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In combination with the 'Core Technology Fee' that financially cripples any developer that tries to release a popular app outside the official app store, this i

In combination with the 'Core Technology Fee' that financially cripples any developer that tries to release a popular app outside the official app store, this is pathetic behavior. Hopefully the EU smacks them down for this temper tantrum at being forced to adhere to the DMA. They are trying to flex their market power and should be reminded they operate within a system of laws that doesn't bend for anyone, regardless of their size.

robertoandred 3y ago
This IS adhering to the DMA. Every browser engine is treated the same.
- impossiblefork 3y ago
  I think that's very unlikely. I interpret 6 (a) as basically requiring you to be able to install whatever software you like and to provide no mechanism whereby any fee can be demanded for such installation to be possible. Apple tries to get around this by this core technology stuff, but APIs aren't even subject to copyright protection, and it's also basic interoperability stuff. I don't think the courts will see it the way I interpret your comment.
- ajross 3y ago
  Deliberately removing useful features from your own product so that you don't have to let other people implement the same features may be technically conforming to the letter of the law, but is clearly violating it in spirit. The spirit of the law is platform interoperability: your control over the platform shouldn't restrict what other people can make it do (be it "run an app store" or "run a web app").
  - riscy 3y ago
    When did it become illegal to take features away from a products or create derivative products with different features? The “spirit of the law” most certainly is not what you’re imagining. If they wanted, they could remove the App Store from iOS in EU, or pull the iPhone from the EU market entirely. Apple isn’t required by the DMA to part of a digital market at all.
    - ajross 3y ago
      > When did it become illegal to [...] That's a question for regulators and lawyers. But in general yes: trying to evade a law instead of complying with its intended application is generally not viewed as unquestionably legal. In criminal law it's sometimes even taken as evidence of guilt! > If they wanted, they could remove the App Store from iOS in EU, or pull the iPhone from the EU market entirely. Apple isn’t required by the DMA to part of a digital market at all. And if the EU wanted, they could ban Apple products entirely. The point is that no one does stuff like this because there's a general sense that healthy competetive markets are good for everyone, and that the capitalist market will enforce this by punishing actors that try to cheat (in this case, by "trying to make more money by making your product worse"). But sometimes that market enforcement breaks down, in the face of trust/monopoly activities like (in this case) control over a computing platform. And when that happens it's routine for regulators to step in to try to right the ship. And that ship is listing pretty badly right now. Apple is dancing as close to the edge of predatory monopolism as is possible. Again, they literally think they'll make more money by deliberately breaking their own customer's web apps. There's no way at all that's a healthy market. QED.
    - ben-schaaf 3y ago
      > When did it become illegal to take features away from a products A long time ago? You can't sell a product under the pretense that it does X and then remove X after the fact, at least not in any country with decent consumer protections.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >When did it become illegal to take features away from a products or create derivative products with different features? The “spirit of the law” most certainly is not what you’re imagining. Depends on the laws and advertising. Sony got dinged for removing the "Other OS" option on the PS3. A feature you can definitely argued "nobody used" (and as someone who tried, the experience for anything but basically headless Linux was atrocious. You had access to almost none of the hardware for this). Still lost the case. I wouldn't bet on Apple losing on that specifically. But it sounds like this is all adding up towards another big slap in a future Case.
    - 3y ago
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    No one is obliged to obey anything but the letter of the law. If you want someone to obey the spirit of a law you need to put that in the letter.
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      That is completely wrong. Judges very much care about the spirit of the law, and frequently discuss it in their decisions, both in common law jurisdictions and in other systems. The justice system is not a computer following logical instructions.
      - giantrobot 3y ago
        Judges can talk about the spirit of the law all they want. If they don't base decisions on the letter of it they'll set themselves up to be overruled on appeal. Prosecutors also can't bring up charges on violating the spirit of a law.
        ajross 3y ago
        So... appellate reasoning is even more likely to be founded on spirit arguments and not loopholes or context-free text readings. "Intent of the framers" is, obviously, very much an argument about spirit and not text. As always, there's a good wikipedia page to start from when discussing this stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_and_spirit_of_the_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_and_spirit_of_the_law But in this particular case it's sort of a silly argument anyway as it cuts better in the opposite direction: the DMA is a big and complicated law and can be interpreted in a zillion ways. If courts and regulators are allowed to read laws as strictly as they want, I can all but guarantee that Apple is in violation of something.
        tsimionescu 3y ago
