It’s a law that establishes no measurable compliance guidelines, while providing absolutely no limitations on what the EU can decide counts as a violation retroactively. It’s basically “We’re not going to tell you what we want you to do. You need to guess what we want you to do, and fuck you if you guess wrong.”
Meanwhile, my company halved our sick time a couple of years ago, and just last week announced that they were eliminating dedicated sick time entirely starting the first of next year. Want to take a sick day? Spend your “paid time off” (a.k.a., vacation days) to do it.
Insert a, “I’d love to use my sick time, IF I HAD ANY” meme here.
I still use Reddit, but I gave up on productively contributing to it.
The only account I use now is purely for NSFW reddits, which Reddit will not display advertising for, and I don’t post questions or write comments. They serve me media they host, incurring the costs of storage and data transfer, and get nothing from me in return.
> Where actually they are a full monopoly in the App Store market.
They do, they absolutely do. What’s worse, it turns out they have a full monopoly in MacBooks, computers running macOS, iPads, and iPhones.
In other words, no they don’t. The legal definition of monopoly is not solely, “if there’s only one participant in a market, the participant in that market has a monopoly”. There is necessarily more to it than that, because if that’s all it was, literally every company selling a product would have a monopoly in that product.
No, they want installs on-demand once you select the browser, which ties into a subsequent demand that browsers be able to be downloaded directly from the source or an alternative App Store.
> Because the only reason I can think of is whining about not being the default.
That is exactly the reason.
The charitable reason is so that the browser, upon launch, can ask the user if they want to make it the default.
The problem is that the only incentive browser vendors have to not ask repeatedly is the frequency threshold past which the user will not use the browser.
> All of these need to get broken up until we have at least a half-dozen competing companies in those spaces.
You seem to be forgetting, we had your “at least a half-dozen competing companies" situation in the past. It was called the late 2000s and the early 2010s. And the reason it disappeared is not the traditional “everybody merges until only two or three are left standing”, it’s because iOS and Android were so much better than the competition that every other phone manufacturer starved to death or switched to Android.
By the time a new generation of smartphones with sufficiently-equivalent OSes had arrived — in the form of webOS and Microsoft Phone — iOS and Android were so established the newcomers couldn’t successfully compete.
Even today, while there are only two major OSes, there are still numerous successfully competing manufacturers: Samsung, Google, Apple, OnePlus, BLU, Lenovo/Motorola, Huwaei, Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo, etc. They all make mobile phones, with varying levels of market share across the world.
> Why not just let people do what they do with other files and leave it on their desktop.
Once upon a time, upon seeing a disk image open with an app icon, a certain quantity of people would choose to run the app straight off the disk image, likely not understanding the prompt to copy the app to the Applications folder.
Then, sometime later, the disk image would be unmounted (e.g., system reboot) and suddenly the app they had “installed” disappeared.
Rather than force everyone into mandatorily copying apps to the Applications folder, they added a dialog to suggest to the user where the app should go. I will say, though, I didn’t realize it applied to _everything_ outside of the Applications folder. I thought it was only for apps run off of disk images.
Why stop at protecting kids when you can force your morals on adults at the same time?
Spain knows it’s never going to stop people from looking at porn, but if you can essentially ration it, and then figure out a way to embarrass the adults who want more rations, you can pat yourself on the back for reducing overall porn usage.
What’s less freedom matter if you’re doing God’s work?
It’s being done in response to Elon Musk being caught liking some questionable things.
Now people (e.g., Musk) can like anti-Semitic and pro-white supremacy and pro-Nazi content all they want without fear of being exposed as anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi.
Apple is often “behind” because it believes that generally, technological advancements are subordinate to product function and user benefit. It generally doesn’t do something just because it’s hip, cool, or trendy. it does something because it believes that something benefits the user.
So it’s pragmatic to publicly advocate one position and then privately advocate another?
Isn’t that what Google is doing here, publicly advocating one position (Epic are a bunch of selfish bastards) and privately advocating another (Google is entitled to screw over everybody else)? Why is Google selfish and Epic pragmatic for the exact same actions?
> It's not wrong for Epic to support changes that also happen to benefit everyone while also prioritizing their own goals.
No, but it’s wrong for Epic to position those changes as part of a battle to ensure everybody gets their money, and then admit on the stand that they were perfectly happy to let everybody else to continue to get screwed over as long as they (Epic) got their cash.
"The Coalition for App Fairness is an independent nonprofit organization founded by industry-leading companies to advocate for freedom of choice and fair competition across the app ecosystem."
No it doesn't, but leading up to the trial, Epic generally and Sweeney specifically made a _huge_ PR push that he was waging this battle on Apple (and Google) on behalf of all developers everywhere who are getting screwed over by the 30% commission.
While it’s perfectly fine for him to sue, I think it’s extremely disingenuous for him to make that huge PR push about how he’s standing up for the common developer and then admit on the stand that he’s perfectly happy to let the common developer continue to twist in the wind as long as he gets his pay-off.
In that sense, Google’s post did get one thing right — Epic’s only interested in itself; any impact for anybody else, positive or negative, is just incidental.
> Epic is accusing Google (and Apple) of being monopolies since it wants to play in the app store space.
I think that’s a secondary effect. The primary reason is so Epic gets to keep all the money it makes on digital purchases, which is pretty much all margin for them.
And any pretense that Epic is doing this for anyone other than, or in addition to, Epic went out the window during the Apple trial when Sweeney admitted on the stand that had Apple offered Epic, and only Epic, a sweetheart deal, he would’ve gladly taken it in a heartbeat.
Putting aside the bugginess of the existing software, this litany of complaints mostly boils down to, “I wish Apple would make the macOS equivalent to the Microsoft Surface.”
This is a wishlist for a device that lets you do literally everything in every way possible that a Mac lets you do, but is simultaneously perfectly adapted to doing all of those things in a completely touch-only format with no downsides, regressions, or compromises.
It’s a law that establishes no measurable compliance guidelines, while providing absolutely no limitations on what the EU can decide counts as a violation retroactively. It’s basically “We’re not going to tell you what we want you to do. You need to guess what we want you to do, and fuck you if you guess wrong.”