> Under the DMA, app developers distributing their apps via Apple's App Store should be able to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative offers outside the App Store, steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases.
To me, this is the most easily agreeable part of what the EU has been after. It is unfair that Apple restricts Netflix from telling it's users that they can sign up and pay for Netlifx on their own website. It's unfair that Netflix can't even tell its users the rules that Apple enforces on them.
It's telling that Gruber is pretty staunchly against EU/DMA interferance in Apple, and broadly thinks they're wrong. But this is the one thing he agrees on
> If Apple wants to insist on a cut of in-app purchased subscription revenue, that’s their prerogative. What gets me, though, are the rules that prevent apps that eschew in-app purchases from telling users in plain language how to actually pay. Not only is Netflix not allowed to link to their website, they can’t even tell the user they need to go to netflix.com to sign up
> The Commission takes the preliminary view that Apple failed to comply with this obligation [to allow third party app stores] in view of the conditions it imposes on app (and app store) developers. Developers wanting to use alternative app distribution channels on iOS are disincentivised from doing so as this requires them to opt for business terms which include a new fee (Apple's Core Technology Fee). Apple also introduced overly strict eligibility requirements, hampering developers' ability to distribute their apps through alternative channels. Finally, Apple makes it overly burdensome and confusing for end users to install apps when using such alternative app distribution channels.
This is great to hear. It sounds like they've just found Apple non-compliant in making alternate app stores as discouraging for both developers and user as possible. I guess it'll take another 12 months for any fines or changes from Apple.
>the most easily agreeable part of what the EU has been after
It's also probably the most dangerous for Apple. It creates a cash incentive to push people outside of Apple's walled garden and show them what's outside.
I really really hope Apple gets its act together, they are the greatest "the user experience comes first" company and they actually have great hard tech but they show signs of rent seeking behavior which can destroy them.
If Apple just play nice with EU, open up and focus on bringing the greatest experience possible they will keep winning. If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.
The Apple's AI blunder is mostly a blunder only because they insist to do it all by themselves so to have higher margins on the services revenues. IMHO those blunders will be more damaging as the Americans no longer have the higher moral grounds than Koreans or Chinese.
"Show signs of rent seeking behaviour" seems like an extremely generous position. Forbidding your customers from even mentioning The Outside is full-on rent seeking behaviour, since its inception.
They've been hard rent-seeking since iTunes and iPod. They aggressively eliminated and made inconvenient other ways for getting music onto iPods. Hardware was great, but hard dependence on iTunes killed it for me.
> If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.
But what alternative? There is no European smartphone OS. Windows and Steam OS and XBox are US-american, too.
I know it would leave a lot of money on the table, but if Apple had set the app store fee at 5% (enough to cover credit card fees and running the service) and been content with a 50% margin on hardware, it never would have been in this mess.
I would imagine that getting the user out of the in-app purchase payment screen and attempt to redirect them at the website for payment, have them figure out how to enter credit card details etc would result in a drastically decreased conversion rate though.
Apple has its act together. Those, who are not Apple, do not in comparison. They are Big Mad that Apple does.
You don't understand the term "rent seeking". Because in this case, it's Apple's competitors that are rent seeking by utilizing the force of the government to make Apple give competitors access to its private but non-monopolistic ecosystem.
I think that Apple should call that bluff and leave the EU.
Which in turn will increase public pressure on the EU, but not as functionally as it would in a democratic system.
All hollow talk. It will lose all of its aggression the moment that Apple leaves the EU, and EU citizens are left with the remaining options.
> It's telling that Gruber is pretty staunchly against EU/DMA interferance in Apple, and broadly thinks they're wrong. But this is the one thing he agree on
I’ve stopped seeing Gruber as any sort of authority on Apple for a while now. He’s just a single guy with an opinion like everyone else, and it’s, more times than not, clearly biased in favor of Apple.
