The problem is that apple is going to continue malicious compliance while the EU is trying to be reasonable: "the EU hopes ongoing dialogue will lead to compliance rather than sanctions."

Could anyone help me understand why this was flagged dead? Is it incorrect somehow? This is a discussion around legality, so it makes sense to keep the discussion in that context.

Apple being able to do something undesirable, in the perspective in the intent of the law, is either a "loophole" in the law, or the law doesn't actually accomplish what it was made to. Both are problems with the law. This isn't an Apple thing as much as a "anyone who will benefit in complying minimally will comply minimally". Apple today, whomever else tomorrow.

> What is malicious compliance? Apple is either in compliance or it isn’t.

Because funnily enough, the comment itself is kind of malicious compliance.

It has the form of polite debate, but it also feigns to not understand the parent (bad faith is a pretty simple/obvious concept and I'm sure the author gets it), which ruins the discussion. So yes, it appears reasonable that it is flagged.

From a point of argument, they're not wrong though, albeit an obvious point they're making that if loopholes exist, companies will definitely find them and take advantage, and still be in compliance because the pitfalls of said regulations weren't accounted for.

This leaves it up for debate in courts to settle those shortcomings, but it wouldn't be surprising if they found they were compliant and that the rules need adjustments.

Because GP's comment mixes the concepts and who thinks what in a very "I'm just asking a question" way, while suggesting that everything not illegal is 100% fine. People don't appreciate that because they see exactly the kind of person who would operate in that malicious compliance mode.

Obviously you can't regulate every bit of behavior and this will always leave room for abusing corner cases. You have quiet hours in your neighborhood? I'll just make the maximum amount of noise every second it's allowed, forever. It's legal, it's not fine. So clearly GP's comment rubs people the wrong way enough to be flagged.

It's pretty clear from the term itself that malicious compliance is compliance or else it would have been called (malicious) noncompliance. This is what people think Apple is doing. What EU authorities believe is that Apple is not compliant with the law, perhaps for different reasons than people see as malicious compliance.

So the EU is bashing Apple for them not being compliant, while regular people are bashing Apple for the malicious compliance. The second one is perfectly fine to do even without a judge's verdict.

> If a company is in compliance to the law and you don’t like the outcome the problem isn’t the company it is the law.

The law isn’t the only thing that upholds a cohesive society that is nice to live in. At the very least, culture plays its own part as well. There are probably many more things

If I only cared about being legal, I would behave very differently. Just think about how far a citizen could go if they would live in full malicious compliance. One would be a nightmare to others

And despite this, some people DO insist on living just on the edge of legality. I recently had an interaction with someone declared a "vexatious litigant" in Texas. That's a legal status that requires them to get authorization from a judge before opening a new lawsuit against another party.

I prefer a world where most people don't ride the edge of legality.

An overly complex set of rules often breeds this kind of behavior; Functioning legally in a world with a practically infinite number of rules requires it. Fixing the unwanted behavior often involves making more rules… and thus a cancer is born.

Another common outcome is complete apathy for the rules. ie: nothing seems legal, why bother trying?

> If I only cared about being legal, I would behave very differently.

While I wouldn't recommend you behave that way, I wouldn't call you a quasi-criminal.

Please report to your local Komsomol office to collect 5 credits as a reward for upholding the right attitude against these ruthless reactionaries and hooligans. Remember to bring your credit book for the stamp.

Someone with a hacker mindset and malicious compliance would be so creative that new laws have to be created just because of what that person did

> What is malicious compliance?

I think cookie dialogs are the best example of malicious compliance in tech.

Instead of just a "Reject all non-essential cookies" button, corporations went the extra mile to instead have a "Manage preferences" button which opens some slow menu with like 70 separate checkboxes, all of which are ticked by default and so you have to go through all of them manually, which then makes like 90% of the users just cave in to the dark pattern and just click "Accept all".

No law can predict all of the ways someone will try to weasel around it, regardless of whether it's something like the example above, or a company trying to maintain a walled garden.

> As part of the new investigation, the commission is examining 0.50c charge, or “core technology fee”, Apple demands every time a developer’s app is installed on a phone.

That said, while this sounds a bit like the infamous Unity Runtime Fee, if done correctly, personally I wouldn't have as much of an issue with this as others might, if it's done in a way where it never will cause a developer to go in the red: https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/

> Instead of just a "Reject all non-essential cookies" button, corporations went the extra mile to instead have a "Manage preferences" button which opens some slow menu with like 70 separate checkboxes, all of which are ticked by default and so you have to go through all of them manually, which then makes like 90% of the users just cave in to the dark pattern and just click "Accept all".

That is not malicious compliance. That's outright non-compliance. Reject All must be as prominent as Accept All.

Guess all of the companies doing that must have missed the memo, though I guess how dire the situation is was more or less known pretty early on: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.02479

There's limited amount of people who can do the litigation, so it's slow going, and the whole point of the mess is to condition people against GDPR

> Instead of just a "Reject all non-essential cookies" button, corporations went the extra mile to instead have a "Manage preferences" button which opens some slow menu with like 70 separate checkboxes, all of which are ticked by default and so you have to go through all of them manually, which then makes like 90% of the users just cave in to the dark pattern and just click "Accept all".

That's straight up non-compliance. The law literally says that refusal has to be as easy as accepting.

