Commission opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta | Hacker News Reader

Commission opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta

ec.europa.eu

579 pointsimpish9208621 comments

The most interesting thing here to me is this bit

> Apple's new fee structure and other terms and conditions for alternative app stores and distribution of apps from the web (sideloading) may be defeating the purpose of its obligations under Article 6(4) of the DMA

because, well, yeah, that's exactly what they do! When Apple users complain about the DMA forcing Apple to allow other stores and sideloading they often predict that Meta and other nefarious corporations will launch their own distribution as the exclusive source of their popular or near-required apps in order to skirt Apple's privacy rules. That is a possibility (though it hasn't happened on Android), but I feel that the benefit of sideloading community-made apps that break Apple's rules by interoperating with services unofficially would more than offset any losses to privacy. However, as Apple's implementation stands the fees and agreements necessary to distribute apps would keep most FOSS or community-maintained apps from being distributed, while allowing rich bad actors an avenue of further abusing their users. It's the worst possible world; a free-for-all for rich corporations to distribute whatever garbage they want and no balancing pressure from unofficial apps keeping their behavior somewhat in check. Moving from a world where Apple gets to decide what code runs on your phone to one where anyone with sufficiently deep pockets makes the call. I hope that the EC finds that the spirit of the DMA is that users decide what runs on their phones, and that Apple's proposed changes are not in that spirit.

>Apple's opt-out by default data policies cost Meta billions of dollars the quarter it was introduced in the OS update. Meta would assuredly restrict their apps to a Meta store to get back those billions.

This conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. Look at Meta's revenue since the roll out of ATT. They're essentially back to where they were. They've figured out ML based probability targeting. If anything, they're in a better position than they were pre-ATT, because now they really have some secret sauce in there, because no one else seems to have been able to figure it out.

You are suggesting Facebook doesn't mind valuable information restrictions because they have found other sets/means of valuable information.

That just doesn't follow. Facebook wants everything.

It is a near certainty that yesterday's restricted information is even more valuable today, since they can also increase its value via machine learning systems.

And high profits today don't dampen the need for growth, they accelerate the need by iteratively raising the baseline for next year. The year after. And onward. For the shareholders. For Zuckerberg.

> Meta and other nefarious… in order to skirt Apple's privacy rules

This isn’t hypothetical, it is precisely what Meta (then Facebook) and Google both already did.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/

https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/news/252456835/Fac...

But outside of Europe people still won't be able to use alternative app stores, so Meta has to provide their app through Apple store, where it will be available to EU users too.

You can restrict which countries your app is available in the App Store. Is there something in the policy that states your app can't be outside the App Store in EU but in the App Store elsewhere?

CTF is waived for nonprofits, which is how a lot of FOSS projects are structured.

lots is doing a lot of work here. the overwhelming majority of FOSS projects have no structure at all much less non profit corporations behind them. more accurate would be to say "a small number of FOSS projects" or "a lot of the top several FOSS projects".

> That is a possibility (though it hasn't happened on Android)

Android as a platform has far fewer default privacy controls as iOS. Meta doesn't need an alternate App Store to slurp up Android users' data. They would need one on iOS which gives them and everyone else impetus to create alternate stores which allow them to slurp up more data. Apple's opt-out by default data policies cost Meta billions of dollars the quarter it was introduced in the OS update. Meta would assuredly restrict their apps to a Meta store to get back those billions.

> Meta would assuredly restrict their apps to a Meta store to get back those billions

Unless, of course, the friction introduced by requiring users leave the App Store they're comfortable with costs them more.

> Apple's opt-out by default data policies cost Meta billions of dollars the quarter it was introduced in the OS update. Meta would assuredly restrict their apps to a Meta store to get back those billions.

How would a different app store change these OS policies and features?

Two questions I have - which may not have answers as of now:

1. Will new app stores be able to sell iPad and Vision apps too? I.e. or just iPhone apps? Apple would obviously restrict this to iPhone apps if it can. But given apps can be cross platform/device, new app stores and their developers are going to want to sell to all devices.

2. If alternate app stores can sell to all Apple devices, will that mean as a practical matter, that the memory allocation/permissions API used for JIT on Macs, and by Apple on its other devices, will now be available to developers for all Apple ecosystem devices?

Among other things, JIT API availability is required for alternate web browser, Javascript, and WebAssembly implementations.

If JIT access becomes universal on iOS devices, then more serious development tools, as well as development friendly interfaces, and third party APIs, are going to be possible. Lots of barriers to serious computing on other devices will be gone.

I am particularly interested in this in terms of Vision Pro + keyboard + trackpad/mouse as a complete Mac replacement for serious work. As apposed to requiring a Mac as it does today.

I don't see a lot of discussion of the Meta "pay or consent" investigation. Why wouldn't giving users the option to pay for tracking-free, ad-free service meet the requirement? Is the concern that the $10/month price too high? Would this kind of model be acceptable at a more reasonable price point?

My understanding, and the understanding of the EU commissioner [0], is that any amount is too high.

Consent must be freely given under EU law, not given in exchange for not having to pay money. You can't give a discount on the services for consenting.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/apple-google-and...

If that's the case, several European newspapers are also in breach. The latest iteration of paywalls typically state something like "we need money to survive, so you either buy a subscription or you agree to being tracked for advertising purposes".

On a certain level I agree with you: it goes against the spirit of the law and it's downright rude (effectively blackmailing readers).

This said, the alternative is that they go full-paywall (and risk death, when less than 1% of readers will actually bother to sign up).

The news sites I frequent are doing something slightly different though. Some of them are detecting adblockers and give a similar popup saying "either you subscribe or turn off adblocker". This is fine as they don't force you to allow tracking, just seeing ads.

What you described may be out there as well, I just haven't stumbled on it personally.

Newspapers aren't gatekeepers, unlike Meta.

> This said, the alternative is that they go full-paywall (and risk death, when less than 1% of readers will actually bother to sign up).

Good. They'll be replaced with others that can either provide enough value that people don't mind paying for them or can reduce their costs to survive without tracking like they did before the Internet. Win/win either way.

Although I agree with the sentiment, I also would like to point of that newspapers existed before the internet and we had to pay for them despite having ads on them.

I don’t know how but at some point as a society we decided that we must tip a restaurant 25% after tax, but the newspapers aren’t worth a dime. I also don’t understand why they have to be all $25 per month now. I don’t think they were ever so profitable to being with.

I wrote about it months ago when they did it. Why wouldn't it? Because... it's illegal (under EU law)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38192620

But the answer is: pay or consent "does not achieve the objective of preventing the accumulation of personal data by gatekeepers". See https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_... (also linked via the tweet elsewhere in this discussion)

I think tracking-free and ad-free are different concerns here. Basically you can offer ad-free for $X/month, but tracking consent should be separate ( basically anyone would be able to deny tracking )

Same issue on the Apple side will play out probably similar; either they can charge every developer some technology fee, or they cannot charge to anyone.

> I think tracking-free and ad-free are different concerns here

Maybe in theory, but in practice they are one and the same. The CPM on ads where you don't know the audience is so low that you might as well skip the ads entirely.

> Same issue on the Apple side will play out probably similar; either they can charge every developer some technology fee, or they cannot charge to anyone.

Yes, and the result for both will be that there is no free tier in the EU anymore. All EU developers will pay the CTF and all EU users will pay $10/month for for ad-free FB.

> Yes, and the result for both will be that there is no free tier in the EU anymore. All EU developers will pay the CTF and all EU users will pay $10/month for for ad-free FB.

And that's a good thing! If people really get value out of Facebook, they'll pay for it. If Facebook cannot deliver value without invading their users privacy and selling their data, maybe their business premise was flawed in the first place. Is it so alien to accept that the era of "free" online services might end after all?

Regarding the CTF specifically: I don't think Apple will get away with this after all, but we'll see.

I know you’re not the person to ask about this. Just asking out of curiosity and frustration: Why do advertisers think that they are entitled to everything about my life, family, habits, and other private information? Being able to collect and correlate data from various resources to identify everything about me doesn’t change the fact that I am entitled to my own privacy.

> Maybe in theory, but in practice they are one and the same. The CPM on ads where you don't know the audience is so low that you might as well skip the ads entirely.

Your case only valid with "zero consent" case. This is proved with Apple's tracking protection for apps already; given that you have some x% of users consenting to tracking, CPM value for non-tracking users are within 85-95% range.

> The CPM on ads where you don't know the audience

Contextual Advertising is also a thing, see CarbonAds and others

Ya I am also not following what the problem is with this approach. Is that not the entire point of options? Do people feel entitled to have all free services with no obligations of their own?

If the policy is "you can't sell you privacy" that would be pretty cool. It would require tech companies to come up with a business model that doesn't profit from pervasive surveillance. It is well within our rights as a society to deem such a model unacceptable.

