[pg_1234]

The EU should make a public service announcement.

Something along the lines of:

"We urge all EU citizens with Apple devices to have an alternate means of accessing critical internet services like banking, to protect themselves in the event we are forced to block all Apple services EU-wide for legal non-compliance."

... then watch AAPL stock drop below NVDA ...

... and Apple come crawling back, suitably obedient.

[whywhywhywhy]

or more likely learn extremely quickly that their citizens prefer their iPhones to their politicians, there would be protests within the hour if they ever blocked iPhones.

Weird to me how common it has become in the last 5 years for people to gleefully cheer for tyranny and control.

[no_time]

Yes, the tyranny of... forcing Apple to open up its walled garden. I am cheering for that and more. Mandate open bootloaders. Mandate user installed EK (Endorsement Key) on all TCB enabled devices.

[VladTheImpalor]

You mean the tyranny and control of Apple? With their removing headphone jack, lightning cable, walled garden and all that?

[whywhywhywhy]

A product you consent to is hardly the same as the government cutting off the ability to use your phone and it sounds very silly to compare the two.

By no means do I agree with the walled garden, I just think cheering for such an absurd idea of the government disabling your phone to fight something most users don't even understand or care about is bizarre.

[Etherlord87]

> A product you consent to is hardly the same as[...]

...The government you also consent to in elections and by deciding where you live?

I'm so sick of this argument: you chose to buy iPhone, it was your decision... But a large part of the law protects citizens against their bad judgement: we don't allow slave contracts or selling your organs.

Within some use-cases, and to a larger degree within some groups of people, Apple is a monopolist. People get *addicted* from Apple ecosystem. If you had a Mercedes house, with a Mercedes charger to your Mercedes Car, that you would park on a Mercedes parking spot near your workplace, it wouldn't be so easy to replace your car with another brand.

[DirkH]

"Tyranny and control"

I can't get the boomer comic where the guy pulls the calendar and sees the next year is 1984 out of my head now.

[capr]

"forced" to block... seems like the only ones who can use force is them

[zuppy]

no, they shouldn't, this will affect customers who already purchased the product and have no fault in this silly war that apple wants to start. no matter what they do, it should only apply to new devices.

[simondotau]

Excuse me, Apple started it? That's absurd. Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years and it's only in the past few years that the EU has chosen to intervene in their marketplace. The EU started this fight; Apple is just doing whatever they can to resist change.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years and it's only in the past few years that the EU has chosen to intervene in their marketplace

You literally just described Apple "starting it". They took the initial action (~15 years ago, by your words), starting it, and the other parties reacted, after that action.

[simondotau]

I’m sorry, what fight did Apple start with the EU fifteen years ago? You do know what a fight is, right?

[ImPostingOnHN]

They started engaging in the sort of anticompetitive behavior that the EU laws in question were written to discourage or forbid, as you yourself noted when you pointed out that apple's actions took place before said legislative reactions. Here's the quote from you:

> Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years

Apple could have started out being more consumer friendly from the beginning, and it wouldn't have been starting a fight with consumers. But they didn't, and now they're reaping the consequences.

[simondotau]

That's a wholly different claim than the one I disagreed with. Be careful with your language.

Opposing a powerful entity's behaviour is not an excuse for sloppy language or misleading hyperbole. In fact it's especially important to avoid it because the powerful entity only needs to re-frame the criticism around that hyperbole and then proceed to factually disprove it.

Regardless, your new framing is still a ridiculous claim. To suggest that Apple was being "anti-competitive" in 2009 is self-evidently absurd — because their marketplace was simply too small to matter with respect to any competition regulation. They grew their marketplace under the supposedly "unfair" rules which means that the rules cannot be framed as an antitrust violation. This is arguably the most significant point of fact which lost Epic their case against Apple.

If you disagree, then you need explain why every two-bit little nobody who creates any kind of marketplace of any size shouldn't be required to follow strict market fairness rules. Under that logic, Tide could force your local chicken shop to sell Tide products, because they should be entitled to fair access to that chicken marketplace.