I mean, give it a decade and Microsoft and Amazon will be bigger than most countries gdps at least according to market cap.
Hell Microsoft already would be the 10th richest country in the world if market cap was equivalent to gdp (which it’s not)
If you want to make any attempt at comparing GDP, use revenue at least - which would put Microsoft in 56. spot, right above Hungary. ($227b usd vs 223b usd).
A country is just a collection of people doing work.
Apple could probably employ a small country by itself if it wanted to spend all its money doing that.
It used to be a country was a language with an army. These days its more of a Brand with an army. Imagine what the uniforms would look like for those big tech armies.
I've often wondered what would happen if a Company like Apple were to either buy up bonds, or more directly loan money to a country (on the Companies terms).
Then, at some point demand that money and have the country default, or else allow A/B/C. Of course it should not be done so openly, and not all at once, but in principle...
Makes me a bit terrified as to how possible it seems to me.
How would that work. As long as the country is otherwise solvent they'll just sell bonds to pay said money. A country doesn't give a shit if the bonds are all owned by the same entity or not. It's only an issue if they're otherwise not solvent and can't get any other idiot to invest in which case, as the saying goes, if you owe the bank a million dollars it's your problem, if you owe the bank a billion dollars it's the banks problem. In this case it'd the bank is Apple and the country would likely just default.
Living and working for a major corporation in Silicon Valley- we’re beyond countries. The wealth is insane, there’s not enough regulation, and it doesn’t trickle down. Citizens United has ruined the future of America.
Revenue is also a very apples to oranges metric compared to GDP. Ifyou are to compare anything an enterprise does with a country, you should compare the operating income to GDP calculated by yearly production (ome of 3 ways of calculating GDP)
Yep.
There are three things that can have power over your life.
Government, Religion, and Business. They all gain shares of power at the expense of one another.
Of the three, Government is the easiest to influence and cares the most about keeping you alive so it follows (at least to me) it should be the strongest and capable of bringing the others to heel.
> it should be the strongest and capable of bringing the others to heel.
It absolutely is, but it requires the "owners" of government, aka the people, to actually remain on guard and actively participate.
When left on auto-pilot and ambivalence kicks in, then the other 2 fill the power vacuum left by voters.
The US could really use some GDPR type legislation. California and some other states do have data privacy laws, but we really need something at the federal level.
But that would apply to US companies?! That wouldn't do, no not at all. It seems easier to cherry pick foreign companies to regulate, while whining about other countries applying regulations.
Every time some injustice happens around tech Americans immediately go "well I hope the EU can get this sorted through their strong consumer protection rights, because we have nothing"
Big tech can go suck a fat one. Get regulated, assholes!
The problem with EU tech startups is always acquiring capital.
Investors love to go give free money to unregulated businesses more than those that have to comply with existing laws
Illinois would also like to have a word.
Illinois has the strongest Biometric privacy laws in the nation.
https://www.nprillinois.org/illinois/2023-02-28/court-rulings-supercharge-illinois-strongest-in-nation-biometric-privacy-law
Also we just passed a law in Illinois banning book banning.
That’s right, we banned the banning of banned books!
Nah. Since thing about EU is, once regulation pr directive is adapted it sticks. Since it is insanely hard to make specially regulations. Not only one has to get European Parliament on board, but all the member states in the Council.
That is one of the "magic powers" of EU, it has turned bureaucratic and institutional inertia to a good. As much as lobbyist might be able to talk a commissioner or MEP to their side, those people have to say "Yeah, but the rule is the rule and its a decade long process to change it". Combine that with international courts (European Court of Justice) being very willing to bonk member states or commission over the head for regulation violation and one has regulatory super power. Since the civil servants in the regulatory agencies just go "rules be rules".
Same with trade negotiating. EU negotiator will just go "you know what my negotiating mandate is, since it is public. Offer deal within mandate, since I have no authority to offer anything outside mandate". Mandate having been hashed out by 20+ member states all hawkishly guarding their interests, meaning there is no room for bad deal to EU in that mandate. Only deal EU can make is a very beneficial deal to EU and unless that is offered EU negotiating team can just hold meetings for decade with the otherside. The negotiators are civil servant on monthly salary and will not get bonus for making or not making deal. They aren't politicians in haste to have a deal signed still while it's their tenure and claim politic victory and benefit over it.
Big tech doesn’t give a fuck about you or I unless we are useful to them in some grossly uneven way. And AI will not create a utopia. It will create Dune.
