3 ms·

Wording and intent of the DMA makes no reference to commissions. And there is nothing anti-competitive about Apple charging for their developer kit.

mdhb 3y ago
Is there a reason why you’re speaking with such certainty? Are you a lawyer specialising in the topic? Do you actually know anything about this or is this just your opinion presented as fact?
- orra 3y ago
  The law is called “Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 of the European Parliament and of the Council on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector”. It's not an outrageous conclusion that the law bans blatantly unfair practices, when that's what it sets out to do.
ethbr1 3y ago
I'm not sure even Apple wants to be flippant about EU regulation. "See this one neat legal flaw that EU regulators hate!" isn't an approach a US$350B-revenue-company wants to take, with a regulator who's already signalled their intent.
micwag 3y ago
Apple probably will be able to continue to charge 99$/year for their developer kit.
zamadatix 3y ago
It doesn't need to explicitly mention commissions, law is not an ACL. The regulators and DMA just need to consider that it qualifies as e.g. gatekeeping, which is centrally referenced. Even if it can't be defined as a required action of gatekeeping today the DMA allows for the commission to quickly update that to qualify and require action by Apple. If, by some miracle, the regulators truly made a law which doesn't allow them to regulate the anti-competitiveness they intended too and they are truly beat by some gotcha this time then Apple has only bought a delay not an exception. $99/year for the development kit will probably be seen as reasonable enough for it to be allowed, though they may have to accept allowing 3rd party alternative solutions to publish things to these other app stores or similar. The fixed price of the development kit isn't really the point when talking about the 30% commission though. That's about revenue from consumer purchases and trying to evade that via moving the pricing to the dev kit wholly then requiring the dev kit will not fly just because the DMA doesn't explicitly reference doing that being an example of a bad gatekeeping action.
- gruez 3y ago
  >The regulators and DMA just need to consider that it qualifies as e.g. gatekeeping, which is centrally referenced. Even if it can't be defined as a required action of gatekeeping today the DMA allows for the commission to quickly update that to qualify and require action by Apple. If, by some miracle, the regulators truly made a law which doesn't allow them to regulate the anti-competitiveness they intended too and they are truly beat by some gotcha this time then Apple has only bought a delay not an exception. Is charging a royalty for using the iOS SDK "gatekeeping"? I don't see why that's the case. Is Epic Games "gatekeeping" Unreal Engine by demanding 5% royalty to use their engine? Why should it be any different for Apple to demand royalty for using their SDK? Even if EU magically made a law that explicitly banned royalties for operating system SDKs, that won't be the end of the story. Such measures could be construed as anti-free trade (given how it disproportionately affects US companies compared to EU companies), and will probably lead to a trade war and/or WTO arbitration between the EU and the US.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    If they kept it to something like 5% and don't try to stop alternatives when used with other stores then it's probably not something that'd cause problems. The same is true for any sane pricing of external API integrations regardless of source as charging for push notifications or similar is fine by itself too. Where they'd get into trouble is by trying to turn these things into ways to move the 30% revenue cut. Just moving the 30% revenue from "rights to be on the one and only store" to "rights to write apps against the device with the one and only SDK" is quite clearly a different motive and forced cost model than having a 5% SDK fee where the developer is free to choose a different SDK. I.e. "but others charge for an SDK" doesn't allow you to then change your SDK cost model to exactly match what was deemed illegally anticompetitive forced market pricing. It just allows you to charge for your SDK in a competitive way, nothing more.
blueelephanttea 3y ago
> And there is nothing anti-competitive about Apple charging for their developer kit. Not only that but a bunch of iOS apis incur services costs on Apple's side. Certainly seems valid that they should be able to charge to provide push notifications, iCloud storage, etc. There is a wide industry of businesses monetizing development kit usage and/or enterprise services. Nothing in the EU's regulations should preclude Apple from monetizing their investment into the iOS development platform.

mdhb 3y ago

Is there a reason why you’re speaking with such certainty? Are you a lawyer specialising in the topic? Do you actually know anything about this or is this just your opinion presented as fact?

orra 3y ago
The law is called “Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 of the European Parliament and of the Council on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector”. It's not an outrageous conclusion that the law bans blatantly unfair practices, when that's what it sets out to do.

ethbr1 3y ago

I'm not sure even Apple wants to be flippant about EU regulation. "See this one neat legal flaw that EU regulators hate!" isn't an approach a US$350B-revenue-company wants to take, with a regulator who's already signalled their intent.

micwag 3y ago

Apple probably will be able to continue to charge 99$/year for their developer kit.

zamadatix 3y ago

It doesn't need to explicitly mention commissions, law is not an ACL. The regulators and DMA just need to consider that it qualifies as e.g. gatekeeping, which is centrally referenced. Even if it can't be defined as a required action of gatekeeping today the DMA allows for the commission to quickly update that to qualify and require action by Apple. If, by some miracle, the regulators truly made a law which doesn't allow them to regulate the anti-competitiveness they intended too and they are truly beat by some gotcha this time then Apple has only bought a delay not an exception. $99/year for the development kit will probably be seen as reasonable enough for it to be allowed, though they may have to accept allowing 3rd party alternative solutions to publish things to these other app stores or similar. The fixed price of the development kit isn't really the point when talking about the 30% commission though. That's about revenue from consumer purchases and trying to evade that via moving the pricing to the dev kit wholly then requiring the dev kit will not fly just because the DMA doesn't explicitly reference doing that being an example of a bad gatekeeping action.

gruez 3y ago
>The regulators and DMA just need to consider that it qualifies as e.g. gatekeeping, which is centrally referenced. Even if it can't be defined as a required action of gatekeeping today the DMA allows for the commission to quickly update that to qualify and require action by Apple. If, by some miracle, the regulators truly made a law which doesn't allow them to regulate the anti-competitiveness they intended too and they are truly beat by some gotcha this time then Apple has only bought a delay not an exception. Is charging a royalty for using the iOS SDK "gatekeeping"? I don't see why that's the case. Is Epic Games "gatekeeping" Unreal Engine by demanding 5% royalty to use their engine? Why should it be any different for Apple to demand royalty for using their SDK? Even if EU magically made a law that explicitly banned royalties for operating system SDKs, that won't be the end of the story. Such measures could be construed as anti-free trade (given how it disproportionately affects US companies compared to EU companies), and will probably lead to a trade war and/or WTO arbitration between the EU and the US.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  If they kept it to something like 5% and don't try to stop alternatives when used with other stores then it's probably not something that'd cause problems. The same is true for any sane pricing of external API integrations regardless of source as charging for push notifications or similar is fine by itself too. Where they'd get into trouble is by trying to turn these things into ways to move the 30% revenue cut. Just moving the 30% revenue from "rights to be on the one and only store" to "rights to write apps against the device with the one and only SDK" is quite clearly a different motive and forced cost model than having a 5% SDK fee where the developer is free to choose a different SDK. I.e. "but others charge for an SDK" doesn't allow you to then change your SDK cost model to exactly match what was deemed illegally anticompetitive forced market pricing. It just allows you to charge for your SDK in a competitive way, nothing more.

blueelephanttea 3y ago

> And there is nothing anti-competitive about Apple charging for their developer kit. Not only that but a bunch of iOS apis incur services costs on Apple's side. Certainly seems valid that they should be able to charge to provide push notifications, iCloud storage, etc. There is a wide industry of businesses monetizing development kit usage and/or enterprise services. Nothing in the EU's regulations should preclude Apple from monetizing their investment into the iOS development platform.