4 ms·
> Why is excel and word any more connected than teams and excel or teams and word? Or even outlook? If outlook can be grouped with “office suite”, and EU didn’t
by burnerthrow008 2y ago
> Why is excel and word any more connected than teams and excel or teams and word? Or even outlook? If outlook can be grouped with “office suite”, and EU didn’t have a problem with that, why not Teams?
It's not.
The argument you're replying to is remarkably similar to the ones in the EU+Apple threads: Why should iOS be considered a "general purpose" OS? Because people consider it as such. Why isn't Xbox or Switch a "general purpose" computer? Because people don't consider it as such. The whole thing boils down to circular logic of "it is a general purpose computer because it is".
The same thing is happening here: Why is it ok to bundle Word and Excel, but not Word and Teams? Because people consider the first one ok, but not the second. Ok, but WHY?!?
It's like arguing with a religious fanatic. You are wrong to assume there is any logic behind it.
If you really dig into why Microsoft and Apple, and why not Spotify and SAP, the only real answer is: because the EC defined the boundaries of the DMA to include the types of businesses that are run from America and exclude the types of businesses that are run from European. When you finally back them into a corner, the defenders of the DMA fall back to "well $AMERICAN_COMPANY is a gatekeeper, but $EURO_COMPANY is not a gatekeeper".
Spotify and SAP easily meet the quantitative thresholds that catch MS, Facebook and Apple, but the EC carefully defined that a "gatekeeper" belongs to certain categories of businesses (operating system, social media, etc.) and does not belong to certain other categories (music streaming, business software) so that it does not catch them. And as we saw with iPadOS, the quantitative thresholds don't even matter if the EC feels like ignoring them.
- snowpid 2y agoThe gatekeeper criteria are open. Could you precise mention which criteria is bad instead of making strong assumptions? I don't see why Spotify is a gate keeper. You have e.g. Deezer or Apple Music and you can switch very easily.
- mike_hearn 2y agoSpotify is the "gatekeeper" standing between listeners and musicians, like how OS vendors are "gatekeepers" standing between users and developers.
- snowpid 2y agoYet you can easily switch to a different "gatekeeper" like Deezer while it is not possible.
- chillfox 2y agoI like the Australian approach to these types of laws. Rather than making some complicated definition that carefully selects the desired targets it's usually just a list that the government maintains. Makes it obvious to everyone how it works.
- throw0101b 2y ago> Why should iOS be considered a "general purpose" OS? Because people consider it as such. I don't. No more than I consider NetApp OS or OneFS general purpose, even though both are based/built on BSD (I've SSHed into OneFS CLI often in my last job) At least with Apple/iOS (not sure about Android), phones and tablets were purposefully designed to be appliances from the very beginning.