That is exactly what EU laws say — privacy is a right. You cannot give up your rights in exchange for money, just like you cannot legally sell yourself as a slave to someone, as that would be illegal for both parties.

>"It is well within our rights as a society to deem such a model unacceptable"

Do societies have rights? Where are these rights defined, and how are they limited (if they are at all)? Are you talking about constitutions (and therefore states), or 'international law'?

> It is well within our rights as a society to deem such a model unacceptable.

Then... pay for it?

So from the articles I can find about the complaints filed against Meta [1] I can't find any explanation of what would be an acceptable price for non-consent besides free.

I mean like it's their right as a government to say 'you can't charge for consent. either charge everyone or no-one', but I wonder how it'll all pan out.

[1](https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/28/meta-consent-or-pay-consum...)

Meta is free to charge money and/or run ads, but what it can't do is do mass tracking of EU people unless they somehow really want to and freely opt in to that. Charging for an ad-free experience is fine, but charging so that you don't get tracked is not a legal option in EU, privacy is an unalienable human right that's not for sale no matter what contracts they write.

I think the idea is that you cannot have these options like denying access to content only if user pays with $ or personal data.

But the issue I find here is that Meta has not premiered this technique, the first offenders were Italian digital newspapers either requiring your data or a subscription.

I’ve long promoted this. Many others did, too. I went as far as suggesting they charge above the per-user profit of the surveillance business just to increase odds it would be profitable. I wanted that for Google apps on alternative Android’s and Facebook.

That they won’t release such products despite the demand shows they’re just evil. They believe they can squeeze more money and power out of ever-increasing surveillance.

Perhaps there is another incentive/coercion to encourage this behavior that we are not aware of.

If you pay, you have to be being tracked surely?

All sounds great. I'm quite curious what their objection to Apple's browser choice screen is though:

> The Commission is concerned that Apple's measures, including the design of the web browser choice screen, may be preventing users from truly exercising their choice of services within the Apple ecosystem, in contravention of Article 6(3) of the DMA.

Looks relatively reasonable to me:

https://preview.redd.it/ios-17-4-db1-new-default-browser-pop...

Is it because they always put Safari at the top and then try to randomise in a mix of browsers most people won't have heard of?

Having Safari hardcoded to the first position in the list certainly won't fly. The Windows browser choice ballot and the Android search engine choice screens eventually settled on a two tier with the five most popular options in a random order at the top, and a second tier was shown after them also in a random order.

But the other problem is the "not now" button, because it's what the large majority of users will click. Does it by any chance have the effect that Safari is kept as the default, and the question is never asked again? The Windows browser choice ballot and the Android search engine choice screens forced the user to make a choice.

Safari is not hardcoded to the first position, it is fully randomized.

> But the other problem is the "not now" button, because it's what the large majority of users will click

Yeah, because not now, dammit. I am not ready to choose the browser, I have no clue. Geezus, give me an option if you really insist on me to have options but don’t FORCE me to make my mind up when I’m not ready, right there on the spot. How do I even know if this is the best choice I am about to make? Just imagine that every time someone taps “not now” they simply say “I don’t care”. Why do I need to feel the breath of a bureaucrat on my neck when settling up my phone? Just because the bureaucrat had some beef with Apple I’m now forced to make some possibly uneducated decisions. Does your 70 year old mother or 3rd uncle knows which browser is the best and the implications of making the choice are?

Go and sort out more pressing matters. Leave my walled garden alone.

You are entirely free to just choose Safari, in that case.

From all the comments in the Reddit thread and from Apple's documentation it's entirely random.

Thanks, I was going just by the OP. Then I'd have to imagine that the problem is with the "not now" button.

Isn't having the 5 top choices always be the same kind of the same violation?

It entrenches the big guys.

I can see that some people would think that, but it's a design that was converged on after several iterations and seems to have worked for both the regulators and the companies. I think both of the previous examples actually started with just enough entries for a single screen, and were later expanded to include more entries in a second tier.

From the user's perspective, having to make a choice from an unsorted list of hundreds or thousands of items would not work. That's why the regulators seem to accept the idea that not every product has the right to be on those choice lists, and not every listed product needs to be equally prominent. What's important is that the criteria are objective and don't give an unfair advantage to the platform owner.

When Microsoft was made to do a browser choice screen for the EU in 2010 they had a two tier system and it seemed to go well with the EU. On one hand, sure - it is an advantage for the popular browsers. On the other hand the goal is more that the manufacturer not be using their position to force the browser so heavily not necessarily to put every Joe Schmoe Browser in front of the same number of eyes. From a practicality perspective it solves the main problem without becoming a complication in itself.

The idea that any of this is or ever was a problem to the end user is laughable honestly, this is political theater. End users want to be able to browse the web, that’s the point of a web browser. Most of them are based on the same underlying technology and implementations. Throwing around political power to force OS teams to spend engineering resources on the illusion of choice is actively harmful for basically zero benefit to the end user.

I’m curious. Why isn’t Microsoft forced to present a similar screen for browsers?

Microsoft has been forced to show the Browser Choice screen way before DMA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

Criticism I have seen:

- Safari will always still be installed and have its icon on the first page of your home screen by default, even if you choose another browser.

- Choosing another browser doesn't actually select it - it brings you to their app store page, where you still have to tap the (relatively tiny) install button.

- If you already have other browsers installed that are not included in the choice screen (e.g. Firefox Nightly, I believe), then you're still forced to install/pick a different browser.

- you can't uninstall Safari. The DMA clearly requires Apple to allow uninstalling it.

- the Share Sheet for in-app webview privileges Safari (Safari-specific "Add to Reading List", "Add Bookmark" at the top) regardless of default browser.

- apps with in-app webviews can roll out a custom engine, but otherwise it uses WebKit regardless of default browser. It should obviously use the webview facility provided by the default browser, if it offers one.

- confusing to change defaults. There's no central "Default Apps" screen in Settings. You have to go in the Settings app, scroll way down to a given browser, and then you can change the default. So the default browser setting is weirdly treated as an app-specific setting rather than a system setting.

- If Safari is not the default, you can change your default browser within "Settings.app >> Safari". If Safari is the default, you can't change your default browser there at all. Whereas the default browser selection menu will always be shown in the Settings.app submenu of third-party browsers.

> It should obviously use the webview facility provided by the default browser

Android doesn't do that either. You get Android System WebView which is always WebKit/Blink.

Windows didn't provide any browser engines apart from Trident through mshtml.dll either.

It would make iOS development harder - instead of getting a web view working just for WKWebView, you would need to get it working for every WebView out there. Given that they are not full browsers, it's not as simple as following web standards/caniuse. For example, service worker support in in-app browsers is limited.

If this actually gets implemented, every app out there will most likely pin the in-app browser engine to WKWebView OR bundle a binary blob with their own browser engine directly into .ipa. Bundled browser engine in .ipa has privacy implications - the app will be able to fully read secure HTTPS cookies of the sites that user visits - something that's currently protected.

> apps with in-app webviews can roll out a custom engine, but otherwise it uses WebKit regardless of default browser. It should obviously use the webview facility provided by the default browser, if it offers one.

This has massive potential to break an unbelievable number of things, first-party and third-party alike. WebKit is used in all sorts of places people wouldn’t expect, for example at one point UILabel (the native control responsible for displaying non-scrolling text and labels) used WebKit under the hood for rendering attributed strings.

The default browser has no technical ability in iOS (currently) to supply an in-app component to replace WKWebView or SFSafariViewController, and frankly as an app developer I shudder at the idea of having to test our use of in-app browsers against every browser, every release.

Users want to truly exercise their choice of browser screen so badly that a list of nitpicks about the ordering of options in the share sheet and the prominence of an "Open" button which works the same way for every other app install flow is thwarting them from doing so.

The DMA is not (directly) about what users want; it's about markets having level playing fields, where all competitors have the same opportunities and thus have to win based on merit, rather than based on dominance in a different market.

Of course, the idea behind that is that that competition will then lead to things that users really want, without having to mandate what that is specifically through central planning.

Interesting! When I got presented this list Safari wasn't even "above the fold" which surprised me, so I assumed it was randomised.

When I clicked Safari it also opened an App Store sheet for Safari, which I thought was weird but probably done to keep it consistent with the other options (more like "see more details" before making the choice definitive/installing)

Thanks for sharing.

I'm curious about the sorting of that list. From the image (mirror: https://i.imgur.com/pjo78lS.png):

   Safari
   Vivaldi
   Opera
   Web@Work
   Edge
   Onion Browser
   Seznam.cz
   Brave
   Firefox? (cut in half)

Is it Safari first then randomized names? It doesn't look alphabetical order to me.

Chrome doesn't even show up, Firefox is almost hidden.

I don't know how the list is generated. But as others have pointed out, there seems to be established precedent that hardcoding Safari first would not be compliant. And alphabetizing would create bad incentives (Calling dibs on "Aardvark" as a browser name, BTW).

