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And who will win? Those "smart people"(I hate this word, being nefarious is not smart, and stop gaslighting us by humanizing an evil multi trillion corporation

And who will win? Those "smart people"(I hate this word, being nefarious is not smart, and stop gaslighting us by humanizing an evil multi trillion corporation doing illegal things, as "people") creating their own market monopoly, or the regulatory bodies of large governments that can regulate those monopolies in their regions? History tells us that the institutions with laws, guns, judges and a monopoly on violence rules over "smart people" who just make phones. Apple's only retaliation is making life shit for EU users or pulling out of the EU market which they won't because that would leave a China style vacuum that Google or a local EU competitor will take after a period of painfull transition for the EU consumers. The EU consumers can live without iPhones. Can Apple's shareholders live without Eu's profits?

robertlagrant 2y ago
> I hate this word, let's stop being gaslighted humanizing an evil multi trillion corporation as "people" It's not gaslighting. People work for the company, and they decided. You're dehumanising them by saying they aren't human.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  I never said people aren't human, I said apple aren't human they're a corporation. And people who knowingly leverage their gigantic corporation to make life worse for others in the name of shareholder profit can and should be dehumanized. There nothing humane in hurting others for greed.
  - nickserv 2y ago
    I get what you're saying, but Apple are a group of people, so they are human. Like the local book club, or Hamas. Anyway, you don't have to look very far to see the many horrible things done to humans by other humans. The word "humane", in my view, defines how we would like to be, not how we really are.
    - chgs 2y ago
      Apple is more than the sum of its parts. Technically a person is just a bunch of cells, but those cells are interchangable, replaceable (indeed few last more than a couple of decades), and if you lose an individual cell nothing happens to the person, but the cell can’t function. we don’t say the cells make decisions, we say people do. With a corporation it’s the corporation that makes the decisions, not the individual cells.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        Your way of thinking advocates for no accountability by employees. The company did it?
      - nickserv 2y ago
        Agreed, there's definitely the emergence principle at work when looking at how groups of people function. The population of a city or a nation is similarly greater than the sum of its parts, and there is an emergent property in both cases. Same as an ant colony. 2 things though. The constituant parts of a corporation are human, unlike an ant colony. So in that sense they are human, and ant colonies are ant. Regarding ourselves, we absolutely are an assembly of cells, it wouldn't be wrong to define us as such, although not terribly convenient. But interchangeable the cells are not, well not like a person to a corporation. A cell can't move from one person to another, if it somehow disagreed with a decision of the central nervous system. The human brain is made up of billions of cells, and decisions of the brain are heavily dictated by the digestive system and various hormones. A corporate board is at the most, what, maybe a few dozen people? There isn't the same level of responsibility of each component. Finally, if the entire corporation decides as one entity, how to punish for wrongdoing? Should every component of the corporation be put in jail if the corporation kills people (looking at you Boeing), or just the humans at the top that made those decisions? Another way of looking at it: Is the entirety of the Palestinian population responsible for the decisions of the dozens of humans that are the Hamas leadership?
        BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        The decision makers still have agency, but structures exist to prevent those who would make un-profitable decisions from reaching the top of the corporation in the first place. Once they’re there, their choices are constrained somewhat and (with nuances) profitable decisions are incentivized over others. The consequence is that, while individuals possess agency, we can also observe that the average individual’s behavior is predictable and in service of the corporate machine in aggregate. You can punish the ghoulish person who decided, along with a few others, to dump toxic waste into the river, while still recognizing that their actions were an inevitable result of the incentives we created for them. The most productive thing, of course, would be to change the incentives, but baby steps.
  - thegiogi 2y ago
    Agree entirely on principle, but nobody should be dehumanized, if nothing else because it is a very ineffective way to model your opponent. And hurting other for greed is surely not humane, but it is very much human. Big difference that e at the end.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Modeling a group of people, answerable to yet another, even larger group of people, as “a person” is what I would call even worse modeling.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        It's not that a company is a person. It's that it's multiple people, some of whom make decisions.
        lxgr 2y ago
        Exactly, and groups of people behave differently from a single person in many important ways.
        robertlagrant 2y ago
        Yes - they have more legs. But what they are not is a homogenised mass, all as equally guilty or innocent of issues as the other. If 3 executives do something bad, those 3 executives are to blame. And not some nothing-to-do-with-people corporation.
        lxgr 2y ago
        I agree! That's why I didn't say "are culpable differently" but "behave differently".
    - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
      One of HN's biggest intellectual blind spots is mistaking explanation with justification. Looks like your comment was caught up in that.
- lxgr 2y ago
