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I have no doubt that Gruber will find reasons why the EU is bad and regulation is bad. At this point it's rather amusing how Daring Fireball (and many other Ame

by jwr 10mo ago

I have no doubt that Gruber will find reasons why the EU is bad and regulation is bad. At this point it's rather amusing how Daring Fireball (and many other American media) rants against regulation, and in another post complains about how companies exploit users. Regulation is unfortunately necessary: the market isn't as magical as we would like it to be and competition is not a magic wand that makes everything good for users. Companies either become dominant, or universally screw over their users. Users either have no choice, do not understand the choices, or simply don't care. I am glad the EU tries to do something. They aren't always right, but they should be trying. As a reminder, one of the biggest success stories of EU regulation: cheap cellular roaming within the EU. It used to be horribly expensive (like it is in the US), but the EU (specifically, Margrethe Vestager) regulated this and miracle of miracles, we can now move across the EU and not worry about horrendous cell phone bills.

Y-bar 10mo ago
They also capped credit card fees at 0.3% in 2015. It also included a prohibition on discrimination against any merchant based on eg size or category of goods sold. And as far as I can see neither Mastercard nor Visa had problems staying in business.
- jwr 10mo ago
  Yes! I forgot about this. The EU Interchange Fee Regulation (IFR) effectively eliminated the high fixed minimum fees that previously made small-value card transactions unprofitable for merchants. The net effect of this is that in Poland, for example, you can carry your phone and no wallet, because you can pay literally for everything using your phone. And I do mean everything, I've recently been to a club in Warsaw and the cloakroom had a terminal mounted on the wall, people just tapped their phones.
- whazor 10mo ago
  So you cannot compare it apples to oranges. There is much more regulation in EU. In EU there is also more consumer protection by default, so charge backs can be rejected by merchants but a consumer can easily take a merchant to court. So capping card fees is also more reasonable. Also, when a merchant goes bankrupt and customers perform charge-backs it would involve the entire payment chain. First merchant reserves, then acquiring bank, then MasterCard/Visa, then issuing bank (customer), and lastly the customer. With lower card fees, this has impact on the merchant reserves and their risk profile. Furthermore, acquirers can add additional fees on top if needed. You can also get lower card fees in US if you have a low risk business model.
  - Y-bar 10mo ago
    > You can also get lower card fees in US if you have a low risk business model. It is only the maximum fee that is capped (along with various provisions for eg transparency). You can also get lower fees in EU, just twenty minutes ago I saw an ad for just such a zero-fee card.
idle_zealot 10mo ago
Yeah, all too often discussion devolves into a religious war between free markets and regulation. Like they're somehow opposing forces. Markets are super cool and useful tools. Some regulation is good, some is bad, which exactly is which depends on your values and what you want to optimize for. Framing markets like they automatically do good, or ideas like "we need more regulation" or "we need fewer regulations" are all thought-terminating. So far the DMA seems like a partial-win for technology users. I wish it enshrined the right to run software on your own computer in less ambiguous language, because as-is there are carve-outs that may let Apple get away with their core technology fee and mandatory app signing.
fersarr 10mo ago
also usbc in iphones! finally we can just carry one cable
- littlestymaar 10mo ago
  I'm very glad we eventually got standardized chargers. It's too bad the standard happened to be the madness that USB-C is though.
  - showsover 10mo ago
    Oh exactly, it's great to have a single cable / charger for many different items in the household. The biggest downside I see with USB-C in this case is that the cables and chargers get quite expensive if you want to be able to just grab one and charge stuff, without having to worry about wattage etc. All in all a big improvement, with some future improvements left to make. Fingers crossed for a more sane USB-D in twenty years.
neya 10mo ago
Yesterday, I was trying to get a voice memo out of my Apple watch - on which the recording was made. I switched from Apple last year. My cousin had an iPhone. Apple would not let me transfer the voice memo out of their eco-system. It's not on my iCloud and the watch can no longer be paired with any other iOS device (even temorarily with authentication to transfer a file)...unless the iPhone is registered to me. This is malicious compliance in the name of security. And mind you, I own 3 Apple devices - 2 Macs and 1 iPad and the watch can't connect to any of those. I must be forced to buy a $1000 device just because I made the mistake of recording something on their watch. We need more regulation because of things like this and I would absolutely hate to live in a society where this is the norm.
- ggsp 10mo ago
  If you are not using iCloud, you could try activating it (you get 5 gigs for free IIRC) and switching off everything besides the Voice Memos app. Then you should see the recording on your Mac, and should be able to export it from there. Definitely a shitty workaround, but you might be able to make it work?
raverbashing 10mo ago
Even the most maligned lids attached to bottles looks stupid for 5 minutes but have the nice side effect of not having to hold the lid while you drink, which makes things easier most of the time you're holding something else
- llmslave2 10mo ago
  Nah I can't get behind that one. I love Europe and I want to live there, but I would 100% take the North American free bottle caps any day.
quitit 10mo ago
I don't think it's as black and white as you suggest. He just wrote about Japan's implementation of a similar set of laws rather favourably - the theme is that Japan's implementation looks very much like a genuine attempt at protecting users and benefitting end users and developers. While I don't agree with what a lot of what Gruber has to say. A point I do agree with is that the DMA is being sold (by Margrethe Vestager, Thierry Breton and Ursula von der Leyer) as a set of consumer protections, when it's plainly not that, and in some clear ways does the opposite. There's also persistent transparency questions like why the EU has excessive meetings with Spotify, or why there is not a "music" gatekeeper in the DMA, or the requirement to easily move music libraries between music services - things that would actually help consumers and prevent genuine lock in. (Note this isn't to excuse the behaviour of big tech.)
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
