Mozilla’s only real chance at this point is a merger with DuckDuckGo so that they can serve as their profit engine.
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Given the importance of the web/web browser I suppose I’m hoping and would expect that the EU would take this on.
Regarding Mozilla, I’m less concerned with it’s survival as an organization and more concerned the open source code. I don’t have an opinion on what rendering engine is chosen but it seems like it would be one of these three. The essential bit is that it is brought under a non-corporate, non-US based non-profit that is publicly funded as a public good/commons.
Letting it rest with current status quo of Google/Mozilla/Apple is a terrible idea.
What many US commentators fail to appreciate is that there is a fundamental, structural difference between the EU and all other polities. The EU is a treaty arrangement between independent states; it is emphatically not a federal arrangement with an overarching federal government. At its core is a free trade arrangement; a “single market” guaranteeing free movement of goods, services, capital and labour.
To make this market work the predecessors to the EU, particularly the European Economic Community (“Common Market”) recognised that you needed a central coordinating authority; an authority empowered by the treaty to impose fair and common standards. You can’t have a “single market” where every country has its own product safety regulations, or tests drugs differently, or allows different food additives.
That was the original purpose of the European Commission, a market oversight bureaucracy. The Commission, however, was never a government; it was (and remains) subject to political control by the EU’s member states — the Council of Ministers.
In a free market economy, however, the market is deeply embedded into society. If you want a single market then not surprisingly you find you need not just common product standards, but common standards on matters like state intervention (that’s the core of the row over Chinese steel, unfair state support), on environmental standards (you don’t want manufacturers in country A undercutting those in B because laxer environmental rules allow them to dump toxins into waste water), on labour policies (no undercutting each other by using child labour) and a myriad of other issues.
In the US those are the role the federal legislature (Congress) and federal government, but the original EEC didn’t have a popularly elected legislature, just the Council of Ministers; and that was too far removed from grass root politics to feel legitimate. A major step in the development of the EEC into the EU was the establishment of the European Parliament, (which is directly elected by PR). Now the European Parliament provides political direction to the European Commission, and the Council of Ministers acts more at the “meta-level” of the treaty arrangements themselves.
To the US observer the EU may look like a duck, it may look like a state in it’s own right, but it doesn’t walk or quack like one; it isn’t a state and you should expect it to behave as one.
Which brings me to the OP’s question. At the heart of the EU are the single market and the international treaties that established it. The treaties formulate not just the market’s political management, but what might be considered its core architectural principles. One is that “primary” legislation need not be prescriptive, but rather address objectives and principles.
That’s the reason why, for example, EU antitrust legislation is so radically different from the US. The harm it seeks to advert is not harm to consumers, but harm to the market itself. Once a company becomes a dominant player in a market — not as in the US a monopoly, just a sufficiently important supplier (or indeed consumer) — it needs to be very careful of how its actions effect that market.
So when Apple pleads that the iPhone App Store is just fine because it’s not a monopoly supplier of smart phones, EU competition lawyers laugh, To them the questions are whether iPhones have a significant share of the smart phone market (yes); whether Apple has significant influence on the market for apps running on the iPhone (yes, it’s the only App Store); and whether it’s using that influence to hinder competition in that market (yes, you can’t side load apps).
The key point here — the point that Apple could so easily have seen and avoided — is that by preventing other app delivery mechanisms it was putting itself in a position where it could both take an economic rent and dictate its level and determine who may or may not participate. That’s what it ran afoul of. The EU wouldn’t give a fig about whether it charged 5% or 95% for so long as app developers and consumers could easily move elsewhere.
The Digital Markets Act should be viewed through the same prism. Alphabet’s in trouble because it’s been abusing its dominant position in the search market to promote its products in preference to others. Apple’s in trouble because it’s using its power in one market (smart phones) to prevent competition in another (smart watches) in which it is also a player.
