Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Complying with what you guess at the lawmakers' intentions was/were is a fool's errand. The law is the text, nothing more, nothing less. That's the point of the law. If the law falls short or has loopholes, it's a bad law and it's the legislature's job to fix it, not citizens' to suss it out.

To assume the law means things that aren't written in the law is, quite basically, undemocratic.

View on HN

The DMA is perfectly clear regarding its intention and context. Trying to split hairs to find wiggle-room in the text just so a gatekeeper can maintain the status-quo for a while longer is absolutely malicious.

Furthermore, Apple’s behaviour is quite discouraging for us EU based developers who actually understand and aspire to the EU’s values and what we consider “normal” treatment of the people using our apps and services.

Obviously Apple doesn't hold the EU's values in high regard (few people in the Bay or even the US do), so of course they will try to fight it. It's perfectly rational and even expected behavior.

Personifying large groups (the EU, or Apple) as if they have one set of “values” or “regard” is almost always a logical mistake.

22,000 of Apple’s employees are EU citizens and residents.

And it's perfectily rational for the EU to take appropriate actions against companies that hold its values in contempt. Apple should expect that and temper their contempt accordingly if they intend on continuing to do business here.

There is nothing the EU can do to stop big tech from doing business in the EU unless it wants to spark a trade war between itself and the US.

The EU is completely and utterly dependent on US technology and protection, so the measures it take can only go so far.

Written it in another comment. If there are ambiguities in the written law, for example because the legislature did not specify in the text of the law, that you can't charge for the access to the platforms, high courts like the CJEU will take approaches where they determine the spirit of the law (i.e. by looking at the discussion material the legislature presented for passing the law) to find out what the intent of the legislature was and then defines this law.

This is for example how Germany now has a basic right to data protection. It's not written in the constitution, it was formed by our supereme court by looking at what the intentions of the author's of our constitution were. Same principle applies to EU laws.

I agree that this is not a citizen's job. That's why I wrote that I am very happy to see the EU commission drag Apple in front of the CJEU.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com