Apple's App Store Policies Charged Under New EU Competition Law (nytimes.com) 75
Apple is imposing unfair restrictions on developers of apps for its App Store in violation of a new European Union law meant to encourage competition in the tech industry, regulators in Brussels said on Monday. From a report: The charges further escalated a tussle between Apple, which says its products are designed in the best interest of customers, and E.U. regulators, who say the company is unfairly using its size and considerable resources to stifle competition. Apple is the first company to be charged for violating the Digital Markets Act, a law passed in 2022 that gives European regulators wide authority to force the largest "online gatekeepers" to change their business practices.
After initiating an investigation in March, E.U. regulators said Apple was putting unlawful restrictions on companies that make games, music services and other applications. Under the law, also known as the D.M.A., Apple cannot limit how companies communicate with customers about sales and other offers and content available outside the App Store. The company faces a penalty of 10 percent of global revenue, a fine that could go up to 20 percent for repeat infringements, regulators said. Apple reported $383 billion in revenue last year. "Today is a very important day for the effective enforcement of the D.M.A.," said Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission executive vice president in charge of competition policy. She said Apple's App Store policies make developers more dependent on the company and prevent consumers from being aware of better offers.
After initiating an investigation in March, E.U. regulators said Apple was putting unlawful restrictions on companies that make games, music services and other applications. Under the law, also known as the D.M.A., Apple cannot limit how companies communicate with customers about sales and other offers and content available outside the App Store. The company faces a penalty of 10 percent of global revenue, a fine that could go up to 20 percent for repeat infringements, regulators said. Apple reported $383 billion in revenue last year. "Today is a very important day for the effective enforcement of the D.M.A.," said Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission executive vice president in charge of competition policy. She said Apple's App Store policies make developers more dependent on the company and prevent consumers from being aware of better offers.
FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's hoping that Apple gets beaten up and fined many billions. Anything less will be a win for it.
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Not sure them being forced to open up their app store and cash cow platform would be regarded as a "win" by Apple. It will lead to more competition and lower prices for consumers, as well as more choice, and lower costs for developers. All things that hurt Apple's bottom line.
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Those things really won't hurt Apple's bottom line that much. You've been able to sideload on Android since forever, but most people get most of their apps from the Play Store anyway. Besides, if Apple users don't even want this functionality as the frothingest of Apple users here on Slashdot love to claim, none of them will use it!
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Limiting what Apple can do on its own app store, such as forcing developers to use Apple payment processing, and reducing the tax from the current 30%, will both hurt Apple's bottom line and make things better for consumers.
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Wasn't Apple charging alternate payment processors 15%, making it nearly impossible to reduce the costs on their system?
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Something like that. I imagine that's going to stop now.
Re: FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! (Score:2)
It won't, for the exact reason I already described, which you ignored in your supposed reply.
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I very much doubt that this will lead to lower prices for consumers. Does Epic sound like a company that wants to do that? No, they'll take the 15% (or whatever the average is) and pocket it.
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Epic isn't the only company that will be offering alternative app stores, or cheaper apps on Apple's store.
It will allow shop apps that don't pay the Apple Tax too. For example, you can't buy stuff with the Amazon app because they want you to use their payment processor on their website, but soon users will be able to shop directly from the app itself. More choice of shops means more competition and lower prices.
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For example, you can't buy stuff with the Amazon app because they want you to use their payment processor on their website, but soon users will be able to shop directly from the app itself.
You already can for physical items. What you can't buy are digital downloads (e.g. movies, TV shows, and Kindle books). Presumably if Apple is forced to allow third-party payment systems, there will be no need for a lot of companies to set up their own stores, and you'll have surprisingly few companies doing that. Realistically, you'll end up with an app store for porn content plus Cydia for haxies and... that's probably about it. Maybe a GPL store.
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Does Epic sound like a company that wants to do that?
Yes, they do. Because there will be multiple other companies competing.
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Yup. If theres one thing I love about the europeans, they do not fuck about when it comes to slapping big US companies in the dick with fines if those US companies try and bully the local market. It was the EU that forced Microsoft to back down on forcing everyone to use internet explorer and that was the thing that let firefox have its brief moment of glory before chrome swooped in and ate the market.
Lets hope they give apple a similar lesson in manners, european style.
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Re:Eurocrats regulating the world. (Score:5, Informative)
Er... only if you want to sell your goods/services in the EU. The rest of the world has its own laws.
