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.
Oh I so hope you are dead on here. It would be an incredible step forward for modern society. Our world revolves around this tech and it’s about time someone stopped the low hanging fruit aspects of how it’s corrupt.
Perhaps Apple will fund those 800K artillery shells for Ukraine?
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
I fundamentally believe what Apple has become is the inevitable consequences of a company being successful under capitalism. For one thing we see this with all of them not just Apple. Apple just goes to excessive lengths to fuck people over for a couple extra bucks
He “innovated” this behavior (and nothing else).
He would definitely find some better-looking and more diplomatic solution, but I actually like that this company is worse at deceit now.
Wouldn’t it be better to go back in time and erase all the apple founders and developers?
Would PDP-11 become dominant in personal computing then, I wonder?
In USSR there were personal computers based on this architecture (there were Apple II clones too).
I’m far too young, but the PDP-11 ISA seems very nice.
That would probably result in non-modern smartphone like devices.
I like my magic rectangle.
Cursed device. We should be using rotating phones and flip phones.
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.
Typo, sorry.
Meant US regulators
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.
Maybe it’s just my UK-centricity, but it seems to me that the UK does have quite a large effect on various markets. Of course, the effect was strongest when it was still part of the EU, but it still has 70m people, a non insignificant number, as well as historical ties.