  > People work for the company, and they decided. I think you have an incorrect model of the incentive structure and actual power dynamics of publicly owned corporations. Even the CEO has to answer to shareholders in the end.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    The CEO has to answer to shareholders when it comes to keeping his job and to legislators when it comes to abiding the regulations in every market. It's a tough act to follow if you try to maximize shareholder returns while also trying to stay out of prison.
stoperaticless 2y ago
I don’t see the future, but argument for Apple could go like this: - it is Apple vs EU - US gov has guns and influence and various levers - US gov will definitely protect Apple from guns of EU (so regulator with guns is a bit mute point) - Apple is important to americans (I think they feel it’s their symbol or something), so officials in US gov might think it’s good opportunity to grab some political points. - US gov might act to help out Apple in this dispute (Nothing like a war, but some slight nod or handshake; maybe via diplomatic backwater; maybe in exchange for something) Though most probably apple will give “something” even if minor change in the rules, at least just so EU would not loose face, to keep relationship friendly. (But it will be move in the right direction)
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Did the US attack China over all the regulations Apple and Google have to fall in line with to be compliant over there?
  - adolph 2y ago
    The US might have less of a leg to stand on vis-a-vis Bytedance absent China's examples of how to do it.
- latexr 2y ago
  The US has filed an antitrust case against Apple, which pretty much denies this whole argument. https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-monoply-news-updates https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-mono...
- Sakos 2y ago
  There is a deep misunderstanding here of US politics and foreign policy. The US might act in various ways to protect American manufacturers, or oil industry, or other industries that are responsible for a lot of jobs in the US or are a strategic resource in some other way. See the 100% tax import for Chinese EVs. The US government doesn't care about Apple. Apple's economic impact is basically irrelevant for the US, because it doesn't provide a noteworthy number of jobs or any significant supply chain within the US. Apple's use as a strategic resource is completely irrelevant based on their antagonistic behavior towards the US government and they've shown themselves to be as eager to comply with Chinese laws as they are to flout US government policies. I'd maybe see the US do something to protect Microsoft, with its deep ties to the military industrial complex, or Intel, which has both these ties and is clearly a strategic resource because of the advanced chips it provides, but really only if there were an existential threat that would also prevent Microsoft or Intel from performing their necessary roles in the US economy, the military and in US foreign policy. But to suggest that US guns are in any way relevant, or that the US would bother trying to protect Apple, is frankly absurd. The EU has smacked down Meta, Google and Microsoft already for things they felt were anti-competitive. The US didn't give a shit. Why would it be any different here?
justinclift 2y ago
> History tells us that the institutions with laws, guns, judges and a monopoly on violence rules over "smart people" who just make phones. The real problem is that some of these mega-corporations can drag things out so long legally that the end result barely matters. :(
- xandrius 2y ago
  Governments have a shot at this fortunately. But it seems that some US people have such an ingrained anti-government that they reject anything, even if it helps.
  - SXX 2y ago
    This is forum with a lot of top1% earners who can afford to pay Apple premium. And entrepreneurs who only dream to build the next apple and be able to abuse market power the same way. Government regulation are kind a opposite side of that coin.
The_Colonel 2y ago
Europe represents ~25% of Apple's revenue (https://www.statista.com/statistics/382175/quarterly-revenue-of-apple-by-geograhical-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/382175/quarterly-revenue...) That's quite a large loss. Esp. given that there's another option - stay on the EU market while conforming to its rules. That will lower the profits, but not by that much. Losing Europe as a market would have larger consequences, though. Software produced in EU would have worse support on Apple, people even in US having connections with Europeans would start installing alternative messengers etc. Apple's strength is in its network effect, cutting out a major part of it would be disastrous.
- musictubes 2y ago
  The EU is a subset of “Europe in that report. Pretty sure Gruber also mentioned that the Middle East is also lumped in there as well for some reason. So yeah, the EU is bound to be a big number but it isn’t 25%. The biggest economies in the EU are Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium? Big countries outside of it but included in Apple’s “Europe” catagory include the nordics, UK, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and probably something else. Even if the EU makes up half of what Apple calls “Europe.” A fine of 10% of worldwide revenues is way beyond what the EU contributes to the bottom line. There’s no way Apple wants to take the nuclear option but if the EU threatens them with big enough fines they might think about it.
  - Liquid_Fire 2y ago
    > the nordics This one is a big stretch. Sweden, Denmark and Finland are part of the EU, while Norway and Iceland are part of the EEA where the DMA also applies.
  - mbs159 2y ago
    Nuclear option? Looks more like a fart to me. Most people in Europe use Whatsapp or FB Messenger, so they don't need Facetime or Apple Messages - major selling points of the Apple ecosystem. Alongside that, only 6% of people in the EU use macs, which further shows how Apple's ecosystem does not have a solid foothold in the EU.
- 2y ago

robertlagrant 2y ago

> I hate this word, let's stop being gaslighted humanizing an evil multi trillion corporation as "people" It's not gaslighting. People work for the company, and they decided. You're dehumanising them by saying they aren't human.

