[Caligatio]

I always scratch my head about articles that lump Meta, Apple, and Google together when it comes to regulations. They all have different problems that require different solutions.

Apple - consumers give the company for hardware which is locked into a closed ecosystem. Apple extracts extra revenue by enforcing this closed ecosystem. There can be no competition other than not purchasing their hardware in the first place.

Google - consumers sometimes give them money (for both hardware and services) which Google then uses to push their other products to the detriment of their competitors. Due to Google's size, the competition is at a massive disadvantage. Also, given that most consumers don't give them money, Google needs to make money off of their consumers and the most profitable method is to monetize PII.

Meta - consumers basically never give them money (excluding Oculus) so Meta needs to make money off of their consumers. The most profitable method is to monetize PII.

I have a little more sympathy for Google and Meta's situation as the EU wants them to maintain their free services while simultaneously reducing their ability to monetize their most valuable asset, consumers' PII (note that PII ultimately belongs to the consumer but it's still the thing that the companies use to make money). There needs to be some sort of happy medium here when people want something without paying for it but also don't want what's valuable about them being a user - their PII - to be monetized.

To be clear, these multi billion/trillion dollar companies don't need anyone defending them. However, it would be interesting to see what the EU's position would be if Meta started as an EU company.

[Scarblac]

Google and Meta could behave like normal companies and require users to pay them money and not sell PII. If that makes them far less successful that's good news for competitors.

[Cu3PO42]

You actually can pay Meta €9.99/month for ad-free Facebook+Instagram in the EU. I would hope this also causes them to track and use much less PII, but I couldn't find anything substantiating that.

[Kbelicius]

As far as I understand the problem with that scheme is that by not paying you not only agree to see the ads but also to the tracking.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

Ads on the internet are worth a lot less these days if they don’t come with measurement of whether they are causing conversions (aka tracking). Apparently this measurement is a human rights violation when Google or Meta sell the ads but not when Apple or the NYT do.

[Cu3PO42]

That is certainly the case, but seems to be perfectly legal. This scheme is implemented by a number of companies, but most charge only €2/mo or so.

[NekkoDroid]

> That is certainly the case, but seems to be perfectly legal.

I don't think its legal, considering that not too long ago even here on HN there was a post about "Pay or Okay" not being considered legal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38458660

Some further articles/document about it:

https://noyb.eu/en/statement-edpb-pay-or-okay-opinion

https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2024-04/edpb_opinion...

[icehawk]

As a consumer, I am particularly unsympathetic to what what Apple is doing to developers.

The developers do the same to me when they have the opportunity.

[dialogawesome]

With that attitude I ain't implementing special hacky workarounds for Safari anymore /s but in all seriousness why? barring developers with malicious intent most developers would just want cross-platform tooling, open systems and less friction in making apps all of which modern web provides and with PWA the experience is even more pleasant as long as relevant API's are available. But when you have a single browser engine preventing this experience it's simply not right. I don't want to code my app twice especially since I don't need the native performance.

[dns_snek]

You're painting with an awfully wide brush there. Apple is screwing everyone, but especially developers who want to develop truly free/transparent apps without ads, tracking, or other predatory monetization models (i.e. the "good" ones).

[ben_w]

> To be clear, these multi billion/trillion dollar companies don't need anyone defending them. However, it would be interesting to see what the EU's position would be if Meta started as an EU company.

I absolutely agree on this point. I do have the… bias, that in my formative years Apple was very much the plucky underdog in danger of bankruptcy.

This may be why I am less concerned about what Apple does. I am aware that, net, most people here very much disagree with my position that if you don't like Apple's software policies, you can simply not buy their hardware. (Indeed, they are priced such that many people who would actually like to have those things, cannot afford them).

Google and Facebook, however, are much harder to avoid — yes, you can in theory replace Gmail with Yahoo, Google.com with DuckDuckGo.com, Google Maps with OpenStreetMap, but people who try this report that it's harder than it seems to totally cut that particular cord.

Facebook Messenger is my only way to remain in contact with some people. I've stopped logging into the main site because their feed is, approximately: [real post from an actual connection but 75% chance I've already seen it on a previous visit, advert, list of people it thinks I might know but I don't, then a repeating pattern of {advert, 3 example posts from a group it thinks I might want to join but don't}].

But yeah, Apple aren't the plucky underdog any more.

[ryandrake]

> Facebook Messenger is my only way to remain in contact with some people.

This is always an exaggeration. You mean to tell me there are people out there for whom the only way to get in touch with them is through Facebook? They don't have a phone number, SMS, an E-mail address (note you need an E-mail address to sign up for Facebook in the first place), a postal address, and ears for word of mouth conversation?