  I just read the post about Japan. The only example he gave where the MSCA is better than the DMA is: > E.g. apps distributed outside the App Store in Japan still require age ratings. There’s no such requirement in the EU. Most of his description of what Japan does better is simply “mutual respect”. Which reinforces the idea that this isn’t about the actual practical differences but about ego. Apple hates how the EU forces them to make change. And Apple has done this before. After the EU forced them to make a change, which emboldened other nations to push similar changes, Apple points to those other nations’s obviously more streamlined law making process (given that the EU has already gone through the hard work of drafting the law, working with a non-cooperative Apple, and then actually seeing it implemented and the practical issues that arise), to justify their hostility to the EU’s trend setting efforts, without which those other nations would almost certainly have not proceeded. I bet if Japan’s MSCA had come before the DMA, Apple’s tone towards both those governments would have been reversed.
  - ksec 10mo ago
    He has been anti EU / UK or EUR for quite some time even during Jony Ive era. Regardless of regulations.
llmslave2 10mo ago
It's a totally reasonable position that both regulation and companies exploiting users are wrong. And it's also entirely a moral assertion that markets should resolve to outcomes judged by members of some political apparatus. Likewise, the idea that a third party should interfere with economic relations between two consenting parties is also a moral judgement, not an absolute fact. Most arguments in favour of regulation cherry pick what they feel are success stories and ignore everything else. Interfering with highly complex and dynamical self-regulating systems has a cost. There are many examples of regulation leading to negative outcomes, and it's also telling that large corporations push for regulation because it's one of the most effective obstacles for competition in a market.
- hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
  Markets depend on regulations. Free market absolutists don’t know what they are talking about. The actual originators of market capitalism, most famously Adam Smith, but also proponents like Milton Friedman, had no such confusion. In reality, today’s free market absolutists don’t get their ideas from economists (even free market economists). Instead, they get their ideas from terrible mid 20th century novelists (I’ll let you figure out who I’m talking about), who didn’t know much about how anything worked, never mind economics.
  - littlestymaar 10mo ago
    “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers
  - llmslave2 10mo ago
    What is the point of responding to someone if you're going to completely ignore everything they say? Serious question, I'm curious what compels you to do this. Especially in such an arrogant and condescending way.
hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
Gruber’s take on the USB-C stuff has been hilarious. All through that fiasco, where Apple was going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C, which was objectively better even if you’re an Apple partisan (given that I could carry a single charging cable for my Mac and Samsung phone, but not for my Mac and iPhone), he was going on and on about how the EU was killing creativity by forcing Apple to do something they didn’t want to. And then Apple relented, their USB-C iPhone saw some of the fastest growth over a previous model despite having minimal other upgrades, indicating significant pent up demand for a USB-C phone. And I’m guessing at this point even Gruber can’t imagine living life with a Lightning charger, so now the tune is that Apple was planning on switching to USB-C and they were playing a game to make it like like they were forced to switch by the EU so as not to alienate their current Lightning charger fans. It’s a patently ridiculous idea but it’s necessary given how badly wrong he was on this issue because of how badly he continues to misunderstand how the EU works (which isn’t anything like how the US govt works).
- AnonC 10mo ago
  Anecdotally, I’ve found Lightning to be a nice fit when plugged in (it’s got a nice “click”) and USB-C a bit flimsy and loose in comparison. YMMV.
  - WA 10mo ago
    Apple could've made Lightning open and maybe Lightning would've been the new USB-C, if it is the superior product. But no, they chose not to.
- monerozcash 10mo ago
  > All through that fiasco, where Apple was going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C Is there any evidence that "Apple was going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C"? Apple worked to create the USB-C standard, was among the first to widely deploy it. Apple fighting against a precedent where the EU would force them to switch everything to USB-C is strictly different from Apple going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C.
whywhywhywhy 10mo ago
His business is too tied to being in Apple's good graces anyway to take him that seriously these days. In the past he's been given access well above a lot of bigger outlets and way above what a blog that size should have especially when most of his social media output is now on mastodon to an audience the fraction of his X size. All though I would say EU regulation has far more misses than hits, this and forcing Apple to USB-C were great but millions of man hours a year are burned navigating cookie banners on every website and chat control being forced through soon. So we have two wins on iOS device convenience, not a great trade off for the other overreach.
- littlestymaar 10mo ago
  > were great but millions of man hours a year are burned navigating cookie banners on every website Cookie banner are not, in fact, an obligation under GDPR. All you need to do to be GDPR compliant is “not collect and sell data to partners” and call it a day. Cookie banners are a loophole that the EC conceded to an ad industry that is addicted to tracking everyone all the time.
  - rogerrogerr 10mo ago
    > All you need to do to be GDPR compliant is “not collect and sell data to partners” Are you asserting that I can log IP addresses in my Apache logs? Seems like no one can give me a straight answer there.
    - mdhb 10mo ago
      That’s not how the law is structured. You CAN do that no problem but it’s then WHAT you do WITH that which is where the law comes into play. If it’s just for security purposes then there’s no problem I believe.
    - littlestymaar 10mo ago
      Of course you can. And you don't need any consent from the user for doing so. The only thing you need to do is to have some document where you list all the personal information you process and store, for how long and what you do with the said data. What you cannot do is store data that you don't have a legitimate interest in storing. And this is why you have to document what you do with the data, because if you're not doing anything with it (“I want to store 10 years worth of IP address logs just in case”) then you aren't allowed to (on the opposite “I want to store IP addresses for a month for DDoS protection purpose ” is allowed).
enaaem 10mo ago
There is this idea that regulations are unnatural and no regulations are natural. But the environment where in Apple can operate and make profit is completely artificial. We could go really deep into the origins of nation states, but there is also a practical example like IP law. Is it natural that no one is allowed to copy a iPhone one-to-one? Imagine our ancestors weren’t allowed to copy bow and arrows.
Hnrobert42 10mo ago
Who is this Gruber? Searching ddg just brings up this post. Unless you mean ol' Hans Gruber. He is quite the villain.
- TheDong 10mo ago
  Searching "gruber apple" brings him up as the first nine results on ddg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber
  - Hnrobert42 10mo ago
    I took the time to search before asking. I appreciate the information but not the castigation.

