EU Digital Markets Act, aimed at Google, Apple, Amazon, approved

1. What devices have to comply? 2. Who decides what device has to comply? Should playstation open their system too. What about a niche bank transaction signing device that internally uses an android capable hardware. Is this illegal now? 3. What about a car infotainment system that can theoretically run linux. 4. What if a European startup wants to compete with the iphone? Now they have so many regulations instead of focusing on a great device for their niche.

This looks like it will kill competition and harm European innovation, while major players will find their ways around it.

It's entirely possible that to enable compliance with this will require explicit compromises to the security of iMessage, for example by requiring key exchange with startup messaging providers. The other rules seem to prohibit Apple from describing the risks involved in such a compromise.

> * Use existing hardware and software features without competitive prejudice. E.g. NFC

This appears to say that a malicious app can present UX elements that were previously limited to the OS. Read liberally, that would mean that e.g. any app could now get biometric data by presenting a fake privilege escalation screen (e.g. FaceID/TouchID) and then capturing the results from the Secure Enclave. Is this something people really want?

> * Not preference their services. This includes CTAs in settings to encourage users to subscribe to Gatekeeper services, and ranking their own services above others in selection and advertising portals

This will likely make it harder for users to find safe/private services to use. If every offering can find its way into the default browser/App Store/etc. settings page in the OS, scam services will appear to be endorsed and therefore legitimate.

Edit: Limitation of interop is still possible, the EU is just deciding to move decision making from California engineers to Brussels attorneys. From the Act:

> The gatekeeper shall not be prevented from taking strictly necessary and proportionate measures to ensure that interoperability does not compromise the integrity of the operating system, virtual assistant, hardware or software features provided by the gatekeeper, provided that such measures are duly justified by the gatekeeper.

So Apple just needs to explain security & encryption to Brussels attorneys to keep iMessage in a silo, for example. (Obviously making iMessage interoperable with e.g. Discord or ICQ will compromise the integrity of the software features of iMessage.) I don't think this is going to increase the pace of product improvements.

Hello, Alphabet world domination. They finally get the chance to get rid of that pesky Safari. Next stop: obligatory sign-in for using a service.

These are all the highest risk API and integration surfaces on mobile devices.

Also I hope Microsoft get pulled into this as well because they're slowly turning Windows into a marketing device.

Edit: as an iOS user I'm optimistic that this will lead to complete device network whitelist capabilities though so you can neuter any apps which circumvent the current browser restrictions. That would destroy a lot of tracking capability instantly and completely stop embedded browser side channel attacks.

That was the unbundling of Internet Explorer from PCs.

Which in hindsight looks like small beers compared to Chrome on-every-device usage, and probably why MS are getting away with it, again, bundling Edge and crippling Firefox workarounds.

For Alphabet (Google) the revenue distribution from 2015 to 2021 was approximately 33% for all of Europe, Middle-east, and Africa. It's unclear to me the actual European numbers since they are combined EMEA.

For Apple in 2021 the revenue was approximately 23% for Europe (no middle-east or Africa).

For Facebook in 2021 the revenue was also approximately 23% for Europe (no middle-east or Africa).

So it's safe to say that a first offense would potential halve the revenue for the region, and a second offense would remove the financial rationale of doing business in the region.

What this will mean for me as an iPhone user: instead of using Apple Pay which is seamlessly integrated in my phone, watch and desktop OS, I will instead have to use my bank's terrible HTML-based 'app' to perform contactless payments, making it 100 times less convenient. This probably will make me switch back to using my bank card.

But hey, my bank makes a little more profit at the expense of UX.

Thanks EU!

I wonder if, just like in Android, this will open the doors for a lot of malware targeting iOS users.

That would be sweet. Currently none of call recording apps work on my phone and this is a must have feature for me. When I take a call with my doctor I have to use my separate memo recorder, so that I can refer to the call in the future if I forget something.

Let's not mention usefulness of this feature when you are placing orders over the phone and then the other party claims this is what I wanted once they deliver something not as agreed. If I could record a call I had evidence in case of dispute.