        To many legal scholars, and to most lay people, the actual law is the spirit, the letter is just there to help note down what the spirit was. If someone thinks they are safe to ignore the spirit of a law because of a quirk of how it is worded, they will often find they are wrong, and have charges brought against them anyway, and lose at trial and any number of appellate courts. Conversely, if someone is convicted based on a technicality where they broke the letter of the law, but not the spirit, that conviction is very likely to be overturned on appeal. Of course, the spirit and the letter of the law can't be arbitrarily divorced from one another. One can't claim that the letter of the law says "you shall not kill", but the spirit of the law is that it's ok to kill but only on the full moon. But if a law says "don't lie to prosecutors", and they ask me what I did on some day, and I tell them X and Y and don't mention Z, I won't be able to claim that the law didn't techniclaly say not to omit information.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    > but is clearly violating it in spirit Huh? If the EU imposes additional requirements on aquarium lights, and a lighting manufacture decides not to product aquarium lights.....that's violating the spirit of the law?
    - ajross 3y ago
      That analogy doesn't make sense to me. Apple isn't pulling the iPhone from the market, they're breaking iPhones that were already sold. The equivalent would be if you said you couldn't sell green aquarium lights anymore, and aquarium light vendors turned all the green aquariums off remotely.
      - paulddraper 3y ago
        You can keep using your green aquarium lights all you want. But if you install their newest version of aquarium lights, they won't have a green option.
        ajross 3y ago
        No, you already bought the lights, and they've always been green. You don't "install the newest version" of lights. Just like you don't for hardware devices like phones. You install software updates, which clearly have a presumption of not removing features for which you paid. That's just straight up common law warranty stuff, come on. Again, this kind of allegorical confusion is generally a sign that you're wrong and trying to cheat. Which Apple is, clearly.
        paulddraper 3y ago
        > software updates which clearly have a presumption of not removing features oof, that is not a good assumption
SllX 3y ago
I’m going to be level with you: there is nothing so great about PWAs that they’re worth mandating or protecting by law in any jurisdiction and the EU doesn’t owe it to you to try. Web developers like them. That’s it, and their PWA advocacy completely disregards what a privacy and security nightmare they can be without proper safeguards, because this little device I carry around in my pocket is 1) always with me and 2) stores a lot of information about me 3) has a full sensory array installed within it. Every new feature browsers add for better hardware access gets immediately disabled on any system I manage: cameras, mics, USB access, sensors, location, notifications, local storage, the whole works because the alternative is letting every website access those or getting spammed with access requests on every site I visit and the more crap that is added, the longer it takes me every time I setup a new browser install from scratch. Why disable them at all? Because 99% of these new features are primarily used to build a better supercookie to track and profile people without their consent. The actual marketable reasons are a secondary use at best. So if it’s not on Apple’s priority list to build out whatever they need to support and allow other browsers to support PWAs in a secure and privacy conscious manner, good for them. Web developers who want to circumvent Apple’s fees entirely don’t need to be anywhere near their top priority and can wait. For Apple: users come before developers, and App developers before web developers.
- deminature 3y ago
  I'm not a fan of PWAs either, but disabling them instead of allowing them to continue to run is an incredibly bad faith response to the DMA.
  - SllX 3y ago
    Not if the alternative is allowing other browsers to install them without a privacy and security architecture in place first. Even if Apple thinks it’s worth doing, that takes time, and web developers aren’t worth prioritizing for them when they have a lot of other ground to cover building out a new system of APIs and entitlements to comply with the DMA’s other requirements.
    - 3y ago
kryptiskt 3y ago
Yeah, this isn't a parlor game, I have no idea why they think the antitrust pressure will abate by such bad faith nonsense moves. Next step for the EU is to make Tim Cook choose whether he wants to be CEO of the device side or service side of the broken up Apple. It's clear that fining them is useless.
- lannisterstark 3y ago
  Ah yeah man EU is totally gonna break up apple. Some of y'all need to be reminded to be realistic.
  - deminature 3y ago
    The DMA has potential fines of 20% of global annual revenue for non-compliance. Apple is playing with fire here. Laws like GDPR and DMA are designed to be just as scary for big entities as small.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    The US might. Microsoft narrowly avoided a company breakup over web browser policies, it seems entirely feasible that Apple's App Store could lead down the same path.
    - johnbellone 3y ago
      Or any of their embedded features. Apple Pay, for example.
      - cromka 3y ago
        That’s getting “fixed” in upcoming release, in EU at least.
  - leifross 3y ago
    On the contrary, this tantrum by no means works to lessen the growing idea that control of the platform should be put into the hands of a independent third party. While not European in origin, the platform holds and manages tremendous value for us, to the extent where small changes can cause mayor economic disruption, and Apple has not been managing it fairly. And for a state actor, which exists to serve the common good, it is not acceptable that a single company holds and abuses this kind of power.