by jwr 10mo ago

Y-bar 10mo ago

They also capped credit card fees at 0.3% in 2015. It also included a prohibition on discrimination against any merchant based on eg size or category of goods sold. And as far as I can see neither Mastercard nor Visa had problems staying in business.

jwr 10mo ago
Yes! I forgot about this. The EU Interchange Fee Regulation (IFR) effectively eliminated the high fixed minimum fees that previously made small-value card transactions unprofitable for merchants. The net effect of this is that in Poland, for example, you can carry your phone and no wallet, because you can pay literally for everything using your phone. And I do mean everything, I've recently been to a club in Warsaw and the cloakroom had a terminal mounted on the wall, people just tapped their phones.
whazor 10mo ago
So you cannot compare it apples to oranges. There is much more regulation in EU. In EU there is also more consumer protection by default, so charge backs can be rejected by merchants but a consumer can easily take a merchant to court. So capping card fees is also more reasonable. Also, when a merchant goes bankrupt and customers perform charge-backs it would involve the entire payment chain. First merchant reserves, then acquiring bank, then MasterCard/Visa, then issuing bank (customer), and lastly the customer. With lower card fees, this has impact on the merchant reserves and their risk profile. Furthermore, acquirers can add additional fees on top if needed. You can also get lower card fees in US if you have a low risk business model.
- Y-bar 10mo ago
  > You can also get lower card fees in US if you have a low risk business model. It is only the maximum fee that is capped (along with various provisions for eg transparency). You can also get lower fees in EU, just twenty minutes ago I saw an ad for just such a zero-fee card.