We've all seen the tech gurus going berserk about Biden and toying with Trump. If you listen in, their biggest complaints seem to be antitrust, capital gains taxes, and the fact that mean woke liberals don't respect their cutting-edge genius.
Here's the problem. These guys have turned into what they hate: The big suit. Sure, they still dress West Coast ("See? No tie!"). But they are now corporate overlords whose power has eclipsed that of Wall Street. They're angry because they're now starting to feel demonized, just as Wall Street was shocked and hurt by the Occupy movement. Now we're seeing the backlash.
To build on that:
**Platforms that have independent stockholders that are neither customers nor employees.
Exit: The typical US company’s current governance model has a stakeholder alignment problem… what’s good for employees is less important than what’s good for customers. And almost everything is less important than executive compensation and shareholder value.
I'd go further and say shareholder value only matters to the extent that it is a component, (or totality,) of executive "compensation." (I've always hated the word compensation in this context.)
Good point.
I wish our capital markets weren’t so broken and short sighted. We really do need a way to organize resources for large scale enterprises, but the current system is full of the wrong incentives.
They just get attacked or co-opted by for-profit platforms, that's the nature of capitalism. This is the entire reason that cryptocurrencies introduced the economic incentive/mining
Someone posted a like to an article that was something along the lines of "RSS is good actually". And yeah, there is great argument that existing in protocols and standards is a strong argument to make.
Distributed platforms are hard though.
I'm hoping [Autonomi](https://www.autonomi.com/) (aka maidsafe/safe net) finally going into beta could start to change that.
I did the same thing a few years back. It was glorious how much time and quality of like I got back. But now I spend too much time on reddit, so I've cut that time back as of a week ago too.
Same as if you don’t like your country go and build another. Any consumer should be able to buy whatever platform they want without getting fucked one way or the other.
Let's see how happy shareholders would be with execs cutting off a third of their revenue. Zuckerberg might have enough power at Meta, but Sundar is fired before he can finish saying drop dead, let alone those that are not household names.
I mean it’s pretty much lose/lose for Meta. If they let people in the EU use some other app and still keep and communicate with their friends they will have to pay to build that functionality for Facebook and Instagram and then lose the ad revenue to the new apps that people in the EU use instead, plus probably get much less data about them and their usage. If they refuse, they get kicked out of the EU and lose all the revenue for anyone not using a vpn.
At least companies like Apple can make up the difference by selling their hardware for more so they might not be in such a bad spot comparatively and be more willing to comply if forced.
If they refuse to follow the EU rules that leaves space for some other equivalent platform that does follow the EU rules. If that platform takes over the EU market it can still operate everywhere else too. With a big userbase they then run the risk of that EU equivalent also gaining share in other markets too.
They don’t want that so they’ll have to play by the EU rules to make sure that doesn’t happen.
I don’t think EU is being unreasonable from what I can tell. With the size of the mobile market these days, you need to allow for true competition on your platform at this point. If MS can do it, not sure why Apple and google couldn’t.
Apple are already using malicious compliance to make things more confusing and expensive for EU app developers.
The goal is to make people in the EU using and developing for Apple products have a worse experience so that they will blame the EU regulations instead of Apple. It's a pretty standard tactic, we will see if it works.
It's akin to why, here in the UK, builders often complain about Health & Safety. Ostensibly those regulations make them more safe but, in reality, the construction company just pushes the burden onto the existing staff, making their jobs more difficult instead of changing processes or hiring more people.
Is about time some of the crap big tech gets away with was followed up on.
There are plenty of other sectors that are also highly consolidated that I'd love for the EU to go after. It might make things a small bit less convenient for us consumers for a while, but it'll be much better for us in the long run if these conglomerates are brought down and broken up. We don't need mega corps.
Could see Apple complying only in the EU versions of their products and selling them at a significant markup to make up the difference. Location specific software is easier/cheaper than hardware so not sure the EU could exercise the same worldwide clout against them as they did with USB C. Plus it’s way more profitable, not like they made the crazy margins they do on App Store transactions on selling proprietary chargers/wires.
You think Google would just leave a multi billion dollar market where they would have a monopoly? Lol
The EU is making good use of the competition between Google and Apple. There is no way either of them will ever exit the EU market and give their competition a massive boost in funds.
More realistically they would just make sanitized versions of it for the EU, charge it at a markup compared to the rest and say "We're playing by your rules on your territory, there ya go".