I found Facebook to be the easiest company to voluntarily avoid. One day, about ten years ago, I simply changed my password to a random string and threw it away, and that was it. It was scary at first (FOMO) but ultimately it didn't even slightly affect my social life or ability to keep in contact with people. I told everyone what I was doing and that I would not be accessing the company's products anymore, and we just switched over to other means of communication. No big deal.

[ben_w]

> This is always an exaggeration. You mean to tell me there are people out there for whom the only way to get in touch with them is through Facebook? They don't have a phone number, SMS, an E-mail address (note you need an E-mail address to sign up for Facebook in the first place), a postal address, and ears for word of mouth conversation?

Yup.

Three people in particular come to mind. For them, with regard to phone/SMS/e-mail, even though they necessarily have those things, they never bothered to give them to me, and/or they change them often, and/or they don't check those modes.

For postal address… these three regularly (and from my perspective randomly) change continents, not merely street or city. One of the countries they often go to is Kenya, where the addresses of the places they live in seem to often be something of the form "third on the left in the gated community next to the Blue Sky Petrol Station".

This also makes "ears and mouth" rather challenging.

Extra irony points, they all self-identify as somewhere between socialist and communist. And still insist on using Facebook.

[seec]

If all of that is true, I don't see why you would bother keeping in contact with them. At some point if someone makes it so hard to be contacted it sends a message that he doesn't want to be contacted.

On top of that, I know some people like that and I think there is an ambivalence about them, a form of intellectual dishonesty that makes it not very worthwhile to frequent them. You can have fun at parties with them but that's pretty much the extent of the relationship a self-respecting person should allow.

But we all know that's not the actual reason you keep a Facebook account, because that's technically bullshit in the first place. If you don't change your stuff, they have a way to contact you and that's all that's needed.

[ben_w]

> If all of that is true, I don't see why you would bother keeping in contact with them. At some point if someone makes it so hard to be contacted it sends a message that he doesn't want to be contacted.

Because FB messenger isn't that painful. Facebook the news-feed is, and if they only used that then I would indeed not bother, but the messenger app isn't.

Well, not yet, anyway. Ads creeping in, a "stories" tab I can't get rid of. I may drop it eventually, but today it has a monopoly on my connection with them, and I'm using it because it's less painful than losing touch.

> But we all know that's not the actual reason you keep a Facebook account, because that's technically bullshit in the first place. If you don't change your stuff, they have a way to contact you and that's all that's needed.

Just because I'm technically apt, doesn't mean everyone else is, or cares. Back when they were still around, I had to turn on "parental controls" to stop my dad from accidentally moving apps out of the dock and losing them (as in couldn't find, not deleted), and he needed me to write down instructions for him to be able to use webmail (and he forgot that his password was "XXXX", so complained that the instructions had a placeholder and I had to explain no, that's what your password actually is). One time my mum asked me to change her password by sending me a postcard with the desired new one written on it. My gran held the mouse rotated 90° and didn't know why it wasn't working.

[kalleboo]

> However, it would be interesting to see what the EU's position would be if Meta started as an EU company

People have been saying that EU regulations are restricting EU companies forever, in fact it was one of the big arguments for Brexit to cut out piles of EU regulations that were "stifling innovation".

[nroets]

I, on the other hand, have a lot more sympathy for Apple: Many highly successful people and many businesses have never owned any of there products. They are not a monopoly. Why can't market forces just regulate them ??

[kvdveer]

Apple may not have a monopoly, but they have enormous market power. By themselves, monopoly or market power are neither illegal or even undesirable.

However, they become undesirable when they are abused to undermine cometition in other markets. For example: Apple has successfully prevented competition to Apple Pay for a long time, by only allowing their own products access to NFC. This meant that parties that were already specialized in handling payments, had no chance to compete, despite them being in an excellent position to do so.

If this behaviour is left unchecked, over time we will end up with one single company dominating most markets. I feel that's undesirable. Given the number of dystopian novels on that premise, most of society considers that future to be undesirable.

Preventing that future is a major part of DMA.

[Sharlin]

Because personal computer market (let’s face it: the primary or only personal computing device of most people today is a phone or a tablet) are a duopoly, with the other actor also being one of the monopolistic tech giants.

[nottorp]

Just to emphasise, the mobile device market IS a duopoly because you may have multiple sources for Android phone hardware, but for software you have exactly two options: iOS and Android.

[Sharlin]

Yes, thanks. I thought that was clear because the HW is not relevant in any way to the concerns at hand, but apparently a clarification was in order.

[bitpush]

What choices do you have as an iPhone user to download apps from? Or as an iOS developer what choices do I have to distribute the said app?

[ben_w]

As a developer, sure, I have no choice in this.

As a user, I was quite happy with my personal Android phone while developing for iOS, both for hardware and software, because absolutely nothing is requiring consumers to buy Apple in the first place as basically every App you care about is shipped to both platforms anyway.

[wiseowise]

They’re a monopoly on Apple *platform*.