This is a great point. Apple have always had the option to be less restrictive and controlling of the iOS / iPadOS ecosystem. The total lack of self-regulation within the tech industry (also Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle etc) is finally leading to politicians now being forced to passing legislation. No, they are not experts, they don’t usually understand techological trade-offs and limitations, but here we are.
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What I haven’t seen in this discussion is anybody taking Apple at their word—that this decision is actually motivated by privacy concerns. (Both sides seem to jump to the assumption that the decision is arbitrary and meant as some sort of ham-fisted PR ploy or political messaging aimed at loosening the EU’s regulatory stance.)
But it’s worth at least considering that Apple simply means what that say. The three features that will not be coming to the EU, all have huge privacy implications if they were forced to be open to third parties.
Consider iPhone Mirroring. The feature allows a user with a Mac to interact with their iPhone from their Mac. This feature presumably uses various APIs to ensure that the user is properly authenticated on the Mac and that the communication between the iPhone and Mac is secure. But the EU has designated the iPhone as a gatekeeper platform. iPhone screen mirroring could be seen as an illegal attempt to leverage the popularity of the iPhone to drive more Mac sales. The EU might insist that Apple create an API to let other operating systems and devices access the iPhone remotely. The negative privacy implications of doing so are obvious and immense.
Share Play Screen Sharing has similar issues. Imagine if Apple were forced to create a publicly available interface for allowing remote control of your iPhone or iPad over the internet. Security nightmare!
Finally, and most problematic of all, is Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence purportedly uses an on-device “semantic index” to provide the “personal context” needed to provide useful responses in Siri and elsewhere. It’s not difficult to imagine the EU insisting that Apple share access to that semantic index/personal context with other developers (Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, startups)so that those developers can build competing iPhone assitants. Or, to take it even further, that Apple provide access to all the on-device information used to create the semantic index/personal context so that other developers can attempt to do an even better job of creating a competing product. Where the EU would draw the line between what Apple can keep secure and what it must open to other developers is unknown.
In short, I think it’s quite possible that Apple merely means what it says and considers these three features—if they were forced to be opened to other parties—to be too detrimental to privacy.
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This was indeed what I considered, but the other way around. From my iPad, I can easily control my Mac via Jump Desktop, Screens or similar. I log in using my password. As I only use it inside my home, I don’t even have an encrypted connection. No matter the implementation details, which undoubtedly will be awesome, it will still basicaly be fancy KVM / RDP?
Also, iCloud for Windows is already a thing. Authentication APIs are not rocket science and well established MANY years back, it’s a solved problem. Choosing to sync your personal data to a non-Apple platform should not be considered “detrimental to privacy”, but rather as a “user choice”. IMO.
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I strongly disagree. The DMA is a bureaucratic mess.
It is simple. If you want open platforms then don’t create fictitious classes to target (gatekeepers), or carve out dubious exceptions (game console makers). Just state in plain language platforms need to be open. All platforms.
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I disagree that gatekeepers are a fictitious class. Apple is clearly acting as a gatekeeper for app sales and distribution on iOS and iPadOS.
We’ll just have to disagree on whether the DMA is better or worse than nothing. I think it’s far from perfect, but far better than nothing, and the world can learn from what it gets right and where it misses.
I agree with you that game console makers shouldn’t be exempt, though that’s a much smaller market that impacts far fewer people, and the devices and the games they run are much less central (if central at all) to most of their users’ personal and business lives.
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I agree that the DMA seems very much in opposition to Apple’s focus on vertical integration and privacy. Ultimately, a lot of the Apple “magic” that we all love is only possibly because different teams at Apple work together in a very close way that wouldn’t be possible if it were all different companies. So I think unfortunately for Apple’s EU customers they will be missing out on more and more Apple magic unless they can vote out the current form of the DMA.
Bad laws are worse than no laws. The DMA is a bad law.
And ‘gate keepers’ is a made up class to target specific companies. It is irrelevant that Apple is a gatekeeper or not. The law should not be specific to so called ‘gate keepers’, it should be true of any platform. It was invented to target US companies and not EU companies.
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Maybe it is. But if privacy is the reason why hasn’t Apple given the rest of the world the same options that users in the EU now enjoy?
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Maybe it is. But if privacy is the reason why hasn’t Apple given the rest of the world the same options that users in the EU now enjoy?
Because Apple clearly believes that alternate app stores, side-loading, and alternate browser engines also present a security risk. But Apple didn’t have the option of removing those features in the EU. Apple’s technical attempts to comply with the DMA appear to be an effort to preserve privacy and security as best as possible, though it remains to be seen whether additional loosening of those restrictions will be required by the EU.
My point was just that the decision not to introduce those three new features in the EU are potentially legitimately based on privacy concerns.