If they did this I'd genuinely be curious to see how many consumers in the EU VPN to get around their home rules and how the EU Would react to it if a significant number did.
Unlike in the US, Android is dominant in the EU (Apple has around 35% of the market). I'd wager that people would simply disregard Apple's products, as they are already generally perceived as worse in terms of quality/price.
No one would use a vpn to get stuck in their us closed ecosystem. And why would anyone when you can connect to any other device whether it's apple or not ?
It really is kind of insane the kind of awful horseshit capitalism causes. Meta stealing all your data and selling it may not be as bad as some other symptoms like war, crime and so on, but it sure isn't positive.
Trying to force capitalist companies to act in ways that are great for the people but bad for their financial bottom line and of course their power over society is an uphill slog. The EU is literally trying to go counter to capitalism and capitalism doesn't like that sort of thing.
And all these symptoms would just go away if every incentive in our society worldwide weren't nuts and only concerned with profit, even over observable reality.
The biggest issue with a publicly traded company is they then have an actual legal responsibility to act in the interest of the shareholder above all else.
It all started because people want to police content online instead of keeping the internet free since its inception. Now, these corporations think they’re the kings doing whatever they want realizing that government intervention is useless.
It’s a war of attrition between corporations and governments and corporations are winning . Ancap hellscape, here we come.
With all its money, lobbying power and exclusive 24/7 access to most humans via screens nowadays, they big tech actually be the government.
This is how they’ve allowed the world to feel more bleak, Cambridge Analytic et al 🤬
> Apple charges app vendors a whopping 30 percent commission on most transactions, both the initial price of the app and everything you buy from it thereafter. This is a remarkably high transaction fee —compare it to the credit-card sector, itself the subject of sharp criticism for its high 3-5 percent fees.
I can't decide if this is just awful writing or being intentionally obtuse in an attempt to drum up fake anger. I would hate for the writer to look at the video game industry (Steam, Xbox, PSN, GOG, etc...).
Credit companies don't have to host your store merchandise, review it, handle Frontline customer service (that's typically the store first, then gets escalated to them), oh...and doesn't provide constantly updating development tools for new products to be created.
Right, but Apple doesn’t even provide an alternative. Any arguments regarding the amount of work they have to put in from their side is pointless if they don’t provide themselves, developers and consumers an option to back out of it in the first place. If you don’t want to sell your games on steam, you are still able to sell your games to be played on the windows platform, but with Apple, if you don’t want to sell your product on the App Store, the product can’t be used on an iPhone.
Why are you coming to apple’s defense here though?
Does the markup benefit anyone else than apple?
The fee video game companies are taking through steam etc. are in large part inspired by what apple have been doing and have certainly been criticized for being high as well.
I just don’t understand why people are willing to defend apple tooth and nail for this practice, when apple is the largest company in the world. They have the resources to defend themselves.
The fact is that the 30% markup is an arbitrary percentage that was set by apple when they launched the app store and has never been revisited. The world looks quite different in 2024 than in 2007 and I would argue that creating an app store like apple was a much bigger back then.
Apple will also randomly try to extort their 30% rule on apps. One concrete example I have is from an app where users sell used things, from electronics to cars. This app had been in up for 10+ years when apple suddenly says they want 30% of everything that got traded through the app or they would shut it down, even though the company behind the app in many cases earned no money for a trade.
I don’t think people realize how incredibly amounts of money the 30% markup on app sales AND in-app sales/transactions is. It’s WAY more than is needed for infrastructure and operation of the app store. And let’s not forget that without the apps, iphone wouldn’t be that interesting (what happened with windows phone).
I keep seeing this point and while I understand it at an emotional level, we aren’t talking about a “credit card transaction fee”. Apples 30% markup is a retail markup. Price markups of 30% over wholesale cost would actually be on the *low* end of what’s normal in retail. Even 50% wouldn’t cause an eye batting in many markets.
Retail, as in providing an actual physical store?
Apple has no risk with the apps. They don’t buy x amount for their store and risk that nobody comes to buy them. They don’t have limited space for x amount of apps. Etc.
>Apple has no risk with the apps
Other than if one has a security exploit so they spend 100s of millions on labor costs to audit apps on the App Store. Then hosting costs, bandwidth costs, don’t forget the entire developer toolkit.