Some of his analysis of objective data is informative, but when he gets into subjective material, I tune out. I don’t really care any more about what he says than most others sharing their opinion on the internet — it’s just one more data point to consider collectively alongside everyone else’s.
I agree with your overall comment, but I think this is basically what OP was getting at: it's not surprising that Gruber is against EU/DMA interference, yet even he has issues with this particular point.
Technically, the first amendment applies only to state actors, not private entities. See Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, Hudgens v. NLRB, and many other cases that upheld this interpretation. Private companies like Apple can restrict free speech on their platforms legally (at least as far as the first amendment is concerned).
That said, I believe in the principle of free speech, especially as envisioned by Tim Berners Lee for the Web. I wish more Americans could adhere to those principles even when the speech is not to their taste. Certainly feels like a lot of cultural backsliding happening.
As an American who thinks free speech is one of the most important rights we have, I wish the answer to your question would be a collective "yes" but unfortunately it is not.
If you extend "speech" to "any kind of action an individual or company can do", then no. There's plenty of laws regulations that restrict what you can do in USA.
Most people who go on about free speech are the ones who clamp down the most on it and are massive snowflakes when people decide not to buy their stuff because of their speech.
Usually the user should heavily penalize such behavior, but Apple has users and apostles. To a degree that some believe Daddy Apple should shield them from temptation by evil Netflix.
It ridiculous and also comes with costs for other customers of that ecosystem. I believe brands really make some people stupid.
US officials and businessmen keep on repeating the same thing:
> The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards.
But this is wildly untrue. The EU isn't hand-picking individual organisations and fining them because they're American, they're fining them because they're in breach of existing legislation. The same legislation applies to local companies.
Ironically, it's the US who takes stances like the one they claim the EU is taken. E.g.: The US required that TikTok be sold, without actually proving that TikTok was in breach of any actual law.
But repeating the same claims gets those claims out into the media, and that's what people hear. So we see a dissonance between what the media says (and many people believe) and what's really happening.
Agreed with your first point. Regarding TikTok though the argument was never (AFAIK) that they were actively breaking the law but rather that their structure and ownership posed a threat to US interests. That's pretty reasonable and largely mirrors China's stance against the US.
If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations. They seem to prioritize free trade above all else.
The US is lying about tiktok, the only reason is to mirror China's strategy towards American app. After watching the tit-for-tat video of Veritasum[1] I agree with America's strategy of banning Chinese apps until China allows American apps. That being said, I wish the US was more transparent about why they're doing this instead of lying.
I'm guessing the reason why they're lying is that they don't want to scare ALL Chinese companies.
I find this so confusing. Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk are foreigners who are both demonstrably influencing American politics through media they control. What makes Tiktok different?
Well... Though I agree with you in principle, the DMA does target specific gatekeeper companies and the criteria for these were set conveniently to ensure no EU company is regulated by it. So I can see their point a little
I'd argue this style of concentrating power under a single giant company is mostly American style.
EU companies tend to keep group entities separate instead of running for absolute synergies. For instance the AOL-Time-Warner-Direct-Dish kind of merger is pretty much unheard of.
thats only kinda right. The DMA does include booking.com as a gatekeeper, which is european. But most gatekeepers (except booking and tiktok) are US-based
US corporations are too used to breaking laws as they see fit and getting away with a slap on the wrist, so being asked to follow the rules feels like an attack to them.
That is not my experience. Every US company I have worked in spent a lot of time training employees to follow the relevant laws. I have even been on teams which had to do work to comply with the European GDPR. The message I have always received is follow the law and don’t break it.
I think you make many good points. Slight tangent: Why isn't EU more concerned about TikTok? While it is very difficult to prove, various studies have demonstrated that TikTok pushes more content favoring the Chinese Government (CCP).
In my anecdotal experience of one, American platforms are way faster in pushing far-right content on me even though it has to be clear to the algorithm that I don't want such content.
it's not difficult to prove. In the wake of the tarrifs, everyone in the US got Chinese manufacturing videos pushed to their feed so customers can buy direct from factories and avoid huge markups by a middleman.
