This I don't understand. What exactly would the court case be about? "You're following the law but we didn't mean it like that?"
If you want them to do things differently, don't you need to either 1. prove that they aren't following the DMA, or 2. change the DMA?
That gives preference to apples own app (the app store) which they can only do because they are still Gatekeeping.
> Core Technology Fee — iOS apps distributed from the App Store and/or an alternative app marketplace will pay €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold.
https://developer.apple.com/support/dma-and-apps-in-the-eu/#...
Pretty clear malicious compliance. "Oh, you want to be able to distribute your popular free apps on other app stores? You gotta start paying us massively then."
- They sell hardware and licensed software to consumers. Within the law they may ask for money for feature updates.
- They also charge developers for access to their tools and access to their store front and payment handling.
That's all legit and if they want to hike prices or put parts of that information behind paywalls, the market will sort it out.
But if a consumer and a third party developer want to do business without all that, then it's my (and the DMAs) stance that apple has no right to a share of that. They EU is increasingly of the opinion that, in general, a device has to serve its owner and not the original manufacturer.
When they want to protect consumers by scanning for known malware that's fine but "Apple loses revenue" is not a threat at all.
It reads like one of those buzzwords that doesn’t actually mean anything useful in a the context of a court of law, at least as a prosecutable offense, but gets talked about like it does, because the statement itself reads like an oxymoron. You’re either compliant with the law or you’re not, and malicious is subjective. Am I off base by saying that? What am I missing?
It depends on the area of law, traditions, common sense etc how much that ia true, but in general, disregarding transparent workarounds is a thing.
So if it comes down to whether Apple is compliant, wouldn’t you just stack up their measures against the law as written? Which would then mean compliance is compliance, and the onus then falls on whatever prosecutorial authority is empowered here to show that it is not.
And there is only one possible outcome: Apple will bend to the EU's will, because in the end the European market is too profitable to ignore.
The commission knows they really don't have much to stand on, if they go any farther they know other EU countries are going to step in again (these rules are not very popular anymore after GDPR and now that the EU is falling even farther behind the USA economically).
The EU commission is a lot less powerful than a lot of terminally online Americans like to believe. EU courts constantly rule against them for overstepping their bounds and they have been caught submitting fake evidence before (see: Qualcomm case)
Right, Far-right and EU-sceptic parties are predicted to become much stronger.
So their stance might change on some topics
The european far right are hardly fans of large American tech companies
now, if they were domestic, that would be entirely different
Those parties are running predominantly on nationalism and populism. If anything they will be happy to screw US tech companies even more.
No law like the DMA passes without the approval of parliament and the council of member states. In fact, all the details are hashed out between these two bodies with little to no say from the commission.
BTW: The way the commission is selected is one step removed from the voters but this principle is not too uncommon in European parliamentary democracies. For example the German or Austrian Chancellors or the prime ministers of Italy ,Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Poland are elected in a similar fashion.
Do they have a much more favorable attitude towards American tech giants than whoever is in power now?
But I agree, as expected, this will go to round two.
Probably not even a new DMA just a court case about malicious compliance. The DMA was written expecting apples reaction
Still that they will reduce the commission fee is quite important on its own.
If this reduces the flood of free ad financed apps and moves the market to a more sustainable model I'm all for it (although I realise this stance is probably controversial)