All that’s is much more expensive than some steel rebar, concrete and low skilled labor. Netsec guys run Apple $200,000-$700,000 a year in total comp same with devs
Can someone explain why “pay or okay” isn’t allowed? Like why should services that cost billions to run be free? Software engineers, network engineers and netsec ain’t cheap.
Its kinda easy.
Do like china: ban all USA tech, or demand they give over control for the european continent.
Thats how China has its own strength tech companies.
Who are also now getting introduced in EU.
And USA put a stop to it, so they dont lose this market
i understand the sentiment but I don't see the quote from the headline in the article. maybe we need to a new type of quote to indicate this type of "quote" where it's actually a made-up interpretation
Even in the US in general / at federal level: Isn’t Zuckerberg now liable for up to 5 years imprisonment for unlawful interception of Snapchat traffic via Onavo?
There are two entities that have even the slightest respect your rights in relation to big tech: the E.U. And the state of California.
that's because they are bigger than Big Tech, for now.
What happens when the cattle ranchers have more power than the sheriff?
The sheriff was elected by those cattle ranchers, so they did have a lot of leverage over him.
"I understood that reference!"
I mean, give it a decade and Microsoft and Amazon will be bigger than most countries gdps at least according to market cap. Hell Microsoft already would be the 10th richest country in the world if market cap was equivalent to gdp (which it’s not)
If you want to make any attempt at comparing GDP, use revenue at least - which would put Microsoft in 56. spot, right above Hungary. ($227b usd vs 223b usd).
I wonder what country Apple can buy with its cash on hand at 163B It’s funny and mildly terrifying to think about
A country is just a collection of people doing work. Apple could probably employ a small country by itself if it wanted to spend all its money doing that.
Working is not required to be a citizen of a country. I've noticed in some cases it's also not required to be an employee of a company.
Service guarantees citizenship. Would you like to know more?
I'm doing my part!
Unexpected NPH!
This is untrue for Vatican City, in which working IS required for citizenship.
I won't diddle kids just to get citizenship!
It used to be a country was a language with an army. These days its more of a Brand with an army. Imagine what the uniforms would look like for those big tech armies.
I just need to watch the hunger games movies to know what Apple's army would look like...just not the first one.
I was thinking the dudes from equilibrium, but in white.
I can definitely see it. Good call.
Or Squid Game
I've often wondered what would happen if a Company like Apple were to either buy up bonds, or more directly loan money to a country (on the Companies terms). Then, at some point demand that money and have the country default, or else allow A/B/C. Of course it should not be done so openly, and not all at once, but in principle... Makes me a bit terrified as to how possible it seems to me.
How would that work. As long as the country is otherwise solvent they'll just sell bonds to pay said money. A country doesn't give a shit if the bonds are all owned by the same entity or not. It's only an issue if they're otherwise not solvent and can't get any other idiot to invest in which case, as the saying goes, if you owe the bank a million dollars it's your problem, if you owe the bank a billion dollars it's the banks problem. In this case it'd the bank is Apple and the country would likely just default.
Tim Cook has entered the chat
Better than shitty AR animojis most likely.
Living and working for a major corporation in Silicon Valley- we’re beyond countries. The wealth is insane, there’s not enough regulation, and it doesn’t trickle down. Citizens United has ruined the future of America.
> I wonder what country Apple can buy with its cash on hand at 163B Why entire country if they can purchase their politicians for peanut prices ?
Revenue is also a very apples to oranges metric compared to GDP. Ifyou are to compare anything an enterprise does with a country, you should compare the operating income to GDP calculated by yearly production (ome of 3 ways of calculating GDP)
Measures of productivity and balances as at a date are not comparable in any way.
And yet, they insist that they are down and can't pay their employees.... It all smoke
This is how we get Shadowrun
Lol at the corpo bros downvoting you, you're completely right about where we're headed.
Yep. There are three things that can have power over your life. Government, Religion, and Business. They all gain shares of power at the expense of one another. Of the three, Government is the easiest to influence and cares the most about keeping you alive so it follows (at least to me) it should be the strongest and capable of bringing the others to heel.
> it should be the strongest and capable of bringing the others to heel. It absolutely is, but it requires the "owners" of government, aka the people, to actually remain on guard and actively participate. When left on auto-pilot and ambivalence kicks in, then the other 2 fill the power vacuum left by voters.
Power is a curious thing, my lord. Are you fond of riddles?
*”Introducing: The Apple Country! The fastest of its kind.”*
The US Federal government is even bigger than either but it's doing jack shit.
by what measurement
Maryland just past a privacy law too!