The problem I see with randomization is that with all the browsers that are skins on Chromium nowadays, this would be likely to steer users into a Chromium based browser.

> Calling dibs on "Aardvark" as a browser name, BTW

It's ok, I'm naming mine after Aachen

Are those real browsers or just reskins of Safaris inner web components?

For now they're all WebKit. Apple now allows other browser engines to be used but they'll probably take a while to come out, if ever.

Oh, that's good news.

I'm excited for Firefox to appear there using its own engine.

When you look at the list you have to be concerned about the state of the browser market.

Chromium is going to dominate desktop and mobile and entrench pro-advertising measures eg. browser fingerprinting, long term first party cookies etc for years to come. Meta and Google must be thrilled.

Of course it makes a mockery of GDPR and other privacy measures EU has been pushing.

But users are demanding choice in browsers, and they are picking the least private, most pro-advertising one en masse! What’s its biggest benefit? It offers a suite of native-replacement, in-the-standards-process-but-not-finalized APIs so developers can write slow, bloated applications once and run them everywhere! This is what users want!

It is only good for Google. Not for the web.

It might be that Apple enforces the use of webkit.

This screen has already so much dark history by Microsoft on Windows.

“Select your birthdate from this randomized list of possible dates.”

You wouldn’t.

Cannot imagine why this is being downvoted. Presenting users with a randomized list is a dark pattern that discourages use of the associated feature.

Randomization is required by the regulation. Another instance of what a smart person wants out of a feature and what the EU wants being very different things.

It's being downvoted because randomizing something that is by its nature chronological is very obviously different from randomizing the order of something where you want to explicitly avoid giving the impression that one takes priority over another.

Chrome is the most popular browser and Apple’s largest competitor and isn’t on the first page?

What changed that caused all this? They can do this now because of the passage of the DMA but was there some specific event that triggered the creation and passage of that?

I’m surprised that so little happened for such a long time in terms of regulation (EU or US) and then suddenly it feels like the EU really jumped in to the fray.

The DMA came into full effect this month. The EC looked at the big companies targeted by the DMA and the state of their compliance, had questions about several of those companies' compliance and so opened investigations.

> was there some specific event that triggered the creation and passage of that?

Not really, but the DSA package has been in the works for quite a while now even though it seems very recent. The DMA may have only really come into effect May last year and the compliance deadline was only three weeks ago, but it was first proposed by the Commission all the way back in 2020, and building off proposals from the previous Commission. In a sense, they've been working on it since GDPR in 2016.

Ok that’s what I was missing, that this back in some ways to 2016.

Does someone know what the minimum fine is gatekeepers face? All sources I find only talk about the maximum fine of 10%

EDIT: Or maybe rather an expected fine, we saw with GDPR that the maximum fine isn't really used much, if at all.

There is no minimum fine. But: “In fixing the amount of a fine, the Commission shall take into account the gravity, duration, recurrence, and, for fines imposed pursuant to paragraph 3, delay caused to the proceedings.” (Article 30 paragraph 4)

So you might compare the actual noncompliance to the worst conceivable noncompliance with respect to those factors and make a guess.

Edit: There’s also this quote by Thierry Breton, Commissioner for Internal Market, on the linked page: “[…] Should our investigation conclude that there is lack of full compliance with the DMA, gatekeepers could face heavy fines.” This would imply that anything but full compliance could already incur “heavy” fines.

Thank you. I think Big Tech is already quite close to the worst perceivable non compliance, but I guess we'll see.

I'm not a lawyer, but I guess that would be zero.

The maximum in absolute numbers would be ~40B USD or ~80B USD for repeated violations, as I read it.

The DMA does not specify a minimum fine for violations.

Why isn't Microsoft on this list?

Mostly because Microsoft doesn't really gatekeep Windows and is actually compliant with the DMA; they were motioning to the same tricks as the other gatekeepers (main one is forced bundling), but the DMA caused them to retract on all of those changes.

Right now, you can properly remove all Windows apps from W11, which was really the big one that they started doing with Windows 10 alongside the Microsoft account push in OOBE (dunno if that one is still required). They also supposedly made actually disabling the Windows telemetry much more feasible than it used to be.

You can? Last I tried I couldn't remove Edge, could not change search engine used in the Windows search to anything other than Bing, every new windows update would default install new apps like Candy Crush and Amazon Prime I never wanted, and so on, and disabling Windows telemetery seems impossible without registry hacks. Ever installed a new Win11? Riddled with dark pattern UX to deceive you into extra telemetry.

The way MS did this was kind of dodge but fits the letter of the law.

On a new install of Windows 11, if you select an EU region, you will have the options to remove things like edge in the OS. You can move off that region because this flag is set only on install. If you install with a non-eu region, you don't have access to those options.

To get Europe's protections, you need to be in Europe (or faking it somehow). If you live in the US or somewhere else outside of Europe, these companies will continue to screw you because you don't have Europe working on behalf of your privacy and choice.

I think they only allow all those things in the EU, and only in a very recent update.

I am unable to uninstall Edge although I see from news briefs it will be possible in April. I am unable to even see Defender listed although it is clearly separable and I do not think they are going to enable uninstallation; if not then I would say they are still not compliant, but I understand how browsers are more of a focus at the moment.

Not tryiing to be argumentative, rather I geenuinely have a serious question.

But doesn't MS gatekeep xbox?

They do, but Xbox isn't considered a large enough market to be considered a gatekeeper affected by the DMA. None of the major console makers are.

The platform must have any of the following to be a DMA gatekeeper:

* Market capitalization of at least €75 billion.

* More than €7.5 billion turnover from EEA residents.

* At least 45 million customers in EEA.

* At least 4.5 million business customers in EEA.

Once any of those criteria are met for 3 years, they qualify as a Gatekeeper. While the gaming market is massive, any individual console platform still sits pretty comfortably below those criteria. You can find the customer number by googling around a bit - Xbox only has around 3 million active customers if I'm not mistaken (counted by Xbox Live accounts that were active in the past year).

A platform truly needs to be collosal to be considered a Gatekeeper. This law is specifically for the large platforms, not small fry.

Xbox is a video game appliance, not a general-purpose computing platform.

As far as I know game consoles live in a slightly different legal space where there's no assumption that they are supposed to be "open" systems.

It’s hard to buy windows without buying Teams along with it, that’s how they crushed slack.

That's easy. I think you mean it's hard to buy _Office_ without buying Teams, which is true.

They are, kinda.

> The Commission has also adopted five retention orders addressed to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, asking them to retain documents which might be used to assess their compliance with the DMA obligations, so as to preserve available evidence and ensure effective enforcement.

So, they are not under active investigation at the moment, but they are being monitored.

source https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_... https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...

I think it's because while Microsoft tries their hardest to nag people about their products (like Edge ads forcible injected into Chrome somehow), they don't prevent alternatives like Apple, as an example.

Microsoft is a very open platform regards many of the aspects of the DMA. There is app sideloading, alternative app stores, alternative browsers, alternative payment methods, alternative hardware, license-free ports, and there are now more laptops than ever offered without windows. In the cloud, they have valid competition (Google, AWS) in both IaaS, PaaS and SaaS (Office).

Microsoft got regulated since before Google was founded (to put in context).

For browser bundling, Chrome has beaten Edge out handily, so there's no case there. For Office bundling, they charge separately for it, so there's no real case their either

Good point. I guess the world recognizes that MS isn't quite as dominant as it was before - aleast on the operating systems side with Apple and Linux gaining reasonable share

Also Windows is comparably open to other environments. The Windows and Xbox stores exist, but you are not forced to use them or does MS take a cut on software sold.

Only potential issue I see is bundling of Office 365 and Teams. And they already fixed that one. So they are the least worst player on market.

Can you install a game on an Xbox with no disc drive without using their store?

AFAIK, MSFT still takes 12% of PC game sales in the windows store, and 30% of sales in the xbox store.

Because MS does not prevent me from anything like different stores or installing anything I want.

The more uncharitable interpretation of this would be that Microsoft has enmeshed itself to such an extent such that the bundling of Office365+Entra+Azure+Teams isn’t worth the loss of these services to governments who may potentially want to launch an investigation.

Not at all. The EU announced just days ago that they're investigating MS Entra+365

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/22/eu_antitrust_microsof...

They started an investigation on 365+Teams a year ago:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...

And Microsoft complied by unbundling Teams in the EEA:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-unbundle-teams-...

and late last year, the EU asked Teams rivals whether they still thought there was an issue:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/microsoft-rivals-asked-...

whilst similar, an antitrust investigation is different than this one. Microsoft should be on both lists.

Not suggesting this is the reasoning, but interestingly same is true of Amazon which powers a lot of gov infrastructure.