> But this is wildly untrue. The EU isn't hand-picking individual organisations and fining them because they're American, they're fining them because they're in breach of existing legislation. The same legislation applies to local companies.
The iPhone App store existed before this legislation, and I suspect the rest of the targetted things did too.
This legislation only applies to companies that have a certain marketshare, which includes no European companies unless you count one that's a subsidiary of a US company.
Maybe it's the case that it is reasonable to handicap successful businesses, but this is a handicap that only applies to some businesses, most of which are US (but one is Chinese).
That's called gaslighting, and it's a hostile act. Truth is the first casualty of war. If someone is trying to deceive you (or deceive others and ruin your reputation), they are actively exposing you to some kind of risk, usually for their own benefit, which is a hostile act. Recommend you act accordingly.
There is no irony. The EU is targeting US companies. The US is targeting Chinese companies. The US is or soon will be targeting EU companies. China is targeting US companies. China will probably soon be targeting EU companies if they aren't already, which is probably already debatable. And this is not a complete list, it's not even a complete list of the highlights.
If they're doing it by legislation, well, the EU has been passing "legislation clearly designed for US companies to be in infringement of" for a while. Maybe you like that. Maybe it's a good thing; after all, the things they're passing laws about are basically just actions only US companies are capable of taking right now. Nevertheless it is clearly targeting. It's just targeting you like. The US has passed such legislation. China does it both with formal legislation and with de facto rules.
Free trade is a dead letter. Whether you like that or not is not very relevant to whether or not it is dead. It's dead. Maybe it'll swing back around in a few decades but right now even that is a distant prospect, we're not even done accelerating into the current merchantalist phase of the cycle, let alone decelerating, let alone heading back.
(Note "whataboutism" would be an inappropriate response to my point here; that's about "it's ok for us because they do it". My observation is not normative, merely descriptive... everyone is doing it, and they're doing it more rather than less right now.)
>So we see a dissonance between what the media says (and many people believe) and what's really happening.
This thing right here terrifies me. The entertainment-information media oligopoly has a tight grasp on public conversations. It feels like a hydra that can't be defeated.
It can be defeated by talking to people about things. If you are known to be an expert in topic X, and you are saying something different to what the media says about topic X (and which makes more sense), people (who know you and your reputation) are inclined to believe you over the media.
This only has a local impact, but global is made of local.
Ah, they said the T-word, presumably to invoke some political fire support from across the Atlantic. I wonder how that will go. Of course, this is not a tariff, for two reasons: firstly, it does not involve money (the UK's digital services tax does, but that's not this), and secondly, the same rules would apply to EU native competitors .. if there were any. It's what's knows as a "non tariff trade barrier". Of course those are all over the place, and many of them are there to protect consumer and public interests.
> The EU regulator also dropped Meta's Marketplace's designation as a DMA gatekeeper because the number of users fell below the threshold.
Now that's interesting. I think the threshold is 45 million? Falling EU userbase?
"the same rules would apply to EU maybe competitors... if there were any."
That can actually be an example of a tariff, though. Basically every country specializes in something, and imports things they're not good at making. For example: cheese, or luxury watches, or GPUs. If you have a special law that charges companies money only for the categories you import and you carve out exceptions for "small" (aka domestic) markets, a la the DMA, you have effectively created a tariff.
eBay's listings are no longer free. They are now extorting their pound of flesh via a so-called "Buyer Protection Fee" which forces buyers, rather than sellers, to pay extra when purchasing items from private sellers.
I'm a bit surprised usage was ever that high; that would imply that almost 10% of the population was using _Facebook Marketplace_!
I think I've looked at it maybe twice since it launched, to admire all the weird scams. Maybe it's gotten better since? It used to be sub-ebay levels of complete nonsense.
Remember that you're probably in a bubble. Marketplace was incredibly popular back in the days when I was at FB, and I'd have expected it to get more popular based on the people I see around me (kids stuff is all over it).
