Spotify, Epic Games, and others pen letter to EC, claiming Apple has made a 'mockery' of the DMA | TechCrunch
Spotify, Epic Games, and others pen letter to EC, claiming Apple has made a 'mockery' of the DMA | TechCrunch
My guess is Apple will be heavily fined for making a bad faith effort.
Problem is the amount of money in the fine. The fine is up to 10% of the global turnover for the first time (that is relevant). But if they get 1% they may just try in keeping in playing chicken with the EU
I don’t think the EU will be fine with this because it would be a precedent for every other big company for all future regulations
They could be fined double, both a damage penalty and a fine for acting in bad faith. I'm not sure what you mean by a max of 10% of global turnover? If that's for the entire company per year, that would be almost 40 billion USD based on 2022. Making 1% almost 4 billion USD.
And they absolutely will, if they go through with it. EU uses the "spirit of the law" approach, so there's no way they'll get out of this.
Even as an avid Apple user, it just comes off as either sheer incompetence or disingenuousness to hear Apple wax such poetic over compromised security from alternative store fronts when macOS is just sitting there, having been doing it fine for generations.
I’m almost expecting Apple to deliberately self-sabotage iOS in the EU somehow just to make a point.
It's definitely disingenuous. They are using their legal defense as marketing, "you guys don't get it, we are just sooo much more secure as a monopoly".
Hanlon's Razor shouldn't be used for business and politics because there are big incentives to be malicious and play dumb there.
I’m almost expecting Apple to deliberately self-sabotage iOS in the EU somehow just to make a point.
Please PLEASE let them do that, hopefully they will lose market share, and it will spread to other regions too, how awful iPhones really are.
Maybe we can even get some more serious regulation to reign in the giant tech companies.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Epic Games, Spotify, Proton, 37signals and other developers had already signaled their displeasure with how Apple has chosen to adapt its rules to meet the requirements of the new EU regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), calling it “extortion” and “bad-faith” compliance, among other things.
Now those companies have formalized their complaints in a letter addressed to the European Commission, where they collectively argue that Apple has made a mockery of the new law and urge the E.C.
Apple’s new DMA rules have been widely criticized by developers and tech companies including also Meta, Mozilla, and Microsoft.
There are hints that Apple may be feeling the pressure, however, as it also today reversed an earlier decision to block progressive web apps from operating normally on devices in the EU.
The FT had recently reported that the E.C.’s ruling focused on competition in the streaming music market will not be in Apple’s favor and will rather extract a €500 million fine from the iPhone maker.
In response to the companies’ letter, an EC spokesperson told TechCrunch that the six-month deadline for Big Tech gatekeepers, like Apple, was there for a reason.
The original article contains 723 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Amazing coming those two
Is Apple acting in bad faith? Sure they are. But except for Mozilla and Proton, I see nothing but violently unethical Evil Corps, that soak the merest click in more trackers and profiling than there are humanoids in our galaxy, that sell this data to everyone and their mothers, that force you to pay undivided to the worst of humanity, interspersed with ads for miscellaneous utter garbage and burn up poor brown people moderating the illegal stuff passing by in their “social” feeds.
Probably because Apple a while ago, made it just a bit harder to track idevice users.
Aside from the massive overreaction about those companies, I mean "violently unethical evil"?, it doesn't really matter who is calling out the bad thing, does it? I guess because they are also bad guys, apple should just get away with it. Let's get mad at them instead.
Few people think a criminal would be a good judge, and so I don’t think e.g. Facebook should be talking about this without fixing their own misdeeds, not spend boatloads of money lobbying against it. All these big tech bros are currently doing is throwing mud at each other (Google complaining about RCS in iMessage while at the same time breaking it themselves) - literally none of them is making any significant changes. So yeah, I think they should shut the F up and start doing something themselves.
Apple spent twenty years building the ecosystem Spotify and Epic want to exploit for free. At least Google had the gumption to rip them off wholesale instead of just crying about it.
From a strict, technical reading of the principles of business, i’m guessing Epic and Spotify will be encouraged to “pound sand”.
What you call "building the ecosystem" I'd call selling products to users that should be allowed to make their own choices. They could very well choose to stick with Apple, but why does Apple get to decide that for them?
It's a part of Apple PR - many of their fans also buy their stock.
Then they show that loyalty bordering on madness and also support Apple owning its customers, because they subconsciously put themselves on the other side of the fence.
A bit similar to Ponzi schemes.
Of course consumers can make their own choices - to not buy Apple. If you want what apple has, buy it, if you don’t, don’t, but Apple shouldn’t have to allow third parties to affect their service, period.