For Amazon, they’ve been unable to enmesh themselves in the same way, and with the EU DATA act passed, I’d assume they’d make quick work of the egress fees which are the main barrier towards multi-cloud architectures.

Lots of governments in the EU uses Linux and non-Microsoft alternatives.

I'm guessing the EU is focused on consumer, not B2B focused companies

> Lots

Citation needed as they say. Even if it's true that's it more than 0, my estimate would be far in excess of 90% (of governmental employees who do their work inside of the Microsoft ecosystem).

But your other point about not focusing on B2B is probably more true. However recent stuff like the cloud egress fees (EU Data ACT) shows that they do care about B2B sometimes at least.

Because Microsoft does not have consumer facing products where they have the ultimate control over.

Here's the list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act#Sectors_...

Windows and LinkedIn should be covered.

Maybe there isn't anything that the commission wants to investigate there because they did a good enough job complying. But future can bring more probes.

Microsoft didn't really have much to change on Windows outside of restoring the ability to uninstall system apps in the EEA and turning things off, and making users aware of such ability.

They don't control distribution of software on Windows (no one uses MS Store), it already has major stores owned by different companies such as Steam, Epic etc that have as much access to the OS that the MS Store does.

I’m not in support of the DMA and I’m not in favor of the US suit against Apple, and I too have been wondering how Microsoft - who I’d argue is the most anticompetitive of all, with the longest history of doing so - has escaped all of this lately. They really must be funding some important people’s pockets.

Microsoft has been through this before. EU windows has a browser choice screen and you can buy it without windows media player (I think for the same price or darn near as with). Microsoft is good at painting in or near the lines, from decades of practice. They probably also respond to new regulations without an excess of foot dragging.

Also, they weren't able to turn their dominant position in desktops into anything in mobile.

Its simple: Microsoft doesn't do the things that the DMA says companies can't do.

They may do other anti-consumer things, but they don't do these things.

Maybe the EU Commission hasn’t received DMA-related complaints from other companies about Microsoft. The Commission seems to be careful to base investigations on competitor statements.

A lot of people are quick to lock themselves into a gatekeeper's walled garden, and throw away the keys.

That Linux has not only survived for so long, but thrived, is a true testament to the will, technical expertise, and product vision of community developers.

FOSS was founded on the principles of openness and collaboration, something that we need now more than ever, as the largest companies of the world have managed to weaken that resolve through slick marketing and anti-competitive practices.

Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades.

Think of the kids growing up now, forced to be consumers rather than producers. And compare them to the last century, the sense of wonder and expression that the internet and infinitely hackable devices brought.

It was revolutionary, and many of the giants that exist now were built literally on the backs of that openness.

> FOSS was founded on the principles of openness and collaboration, something that we need now more than ever, as the largest companies of the world have managed to weaken that resolve through slick marketing and anti-competitive practices.

Some of the best open source software was developed, open sourced and maintained by the largest companies of the world.

>Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades.

Do you think an open source group could build an Apple watch?

> That Linux has not only survived for so long, but thrived, is a true testament to the will, technical expertise, and product vision of community developers.

That Linux is still mostly used as a server OS, and not as a viable OS by the general public is a true testament that there are things that matter to people that community developers don't care about.

>Think of the kids growing up now, forced to be consumers rather than producers. And compare them to the last century, the sense of wonder and expression that the internet and infinitely hackable devices brought.

Techie kids growing up now are on average an order of magnitudes better than their equivalent from last century. As a matter of fact, there are more great and creative coders nowadays compared to any time in history. Just look at the amount of open source projects on github.

Idealism that is as far disconnected from reality as yours is one of the issues plaguing FOSS today. I have no idea how your comment can be as upvoted as it is - maybe selection bias based on the nature of the article. It is still concerning though.

> Do you think an open source group could build an Apple watch?

Apple Watch? Depends on what you mean by that but they 100% could build a smartwatch, such as the open source $27 Pinetime watch:

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PineTime

https://pine64.com/product/pinetime-smartwatch-sealed/

> That Linux is still mostly used as a server OS, and not as a viable OS by the general public is a true testament that there are things that matter to people that community developers don't care about.

Given the success of Android, I'm not sure how true that is, but ignoring that, the success of Chromebooks says something, but ignoring that, the fact that I can't wander into best buy and get a laptop with Ubuntu preinstalled is what makes the vast majority people end up with Windows laptops, and then some small percent with MacOS, not some holy testament against the viability of Linux as a desktop operating system.

Idealism that is as far disconnected from reality as yours is one of the issues plaguing FOSS today.

Let's unpack this even more. A quite potent problem, is when something else is posing as or sneaking into activism and movements like Open Source and FOSS. This something else can take the form of cliques, hipsterism, or the use of movements to vent anger or aggression.

The best way to hurt a cause is to represent it badly.

Some of the best open source software was developed, open sourced and maintained by the largest companies of the world.

Scapegoating people and groups merely by taxonomy has had a bad record across history. Hold people and companies to account for the things they do, not for their characteristics. That's the only fair form of accountability.

> Do you think an open source group could build an Apple watch?

Surely not, but Apple could have worked on integrating and participating to the development of an open source software for the Apple watch.

In another world, MeeGo[1] would have take off and we would use it on every smartphones (no iOS/Android incompatibility), every car systems, every tablets, every smart watches and everything would work seamlessly. Hardware manufacturers would concentrate on hardware and we would be able to buy the hardware we want and it would connect every devices we already own.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo

> Do you think an open source group could build an Apple watch?

This is such a dishonest argument. Which part of the parent post talked about building hardware? It's all about the hardware being open to run any software without artificial limitations, and providing the documentation to interface with the hardware. An open source group could definitely build an operating system and software for an Apple watch. I can't believe you try to call someone else disconnected from reality and idealistic when you engage them in such a malicious, dishonest way.

Capitalism that is as far disconnected from reality as yours is one of the issues plaguing FOSS today. I have no idea how your comment can be as upvoted as it is - maybe selection bias based on the nature of the article. It is still concerning though.

> Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades.

This is a bit of a non-sequitur. Far and away the biggest ecosystem of apps ever created for everyday users existed on Windows, an infamously proprietary platform. Nothing on Linux or Unixes has ever compared (unlike server software, which is the opposite). But, of course, Windows was always open in a different sense, one in which non-PC devices have never been, even those built with open-source software (Android). So yes, I do agree that open-ness is important, but I don't think FOSS has much to do with that.

While Windows itself may be proprietary, it mostly runs on fairly open hardware. Open in the sense that the manufacturer doesn't impose artificial limitations on what software is allowed to run on it, and also provides very thorough documentation for it, giving no advantage to any party in regards to information.

Also Windows itself is open in the sense that it doesn't restrict any software from running on it. You can write user-mode applications and run them on any architecturally compatible Windows system. You can write drivers to run kernel mode code on any Windows system (you can disable signature verification).

In the case of Windows, it being proprietary doesn't actually limit what anyone else can do on it nor is it artificially limited to only run on approved hardware. In many ways, it is open.

Also Android is very loosely considered as open.

Samsung and Google layer so many proprietary components on top that it's more of an open foundation rather than a true open platform.

But that's merely because of market share. If the majority started using Linux, you'd see the same growth of the app ecosystem.

But it's a chicken and the egg problem. Without more users, we don't have more apps/polish on Linux, but without polish, it's not going to get any more users.

Do you have stats to back that claim? Isn't the biggest ecosystem of apps ever created on Android (Linux)? We have way more smartphones than PCs.

Most active FOSS are there just because big companies supports it with their multiple 6 digit salary employees. Only 3.9% of linux changes comes from developers without company attribution[1]. Pytorch and react and lot of other things came from company which is worst violator of their monopoly status. Same with unix, transistors, C etc.

[1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/775440/

I'm going to reply here to provide a bit more context, since many of the threads are diving too deep into the specifics of linux/foss/openness/ideology, which was unfortunately not the point.

The main crux of my comment is about being able to "own" your own device. A hackable device is better than a closed device, more choice is better than no choice.

Is it so hard to believe that if Microsoft or Apple had a death grip on Windows and MacOs respectively, restricting completely the kinds of things you could do on these platforms unless individually blessed, that there would be a far less interesting ecosystem of apps / capabilities available than what we have today?

As an example, one cannot build AWS on an iPad. Like literally cannot - the tools are either not available or are significantly crippled, since you may use them to circumvent Apple's gatekeeper cut.

That's the main idea, make smartphones and tablets, smartwatches, vr headsets etc. more like traditional desktop devices.

A parallel is Disney taking public domain stories and then dramatically manipulating copyright law to monopolize them.

The "pull the ladder up behind you" mentality is so pervasive in modern business it's amazing anything new gets built at all.

> Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades.

Nothing is stopping anyone from making these devices, and I think many do in fact exist but are not popular.

Openness is about people being able to run their own software on hardware that they buy. It is a completely unreasonable argument to state that "if you want to run your own software, first build your own hardware".