Maybe the gatekeeper thing is a reflection of less people in the EU using FB at all, rather than specifically Marketplace.
> Apple faces a €500 million fine for breaching the regulation’s rules for app stores, while Meta drew a penalty of €200 million for its "pay or consent" advertising model,
> The procedural fines fall short of the two giant penalties issued by the EU executive under its antitrust laws last year: €1.8 billion to Apple for abusing its dominant position while distributing music streaming apps, and €797 million to Meta for pushing its classified ads service on social media users.
Really honest questions: are those fines actually paid, in practice ? Is there a way for a citizen to know ? (As in, do they appear in the public budget of the UE ?) Or are they somehow deducted from subsidies, added to taxes, etc... ?
I know who collects taxes in France ("Le Tresor Public"). I don't know of a EU version of a treasury. Is it collected by one of the member states (Ireland, I would guess ?)
> Fines imposed on undertakings found in breach of EU antitrust rules are paid into the general EU budget. This money is not earmarked for particular expenses, but Member States' contributions to the EU budget for the following year are reduced accordingly. The fines therefore help to finance the EU and reduce the burden for taxpayers.
This quote is re: anti-trust, but likely generalizes.
No. They just made it illegal for Meta specifically to do it, and they’re reserving judgment for anyone else on their hit list covered by the DMA. The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles despite the PR and the extra layers of indirection, it targets American and Chinese companies specifically because that’s what it was designed to do.
> "This isn't just about a fine; the Commission forcing us to change our business model effectively imposes a multi-billion-dollar tariff on Meta while requiring us to offer an inferior service."
Meta complaining about getting tariff'd is objectively hilarious.
> the Commission forcing us to change our business model
This is total, utter, complete 100% grade A organic nonsense.
I worked at FB (but the same is true of basically all action driven advertising systems). Only a tiny proportion of users ever click, but they are incredibly lucrative for online advertising platforms.
The whole subscription was a really transparent attempt to get people to accept the tracking and it's honestly profoundly depressing that this is what they're reduced to.
At least, old school ads. Sensible ads. Like Coca-Cola. I have no idea how these ridiculous online gaming things stay in business but I'm sure it's much stupider.
No, like the rest of these power games it should be worrying. It's not about whether it's actually a tariff or not - it's not about objective truth. It's about getting the orange guy to do things that are beneficial for Mr Sugarhill's money pile. It might or might not work in this particular instance, but it should be very concerning that this sort of thing is the way to get money now.
Mr Sugarhill's ploy is presumably to get Mr Mango enraged about the tariffs so he tariffs them back 200%, and they back down to avoid the 200% tariffs.
I don't understand meta's statement that this handicaps american businesses while allows European and Chinese companies to operate under different standards.
It's not completely unwarranted. According to the article, Facebook was fined for their model of asking for pay or accept tracking. Which is exactly what almost all publishers do, e.g. all big German newspapers. It's absolutely clear that this is against the law - they could show ads, but can't invade the users privacy for that, so no tracking ads - but they do it anyway and got away with it in various decisions. And now Facebook gets a huge fine for the same behaviour.
Which is good in a way, maybe it will lead to a behaviour correction also for the smaller publishers. But it's of course not an equal treatment.
Apple on the other hand completely deserves its fine, without a question. They got clear rules and did everything to circumvent them. The Apple's Core Technology Fee was obviously illegal. Don't know why they expected to get away with that, there wasn't even a minimal chance of that working. Idiots.
Big German newspapers do not need to comply under DMA.
The EU focusses, rightfully, on EU macro dynamics with these laws, not how smaller outlets work.
This is very much reasonable. When a platform is big, it has bigger impact, but also bigger budgets to hire legal help and bigger budgets to stay compliant.
