An american subsidiary lied once and an american court said they didn't have to keep them around, so we kicked a european subsidiary out of the european mandated DMA.
Yeah, that's gonna go over great with the EU. Apple really deserves the 10% of global revenue fine to be brought down a peg.
Epic created a new account in Sweden so they can create an App Store in the EU.
Apple used the judge’s reasoning of a pattern of malicious compliance to preemptively shut down Epic’s account. Because they believe Epic will not play by the rules.
So it’s a kind of pre-crime reasoning, they’re shutting down Epic’s account before they can do anything wrong. And probably also because Epic publicly criticized Apple’s malicious compliance around the EU rulings.
Using an American court's decision as a basis to try and break EU law tends to very well over on our side of the pond. Good luck with that.
Seems like a great fit for Apple.
What "pattern" are you referring to? There was one incident with Fortnite, and Apple banned Fortnite permanently immediately after that one incident.
They also said that they didn’t have to keep any subsidiaries around.
It’s not even _pretending_ to be an independent subsidiary.
Apple could easily resolve this by just removing their their bogus constraints around the requirements for launching a competing app store on iOS. After that they could probably keep Epic banned all they want from the main App Store based on future ToS violations. (Though with the caveat that the ToS would need to be reasonable, and it seems clear that Apple has no intent of making a reasonable ToS unless forced).
But they're not going to do that, are they? None of Apple's restrictions were about security or user safety, they were always intended as an exclusionary measures, to make sure nobody can launch a viable competing store. When it looked like Epic was going to do it despite the ridiculous business terms, Apple reached for the next excuse in their toolbox.
Violating some company's ToS is completely irrelevant when it comes to actual laws.
And more importantly, it makes no sense that Epic has to interact with Apple at all in order to sell software to owners of Apple products. Apple has implemented systems which makes this very hard or impossible for non-expert users. Which means Apple violates basic principles of ownership.
Apple has the responsibility to safeguard apps delivered by its own store, but it will be each third party store responsibility to do the same while also complying to EU laws.
It’s not a great look when your first action in that gatekeeper role is to block access to a competitor because of actions the competitor’s parent company took years ago in another country and a different jurisdiction.
Many of Apple's customers are also customers of Epic.
Apple is trying to prevent those shared customers from accessing Epic.
Even Meta, who are also happy to rack up fines instead of fixing their privacy issues, aren't this reckless.
The results have been mixed: they should probably spend even more.
In general these are some of the “least evil” people in the valley. I have personal disputes with some of them, some mutually pretty unpleasant. But that increases, not decreases my responsibility to be fair.
Bosworth in particular is about as close to a good guy as you can be in a job like that.
I don’t think very highly about how I’ve been treated personally, but that’s irrelevant to the broader point: Meta’s team is playing at the “least rough” end of the field. They’re great on open models and research, their lobbying is at the low, low end of shady (by the dismal standards of the day), employees have historically been treated well, it’s less bad.
If you want to get on them about something, the availability of Reels to minors needs to change.
Another reason I believe they are on sure footing is that they got the rejection from the law firm, which I presume knows what they are doing, just as they did during the 2020 shenanigans from Epic.
The only way to secure a device is to actually give control of the device to the user. But that would imply no more Apple tax, so Apple would rather die on that hill than follow the DMA. Add to that their psychopathic need for control.
I think one point lost in most of these conversations is that the existence of an open iOS will spawn a lot of "change your region to Europe" how-to articles in the rest of the world, creating an escape hatch from the walled garden (and finally a good reason to use a VPN), similar to what Apple keeps attacking sideloading for. Maybe they'd rather keep control of their other markets than be in the EU one.
This might lead to a complete opening-up of the iPhone as a result for the EU market.