Rinzler89 2y ago
I never said people aren't human, I said apple aren't human they're a corporation. And people who knowingly leverage their gigantic corporation to make life worse for others in the name of shareholder profit can and should be dehumanized. There nothing humane in hurting others for greed.
- nickserv 2y ago
  I get what you're saying, but Apple are a group of people, so they are human. Like the local book club, or Hamas. Anyway, you don't have to look very far to see the many horrible things done to humans by other humans. The word "humane", in my view, defines how we would like to be, not how we really are.
  - chgs 2y ago
    Apple is more than the sum of its parts. Technically a person is just a bunch of cells, but those cells are interchangable, replaceable (indeed few last more than a couple of decades), and if you lose an individual cell nothing happens to the person, but the cell can’t function. we don’t say the cells make decisions, we say people do. With a corporation it’s the corporation that makes the decisions, not the individual cells.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      Your way of thinking advocates for no accountability by employees. The company did it?
    - nickserv 2y ago
      Agreed, there's definitely the emergence principle at work when looking at how groups of people function. The population of a city or a nation is similarly greater than the sum of its parts, and there is an emergent property in both cases. Same as an ant colony. 2 things though. The constituant parts of a corporation are human, unlike an ant colony. So in that sense they are human, and ant colonies are ant. Regarding ourselves, we absolutely are an assembly of cells, it wouldn't be wrong to define us as such, although not terribly convenient. But interchangeable the cells are not, well not like a person to a corporation. A cell can't move from one person to another, if it somehow disagreed with a decision of the central nervous system. The human brain is made up of billions of cells, and decisions of the brain are heavily dictated by the digestive system and various hormones. A corporate board is at the most, what, maybe a few dozen people? There isn't the same level of responsibility of each component. Finally, if the entire corporation decides as one entity, how to punish for wrongdoing? Should every component of the corporation be put in jail if the corporation kills people (looking at you Boeing), or just the humans at the top that made those decisions? Another way of looking at it: Is the entirety of the Palestinian population responsible for the decisions of the dozens of humans that are the Hamas leadership?
      - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        The decision makers still have agency, but structures exist to prevent those who would make un-profitable decisions from reaching the top of the corporation in the first place. Once they’re there, their choices are constrained somewhat and (with nuances) profitable decisions are incentivized over others. The consequence is that, while individuals possess agency, we can also observe that the average individual’s behavior is predictable and in service of the corporate machine in aggregate. You can punish the ghoulish person who decided, along with a few others, to dump toxic waste into the river, while still recognizing that their actions were an inevitable result of the incentives we created for them. The most productive thing, of course, would be to change the incentives, but baby steps.
- thegiogi 2y ago
  Agree entirely on principle, but nobody should be dehumanized, if nothing else because it is a very ineffective way to model your opponent. And hurting other for greed is surely not humane, but it is very much human. Big difference that e at the end.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Modeling a group of people, answerable to yet another, even larger group of people, as “a person” is what I would call even worse modeling.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      It's not that a company is a person. It's that it's multiple people, some of whom make decisions.
      - lxgr 2y ago
        Exactly, and groups of people behave differently from a single person in many important ways.
        robertlagrant 2y ago
        Yes - they have more legs. But what they are not is a homogenised mass, all as equally guilty or innocent of issues as the other. If 3 executives do something bad, those 3 executives are to blame. And not some nothing-to-do-with-people corporation.
        lxgr 2y ago
        I agree! That's why I didn't say "are culpable differently" but "behave differently".
  - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
    One of HN's biggest intellectual blind spots is mistaking explanation with justification. Looks like your comment was caught up in that.
lxgr 2y ago
> People work for the company, and they decided. I think you have an incorrect model of the incentive structure and actual power dynamics of publicly owned corporations. Even the CEO has to answer to shareholders in the end.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  The CEO has to answer to shareholders when it comes to keeping his job and to legislators when it comes to abiding the regulations in every market. It's a tough act to follow if you try to maximize shareholder returns while also trying to stay out of prison.