This is well established in accounting where there exists different rules depending on size (in many jurisdictions)
I agree, except the DMA specifically only applies to companies over a specific size. I think if the German newspapers were at FB/Apple scale, in terms of number of users, then the DMA would apply (i.e. they would be designated gatekeepers or similar) and they could also be fined. Although I think pay for no ads is also a violation of GDPR maybe?
The measures apply by size, not by country of origin. It happens that the companies over the threshold are American. So their statement is basically untrue, but that's politics these days.
Spotify conveniently falls outside of the scope of this law when any artist would tell you it should absolutely be covered.
The DMA is gerrymandered to exclude domestic businesses. Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
> EU are basically enforcing market capitalism by disallowing monopolistic practices.
Users are free to just not buy iOS devices. Users are free to just not use Meta services.
There is no monopoly here. This is all much ado about nothing.
No real-world user is meaningfully harmed by the current state of Apple App Store/Meta Ads, but plenty will be harmed once spyware/piracy sideloading becomes common. Many small businesses will collapse due to ineffective advertisement (large businesses will love it though - it becomes a winner-take-all market).
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To me, this is the most easily agreeable part of what the EU has been after. It is unfair that Apple restricts Netflix from telling it's users that they can sign up and pay for Netlifx on their own website. It's unfair that Netflix can't even tell its users the rules that Apple enforces on them.
It's telling that Gruber is pretty staunchly against EU/DMA interferance in Apple, and broadly thinks they're wrong. But this is the one thing he agrees on
> If Apple wants to insist on a cut of in-app purchased subscription revenue, that’s their prerogative. What gets me, though, are the rules that prevent apps that eschew in-app purchases from telling users in plain language how to actually pay. Not only is Netflix not allowed to link to their website, they can’t even tell the user they need to go to netflix.com to sign up
https://daringfireball.net/2019/01/netflix_itunes_billing
https://daringfireball.net/2020/07/parsing_cooks_opening_sta...
(I think Apple now has their 'reader app' carveout for apps like Netflix, but it's still pretty obtuse and inconsistent)
> The Commission takes the preliminary view that Apple failed to comply with this obligation [to allow third party app stores] in view of the conditions it imposes on app (and app store) developers. Developers wanting to use alternative app distribution channels on iOS are disincentivised from doing so as this requires them to opt for business terms which include a new fee (Apple's Core Technology Fee). Apple also introduced overly strict eligibility requirements, hampering developers' ability to distribute their apps through alternative channels. Finally, Apple makes it overly burdensome and confusing for end users to install apps when using such alternative app distribution channels.
This is great to hear. It sounds like they've just found Apple non-compliant in making alternate app stores as discouraging for both developers and user as possible. I guess it'll take another 12 months for any fines or changes from Apple.
It's also probably the most dangerous for Apple. It creates a cash incentive to push people outside of Apple's walled garden and show them what's outside.
I really really hope Apple gets its act together, they are the greatest "the user experience comes first" company and they actually have great hard tech but they show signs of rent seeking behavior which can destroy them.
If Apple just play nice with EU, open up and focus on bringing the greatest experience possible they will keep winning. If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.
The Apple's AI blunder is mostly a blunder only because they insist to do it all by themselves so to have higher margins on the services revenues. IMHO those blunders will be more damaging as the Americans no longer have the higher moral grounds than Koreans or Chinese.
I hope Apple is treading carefully.
They've been hard rent-seeking since iTunes and iPod. They aggressively eliminated and made inconvenient other ways for getting music onto iPods. Hardware was great, but hard dependence on iTunes killed it for me.
But what alternative? There is no European smartphone OS. Windows and Steam OS and XBox are US-american, too.
I suppose Linux, Playstation, and Nintendo, then?
You don't understand the term "rent seeking". Because in this case, it's Apple's competitors that are rent seeking by utilizing the force of the government to make Apple give competitors access to its private but non-monopolistic ecosystem.
I think that Apple should call that bluff and leave the EU.
Which in turn will increase public pressure on the EU, but not as functionally as it would in a democratic system.