> Nothing is stopping anyone from making these devices

Anti-competitive practices do. Example of a struggle: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/

> Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades.

What has not been holding Linux etc back, but has been holding smartphones etc back?

To expect people to contribute their minds out of the kindness of their hearts and not deserve compensation feels a lot like "greed," too.

And let's not understate the value of vertical integration, something that open source fundamentally diverges from

> companies of the world have managed to weaken that resolve through slick marketing

Ah yes. The only reason people chose “closed” source products over FOSS is because they’re less intelligent than you. All the dumb people (not you of course) got tricked by slick marketing!

It couldn’t possibly be that the companies behind “closed” products are invested far more in understanding and serving what their users actually need/want, since their users pay them. It couldn’t possibly be that “closed” products focus on actual product-market-fit instead of developer-enthusiasm-fit.

Open source has absolutely made some amazing contributions to the software ecosystem of today. But let’s not kid ourselves, we need those “evil” profit-seeking companies as well.

As a long time Linux user, a long time Mac and iPhone user....

In terms of "capabilities that could exist" - I honestly have no idea what you are talking about! I use iOS and Mac because it has _more capabilities_ than anything from the FOSS arena. Last time an "open source competitor" to airdrop came around here it was hilariously unusable!

There are undeniable advantages to vertical integration. The miracle of apple bluetooth headphones is a stark example. The enhanced pairing/hand off that airpods have is insanely superior to the stock standard. Even iMessage has superior default encryption than anything short of Signal (maybe).

Alas the "product vision" of community developers is rather short sighted and stymied by lack of hardware manufacturing capability. Linux on the desktop is barely usable, so I really wouldn't get too excited about the product vision.

There's a lot to be said about Linux and such, but the idea that Apple/Google/etc are limiting innovation is just not based in reality!

iMessage does not have better encryption. If the recipient's phone dies and is unreachable, it will resend the text as a plaintext SMS, which is kind of a problem.

FOSS has been a narrow and self-congratulatory group of people who, while making great core contributions, have done little in the way of product development required to actually help the world compute.

Now imagine if TTIP was signed, EU would most likely be forced to abolish DMA or GDPR altogether.

That is not a good thing.

I guess my bad for sounding ambiguous, of course it's very good that EU is not obliged to bow to US "investors".

A terrible thing in fact. We should instead hope for a trade treaty that abolishes the DCMA. It's policies like these that make it clear that the government only serves special interests and not the average voter.

> We should instead hope for a trade treaty that abolishes the DCMA.

Trade agreements have weaseled more copyright and DMCA nonsense into just about every treaty now. Good luck going against the grain there.

It's a good idea to regulate and examine companies with over a certain share of the market and over a certain size since it's almost guaranteed they will abuse their market position one way or another.

These companies pose a general threat to the proper functioning of a healthy market due to network effects and compatibility issues, things that regulators should always be working to counteract.

Especially because in a global market, these kind of companies can be more powerful than governments. So it’s a good thing that large countries, or unions of countries, attempt to push back a little bit on their power.

I think EU has an easier case, because the way I understand it, in the EU anticompetitive behavior in itself is illegal, while in the US, as long as you can argue the consumer benefits (eg Amazon selling stuff at a loss), it’s no problem.

I think you can replace "can be" with "are".

If Google, Apple or Meta feel like what you're saying is not in their interest for the public to hear it, you just... can't say it. Apple can remotely disable your iPhone. Google can remove you from search results. Meta can nuke your social media presence from orbit.

This is by no means an endorsement of the guy because he's a complete piece of shit, but the one thing Alex Jones got right during his temper tantrum when he got deplatformed is that getting deplatformed is not a thing that only happens to people you don't like; theoretically, and in fact quite regularly, large multinationals can simply decide that someone should cease to exist in the public sphere, and they can legally disappear people more effectively than the CIA. Today it's anti vax loonies and racist conspiracy theorists, tomorrow it's folks reporting on Apple's Foxconn factories in China or Meta's content moderation staff or Google's spying on people's private communications.

We live in a world where we've created the marketplace of ideas, which necessarily means that those who hold the marketplace have to give everyone a stall, almost regardless of how vile their ideas are. Not doing so is a great way for large corporations to silence their critics on a scale never before imagined. I'm not exaggerating when I say these three companies can erase you from existence. Losing your Google account, Apple ID, and Meta accounts all at once would be an excellent way to prevent a corporate dissident from accessing the info they need to keep these companies accountable. It's terrifying, and it's also a mundane kind of terrifying that requires what might seem like overly aggressive government regulation, but I really don't see another way forward.

And before someone comes in and says something to the effect of "well, isn't all of the above still true if you replace Google, Apple and Meta with $COUNTRY?" and of course the answer is yes, but at the very very least, countries are theoretically accountable to their citizens. Corporations are effectively accountable to no one, which is certainly worse.

Continuous examining for abuse is great and what a proactive regulator should be doing anyway. Question is, does it incentivize these companies to reduce their market share by different means - going low on a certain marketing campaign, release a subpar product, or make choices that alienate say bottom 10-20% of users and cause them to leave. Once they reduce the market share, would they not be examined till they attain that market share back? (that is after the market definition is clear)

In India, there is UPI which at it's core is dominated by 2-3 apps. Regulator is trying to reduce market share but to no avail. The thing is, service is free for end user, so the only way a service provider app (links user with banks on whose rails the tech works) earns money is via advertising. Others dont take it up because returns are only possible once you burn money to attain a certain scale. No one in the chain earns anything on a single transaction except banks(paid for by other banks). Think while regulator should be watching the apps (and banks) closely, they should instead also work on an incentive structure which could open the market further for newer entrants.

Market share is fine, honestly earned. Abuse of market share or product is not.

You might make a world beating product and achieve 100% market share. That's great!

If you then use that market share, or your product, to resist competition, or if that happens naturally, so that by doing nothing you are guaranteed 100% market share, then regulators have to step in to ensure a healthy market going forward.

> Question is, does it incentivize these companies to reduce their market share by different means - going low on a certain marketing campaign, release a subpar product, or make choices

I dont think anybody expects them to reduce their market share. Thats what competition is for.

It’s a bit too late for that. The big players just buy any competitor coming anywhere close to be relevant, a boat load of money for said company, peanuts for the ones buying. I’d say the market is defunct since decades ago.

I don’t think EU not the US is ready to implement rules against smaller companies being bought, I mean Microsoft could by Activision Blizzard.

Actually it's better than that: medium corp will go against buying small player to avoid being subjected to DMA ! It will slow or stop growth because it will lower or cancel the advantage of being so big as having no competitor

In the end, markets will optimize to have 2 or 3 big players in each fields to avoid that kind of problem...

These rules already exist, it's just enforcing them that is the issue.

Consumers would be helped more if these large companies are broken up.

We could have so much more competition if Apple was divided into software, hardware and services companies.

And these companies (except perhaps the services company) would be more pro-consumer, making stuff that we actually want instead of stuff that Apple wants us to have (and vendor-locks us in).

It is also a bit ridiculous that some of the best CPUs out there are available only for consumer products.

It’s about choice. I want a tightly integrated experience on my iPhone and Mac. I don’t want regulators as designers.

iPhone and Macs own a small fraction of their markets around the world. Clearly there are alternatives and you don’t need to choose an iPhone or a Mac.

This comment is pretty ignorant of the history of computing.

Apple tried to allow competition in their ecosystem. And all that happened is that vendors like Power Computing went straight for Apple's most profitable markets and nearly bankrupted the company.

The only reason Apple is successful is because people like the console-esque experience of having one vendor do everything.

I don't think that's necessarily the answer. Often these things arise out of market failure.

For instance Apple couldn't sell its ARM processors even if it wanted to because ARM's licence agreement with Apple forbids it. The problem is that the market for CPUs lacks choice. Hopefully RISC-V will alleviate that, eventually.

Proper functioning of a healthy market is hardly the worst. These giants would sell people if they could get away with it and make money doing it. The people behind them would not think twice before damaging the society if there were few bucks in it for them to hoard.

It's making me sad that this world is full of so many people and massive states/corps and only the EU tries to navigate the new challenges of integrating technology in our lives responsibly. It feels like the world is full with idiots, cry babies, and evil geniuses and just the EU which is such a small fraction of the world acting like a grown up.

I mean, many people would agree that the US is the face of the western world. How come such a massive group of people act so irresponsibly making the same mistakes over and over again, causing a significant amount of suffering, and then saying the east is evil. The EU is the only body that advocates socialism and democracy while the US doesn't live to its standard, which is a shame really. In these challenging times the west needs strong leaders, not the horrifying shit show there is now.

The best thing the EU can do is demonstrate that there are other ways to do things, often as a counterpoint to the US.

Both a large liberal democracies (for now) but they live on opposite sides on the (center) left/right spectrum.