Scams proliferate, praying on elderly and young. Widespread tracking of your location, browsing history. Same with other points, narrow, selfish thinking.

It certainly puts a huge incentive on Apple to figure out technical solutions to problems like "How do we get other browser engines on this thing without compromising a hundred OS assumptions, battery performance, or user security," but it's also possible Apple decides that's a no-go and it'll cost more than 25% of annual revenue to comply, at which point the winning market strategy is opt-out. That's fine; win-win for the EU market because it clears the playing field for a European-originated competitor to the iPhone.

ETA I forgot the third possibility: Apple decides it will cost more than 10% (and later 20%) of revenue to comply, but the 5% bump in value is still worth it and they write off non-compliance as a tax to do business in Europe. Then if the EU tries to impose structural or behavioral changes, we're back to square one on the question of whether those changes cost more than (now) 5% of Apple's revenue.

> * Install any App Store and choose to make it default

I don't see mention of this in the summary. Where is it described?

Cool. I have an iPhone but everything in my house uses Alexa. It would be great to have my phone control my using using ‘Alexa’ as a wake word.

It will also be nice to have a real Brave or Opera or whatever (with Blink not WebKit) on my iPhone.

Six months is barely enough time for companies to digest and understand the new requirements, and certainly not enough time to develop and ship such dramatic changes.

Lol. The encryption keys being shared with security services bits have political cover. Not the rest. It’s surprising European legislation doesn’t yet have a reconciliation process, to prevent this sort of burying-the-lede gambit.

Does it break any privacy/digital-dignity protections though?

I believe that they will find a way to somehow undermine these rulings. EU hasn't won yet.

> Make core messaging functionality interoperable. They lay out concrete examples like file transfer.

Encrypted messaging by someone not in the U.S.' jurisdiction. More privacy, more terrorism.

> Fines are up to 10% of global revenue for the first offense, and 20% for repeat offenses.

Ouch, that'll impose some discipline.

Could we have something like F-droid on iOS? I guess that's Cydia now but could Cydia be installed without requiring jailbreaking?

That wasn't one of the bullets in the posted article. Do you have a reference to the language of the law that says this?

> But they can no longer reuse private data collected during a service for the purposes of another service.

I hope this is applied retrospectively (for even data gathered before the DMA was legislated and came into effect).

How is chromebook going to exist without a chrome browser? Sometimes I wonder if the people making the laws have any knowledge of the technology landscape?

This is huge and I cannot believe it has taken this long. Apple forcing everyone to use their own browser engine with all other ios “browsers” essentially just being skins for Safari was ridiculous.

Install any app you've previously purchased, from any app store, I think regardless of whether they'd otherwise offer said app

I think that will get rid of selling the same game, app, whatever on many platforms. Buy once, use everywhere

Apple on the other hand makes their money by targeting features (privacy, integration, etc) that people pay more for.

Apple will have to transition to a more ad-tech focus in order to compete in Europe under this infrastructure.

...only works if the OS doesn't unchange it every. sodding. day.

In short, I expect it to be years before we can do most of the things you list in your post. There will be lots of court cases before we, as consumers, see any real change.

I wonder why Google is there, they don't block any of this.

But that's just realpolitik for you. This is the same reason that in the USA it is legal to have California Champaign and New York Bordeaux (style in small font) wine.

For some reason every Linux user assumes everyone is as smart as they are and anyone who doesn't take the time to learn whatever esoteric config file to manage their DE is a child that can't tell left from right. Somehow the decade of directed scams and proliferation of malware and spyware isn't a problem and it's the developers "right" to be able to turn on your microphone and send that data to the cloud.

When Facebook mandates that to install Instagram you must sideload it from the Facebook store and your entire's family's location is being tracked 24/7 I hope you will thank Zuckerberg for all the freedom hes giving you

>Don't demand that Apple treat the rest of us like children just because that's how you would like to be treated.

You could just not buy from Apple. I never understand how the anti-Apple crowd is convinced that Apple is run by Satan himself, but cannot compel themselves from buying Apple products.