robertoandred 3y ago

This IS adhering to the DMA. Every browser engine is treated the same.

impossiblefork 3y ago
I think that's very unlikely. I interpret 6 (a) as basically requiring you to be able to install whatever software you like and to provide no mechanism whereby any fee can be demanded for such installation to be possible. Apple tries to get around this by this core technology stuff, but APIs aren't even subject to copyright protection, and it's also basic interoperability stuff. I don't think the courts will see it the way I interpret your comment.
ajross 3y ago
Deliberately removing useful features from your own product so that you don't have to let other people implement the same features may be technically conforming to the letter of the law, but is clearly violating it in spirit. The spirit of the law is platform interoperability: your control over the platform shouldn't restrict what other people can make it do (be it "run an app store" or "run a web app").
- riscy 3y ago
  When did it become illegal to take features away from a products or create derivative products with different features? The “spirit of the law” most certainly is not what you’re imagining. If they wanted, they could remove the App Store from iOS in EU, or pull the iPhone from the EU market entirely. Apple isn’t required by the DMA to part of a digital market at all.
  - ajross 3y ago
    > When did it become illegal to [...] That's a question for regulators and lawyers. But in general yes: trying to evade a law instead of complying with its intended application is generally not viewed as unquestionably legal. In criminal law it's sometimes even taken as evidence of guilt! > If they wanted, they could remove the App Store from iOS in EU, or pull the iPhone from the EU market entirely. Apple isn’t required by the DMA to part of a digital market at all. And if the EU wanted, they could ban Apple products entirely. The point is that no one does stuff like this because there's a general sense that healthy competetive markets are good for everyone, and that the capitalist market will enforce this by punishing actors that try to cheat (in this case, by "trying to make more money by making your product worse"). But sometimes that market enforcement breaks down, in the face of trust/monopoly activities like (in this case) control over a computing platform. And when that happens it's routine for regulators to step in to try to right the ship. And that ship is listing pretty badly right now. Apple is dancing as close to the edge of predatory monopolism as is possible. Again, they literally think they'll make more money by deliberately breaking their own customer's web apps. There's no way at all that's a healthy market. QED.
  - ben-schaaf 3y ago
    > When did it become illegal to take features away from a products A long time ago? You can't sell a product under the pretense that it does X and then remove X after the fact, at least not in any country with decent consumer protections.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >When did it become illegal to take features away from a products or create derivative products with different features? The “spirit of the law” most certainly is not what you’re imagining. Depends on the laws and advertising. Sony got dinged for removing the "Other OS" option on the PS3. A feature you can definitely argued "nobody used" (and as someone who tried, the experience for anything but basically headless Linux was atrocious. You had access to almost none of the hardware for this). Still lost the case. I wouldn't bet on Apple losing on that specifically. But it sounds like this is all adding up towards another big slap in a future Case.
  - 3y ago
- giantrobot 3y ago
  No one is obliged to obey anything but the letter of the law. If you want someone to obey the spirit of a law you need to put that in the letter.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    That is completely wrong. Judges very much care about the spirit of the law, and frequently discuss it in their decisions, both in common law jurisdictions and in other systems. The justice system is not a computer following logical instructions.
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      Judges can talk about the spirit of the law all they want. If they don't base decisions on the letter of it they'll set themselves up to be overruled on appeal. Prosecutors also can't bring up charges on violating the spirit of a law.
      - ajross 3y ago
        So... appellate reasoning is even more likely to be founded on spirit arguments and not loopholes or context-free text readings. "Intent of the framers" is, obviously, very much an argument about spirit and not text. As always, there's a good wikipedia page to start from when discussing this stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_and_spirit_of_the_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_and_spirit_of_the_law But in this particular case it's sort of a silly argument anyway as it cuts better in the opposite direction: the DMA is a big and complicated law and can be interpreted in a zillion ways. If courts and regulators are allowed to read laws as strictly as they want, I can all but guarantee that Apple is in violation of something.
      - tsimionescu 3y ago
        To many legal scholars, and to most lay people, the actual law is the spirit, the letter is just there to help note down what the spirit was. If someone thinks they are safe to ignore the spirit of a law because of a quirk of how it is worded, they will often find they are wrong, and have charges brought against them anyway, and lose at trial and any number of appellate courts. Conversely, if someone is convicted based on a technicality where they broke the letter of the law, but not the spirit, that conviction is very likely to be overturned on appeal. Of course, the spirit and the letter of the law can't be arbitrarily divorced from one another. One can't claim that the letter of the law says "you shall not kill", but the spirit of the law is that it's ok to kill but only on the full moon. But if a law says "don't lie to prosecutors", and they ask me what I did on some day, and I tell them X and Y and don't mention Z, I won't be able to claim that the law didn't techniclaly say not to omit information.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  > but is clearly violating it in spirit Huh? If the EU imposes additional requirements on aquarium lights, and a lighting manufacture decides not to product aquarium lights.....that's violating the spirit of the law?
  - ajross 3y ago
    That analogy doesn't make sense to me. Apple isn't pulling the iPhone from the market, they're breaking iPhones that were already sold. The equivalent would be if you said you couldn't sell green aquarium lights anymore, and aquarium light vendors turned all the green aquariums off remotely.
    - paulddraper 3y ago
      You can keep using your green aquarium lights all you want. But if you install their newest version of aquarium lights, they won't have a green option.
      - ajross 3y ago
        No, you already bought the lights, and they've always been green. You don't "install the newest version" of lights. Just like you don't for hardware devices like phones. You install software updates, which clearly have a presumption of not removing features for which you paid. That's just straight up common law warranty stuff, come on. Again, this kind of allegorical confusion is generally a sign that you're wrong and trying to cheat. Which Apple is, clearly.
        paulddraper 3y ago
        > software updates which clearly have a presumption of not removing features oof, that is not a good assumption

