[cosmic_cheese]

While I can sympathize with the desire for interoperability (I too pine for the days of Adium/Pidgin), the EU’s approach to all of this feels needlessly and potentially harmfully heavy-handed.

They basically make it an existential risk to build your success on anything nicely and neatly tightly vertically integrated. Everything must be dragged down to mediocrity by the unavoidable slippage between mandated abstraction layers and avoidance of features that can’t be easily or safely generalized.

It’s conflicting. Is Apple abusing its role in some cases, such as the App Store, and in need of some reigning in? Sure, but some of this goes too far and essentially requires them to strip their products of a portion of their appeal.

Even more frustrating is that nobody seems to be willing to discuss the issue with any level of nuance. It’s nearly all binary EU good/Apple bad or the reverse.

[atraac]

These laws only apply to megacorps. It's not an existential risk to them, as Apple is clearly proving now.

Who is saying that enforcing companies to open their systems to competition is making them mediocre? Maybe if that's the end result, they should put more time into designing systems that wouldn't become mediocre just by allowing third parties to do things with those said systems? We need to stop defending corporates for abusing their monopolies.

[cosmic_cheese]

Megacorps weren't always giants and it's not unusual for small companies to eventually become giants through excellent vertically-integrated products, and such companies would become subject to these regulations.

Interoperability is not free. One of the trades it brings is a notably lowered ceiling in terms of tightness and capabilities, and this persists no matter how many man-hours are poured into engineering the systems that enable it.

The Linux desktop is a great example of this at play. While it's technically worked for decades at this point, it's been a constant struggle to make it a high quality, thoroughly polished experience end to end and that's partly thanks to the unavoidable friction and gaps between layers that comes with interoperability and tens of involved parties.