But in the specific case of iphones, the argument is made that giving rational level-headed adults the freedom to associate with the software they wish would imperil children and the elderly, and you don't have to look far to find somebody arguing that that risk outweigh any other consideration. If this belief were likely to be limited to iphones I wouldn't really care, I'd simply not buy an iphone. But I fear special-case exceptions don't stay that way forever, and I fear Apple's style of paternalism (which is very profitable) will inevitably spread and become difficult if not impossible to avoid unless stomped out soon.

> No, Apple restricting your freedom does not afford you greater security.

No, Apple restricting your freedom does not afford you greater security.

You don't know anything about me. How can you possibly make the call on what makes me secure or not? Not being able to install malware... that is by definition more secure than being able to install malware.

> If you're not confident in your ability to tell shady from legit, just stick to the App Store.

No, you believe that other people who are not confident in their ability to tell shady from legit, can just stick to the App Store.

...but that's not true for some people. Some people make bad decisions. Lots of people make bad decisions. What you believe other people should be capable of, is your choice, but it's (clearly) wrong for a certain cohort of people.

> Don't demand that Apple treat the rest of us like children just because that's how you would like to be treated.

You may feel like you're being treated like a child because you are being prevented from doing what you consider to be something you should be entitled to do.

...but, other people feel differently.

You don't represent everyone. Your opinions are not shared by everyone.

> It blows my mind

...that other people have opinions. I know, it's astonishing.

Just because you (and I) personally will be positively affected by this change, doesn't mean everyone one will be. Does the positive benefit to us few outweigh the negative benefit to many others?

I don't know. I'm pretty worried about it. I think it's gonna to end up with a lot of bad things, for a lot of people, who aren't good at making decisions, especially when it relates to computers and other technical stuff.

I, for one, don't want to waste my time being IT support for my entire family. That's the whole reason most of us prefer the walled garden of iOS. I don't care if it is as powerful a computer as a server from some 15 years ago, I WANT to treat it like an appliance, a friggin consumer device, I want to standardize it across my home and have some peace of mind.

If I want to hack, I have plenty of other devices at home or that I can buy that are far more adequate to this end.

For whatever reason, my dad cannot choose to not install shady software. Keeping him in iOS land is the only thing that has worked at keeping his devices clean.

You assume that everyone is as smart as you in figuring out which software is "shady software". Majority of the population have no clue and if the path to complying with this regulation is to drop the stance on security (regardless of existing issues with default security, as implemented today) further, well... good luck. Me and you maybe will not get tricked into installing some "shady app" but I'm looking forward to reading more about how people got hacked via their phone because they have installed "a bank app" from "appstore x" thinking that it was from "appstore y".

But apparently you, as an adult, can't choose to not buy Apple if you don't like their policies? Strange.

Interestingly, I think this can be used to argue either side.

You clearly do not play tech support to elderly family members, or have kids

Apps from 3rd party stores will be sandboxed just like apps from the App Store are today.

The magical rockstar engineers of Apple will listen for their best in the world UX and handcraft artisanal UI that will respectfully explain users what causes the popup.

The argument doesnt make sense. The user is either tech savvy or not tech savvy.

...

And even more: You people talk as if that doesnt happen today. Nobody will try to scam anyone by creating an entire freaking APP STORE while they can just phish them by sending them an email to get their credit card numbers and whatever data they can collect.

And further: Today anti-virus software is capable of detecting and preventing most of those scams already. We are not in mid 2000s. Anti virus software will not disappear with the appearance of 3rd party app stores. So the problem does not even make sense to be considered a problem.

...

It just feels like some of you people (i mostly saw Americans) are SO mentally hostage to your corporations that you really defend the indefensible.

Firstly, as all should know by now there is no need to give a cookie warning for any technical cookies. This means whenever it is there it is provided because the website provider thought they need a third party tracking to manage ads or get customer info.

Secondly, the way the banners are designed is the problem, not that the banners are there. A few large providers (notably Google and an adtech alliance) have standardised intrusive, bad-default and dark-pattern heavy cookie banners. If this was a single well-remembered click on each site no one would mind, the problem is that the providers want to make it painful so you start to just click 'accept' to get it over with.