If you don't like the rules, or don't want to follow them, you don't have to participate in the EU market !
Re: Eurocrats regulating the world. (Score:4, Informative)
Apple and Google should exit Europe so the European people will realize Eurocrats are pushing the people.
Apple's 2023 revenue for Europe is 94 billion dollars. Now we can all see why no one lets you be in charge of anything.
California tries to do this too. TheyÃ(TM)ll come up with a new emissions mandate and being the largest state in the union the auto manufacturers will comply.
That's because before we started doing that, children were getting bleeding lesions on their lungs in Los Angeles.
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If AAPL fights back and pulls out of Europe, my bet is the people of Europe would demand the unelected regulatory bureaucrat bullies in Brussels change their position.
If the river were whiskey, etc etc.
Got any more fantasies disconnected from reality which I can mock? Or are you all out?
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Personally believe the excessive heavy handed regulation out of Brussels is why thereÃ(TM)s no mega cap tech companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia etc from Europe. Their loss
Having those megalithic companies exist means competition is harmed. It's our loss, because competition drives innovation.
Re: Eurocrats regulating the world. (Score:1)
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The unintended consequences and costs associated with regulatory compliance often helps the big guys maintain their position, though.
Corporations literally pay lawyers to write those laws and then hand them to their bought and paid for congresscreeps to have them passed. Those are not unintended consequences, they are the intent.
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agree with you that competition is necessary and drives innovation. The unintended consequences and costs associated with regulatory compliance often helps the big guys maintain their position, though.
Competition. Apple is determined to be hurting competition. So let's just eliminate Apple, make it illegal to use any of their products. Make Windows and Android the only operating system, and watch as the world enters a new golden age of honest, legal products competing fairly and as the free market's invisible hand does it's work.
Competition. If we only had say Android phones to choose from, that is the very definition of competition, a monoculture. The only way to have more competition is to make less
Re: Eurocrats regulating the world. (Score:1)
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Correct. A good reason to have less not more regulation, which is written by the big entrenched corporations lobbyists.
That's the dumbest of all possible takes. It's a reason to have more regulation of corporations, which is the thing We The People should be uniting over when instead we're fighting culture wars promoted by Big Media, predominantly the most mainstream of all mainstream media, Fox.
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Do Apple pay you to have the worst possible takes or is this just a hobby
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The answer is to fix the problem, not burn it down. It's always easy to break stuff, but hard things are often worthwhile.
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There are certainly multiple factors at play. Regulation may be one: it's easier to see how to monetise data in a jurisdiction with a minimalist concept of privacy. But that's only part of a wider issue of US venture capital being keen on tech. I don't know what the situation is like in Germany or the Netherlands, but here in Spain people with lots of money prefer the lower-risk sufficient-reward option of investing in property. There are startup accelerators, but they're on a much smaller scale than in Sil
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Its disgusting how people on here root for the corporation that could not give a shit about people as long as they are buying their crap.
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Exactly this. Its disgusting how people on here root for the corporation that could not give a shit about people as long as they are buying their crap.
We need to understand that Google has never made a cent, and that Samsung donates every cent of profit to widows and orphans charities.
Google and all of the Android manufacturers - you have to take a vow of poverty to work for them, and perform public service.
Meanwhile, Apple has opened up the first Soylent Green camp, at present using widows and orphans, but soon to include minorities.
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you ok, dude?
Noooooo! Apple hurt me!
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just butthurt apple fanboi reaction to market regulation, he'll be fine, don't worry.
i have been wondering myself if he was joking or serious, i think he is both, which is the hallmark of delirium. he even has a point, eu institutions are indeed a bunch of snotty extractive gutmenschen themselves. but their framework is not irrational, and it's their territory: apple can comply and pay and keep profiteering or gtfo, simple. fever will subside and the cons-paranoia will evaporate.
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Making claims about Apple is not a support of Android. Not everyone is a fanboy in the two camps.
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Making claims about Apple is not a support of Android. Not everyone is a fanboy in the two camps.
Blasphemy! You will use Android, and you will love it. No exceptions, the lack of choice, which is the very basis of thede free market and competition requires one device to rule them all. Government needs to nationalize the smartphone industry thand make a volksphone, and all else must be eliminated for the promotion of the free market and the cause of competition. This will enable innovation, because nothing spurs progress like a monoculture.