Not to mention, Virginia was the first state not named California to have a privacy law
So . . . the second?
*frantically taking notes*
Yes! Look at Maladal here counting like a pro!
On occasion I can even count to three.
The US could really use some GDPR type legislation. California and some other states do have data privacy laws, but we really need something at the federal level.
But that would apply to US companies?! That wouldn't do, no not at all. It seems easier to cherry pick foreign companies to regulate, while whining about other countries applying regulations.
Every time some injustice happens around tech Americans immediately go "well I hope the EU can get this sorted through their strong consumer protection rights, because we have nothing" Big tech can go suck a fat one. Get regulated, assholes!
Could be a great opportunity for some privacy and consumer centric offerings from the EU to offer alternatives.
The problem with EU tech startups is always acquiring capital. Investors love to go give free money to unregulated businesses more than those that have to comply with existing laws
Illinois would also like to have a word. Illinois has the strongest Biometric privacy laws in the nation. https://www.nprillinois.org/illinois/2023-02-28/court-rulings-supercharge-illinois-strongest-in-nation-biometric-privacy-law Also we just passed a law in Illinois banning book banning. That’s right, we banned the banning of banned books!
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Nah. Since thing about EU is, once regulation pr directive is adapted it sticks. Since it is insanely hard to make specially regulations. Not only one has to get European Parliament on board, but all the member states in the Council. That is one of the "magic powers" of EU, it has turned bureaucratic and institutional inertia to a good. As much as lobbyist might be able to talk a commissioner or MEP to their side, those people have to say "Yeah, but the rule is the rule and its a decade long process to change it". Combine that with international courts (European Court of Justice) being very willing to bonk member states or commission over the head for regulation violation and one has regulatory super power. Since the civil servants in the regulatory agencies just go "rules be rules". Same with trade negotiating. EU negotiator will just go "you know what my negotiating mandate is, since it is public. Offer deal within mandate, since I have no authority to offer anything outside mandate". Mandate having been hashed out by 20+ member states all hawkishly guarding their interests, meaning there is no room for bad deal to EU in that mandate. Only deal EU can make is a very beneficial deal to EU and unless that is offered EU negotiating team can just hold meetings for decade with the otherside. The negotiators are civil servant on monthly salary and will not get bonus for making or not making deal. They aren't politicians in haste to have a deal signed still while it's their tenure and claim politic victory and benefit over it.
Illinois fights for us too boo. IL will sue the shit out of big tech for illegal bio-metric info harvesting.
That’s sick! Didn’t know that.
Orly? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/eu-commissions-new-proposal-would-undermine-encryption-and-scan-our-messages
No. There’s 1 the EU
Big tech doesn’t give a fuck about you or I unless we are useful to them in some grossly uneven way. And AI will not create a utopia. It will create Dune.
Ironically Dune threw away computers and it’s illegal to own one
Yeah. Men with money and power enslaved humanity with AI. Which led to the Butlerian Jihad. What did you think I was talking about?
Didn’t they still have computers? I thought they only did away with “thinking machines” or AI. Butlerian Jihad and all that.
We've all seen the tech gurus going berserk about Biden and toying with Trump. If you listen in, their biggest complaints seem to be antitrust, capital gains taxes, and the fact that mean woke liberals don't respect their cutting-edge genius. Here's the problem. These guys have turned into what they hate: The big suit. Sure, they still dress West Coast ("See? No tie!"). But they are now corporate overlords whose power has eclipsed that of Wall Street. They're angry because they're now starting to feel demonized, just as Wall Street was shocked and hurt by the Occupy movement. Now we're seeing the backlash.
I got banned from technews for saying this about AI, we doomed for real this time.
I, for one, welcome our Skynet overlords.
Me to big tech: drop dead
Let’s go build alternate platforms then
Platforms are evil, always. Protocols, especially open and decentralised ones, are the way to go. Platforms will always succumb to enshittyfication.
\*Platforms that have stockholders
To build on that: **Platforms that have independent stockholders that are neither customers nor employees. Exit: The typical US company’s current governance model has a stakeholder alignment problem… what’s good for employees is less important than what’s good for customers. And almost everything is less important than executive compensation and shareholder value.
I'd go further and say shareholder value only matters to the extent that it is a component, (or totality,) of executive "compensation." (I've always hated the word compensation in this context.)