Exactly how we deal with everything else that works across platforms: standardization. We've done it at least once before (SSL/TLS), I'm sure these rich and "amazingly smart" companies can figure out how to achieve it once again.

> Isn't there, again, some hardware security issues in play with that?

Is there hardware security issues with accept CC details on the web? Assuming the computer itself isn't compromised, the web seems to (again) have figured out how to deal with it across platforms, both OSes and browsers, why can't phone OSes do it?

What we can expect is weak protection on request of the government which puts people genuinely at risk.

If that happens I cannot possibly support the DMA or the EU on this but it'll be too late before it becomes apparent.

The real concern with interoperable messaging is antispam. E-mail was an absolute disaster because there was no barrier to entry for someone who just wants to send unsolicited garbage to everyone. Google killed federated messaging for Google Chat back in the day because for every one person running their own XMPP server there were hundreds who realized Google was just giving away valuable real estate on everyone's Gmail inbox to this chat service. The EU appears to be trying to mandate federation to fix the competition problems involved with iMessage[0] and I genuinely hope there's a user opt-out for this when it inevitably gets abused for spam.

[0] Which, ironically, is more of an American problem than a European one

Also there's a line in the final full act:

>The level of security, including the end-to-end encryption, where applicable, that the gatekeeper provides to its own end users shall be preserved across the interoperable services

On the iPhone, this is done visually with the blue/green bubbles. But other solutions can be implemented.

One way would be for Apple to offer a web API endpoint for companies that have signed an agreement with them (covering rate limits, server identification certificates, liability, etc.).

In fact, the API could be implemented in iOS itself, so you could have something like "Signal support for iMessage" as an app in the App Store, which would basically be a headless version of the Signal app which delegates all the UI tasks (mainly message display and input) to the iMessage app.

Client side lock downs aren’t security. They’re security theater.

Quite simply: it doesn't. It can only work the same way as iMessage interoperates with SMS, by throwing away security.

TBH , unlike GDPR, this seems a lot more pragmatic and feasible

Those companies are bigger than states, have high influence on politics and together could overthrow states. If you have a innovative idea without an entire law department they will just copy it or pressure you into a buy out. If you play by the law you cannot beat them at their game if they don't let you.

Eu produces effectively 0 innovative tech because the PR marketing-machine that is geared to sell you stocks on the US stock market makes incessant noise about American companies to sell those shares to you while excluding anyone outside.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/10/meet-europe-top-tech-...

Those are the 'hot up and coming'.

https://www.value.today/top-companies/top-technology-compani...

Those are by size.

All of this, without talking about SAP and the like.

European businesses dont operate on 'Sell over-inflated shares to those suckers to "capitalize"' - they operate on traditional indicators. Hence there isnt a need in Europe to constantly hawk any company's shares to make fools part with their money for the sake of financial sector. So you end up with companies like Hetzner slowly growing from engineering roots and then suddenly jumping on to the other side of the ocean to kick incumbent cloud butt there.

Because its almost impossible to compete? These companies have so many resources, its impossible for any local competitor to compete. Amazon can just crash the prices till the competition dies, Google can just not allow YouTube on it, Facebook will exist because of the network it has.

What the EU is doing is what is needed to happen long ago. These companies are not currently successful because they offer the best experience or the best innovativtion, they are successful because they crush anyone else.

For example WhatsApp has many many better alternatives, which have better features and better privacy, but it still the #1 because of the monopoly it has on communication.

What the EU did here is smart, they didn't outright ban WhatsApp, or funded a direct competitor. They forced them to play fair, to stop the monopolistic behavior and force them to compete on features, rather than succeeding only because my familly is on WhatsApp.

The same thing applies to Apple, which forces to everyone to use its crappy, intentionally handicapped browser engine.

And also forcing everyone to use its payment services while taking percentage of the profits and not even allowing you to increase the prices to cover their percentage!, this is absolutely outreagous and finally something is being done about it.

Agree about the EU though.

There is free movement of good, services, money and people. But it is still 28 similar markets with different cultures, different languages, different bureaucracies and sometimes different currency.

It is 400 million people but comparing the EU to the US is wrong on so many levels.