There is a real benefit to humanity with competing ideas being put into practice at scale.

i wonder how much these changes are costing Apple vs how much they make in Europe. would be interesting to know if there's an amount of compliance costs and complexity that could see Apple leave the EU market!

The threshold is nowhere near close.

You forget that these companies already operate in China which is a massive pain in the backside for all involved.

The only reason why a company might threaten to pull out is if they wanted to stop other countries getting similar ideas.

Virtually all Meta and Google services are blocked in China. Only Apple has significant consumer presence (and manufacturing) there.

China isn’t threatening Apple’s entire App Store model though.

I'd say that it's realistically not possible for any amount of cost or complexity of compliance to make them leave the EU market.

Apple has a vested interest in being able to offer their services worldwide. If one part of the world is not included, companies in that part will have a much easier time to develop and grow their own alternatives. If these alternatives gain enough traction in that part they might then be able to threaten Apples services globally.

Therefore I'd assume that even if they will only break even (or operate at a manageable loss) they would still stay in the EU.

The EU is a huge market of people with deep pockets, I conjecture the break even point is not anywhere on the horizon.

At some point control of one's own business future balances out a certain level of profit.

You would not only need to consider how much it brings in but also how much it would cost to pull back. They would have to unwind a ton of legal structures, get rid of employees and live up to contracts that are already in place. This would take years and would be more than enough time for competition to smoothly make a transition.

Then you are also thinking of Apple as some kind of US entity. It's a faceless shareholder owned business. The shareholders would somehow need to agree to leave a still very profitable region. They would only agree to that if they think the company can force other regions or the EU to not legislate Apple. It's a risky strategy that could work but I don't think you can get the majority of shareholders to try it. Even then it could fail and just bankrupt the company.

You also have to consider how much it costs to actually comply. The board would probably much rather Apple comply and keeps selling iPhones and services in the EU vs not getting ANY profits at all from their currently second largest region in the world.

Remember how the US tech market went into layoff spree just for a slight dip in profits and slightly higher rates?

Think what does same investors will do to the company that leaves a 300mil people market over a legal spat.

They mass hired too many unqualified people in 2021.

Think about all of the innovations those terminated people will bring to the market when they are no longer shackled in golden handcuffs.

That would be a net positive as we would all benefit from new players that would emerge and fill that void. Obviously your question was rhetorical and this won't happen.

New players emerging in the high-end smartphone space? You seriously believe that a comparable player to *Apple* is going to emerge any time in the next decade? Lol

$94B

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/

Did the math, 24.5% of their global 2023 revenue.

If they leave the EU market, Android immediately becomes a much bigger focus for every app developer which can have an effect on the quality of apps available on the app store around the world.

Android is already the dominant mobile OS in Europe by market share. Why would quality increase by going from dominant to more dominant?

These DMA like changes are now coming from everywhere. It is just that EU has teeth, not to ignore and usually moves first.

California has adopted GDPR, there are ongoing probes in the US just last week, etc.

Time is up for regulation-free business in IT. We had 50 years of freedom (compared to let us say: drugs, medical devices, cars, airplanes, ...). It is normal cycle for a market

> Time is up for regulation-free business in IT. We had 50 years of freedom (compared to let us say: drugs, medical devices, cars, airplanes, ...)

This is an odd reading of the history, tbh. The US regulators were generally more active on competition in the industry in the 90s than today; see the Microsoft and Intel investigations, for instance.

> We had 50 years of freedom

More “Wild West gold rush” than “freedom”

A quarter of Apple’s total revenue comes from the EU (with Apple’s average profit margin of ~40%), but only 7% of the app store revenue. Which means that even if Apple gave up on all app store revenue from the EU, they wouldn’t lose that much. In any case, the resources they put into compliance is certainly much, much less than a quarter of their total resources.

I doubt they would leave the EU. I do think it is expected that they will design their products or features with the EU in mind and probably not even ship specific things in that region to avoid risk of being micromanaged / product managed by authorities.

Apple would first have to determine if it’s worth continuing to act like petulant children instead of just complying. They could not reasonably classify what they’re taking on now as simply “compliance expenses”. They’re doing it BECAUSE they see the worth in fighting back.

I don't think it's that unusual for companies to have wildly different margins in different markets. Apple's margins leave quite a lot of room for a market to still be worth pursuing.

I mean, the US is also pursuing competition investigations into Apple; if the strategy is to just flee anywhere that the regulators ask them mean questions, then they're probably realistically looking at only operating in developing nations, and not all of those.

And that would literally mean that the probe was warranted.

Awesome!

https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/1772207590212063397

I wish they would also push forward with cookie consent pop-up - 1) enforce easy reject (as it should be but dumb websites hide it away, which is illegal) and better yet 2) enforce it on a browser config level like we have do-not-track config but should be with 3 levels and enforceable.

> cookie consent pop-up

The second you call it a pop-up it's just more hell, should just be a browser setting that has to be abided by. No popup, no constantly asking me for consent.

I should consent once, ONCE!

The biggest browser manufacturer is not interested in making it easy to opt out of tracking cookies for some reason, wonder why that is…

> should just be a browser setting that has to be abided by

It should be a browser setting that is enforced by the browser.

If I open something in private mode, or use the multi-account containers extension (Firefox), cookies are isolated or forgotten without any involvement from the remote party. The site doesn't need to know or care.

A browser setting would be binary - yes or no.

A per site consent dialog, with per "partner" option, with easy to use "Decline all" / "Allow all" buttons, is much more granular. Maybe you're OK with a random community website "tracking" you because you know it makes them more money from ads; but you're not OK with Meta tracking you across the whole web.

Website: "We and our 281 partners value your privacy.. Click to accept and continue, or click here to waste your time with this massive list of checkboxes."

Me: Close tab.

The supporters don't seem to understand how much of their lifetime gets wasted with clicking through those popups. This should be a once for all setting in the browser that the websites can access.

281? Peanuts, try 1,609: https://www.allrecipes.com/

Non-Twitter link: https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission/112155867623...

I guess they don't feel comfortable mandating how open source software is written?

Safari could be mandated to do something like this and honestly I think Apple would be very happy to do it, but it's a bit weirder with Firefox...

I'd say that Firefox would be even on board with the idea (weird they haven't proposed it themselves).

Besides - EU could create a law saying: "website should obey browser setting and if such setting is not present allow user to consent to tracking"

Yeah the ePrivacy Regulation, which would overhaul cookie consent, was supposed to pass alongside the GDPR. I don't think any real progress has been made on it for years. The last update on the text itself was in 2021.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eprivacy-r...

This sounds awesome! Comission is again a step ahead ;)

> Simpler rules on cookies: the cookie provision, which has resulted in an overload of consent requests for internet users, will be streamlined. The new rule will be more user-friendly as browser settings will provide an easy way to accept or refuse tracking cookies and other identifiers. The proposal also clarifies that no consent is needed for non-privacy intrusive cookies that improve internet experience, such as cookies to remember shopping-cart history or to count the number of website visitors.

basically what I mentioned before

NO MORE POP UPS

Cookies in 2024 is kinda irrelevant, more important is to prevent fingerprinting of veriest kind (CSS, fonts, GPU, screen size etc).

The actual law is about any kind of personal data, including but not limited to fingerprinting web/app users, which can be associated with a real human.

European fear of harms caused by malicious use of databases of personal data go back to actual harms caused by such databases when they were still paper-based and the first transistors had not even been demonstrated.

They're also on the way out because Google is moving to turn Chrome into a massive tracking black box on it's own.

There's no need to use cookie-based fingerprinting if you control ~97% of the browser market and you can just install the tracking tools directly in the software used and keep them active with maliciously crafted (dark pattern) popups.

a precedence in pay-or-consent would uproot a lot of news business. Overdue because this is illegal since GDPR but this is a tough cookie (oh the wordplay) for many organizations.

Does anyone know of good online resources to teach yourself law. CS and engineering have great courses online, surely there are some hidden law gems.

By law here, you mean EU style civil law?

I mean any set of resources that after studying it will make you confident in reading material in law. It doesn't necessarily have to be a specific law system, or is that not how things work?

I wish Discord was affected by the DMA so we could get some kind of official interoperability.

It's crazy how the 00s was this golden age of interoperability. You could use almost every messaging service with a third party client. Now all we have is walled gardens.

Where do people get this notion that every system has to work with their competitors’ system? Genuinely curious. Why would I spend resources making sure to accommodate connection to something that competes?

ActivityPub discord would be lit

What product do you work on? Let’s make that DMA as well.

After “EU launches probes..” i was hoping to read planet names

That's ESA. :)

(Next launch to another planet seems to be ExoMars 2 to Mars in 2028, carrying the Rosalind Franklin rover. Originally planned for 2022 on a russian rocket, now with a european launcher.)

