It just reads like arrogant foreigners throwing a tantrum over our laws.
At the very least to the extent that the whole setup limits national sovereignty.
Your comment comes across as though you expect us to believe EU citizens are a homogenous whole, who happen to align with your perspective on this matter.
They complain about things their competitors are able to implement with no problems at all, and then once their tantrums are not sustainable anymore, they’re apparently able to solve all the problems as well.
For a company that sells itself as a design + engineering firm, they seem to have very little confidence in their ability to design or engineer their ways around constraints pretty much everyone else is able to.
> At the very least to the extent that the whole setup limits national sovereignty.
That's how anything grouplike works indeed.
> I struggle to believe there isn’t a significant fraction of EU citizens who are frustrated with the EU’s laws.
Sounds like something that'd have polling data coverage?
Across the gamut of regulations the EU has, it's not really the ones that apply to Apple that draw much ire.
iPhone mirroring for example. Seems like practically 100% chance that if they put that out in the EU they'd be facing lawsuits for not making it work with every Android and Kindle and digital pregnancy test on the planet. And making it an open API right out of the gate is a much bigger undertaking than just making it work with your own devices through a proprietary API that you're free to break at any point and just update your devices to work accordingly.
Yes, it is harder to support APIs compared to… only having a completely closed system.
It would take a trillion dollar company to have the kind of resources that kind of thing would take.
The fact Apple thinks it should be exempt from rules that try to impose some fairness and choice, simply because “it’s hard” is the kind of thing that makes me feel they should be forced to be broken up in some fashion that limits the conflict of interest. They can be a petty platform owner who extracts rents from every developer OR they can offer things like apps and services on top of a platform. They are proving themselves too evil to be both.
If only there were a way to design a system in a way that didn't even require you to know who's on the other side of an interface. Some kind of... protocol specification maybe.
Imagine the things we could do, like making a phone call to a different brand phone than yours, or a web server running a different OS than the client, maybe even one that the other side has never heard of!