Also calling the US an "open" market is like saying China is a "free" democracy.

"One would think that if there is truly a US wide market for such an affordable healthcare service a competitor should be able to challenge the current market dominance. The US could even subsidize it."

Also it doesn't matter if the EU could do it themselves. Our market, our rules. If you don't like the rules, don't play.

The problem is that such a device doesn't really have a chance because it's not compatible with existing infrastructure such as WhatsApp, Instagram, your banking app, what-have-you. It could be the best device in the world, but there's always a catch-22 problem with software that's fundamentally closed and can't be implemented by a third party.

I thought it's common knowledge that consolidation and cartels cripple free markets to the point of not functioning and benefiting society anymore?

Because they haven't been winning. It's not a coincidence that the revenue thresholds for this bill is conveniently higher than any Europe-based companies.

The open market employs children to work in coal mines. No one should trust the open market.

I personally like these changes, but the cynical forum shopping underlying the €75B threshold they picked is pretty nasty behavior, and I hope US lawmakers retaliate appropriately.

(Lawrence Lessig, a law professor, was one of the founders of Creative Commons. He later tried to change US copyright laws to be more consumer-friendly, but concluded that it's almost impossible to do so as long as corporate interests rule politics. He then shifted his research topics to institutional corruption in politics. He actually ran for presidency a few years ago, with funding only from the popuplation, and limited to a certain amount. It failed, he wasn't even invited to TV debates because "if he doesn't take company money he doesn't have a chance".)

This leading to many actual left-wing MPs getting elected and informing entire parliaments about stuff which the average American may never know about - less American congressmen would ever want to hear about: The browser wars came to Euparl way back in mid 2000s and left-wing MPs first warned that major corporations would abuse it, then over time they demonstrated that it was happening exactly so. Leading to Microsoft vs the Commission and the browser ballot box. Then GDPR. In the meantime, also GMO labeling. And food standards WAY back. And right to repair and all that stuff. And now this.

There are even communist MPs in Euparl who are MAJOR proponents of Open Source since a long time ago. They also subscribe to the ideology as well.

Which brings about an interesting point: The legislation precisely targets the early, free state of the Internet from mid 2000s to early 2010s before major tech companies consolidated everything.

Take for example carbon pricing. It started long time ago, was not good enough. There was gradually tightening and now it finally starts having some teeth and more is coming.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132417

Perhaps you missed the news but there is a bigger bully in town. The U.S gov is looking to ban tiktok so you may not be able to use it at all. Not that I think tiktok is worth my time but I am pro choice.

>> I’d say to Apple just stop selling to the EU. See how long it takes them to blink because they would.

That doesn't sound like a good business plan. Are you sure the shareholders would approve it? Perhaps Apple should stop selling in China too instead to handover the approval process to the CCP(btw that's a bigger bully. Do you like it? )

Also although I've been an Apple fan since the ipod I would stay behind EU on this one. First Apple defies us with that open letter about taxes(thinking the siphoning tax money out of Europe is somehow the right thing to do) and now they stop selling in Europe unless we surrender to its monopolistic behaviour?

I think we are all good. Hopefully they will focus more on the hardware value and less on pushing users to buy subscriptions(i.e icloud storage).

Takes the power away from Apple you mean.

If Apple cares that much about privacy, as opposed to their bottom line under the guise of caring, then they can implement additional controls into the OS layer that will help users control or even anonymize/randomize their data when running third-party apps.

A lot of the doomsday scenarios about Facebook creating an app store to invasively track people seem to forget that regulators don't like that, nor their respective monopolistic practices, either. I don't think they'll be able to get away with creating an user-tracking scammy app store and then taking their existing ubiquitously-used apps off of the official App Store without drawing the ire of the EU.

you might end up with an ad- and app-store- riddled europhone and if you decide that you want to buy a us or international spec iphone you won’t be permitted to do so.

- (Gatekeepers have to) give business users access to their marketing or advertising performance data on the platform - (Gatekeepers can no longer) reuse private data collected during a service for the purposes of another service

Obviously there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there, but if one of these gatekeepers has 100 million users, then it is hard to justify them writing and maintaining a load of extra code to interoperate with an app that has less than, say, 1 million users.