After reading your comment, I really appreciate it. The thinking has a positive world spin (progress for all mankind) instead of the ugly truth of our word.

We all should think like that.

The web as designed by Tim Berners-Lee was a decentralized system where you could host a website and others could see it.

Google came along and made finding these websites much more convenient and accessible. Along the way Microsoft IE began using monopoly advantage to make the web in Microsoft’s image. It was a clunky unstandardized mess for many years as only Microsoft could officially push a standard. You could build for Netscape/Firefox, but you would be breaking 90% of your users due to undocumented and tailored code.

Now Google has the market share. The standards are much more aligned amongst the major players, and it would be a stretch to call it a monopoly. That’s the goal.

Google unofficially pushes the new browsers standards towards Google’s image, just as Microsoft had before. Just look at Chrome extensions for an example. It’s not a coincidence ad blockers are becoming weakling in the name of “security”.

Apple has their entrenched user base, solidifying with every iOS app unavailable to other ecosystems. Compound the issue when people have paid real money for useful apps that they don’t wish to sink the cost for.

It’s better than before, but companies will never have your best interests at heart. Profit is incentivized first, then product (including you).

A decentralized web is possible, we have the technology. There is no reason a static site server couldn’t be implemented with a proxy hiding feature, even using IPFS potentially. Large plates can still cache and serve data to get paid, but your data doesn’t have to be centralized.

Moreover, serving up a web server from your local machine could be as easy as opening a custom pinned tabbed and sharing it out. CRDTs and homomorophic tech open worlds of possibility with secure p2p applications at scale.

But this is not what a cloud provider wants. It is not the direction we are heading. We are trained to be paranoid (rightful so unfortunately), and cloud providers tout themselves as the panacea. In some ways they are, but at what cost?

We no longer trust the user to have a direct connection. All of your services should be on the cloud if you’re “enterprise” enough, and you’ll pay for it accordingly.

What I want to see: Governments recognize that the internet is a public utility at this point, and reduce the roadblocks to hosting your own data. Allow all GUA IPv6 addresses to be static if requested. Don’t allow carriers to give special preference to business accounts vs personal for static assignment. There is no technical reason for this if a customer requests it. We’re not running out of IPv6 addresses.

This fixes the STUN/TURN debacle created by NAT, and opens up the field for new possibilities. It also allows for real decentralized competition with cloud providers.

It used to be that I got excited about the random blog posts I could find. Simple HTML sites from interesting people, which I mostly get on Hacker News now. Search engines filled with ads and SEO/AI garbage only exist because of the profit structure and centralized control.

With ID verification a certainty due to AI advances, we’re going to be even more locked into these monopolistic systems. We need competition, and as long as they hold the search screen, we’re only going to move towards higher profits for them. Yet something tells me our governments have something to do with it. Data collection isn’t just profitable, it’s potent.

I strongly agree with the general gist of your post; I don’t use any social media and a piece of me dies anytime a twitter link is shared that I can’t read because I don’t have an account.

That said, I don’t think the technologies and solutions you’ve proposed will take flight unfortunately.

I’ve been very curious about IPFS for the longest time, but it seems to fit into the same category as blockchain: beautiful technology that could solve a lot of problems, yet the barrier to entry vs just doing it the status quo way is too high.

If the general public can’t be bothered having their own Wordpress blog, the jump to running a server or writing a single HTML tag is far too difficult.

I’d love to see a fully not-for-profit social media organization whose only goal is the wellbeing of users

There is one reason left: copyright.

A true decentralized content sharing platform cannot prevent copyright infringement. That's the guarantee that we have built our entire society around. Copyright isn't even about artists making money anymore. It's the tool we use to litigate fraud. It's the tool we use to demand privacy. It's the foundation for content-moderation.

If we want a decentralized web, we need to leave copyright out of it. The greatest challenge for that is moderation. I advocate that we replace moderation with curation.

Original https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_... see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39814690

Throwaway account for obvious reasons:

As a SRE SWE at Alphabet/Google, I find this assumed-guilt and assumed-lack-of-giving-a-shit irritating.

For the past several quarters we have spent a significant proportion of our effort on DMA compliance, right down to the infrastructure & RPC level. It is top priority mandate level stuff and getting absolute top billing from managers and TLs in planning and day-to-day activities.

I have spent a long time over the past few months working almost entirely on DMA projects so it is pretty aggravating to then see these "probes" into if we are taking it seriously.

Don't get me wrong, I think the DMA is a good thing and it is totally the right thing to do. But this assumption that Google don't care and are ignoring it or whatever is just exasperating when myself and many other good engineers are working their hearts out to implement it.

</rant>

> I find this assumed-guilt and assumed-lack-of-giving-a-shit irritating.

Europe's probes works differently w.r.t. US. It's not "assumed guilt", it's "we want a clearer picture".

If you did everything alright, there's nothing to be afraid or be irritated of. You answer your questions and move on.

If you tried to work your way around, then, well...

If there wasn't a DMA, and no prospect of probe or accountability, google, and the likes, wouldn't give a shit. As we can see from the current state of affairs (that led to DMA and all that)

How many other good engineers at Google are working on anti-competitive practice by pushing Google as default browser, providing a worse service on non-Chromium based browsers (like slowing YouTube for Firefox), etc? [Microsoft Edge does worse]

How many other good engineers at Google are working on ethically dubious practices, like tracking users that are in explicit do-not-track mode through browser fingerprinting?

How many other good engineers at Google are working on <insert any other terrible practices>?

Maybe paying a few engineers to clean up their reputation is not enough? Maybe you just picked a bad role and are looking for the wrong culprits?

Even on a law and implementation effort like this with such large impact there are maybe 10,000 people in the world involved who actually understand it in any significant sense, and they all have a strong reason not to post about it on a public forum, or even a private one.

And even those people will only understand a limited aspect or perspective.

So the people commenting can only comment based on their outside impressions and emotions about generalities and how the specific implementation details seem to affect they as an end user.

I try to take anything said with that in mind. There is information in the comments about user experience but anything else is at the level of bullshitting at the bar with your friends, and not to be taken personally.

Ha! Just because you're only getting flack for this, I once upon a long ago worked on gdpr implementation and it was exactly the same thing.

Our entire team was working overtime and liaising with regulators to figure out what some of those pretty vague statements actually meant when it came down asking user permission for third party analytics and how to ensure we were compliant (what counts as essential, how many non-essential can you reasonably ask someone to review, who creates that list, what happens to the companies not in it, etc.etc.).

Nobody else knew either because they were all looking at us, as we'd be likely to get sued first anyway. Cue the articles after launch on how we either didn't care to do it right or we were actually being our usual evil selves in sneakily not implementing it in properly.

I feel your pain

> to then see these "probes" into if we are taking it seriously

The probe is to determine if the effort was effective not if you are taking it seriously. If your work was effective then nothing will happen, if it wasn't effective than the fine or lack thereof would be sized appropriately to how serious they believe you are taking it. That is just effective regulation in action.

From the press release:

> The Commission has opened proceedings against Alphabet, to determine whether Alphabet's display of Google search results may lead to self-preferencing in relation to Google's vertical search services (e.g., Google Shopping; Google Flights; Google Hotels) over similar rival services.

I will admit to not having used google search for ages because of these practices and other modifications making it worse and worse, so off I go to search for "hotels paris" the sort of search I might make when planning a trip to Paris and I want to avoid booking.com for similar reasons.

And the top is google maps followed by some excerpt of google lodging links redirecting through google. So yeah, seems like google lodging is being preferenced over booking (which I also don't want) and tripadvisor, hotels.com, expedia etc. all prioritised over organic results that I would actually want.

So google search certainly preferences google maps and google lodging, maybe that is a preference consistent with the DMA but I feel like maybe it shouldn't be. If you were involved in a project to depreference google maps or lodging in a way consistent with the DMA, then I feel like you were targeting a little too deep into the grey area or didn't have enough time. As others pointed out, this is just a probe to determine if compliance has been achieved or not. There is no assumption of guilt.

> I find this assumed-guilt and assumed-lack-of-giving-a-shit irritating

Web Environment Integrity.

Those three words burned up a lot of what little goodwill was left for google.

"past several quaters". The DMA entered force November 1. 2022.

Google can spend a lot of money on it, and still be non-compliant. How much time has been spent on it, or how seriously it's being taken, is not really indicative of anything relevant.

Google only cares about DMA compliance because they don't want to get in trouble. Otherwise you wouldn't be so busy with it right now, you'd already be compliant.

I have sympathy for you as a SWE, but I have no sympathy for megacorporations - they should never be trusted.

Looks like the EU are investigating Alphabet for "Alphabet's rules on steering in Google Play and self-preferencing on Google Search".

Is it possible Alphabet has complied with some parts, but not all?

This might not be pedantic. Maybe they're missing important details?

