Europeans using Apple, Google and other major tech platforms woke to a new reality Thursday as a landmark law imposed tough new competition rules on the companies — changing European Union citizens’ experience with phones, apps, browsers and more.
The new EU regulations force sweeping changes on some of the world’s most widely used tech products, including Apple’s app store, Google search and messaging platforms, including Meta’s WhatsApp. And they mark a turning point in a global effort by regulators to bring tech giants to heel after years of allegations that the companies harmed competition and left consumers worse off.
As someone from the US, a hearty thank you to Europeans. Not all of these will directly benefit me, but some of it will. Also, Apple has to be so fucking mad that they can’t keep their app store monopoly, even if just in Europe.
They aren’t mad about the app store. All they did was just create a separate pay structure for non apple app store apps which effectively makes it impossible to afford to create a successful app outside their ecosystem. Those pieces of shit probably feel pretty smugly proud of themselves for flouting the regulation, but I hope the EU brings the hammer down much harder because they clearly are trying to get around the entire point of the regulation.
Their attempt to maliciously comply is both against the spirit of the law - making it a violation in the EU regardless - and the letter of the law: the text mentions that they can’t charge for this.
Time for a nice 10% of global revenues-fine. That’ll do some good in the coffers of the EU.
Man, if we discover some cancer killing thing and a time machine that can go back it time the first thing I would do would be to help Steve Jobs get better, literally apple just got worse and worse when the “innovator” got replaced by the “logistics and finance” guy
Just look at how Steve did things, if he was confronted with this problem he would probably just do it android style and not screw over people like Timmy does
Wouldn’t it be better to go back in time and erase all the apple founders and developers?
Yeah, US regulators don’t have the guts to create these kinds of laws. There’s too much money in it for them.
Don’t know who you mean by ‘us regulars’, but normal people don’t have the power, the guts is irrelevant. Only a few countries or organisations have that: The EU, USA, UK, China, and maybe a few others I have missed. The others besides the EU in that list don’t have the ‘guts’, as you put it, but the rest don’t have the power, even if they wanted to.
Why the UK? It’s a single market against the whole of the EU, the US and China. It’s size is not really relevant.
Users of messaging apps such as Signal or Viber, meanwhile, could soon be able to send chat messages directly to people who use Meta’s Messenger and WhatsApp platforms
Signal and Threema have already announced that they have no plans doing that.
A nice as it would be to have, I don’t get how the messaging interoperability is going to work in practice. The different platforms have many technical differences between them at the backend, and also mismatched user facing feature sets. Ironing all of the that out into some sort of common ground is going to be difficult, especially without it being very janky.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is kicked into the long grass eventually.
It would certainly be a technical challenge. But I think the utility would be very high. In my experience, it’s difficult to convince people to use an app like Signal if they can’t use it to communicate with their Whatsapp contacts (etc.).
They all have the capability to support a UI where you type a message, hit send, and the message is delivered. This proves it’s possible to make and support an interface that hides all the backend complexity. If they don’t expose the same functionality through an API, it’s because they don’t want to, not because it’s too hard.
I’m sure there will be some features that aren’t fully supported across messaging platforms, but for basic use cases like sending a text or an image, there’s really no excuse.
It would probably just use RCS as the backend and have some different functionalities, they could easily just highlight “this person isn’t using Signal so chat features are limited”. Hell, Signal had exactly this when they made the app work as an alternative SMS client. They removed that feature, but it existed previously.
Nah, fuck RCS. There is no reason for a mobile carrier to be involved in anything besides voice calls and TCP/IP traffic. Any protocol that requires participation from carriers beyond delivering TCP/IP packets is broken by design. It’s like designing a water faucet that somehow can’t work without active cooperation from your local water company.
Ironing all of the that out into some sort of common ground is going to be difficult
The big platform has to develop an open API to implement standard message, image and video traffic. No need for a common standard, as long as everyone can implement the eg. open Whatsapp API.
Because you can’t end to end encrypt if you don’t have control over both ends. You’d need to trust the other end. Signal doesn’t and their user base especially doesn’t.
Yes, sure, but why not point out that the communication between Signal and Whatsapp, for example, is not sufficiently encrypted? If someone doesn’t use Signal or Theema, you can only communicate with this person anyway if you use the corresponding app. That’s not any more secure. I just think that Signal & Co. could gain a lot of users if they also allowed (insecure) communication with other messengers. Encryption between users who both use Signal, for example, is not affected by this.
Why do you need to control both ends for E2EE? Both ends need a public and private key to encrypt and decrypt messages. You need a method of key exchange. I would prefer to have an offline method (phone call, in-person) of validating a key (like iMessage and Signal have). But I don’t see a reason to need to control both ends.
Man, hate reading these kinds of articles that feel like a high school essay with a minimum page requirement. They pad out the article by repeating the title in each paragraph, just worded differently, without divulging the actual content till the end.
changing European Union citizens’ experience with phones, apps, browsers and mor
Hmm, I’m an EU citizen but don’t live in the EU, I assume I won’t benefit from this?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
And they mark a turning point in a global effort by regulators to bring tech giants to heel after years of allegations that the companies harmed competition and left consumers worse off.
The industry-wide changes are linked to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a 2022 law requiring dominant online platforms to give users more choices and rivals more opportunities to compete.
“The new options we’re introducing to comply with the DMA necessarily mean we will not be able to protect users in the same way,” Apple wrote in a white paper it published last week ahead of Thursday’s compliance deadline.
If Apple’s decision is allowed to stand, it will mean tech giants can thwart competition and undermine the law just by pointing to a rival’s past efforts to call out anticompetitive behavior, said Tim Sweeney, Epic Games’ CEO.
The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a trade group representing four of the six gatekeeper companies — Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta — told CNN that “regulators need to resist the urge to politicize the process” of reviewing the plans.
DMA enforcement “should be proportionate and unbiased, taking into account the significant differences between gatekeepers, as well as how these services work in reality,” said Daniel Friedlaender, senior vice president of CCIA and head of its Europe office.
The original article contains 1,632 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 87%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