Perhaps in practice, though, the gatekeepers will be able to publish a simple API and say that all competitors who want to interoperate with them can do so, after signing a contract with their lawyers and exchanging public keys in person, and paying an administrative fee (to prevent spammers).

Either way I'm sure they will use this legislation as a marketing tactic to justify typical annual price increases.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31991394

Out of the ones you've listed, I think Epic has the highest likelihood to do it, not just because they were the only one to take substantiative legal action to try to force it, but because theirs is a platform that might actually offer compelling content that would give users a good reason to switch. (Though then again, plenty of iOS games will remain with the Apple Arcade, and I'm not sure what killer apps Epic has beyond Fortnite.)

If Facebook or TikTok moves their apps to a new app store without offering an additional app library of new content, users are going to be irate and it could end up backfiring on them. I think TikTok would stand a greater chance of doing that given that ByteDance is a Chinese company subject to that nation's regulations and policies, but I don't see attempts at a Meta, Google/Alphabet, or Amazon app store succeeding for long. App stores are hard, and even harder when your competitor owns the platform- I'm sure Apple can still exercise leverage over iOS beyond the App Store.

Where are the these app stores for Android?

I think the answer is "No", because that counts as social media interoperability rather than messenger interoperability, but I don't understand how Facebook have managed to convince the EU to exempt them from this.

They can also be disallowed to do business with European consumers and companies.

In short: "The fines will continue until compliance improves. Get in line or get out of the market".

They don't have much political leverage, given how few people they employ and how little taxes they pay over here.

Their standing in the US isn't the best either so it's doubtful whether America is willing to invest much political capital over something she herself is considering.

not at all from my experience. it’s been extremely frustrating so far.

Hopefully your friends and family haven't become so trained to look for the word "accept" that they will be unable to find the correct button when companies finally start complying. Or better yet, companies will realise that 99% of users click reject, and the tracking data provided by the remaining 1% is not valuable enough to annoy the 99% for.

If it has e.g “accept” and “manage choices” then it’s blatantly non-compliant and hopefully such popups will be extinct once a few such sites are fined.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32166399.

What's trash about it? Never had any issues with it, ever.

> My Apple watch keeps bugging out and notifying me few minutes late and requires restart of both devices.

Bugging out and notifying you a few minutes late for what? I get text messages on my watch at exactly the same time as my phone.

> The device keeps connecting to open networks while my remembered home network is available.

The device will only connect to networks you've connected to before. So this is user error. It's simple, forget that network.

> The camera lens has issues with glare in the sun.

This is a problem with any phone, or any camera?

Someone else's opinion isn't 'crap'. Like what you have proffered, is as much an opinion as the OP.

For example, don't use an Apple smartwatch to keep time (the clock will fall behind and stay there, even after interacting with the display to "wake" it up.)

The "Pencil 2" stylus they sell for iPads can't be used exclusively. (E.g. activating the "Command Center" requires you use your finger.)

They build advertisements into the OS (very notable if you don't use iCloud) and reset preferences willy-nilly (such as if you have iMessage disabled.)

I hope more people talk about these issues, I'd love to see Apple pressured to make meaningful improvements.

iDevices aren't perfect but they cover 95% of what I need from them.

Can it be better, much better even? Absolutely, yes. But your comment is painting a doom picture that is just not there for many people.

Noscript has nothing to do with this.

I agree that interoperability on the web should be protected at least as much as on mobile, since the web as a platform has the potential to be more open than the tightly integrated mobile ecosystems.

Unfortunately, what that would look like in practice is harder to say, as I don't think governments could mandate "Semantic Web" versions of all websites, even though that would give true client choice and allow the building of complementary services.

My main disappointment with the legislation is that "core messaging interoperability" doesn't also require interoperability between social networks, since a Facebook user should be able to send a DM to a Twitter user, for example, and ActivityPub solves the more general issue of social network federation.

You will be pleased to hear that the legislation has a floor defined for "Gatekeepers" as only those with a fair market valuation over €75 billion.