The EU is overplaying its hand. It's totally doomed if it starts sanctioning big tech companies like Apple. It has no tech of its own, having become wholly reliant on American tech.

If Apple stops servicing the EU… …life will go on. No EU country will be “doomed” let alone “totally doomed”. I prefer many Apple products over Android-based devices or, god forbid, any S(h)amsung crap, but the EU will continue to prosper without Apple Intelligence, iPhone Sharing or even iPhones and Macs at all. The EU is setting a precedent that every consumer would benefit from, especially if more countries would follow the lead. Yes, the EC’s approach could be better, they’re stumbling forwards (cookie-dialogs, plastic-bottle tethered-caps,o insane E2E encryption-invalidating proposals etc etc) but I still believe the overall direction will ultimately be beneficial to many.

The purpose of the DMA is to increase competition, not directly benefit the consumer. If there is no Apple product, you don't have that product to support your application and your business.

It's a 450M people hand, with decent GDP :-)

... which makes up a small fraction of Apple's profits. About 7% [1].

Losing 7% would be "A big deal", although they'd also lose a lot of the operational costs so the overall loss may be less than that. There are several costs of doing business in the EU.

I can also see them selling more to the UK and a black-market opening up in the EU for UK phones. Again, not a huge thing but a little +ve offset.

Overall, I could see it happening, maybe, emphasis on the maybe part. I think the EU thinks it's inconceivable for Apple to exit their market. I also think Apple are very hard-headed. Make the cost/benefit balance skew too heavily in the -ve direction, and the potential of future profits stop outweighing the costs.

Personally I really hope they just do as they're told by the EU because I think it'd hit the stock, and I could do with the stock staying reasonably high in the short term, but they'd recover. Hell, they could run on cash/savings with no sales for several years at the current rate...

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/2024/03/more_on_the_eus_market_mi...

Is it a joke? Apple is 27% of Apple revenue, profit is irrelevant as this is just finance engineering and you can put the value you want for tax reason.

>It’s unclear whether Maestri was saying that the EU accounts for 7 percent of Apple’s worldwide App Store revenue, or 7 percent of all revenue, but I suspect it doesn’t matter, and that both are around 7 percent

Eh.

Of Apple were to give up on the second largest market (GDP) in the world, I think that would make their platforms a lot less attractive as a target for software makers. More of them might decide to target other platforms first.

This is strongly wishful thinking. America isn't even the top trade partner of the EU as far as goods go. Many companies would literally hold a party if Apple, or any other American companies for that matter, left the EU market.

That’s one whole year of free money from Apple’s perspective.

So... what's Apple's argument here? Do they just think the DMA was badly drafted, or do they want to strip competition law out of the EU? Or is this the same "we have a right to monetize our IP[0]" argument they used in the Epic lawsuit?

[0] Intellectual property, in the Doctorowian sense of "thing that lets us tell our competitors what to do"

The DMA was badly drafted, and it's quite protectionist. The EU does not write good tech legislation overall, because it does not understand tech industry at a cultural level, having never built out its own.

Yes obviously it’s protectionist, the whole point of the DMA is to protect the EU internal market from entities that aren’t EU state apparatus from having too much control.

I’m not entirely sure how you say the DMA is badly drafted, what do think its objectives are? It’s not a “tech law” at all, it’s a market competition law that designed to deal with the unique imbalances created by large tech companies that historical competition law hasn't adequately dealt with.

> ...it does not understand tech industry at a cultural level, having never built out its own

Consumer products are only a subset of tech. ASML, Siemens, ABB, Bosch have been tech industry bellwethers for ages. Europe is also no slouch in consumers/web/apps either (Spotify, booking.com)

Man forgets the industrial era was started in Europe. There are plenty of European tech companies behind all of the big American ones, the difference is really just the size of the market.

Face ID tech is old Kinect tech, Apple bought...an Israeli company for it (not EU, I know). But probably the biggest and most obvious example is ARM.

This just seems like deflection. The EU does not have an understanding for modern consumer tech products, period. That they have old giants still producing sub components has no bearing on this discussion, it's not like their industry actually has to worry about making viable end-user products.

They do not have any meaningful companies that actually have to worry about the end-user viability of tech.

Spotify, Indeed, and Booking are maybe the only real examples of consumer web apps from the EU, there are literally hundreds larger examples from the US.

Generally wondering: how to you look at US imposing 100% tariffs on EVs from China?

That it's an absolutely insane thing to do to a trading partner and calling prices "artificially low" is just "our glorious government investment their savage government trade war subsidies." Go read the whitehouse announcement, it's blatant. The best part is that is centers around IP literally proving that any country that ignores the insanity of western IP laws will outcompete. Big no no, it's the children that are wrong energy.

Absolutely do not support the US artificially limiting EV adoption by forcing prices higher to prop up a domestic auto industry that got caught with their pants down. If they're gonna sell us EVs below cost we would be stupid not to buy them all up and make them lose money. But there's the rub, they're not actually doing that, they are just able to make them cheaper.

If they're selling below cost, who's the "we" that should buy them all up? Because if it's US consumers, then the domestic auto companies could fail in the while that's happening. If it's the US government - isn't that kind of what the tariff accomplishes, without having to take ownership of a bunch of inventory?