Shows how NON compliant Alphabet was before DMA ;)

"Make infra compliant, but try to pull some shit with billing, to see how serious the EC is about DMA. That way, if they're serious, we're ready, but if not, we can still make money."

Google is one of the reasons why this law had to be created in order to protect the users from its systemic dark patterns. I'm glad they're spending significant effort on DMA compliance, it means the law is working.

> Don't get me wrong, I think the DMA is a good thing and it is totally the right thing to do.

This is the part that you and Google don't agree. If you look at your comment from that perspective, you can see why probe makes sense.

So are we all going to just trust your word? That ship has long sailed, the trust is not there anymore.

This is what tech companies deserve to get (not just Google) when they try to play the different laws and circumvent them.

It's possible that both are true at the same time: 1. Google doesn't really give a shit and will do the very least they think can get away with, 2. They have some people working on it out of the 27k engineers they have.

I'm not even sure how it's controversial, I assume you are biased and emotional as a Googler, but every company will do the very least possible to loosen their grip on the market.

Alphabet is under investigation for, among things:

> Whether Google preferences the firm's own goods and services in search results

Are you saying that Google doesn't preference it's own goods and services on the 'Google' platform ahead of it's other competitors on that platform?

I mean, if you did a good job, then this is no extra work for you. But there's very little reason to trust any of you right? Especially after stunts Apple is constantly pulling, everyone in EU leadership would have to be a brain dead moron to believe whatever US corps are telling them without any kind of verification.

If you pass with flying colors, that doesn't diminish any of your work - it confirms that you did it well.

And yet all the gatekeepers have publically taken action to actively try to undermine the DMA. Admittedly Google is nowhere near as bad as Apple, but it's still happening. So of course investigations have been launched

What's irritating is your pearl clutching. Google either turns the things it touches to shit or kills them. Guilt is assumed because it is fucking deserved. Seethe about it.

> I have spent a long time over the past few months working almost entirely on DMA projects so it is pretty aggravating to then see these "probes" into if we are taking it seriously.

Well just because you take it seriously does not mean you have done a good job in implementing the changes? I dont know about google but apple certainly flaunted the rules completely so its a good thing that they are not letting it go.

Except Google isn't complying.

Google charges 12-17% for "linking out" to a web purchase screen (aka "external offers").

> has opened proceedings to assess whether the measures implemented by Alphabet and Apple in relation to their obligations pertaining to app stores are in breach of the DMA. Article 5(4) of the DMA requires gatekeepers to allow app developers to “steer” consumers to offers outside the gatekeepers' app stores, free of charge

This reminds me of a conversation from Dune, between Count Fenring and the Baron:

"The Emperor does wish to audit your books," the Count said.

"Any time."

"You... ah... have no objections?"

"None. My CHOAM Company directorship will bear the closest scrutiny."

The point is if everything is in order (or made to look as if it's in order), then Google has nothing to fear, no matter how many probes the EU launches. And the Baron didn't take it personally, and neither should Google. It's all in the game, after all.

You rant feels unnecessarily emotional and victim assuming.

"WAH! WAH! The EU doesn't apreciate the job at Google I signed up for and getting paid $400k+ to do."

If you don't like your job, quit and find something you'll find fulfilling because you're not gonna get any sympathy for you not getting public government appreciation for the very well paid job you singed up to do at a private company. Go out and get some perspective, there's people out there with real problems in their lives, breaking their backs and barely scraping by. Seriously, the entitlement of some well paid big-tech workers is astonishing.

The EU hasn't got any beef with you or your job. Nobody at EU said that Google engineers aren't working hard on DMA compliance.

It's Google's (management's) responsibility to prove to regulators that they're DMA complaint, not their employee's to go public under burner accounts to say this.

"Trust AND verify".

Blame your management for lack of (proactive) action and lack of communication to the authorities, not the EU for looking into your employer.

> The Commission is concerned that Alphabet's and Apple's measures may not be fully compliant as they impose various restrictions and limitations. These constrain, among other things, developers' ability to freely communicate and promote offers and directly conclude contracts, including by imposing various charges.

Oh that hurts Apple. "directly conclude contracts". That goes deep.

Imagine how much time will be wasted to comply with crazy demands like making the Photos app uninstallable which help basically nobody.

Do you enjoy pre-installed aware, shareware, demoware etc. in general? or is this only because it is Apple products and his is about?

like having a demo version of Norton installed on your new PC.

or having Facebook OEM installed with no way to remove it?

you are the first one I have ever heard of, who actively encourages and enjoys that.

impressive.

Please do tell us more about why the Photos "app" is unique and wasn't uninstallable to begin with, surely it's not a business decision made explicitly to increase vendor lock-in and introduce friction to consumer choice (like the rest of the Apple suite of "apps").

The EU has long lost the plot with all the bureaucracy and rules. People like it when the government cracks down on powerful corporations, not understanding that the government apparatus is the most powerful and dangerous institution of them all. I'm not fully against that part of the DMA, breaking up these walled gardens could be positive. But history has shown once they start meddling with the markets, governments rarely know when to stop. That's because people in positions of power generally think they're in control and know what they're doing.

Look at the recent bottle cap directive for a more insane example. There are sadly hundreds of such cases at this point and the number of rules keeps growing year by year. Doing business in the EU will become more and more difficult and especially the cost for starting a new business is growing massively because of what needs to get invested in compliance before you even get started. This will be devastating for innovation and their economy as a whole.

Many system apps that are bundled with iOS can already be uninstalled and reinstalled via the App Store.

Photos also has an “Uninstall” button. Won’t feel like trying out what that does.

Imagine how much time could have been saved if they had just made Photos a normal app from the beginning?

In turbulent times, the tallest grass gets chopped first.

But also, a few megacorps increasingly occupy increasingly numerous facets of lives of billions of people and should be carefully monitored so that they don't abuse their power.

> In turbulent times, the tallest grass gets chopped first.

This is an incoherent metaphor. Why would turbulent times cause a change in grass-chopping behavior?

These megacorps have been avoiding paying taxes in the jurisdictions where they make most of their money. It's only natural to expect govts. to claw some of that revenue back. People think it's about privacy but it's really about tax revenue.

I love the DMA. But if you have to launch a long, sprawling compliance investigation the minute the law enters in force, it might mean you didn’t write it with enough precision…

It's moreso that all major gatekeepers under investigation (note that not all Gatekeepers are under investigation - Amazon and ByteDance aren't) didn't even try to be compliant with the proposed legislation - they attempted to lobby against it, take overly literal interpretations to make the legislation seem crazy and so on and so forth.

They had 2 years to be compliant with the DMA. All of them waited until the last second and all of them have attempted some degrees of malicious compliance with it. Apple is the most outstanding horrible one, but they're all trying to avoid proper compliance as much as possible because they think it'll allow them to squeeze out just the slightest amounts of more profits.

What does checking whether companies actually complied with a law that's been published for years have to do with precision?

(Lack of precision tends to be a US legal weasel word actually meaning "you didn't leave us loopholes to exploit".)

…or it means that subjects didn’t take it seriously enough or are ready to die on this hill.

Realistically, unless a law is so targeted that it's basically an act of attainder, you're going to need an investigation, and if the target of the investigation is a multinational, that investigation is going to be long and complex.

The length of the investigation is so far less than 24h, no? And how sprawling can it be, after less than 24h.

If it eventually takes two years, yeah, it will be proof somebody didn't do their homework. But it seems a bit early to tell.

Also, I guess some of the size of the investigation is correlated with the size of the company being investigated. And especially with the size of the company's legal team.

Wouldn't a compliance investigation effectively just be the evidence collection phase before a charge is filed, assuming the evidence supports it?

I wouldn't expect them to write the law and immediately charge Google, for example, based only on public knowledge and no compiled evidence.

>But if you have to launch a long, sprawling compliance investigation the minute the law enters in force

"Trust but verify"

"Trust AND verify."

Pick your answer, but how else do you want the EU to make sure that Google is now compliant with the law if they don't check. Should they just take Google's word for it?

If you go to a concert they always check everyone's tickets at entry. You can't complain they don't let you in by taking your word for it.

Doesn't it just mean the companies affected are flaunting the law?

Or you wrote the law to address an obvious issue that needs immediate action

These threads have been rife with the 'teleological interpretation' explanation i.e. the law means what it's intended to mean, not what it says, and firms just have to try their best to meet those expectations.

or, y'know, it might be good to try their least, and find out where the constraints of the law are _actually_ binding in the inevitable investigation and fine, since it seems like that's an essential part of figuring out what an EU law actually requires.

Or there is a difference between RFCs and laws - and possibly between american and european law culture.

Huh? IMO it's much more indicative of the idea that the companies didn't actually make a good faith effort to comply and are trying to see what they can get away with.

Oh, is there a fast way of collecting the needed evidence instead? ;)

"I love the DMA."

It might strengthen oligopolies on mobile. And even cement them.

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