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European iPhones will have more freedom than American iPhones. Amazing
by hakdbha 2y ago
European iPhones will have more freedom than American iPhones. Amazing
- grumpyprole 2y agoWell I guess there's more freedom in the US for Apple to do whatever they like!
- nickburns 2y agoat least some of Apple's chickens would finally appear to be coming home to roost, and us in-the-know Americans appreciate those in-the-know Europeans for leading the charge (on both this antitrust protection and separately, GDPR/privacy regulation as well).
- AniseAbyss 2y ago[dead]
- shiroiushi 2y agoThe Europeans have done some good work on things like privacy, but as for Apple and their app store, it's really trivial to simply not buy an iPhone. There are lots and lots of other phones out there that aren't nearly as monopolistic in their treatment of users.
- nickburns 2y agowe're talking about trust busting, not personal device options or preference.
- shiroiushi 2y agoAgain, Apple does not have a monopoly, or anything approaching it. 50% marketshare is a lot for a single vendor, but it's not even close to 100%, and there are plenty of viable alternatives which apparently a lot of people don't want to consider because it isn't "cool" enough for them.
- nickburns 2y agoagain, this has nothing to do with 'market share' (of smartphone devices i think you mean?)
- erinnh 2y agoIt kind of does, since the gatekeeper status is bound to how many users a platform has. I’d also like to mention that EU anti-trust law talks about „dominant position“ and not about monopolies. And any Company with more than 40% market share are in a dominant position.
- nickburns 2y ago'market share distribution among competitor platforms' would have made my point clearer. this is not about that. antitrust regulation strictly considers the 'market share' (i guess you could say?), i.e. the size/influence of the alleged monopoly, not its share of the market relative to the whole.
- ben_w 2y agoWhy not? Nobody cares that Nintendo has a monopoly on games published for their hardware. I think we would care if all the other console makers left the market. I think this analogy applies to Android vs. iOS — and that's despite me being annoyed by Apple acting as morality police with regard to content, instead of limiting their rules to the security domain.
- nickburns 2y agocomparing video game consoles to the modern smartphone is an intellectually dishonest analogy based on numbers alone, never mind what each is respectively used for. but i don't quite understand what you mean regardless. (why would we care about Nintendo if all other game console makers did what? they all just up and randomly closed shops in this hypothetical for what reason/s?)
- 2y ago
- vidarh 2y agoIt's really trivial for Apple to simply not sell us iPhones too. Apple has no inherent right to a market if the people making up that market - directly or via our representatives - decide we don't want them to market to us. If they want access, they are free find a compromise that makes us willing to let them deal with us. I have plenty of issues with the EU, but consumer regulations is one of the areas where its work has produced by far the most benefit for regular people. Sometimes it takes a while to shake out properly (e.g. the nuisance of cookie banners), but overall they seem to be persistently chipping away at issues that have actual negative effects on people's lives, however small they might feel if a given one does not directly affect you.
- rvense 2y agoTo start: There absolutely should be limits to what kinds of devices can be sold. E.g., they should not be dangerous to operate. If you can't make a lawnmower that doesn't harm people, it's OK for governments or the EU to tell you that you can't sell lawnmowers. It's also OK to enforce standardization in e.g. electrical sockets and other basic infrastructure. This should not come down to "consumer preference" - _especially_ not when the harms aren't obvious at the time of purchase. Apple's total control of all aspects of the iPhone platform is harmful to consumers in a way that is not at all obvious, especially not to the less technologically literate. An obviously absurd analogy is if a hammer company was somehow able to force you to use their brand of nails and wood and charge you per annum for the use of whatever you built. We did not have previous legislation to handle this situation, because simple physics means that can't happen. But with modern-day complicated tools, it can, and so some regulation of this sector is absolutely needed. (I don't know the DMA well enough to say if it, specifically, is the right way to handle it, mind, but it's obvious to me that the present situation is untenable.)
- shiroiushi 2y ago>An obviously absurd analogy is if a hammer company was somehow able to force you to use their brand of nails and wood and charge you per annum for the use of whatever you built. We did not have previous legislation to handle this situation, because simple physics means that can't happen. But with modern-day complicated tools, it can, and so some regulation of this sector is absolutely needed. Is it though? To extend your analogy, let's say you can go to the store and buy a hammer. One brand ("Granny Smith"), and only that brand, has these limitations and it's pretty well-known these limitations exist if you buy that hammer. Or, you can buy one of the other dozen or so brands of hammer, and you don't have that limitation. But because the Granny Smith hammer is pretty and has slick marketing, half the hammer buyers get that brand of hammer, even though the other hammer buyers call them idiots for doing so. Is this really a place where we need government intervention, when consumers are willingly making this choice? If it got to the point where you couldn't realistically do any hammering without a Granny Smith hammer, then sure, it's pretty obvious action is needed. But right now, it's only a problem because half the buyers are happily choosing Granny Smith despite all the alternatives (which generally have more features and cost less). Even worse, they say they like these limitations, and don't want them removed!!!
- Doxin 2y agoThe whole point of this entire kerfuffle is that Apple has a monopoly on distributing iphone apps. The courts have decided that iPhone is a big enough market to where having a monopoly on the distribution of apps is undesirable.
- 2muchcoffeeman 2y agoI’m pro voting with your wallet, but what the EU is doing is different. You pretty much need a smart phone these days. So it’s reasonable for phones to have greater scrutiny and require all phones to support the same bare minimum.
