion$ revenues) and Epic Games (5+billion$ revenues) have strongly pushed for the DMA: do you think they are doing it to protect customers’ rights or their own profits? Does Spotify or Epic Games want to distribute their apps outside of the App Store to protect me or to have more profits?
Spotify cheapest plan is 10.99€ in Italy (distributed outside of the App Store), same price as Tidal and Apple Music. I do not believe Spotify is going to lower their price because of the DMA, they are already market leader in music streaming, so I do not see any concrete advantage for consumers: it will just increase the conversion rate for Spotify premium because they will start advertising heavily inside the app to pay for a premium plan.
So I believe that the regulators’ job is to focus on consumers and create clear rules for the corporations to play fairly: there should be a balance between following up complains from other corporations and the consumers’ interests.
In this moment, personally I have understood that the consumers’ advantages could be:
- Lower prices for services: because of the possibility of distributing outside of the App Store and promote own payment processings. Specifically for music streaming, as Spotify is already doing that, I am not sure that will end up in something really happening?
- Innovation: In principle it aims to reduce barriers for companies so that we may get more innovative services. However it doesn’t seem that the App Store has done that bad so far on this topic so again I’m not sure how concrete is this benefit.
However as the DMA rules are not so clear, it is not clear the benefit to protect me as a consumer while it is very clear the advantage for the businesses which are not falling under the DMA gatekeeper status. What do you think?
www.engadget.com
. I stand corrected..they just released it!