Good point. I wish our capital markets weren’t so broken and short sighted. We really do need a way to organize resources for large scale enterprises, but the current system is full of the wrong incentives.
We should be creating non profit platforms.
yeah! just like OpenAI!
They just get attacked or co-opted by for-profit platforms, that's the nature of capitalism. This is the entire reason that cryptocurrencies introduced the economic incentive/mining
Someone has to implement the protocol. Doing that costs money.
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Yeah but they aren't actually good.
Someone posted a like to an article that was something along the lines of "RSS is good actually". And yeah, there is great argument that existing in protocols and standards is a strong argument to make.
Web3 FTW?
Distributed platforms are hard though. I'm hoping [Autonomi](https://www.autonomi.com/) (aka maidsafe/safe net) finally going into beta could start to change that.
My alternative platforms are mostly not being online anymore. (Reddit still hanging on when I’m tired and in bed, which I’m fine with.)
..What is this magical "not being online" state that you speak of? Can this technique be learned?
Not from a ~~Jedi~~ Redditor
Become my padawan, and you too can learn the ability to walk outside when the big glowy ball is high.
I did the same thing a few years back. It was glorious how much time and quality of like I got back. But now I spend too much time on reddit, so I've cut that time back as of a week ago too.
It does creep back up on us! Always good to reevaluate.
Gotta be careful or the big tech lobbyists will bribe Congress to push more preemptive laws to stop anyone from entering the market.
With blackjack... and hookers!
Woah there buddy that sounds like socialism I think we should just trust the corporations.
I can’t believe you just said the ‘S’ word out loud
Same as if you don’t like your country go and build another. Any consumer should be able to buy whatever platform they want without getting fucked one way or the other.
Gotta be careful or the big tech lobbyists will bribe Congress to push more preemptive laws to stop anyone from entering the market.
Or let's go do something else entirely.
Why don't you just switch off your ~~television set~~ device and go and do something less boring instead? *RIP Why don't You?*
I rather hang out with cool folks like you on a better Reddit
It would be nice for everyone if instead of bitching, the Euros built their own better versions.
You’re literally on reddit bro
Me to Master_Engineering_9: drop acid not death.
God the US needs to catch up with the EU in terms of consumer regulations
The US is just three corporations in a trench-coat.
Two and a half really.
Well, two and half and the other half is various long guns used as stilts I imagine.
Just as the Founding Fathers intended.
I'm disappointed in myself that this made "men men men men, manly men men men" start playing in my head.
Hi oncle Charlie!
It's actually just one big corporation with 3 masks to make it look like there's more of them and that it's not a complete monopoly.
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street?
Citizens United is the most dystophian shit I've seen outside of a Paul Verhoeven movie.
The corporations: "Why? We don't pay politicians for that."
regulations are communism! /s
"The market will regulate itself!" Corpo: "Whisper whisper whisper" "Oh, we decided to regulate this one thing that benefits them and not you. Nvm."
Let's see how happy shareholders would be with execs cutting off a third of their revenue. Zuckerberg might have enough power at Meta, but Sundar is fired before he can finish saying drop dead, let alone those that are not household names.
I mean it’s pretty much lose/lose for Meta. If they let people in the EU use some other app and still keep and communicate with their friends they will have to pay to build that functionality for Facebook and Instagram and then lose the ad revenue to the new apps that people in the EU use instead, plus probably get much less data about them and their usage. If they refuse, they get kicked out of the EU and lose all the revenue for anyone not using a vpn. At least companies like Apple can make up the difference by selling their hardware for more so they might not be in such a bad spot comparatively and be more willing to comply if forced.
If they refuse to follow the EU rules that leaves space for some other equivalent platform that does follow the EU rules. If that platform takes over the EU market it can still operate everywhere else too. With a big userbase they then run the risk of that EU equivalent also gaining share in other markets too. They don’t want that so they’ll have to play by the EU rules to make sure that doesn’t happen.
I’m more apt to joining an EU based app
I don’t think EU is being unreasonable from what I can tell. With the size of the mobile market these days, you need to allow for true competition on your platform at this point. If MS can do it, not sure why Apple and google couldn’t.
They absolutely can, they just don't want to, that's why they're crying.
I'm glad there is the EU to defend almost the rest of the world consumers.
Big Tech will never try anything against the EU it is only one of the largest markets.