SllX 3y ago

I’m going to be level with you: there is nothing so great about PWAs that they’re worth mandating or protecting by law in any jurisdiction and the EU doesn’t owe it to you to try. Web developers like them. That’s it, and their PWA advocacy completely disregards what a privacy and security nightmare they can be without proper safeguards, because this little device I carry around in my pocket is 1) always with me and 2) stores a lot of information about me 3) has a full sensory array installed within it. Every new feature browsers add for better hardware access gets immediately disabled on any system I manage: cameras, mics, USB access, sensors, location, notifications, local storage, the whole works because the alternative is letting every website access those or getting spammed with access requests on every site I visit and the more crap that is added, the longer it takes me every time I setup a new browser install from scratch. Why disable them at all? Because 99% of these new features are primarily used to build a better supercookie to track and profile people without their consent. The actual marketable reasons are a secondary use at best. So if it’s not on Apple’s priority list to build out whatever they need to support and allow other browsers to support PWAs in a secure and privacy conscious manner, good for them. Web developers who want to circumvent Apple’s fees entirely don’t need to be anywhere near their top priority and can wait. For Apple: users come before developers, and App developers before web developers.

deminature 3y ago
I'm not a fan of PWAs either, but disabling them instead of allowing them to continue to run is an incredibly bad faith response to the DMA.
- SllX 3y ago
  Not if the alternative is allowing other browsers to install them without a privacy and security architecture in place first. Even if Apple thinks it’s worth doing, that takes time, and web developers aren’t worth prioritizing for them when they have a lot of other ground to cover building out a new system of APIs and entitlements to comply with the DMA’s other requirements.
  - 3y ago

kryptiskt 3y ago

Yeah, this isn't a parlor game, I have no idea why they think the antitrust pressure will abate by such bad faith nonsense moves. Next step for the EU is to make Tim Cook choose whether he wants to be CEO of the device side or service side of the broken up Apple. It's clear that fining them is useless.

lannisterstark 3y ago
Ah yeah man EU is totally gonna break up apple. Some of y'all need to be reminded to be realistic.
- deminature 3y ago
  The DMA has potential fines of 20% of global annual revenue for non-compliance. Apple is playing with fire here. Laws like GDPR and DMA are designed to be just as scary for big entities as small.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  The US might. Microsoft narrowly avoided a company breakup over web browser policies, it seems entirely feasible that Apple's App Store could lead down the same path.
  - johnbellone 3y ago
    Or any of their embedded features. Apple Pay, for example.
    - cromka 3y ago
      That’s getting “fixed” in upcoming release, in EU at least.
- leifross 3y ago
  On the contrary, this tantrum by no means works to lessen the growing idea that control of the platform should be put into the hands of a independent third party. While not European in origin, the platform holds and manages tremendous value for us, to the extent where small changes can cause mayor economic disruption, and Apple has not been managing it fairly. And for a state actor, which exists to serve the common good, it is not acceptable that a single company holds and abuses this kind of power.