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There’s also the difference in legal structure. Continental Europe has a Napoleonic Civil Law structure that more easily scaled up in what I will call “confederation” that is the EU. You guys write everything down in all your laws and try to prepare for every eventualities. Which is why it seems to us you guys are micromanaging every aspect of industry.
U.S. and the U.K. is Common Law which means that legislative authorities take a broader approach and place it in the hands of the courts and executive authorities to solve problems as they arise. (I also believe its part of the reason why the U.K. was not a solid partner in the EU and eventually left.)
Which means that there is just a profound diversion of legal world view that is hard to broach if you are not educated in the differences.
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True. But the App Store was designed to allow Apple to charge rent and determine who may or may not participate, IMO.
I do not have a problem with some of the EU’s demands. In fact I would be happy if Apple allowed their US customers some of those benefits. I don’t, however, think Apple should have to provide anything they have developed for free.
Perhaps a licensing agreement where third parties paid Apple a reasonable fee would be a more equitable solution.
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I would really like to compliment everybody on this thread. The discussion has been very meaty, informative, and serious. I love it and I appreciate it.
Keep it coming.
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Licensing on FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms is common place for IP that underpins infrastructure, like telecoms, so I would expect the European Commission to be responsive to such a strategy.
The problem is that Apple’s approach to date has been to use IP to lock consumers into its ecosystem of products, which is inherently anti-competitive, and their responses — you can’t mandate USB-C charging as it would stifle innovation, consumers shouldn’t have the same choice for buying/loading apps on iOS as on macOS, it’s a security risk — are palpably false and just put regulators backs up.
It would likely be Ok if Apple built a walled garden comprising only their own
products, if nobody be Apple could write apps for iPhone, iPad or watch, but that’s not the case. Apple want people to buy their watch, but they don’t want it to work with Android phones so that anyone buying a watch must have an iPhone. And the inverse, they can stop consumers using an Android watch with an iPhone by simply refusing the watch’s phone app a place in the App Store. That’s anti-competitive.
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Discovery from various legal proceedings has shown some examples of that (green bubbles so parents will buy iPhones, etc). But Apple won’t give up a dollar that they don’t have to. And most buyers will still buy iPhones regardless of how many years it takes Apple to deliver “Apple Intelligence”.
But I do wonder what investors will do if iPhone sales stay flat. Or what people think if the AI Samsung is selling actually works as advertised.
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I’m really tired from a very long day, will formulate a more cogent response later but the short form is.
Right to repair, right to use, right to connect is critical and I find myself siding with the EU regulators more and more. It’s my device, I should be able to run anything on it at all and connect to everything I want to easily without being forced into the Apple walled garden. I believe that walled garden is stifling innovative uses of what is otherwise good hardware.
As an example of the IMO heavy handedness of Apple that is grating. I cannot write software for an apple mobile device that connects via bluetooth classic at all without every hardware piece that wants to use that communications method having a specific Apple approved change to the hardware and me as a SW developer paying outrageously large fees for the privilege. Nearly every EID reader runs Bluetooth Classic. Only ONE that I know iof will connect to iOS at all and it’s very, very expensive. So I can never get AnimalTrakker® to work on iOS devices. Now granted, that is actually a benefit, because most livestock can step on, or otherwise destroy most hardware and it’s a lot easier to replace a $90 Android tablet from Walmart than a thousand dollar iPad. But I should have the choice and Apple does not allow me that choice.
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I really appreciate this thread and the thoughtful responses.
What I’m trying to wrap my head around is when it’s ok for Apple to benefit from their hard work and innovation. And when is the right time for that “benefit” to expire. I struggle with Apple being told to open up their system in such a way that nullifies the benefits of AirPods, for instance. Because if people really don’t like it, they can always go to Android and side load/use whatever device to their heart’s content.
But I also struggle because I don’t think Apple should have a stranglehold on alternate app stores or side loading of software. I think it should be more Mac-like. On my MBP, I will first check the Mac App Store because it’s easier for me. But I would hate not being able to run sottware I download from a website. I really don’t buy the lockdown reasons Apple puts forward.
