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Comment by quitit | Hacker News Reader

EU members: Android and iOS is a duopoly that must be addressed.

EU member: lol, citizens get yourself an iPhone or Android or no digital services for you.

Yes, I am glossing over nuance here - but how short sighted is this approach.

From another perspective, the latter proves the former. Google and Apple are so dominant in the market that consumers have no choice but to use their services. As such, the services require public oversight.

Yes, the dutch government is itself perpetuating the situation, but they're only doing what private industry has for years.

But that's a complete lie. There is the web, which has worked more than well enough for all government-personal contact purposes way before Android and iOS even existed. It's only now that they stopped caring about web and do the latest whim instead.

And I just can't understand this logic?

1) Someone makes a platform, it's big and successful

2) State wants to overlord it, so they make apps only for said platform

3) State says platform is so dominant apps are only on said platform and there's no choice - must be regulated

Wtf?

That's not quite the order it happened, though:

1) Someone makes a platform, it's big and successful.

2) Private companies (banks, taxi services, streaming providers, education platforms) decide to only make apps for said platform, because the potential market of customers using anything else is too small to justify any business investment.

3) State says platform is so dominant apps are only on said platform and there's no choice - must be regulated.

4) State follows the same practices as private companies when making its own apps, for the same reasons as the private companies.

That doesn't change anything about it being bullshit. Web is still there and better than ever, and works on every platform too (as it always did). For their purposes, it's feasible to render only the most basic HTML/CSS and process everything server-side; thus the choice to make only incompatible platform-specific apps is theirs and theirs only. The private sector - banks, taxis, etc - have absolutely nothing to do with it, and they're still doing webs today (more than ever, actually)!

Government regulation doesn't only exist to thwart monopolies.

> Web is still there and better than ever, and works on every platform too (as it always did).

We're talking about an MFA solution, no? There's really no way to do that with pure HTML/CSS, you need some sort of TOTP generator.

IMO, this is why 2FA should always be optional, but the rest of the world seems to disagree with me...

Why is SMS auth (like my bank does, with plain HTML/CSS pages) not sufficient?

Anyways, my government is sending me SMS for auth anyways and won't stop anytime soon. No need to introduce yet another requirement on the citizens.

Because it's too easy to convince carriers to port someone else's phone number to a new SIM. I wish the carriers would address that, but that too would likely require some sort of government intervention.

Alas, if only the government could provide government intervention? Since they can't, we're left only with the option of government intervention to mandate use of android or iOS?

In fact, intervention wouldn't have to be to change SMS. They could instead mandate a standard like U2F or FIDO2. If they really don't like those for some reason, EU states could get together and make a new standard and mandate that.

I agree with this take! I was trying to defend the Digital Markets Act, and was responding to someone who (as far as I could tell) appeared to be fundamentally against any or at least most government regulation.

Yeah, especially if it's not absolutely necessary (e.g. the goal would be otherwise impossible).

I'd be okay if they regulated telco carriers a little bit more than they already do; much more okay than with anything resembling what they're trying to do now.

U2F has been around for a long time and has worked great for me for email (and is more of a real second factor than TOTP: you just plug it in and push the button and it does its crypto thing). There are similar newer standards like FIDO2. I think some of those standards work with smartphones too (haven't checked recently)?

You have to remember that a government is not a single hive mind. 2 and 3 are probably being pushed by completely different groups of people with differing goals.

That's one of the big problems of states. Every power you give a state government, there's someone (not one - thousands, if not more) waiting to do bad things with it. And while they're busy with it, the other part will keep claiming how you're a bad person because you don't want to help poor people.

> but they're only doing what private industry has for years.

Thoughts similar to this one are often deployed here - like this:

commenter A: This makes <problem related to surveillance> worse

commenter B: It's only incrementally worse, so it's OK. Besides <other parts of problem> mean there's no practical difference currently (at least if you've already basically admitted defeat about <problem> as I have), so what possible rational basis could there possibly be for not going ahead?

But many steps that make a problem incrementally worse can lead you to a bad place. Many steps that make things incrementally better would lead us to a better place. And with a tangled problem like this is by now, I think you do sometimes have to accept that not every step may always make a practical difference for many people, if you want to move towards a solution rather than forever away from it.

In this case I'm surprised to see you use the word "only" - government starting to mandate something is a significant step over even a duopoly doing so, because the cost of trying to ignore a government mandate can be much higher even than ignoring the smartphone duopoly - right? I can and do avoid the smartphone duopoly currently, but good luck to me if the government mandates it, eh?

Also given government power, in some ways it's a lot easier to make progress on knotty problems like this one than it is for a company, because government has a lot of power - so in that sense they have less excuse than private industry for moving us backwards here. Of course the public, though I think they see the problem to some extent, don't really believe in solutions yet. It's up to us to give them confidence that better solutions exist.

To be clear, I don't think what the Dutch government has done here is okay. But I don't find it contradictory.

I wonder how much of it is also.

EU member: Hey IT team get us some sort of identity verification! (doesn't care about the details)

The nuance and knock on effects, costs, and etc of policy are often hard to account for, but big sweeping legislation sure is nice to think about.

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