Dude - I've ramped up sarcasm level to 10,000 because this ha
Re: Eurocrats regulating the world. (Score:4, Insightful)
"All of this is exactly using the courts as an anti-competitive tool while claiming the opposite"
So, so, so dumb.
Apple's actions are obviously and clearly anticompetitive. Like, nobody has to ask for clarification, they do thing after thing obviously and only for the purpose of stifling competition.
Google also does things which are anticompetitive, and the EU also holds them accountable for those things, but Apple does more such things so a rational person expects them to be the target of more antitrust action. And that's exactly what is happening.
You expect this to not happen only because you are used to the system in the US where antitrust is no longer prosecuted in most cases, even when the abuse is obvious, because corporations completely ru[i]n the government here. But Europe is not America, the courts still function there in most nations and in the EU itself, and your expectations do not apply.
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Apple's 2023 revenue for Europe is 94 billion dollars.
The EU only represents about 7% of Apple's revenue based on comments from their CFO during their earnings call last quarter [sixcolors.com] (the numbers he provided are a good proxy for total revenue). The reason your number provides an inflated view and is of no relevance to the situation at-hand is because you didn't account for two very important details:
(1) Europe > EU
(2) "Europe" in Apple's regulatory filings > Europe
Apple's "Europe" includes European countries that are not in the EU, such as the UK (where they
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The fact that non-punitive fines can exceed the maximum theoretically possible damages is unconscionable
If they couldn't, then they would merely be a fee, and make the government little more than a party to the malfeasance as ours has become here in the states. The goal of the fine is to change behavior. If it cannot exceed the revenues gained from the behavior, then it cannot effectively do that.
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I deliberately constrained my statement to non-punitive fines. For the sorts of activity that you're describing, a punitive fine that exceeds damages absolutely makes sense. I have no complaint with that idea. I do have a complaint with the notion of non-punitive fines exceeding theoretical damages.
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Er... only if you want to sell your goods/services in the EU. The rest of the world has its own laws.
If you don't like the rules, or don't want to follow them, you don't have to participate in the EU market !
I think his problem is that laws that start out in the EU tend to get copied by other free and fair societies because those laws are beneficial to the members of that society. This is somehow bad.
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Japan is starting regulate apple https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
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Apple is an EU (Irish) company.
They decided to become European to avoid paying US taxes on profits made by selling to Europeans. (As long as they keep the money in their EU company and don't pay it back to the US parent company it is not taxed by the USA.) The cost of this is that the Irish company is European and must obey all Irish/European laws. The parent company (Apple, Inc.) is still an American company and does not have to follow the EU regulations -which is why the US versions of their products (a
Used to be happy with Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
As a Unix nerd, I have really loved using MacOS - it being the best of both worlds with a slick, maintained GUI and a regular Unix shell lurking just a mouse click away. That's still the same, however ...
Apple are absolutely taking the piss with their 30% on every transaction, they know it for sure and ergo should be more careful with regulators. Apple could compete by making it easier for users to pay with apple (which is actually the case) rather than bullying App publishers and mandating draconian terms in the App store agreements.
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FTFY
Why hunt and peck when Spotlight works so well?
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As a Unix nerd, I have really loved using MacOS - it being the best of both worlds with a slick, maintained GUI and a regular Unix shell lurking just a mouse click away. That's still the same, however ...
Apple are absolutely taking the piss with their 30% on every transaction, they know it for sure and ergo should be more careful with regulators. Apple could compete by making it easier for users to pay with apple (which is actually the case) rather than bullying App publishers and mandating draconian terms in the App store agreements.
Not to put too fine a point on it - how has Apple forced you to write for them? If that were an overall issue, a simple matter of abandoning the market and taking the programming expertise to Android should fix that issue.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Unix guy, I love the ecosystem Apple provides. CarPlay and My Phone and Macs integrate ridiculously seamlessly. And on my Macs, I get that Unix Goodness, be it with the slick interface or bashing around in Terminal. To top it off - Linux is then easy.
In my wor
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As a Unix nerd, I have really loved using MacOS - it being the best of both worlds with a slick, maintained GUI and a regular Unix shell lurking just a mouse click away.
you already had a regular unix shell available for free. explain how a "slick, maintained GUI" justfies paying a luxury premium. this is going to be fun.
disclaimer: i have used mac os, the gui is (in my humble opinion) vastly overrated. i just don't like it.