- fsflover 2y ago> it's really trivial to simply not buy an iPhone Only if you don't care about your privacy at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261 See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39935888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39935888
- isoprophlex 2y ago[flagged]
- kubb 2y agoRemember that freedom isn’t a resource that a society can have more or less of. Freedom of one person or group always comes with a restriction of freedom of someone else. It’s a delicate balance, not a “do whatever you want” kinda thing.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoUnder that framework, we're talking about shifting the balance towards customers, at the expense of reducing freedom for a corporation to squeeze their customers and suppliers.
- kubb 2y agoYes, in this case the freedom of the company to milk the customers AND the developers on its platform is restricted, but the freedom of consumers is protected. This is possible because of the powerful regulatory body that is the EU. Regulation and interventionism give the public more freedom. This might be hard to swallow for a proponent of lessez-faire policy.
- simion314 2y agoYes, I remember a nice quote from some book, some French complain about slavery in the land of the free and the american responds something like "america is land of the free, we are free to have slaves" So freedom for Apple is more free in USA to screw customers, like those Aplle custoemrs are prevented to be shown some informational text, if users know to much is bad for Apple.
- arp242 2y agoI wouldn't say "always"; the freedom of gay people to have gay sex in the privacy of their homes doesn't affect anyone except themselves, and certainly doesn't infringe on the freedom of others. In other cases the restrictions of "freedom" are not really legitimate – e.g. the "freedom" to not see interracial marriage or something like that (and I did see some twat complain about that on HN just a few months ago). But in some cases, yes, there's an interaction of conflicting freedoms and finding the right balance can be tricky, and consumer protection laws are a good example of that.
- LeoPanthera 2y agoI'm in two minds about this. You're not wrong, but I would be terrified if my parents had this "freedom". If some popular app required them to give it full access to their phone, they would do it, and they wouldn't understand the risks involved. I have always recommended Apple ecosystem products to my family specifically because it is relatively hard to do the Wrong Thing, and I honestly believe Apple being forced to loosen this control is a net bad. If you want to root your phone and install all sorts of weird system-level tools, I have no idea why you'd choose an iPhone in the first place. That kind of thing is virtually the raison d'etre of Android.
- CardenB 2y agoThey likely would not be in this position if they weren’t abusing it for an egregious fee. If they were noble, they wouldn’t have the fee. I think it’s more about holding profits captive than anything else.
- zigzag312 2y agoYou could use parental control, to keep your parents safe :P
- nickburns 2y agogreat idea. (who knew the name goes both ways?)
- LeoPanthera 2y agoUnfortunately, I cannot, because we live in different countries and Apple "families" have to all be in the same country.
- knallfrosch 2y agoThis is a better idea than the joke suggests at first. With great responsibility should come great authority.
- zilti 2y agoBeing terrified of freedom is... fucked up.
- shiroiushi 2y agoThe US is not a very free country, despite the claims to the contrary. Try drinking some beer in a public park while having a picnic and see what the police do to you. The main "freedom" in America is the ability of wealthy interests to screw over everyone.
- djaykay 2y agoLet’s steer clear of bitter partisanship and hyperbole, please. Freedom is a complex and nuanced concept.
- shiroiushi 2y agoPartisanship and hyperbole? Where's the partisanship? There's no political party in the US that wants to legalize alcohol consumption in public parks (maybe the libertarians, but no one pays attention to them anyway, for good reason; their last Pres candidate didn't even know what Aleppo was when it was all over the news). Hyperbole? It's *literally* the truth. Go try it for yourself. Make sure a cop knows you're drinking a beer. There's nothing "complex" about this.
- sph 2y agoIt becomes a complex and nuanced concept if you want to call freedom what ain't freedom.
- lm28469 2y agoYet in all aggregated benchmarks the US never ends up on top
- guappa 2y agoThey're absolutely on top when they bomb you from above, for voting the wrong candidate at the elections.
- chgs 2y agoI don’t gel I’ve any European country claims to be “home of the free” while massively limiting pretty much any freedom other than gun ownership
- mnemoni_c 2y agoYou can install alt store outside of EU and the apps are basically emulators and cracked spotify/youtube. Freedom to install anything is nice but 95% of people won't use it
- lm28469 2y agoWait until you learn about European people having more freedom than Americans
- sureMan 2y agoIn general, having lived and worked for extended (10 year + periods) in both the US and Europe. I find Europe have a lot more freedom, generally speaking. In some area's the US is better, and in other area's Europe is, but overall, I would tip the scale to Europe. American "freedom" have always felt to me like just pure marketing, however the same can be said for some European countries. For examples the Netherlands is not nearly as open minded and free, with lots of silly rules and regulations. However, places like Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy etc. are actually much better in my opinion.
- guappa 2y agoI know a woman who had married a dutch and went to live in a farm there. Apparently it was frowned upon for women to wear pants in the village where they lived, and finally she divorced and left (also for other issues I presume, but she cited closed mindedness as a major one). She's in her 40s, not in her 80s.
- cesaref 2y agoOver here in Europe your be better off saying trousers, as suggesting it was frowned upon for women to wear pants sounds like quite a free and sexually liberated village to me :)
- guappa 2y agoWhere exactly do you think "the netherlands" is located?
- fransje26 2y agoOne does not simply walk into the Bible Belt with pants on..
- guappa 2y agoWell seems NL has their very own bible belt that isn't as famous.
- sofixa 2y agoThat's because Americans often don't get the difference between freedoms from and freedoms to, and confuse the two, thinking Apple's freedom to do whatever they want outweighs their customer's freedom from abusive practices. Same with many other topics - your freedom to own a gun doesn't outweigh other people's freedom from getting shot.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y agoBased on what others are saying: no. Apple still retains total control over software running on what is supposed to be your hardware.