All hollow talk. It will lose all of its aggression the moment that Apple leaves the EU, and EU citizens are left with the remaining options.
I’ve stopped seeing Gruber as any sort of authority on Apple for a while now. He’s just a single guy with an opinion like everyone else, and it’s, more times than not, clearly biased in favor of Apple.
Some of his analysis of objective data is informative, but when he gets into subjective material, I tune out. I don’t really care any more about what he says than most others sharing their opinion on the internet — it’s just one more data point to consider collectively alongside everyone else’s.
What I really dislike and the reason I don't subscribe to his feed is the politics.
That said, I believe in the principle of free speech, especially as envisioned by Tim Berners Lee for the Web. I wish more Americans could adhere to those principles even when the speech is not to their taste. Certainly feels like a lot of cultural backsliding happening.
The freedom of speech isn't restricted, apple just isn't providing a platform to speak on.
This is an anti trust issue balance against two parties ability to be bound by contract.
It ridiculous and also comes with costs for other customers of that ecosystem. I believe brands really make some people stupid.
> The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards.
But this is wildly untrue. The EU isn't hand-picking individual organisations and fining them because they're American, they're fining them because they're in breach of existing legislation. The same legislation applies to local companies.
Ironically, it's the US who takes stances like the one they claim the EU is taken. E.g.: The US required that TikTok be sold, without actually proving that TikTok was in breach of any actual law.
But repeating the same claims gets those claims out into the media, and that's what people hear. So we see a dissonance between what the media says (and many people believe) and what's really happening.
If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations. They seem to prioritize free trade above all else.
I'm guessing the reason why they're lying is that they don't want to scare ALL Chinese companies.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
This is pretty much as vague as it gets "they're doing _something_ wrong".
The exact behaviour that is prohibited needs to be codified into law. Then you can go after organisations what break such law.
In this case, they've just been found guilty of an unwritten crime.
> If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations
Corporations in general rather. I do agree that we should be stricter of foreign corporations, and on non-foreign ones equally so.
5/7 designated gatekeepers are US companies: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
EU companies tend to keep group entities separate instead of running for absolute synergies. For instance the AOL-Time-Warner-Direct-Dish kind of merger is pretty much unheard of.
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TikTok never does that.
Does that violate EU law? (Serious question, I really don't know)
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-tiktok-ban-linked-isra...
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The iPhone App store existed before this legislation, and I suspect the rest of the targetted things did too.
This legislation only applies to companies that have a certain marketshare, which includes no European companies unless you count one that's a subsidiary of a US company.
Maybe it's the case that it is reasonable to handicap successful businesses, but this is a handicap that only applies to some businesses, most of which are US (but one is Chinese).
It doesn't matter what applies, only what's enforced matters.
Laws being selectively enforced for an agenda is a tale as old as the existence of laws.
If they're doing it by legislation, well, the EU has been passing "legislation clearly designed for US companies to be in infringement of" for a while. Maybe you like that. Maybe it's a good thing; after all, the things they're passing laws about are basically just actions only US companies are capable of taking right now. Nevertheless it is clearly targeting. It's just targeting you like. The US has passed such legislation. China does it both with formal legislation and with de facto rules.
Free trade is a dead letter. Whether you like that or not is not very relevant to whether or not it is dead. It's dead. Maybe it'll swing back around in a few decades but right now even that is a distant prospect, we're not even done accelerating into the current merchantalist phase of the cycle, let alone decelerating, let alone heading back.
(Note "whataboutism" would be an inappropriate response to my point here; that's about "it's ok for us because they do it". My observation is not normative, merely descriptive... everyone is doing it, and they're doing it more rather than less right now.)
They already do, lookup how many European banks have been fined by the US and by how much then compare that to US banks.
Everybody plays these games.
This thing right here terrifies me. The entertainment-information media oligopoly has a tight grasp on public conversations. It feels like a hydra that can't be defeated.
This only has a local impact, but global is made of local.