So I think they shouldn’t be allowed to lock down their OS from non-App Store software. But I also don’t think they should be forced to expose every part of their OS to let other devices work as seamlessly.
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AFAIK, patents last for 20 years. Although the way AI is growing a patent may be worthless long before it expires.
From the EU perspective, when “benefit from” transitions to “exploit”; when whatever you’re doing interferes with the smooth operation of markets and has the effect of stifling competition or hindering the entrance of new players. The title of the EU legislation says it all, it’s the Digital Markets Act. From https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/index_en:
“The Digital Markets Act (DMA) establishes a set of clearly defined objective criteria to identify “gatekeepers”. Gatekeepers are large digital platforms providing so called core platform services, such as for example online search engines, app stores, messenger services. Gatekeepers will have to comply with the do’s (i.e. obligations) and don’ts (i.e. prohibitions) listed in the DMA.
The DMA is one of the first regulatory tools to comprehensively regulate the gatekeeper power of the largest digital companies. The DMA complements, but does not change EU competition rules, which continue to apply fully.”
The rules start to bite only when a company or product achieves the scale that their actions impact competition.
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IPhone sales are gonna stay flat and even recede as phone innovation slows and devices last longer.
That’s why Apple is hell for leather on Services and newer devices.to build new areas of growth.
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I meant to add that the EU’s position has been very clear for a long time. When computer software was first afforded copyright protection (originally it was only trade secret as it wasn’t literature and it wasn’t printed) the legislation (9/250/EEC) included a specific carve out for reverse engineering to achieve interoperability.
“Article 6 Decompilation
1. The authorization of the rightholder shall not be required where reproduction of the code and translation of its form within the meaning of Article 4 (a) and (b) are indispensable to obtain the information necessary to achieve the interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, provided that the following conditions are met: …” (my emphasis).
1991 is contemporaneous with the widespread introduction of the first PCs. The reverse engineering clause was introduced in an effort to avoid the interoperability fiasco that business had faced with mainframe / departmental mini / workstation systems.
That specific legislation was later repealed after massive lobbying, but it shows that the even in the days before the creation of the EU, Europe recognised the importance of interoperability (and the application of recognised standards) if free and fair, competitive markets were to develop.
The writing was on the wall even then.
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Apple must make its automatic audio switching feature available to third-party headphones by June 1, 2026
Just picking out a single example, I’m wondering if anybody has informed the EU that some of these features barely work with Apple’s own products. 
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Agreed. But some think that the majority of Apple’s services revenue comes from iPhone customers. Currently it is estimated that Apple Music may not be very profitable because Apple pays a lot to artists, and Apple TV+ is reported to be losing $1 Billion/year.
Services is expected to drop around 23% if/when Google is ordered to stop paying Apple for making Google the default search engine in Safari. And without increasing iPhone sales the stock market probably won’t view Apple as a growth company which would likely affect their stock price.
Don’t forget the part played by the guillotine in all of that wonderful Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity!
As a whole, the Phone market is saturated, the only way to sell more models is to win customers from other models (which Apple has recently been successful at) or sell phones to people more often which requires more fragile phones (which would be bad for other reasons), more expensive phones (£2k folding phone anyone?), or more innovation (when the “phone” is effectively a solved problem).
There is effectively, little to no growth available in phones, and the stock market know this. And Stock market analysts have already factored in the Google Search revenue (whenever it finally drops) it won’t be a surprise and Apple won’t be punished for it.
Honestly the only avenue I see for Apple-Scale growth (barring AI not being a Bubble) is if they become a cloud vendor like Microsoft and Google and then become more interoperable across platforms. Get into the enterprise space and take market share from Google and Microsoft.
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That doesn’t seem like it plays well to any of Apple’s strengths. They’re not big on “you can count on this platform not changing for a decade or more.”
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