idle_zealot 10mo ago

Yeah, all too often discussion devolves into a religious war between free markets and regulation. Like they're somehow opposing forces. Markets are super cool and useful tools. Some regulation is good, some is bad, which exactly is which depends on your values and what you want to optimize for. Framing markets like they automatically do good, or ideas like "we need more regulation" or "we need fewer regulations" are all thought-terminating. So far the DMA seems like a partial-win for technology users. I wish it enshrined the right to run software on your own computer in less ambiguous language, because as-is there are carve-outs that may let Apple get away with their core technology fee and mandatory app signing.

fersarr 10mo ago

also usbc in iphones! finally we can just carry one cable

littlestymaar 10mo ago
I'm very glad we eventually got standardized chargers. It's too bad the standard happened to be the madness that USB-C is though.
- showsover 10mo ago
  Oh exactly, it's great to have a single cable / charger for many different items in the household. The biggest downside I see with USB-C in this case is that the cables and chargers get quite expensive if you want to be able to just grab one and charge stuff, without having to worry about wattage etc. All in all a big improvement, with some future improvements left to make. Fingers crossed for a more sane USB-D in twenty years.

neya 10mo ago

Yesterday, I was trying to get a voice memo out of my Apple watch - on which the recording was made. I switched from Apple last year. My cousin had an iPhone. Apple would not let me transfer the voice memo out of their eco-system. It's not on my iCloud and the watch can no longer be paired with any other iOS device (even temorarily with authentication to transfer a file)...unless the iPhone is registered to me. This is malicious compliance in the name of security. And mind you, I own 3 Apple devices - 2 Macs and 1 iPad and the watch can't connect to any of those. I must be forced to buy a $1000 device just because I made the mistake of recording something on their watch. We need more regulation because of things like this and I would absolutely hate to live in a society where this is the norm.

ggsp 10mo ago
If you are not using iCloud, you could try activating it (you get 5 gigs for free IIRC) and switching off everything besides the Voice Memos app. Then you should see the recording on your Mac, and should be able to export it from there. Definitely a shitty workaround, but you might be able to make it work?

raverbashing 10mo ago

Even the most maligned lids attached to bottles looks stupid for 5 minutes but have the nice side effect of not having to hold the lid while you drink, which makes things easier most of the time you're holding something else

llmslave2 10mo ago
Nah I can't get behind that one. I love Europe and I want to live there, but I would 100% take the North American free bottle caps any day.

quitit 10mo ago

I don't think it's as black and white as you suggest. He just wrote about Japan's implementation of a similar set of laws rather favourably - the theme is that Japan's implementation looks very much like a genuine attempt at protecting users and benefitting end users and developers. While I don't agree with what a lot of what Gruber has to say. A point I do agree with is that the DMA is being sold (by Margrethe Vestager, Thierry Breton and Ursula von der Leyer) as a set of consumer protections, when it's plainly not that, and in some clear ways does the opposite. There's also persistent transparency questions like why the EU has excessive meetings with Spotify, or why there is not a "music" gatekeeper in the DMA, or the requirement to easily move music libraries between music services - things that would actually help consumers and prevent genuine lock in. (Note this isn't to excuse the behaviour of big tech.)

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
I just read the post about Japan. The only example he gave where the MSCA is better than the DMA is: > E.g. apps distributed outside the App Store in Japan still require age ratings. There’s no such requirement in the EU. Most of his description of what Japan does better is simply “mutual respect”. Which reinforces the idea that this isn’t about the actual practical differences but about ego. Apple hates how the EU forces them to make change. And Apple has done this before. After the EU forced them to make a change, which emboldened other nations to push similar changes, Apple points to those other nations’s obviously more streamlined law making process (given that the EU has already gone through the hard work of drafting the law, working with a non-cooperative Apple, and then actually seeing it implemented and the practical issues that arise), to justify their hostility to the EU’s trend setting efforts, without which those other nations would almost certainly have not proceeded. I bet if Japan’s MSCA had come before the DMA, Apple’s tone towards both those governments would have been reversed.
- ksec 10mo ago
  He has been anti EU / UK or EUR for quite some time even during Jony Ive era. Regardless of regulations.

llmslave2 10mo ago

It's a totally reasonable position that both regulation and companies exploiting users are wrong. And it's also entirely a moral assertion that markets should resolve to outcomes judged by members of some political apparatus. Likewise, the idea that a third party should interfere with economic relations between two consenting parties is also a moral judgement, not an absolute fact. Most arguments in favour of regulation cherry pick what they feel are success stories and ignore everything else. Interfering with highly complex and dynamical self-regulating systems has a cost. There are many examples of regulation leading to negative outcomes, and it's also telling that large corporations push for regulation because it's one of the most effective obstacles for competition in a market.

hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
Markets depend on regulations. Free market absolutists don’t know what they are talking about. The actual originators of market capitalism, most famously Adam Smith, but also proponents like Milton Friedman, had no such confusion. In reality, today’s free market absolutists don’t get their ideas from economists (even free market economists). Instead, they get their ideas from terrible mid 20th century novelists (I’ll let you figure out who I’m talking about), who didn’t know much about how anything worked, never mind economics.
- littlestymaar 10mo ago
  “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers
- llmslave2 10mo ago
  What is the point of responding to someone if you're going to completely ignore everything they say? Serious question, I'm curious what compels you to do this. Especially in such an arrogant and condescending way.

hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago

Gruber’s take on the USB-C stuff has been hilarious. All through that fiasco, where Apple was going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C, which was objectively better even if you’re an Apple partisan (given that I could carry a single charging cable for my Mac and Samsung phone, but not for my Mac and iPhone), he was going on and on about how the EU was killing creativity by forcing Apple to do something they didn’t want to. And then Apple relented, their USB-C iPhone saw some of the fastest growth over a previous model despite having minimal other upgrades, indicating significant pent up demand for a USB-C phone. And I’m guessing at this point even Gruber can’t imagine living life with a Lightning charger, so now the tune is that Apple was planning on switching to USB-C and they were playing a game to make it like like they were forced to switch by the EU so as not to alienate their current Lightning charger fans. It’s a patently ridiculous idea but it’s necessary given how badly wrong he was on this issue because of how badly he continues to misunderstand how the EU works (which isn’t anything like how the US govt works).

AnonC 10mo ago
Anecdotally, I’ve found Lightning to be a nice fit when plugged in (it’s got a nice “click”) and USB-C a bit flimsy and loose in comparison. YMMV.
- WA 10mo ago
  Apple could've made Lightning open and maybe Lightning would've been the new USB-C, if it is the superior product. But no, they chose not to.
monerozcash 10mo ago
> All through that fiasco, where Apple was going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C Is there any evidence that "Apple was going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C"? Apple worked to create the USB-C standard, was among the first to widely deploy it. Apple fighting against a precedent where the EU would force them to switch everything to USB-C is strictly different from Apple going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C.

whywhywhywhy 10mo ago

His business is too tied to being in Apple's good graces anyway to take him that seriously these days. In the past he's been given access well above a lot of bigger outlets and way above what a blog that size should have especially when most of his social media output is now on mastodon to an audience the fraction of his X size. All though I would say EU regulation has far more misses than hits, this and forcing Apple to USB-C were great but millions of man hours a year are burned navigating cookie banners on every website and chat control being forced through soon. So we have two wins on iOS device convenience, not a great trade off for the other overreach.

littlestymaar 10mo ago
> were great but millions of man hours a year are burned navigating cookie banners on every website Cookie banner are not, in fact, an obligation under GDPR. All you need to do to be GDPR compliant is “not collect and sell data to partners” and call it a day. Cookie banners are a loophole that the EC conceded to an ad industry that is addicted to tracking everyone all the time.
- rogerrogerr 10mo ago
  > All you need to do to be GDPR compliant is “not collect and sell data to partners” Are you asserting that I can log IP addresses in my Apache logs? Seems like no one can give me a straight answer there.
  - mdhb 10mo ago
    That’s not how the law is structured. You CAN do that no problem but it’s then WHAT you do WITH that which is where the law comes into play. If it’s just for security purposes then there’s no problem I believe.
  - littlestymaar 10mo ago
    Of course you can. And you don't need any consent from the user for doing so. The only thing you need to do is to have some document where you list all the personal information you process and store, for how long and what you do with the said data. What you cannot do is store data that you don't have a legitimate interest in storing. And this is why you have to document what you do with the data, because if you're not doing anything with it (“I want to store 10 years worth of IP address logs just in case”) then you aren't allowed to (on the opposite “I want to store IP addresses for a month for DDoS protection purpose ” is allowed).

enaaem 10mo ago

There is this idea that regulations are unnatural and no regulations are natural. But the environment where in Apple can operate and make profit is completely artificial. We could go really deep into the origins of nation states, but there is also a practical example like IP law. Is it natural that no one is allowed to copy a iPhone one-to-one? Imagine our ancestors weren’t allowed to copy bow and arrows.

Hnrobert42 10mo ago

Who is this Gruber? Searching ddg just brings up this post. Unless you mean ol' Hans Gruber. He is quite the villain.

TheDong 10mo ago
Searching "gruber apple" brings him up as the first nine results on ddg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber
- Hnrobert42 10mo ago
  I took the time to search before asking. I appreciate the information but not the castigation.