I do not mean to suggest that Apple is not motivated by profit, particularly in the App Store and the non-technical aspects of compliance with the DMA. But I think their desire for control/security/privacy is at least part of the story here, and perhaps a much larger part of the story regarding the three withheld features.
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I’m not sure I understand the logic of acknowledging that Apple is a gatekeeper while claiming that gatekeepers are a fictitious class. I think you mean (correct me if I’m wrong) that the law should target a larger class of which the gatekeepers are a subset, but I’m not clear on what you believe that larger class to be.
I already said I’d be happy if it also applied to game consoles. But antitrust and similar regulations typically (and with good reason) focus first or primarily on entities large and dominant enough to engage in rent-seeking and anticompetitive behavior that affects major sectors of the economy and broad swaths of the public.
When US trust busters went after the robber barons of steel, oil, and railroads at the beginning of the last century, they didn’t focus on small regional players.
What EU companies in the IT sector have economic dominance approaching that of Apple and Google, in Europe or the United States, and can dictate the behavior and permitted market channels of smaller companies in similar ways?
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Actually, the EU designated Booking.com as a gate keeper. And ByteDance for TikTok. So they do not only target US companies.
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I hope we can get it in the UK now that we are outside the EU. The EU is a bureaucratic nightmare. I suspect the DMA is entirely about revenue raising. Apple is big enough to challenge them on it. good for Apple.
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You are correct, I did not make a good distinction between “gatekeeper” in the vernacular and “gatekeeper” in the DMA.
The trust busters went after monopolies. As far as I can tell Apple does not have a monopoly in the trust buster sense in any market it is in. (And the off heard trope that Apple has a monopoly on iPhones makes as much sense as saying McDonalds has a monopoly on Big Macs. (I’m not suggesting that you are claiming this.))
We are in agreement that the App Store rules are at best subject to arbitrary interpretation and at worst anticompetitive. Where we disagree is that the DMA is a good law to address this issue.
Spoiler alert, it is not.
A good law would clear and concise, and apply to all. This the DMA is not.
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This is my view too. While I understand the impulse behind DMA-type regulation, I think that the current implementation is extremely poorly designed. I actively choose Apple products because of the privacy protections and I think the DMA demands that we sacrifice those in favour of a chimera of “openness”. I’m one of those who is content that, while I can hack to be heart’s content on my Mac, my IOS devices are heavily protected.
I also think that, based on some of the rhetoric around this, there is an element of straightforward protectionism.
I’m hoping that, now we’re no longer in the EU, we (UK) won’t be victims of this - but we’ll have to wait and see.
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Well we have the just passed Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill. A lot of that covers the same areas, but yet to see how it will be implemented,
What I don’t understand is why with less than 33% market share for iOS in Europe - Apple has been targeted - I get the three criteria that define a gatekeeper - but I would have though that market share should be the key one. The walled garden in iOS is quite attractive to me!
If anyone is interested here Implications of the Digital Markets Act for Transatlantic Cooperation is a long article about the DMA. It was written in 2021 by the Center For Strategic and International Studies. It describes itself as a bi-partisan organisation and is US based. It outlines the good, the bad and ugly. I have to say some of the points established in Articles 5 and 6 seem pretty sensible.
It’s a misconception that antitrust only targets literal monopolies. It’s about reining in companies that are dominant enough to engage in rent-seeking and anticompetitive behavior.
The market for smartphone operating systems and app distribution is controlled by a duopoly that collude to maintain their mutual dominance as much as they compete with one another. Apple is even more dominant in tablets.
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It’s not the case, though. Article 8(3) (PDF) specifically says that companies can engage with the commission beforehand to make sure they stay within the DMA.
"[a] gatekeeper may request the Commission to engage in a
process to determine whether the measures that that gatekeeper intends to implement or has implemented to ensure compliance with Articles 6 and 7 are effective in achieving the objective of the relevant obligation in the specific circumstances of the gatekeeper. "
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Can vouch for CSIS’ credibility — they do really good work/research and are highly respected at least in my circles.
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I think you are kind of making my point for me. Because the DMA is not clear and more of a “we’ll know it when we see it” type mentality, it requires Apple to submit proposals (to my understanding, it’s not just a paper explaining what they want to do but an implementation of that solution), wait for responses, adjust, rinse, and repeat. That all takes time (and money).
So circling all the way back to everyone reading malicious intent into what Apple is doing…it legitimately could just take time (if they decide to bring these features to the EU) to work through the bureaucracy of the DMA.
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Taking some time for them to talk to the EC would be a sensible explanation. But I can see that people feel some maliciousness from Apple. They did not exactly play nice with the core technology fee with developers. Also Apple Intelligence was not going to arrive soon in Europe anyway.