Big Tech needs to knows its place. Yes especially you Apple. Make sideloading available globally.
And stop charging a “Core Technology Fee”. And allow JIT compiling for non-browsers so emulators for newer systems can perform well.
Wow. I have no idea what a “Core Technology Fee” is. Guess I’ll stick with Android.
Big tech can go F itself.
All big tech has done is stolen our data and lied to us for their own needs.
Make all software FOSS
wake me up when someone figures that out. so far I haven’t seen any large scale implementation that could last and/or keep everyone happy.
This smells like sour grapes to me, just like when people say to boycott Starbucks and then in the same breath say their coffee sucks. These companies became behemoths because people find a lot of value in the products and services they offer. Failing to acknowledge that truth just makes you sound out of touch.
I mean you SHOULD boycott starbucks for their business practices. But you can’t say their coffee sucks. They don’t have coffee. They have “diabetic inducing coffee flavored sugarwater”
But it’s not coffee
I think the point being made here is that many people clearly enjoy what Starbucks offers. So, saying they suck is preaching to the choir. The only people listening to that are the people you aren’t trying to convince. If you want an impact, suggest an alternative that will make those people happy. To do that, start with an understanding of the value Starbucks brings them. Failing that, you are just signaling that your thinking isn’t for them. They’ll just ignore you and continue to happily give Starbucks their money.
people find a lot of value in the products and services they offer
This is definitely true to some degree, but there imo is also another side to this.
Yes, they there are underlying problems/demands that they solve, but they definitely also create and shape those since psychology sadly works extremely effective. And they really try their hardest to manipulate customers.
Another aspect is that they might have originally created that value and given the users what they wanted, which got them in the position they are in now. Sometimes even operating at a loss to bully competition out of the market. But once they achieved this dominant position enshittification commences. Which wouldn’t be that much of an issue, if they wouldn’t also often prevent competition from growing enough to be able to compete.
Example Google search: The demand for a way to navigate the web is real and google fulfilled it best, which made them huge. Timejump to the present: the demand is still the same, but now google shows you what they want you to see and pay billions to be the default search engine to hinder any competition from gaining any traction.
It’s a timeline. tech companies have become much worse, and people warning about them more vocal, so the lower educated classes who mindlessly use their products have (partially) woken up to the real motives of companies who create “free to use” products, i.e. data mining. In the EU, we have a lot of dummies who we call “remote controlled”, who want to simulate a version of the US lifestyle (huge cars, celebrity adulation, eating like shit, single-issue voting, vapidness). These mainly teenagers but regrettably also low-class adults. Those are also the people who still use social networks because they have nothing else going on and are too lazy to invest their free time in worthwhile activities. So it’s a class issue, the social underbelly of the EU is remote controlled by US culture and corporations almost like the social underbelly of the US is.
Americans found lots of values in Starbucks coffee because Americans have no concept of coffee that’s simultaneously black, not bitter, not acidic, and sweet. It would be wrong to blame Starbucks for that, they’re a symptom, not the cause, but yes their coffee sucks. As it does everywhere else in the US, the country that thought that percolators were a mighty fine idea.
(And yes I know you guys invented the Aeropress. Good thing, good job, good coffee (with proper beans), now also use it).
Please, remember to vote on the European elections! We do need the EU to keep taking actions like this
What parties should we vote for to make sure they keep protecting consumers?
Volt wants:
To make digital rights binding. They call for a “Declaration on European Digital Rights and Principles”.
Tax revenues from digital technologies where they are generated.
Guarantee net neutrality and reject contradictory laws.
Enact laws against the unethical use of AI.
How does taxing revenue from digital technology where it’s generated work?
Can you explain what that means for me.
Depends on you country, but the right wing one are usually not the ones that are so pro-regulation.
Discard the Brownshirts, their collaborators, and the Putin fluffers, and you probably won’t have many choices left.
European elections have this advantage that the morons don’t even go to vote nor know what is going on.
It’s the sole reason why is it going so good, obfuscation. Anything outside of the country is too much too grasp for the rightists.
There’s some kind of deep moral to this and I am not sure it is a good one
I don’t think that’s true at all.
When the UK was in the EU, UKIP was their largest party. For France, Le Pen’s National Front party was the largest. And they aren’t alone. There’s a number of right wing EU parties.
And it’s due to get worse, if we bring data into it. Many countries in the EU are swinging to the right. Polling is indicating right wing parties will have a solid majority in the EU parliament this year.
Well it’s true where I live. Those elections are seen as unimportant and not many care and even skip them with a tendency for more… intellectually, EU versed ppl to vote
25% attendance in eu elections vs 45% for country parliament. Most recent elections improved 40 to 65
As I said the moral of this story isn’t pretty
I think those politicians don’t really bother going to the parliament and mostly cash the checks in, but it’s just a guess
There’s a rule banning “self-preferencing.” That’s when platforms push their often inferior, in-house products and hide superior products made by their rivals.
Spaz isn’t going to like this.
He wouldn’t if it applied to him. Unfortunately, reddit is not a gatekeeper in the sense of the DMA and due to its management it’s also unlikely to ever reach that position :)
Unless the saga continues, they didn’t “hide” the competition, they paywalled their access.
There’s nothing wrong, per se, with charging access to the API. Where they went wrong was setting an exorbitant price. That was clearly anti-competitive. They knew the pricing they set wouldn’t be sustainable to any third party developers. Then he started shit talking the Apollo developer…
Well it may or may not be wrong. One of the measures would be, can Reddit afford the price if it also had pay for the same access? If the answer is no, then it might be considered preferential treatment to their own app. However ianal so there could be a carve out for that.
To this articles question on why apple should care about EUs 500 million citizens when they have trillions of Dollars. Well given that the USA only has 333 millions I would say they should care a lot.
Apple needs to realize that the EU doesn’t care if they left. They barely pay any taxes in the EU and don’t even create much economic value. Since most Apple jobs in the EU are in retail, businesses administration and tax evasion. They don’t produce shit here.
Meta tried to do the same. The EU response was to ask when they’d leave to plan the going away party. Meta was a lot less confrontational after that.
I think that the EU is fully aware that what makes those extra powerful is network effect. And, once they’re gone, something else pops up in their place. The case of Germans using WhatsApp for example would become inconvenient for them for fifteen whole minutes, then they’d jump into an alternative, and business as usual, without Faecesbook/Merda meddling.
At least in germany, nobody cares. We are using WhatsApp over here most of the time
As of the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, the Americas held around 41 percent of the revenue, whereas Europe came in second with roughly over 26.5 percent.
As the second largest revenue generator, Europe has a powerful voice.
The EU is only one chunk of Apple’s “Europe” segment, which is defined as “European countries, as well as India, the Middle East and Africa.”
Most companies group MENA separately. They must sell so few devices there that they don’t want to show the numbers separately
And I think a lot of that revenue is in the Middle East to be honest. Those are poorer parts of the world, but with very bad culture of demonstrative consumption.
Still, how big this is for Apple is important only for Apple users. While creating a culture of not fucking around is important for everyone.
So I’d say the EU should cut Apple down right now. They’ve made a lot of bad faith and faux compliance actions. Just ban them. I’m confident there’s much more than one reason justifying that legally. No, that company doesn’t help innovation, education and whatever else.