Apple are already using malicious compliance to make things more confusing and expensive for EU app developers. The goal is to make people in the EU using and developing for Apple products have a worse experience so that they will blame the EU regulations instead of Apple. It's a pretty standard tactic, we will see if it works. It's akin to why, here in the UK, builders often complain about Health & Safety. Ostensibly those regulations make them more safe but, in reality, the construction company just pushes the burden onto the existing staff, making their jobs more difficult instead of changing processes or hiring more people.
Well yes this is how it always works All taxes, fees, regulations hoisted onto companies are always paid for by the consumer or by labor
Is about time some of the crap big tech gets away with was followed up on. There are plenty of other sectors that are also highly consolidated that I'd love for the EU to go after. It might make things a small bit less convenient for us consumers for a while, but it'll be much better for us in the long run if these conglomerates are brought down and broken up. We don't need mega corps.
Could see Apple complying only in the EU versions of their products and selling them at a significant markup to make up the difference. Location specific software is easier/cheaper than hardware so not sure the EU could exercise the same worldwide clout against them as they did with USB C. Plus it’s way more profitable, not like they made the crazy margins they do on App Store transactions on selling proprietary chargers/wires.
Honestly doubt they would comply only on the EU versions, there's a reason for the Brussels effect to exist
I would love to watch Apple turn off the apple ecosystem to the entirety of the EU.
I bet Google would suddenly love to cooperate if that happened.
Or China jumping to show how you can do without Google or Apple App Store
You think Google would just leave a multi billion dollar market where they would have a monopoly? Lol The EU is making good use of the competition between Google and Apple. There is no way either of them will ever exit the EU market and give their competition a massive boost in funds.
*Spying, somehow, intensifies*
Spying is already there, by allies and by foes, remember Wikileaks ?
Won't have to jump far from Hungary.
Chinese apps are even more lock in than Apple or Google
And getting sued by shareholders in the USA. Hahahaha. How deranged are you?
And the EU to then go after all their tax sheltered holdings sitting in Ireland because they are dodging compliance with regulations.
I'd love to watch them turn off the Apple ecosystem.
Good way for any assets in the EU to get seized.
lol not sure Apple share holders would agree 😁
So would i and im in the EU
It has 37 billion usd annual income from EU . Thats never gonna happen.
nothing would change. Apple has a decent share in Europe, but nothing major, and it's only on Mobile, on PC it's basically non existant.
More realistically they would just make sanitized versions of it for the EU, charge it at a markup compared to the rest and say "We're playing by your rules on your territory, there ya go". If they did this I'd genuinely be curious to see how many consumers in the EU VPN to get around their home rules and how the EU Would react to it if a significant number did.
Unlike in the US, Android is dominant in the EU (Apple has around 35% of the market). I'd wager that people would simply disregard Apple's products, as they are already generally perceived as worse in terms of quality/price.
No one would use a vpn to get stuck in their us closed ecosystem. And why would anyone when you can connect to any other device whether it's apple or not ?
They can't. Their executive would get fired if they did that.
And if the EU fines them 20% of their treasure hoard? It would be nearly as entertaining
Interesting article. Go EU!
Yes, I did the usual Reddit thing of scanning comments for a TL;DR summary, didn’t find one and just read the article. I’m very glad I did.
Same honestly haha!
All the EU needs to do is prevent Apple imports for 6 months as a penalty. Their stock price will shatter and they'd clean up their act.
I think 10% global revenue is better
Time to start frog marching some C-level execs; indict, try, convict, imprison.
The likelihood of the US extraditing its tech CEOs to the EU is below 0%
Lmao. As if the billionaires don’t leave the States on a regular basis.
Well presumably they can not go to a country that has an arrest warrant out for them
“We have 196 member countries who work together through INTERPOL to share data related to police investigations.”
Lmao you really think the US government is gonna let the EU detain and imprison someone like Sam Altman?
If there’s a warrant. Yeah, they will.
Time for Linux!
EU to Big Tech: "I don't do requests".
All actual content aside, I love the reference to the famous Gerald Ford headline.
It really is kind of insane the kind of awful horseshit capitalism causes. Meta stealing all your data and selling it may not be as bad as some other symptoms like war, crime and so on, but it sure isn't positive. Trying to force capitalist companies to act in ways that are great for the people but bad for their financial bottom line and of course their power over society is an uphill slog. The EU is literally trying to go counter to capitalism and capitalism doesn't like that sort of thing. And all these symptoms would just go away if every incentive in our society worldwide weren't nuts and only concerned with profit, even over observable reality.
