Apple amended their rules by not requiring the CTF from noncommercial developers and from commercial developers with less than 10 million Euro worldwide yearly revenue and less than 1 million first annual installs [0]. There is also a 3-year free on-ramp period. In addition, between 10 and 50 million Euro yearly revenue, the CTF is capped at 1 million Euro.
That's sure a step in the right direction but it still feels like a very unjustified form of rent-seeking. Ideally it should be possible to distribute an iOS app without paying a single cent to Apple and without any Apple involvement whatsoever. Same way you can distribute Android apps right now.
What was Apple's legal effort based on? That somehow all the market numbers are wrong? That although it might seem like Apple is "in a strong position", the reality distortion field states otherwise?
The law in question applies to companies with an “outstanding cross-market importance”. There are no hard criteria for that, so of course Apple would try to argue against themselves meeting that definition.
AFAIK the EU law has to be implemented on a local level, and the countries' agencies can uphold in their respective country. Once a single country has a precedent, this can be used by other member states.
Nope. 1) Not all of the "EU law" behaves the same way. There are legal acts of the EU that are directly applicable (like most provisions in regulations), there are even some provisions of the primary legislation (treaties) that can be applied directly (i.e. are binding and can be litigated). Of course, there are also legal acts that need implementation (like most provisions of directives).
2) EU law is upheld both by the EU Court of Justice (Luxembourg) and national courts, this depends on the cause of action you have.
3) An "agency" has a special meaning in the EU, that doesn't mean the same thing as a federal agency in the US (as a branch of the executive). There are instead EU institutions and national public bodies (whose exact nomenclature depends on local law) that may also have the task of upholding legislation.
4) No precedents are necessary or used at the EU level. Precedents are more a common law thing, they have an explicit binding nature for courts there. While there are common law countries (Cyprus, Ireland, Malta) with precedents, their precedents have no special place or role in how EU law works, there is no stare decisis how it works in common law.
So, this is a national decision based on German national enforcement reviewed by a German court.
Precedent might have no place in EU law but there are plenty of places where precedent does matter in statute law even if the precedent is advisory rather than binding. There is quite definitely a doctrine of precedent in Norway, see for instance [1].
Norway is not a member of the EU. Yes, precedent can be used with different meanings, and many clueless ministries of justices in continental law countries tried to innovate by calling some measures they made as turning that country into partly based on precedents (usually to restrict the freedom of judges, like in Hungary - which clearly failed).
But more importantly, there is a world of difference between precedents 1) having in practice some relevant legal effect in a jurisdiction (e.g. using them as arguments or just as interesting case law) or 2) in the sense that lower courts are bound by some decisions of upper courts in a country, and 3) having a worldwide legal system built around stare decisis that is actually working the same way for hundreds of year, and where decisions from, say London, are read by lawyers in NZ or Singapore because they may have as much legal force as an act of a parliament. It's not just a spectrum, it's a very different beast for practical purposes.
And they take 30% of everything sold through the app store. That's rent extraction pure and simple, not to mention their ability to shut down any apps they don't like. This is a direct function of their market power. It is precisely what the governments should be protecting against.
The more hostile the EU becomes to operate in, the higher the chance that at least portions of functionality is disabled. The breaking point is never reached...until it is.
> the higher the chance that at least portions of functionality is disabled
Just for the record, a large number of Apple services do not work consistently across the EU. Everything from Fitness and News to translations and Siri. Not to mention the mess with languages and subtitles if you want to watch a movie on ATV+ or buy it on the iTunes Store. Also forget about Family or gift cards spanning multiple countries. Apple outside the US is very different from Apple US.
"the higher the chance that at least portions of functionality is disabled. The breaking point is never reached...until it is."
It is ambiguous for me, if you are talking about Apple or about the UE. Given your previous post I think it is the later.
However, it can apply to Apple, too. The less walled their market is, the worse they will do. Hopefully, people can use an Iphone with a windows laptop with a pine tablet and a samsung watch if they so choose.
Like how Microsoft left the American economic zone when they were sued by the government? Oh, wait... Microsoft knew they were breaking the law and accepted the ruling. Because "hostile" behavior against objectively harmful business practices will always be justifiable.
You are fearmongering because you know Apple is wrong. People like you are my favorite breed of HN user; you don't know anything about business administration and you don't have even a lick of technical understanding to back up your position. You're simply scared, a scared person who really likes a business that relies on anticompetitive market control.
> Do you legitimately believe that someone is just going to go and write a new mobile operating system?
Lots of people have done this. Moreover, several of the existing ones (including Android) are mostly or entirely open source, so you can start from that base if you have something to add.
But then these alternatives fail to gain traction, why? If all you did was take Android and remove the spying bits from it, that should be popular. People should be wiping their phones and installing that the second they buy one, or having their tech friends do it for them, the same as people do with a clean install of Windows to remove the OEM crapware that comes with a new PC. And yet they don't.