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Sorry to disappoint, I'm not going to get into a debate about this GUI vs that GUI, it was a subjective opinion.
What I will say is that I would probably run Linux if it had the app/driver support available to MacOS as I really prefer the freedom to configure as I wish.
One final point, do not mention Windows... that (I would claim with some objectivity) is the biggest pos, garbage, junk, time wasting crap ever foisted on an ignorant, unwitting public (justification: windows command line, Windows fucking no l
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you don't need to justify yourself for liking apple, that's not a crime. i was asking for some concrete explanation of the goodness of its user interface which is often praised as top of the line. i would like to know why, because my experience differs, for me it's just another gui, except i particularly hate its insistence on systematically hiding information from the user. it annpoys me to no end. is that what you mean with "slick"? well, i find that's a really bad design decision, and actually i deplore
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No visigoths, but there are at least whistleblowers and the EPA [slashdot.org].
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... and corrupt to its core. It's long overdue sacking. Where are the Visigoths when you need them?
They're called competition. They never went anywhere, it's just that the delusion that Apple is special is failing.
More and more people are realising you don't need to spend £1000 on a phone or £2500 on a laptop to get something decent, in fact they're finding they can get something equivalent for 1/2 to 1/3 of the price.
My Asus laptop I bought back in 2021 may only be worth £50 today but I guarantee that if I bought a Macbook Pro in 2021 I would have lost more than £650 jus
Re: Like Rome, Apple became greedy, decadent ... (Score:2)
Howâ(TM)s that ASUS laptop you bought in 2008? Iâ(TM)m still using my 15" mid-2007 MBP, although I am beginning to think about retiring it.
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Well lucky you. My early 2010 17" MBP stopped working in about 2017 due to a failing interrupt controller. I'd replaced the battery once during that period. The trackpad had always been trouble, with the physical "click" not corresponding to when it registered a click. I replaced it with a Dell Latitude, which still runs fine, but several of the key caps have come loose and the left trackpad button is failing (the button below the trackpad, the buttons between the trackpad and keyboard still work fine).
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Ive got a couple of Dell Latitudes from 2005 that still run great.
Here's hoping. (Score:3, Insightful)
As I have said in earlier discussions.... (Score:5, Insightful)
As I have said in earlier discussions, the EU Commission is set upon demolishing the walled garden business model. You can like or dislike what they are about, but that is what they are doing.
That business model involves getting free money by levying a percentage on app sales which don't incur any material costs for Apple. Its free money. The EU is determined to stop this.
You have to look at this from a strictly rational and cold blooded point of view, and the only question is, who is likely to win this fight? Its the EU. Apple may be a huge company, but the EU is a huger government, and one with considerable autocratic powers which make it more or less immune to popular opinion. If one measure doesn't do the trick it can just adopt another, and it will do this until it gets what it wants. Its sort of rule by decree.
One can see why Apple would feel obliged to take it on, because their model is the source of those magic margins. But in the end, in the contest between big government of the EU sort and one big tech company, there is only one smart bet, and that is on the EU.
Apple will in the end have to yield or be fined serious percentages of its global revenues, and the demolition of the walled garden model in Europe will have follow on effects elsewhere in other markets. It was a good run while it lasted, but its coming to an end.
There is no point getting upset about this and posting anti-EU rants. Just take account of the facts, and if you are an investor, take precautions, because its coming.
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But is it right to fine apple a percentage of global revenue? Or should it be limited to a percentage of revenue obtained in EU?
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The fine is useless unless it is a real deterrent. The EU has slowly ramped up to a real deterrent. This is where we are.
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"But is it right....?"
The Commission don't care, its not even a question for them. Its what they are going to do, and it doesn't matter what anyone else says or thinks.
You have to understand where the EU is coming from. Its a partly a Bismarckian alliance of corn and steel with tariff barriers. In that model, you subsidize agriculture and protect it from imports. You also put up protective tariff and regulatory barriers to industrial imports. Turns out this protection results in very comfortable oligop
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I want some jurisdiction somewhere (one Apple would be unwilling to simply stop doing business in) to pass a law that forces Apple to allow true side-loading the way it is on Android.
That is, being able to run apps on an Apple device without having to get that app approved by Apple in any way and without having to give apple any money whatsoever.
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As I have said in earlier discussions, the EU Commission is set upon demolishing the walled garden business model.
... unless you are a gaming console.
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