> The EU regulator also dropped Meta's Marketplace's designation as a DMA gatekeeper because the number of users fell below the threshold.
Now that's interesting. I think the threshold is 45 million? Falling EU userbase?
That can actually be an example of a tariff, though. Basically every country specializes in something, and imports things they're not good at making. For example: cheese, or luxury watches, or GPUs. If you have a special law that charges companies money only for the categories you import and you carve out exceptions for "small" (aka domestic) markets, a la the DMA, you have effectively created a tariff.
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I think I've looked at it maybe twice since it launched, to admire all the weird scams. Maybe it's gotten better since? It used to be sub-ebay levels of complete nonsense.
Maybe the gatekeeper thing is a reflection of less people in the EU using FB at all, rather than specifically Marketplace.
It has taken the place of Craigslist for younger generations.
By this same logic, I guess we can say that the EU isn't trying to build a trade barrier favoring local competitors. So, while, as you say,
> It's what's knows as a "non tariff trade barrier".
...It's also not that, since the goal isn't prevent them from competing equally in the market, where they have no competition.
Dead Comment
> The procedural fines fall short of the two giant penalties issued by the EU executive under its antitrust laws last year: €1.8 billion to Apple for abusing its dominant position while distributing music streaming apps, and €797 million to Meta for pushing its classified ads service on social media users.
Really honest questions: are those fines actually paid, in practice ? Is there a way for a citizen to know ? (As in, do they appear in the public budget of the UE ?) Or are they somehow deducted from subsidies, added to taxes, etc... ?
I know who collects taxes in France ("Le Tresor Public"). I don't know of a EU version of a treasury. Is it collected by one of the member states (Ireland, I would guess ?)
This quote is re: anti-trust, but likely generalizes.
https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/index/fines_en#:~:te...
Dead Comment
Wait, so the EU has made it illegal to sell a paid service while also offering an alternative where the user pays via seeing ads?
You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.
Do you think the EU subsidizes Meta/Apple.
Dead Comment
Meta complaining about getting tariff'd is objectively hilarious.
This is total, utter, complete 100% grade A organic nonsense.
I worked at FB (but the same is true of basically all action driven advertising systems). Only a tiny proportion of users ever click, but they are incredibly lucrative for online advertising platforms.
The whole subscription was a really transparent attempt to get people to accept the tracking and it's honestly profoundly depressing that this is what they're reduced to.
At least, old school ads. Sensible ads. Like Coca-Cola. I have no idea how these ridiculous online gaming things stay in business but I'm sure it's much stupider.
Mr Sugarhill's ploy is presumably to get Mr Mango enraged about the tariffs so he tariffs them back 200%, and they back down to avoid the 200% tariffs.
--
Other related PR: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
This rules that the "Core Technology Fee" is de facto illegal.
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Which is good in a way, maybe it will lead to a behaviour correction also for the smaller publishers. But it's of course not an equal treatment.
Apple on the other hand completely deserves its fine, without a question. They got clear rules and did everything to circumvent them. The Apple's Core Technology Fee was obviously illegal. Don't know why they expected to get away with that, there wasn't even a minimal chance of that working. Idiots.
The EU focusses, rightfully, on EU macro dynamics with these laws, not how smaller outlets work.
This is very much reasonable. When a platform is big, it has bigger impact, but also bigger budgets to hire legal help and bigger budgets to stay compliant.
This is well established in accounting where there exists different rules depending on size (in many jurisdictions)
[1] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
The DMA is gerrymandered to exclude domestic businesses. Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
> EU are basically enforcing market capitalism by disallowing monopolistic practices.
Users are free to just not buy iOS devices. Users are free to just not use Meta services.
There is no monopoly here. This is all much ado about nothing.
No real-world user is meaningfully harmed by the current state of Apple App Store/Meta Ads, but plenty will be harmed once spyware/piracy sideloading becomes common. Many small businesses will collapse due to ineffective advertisement (large businesses will love it though - it becomes a winner-take-all market).