stoperaticless 2y ago

I don’t see the future, but argument for Apple could go like this: - it is Apple vs EU - US gov has guns and influence and various levers - US gov will definitely protect Apple from guns of EU (so regulator with guns is a bit mute point) - Apple is important to americans (I think they feel it’s their symbol or something), so officials in US gov might think it’s good opportunity to grab some political points. - US gov might act to help out Apple in this dispute (Nothing like a war, but some slight nod or handshake; maybe via diplomatic backwater; maybe in exchange for something) Though most probably apple will give “something” even if minor change in the rules, at least just so EU would not loose face, to keep relationship friendly. (But it will be move in the right direction)

Rinzler89 2y ago
Did the US attack China over all the regulations Apple and Google have to fall in line with to be compliant over there?
- adolph 2y ago
  The US might have less of a leg to stand on vis-a-vis Bytedance absent China's examples of how to do it.
latexr 2y ago
The US has filed an antitrust case against Apple, which pretty much denies this whole argument. https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-monoply-news-updates https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-mono...
Sakos 2y ago
There is a deep misunderstanding here of US politics and foreign policy. The US might act in various ways to protect American manufacturers, or oil industry, or other industries that are responsible for a lot of jobs in the US or are a strategic resource in some other way. See the 100% tax import for Chinese EVs. The US government doesn't care about Apple. Apple's economic impact is basically irrelevant for the US, because it doesn't provide a noteworthy number of jobs or any significant supply chain within the US. Apple's use as a strategic resource is completely irrelevant based on their antagonistic behavior towards the US government and they've shown themselves to be as eager to comply with Chinese laws as they are to flout US government policies. I'd maybe see the US do something to protect Microsoft, with its deep ties to the military industrial complex, or Intel, which has both these ties and is clearly a strategic resource because of the advanced chips it provides, but really only if there were an existential threat that would also prevent Microsoft or Intel from performing their necessary roles in the US economy, the military and in US foreign policy. But to suggest that US guns are in any way relevant, or that the US would bother trying to protect Apple, is frankly absurd. The EU has smacked down Meta, Google and Microsoft already for things they felt were anti-competitive. The US didn't give a shit. Why would it be any different here?

justinclift 2y ago

> History tells us that the institutions with laws, guns, judges and a monopoly on violence rules over "smart people" who just make phones. The real problem is that some of these mega-corporations can drag things out so long legally that the end result barely matters. :(

xandrius 2y ago
Governments have a shot at this fortunately. But it seems that some US people have such an ingrained anti-government that they reject anything, even if it helps.
- SXX 2y ago
  This is forum with a lot of top1% earners who can afford to pay Apple premium. And entrepreneurs who only dream to build the next apple and be able to abuse market power the same way. Government regulation are kind a opposite side of that coin.

The_Colonel 2y ago

Europe represents ~25% of Apple's revenue (https://www.statista.com/statistics/382175/quarterly-revenue-of-apple-by-geograhical-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/382175/quarterly-revenue...) That's quite a large loss. Esp. given that there's another option - stay on the EU market while conforming to its rules. That will lower the profits, but not by that much. Losing Europe as a market would have larger consequences, though. Software produced in EU would have worse support on Apple, people even in US having connections with Europeans would start installing alternative messengers etc. Apple's strength is in its network effect, cutting out a major part of it would be disastrous.

musictubes 2y ago
The EU is a subset of “Europe in that report. Pretty sure Gruber also mentioned that the Middle East is also lumped in there as well for some reason. So yeah, the EU is bound to be a big number but it isn’t 25%. The biggest economies in the EU are Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium? Big countries outside of it but included in Apple’s “Europe” catagory include the nordics, UK, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and probably something else. Even if the EU makes up half of what Apple calls “Europe.” A fine of 10% of worldwide revenues is way beyond what the EU contributes to the bottom line. There’s no way Apple wants to take the nuclear option but if the EU threatens them with big enough fines they might think about it.
- Liquid_Fire 2y ago
  > the nordics This one is a big stretch. Sweden, Denmark and Finland are part of the EU, while Norway and Iceland are part of the EEA where the DMA also applies.
- mbs159 2y ago
  Nuclear option? Looks more like a fart to me. Most people in Europe use Whatsapp or FB Messenger, so they don't need Facetime or Apple Messages - major selling points of the Apple ecosystem. Alongside that, only 6% of people in the EU use macs, which further shows how Apple's ecosystem does not have a solid foothold in the EU.
2y ago