Because there are locked bootloaders, remote attestation, widespread third party app dependencies on Google Play services, undocumented hardware with kernel-specific binary blobs, etc. If you do a Google search on how to install a custom ROM, Google's AI summary thing will show up to warn you that hardly anybody does that and if you do there are security risks, leaving people to imagine that if you do it some Russians are going to steal your car, wipe out your bank account and cause you to get fired, even though what "security risks" it entails are not actually specified.
It almost goes without saying that Apple is even worse here.
It's not because nobody wants to do it. There are millions of people who even put up with that level of friction and make it happen regardless. But the barriers inhibit adoption by normies and keep the alternatives in the small minority, which is the issue, because these things have a network effect and need a threshold amount of scale to become viable.
But Apple sells more than phones: it also sells keyboards, mice, external trackpads, wireless headphones, and connected watches. Notably, Pebble had some significant issues recently (https://mashable.com/article/pebble-smartwatch-back), because they were not allowed to use the same connectivity functionality of the iPhone that the Apple Watch does. Non-apple headphones don’t and can’t support handoff.
Apple is using their market position in the smartphone space to bolster their products, and hamper competing products, in their other product categories.
Why not do both? Its not like those activities are mutually exclusive. Mega corps desperately avoiding taxes and pushing their own agendas definitely shouldn't get a free pass
Fines are a perverse incentive. If bureaucrats want money, they can pass laws that are ambiguous or contain arguable loopholes. Companies then engage in malicious compliance, which subverts the purpose of the law and prevents it from actually restoring competition, and then just pay the fine when the prosecution comes because that's less expensive than allowing that market to foster viable competitors that could subsequently break into the global market or demonstrate to other jurisdictions that antitrust rules can be effective. Meanwhile the bureaucrats are happy because they get billions of dollars in fine revenue even though the problem hasn't been solved.
What they should be doing is to regard this kind of antitrust violation as a manner of copyright or patent abuse and use the penalty of invalidating the perpetrator's copyrights and patents. Then you would get actual compliance, because the alternative is that TSMC could have a fab in Germany and start producing competing iPhones.
Every time theres some news of the US trying to regulate Apple, people here respond with comments like "what about Google?!".
And when theres news of the EU trying to do it, they respond with comments like yours, accusing the EU of trying to fine US companies instead of competing with them.
In both cases, there are also endless (and uninformed) arguments about how Apple isn't a monopoly.
But yours also adds a new element to it, accusing the EU of being anti-Trump, so kudos.
The conclusion I've come to is that tech companies (particularly Apple) can do no wrong in the eyes of a lot of HN readers, and it truly is a waste of time to try and have a productive discussion on this topic. Which sucks, because this place usually does result in interesting discussions, more so than other sites (even if there are a lot bad takes)
Regulations create the competitive environment that these free market proponents like to talk about as it puts all competitors on a level playing field, usually raising the bar to some minimum they all must do that is a benefit to consumers and the environment. With no regulation megacorps are free to use their size and money to crate anti competitive environment to win rather than compete on the merits of their product, or just buy out the competition.
It's a horseshoe. At some point regulatory capture comes in and makes the environment too expensive to enter let alone compete with established players
No regulation and too much regulation have terrible impacts, but identifying the middle ground is it's own problem.
...which is why the current tech regulations that Apple is running afoul of are only aimed at the top 1% of the market.
You're not gonna run afoul of Europe's antitrust laws by mere coincidence - you have to be a very big and established player before they become relevant (meaning you should have plenty of room to adapt, should you start to approach the limits specified in their legislation[0]). If you're just a small participant in the market, these laws aren't relevant to you.
Regulatory capture isn't really a risk for these regulations because most companies won't ever become that massive in the first place[0].
[0]: For reference, you need more than 75 billion euros in market value, 7.5 billion euros in profits from EU citizens or alternatively, more than 45 million active end users and more than 10k business customers before the real "big teeth" EU antitrust legislation (the Digital Markets Act) becomes relevant for a company. The overwhelming majority of tech companies aren't even close to being in that position (and almost certainly don't have a market cap that comes close to this), it's pretty much only GAFAM and ByteDance that are in this position.
Apple mostly tends to get defensive fanboys because of buyers remorse. Their products are extremely overpriced and Apple markets their products not as products but as a lifestyle. If you buy Apple, that's to be "different", to be "the Elite". Even if this is pretty measurably false (owning an iPhone doesn't actually split you amongst lower/middle/upper class), a big part of their marketing is aimed at making a (prospective) customer feel like this.
This leads to a particular type of consumerism where criticizing Apple becomes criticizing Apple buyers, even when that criticism is purely aimed at the company.
Like, I think Apple makes good hardware (a good form factor is worth something and their devices "feel" good to use in your hand) and cynically exploits vague concerns about software security and privacy to lock down it's software and make more money from it's customers (and therefore support antitrust action against them), but by saying that, in the eyes of an Apple buyer, I'd just be a "hater".