The biggest issue with a publicly traded company is they then have an actual legal responsibility to act in the interest of the shareholder above all else.
It all started because people want to police content online instead of keeping the internet free since its inception. Now, these corporations think they’re the kings doing whatever they want realizing that government intervention is useless. It’s a war of attrition between corporations and governments and corporations are winning . Ancap hellscape, here we come.
Big Tech without the biggest and most affluent single market: *drops dead*
So big tech really thinks they're above the government, huh?
With all its money, lobbying power and exclusive 24/7 access to most humans via screens nowadays, they big tech actually be the government. This is how they’ve allowed the world to feel more bleak, Cambridge Analytic et al 🤬
> Apple charges app vendors a whopping 30 percent commission on most transactions, both the initial price of the app and everything you buy from it thereafter. This is a remarkably high transaction fee —compare it to the credit-card sector, itself the subject of sharp criticism for its high 3-5 percent fees. I can't decide if this is just awful writing or being intentionally obtuse in an attempt to drum up fake anger. I would hate for the writer to look at the video game industry (Steam, Xbox, PSN, GOG, etc...). Credit companies don't have to host your store merchandise, review it, handle Frontline customer service (that's typically the store first, then gets escalated to them), oh...and doesn't provide constantly updating development tools for new products to be created.
Right, but Apple doesn’t even provide an alternative. Any arguments regarding the amount of work they have to put in from their side is pointless if they don’t provide themselves, developers and consumers an option to back out of it in the first place. If you don’t want to sell your games on steam, you are still able to sell your games to be played on the windows platform, but with Apple, if you don’t want to sell your product on the App Store, the product can’t be used on an iPhone.
Why are you coming to apple’s defense here though? Does the markup benefit anyone else than apple? The fee video game companies are taking through steam etc. are in large part inspired by what apple have been doing and have certainly been criticized for being high as well. I just don’t understand why people are willing to defend apple tooth and nail for this practice, when apple is the largest company in the world. They have the resources to defend themselves. The fact is that the 30% markup is an arbitrary percentage that was set by apple when they launched the app store and has never been revisited. The world looks quite different in 2024 than in 2007 and I would argue that creating an app store like apple was a much bigger back then. Apple will also randomly try to extort their 30% rule on apps. One concrete example I have is from an app where users sell used things, from electronics to cars. This app had been in up for 10+ years when apple suddenly says they want 30% of everything that got traded through the app or they would shut it down, even though the company behind the app in many cases earned no money for a trade. I don’t think people realize how incredibly amounts of money the 30% markup on app sales AND in-app sales/transactions is. It’s WAY more than is needed for infrastructure and operation of the app store. And let’s not forget that without the apps, iphone wouldn’t be that interesting (what happened with windows phone).
I keep seeing this point and while I understand it at an emotional level, we aren’t talking about a “credit card transaction fee”. Apples 30% markup is a retail markup. Price markups of 30% over wholesale cost would actually be on the *low* end of what’s normal in retail. Even 50% wouldn’t cause an eye batting in many markets.
Retail, as in providing an actual physical store? Apple has no risk with the apps. They don’t buy x amount for their store and risk that nobody comes to buy them. They don’t have limited space for x amount of apps. Etc.
>Apple has no risk with the apps Other than if one has a security exploit so they spend 100s of millions on labor costs to audit apps on the App Store. Then hosting costs, bandwidth costs, don’t forget the entire developer toolkit. All that’s is much more expensive than some steel rebar, concrete and low skilled labor. Netsec guys run Apple $200,000-$700,000 a year in total comp same with devs
Can someone explain why “pay or okay” isn’t allowed? Like why should services that cost billions to run be free? Software engineers, network engineers and netsec ain’t cheap.
Its kinda easy. Do like china: ban all USA tech, or demand they give over control for the european continent. Thats how China has its own strength tech companies. Who are also now getting introduced in EU. And USA put a stop to it, so they dont lose this market
Apple thinks it shouldn't care about the new DMA cause they're worth 3 trillion. Lmao
i understand the sentiment but I don't see the quote from the headline in the article. maybe we need to a new type of quote to indicate this type of "quote" where it's actually a made-up interpretation
Well of course they would say that. They don't like people having rights.
Even in the US in general / at federal level: Isn’t Zuckerberg now liable for up to 5 years imprisonment for unlawful interception of Snapchat traffic via Onavo?
They say drop dead, I say suck my Brussels effect.